The "Remarkable Effect" of "Silly Words": Dialect and Signature in "The Gold-Bug"

JENNIFER DILALLA TONER The "Remarkable Effect" of "Silly Words": Dialect and Signature in "The Gold-Bug" It may safely be put down as a general rule that the more faithful a dialect is to folklore, the more completely it represents the actual speech of a group of people, the less effective it will be from the literary point of view. A genuinely adequate representation of a living dialect could be made only with the help of a phonetic alphabet, and such a record would contain an enormous amount of detail which would merely distract and often puzzle the literary reader. The writer of literary dialect is not concerned with giving an exact picture of the folklore of speech. As an artist he must always keep his eye on the effect, and must select and reject what the scientific observation of his material reveals to him according as it suits or does not suit his purposes. George Philip Krapp, "The Psychology of Dialect Writing" (24) "But do you know that Jupiter's silly words . . . had a remarkable effect on my fancy?" Legrand in "The Gold-Bug" (833) ? the beginning of the nineteenth century, American literary ' representations of black English dialect were becoming "commonplace ," even a "vogue" (Dillard Black English 93; Farrison G89). Yet critics and linguistic historians generally have dismissed these early representations , which include works by Brackenridge, Cooper, Tenney, Poe, Longstreet, and Simms, as weak or patently incorrect. Sylvia Holten , for instance, argues that it was not until the 1880s, with the advent Arizona Quarter!} Volume 49 Number 1, Spring 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 Jennifer DiLaUa Toner of the "insistently realistic" local color movement, that American authors began to display any "serious concern with authenticity" in their dialect-writing (65). Dialect theorists in the 1920s agreed: Ambrose Gonzales suggests in the foreword to his 1922 collection of Gullah dialect stories that in fact "no Northern writer has ever succeeded even indifferently well in putting Negro thought into Negro dialect, " and he argues that readers must turn to "recent" Southern writers—namely, to Joel Chandler Harris—"for intelligent understanding of the Negro character and the recording of his speech" (13). And as late as 1926, Addison Hibbard was writing of the "new seriousness" beginning to govern literary representations of black English, noting that "when Poe wrote his 'Gold-Bug,' it was possible to write almost anything in distorted English and call it Negro dialect" (495). Interestingly, as Hibbard's comment shows, students ofblack English dialect often select as their prime example of representational ineptitude Poe's "The Gold-Bug," the only Poe tale in which a black American character speaks. "Even Poe," Gonzales complains, "put into the mouth of a Charleston Negro such vocables as might have been used by a black sailor on an English ship a hundred years ago, or on the minstrel stage, but were never current on the South Carolina coast" (12—G3). And while J. L. Dillard attempts in some sense to vindicate Poe and his dialect-speaking character, Jupiter, he still notes that "it is a relatively rare edition of 'The Gold-Bug' which does not point out this 'flaw'"— the apparently bungled representation ofJupiter's speech (Black English 94). In this study, I want to invoke Krapp's sense of the "psychology" of literary dialect-writing quoted above as a context within which to read particular instances of Poe's misrepresentation of black English speech. In so doing, I hope to show that one of "The Gold-Bug" 's most significant aesthetic effects derives from Poe's deviation from linguistic—or, more specifically, dialectal—expectation. While dialect theorists have criticized Poe for his careless construction of black English in the tale, literary critics generally have deemed Jupiter and his language worthy ofonly cursory or dismissive comment.1 I want to look closely at what seems to me the most obvious and interesting characteristic of Jupiter's manner of speaking—his habit of sound association and repetition (what Michael Williams calls "homophonic confusion" and Marc Shell refers to as "Goolah" punning). From the first time he enters the narrative verbally by interrupting a conversa- "The Goïd-Bug...