Speaking Machines and Ghostly Phantoms: The Claustrum Poetics of Voice and Dysfluency

Throughout the nineteenth century, experts in the study of voice and speech relied on a wide range of ghostly or haunted analogies to describe the enigmatic nature of vocal production and the causes and cures of stuttered speech. Phantoms, spectres, ghosts, incubi, and devils populate elocutionary, technological, scientific, and medical representations of voice and vocal dysfluencies, but the most provocative of such analogies is the voice as crypt, tomb, or what psychoanalysts influenced by the work of Donald Meltzer refer to as the "claustrum" (Meltzer, Plänkers). In our own times, the interdisciplinary field of voice studies prioritizes the "object voice" (Dolar 4) or "acousmatic voice" (Chion 18–27) as vocal effects characterized by an uncanny decoupling of voice and body. Regarding speech dysfluencies in particular, Brandon LaBelle argues that the mouth is a "vessel not filled with language, but more so, haunted or stammered by it" (130). Such analogies of uncanny or haunted vocal effects and speech symptoms echo nineteenth-century attempts to describe the speaking body as porous and prone to invasion and inhabitation, attempts that reached their zenith in medical expert James Hunt's claim in the posthumous edition of Stammering and Stuttering; Their Nature and Treatment (1870) that poor speech habits could be contracted by either unconscious or conscious imitation of people who stutter. Relying on a haunted analogy for argumentative effect, Hunt warns young speakers "against stuttering in mimicry, lest they should raise a ghost which they cannot get rid of" (254). My contribution to this forum on Victorian voices examines two case studies from the 1840s and 1850s that represent broader anxieties about the speaking body as a crypt that can be penetrated from the outside by unwanted vocal effects: Joseph Faber's 1846 exhibition of the Euphonia, or "Speaking Machine," and Henry Monro's medical treatise On Stammering (1850). Both are especially intriguing accounts of the claustrum poetics of Victorian technical and medical thought about the origins of voice and vocal production. Analogies of the claustrum were not merely figurative descriptions of the voice as a physiological object of scientific scrutiny but also sophisticated explanations of the phenomenology of the body as a receptacle and receiver of voice.

Faber's Euphonia first appeared in 1846 at London's Egyptian Hall to the curiosity of experts in vocal production and the general public. While the science of machines that could reproduce the sounds and intonations of the human voice began in the eighteenth century with the work of Wolfgang von Kempelen, nineteenth-century speaking machines contributed to the ongoing development of "new" media such as the phonograph and telephone (Hankins and Silverman 178–221; Young 79–80). None were as sophisticated

Fig 1.

"The Euphonia, or Speaking Machine" from the Illustrated London News, 8 Aug. 1846.

in their range of vowel and consonant sounds and euphonic assemblages of words as Faber's Euphonia, which relied on a series of bellows operated by a pedal that produced the air currents necessary for its production of an artificial human voice (Du Moncel 343). These bellows could be manipulated to produce an extensive range of vowel and consonant sounds and word pairings through an expert's deft "playing" of the automated voice on a keyboard. Unlike Kempelen's early prototype of a speaking machine, the Euphonia displayed in London included a racist likeness of a male "Turk" that amplified the uncanny effect of the speaking machine.¹

Despite its technical accomplishments, scientists, elocutionists, and medical experts in London were united in their assessment that the Euphonia's vocal production—its whispers, laughs, stutters, stammers, stumbles, blocks, and hesitations—seemed to emanate from deep within a crypt. Respondents agreed that something was not quite right about the Euphonia's production of an artificial human voice; it also produced a haunting reminder of the voice's dwelling in entombed, indefinable, and inaccessible sites. Respondents relied on the language of what Meltzer calls the "claustrum," a projected fantasy of the mother's body as compartmentalized (mouth, breasts, womb, anus), porous, and...