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Cambridge University Press
0521851939 - Voice and the Victorian Storyteller - by Ivan Kreilkamp
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CHAPTER 1

"The best man of all": mythologies of the storyteller

This book questions and hopes to trouble a well-entrenched commonplace concerning the relationship of speech to writing. It is no exaggeration to say that contemporary criticism is haunted by the paradox that speech is both extremely powerful and doomed to cultural obsolescence. "Writing is the destruction of every voice," Roland Barthes famously proclaims in "The Death of the Author," articulating a half-triumphant, half-guilty belief concealed at the heart of contemporary print culture.¹ Most of us assume that orality is an attenuated relic of an era before the rise of modern print culture - and at the same time, a force latent in suppressed groups and indeed parts of our own selves, capable of disrupting writing with all the force of a resurrection. Contemporary literary criticism takes it for granted that members of pre-novelistic cultures relied on modes of oral communication exemplified by communal storytelling, and that the advent of print displaced the spoken word as the glue holding modern societies together - thereby driving speech into obsolescence. Studies of modern print culture have too often either neglected voice, speech, and orality entirely or romanticized the vocal as a remnant of a lost and mourned pre-modern past. The distinction between a pre-modern "oral culture" and a modern print culture thus becomes a narrative of the fall from an idealized folk to a degraded mass culture.²

Walter Benjamin provides the classic articulation of the longing generated by the supposed displacement of voice in his melancholic 1936 essay "The Storyteller." With the diffusion of print culture and the rise of the novel, Benjamin writes, "storytelling began quite slowly to recede into the archaic." Those who have been influenced by Benjamin's argument tend to regard "voice" as a single, unitary thing we have lost or are on the way to losing. This is not what my reading of Victorian fiction, and of the contemporary criticism that has inherited many of its structures and presumptions, suggests. I want to insist, on the contrary, that voice is heterogeneous and thriving within modern print culture. And if one legacy of Benjamin's essay has been a tacit agreement that where the novel rises, the oral storyteller falls, my readings show that, on the contrary, the much-lamented storyteller came into being as a fiction within the very medium that is accused of having killed him off.

The relationship between speech and writing - from Saussure's first lectures on general linguistics through Jacques Derrida's work and beyond - has provided the basis for the twentieth century's most important reflections on language, but it has been less often recognized that this relationship was also a topic of recurring and urgent concern throughout the Victorian period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, competing forms of speech put the lie to any unitary (and apocalyptic) history of the modern decline of oral culture.³ Between the ancient bards and communal storytelling of historical memory, and the mechanically reproducible spoken word of the phonograph, radio, and telephone, lies the often-misunderstood territory of nineteenth-century vocal and aural experience.⁴ Here a nationally circulating print culture coexists and competes with different circulating systems of speech. Indeed, even if we accept the argument - made by theorists from Benjamin through Benedict Anderson - that modern print relegates any speech-based community to the dustbin of history, we cannot ignore the simple fact that voice persists in the discourse of print culture, where it remains as trace and residue capable of giving rise to inchoate new forms. To understand nineteenth-century print culture we must take into account its coexistence and competition with what might be called "vocal cultures."

David Vincent offers a persuasive critique of contemporary accounts of the relationship between orality and print. Vincent claims that most historical conceptualizations of the relationship between orality and literacy propose the advent of literacy as "a new form of spiritual conversion," a sudden and total transformation:

Whether they attempt to explain the present or the past, these theories rest on a basic dichotomy between "oral" and "written" cultures, which can be located in every society in which the victory of print is incomplete. The encounter with books produced a fundamental change in the mind of the reader, who undertakes a one-way journey to a rational, purposive, participatory way of life. From being God's chosen instrument, literacy comes close to replacing the role of religion altogether. We are presented with a new form of spiritual conversion, as profound and irresistible as any described by those who found salvation through reading the Bible. (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, pp. 8-9)

Vincent argues that the divide between "oral" and "written" cultures is never as complete and impermeable as such accounts imply - and suggests that the death of voice has become a modern mythology.⁵

Vincent criticizes conventional assumptions that capitalist print culture overwhelmed and did away with pre-modern forms of vocal culture in the nineteenth century. He argues that the commercialization and mass production of literature in the nineteenth century may indeed have eventually led to a monopoly on imaginative fiction by professionals, and to a diminishment in the public performance of literature. This process did not, however, follow a direct path from the eighteenth-century public singing of broadsides to the atomized private reading of modern texts. Instead, Vincent insists, in the early "encounter with print by the newly literate,"

[a]t every level, the sound of the human voice was magnified rather than quelled by the mass production and distribution of prose and verse. The simple relationship between the faceless publisher and the soundless reader was disrupted by men and women reciting, singing, shouting, chanting, declaiming, and narrating. (Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 201)

Vincent demonstrates the inadequacy of any notion of a unitary "oral culture" giving way to print culture in the Victorian era. Victorian print culture was also a vocal culture.

My argument obviously calls for a questioning and rethinking of Benjamin's account of the novel's rise to hegemony. Where Benjamin cast the novel as the villain who overtakes and replaces the oral storyteller at one catastrophic historical juncture, I believe it is actually more accurate to describe the Victorian novel as a fabricated struggle between multiple and complex forms of speech and writing - one that plays out to the distinct advantage of writing. But this was no clean victory. It required fiction to turn on itself and invest extraordinary value in an idealized version of the speech community it had relegated to the past, a community for which the novel offered itself as both substitute and cultural memory.⁶ In this way an imaginary storyteller acquires symbolic power within Victorian fiction as that which redeems fiction from the guilt of participating in a bureaucratic modernity. Novels are mass-produced and distributed throughout the country to readers who cannot know or be known by the novels' authors. Yet by defining a novel as the utterance of a powerfully authentic speaker, authors and critics can claim that novelistic language generates the same kind of community supposedly once defined by face-to-face oral exchange. From Dickens onward, then, the figure of the storyteller emerges within British fiction as the sign of endangered intellectual authority, charisma, and personal presence.

Renato Rosaldo has termed "imperialist nostalgia" the attitude displayed by a triumphant imperialist culture toward a conquered people. Once the native has been effectively removed as a real danger, he emerges as a mythologized figure who embodies a lost natural past. James Clifford, similarly, describes the "salvage operation" that modern cultures perform on the native cultures they have displaced - cultures formerly demonized but invested with moral nobility once they no longer pose a threat.⁷ The figure of the storyteller might be understood to be analogous to that of the native in these arguments. Like the "noble savage," the storyteller is a back-formation, an idealized agent deployed to anchor a regretful story of origins for a modern culture seen as oppressive.⁸ We might even say that as the noble savage or innocent native is to culture, the storyteller is to print culture.⁹ But whereas the innocence of the native is invented once he has been successfully displaced and rendered harmless, there is little evidence that the redemptive storyteller ever really existed in the first place.

Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire identifies the bard as a major cultural icon haunting late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature - an ambiguous embodiment of a lost pre-print vocal world. In Trumpener's compelling study, the forces of a "London-centered, print-based model of literary history" struggle with "a nationalist, bardic model based on oral tradition" (Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 70). Trumpener charts a tug-of-war between two rival visions of the bard:

For nationalist [Celtic] antiquaries, the bard is the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating its values, chronicling its history, and mourning the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. English poets, in contrast, imagine the bard (and the minstrel after him) as an inspired, isolated, and peripatetic figure ... [H]e represents poetry as a dislocated art, standing apart from and transcending its particular time and place. (Bardic Nationalism, p. 6)

The storyteller can be seen as the attenuated form taken by the English bard once he has been thoroughly incorporated into the industrialized print culture of the 1830s and 1840s and into the Victorian novel. The storyteller, like the bard, embodies a prestige associated with an endangered voice within modern print - yet the storyteller has been stripped of the political specificity the bard possessed for Celtic nationalists. If the Romantic-era bard is alternately a thoroughly political embodiment of historically rooted cultural nationalism and an emblem of a transcendent, English aesthetic, the Victorian storyteller is an apolitical - indeed, anti-political - product of a print culture that understands itself to be hegemonic. Trumpener criticizes as culturally insensitive and imperceptive Samuel Johnson's mockery of the "cult of the bard as a deluded, retrojecting fantasy" (Bardic Nationalism, p. 79) and his claim that "neither the ghost nor the bard had ever had an existence"(quoted in Bardic Nationalism, p. 77). Yet such dismissals might be more justly made of the storyteller, who lacks the bard's basis in cultural history, and only retains a faint aura of the bard's defeated prestige. James Macpherson's collection of poetry purporting to be by the bard Ossian, Trumpener writes, "offered English readers new possibilities for sympathetic identification with a defeated people and a dying culture" (Bardic Nationalism, p. 76). Having acquired a taste for "this myth of survival in destruction" (Bardic Nationalism, p. 8), English literary culture in the Victorian period invented a new means of gratifying it in the figure of the storyteller.

One emblematic site for a consideration of Victorian culture's nostalgia for a pure orality would be Francis James Child's famous five-volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98). As John D. Niles explains, Child, who "assumed that the great creative period of ballad making began during the Middle Ages and ended before the close of the eighteenth century" (Niles, Homo Narrans, p. 150), was guided by a fundamental suspicion of print culture's influence on oral forms. "Child assumed that the bulk of recent oral balladry of his day was corrupted by print, and hence of little worth" (Homo Narrans, p. 151). "He had equal disdain for the sensational or sentimental products of the nineteenth-century broadside press, as well as for songs relating to industrial society" (Homo Narrans, p. 150). Child's project of purifying and isolating a proudly native, folk-based, oral ballad tradition from the corrupting and "contaminating" forces of a novelistic modern print culture, Niles concludes, was "doomed from the start" (Homo Narrans, p. 152). Child's monumental project typifies a self-doubting quality of Victorian print culture: its guilty conscience about its own participation in the displacement of a native orality believed to have expired around the turn of the nineteenth century, and its quixotic desire to use print forms, methods, and technologies to recover and sanctify an obsolete pre-print voice. The Victorian novel offered itself as a form performing much the same work as Child's ballad collection - that of preserving and reproducing a charismatic voice.

From the Victorian era to our own, the double gesture of lamenting the loss of the oral speaker, on the one hand, and figuring a regenerated storyteller, on the other, produces a self-interested critique from within a print culture that the novel itself represents as mindless, bureaucratic, and given to repetition (think, for example, of the Gradgrind schoolroom in Dickens's Hard Times). To re-imagine the storyteller is to mourn the loss of a time when intellectual work seemed like real manual labor, and narratives were not yet commodities within a disenchanted bureaucratic system, but the auratic wisdom of sages. The figure of the storyteller served as a fetish - a way of simultaneously acknowledging and disavowing this change - for intellectuals confronting what Pierre Bourdieu calls the "decline of the intellectual artisan in favor of the salaried worker" (Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, p. 130) in modernity. Fiction combats speech that resists the authority of print culture, in order to come to the rescue of speech that produces and marks the highly individuated novel reader. The most valued forms of speech are those that at once subordinate themselves to print and, simultaneously, offer the promise of redeeming or humanizing that print.¹⁰

Critics have remained curiously blind (or perhaps deaf?) to the functioning of myths of orality within a disenchanted print culture in which voice operates as a wishful form of re-enchantment. If the novel seems, in one sense, all of a piece with modern industrial culture, it is also invested with the power to salvage and conserve pre-industrial voices. Indeed, some forms of speech appear capable of restoring charisma and humanity to the mass culture that had destroyed them. Victorian print culture grants special authority to forms of writing that pay homage to, or even pass themselves off as, transcriptions of that voice whose death knell was supposedly sounded by print. Affect, no longer primarily generated, as in eighteenth-century novels, by an exchange of confidences through letters or the revelation of private journals, instead becomes the product of vocal exchange. Speech, increasingly, becomes the sign of the human and the humane. And where print tended to open more positive vistas for those earlier intellectuals who, like Samuel Johnson, saw it as a means of controlling speech or, like Wordsworth and Scott, who thought of it as the safe and rational repository of indigenous oral cultures, print - following the exponential explosion in the amount produced in the 1830s - became newly problematic.¹¹

Without underestimating the complexity of earlier conceptualizations of voice's relationship to print, it seems safe to generalize that from Johnson through Wordsworth, English intellectuals displayed some confidence in print's capacity to appropriate voice without either destroying voice or undermining print's own authority.¹² Even if the print/vocal relationship was always a complicated one, prior to the early decades of the nineteenth century we can at least find a pervasive belief in the possibility that a bourgeois public sphere and its print culture might be able to control orality in a benign manner. For a number of reasons, among them the industrialization and massification of print and the emergence of an oppositional and literate working-class culture, even any such tentative faith in a harmonious relationship between print and voice began to falter in the early Victorian period. The figure of the storyteller emerged as both a symptom of and an attempt at a solution for this perception of cultural crisis: the Victorian storyteller steps forward as a cure for dangerous speech and as a stable source of good speech. And this Victorian construction proves surprisingly resilient and adaptable, going on to play a major role in twentieth-century criticism of the novel. As analysts of Victorian fiction, we have become seduced by one of that fiction's own inventions. Modern novel criticism has not simply failed fully to recognize the mythology of the storyteller, but has perpetuated it in new forms.

BENJAMIN'S STORYTELLER

Benjamin's "The Storyteller" stands at once at the end of a nineteenth-century literary tradition and at the beginning of an ongoing critical practice. His essay gathers a cluster of tropes from the nineteenth century and condenses them into a figure of enormous persuasive power for subsequent scholars and critics of Victorian literature and the British novel more generally. I examine the essay as both typical of and foundational to the logic I am explaining. Benjamin argues that the practice of storytelling has been gradually displaced by the effects of a modern print culture. Benjamin's storyteller is a charismatic but fragile figure who retreats into the pre-modern past before the implacable advance of print. Though silenced, his voice revives in an ecstatic scene of recovery, as Benjamin explains how the righteous man emerges from between the lines of print. Here we find a story of voice's separation from a damaged man and the subsequent restoration to him of that lost voice. The storyteller's archaic nature lends heroic drama to the scene of his recovery in print. Writing, figured as an imaginary voice, acquires the moral force of "wisdom" or "counsel," that is to say, of language that cannot be ignored. In the process of its fabulous death and resurrection, storytelling acquires all the prestige of an honorable but archaic form of production.¹³

By investing voice with all the pathos and power of an archaic practice, and regretfully asserting the absolute hegemony of a print and information culture, "The Storyteller" establishes what becomes a standard line within twentieth-century criticism. Yet this hegemony invariably reveals sudden gaps and opportunities for voice to re-emerge. Print culture is alternately posited as all-powerful, and as not quite so dominant as to prevent the heroic recurrence of storytelling and voice. Benjamin's lament for the decline of the storyteller should be understood in part as a symptom of dismay at the perceived diminution of the authority of the individual cultural producer. Bourdieu argues that "the emergence of large collective production units in the fields of radio, television, cinema and journalism as well as in scientific research, and the concomitant decline of the intellectual artisan in favor of the salaried worker" brought about a "demystification of intellectual and artistic activity" accompanied by the pathos of lost status. "Intellectual labor carried out collectively, within technically and socially differentiated production units, can no longer surround itself with the charismatic aura attaching to traditional independent production" (Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, pp. 130-1). Thus, in regard to "voice," the intellectual looks back with longing on what he or she imagines as a vanishing source of charismatic power, one freed from all the binds and compromises of bureaucratic knowledge.

I believe the myth of the decline of storytelling and of oral culture more generally emerged out of a form of this longing. Accordingly, modern assertions regarding the attenuation of voice - and its resurrection within print culture - can be understood as motivated in part by regret over a cultural shift toward rationalized and demystified "collective production" in intellectual practice. Even as Benjamin discusses the shift from communal vocal story-telling to solitary novel-reading, his essay mourns the diminishing power of the autonomous culture producer in modernity. "The Storyteller" narrates the decline of the powerful individual voice that, we are to believe, once unified and defined a community that sprang up around him. Benjamin's nostalgia for a community of listeners cannot be disentangled from his longing for the solitary speaker whose voice centered that community. Storytelling and voice become highly charged emblems of loss, overdetermined by the desire for a mode of literary and critical production in which the "charismatic aura" of the solitary intellectual might still inhere. To tell a story is a means by which the intellectual might stand alone and speak out within a modernity unfriendly to sages.

Benjamin's prestige in our current critical scene is such that it is tempting to think of him as an instance of precisely the storyteller he describes. To offer a critique of his account of storytelling may in fact be to perform just that operation on his language that his status as a storyteller would seem to prohibit. For what distinguishes a story told from one merely written, in Benjamin's essay, is that an oral performance, possessing all "that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him," accrues the charisma of martyrdom. The tale of Benjamin's own death at the German-French border grants his essays a moral resonance that has rendered them almost beyond criticism.¹⁴ Writing that attains the stature of storytelling may not be refused, much less critiqued. Reimagined as storytelling, writing becomes a moral tale that can be received into one's life as "experience" but cannot be otherwise consumed. It becomes a kind of language that determines its own reception as "wisdom" and defines any alternate form of reading as misreading, even as disrespect for the dead.

The story of the storyteller is a moralizing narrative of weakness and recovery, of the near-extinction of voice and then of its subsequent recovery. It is a story of the transformation of weak or wounded men into eloquent sages, teachers who transmit and reproduce culture on an individual basis and who render an abstract and bureaucratic language as a sensuous physical reality. According to Benjamin, the rise of the novel marks the death of storytelling, but in Victorian fiction we see its resurrection. That fiction may always threaten to suppress voice, but it does so in order to return voice to the site of its former evacuation. The novel subsumes, transcends, and reproduces speech. The crisis of storytelling in the representation of its diminution functions as a declaration of cultural emergency that justifies extraordinary procedures. Once the storyteller has been declared nearly dead, special measures must be taken to resuscitate him. This emergency consists of a perceived loss of individualized intellectual authority: the diffusion of cultural power, via print, away from self-possessed, authentic speakers into multiple and shifting sites of the production and distribution of language.

In so mourning the storyteller, Benjamin positions this figure in the pantheon of print culture. The representation of the death of the storyteller becomes, paradoxically, the means of defining him as the imaginary source of writing. And the state of emergency declared by the story of the storyteller justifies unusual means to restore the intellectual to his proper place as the charismatic center of society. The usual right of a listener to choose not to listen to a speaker is withheld in the case of the storyteller, whose speech is defined as, in effect, compulsory wisdom.

Benjamin's essay begins by marking the disappearance of its analytical object:

Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. (Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 83)

With every moment, Benjamin implies, insistently sounding a note of regretful loss, the storyteller and his vocal utterance are receding into the past.

[T]he art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly ... It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest of our possessions, were taken from us. ("The Storyteller," p. 83)

Having announced that storytelling "is coming to an end," he then shifts tense to explain that "[s]torytelling began quite slowly to recede into the archaic" ("The Storyteller," p. 88, emphases mine). When exactly was the powerful art of storytelling lost? Is that loss an imminent threat to be staved off, or a fait accompli to be mourned and regretted? Benjamin prefers to leave the exact moment of loss unspecified and thus capable of floating through his essay as a kind of open threat.

His story of loss and decline emphasizes what he calls "the tiny, fragile human body." But there are actually two bodies in his essay. One is a fragile body that stands "under the open sky ... in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions" ("The Storyteller," p. 84). The other is the robust body of the storyteller, a figure of "full corporeality" ("The Storyteller," p. 84). The damaged body is the product of its separation from the oracular body, whose absence diminishes the entire culture: "experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness ... it has reached a new low" ("The Storyteller," p. 84). Benjamin implies that the storyteller's demise entails the splitting off of a vital part of the human body. The loss of voice means the end of "full corporeality," leaving us to inhabit a body that is exposed to an overpowering modernity. Discussing the work of Leskov, Benjamin notes, "There are a number of his legendary tales whose focus is a righteous man, seldom an ascetic, usually a simple, active man who becomes a saint apparently in the most natural way in the world" ("The Storyteller," pp. 85-6). We might say that Benjamin's essay is itself such a "legendary tale," one describing the revitalization of the intellectual within modernity, the healing of his "fragile body" and restoration to "full corporeality." Speaking for and to intellectuals who understand the loss of "aura" in the modern work of art as a diminishment of their own status, Benjamin adopts the language of a dispossessed owner: "It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us" ("The Storyteller," p. 83). Voice becomes newly defined as possession. It becomes conceptualized as that which we never knew we owned until it was taken away - at which point its loss becomes seen as a devastating dispossession. When voice is removed from the body, what had seemed a secure whole splits off into partial fragments.

The storyteller is not only a simple man who becomes a sage, he is also a laboring man whose very voice is a form of manual craft. Leskov plays this

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