Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk 1503635171, 9781503635173

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
ONE Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson
TWO Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker’s White Cosmopolitics
THREE George Meredith’s Profuse Inarticulacy
FOUR Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s Dysfluent End of the World
Conclusion
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

REFIGURING SPEECH

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Refiguring Speech Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk

AMY R . WONG

STA N FOR D U N I V E R SI T Y PR E SS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2023 by Amy R. Wong. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree, archival-­quality paper ISBN 9781503635173 (cloth) ISBN 9781503635999 (electronic) Library of Congress Control Number: 2022045001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request. Cover design and art: David Drummond Typeset by Elliott Beard in Arno Pro 11/15

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction ONE Parroting With and Eavesdropping

vii 1 34

On Robert Louis Stevenson TWO Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker’s

63

White Cosmopolitics T H R E E George Meredith’s Profuse Inarticulacy

93

FOUR Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s

124

Dysfluent End of the World Conclusion

152

Notes

161

Bibliography

199

Index

213

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book believes not only that ideas and expression are generated in community, but also that what we say is never really ours. Nowhere will this seem truer than in these acknowledgments. At UCLA, where this project began, I was lucky to find steadfast and dedicated mentors and a generous community of colleagues. Joseph Bristow’s patience in teaching and inspiring me to read, write, and think with humility and always toward precision has been a true gift. Jonathan Grossman’s exacting but generous mentorship has taught me that it is not enough to be smart, but that one has to really believe what one is writing. I am also grateful to other faculty members at UCLA whose work and guidance have variously inspired or shaped the directions this book has eventually taken: Ali Behdad, Michael Cohen, Helen Deutsch, Christopher Mott, Michael North, and Elinor Ochs. I also thank my graduate colleagues and friends, whose collective brilliance and good cheer made my graduate experience in Los Angeles a wonderful time: Katherine Bergren, Julia Callander, Stacie Cassarino, Daniel Diez Couch, Dustin Friedman, Amanda Hollander, Lisa Mendelman, Alex Milsom, Jason Morphew, Sarah Nance, Michael Nicholson, Justine Pizzo, Sina Rahmani, Taly Ravid, Cristina Richieri-­Griffin, Lindsay Wilhelm, and Alex Zobel. To Jacquelyn Ardam and Will Clark, I vii

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Acknowledgments

am so grateful to you both for your brilliance, your realness, and your exquisite care. At Dominican, I have found myself among warm colleagues. I am grateful to have spent the last six years in community with Joan Baranow, Thomas Burke, Ava Carl, Chase Clow, George Faithful, Gigi Gokcek, Jaime Libby, Jordan Lieser, Dan May, Whitney Myers, Radica Ostojic-­Portello, Carlos Rodriguez, Laura Stivers, Cynthia Taylor, Julia van der Ryn, Sister Aaron Winkelmann, the members of the Diversity Action Group, and the many wonderful students whom I have had the privilege to teach. Special thanks to Nnekay FitzClarke for her unmatchable sense of humor, brilliance, and enduring support; to Perry Guevara for talking with me about our work and everything else; and to Judy Halebsky for her generosity and cheerleading me to the finish line. To Mary Marcy and Nicola Pitchford, thank you for your support and inspiration as exemplary women leaders. I wish also to thank the PREC Committee for my promotion and qualification for a sabbatical leave to finish this book, and also to Pomona College for a Graves Award in the Humanities in support of this project. Among the many scholars in Victorian studies whom I have been lucky to meet in the past decade, I thank the following for reading or offering me opportunities to share work in progress, offering advice and support, or otherwise being in company and in conversation with ideas I have been thinking about: Zarena Aslami, Sukanya Banerjee, Manu Chander, Ryan Fong, Renee Fox, Elaine Freedgood, Jill Galvan, Devin Griffiths, John Jordan, Tricia Lootens, Daniel Martin, Richard Menke, Olivia Moy, Nasser Mufti, Cornelia Pearsall, Jason Rudy, Bea Sanford Russell, Matthew Sussman, Megan Ward, Roger Whitson, Carolyn Williams, Daniel Williams, and Susan Zieger. To the Berkeley English Nineteenth Century Working Group and attendees, especially Ian Duncan, Emma Eisenberg, Mary Mussman, Chloe Osborne, and Rudi Yniguez, and UCLA’s Nineteenth Century Group, especially Lilly Lu and Jessica Cook, thank you for your generous and sharp recent engagements with my work in progress. To Ronjaunee Chatterjee, if not for the singular experience of getting to think with you, I do not know who I would be or where I would belong as a scholar. To Alicia Mireles Christoff, the immense care, rigor, and intensity you bring to everything has been nothing short of inspirational and humbling.

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My editor at Stanford University Press, Caroline McKusick, has simply been a dream to work with. I am so grateful for her care and enthusiasm in moving this book forward. My thanks also to the design team for coming up with a brilliant cover for my book. To the anonymous readers, thank you for the generosity with which you each saw and engaged the manuscript; it has felt like a rare privilege to receive such insightful and helpful reports–­ especially amid the circumstances of the recent pandemic. In addition, I have been extraordinarily blessed by the company of colleagues and friends in the Bay Area: Ashley Clarke, Jane Hu, Omar F. Miranda, Hannah Zeavin, and Dora Zhang, whose support and collective brilliance have helped to buoy my spirits and ferry this project toward its final stages. Finally, I thank my extended community of family and friends who have contributed intellectually, psychically, and emotionally to the life of this seemingly never-­ending project. Thank you to my parents, Mimi and Seung-­K ai Wong, for their unstinting support of my education and career in the humanities; and to my sister, Maggie Wong, for her company, especially in these last few years in the Bay Area. To Helen Wolfman, Greg Poppe, and Jess Poppe, I am very grateful for your unconditional support and generosity. To Sydney Wong and Angela Lau, thank you for making it so easy to be family. Special thanks to the Bunker Buddies, Katherine Isokawa, David Chow, Nobi Chow, and Kai Isokawa, for keeping us safe and grounded; I could not have finished a book during the pandemic without you, you are the definition of extended family. To Christopher Bauer, Pearl Chaozon Bauer, Matt Cantor, Elizabeth Corinth, Kathryn Eidmann, Alex Fortes, Matthew Fox-­A mato, Brendan Gillis, Manav Kumar, Jeremy Lawrence, Lauren Lawrence, Aimee Miller, Josh Patashnik, Greg Schmidt, Amritha Subramanian, and Kate Walker, your singular friendships have contributed to this work in numerous intangible but crucial ways. To Kate Fox-­A mato, I will be eternally grateful to you for being there nearly from the beginning. To Glenn, thank you for your unflagging enthusiasm for my work, and for the everyday surround of the life we have made together with Rei and our loving dogs, Matilda, Oscar, and Ziggy. Rei, you are already the best person I know, and it’s a privilege to be your mom.

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REFIGURING SPEECH

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Introduction On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding apocalypse and Babel’s fall. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility. — ­É d o u a r d G l i s s a n t, The Poetics of Relation (1990)

This book engages a n unusual grouping of four late Victorian fictions of empire, selected for how they illuminate features of a crisis of speech that reached a particularly intensified pitch in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By speech, I mean a certain proprietary fantasy in the Anglo-­A merican imagination that prizes a perfect tethering of expression to intent, as well as its associated aesthetics of self-­possession. In such a fantasy, speech is the act of flag burning that will finally deliver a clear-­cut judiciary decision. In more mundane contexts, speech is the fluent and articulate lecture, or the perfectly witty comment delivered at just the right moment. In two fictions that are well known, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and two that are less so, George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s jointly written The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901), this kind of speech unravels in somewhat embarrassingly spectacular ways, alongside the colonialist selves and worlds that it sutures together. My approach to these fictions will be somewhat perverse in its bid to follow the logic of this unraveling further than these texts are willing to go. These fictions of empire share the sense that the unraveling of speech will mean the end of the world. My aim, instead, is to follow Afro-­Caribbean 1

2

Introduction

thinkers—­especially Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter—­to show how these texts imagine, if unwittingly, the end of colonial worlding. In each of my readings, I “refigure” the materials of speech that these literary works have already begun to disarticulate into a different poetics of communication, which I have opted simply to call “talk.” Talk, which I see as emerging out of scenes where speech fails, stands on its own poetics in a manner that has always exceeded Anglo-­A merican speech’s colonialist, proprietary underpinnings. Talk is what forms like mimicry, inarticulacy, and dysfluency are if they were not described in terms of speech’s degeneration. Talk is also what Babel could be—­a condition of multilingualism that is not the end of the world—­if Anglo-­A merican speech were not so obsessed with the self-­possession of native English speakers. For Glissant, the multilingual conditions of the Caribbean and creolization give rise to his reworking of the Babel myth: there is neither an outside to nor a “return” from colonialism; métissage is the ontological condition from which anticolonial poetics finds “the shiver of a beginning.” What Glissant reworks is not colonialism so much as the view of colonialism as an end or ending. Taking inspiration from Glissant, and from other Afro-­Caribbean thinkers whom Victorian studies rarely engaged in its encounter with postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 1990s, this book develops a conception of talk that seeks what may be “on the other side” of a struggle with and liberation from speech, offering a way around questions that have stalled out before the insurmountable ideological barriers to subaltern speech. When Glissant insists on an aesthetic that is “on the other side” of liberation from the colonial imaginary, he offers “errantry [errance]” as a new model of relation-­making. According to Glissant, errantry is rhizomatic, with a nod toward Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s well-­k nown formulation, but distinct from the nomadic movement shared by the Western exile and the conqueror alike.1 In both exile and conquest, argues Glissant, the origin remains a major point of reference: in the former, there may be a rejection of (or more complicated negotiation with) one’s roots; in the latter, the root becomes transient, striving to generalize that which is actually particular. This process of generalizing the particular, and erasing the traces of particularity, is central to the project of Western colonialism. Errantry, however, escapes such identificatory consolidations and makes space for

Introduction

3

what might be contingently formed through a relationship with others.2 Its dialectical movements are situated, where totality is merely “conceive[d]” and “any claims to sum it up or to possess it” are immediately “renounce[d].” An errant person “plunges into the opacities of that part of the world to which he has access.” But errance is by no means idle adventure or blind wandering—­rather, as translator Betsy Wing has clarified, “errantry  .  .  . knows at every moment where one is—­at every moment in relation to the other.”3 One may begin with vertiginous feeling amid “the opacities,” but it is a moral imperative in errantry to attempt to know where one is in relation, as limited as that knowing may be.4 This is the manner of situating—­rather than mapping—­that I will take up, in my account of late Victorian fictions of empire, and in relation to other scholarly conceptions of speech I have encountered. Acknowledgment that the constellations I set up here are necessarily partial ones is also important for honoring the nonaerial view from which any “poetics of relation” works. When Glissant says “access,” I think of how we are primarily conditioned by our positioning in any given domain (professional, social, and so forth), though our conditioning is also produced from less structured—­and more opaque—­circumstances and experiences. For instance, my own path to borrowing a sense of “talk” from sociolinguistic understandings—­as I will later elaborate upon—­m ight owe as much to an immigrants’ child’s awareness of language bias and scholarly trends coinciding with my graduate education as to my own (nonexhaustive) review of approaches in search of an apt conceptualization of this book’s primary concerns. I wish to make clear up front that methodological positioning is always an immersed project of incomplete mapping and also that literary criticism itself is a constructed aesthetic: as Wynter cautions, “rethinking” the aesthetics of coloniality means turning a “deciphering practice” (we could say, a disarticulating one) not only on the objects of our criticism but also on how our criticism is made.5 Albeit from a perspective oriented less toward criticism as aesthetics, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has also warned that “the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract ‘pure’ theory and concrete ‘applied’ practice is too quick and easy.”6 It is important, given the particular arguments this book makes, to point out that what we have often thought of as “mapping out” our work in relation to what is imagined

4

Introduction

as a stable and bounded “field” hides its own citational politics; that politics, too, may be motivated toward proprietary—­and colonialist—­regulation. *

*

*

Here, I will offer a brief detour into an account of a small archive of Victorian manuals on the art of conversation, which catalyzed a set of questions and concerns that would eventually result in this book. Though they will not be featured in the chapters that follow, I marshal them here as objects that not only tell something of an origin story for this project, but also are capable of telegraphically laying out the interwoven concerns of this book. My initial encounter with them several years ago inspired questions such as why somewhat abstract qualities of speech like fluency were entangled with proprietary rights of transfer, whether a disdain for mass print media in these manuals had something to do with the stakes of “owning” speech, and how late nineteenth-­century concerns about Britain’s quickly expanding empire might enter into these manuals’ territorializing formations of a domestic, bourgeois speech community. These manuals (and sometimes also periodical essays written in a similar style) were clearly aimed at a growing middle and upper-­m iddle class with aspirations to leisure, and became most popular in the 1880s before tapering off after the turn of the century. As I will lay out here, these manuals sought not only to naturalize certain social performances of speech, but also to regulate how speech should circulate; as such, they are a part of a territorialization of speech that, as I will argue, becomes markedly frenetic in the final decades of the Victorian era, and the British empire’s rush to its height. The only scholarly survey of these handbooks and essays on conversation I have found is an account appended to E. A. W. St. George’s book, Browning and Conversation (1993); in his study of Robert Browning’s somewhat truculent conversational poetics, the manuals serve mainly to illustrate a form of Victorian bourgeois congeniality that Browning resisted.7 With an emphasis on conversation as a pastime or leisure activity (rather than, say, a form of idealized, rational exchange, as sought under a conversational paradigm familiar to eighteenth-­century republicanism), these manuals were directed toward the naturalization of a certain upper-­m iddle-­ class political aesthetic that had clearly emerged by the late nineteenth cen-

Introduction

5

tury.8 As Rosetta Young has argued, though the term “upper middle class” did not become common until around 1860, the nineteenth-­century Anglo-­ American novel from Jane Austen to Henry James played a central role, alongside etiquette manuals, in establishing a certain form of sociable conversation as a speech genre possessed of quasi-­magical, capital-­generating qualities.9 Reflecting an upper-­m iddle-­class sense of leisure, Roger Boswell defines conversation in The Art of Conversation (1867) as “mak[ing] the time pass agreeably, for others as well as ourselves”;10 similarly, for J. P. Mahaffy—­Oscar Wilde’s tutor at Trinity College Dublin—­in his Principles on the Art of Conversation, conversation is a “daily pleasure,” a “recreation open to all.”11 Though such language suggests universality, these accounts do rather little to cover up the fact that these manuals were intended for those who could afford enough of an escape from routines of labor to develop congenial selves through the proper circulations of speech: after all, the manuals often reference settings of domestic, bourgeois interior spaces, such as drawing rooms, dining rooms, supper tables, and even staircases.12 Still, the Victorian art of conversation manuals maintained, at least rhetorically, this openness “to all.” In upholding principles of circulation, such as fluency, pacing, and balance, that remained somewhat abstract, these manuals also tried to reside in an impersonal realm of unquestioned common sense. What something like “flow” entails, for instance—­if it is about pacing or rhythm, or if it is a property of a single speaker or a matter of conversational relays—­receives little elaboration. Such abstracted principles of form and transfer without much further detail represent an important departure from both more prescriptive conduct manuals of the eighteenth century, and rather technical Victorian elocution manuals for the university elite.13 In a preface to his manual, The Ability to Converse (1912), for instance, Stanley M. Bligh expresses anxiety lest his readers mistake his work as a “guide to conversational formularies”; rather, his is a theory of conversational “planes” (anecdotal, personal, scientific, political, aesthetic, ethical, spiritual) that wishes, above all, that speakers remain “as free and unconstrained as possible” to “adapt and enlarge” conversation “to suit [their] own purposes.”14 Bligh considers his conversational planes something of an innovation, but they share with earlier manuals an ethos of what might be called form at a middle distance—­in line, for instance, with

6

Introduction

what Mahaffy describes as the “natural easy flow of talk,” which “consists in following the chances of the moment, drifting with the temper of the company, suiting the discourse to whatever subject may turn up.”15 The matter-­of-­fact, the commonsensical: these are the accompanying affective tenors of form at a middle distance, which contribute to the naturalization of such properties as equality, flow, and adaptability. Such properties, in my mind, are ultimately preoccupied with embodiment and territorial control. Apportioning speech quantities, the regulation of flow, and the idealizing of a responsiveness to environment are aligned with proprietary logic, where to possess speech and to know how and when to transfer it slides into being a self-­possessed person. But why this recourse to these proprietary abstractions of conversational form, at this time? Against what perceived threats, exactly, were these seemingly matter-­of-­fact art of conversation manuals defending? One answer that the manuals themselves bring to the surface is a shared sense that the conditions of late nineteenth-­century media, especially the growing availability of cheap print, caused regulatory anxieties about the entrance of working-­class readers into the spaces of the virtual public sphere. Though, again, not always explicit about class, the art of conversation manuals typically take as given that conversation is a dying art in need of rescue because of the rise of cheap forms of mass print. It is not hard to see, for instance, that when Jane Francesca Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s mother) worries that newspapers, periodicals, and “cheap literature” were “destroy[ing] beauty, grace, style, dignity, and the art of conversation,” she is holding up an imagined, closed-­off, and prior world of speech to counter anxieties about unsavory print materials infiltrating the social world of middle-­and upper-­class Victorians.16 Similarly, the class-­inflected worries that mass print could have a degenerative effect on individual and social mores might be readily observed from how the author of How to Shine in Society; Or, The Art of Conversation laments that in “the present age, wherever you go, whether into a railway carriage, a steamboat, a restaurant, or a coffee-­house, two-­thirds of your fellow travellers have a book, a paper, or a pamphlet before them.”17 In the view of this author, these forms of print consumption easily become addictions, “like smoking or dram-­drinking,” removing individuals from the commonsensical good of social circulation

Introduction

7

and converse. If such sentiments seem familiar in our own day—­in injunctions to put down our phones and return to face-­to-­face interaction, as featured, for instance, in Sherry Turkle’s best-­selling critiques of social media—­it might be worth looking more critically at what world of speech such injunctions imagine a “return” to, and who makes it up.18 Of course, these Victorian art of conversation manuals were also a part of the burgeoning forms of print ephemera that they were railing against—­and thus, many of them note their own existence as something of a rapprochement with the new conditions of media. When the authors of manuals considered the relationship between periodicals and conversation, for instance, they tended to say how the former should always be in service to the latter: commonplace books should be kept to store only article titles and other tidbits that might be recalled for conversation, as Roger Boswell recommends, and they should always be updated to avoid stagnant conversation.19 Likewise, Mahaffy regards popular “society papers,” such as Punch, as mere aids to agreeable chitchat, asserting that these papers “owe their circulation to their usefulness in furnishing topics for . . . conversation.”20 “Book men” and voracious consumers of newspapers, periodicals, and handbooks alike receive Mahaffy’s censure, for the “enormous increase of the means of acquiring knowledge . . . are by no means accompanied by corresponding strides in the art of conversation.”21 Whether thinking of print as a conversational aid, or pointing to reading and speaking as incommensurate skillsets, such comments tended to enact protective, territorializing distinctions to cordon off speech communities from the wider world of print. When I was first considering these manuals, I was also thinking about which literary objects seemed most apt for illustrating different facets of a crisis in speech I was locating within the late Victorian period. On the one hand, fictions about empire seemed an obvious choice for understanding the stakes of speech in late nineteenth-­century literature, given the moment in which nineteenth-­century British literature became an important archive for postcolonial theorists—­most notably, Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha—­interested in the matter of limits to subaltern voicing. On the other hand, the question of subaltern speech has become, in both Victorian and postcolonial studies, somewhat over and done with, even a dead end, to

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Introduction

be regarded, as Rey Chow has more recently brought up, with some wistful melancholy.22 Moreover, I wanted to retain what I was thinking about in relation to the democratizing but also increasingly fragmented media landscape’s perceived threats to longstanding Anglo-­A merican understandings of speech, not least because of the obvious relevance of such matters to the twenty-­fi rst century. Given these considerations, it was not entirely clear to me how to proceed—­and for someone specializing in Victorian literature, the study of media is often segregated from the study of empire and race.23 Mulling over these conundrums, I came across what can only be described as a gallingly racist but “throwaway” beginning to Mahaffy’s manual that I had glossed over in my earlier and admittedly cursory review of the archive of art of conversation manuals: Whatever contempt the North American Indian or the Mohammedan Tartar may feel for talking as mere chatter, it is agreed among us that people must meet frequently, both men and women, and that not only is it agreeable to talk, but that it is a matter of common courtesy to say something, even when there is hardly anything to say.24

Now race is not explicit like this in most other manuals, nor apparent in the way that class politics is from how these manuals discuss media consumption. But as Rei Terada has cautioned, the demarcation of the racial from the “nonracial” is a colonialist nineteenth-­century technology, traceable in particular to Hegelian philosophy’s understanding of historicity and consequently, what is “real” as nonracial.25 Though with a keener focus on racial logic and work from Black studies, Terada’s argument about the legacy of Hegel complements what postcolonial thinkers like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Gauri Viswanathan have argued in their work on the inextricability of the nineteenth-­century British literary canon from imperialism.26 It therefore occurred to me that the throwaway nature of Mahaffy’s comment and the general absence of race (the seeming “nonracial” concerns of the manuals) make race-­thinking even more important, more grounding, more commonsensical. Read with more attention, and in relation to other manuals, Mahaffy’s comment unfolds Darwinian-­inflected, racialized hierarchies that point to speech as a matter of territorial control. The contrast between the os-

Introduction

9

tensibly nonconversational (and by extension, noncongenial, uncivilized) Native Americans and Muslim Turks—­two very different groups from very different parts of the globe strategically flattened and fused together—­ does more than distinguish the “us” of the civilized West from its “other.” It enables a universal consolidation of this “us,” which makes an ostensibly inclusive gesture by highlighting “both men and women,” as well as the already agreed-­upon good of saying something for the sake of the also already agreed-­upon good of “common courtesy.” Racial form thus bolsters class politics, in this moment when the English middle class was beginning to have more time for leisure, and thus might fill this time with “say[ing] something, even when there is hardly anything to say.” With this in mind, a colonialist dynamic of selectively mapping, fixing, and containing an imagined terrain of speech (newly highlighted, but purportedly always there) becomes fairly obvious in these conversation manuals, while rhetorics of racial denigration—­often in a Darwinian idiom—­are applied liberally to bodies that are dysfluent, that claim too much speech, or are otherwise un-­self-­possessed. Some handbooks did turn more explicitly to the physical body, forsaking form at a middle distance, but only when elaborating features of “unnatural” speakers.27 In these elaborations I came to see Darwinian racialization as a powerful tool for delineating a certain form of selfhood—­tagged to a certain aesthetic of speech—­as universally human against a plastic sense of animalistic others. Poor conversationalists were proliferatively consigned to subhuman evolutionary backwardness: Boswell’s manual, for instance, devotes half of its pages to taxonomizing types of bad conversationalists (the Bear, Bully, Differential, Jabberer, Proser, Rigmarole, Punster, Joker, Monotone, Egotist, Self-­ Seeker, Exclusive, or Mute) who are paired with physiognomies tagged, through metonymic racializing markers, to class, gender, and disability. Notably, there is no section to taxonomize good conversationalists, who thus remain securely tethered to an abstract but commonsensically natural form of human speech. The prurient interest in the embodiments of “bad” speech meanwhile overtakes a reviewer of Beatrice Knolly’s and Florence Bell’s handbooks, who expends much energy mocking the poor conversationalist who “has given free play to his lingual and maxillary muscles,” his “wagging jaws,” and the animalistic way in which such speakers emit “me-

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Introduction

chanical beast-­cries, dictated by the bodily instincts of the moment, akin to the twittering of birds, the purring of cats, and the lowing of oxen.”28 It is such degenerate specimens of humanity that the art of conversation tries to defend against. *

*

*

As I will demonstrate through my readings of late Victorian fictions of empire, the kinds of selves that the manuals try to suture up—­by figuring “natural” speech through forms of transfer that elide the embodiments of its ideal participants—­unravel into the kinds of degenerate speech taxonomized above and more, sometimes together with the colonialist worlds that they hold together. In these readings, this book finds its primary focus in tracing how the unspooling of colonialist logics of speech often involves the use of “bad” aesthetics. Most obviously, the unraveling of speech and ownership is enacted through characters’ bodies and dialogue: speakers who cannot hold, store, regulate, or otherwise control their speech in ways that make them seem, sometimes, like glitching, broken media. These bodies—­ primarily white, and ranging from pirates and peasants to the Anglo-­ European imperial elite—­in some instances parrot, and in other instances are excessively embodied, profusely inarticulate, and dysfluent in ways that underscore racialization’s elastic and proliferative mechanisms in marking unproprietary speech across class, gender, and disability. These literary examples not only seem particularly concerned with scenes of un-­self-­possessed speech, but also allow for the migration of this sense of speech’s degradation into narration and other structural elements, such as plot and genre. In Treasure Island, for instance, the adventure plot’s dependence on a protagonist “adrift” with the flow of unexpected contingencies complements Stevenson’s apparent interest in the uneven and treacherous conditions that structure any exchange of speech in everyday talk. In Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors, the sense of the protagonist-­conqueror’s inarticulacy, which owes to his desire to digest and distill into language more than he can handle, is registered also in the novel’s awkwardly profuse narration. As a group, Treasure Island, Dracula, One of Our Conquerors, and The Inheritors cross and hybridize between romance, imperial gothic, satire, comedy, realism, science fiction, and speculative fiction. In the context of their fairly explicit engagements with crises of territorialization, at the level

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of both imperial land grabs and the extension of media, I argue that these varied registers of formal and generic instability disarticulate colonialist notions of speech and selfhood. In the wake of their disarticulation, we have to construct what else is possible, through different critical assemblages that have largely been missed in our approaches to the British empire and to Victorian literature. Out of speech’s dissolution, I argue, we can get to “the other side” of Glissant’s anticolonial imaginary by positing talk as a negative space of communication against which speech has always made and continues to make itself. In the following paragraphs, I will say more about the critical assemblages that will get us there, in relation to earlier work in Victorian studies and postcolonial theory, as well as where they meet up with deconstruction and sociolinguistic approaches to talk. I also provide more historical clarity regarding the crisis of speech I observe at the end of the British nineteenth century: how concerns about media came to be interwoven with concerns about imperial territorialization and how we can situate this crisis within a longer genealogy of speech and Anglo-­A merican empire. This genealogy begins, in my account, with John Locke. Speech, the Coloniality of Being, and Race-­Thinking

In a passage from his influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke relays a secondhand story of a Brazilian parrot that seemed rational in its apt responsiveness.29 The occasion of this animal becomes the starting point from which Locke theorizes personhood: And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and to change them as he pleases. But yet, when we will inquire what makes the same spirit, man, or person, we must fix the ideas of spirit, man, or person in our minds; and having resolved with ourselves what we mean by them, it will not be hard to determine, in either of them, or the like, when it is the same, and when not.30

Here, Locke explains that selfhood is distinct from the substance (man) and the soul (spirit) of man: personal identity, which he regards as equivalent to selfhood, owes to consciousness that remains continuous over time. Thus,

12

Introduction

consistency of consciousness alone determines selfhood, so that the “substance” of one’s body does not enter into considerations of whether someone counts as a person or not. As he clarifies, “self is that conscious thinking thing,—­whatever substance made up of.”31 Thus, reasons Locke, the parrot might attain the status of personhood—­if indeed the parrot maintains a continuous consciousness—­though it may not share the substance or spirit of mankind. That the Brazilian parrot occasions a passage on personhood is somewhat strange but especially notable for the purposes of this book. Not only is speech the particular metric by which consistency of consciousness might be determined, and personhood hence justified, but also the grounding of speech requires an animalistic other that I argue is already produced through colonialist racial logic here. The Brazilian parrot that haunts Locke’s discussion of speech and personhood is ultimately safely neutralized as the exception that proves the rule; further, its position within a secondhand story attenuates this exceptionality as uncertain and unverifiable. Yet, drawing from what John Durham Peters has observed about how Anglo-­A merican speech has always depended on a concept of the “abyss” against which a form of Judeo-­Christian “self-­mastery” defines itself, I suggest that the parrot is more than an animalistic other: threateningly, it touches the abyss against which Lockeian selfhood emerges. Peters explains that forms of self-­mastery are paired with a triumph over an “abyss of evil,” so that the “satanic” has been constitutive of free speech ideals—­a “Miltonic sense of confronting or even sponsoring an adversary whose opposition provides material for redemptive struggle” (crystallized, for instance, in the modern example of the ACLU’s defense of Nazis’ right to march at Skokie).32 From such a perspective, Locke’s consistency of consciousness, as evident through speech, requires forbearance and self-­control in the face of a disavowed abyss. Though perhaps not of Miltonic proportions, the parrot that occasions Locke’s definition of selfhood opens up into this abyss as a figure that could delink speech from the “substance” of the male, Anglo-­Saxon property owner and colonialist. Meanwhile, the parrot’s exceptionality—­while making it highly unlikely (even if possible) that animal and animalistic bodies would be capable of speech and personhood—­does not seem suf-

Introduction

13

ficient in staving off an abyss in which we may all just be “apply[ing] what articulate sounds to what ideas [one] thinks fit.” Later in this essay, Locke tries to assert, through a definitive taxonomic categorization, that “parrots, and several other birds, will be taught to make articulate sounds distinct enough, which yet by no means are capable of language.”33 But the Brazilian parrot from earlier has already enacted an opening into the abyss. In my account of a particular late nineteenth-­century crisis in speech within the context of the British empire’s race to its zenith, the abyss against which speech’s longstanding proprietary ideals reiterate themselves becomes more obviously racialized in Darwinian ways that remain recognizable into the present of the American empire. Not only did the conditions of the British empire at the end of the nineteenth century produce a crisis for speech’s established proprietary ideals—­the intensification of imperial rivalries over disappearing “dark places of the earth”—­but also unprecedented expansions of mass media into a global arena produced concerns that speech’s tethering to particular persons seemed increasingly untenable. If we are to understand what, precisely, this period of crisis disarticulates of speech—­as reflected in how the fictions I discuss unravel Western colonialism’s entwinements with speech’s proprietary ideals—­we have to bear in mind a longer genealogy of Western colonialism and race-­thinking. Specifically, I draw a more flexible sense of coloniality as a particular regime that determines what it means to be human from Wynter, who has argued that colonialist race-­thinking stretches back to the moment of contact between European and Indigenous peoples. It may be helpful to note here as well the important points of contact between Michel Foucault’s epistemic history and Wynter’s genealogy, given Foucault’s monumental importance to the field of Victorian studies. Foucault argues that racial demarcations began with the biopolitics of eighteenth-­century European state power, while Wynter traces a longer genealogy, contending that racial logic emerged at the primal scene of the Judeo-­Christian subject’s first colonial encounter.34 Race began with a distinction between rational European man and the irrational subhuman “native,” to justify the seizure of property, a distinction that Wynter argues retained an “extrahuman” authority from medieval Christianity (and it is here, too, that I see Wynter’s genealogy of coloniality linking up with Peters’s on Anglo-­A merican speech):

14

Introduction

“ ‘race’ was therefore to be, in effect, the nonsupernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/ gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing West would now give to the Heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are.”35 Wynter’s notion of the “coloniality of being” thus underwrites a singular—­ and unfortunate for most—­autobiographical history of the West’s becoming human on the basis of racial distinctions that demarcate who does and does not belong to this category. Nineteenth-­century liberal humanism is an important node in Wynter’s genealogy, where race specifically becomes biologized under a Darwinian imaginary. That is, in Wynter’s formulation, an entrepreneurial, deserving, “selected” Man came to be constituted by the abjection of the jobless, undeserving, “dysselected” others.36 This is the “genre” of the human, Wynter contends, that continues to “overrepresent” himself into the twenty-­fi rst century.37 Wynter’s genealogy of Western humanism helps connect Lockeian notions of property to other familiar nodes of thinking that coordinate speech and selfhood: Adam Smith’s stoic injunction for “self command” in sympathy; and, of course, John Stuart Mill, whose liberalism strenuously requires individuals to make a full descent (to borrow Peters’s parlance) into an opponent’s position through an act of imagination that yet maintains self-­ mastery. Consistency, command, mastery: we might see all these formulations as varieties of a proprietary aesthetic that adheres to specific styles of conduct and its attendant affective markers. What Wynter can teach us is that these styles of self-­possession are colonialist, because the abyss against which they are defined has a long history of being demarcated through the racial. To return to Locke’s parrot: on animalization’s role in racialization, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has recently extended Wynter’s understanding of the abjection of the irrational by arguing that a more “plastic” relationship between race and the animal has existed throughout the history of Western colonialism.38 Plasticity in Jackson’s account specifically draws attention to the ways in which lacking “reason” is only one part of how “the animal” has functioned to racialize what she calls “black(ened) flesh”; Jackson focuses especially on how gender and sexuality feature prominently in these processes as well. In her reading of Octavia Butler’s short story, “Blood-

Introduction

15

child,” Jackson targets Lockeian claims to selfhood that are grounded in speech and ownership, demonstrating how an alternative model of relation through symbiosis is inexpressible by speech. Ultimately, Butler’s story of the mutual survival between the alien Tlic who protect humans who serve as hosts for their eggs, challenges the notion of owning one’s self, because in the relationship at the center of the story, the human Gan’s “conscious acceptance of risk or Gan’s negotiation of shared risk” is perhaps less important than “the revelation that mutual risk had been there all along.”39 This revelation unravels Lockeian imperatives of consciousness, and also self-­possession, since consciousness is the means by which Locke imagines self-­possession. Jackson further underscores how Butler registers the dependence of colonialism (“the ownership of ‘the world’ ”) on the ownership of the self.40 In Butler’s story, it is humanity’s attempted colonization of an alien planet that leads to the near destruction of the world, and only a new relation “located in an uncharted social position rather than territory: partnership” enables mutual survival of human and alien races.41 In Locke’s parrot, an animal on the threshold of an abyss that dissolves self-­ownership into unconscious acts of mimicry, we can already begin to see the outlines of a form of racialization that has lasted into the contemporary world. Mimicry, of course, has been discussed most prominently in postcolonial theory, and tagged typically to the colonial relations of the British empire in the nineteenth century. Here I am thinking not only of Bhabha’s well-­k nown work on the ambivalence of colonial discourse and the menace of mimicry’s “not quite[ness],” but also of important scholarship by Gauri Viswanathan and Priya Joshi that has illuminated the formations of Englishness through its relation to colonized subjects, as well as Patrick Brantlinger’s longstanding focus on Victorian literary history, cultural studies, and the complex and violent relationships wrought through the many different colonial encounters under British imperialism.42 Brantlinger and historian Linda Colley, meanwhile, have also focused on the dynamics of “white mimicry” and the trope of “going native.”43 Certainly, the particular historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, when more and more colonized subjects across the world were speaking English and other European languages, made mimicry and the figure of the parrot more central to the racialization of a “bad” form of speech that merely played at posses-

16

Introduction

sion. But I contend that the importance of ownership to the notion of what parroting does not entail (or at least not generally) was consolidated well before the nineteenth century. In my reading of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, I will argue that the racialization of pirates as parrots may be less about mimicry than about the threat to ownership that parroting enacts: how the pirate John Silver speaks someone else’s words with perfect self-­possession, and the consequent unraveling of colonialist personhood this could bring about. In the late nineteenth century, the tethering of speech to persons was receiving more pressure. The crisis in speech I look at emerged amid the competitive, Darwinian struggle of English to become a global language, not to mention already existing dialects and regional variations “at home,” as well as the specter of pluralistic fragmentation where English might start belonging to natives as well as native speakers. If we reflect on an earlier moment, by way of contrast, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), we could observe that Macaulay had no question that English belonged to England’s white, ruling classes. Secure in his view of the English language’s unchallenged and fixed superiority, Macaulay extends his patronizing largesse to some “natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language.”44 By the end of the century, the “fluency and precision” of a foreigner like Count Dracula—­w ith his near-­perfect English grammar, but ineradicable foreign accent—­had become monstrous. Dracula is consequently defeated by a coordinated surveillance network of modern multimedia, which, as I will argue in chapter 2, establishes a new form of white cosmopolitics that sets a racial limit to its otherwise “generous” inclusion of other white speakers of English across the bounds of nation and gender, and that grants collective ownership under terms set by a hegemonic category of “English-­speaking peoples.” As I will elaborate below and in my reading of Dracula, the phrase “English-­speaking peoples” at the end of the nineteenth century came to stand for a new geopolitics of native English speakers under Anglo-­A merican white supremacy. Although I locate a late nineteenth-­century crisis of speech within a longer colonialist genealogy of racialization and personhood that stretches from Locke to twenty-­fi rst-­century patterns of thinking about speech in the

Introduction

17

United States, this book is not centrally concerned, ultimately, with further establishing this genealogy.45 But I do commit to the argument that our intimate familiarity, in the twenty-­fi rst century, with forms of Victorian racialization reveals the strength with which aesthetic structures forged during the late British empire continue to resonate in the Anglo-­A merican imaginary at present. Late Victorian tropes on degraded speakers circulate, still, as our own: nonwhite immigrants parrot; Black people are inarticulate; Asians (and terrorists, and women) chatter. One need only wade lightly into any discussion of English language instruction in public schools to find plenty of assumptions behind calls for systematic and remedial forms of learning; into any situation in which Black leaders have reached positions of high political office to find incredulous praise about articulacy and “poise”; into any video clip of high-­profile figures mocking Asian accents in English.46 These are uncomfortable prejudices to sit with, especially when we begin to interrogate how deeply they inhabit how speech rights are adjudicated and apportioned, from the most formal legal settings to scenes of everyday interaction, as I will further touch upon in my conclusion. The Poetics of Talk

One much discussed and controversial example of how speech functions centrally in a story of nineteenth-­century European imperialism is how the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) manages to pronounce on “the horror,” however attenuated his speech has become by the time of his death. As famous readers like Chinua Achebe have argued, Kurtz’s speech contours itself against the presumed muteness of Africans, and the state of “dark” abjection on which he pronounces only reveals the racism that anchors the text.47 There is finally not much of a question as to the power of this voice and to whom it ultimately belongs–­h is speech, according to Lionel Trilling, has been vouchsafed to him through its “Stygian authenticity.”48 But attending Kurtz’s deathbed, too, is a bit of talk that would be far less memorable than the colonizer’s speech were it not for T. S. Eliot: “Mistah Kurtz—­he dead.”49 As I demonstrate throughout my readings of other Victorian fictions of empire, however, talk as the abyss against which speech emerges is not only marked by features like dialect and nonwhite

18

Introduction

bodies, but consists of the expansive, universal conditions of unproprietary, un-­self-­possessed communications that are only most often associated with racialized, disabled, and nonhegemonically classed and gendered bodies. In contrast to Heart of Darkness, the fictions I discuss in this book tip the balance toward disarticulating colonizer bodies to the point of no return–­ such that it is no longer just the subaltern who cannot speak, but the master as well. I am therefore also reading with these fictions as much as I am reorienting them toward a different aesthetics of un-­self-­possessed and anticolonial communications that I am calling—­a fter a Glissantian positing of a totality that refuses to be summed up or possessed—­a “poetics” of talk.50 I think of talk as not really “in” any of these texts–­indeed, the observations of Kurtz’s demise ascribed to the “insolent black head in the doorway” are, at least within the novel’s imaginary, not so much talk as degenerate speech.51 Talk, rather, is an insurgent force that hovers primarily outside these late Victorian fictions of empire, forming a counterpoetics that circulates in a surround that these fictions are incapable of imagining—­though they do, as I argue, disarticulate longstanding Lockeian models of speech and selfhood in envisioning the British empire’s final acts. In contending that critical engagement sited at the textual borders can usher forth anticolonial refigurings of speech into something else that requires another name, I am explicitly aligning my method with how Glissant understands poiesis as anticolonial aesthetic labor that breaks with Western territorial logic (itself an aesthetic) through to a different field of nonproprietary relations. Again, Glissantian poiesis is located “on the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination”: he imagines that the true work of anticolonial poetics extends beyond oppositional dialectics, whether the bifurcation of a subject and its “other,” center and periphery models, or postcolonial conditions of “hybridity” like Bhabha’s, which remains somewhat linear in its logic.52 It is important to my account, which also traces the affective resonances of disarticulated speech in fictions of empire, that Glissant describes this beyond as indexed by a feeling, which he calls “vertigo.” Vertigo, a condition of losing one’s coordinates and relation to the world, is not apocalypse, nor yet a new beginning, but the “shiver” of a beginning (out of many possible other beginnings). Consequently, I see vertigo as an important feeling—­or, perhaps better, a sensory

Introduction

19

and cognitive experience—­that is capable of overriding other visceral affects that circulate around scenes of failed speech, such as embarrassment, anxiety, fear, rage, or a mocking superiority. Secondarily, my use of “poetics” also picks up on linguist Roman Jakobson’s claim that all forms of language, from literary texts to everyday verbal exchanges, instantiate a “poetic function” typically only associated with art.53 In conceptualizing a poetics of talk, I am also thinking about the many ways in which, colloquially, talk readily connotes a wide range of downgraded alternatives to speech that draw on the instabilities of embodied and emplaced interactions, and decentered ownership. As Shelley Salamensky has usefully put it, while quoting different usages of “talk” from the OED: [T]alk (as opposed, for instance, to speech or discourse) is traditionally coded as “familiar,” “ordinary”: informal, close-­at-­hand, common, pedestrian, everyday—­more primary or originary for its proximity to us, perhaps, but seemingly also secondary, second-­class, not for elevated usages. Talk is the popular discourse of the public domain; yet, free from central authority, talk may travel secret pathways, emerging “behind” one’s “backe” . . . Talk is feared, and yet also dismissed as ineffective, ineffectual, “idle.”54

This evocative list, with its emphasis on what Edmund Husserl named the “life-­world,” open ownership, and escapes from “central authority” and utilitarian communicative ends, is highly compatible with approaches to talk from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, closely related disciplines influenced by Jakobson.55 As the self-­proclaimed “microanalyst” of everyday interactions, sociologist Erving Goffman, has observed in his Forms of Talk, talk seems especially slippery at conveying a simultaneously “obvious but insufficiently appreciated fact that the words we speak are not often our own.”56 Goffman’s observations of talk extend far beyond a consideration of words and persons: in his descriptions, a single exchange of talk contains an infinitude of different constitutive parts in relation to other parts. These parts might range from more visible aspects of embodiment (such as gestures) to paralanguage (such as soundings like gasps and throat clearings, or other “nonlexical” inflections like pacing, volume, or tone) to nuanced rituals of social positioning in accordance with one’s “footing,”

20

Introduction

and the “delicts,” or faux pas, that may disrupt ritual positioning.57 Talk, at least from sociolinguistic perspectives outside literary studies, may thus be characterized as a series of coordinated yet unstable rituals, communal yet risky, a shared process and experience that belongs neither to self nor to other. Talk as opposed to speech is more tenuous, more likely to fall apart at any moment of its ritual enactment; it is outside the control of any single, self-­possessed person. It may be of use to mention as well that by zeroing in on talk’s provisional and co-­creative enactments and its role in disarticulating a colonialist model of selfhood, my terminological use of “talk” relates to how enactments of expression may be regarded in psychoanalysis. Most obviously, talk comes up, of course, in the “talking cure,” in which, according to Freud, the therapeutic expression of the symptom in speech relies on the dyadic interactions between analyst and analysand—­so that we might conceptualize such speech as not quite belonging to the analysand. From a Lacanian perspective, anything that might be said will miss something in excess of linguistic reference (that is, the unconscious, or the Real), such that we are always running up against an inarticulable lack when it comes to speech. As Mari Ruti has usefully summarized: for Freud, “the symptom communicates what the subject is unable to articulate through any other means . . . Lacan, however, argues that there is a steadfast breed of symptoms . . . that cannot be unraveled through the signifier’s intervention.”58 Meanwhile, as Alicia Mireles Christoff has argued in her readings of Eliot and Hardy in relation to major thinkers of the British object relations school, expression or selfhood contained or determinate in so-­called high realist fictions is unraveled through how the authors negotiate narrative voice’s multiplicity, or a condition of characterological aloneness that depends on being with others.59 From work like Christoff’s, we can see how the crisis of speech and selfhood at the turn of the century is not so much a rupture as an intensification. Finally, in foregrounding talk’s multiplicity, my understanding picks up on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, familiar to literary studies, which describes the conditions of multivocality and social stratification that attend any given utterance, and especially the novel form. Bakhtin stresses the polyphonic effects of novelistic language—­which may include

Introduction

21

dialect, slang, jargon, authorial speech, institutionalized language, and more—­but also regards the novel as an “orchestration” of such polyphony.60 By contrast, I am interested in how late Victorian novelistic form breaks apart into untenable aesthetics because the kinds of social stratification necessary for the maintenance of the colonial project are headed toward a democratic leveling into degenerating speech for all.61 As a consequence, an obviously heteroglossic fiction of empire like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), which successfully “orchestrates” the social stratifications of diverse forms of speech, does not quite fit within the purview of this particular project. Moreover, my account of speech disarticulating into talk also departs from Bakhtinian heteroglossia in that I will be emphasizing features of paralanguage, embodiment, and the material environment that I have just highlighted, via Goffman. The bodies and environments that constitute what Goffman calls the immeasurably complex and delicate (though seemingly mundane) “interaction order” of everyday life are involved in rituals of coordination that are always managing the threat of dispossessed selves, as well as of dispossessed language. These material resonances of this inarticulate abyss, as I will demonstrate, seem to haunt the narrative borders of the late Victorian texts I read. In their disarticulations of speech, they both flirt with and foreclose the abyss in their limited imperial imaginaries. Victorian Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Anticolonial Poiesis

As I have said, my consideration of speech in late nineteenth-­century fictions of empire returns to questions that have been central to deconstruction and postcolonial theory. My focus on talk, however, is something of a workaround rather than an answer to some of the predicaments about speech most pointedly raised in Spivak’s 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Talk, as I have begun to describe, is not just the dissolution of speech’s colonialist, proprietary logic, or speech’s “other,” but a provisional term that tries to get “on the other side” of resisting Anglo-­A merican speech’s longstanding entanglements with colonialism and racial logic. In speech’s various states of untenability and disarticulation in the texts that I read, I detect a deconstructionist theoretical impulse that rhymes with Derridean critiques of phonocentricism in Western philosophy.62 To take one instance,

22

Introduction

the singular aura of a speaker’s presence (retained, however ambivalently, by Kurtz) could not be further from George Meredith’s introduction, in the first chapter of One of Our Conquerors, to the English “conqueror” Victor Radnor: the narrative knowingly “proceeds at a slower pace than the legs of a man in motion,” moving painstakingly through a thick description of Radnor’s fall on the slippery London Bridge, an embodied “delict”that results in his disordered cognition and, thereafter, in an upsetting dialogic exchange with a working-­class stranger.63 This example from Meredith, however, does not just disarticulate—­quite literally, renders inarticulate—­ one to whom a claim to speech and self-­possession might seem vouchsafed: a seemingly minor “failure” of speech in which Radnor fails to come up with a quick enough riposte to an insult becomes something of a catalyzing event for the conqueror’s psychic and social unraveling in the rest of the novel. The moment also potentiates a different kind of awkward presencing than a speaker’s aura.64 As I will argue more fully in chapter 3, though satire motivates Meredith’s disarticulation of the conquering Englishman, there is a certain pliability to the narration that renders possible a different view of disarticulated speech as an insurgent form of talk that mediates a subjectivity in common.65 We might also productively read the deconstructive impulse toward speech in these late Victorian texts alongside Judith Butler’s case against the efficacy of speech acts in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997). Butler argues that J. L. Austin’s assignations of illocutionary and perlocutionary force to speech acts fail to take into account the spatial and temporal indeterminacy of any situation of speech.66 Any “moment” of social ritual and convention, Butler writes, “is a condensed historicity” open to the past and to contingent futures.67 That is, Butler unravels the sense of closure that the Austinian speech act assumes, and the attendant notion that speech, in any given situation, can exert some kind of articulable, independent power: “the speech act as sovereign action.”68 Butler extends the unraveling of the speech act to point out, moreover, that bodies are never separable from the speech that they utter; that is, instrument and utterance are mutually constitutive, besides both being subject to spatial and temporal indeterminacy.69 “The speech act as sovereign action” is thus a fantasy, as is the “sovereign” speaking body.

Introduction

23

Butler ultimately diagnoses, specifically in the arena of legal discourse, the sovereignty that attaches to speech as “linked with the idealization of sovereign state power,” whereby power is “expropriated” to individuals, thus allowing the state to seem “a neutral [nonsovereign] instrument” that can serve as a legitimate arbiter of speech and its harms.70 Likewise, I am interested in theorizing speech’s unsovereign qualities in relation to the workings of hegemonic structures of power, but rather than focusing on legal discourse and state power, I make claims about racialization and coloniality that are not quite central to Butler’s account of speech. Again, I understand speech’s tethering to ownership as underwritten by racialized aesthetics that have extended and endured in sprawling and diffuse areas of culture. Arguably, our metabolized notions of articulacy and self-­ possession permeate not just public political controversies on speech rights, but also our experiences of a dinner or a classroom debate or how we adjudicate the merits of an expository essay. As we will see, by way of late Victorian literature, the aesthetics of self-­possession that bolsters the right to own speech leans heavily on the racializing taxonomies that fix who is an “un-­self-­possessed” subject, even in the absence of raced bodies. At present, we continue to circulate racialized logic through veiled policing of which embodiments are fit to own and control words, which embodiments are capable of being self-­possessed. We certainly judge—­dare I say, especially as academics?—­“ brilliance” according to someone’s level of articulate performance, as if articulacy were a neutrally agreed-­upon merit rather than a proprietary aesthetic with its own history. Though part of the same moment as Butler’s work, Spivak’s essay on subaltern speech is not really about speech at all—­at least, its deconstructive energies are directed more against the Western intellectual’s abjuring “the difficult task of counterhegemonic ideological production” by evoking the “good” politics of not speaking for the subaltern.71 Recall that in Spivak’s essay, her primary targets are Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, whom she charges with a particular contradiction: they theorize against the “sovereign subject” in their critiques of power, but when approaching the subaltern, their language turns fetishistic and marks subalterns as “self-­k nowing, political canny” subjects.72 These contradictions become the jumping-­off point for Spivak’s well-­k nown attempt at her own “counterhegemonic ideo-

24

Introduction

logical production,” however compromised, through her reading of the practice of sati, and her final, tentative discussion of the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri during menstruation as something of a speculative elsewhere from speech compromised under postcolonial discursive conditions.73 I return to these details of Spivak’s essay, because I want to take off from speech’s enervated form in it to skip away from the question of speech entirely. To this end, I call attention to a different moment at the beginning of Spivak’s essay: her rarely remarked-­upon choice to focus her reading of the European intellectual on the transcription of a 1972 conversation between Foucault and Deleuze, rather than on their writings. Spivak briefly justifies her choice: I have chosen this friendly exchange between two activist philosophers of history because it undoes the opposition between authoritative theoretical production and the unguarded practice of conversation, enabling one to glimpse the track of ideology.74

Although this is but a brief prefatory remark in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I suggest that this justification points to “unguardedness”—­an antiproprietary feeling—­as that which is in excess of speech as it is normatively regarded, only palpable in conversation. By this logic, speech’s ability to cover up ideological power owes in part to its “guarded” proprietary aesthetic of precision. It is at this juncture that my account of disarticulated speech opening up into another space of talk meets up with Spivak’s, and it is also at this juncture that I see Glissant’s interest in refiguring Babel taking off. With Glissant’s speculative approach to what poiesis might enact from the materials bequeathed by colonialism in mind, I reroute emphasis from speech into talk in my readings. I offer a few caveats: I am not arguing that subaltern speech can be heard—­through extractive means—­in colonialist texts as talk. Rather, by pairing a sociolinguistically inflected understanding of talk with anticolonial poiesis, I am trying to instantiate a form of criticism that accepts the discursive limits of “the text,” but finds in approaches like Glissant’s and Wynter’s the necessity of conjuring a different view from speech’s disarticulated colonialist materials. At the same time, because, as I have mentioned, these texts are each already driven, in some manner or another, by a deconstructive theoretical impulse, my readings also stay

Introduction

25

close to these texts. In them, as we will see, the “bad” aesthetics of un-­self-­ possessed bodies unravels speech’s sovereign subjects and the colonialist worlds that these subjects suture. From these unravelings, I take up talk as figuring a different, and potentially anticolonial, poetics of communication. In so doing, I am pointing out missed opportunities that Victorian studies and deconstruction-­oriented postcolonial theory, focused on the discursive limits of speech, may have taken up from Caribbean anticolonialism in an earlier moment. As both Tim Watson and Nasser Mufti have recently pointed out, the Caribbean as a location, as well as Caribbean thought, has been almost entirely ignored by Victorianists even though well-­k nown figures like C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois were as much insiders to Victorian studies as any of the white, Anglo-­A merican founders of the field in the mid-­t wentieth century (as Mufti specifically argues).75 In this book, I am interested in how articulating forms of talk that strain against the colonialist texts that yet also guard them away requires criticism as the supplement that enables what postcolonial and anticolonial Afro-­Caribbean thinkers conceptualize as poiesis, and what Wynter calls “rethinking aesthetics.” Like Glissant, Wynter is interested in “poiesis,” though she is more explicit about criticism as poiesis. Additionally, writing on C. L. R. James, an important influence, Wynter claims that his refusal to settle into singular political models, not entirely rejecting or embracing the terms given by his own entirely colonial education, is a part of his “counterdoctrine of Jamesian poiesis.”76 In its provisionality, the sense of poiesis shared among these particular thinkers on coloniality neither privileges origins nor endings; it is speculative, improvisational, always partial, and never unblinded. As hopefully clear already, it is not my intent to offer these works of imperial fictions—­authored by members of what Wynter names an “ethnoclass Man” that has “overrepresented” himself since the aftermath of the first colonial encounter and into our present—­a redemptive arc.77 At the same time, I am also not advocating for a complete disavowal of them, since, as I have said, these texts seem more permissive of the kinds of critical interventions I make.78 Any sense of anticolonial latency in these fictions, however, I think of as enacted by the process of engaging them with different (by which I mean, previously unengaged in Victorian studies) theoretical constellations. Finally, since this book keeps in view the legacies of the Brit-

26

Introduction

ish empire’s racial logics into the twenty-­fi rst-­century United States—­a lso a period infused with a sense of imperial decadence, what Jed Esty has recently called “declinism,” and dizzying media transformation—­the theoretical constellations I construct will also draw occasionally on thinking about racialization from ethnic studies, including work from Asian American and Latinx studies, as well as Black studies from scholars working in a North American context. These other engagements will be calibrated to the particular “refigurings” I attempt in relation to each text. Speech, Media, and Territorial Expansion

Modern media technologies are front and center to how both Dracula and The Inheritors evoke a white cosmopolitan dream of globally connected extensions of colonizer speech—­and, as well, the fears that such an ambitious project would fail and yield disarticulated speech and disintegrating embodiment and selfhood. My chapters on both of these novels will thus pick up most explicitly on my discussion in the following paragraphs on late nineteenth-­century media and the British imperial project; though as we will see, Treasure Island and One of Our Conquerors also register changes in the landscape of commercial publication and journalism in subtler ways. In a turn-­of-­the-­century decisive shift toward the twinning of media and empire, I see an Anglo-­A merican consolidation of Western hegemony that has given our twenty-­fi rst century its particular forms of jingoistic, utopic visions of global community—­as well as their undoing. This is a sense of the “global” that Aamir Mufti has critiqued (in relation to English-­language hegemony in the formation of world literature) as “function[ing] . . . as a vanishing mediator.”79 I argue that this late nineteenth-­century moment of confluence between media on the brink of unprecedented globality and the unprecedented scale of New Imperialism’s systematic extractive endeavors is a pivotal one, which marks a definite swing toward what we now colloquially refer to as “media empire.” As Aaron Worth has also noted in his study of imperialism and media from the 1857 Indian Rebellion to World War I, the early twentieth century witnessed the shift toward “the idea of a quasi-­autonomous media empire to supplant that of a media-­inflected and -­lubricated empire.”80

Introduction

27

Utopic defenses of new media’s seamless extensions of the human body were as much a part of the late Victorian era as they are of our twenty-­fi rst century. W. T. Stead, a New Journalism innovator who imagined specifically Anglo-­A merican–­led futures enabled by new communication technologies, offers one of the more intense examples of what was no less than a prophetic vision for new, imperial media. In 1886, Stead proclaimed that “the telegraph and the printing-­press have converted Great Britain into a vast agora, or assembly of the whole community.”81 Something of a late Victorian Marshall McLuhan, Stead was an eccentric with Calvinist roots who dreamed that new media technologies would evolve together with occult forms of media—­including telepathy and automatic writing—­to broker continuous extensions of the Western self. As Duncan Bell has illuminated, Stead, alongside the better known Cecil Rhodes, was a key figure in promoting a turn-­of-­the-­century alliance between England and the United States, in effect an imperialist handover of a baton that was to ensure unity and mastery under the English-­speaking, white race.82 At stake in articulating such a grand telos of becoming from the bodies of the Athenians to the English to the Americans is, of course, the forceful maintenance of Western imperial hegemony in discursive form. As Tanya Agathocleous has also demonstrated in her discussion of Stead’s Review of Reviews and Prithwis Chandra Ray’s repurposing of it in his Indian World for the purposes of Indian nationalism, Stead’s Review had grand ambitions of becoming “a vital repository of Anglocentric knowledge and a web of connections that spanned the globe.”83 This repository would “prepare all English-­speaking peoples to lead a future Anglo federation based on a simultaneously expanding and liberalizing empire.”84 The gradual coming together of mass media—­especially in print, and eventually in radio and cinema—­in other words, was key to the production of a white supremacist, Anglo-­A merican world. That such worlding would be facilitated by communication technologies that seamlessly extend the original selves of Athens into the future of the twentieth century and beyond, reveals, at bottom, a preoccupation with ensuring that speech remains sutured to the right bodies. Bell aptly characterizes this embrace of media prostheses for the purposes of uniting a white supremacist “Angloworld” as cyborg-­facilitated imperialism: “stretched across thousands of

28

Introduction

miles, this newly constituted people could be imagined in the singular, an intricate synthesis of bodies, machinic infrastructure, and electrical current.”85 As Worth has also demonstrated, the literature of the late Victorian period registered the discursive as well as material ways in which media infrastructures intersected with the spatial and temporal capacities of the imperial imaginary.86 As I will discuss, the multimedia “Angloworld” that narrates Dracula is a version of this kind of cyborg-­facilitated imperialism described by Bell; meanwhile, the dystopic Inheritors shows the failure of the networked Anglo-­European world to hold itself together, as New Journalism becomes the very means by which a Fourth Dimensionist alien race both renders colonizer speech dysfluent and destroys Western imperialism. Both utopic and dystopic visions of imperialist media futures find direct resonance in how we have negotiated the rise of social media platforms in the twenty-­fi rst century. Among Silicon Valley elites, it is not hard to come by rhetoric positing that the latest available platforms will finally achieve the seamless “extensions of man,” even as recent US electoral politics has spectacularly revealed the limits of utopic visions of media globality.87 For example, speaking of Clubhouse, a social audio app allowing thousands of users to congregate in voice chat rooms, and which briefly gained popularity during the COVID-­19 pandemic, the founder of Silicon Valley’s best-­ known venture fund, Marc Andreesen, had this to say: “Clubhouse is the Athenian agora come to life, globally. I mean that seriously. Clubhouse is the first venue for people anywhere in the world to come together in groups to talk—­not metaphorically, but literally—­about any topic they can imagine.”88 Once again, the idealized selves of the Athenian agora, this time “come to life, globally” and seamlessly extended in their full embodiments (“not metaphorically, but literally”). In abstractedly referencing the “global,” such statements trade in a politics of nominal diversity (“any topic they can imagine”) that elides difference. Though Clubhouse has billed itself on its website as a space for “unlikely collisions” and has become a multilingual platform, these “collisions” are conceptualized as “magic” and “fascinating” rather than as challenging or discomfiting in any material way.89 “People anywhere in the world [coming] together” are assimilated, in Andreesen’s overall vision, to an originary mythos of democracy and Western speech. My account of a late nineteenth-­century crisis in speech is most inter-

Introduction

29

ested in disintegrative anxieties, inextricable from the sense of just how far territorialization might stretch, and so I will now discuss the ways in which perceptions of new media just as often brought to the surface worries over the severance of speech from “original” bodies. Historians of late Victorian media have also pointed to the sometimes obscured reality of media’s nonintegrated, messy conditions in the approach to the century’s end, and so the seamlessness and smoothness of globality envisioned by figures like Stead or Marie Corelli (also a figure, not incidentally, interested in spiritualism and occult transmission) might be taken as something of a projective urge. As Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley have argued, both technophilic teleologies of media history and Marxist critique of the so-­called “culture industry” have perpetuated “the spatial incorporation of the historical many into the one true media now understood as the first sign of a media matrix,” thereby obscuring the rather disjointed nature of nineteenth-­century media ecology.90 In relation to any number of late Victorian technologies, then, we might imagine different anxieties over speech’s severance from colonizer bodies; it is perhaps only most obvious with examples like Kurtz’s somewhat severed, phonographic voice.91 The rapid development of a diverse field of mass print media in the final decades of the nineteenth century played a significant role in reconfiguring perceptions of human cognition and embodiment. Commercial print culture reached unprecedented heights of production and circulation; factors contributing to this boom in print included education reform, rising literacy, advances in printing technology (steam press), the lowering of paper duties, and of course, the development of adjacent technologies like the wireless telegraph and steam-­powered transport that aided the mass production and worldwide circulation of newspapers and other periodicals. As scholars like Alison Byerly and John Plotz have argued, a sense of virtual space with which we are familiar in the digital age developed around this time.92 Recently, Susan Zieger has brought important attention to how diverse forms of print ephemera—­obscured by a scholarly tendency to focus on periodicals and books—­generated conditions of mind, affect, and self-­making that find easy analogues to the present impact of social media. Zieger’s discussion of a late nineteenth-­century “information addict,” consuming tobacco papers and cigarette cards, offers a complementary reading of reconfigured

30

Introduction

masculinist selfhood in this moment, based on the porosity of “mediated minds” to the materials of mass culture.93 Such mediated minds are, Zieger notes, also colonizer minds: cigarette cards enable the same virtual experience of (informational) conquest as world’s fairs.94 Meanwhile, in chronicling the “many inventions” of the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Richard Menke has shown how new technologies, like the telephone, brought attention to print’s integrated functions of storage, communication, and reproduction–­and I would add that the body was also becoming newly illuminated as a technology that could unify these processes, but in contrast to print, more liable to disrepair and fragmentation.95 As I will discuss, in Dracula, multilingual bodies of Eastern European peasants and villagers were reimagined as failures of storage, unable—­unlike the long-­l iving (“undead”) Count—­to seamlessly contain multiple languages while also functioning as vehicles of communication. Against these multilingual bodies racialized in a manner that contains them into the picturesque, the extensions of English-­only speech are managed and stored through Mina Harker’s remediation of diverse other media into typewritten form—­though, as Menke points out in his reading of the novel, Dracula registers that her typescript is “lossy” in how it inevitably discards material in its consolidation. It is worth noting, to be sure, that worries over the severing of speech from bodies and, consequently, disintegrating selfhood in light of new media technologies have a longer association with print that stretches further back than the late nineteenth century. As Paula McDowell has argued, for instance, new expansions in the book trade and the beginnings of commercial print activity, around the 1760s, precipitated the “invention” of a modern (Western) concept of orality. McDowell traces the valuation of folk, oral traditions by literary elites as well as the strategic nostalgia to “recover” certain—­but not all—­speech forms supposedly overtaken by the emergence of print commerce to this moment.96 Yet, as McDowell is careful to note, this ostensibly “positive” construction of orality was “prompted less by any protodemocratic impulse than by a profound discomfort with new cultures of reading, writing, and even speaking shaped by print,” and many of the constructions of oral culture in this period continued to reflect engrained, earlier associations of vulgar voices with working-­class illiteracy.97

Introduction

31

In other words, even in this earlier moment, we can observe a clear (class) anxiety about what kinds of new bodies might begin to claim territory as speakers. The Lockeian preoccupation with defining personhood to restrict who is capable of owning speech rears its head—­in the name of consolidating a purportedly universal speech community. Jumping ahead to our own moment of the digital age, we might find echoes of such an “invention” of orality in Sherry Turkle’s arguments that we must “return” to face-­to-­face interaction to foster empathic connections, which I briefly mentioned earlier in relation to the art of conversation manuals. Some of her most seemingly commonsensical articulations encode some significant assumptions about personhood. In her bestselling Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), Turkle offers this gambit: “If we make space for conversation, we come back to each other and we come back to ourselves.”98 But who are the selves that we supposedly return to through talk, and what are the stakes of returning to these selves? Turkle offers a partial answer by invoking a Thoreauvian interior subject, who equally values solitude and conversation, engaging a dialectic whereby, alone, one reestablishes a grounding in an interior self; in converse with others, material is furnished to be metabolized for self-­ reflection; alone once again, one discovers an even more authentic interior self. These are, crucially, whole selves that work constantly toward an imagined horizon of integration based on a core interior: any “openness” to alterity and community is ultimately a route back to enriching the boundaries of the singular self. The wholeness of selfhood enriched through the exchange of speech with others is substantiated in its contrast with the kinds of fractured selves wrought by social media: “We take what we need from [others] in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.”99 For Turkle, the violence of social media is that it is a form of property theft that results in the two-­way dispossession of self and those from whom we steal. In this, we hear the echoes of the claims in art of conversation manuals that mass print was having detrimental effects on self-­ possessed speech. Though any dream of harmonious global connection through new media is ostensibly the other side of a “return” to conversation, we can see how both utopic and dystopic views on communication technologies share

32

Introduction

the assumption that one must avoid fragmented selves at all costs. A certain wholeness that inheres in the idealized political bodies emplaced in the Athenian agora, self-­possessed and sovereign, must be preserved: whether through a return to face-­to-­face interaction, or by a seamless technological extension. As Peters puts it, in a statement that opens his account of the entanglement of Anglo-­A merican free speech with notions of self-­mastery: “Ever since the beginnings of democratic theory and practice in ancient Athens, communication—­understood as the general art of concerted living and acting in the polis through the gift of logos (speech or reason)—­has been considered the lifeblood of public life. In the heart of every democrat since beats the pulse of Athens envy, a desire to put on a toga and speak swelling oratory.”100 I am arguing that these Athens-­envious, liberal selves are colonialist ones; the recourse to this longstanding mythic origin for Western civilization offers a strong discursive clue that their claim to universality is tenuous. These whole, sovereign selves are characteristically invested simultaneously in boundedness and territorial expansion—­a dynamic that needs less explication when it comes to technophilic prosthetics, but which inheres also in the “territorial expansion” of the interior self. This simultaneous drive toward boundedness and territorial expansion, I argue, everywhere conditions the terms by which communication technologies and speech are worked out at the close of the British nineteenth century. *

*

*

Emerging out of possession, control, mastery, and regulation’s disarticulation is the excessive disorder of talk—­w ith an uncontainable poetics that derives energy from speech detached from one body and wandering into another. Talk warms bodies to life, as Stevenson might have it, in the same manner as an adventure: “talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still simmering and the physical earth swimming around you with the colours of the sunset.”101 Or, as Meredith might have it, bodies (and minds) become profusely inarticulate, knocked out of their self-­possession by trying to hold too much of the world in them. In Stoker’s Dracula, racialized talkers who seem full of too many languages experience communicative breakdowns, compensating by excessive ges-

Introduction

33

turing and excessive affect; in Conrad and Ford’s The Inheritors, dysfluency signifies the disordered condition of a disintegrating colonial order, but unresolved dimensions of gender prompt thinking that might go toward something else. Out of disordered scenes of speech, Refiguring Speech tries to follow unpossessed selves from the literary materials of the colonial project itself through to the “shiver of a[n] [anticolonial] beginning.”

ONE

Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom, and effect. — ­R o b e r t L o u i s S t e v e n s o n , “Talk and Talkers” God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man, therefore, had by nature his organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words. But this was not enough to produce language; for parrots, and several other birds, will be taught to make articulate sounds distinct enough, which yet by no means are capable of language. —­J o h n L o c k e , An Essay Concerning Human Understanding The secret has been told to the parrot. —­Words spoken by A l e x a n d e r S m o l l e t t in S t e v e n s o n , Treasure Island

In a t wo-­pa rt essay, “Talk and Talkers,” first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1882, Robert Louis Stevenson compares literature and everyday talk, and finds literature coming up short. Merely the “shadow of a good talk,” literature is not only an “imitation” but one that has lost talk’s primary vitality and movement. As this opening chapter will show, Stevenson’s apparent distaste for print culture more broadly, and his valorization of the primacy of a certain kind of orality, is more complicated than it might seem at 34

Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson

35

first glance. Though ostensibly circling around the same concerns that have occupied media theorists of the “orality and literacy” school, such as Walter J. Ong, Stevenson’s understanding of literature as derivative of talk turns on a particular understanding of talk as a dissolving, un-­selving experience. This chapter argues that Treasure Island’s marked interest in parroting and eavesdropping illustrates an important way in which Stevenson’s interest in talk undermines the adventure romance’s own imperial imaginary. Parroting and eavesdropping, both of which figure unauthorized transfers of speech (repeating the words of others, hearing words for others), crystallize something of a crisis of ownership that undoes the tight tethering of speech to bodies that sutures together colonial subjectivity. I further suggest that Treasure Island even anticipates the ways in which the importance of speech to the imperial project will be overwritten by a Glissantian poetics of relation through Stevenson’s explicit interest in everyday talk—­and especially in parroting and eavesdropping, and their disruptions to transfers of speech as property. The Scottish author’s somewhat offbeat interests in these unproprietary forms of orality instantiate departures from the usual phonocentrisms of Western metaphysics that we could follow through to an anticolonial poetics of talk. In comparison with Stevenson’s later South Sea tales, which are more openly critical of European imperialism, Treasure Island has been regarded as hewing fairly close to the conventions of other so-­called “boys’ own” adventure fictions that functioned ideologically to delineate the subject of “imperial boyhood.”1 But I will show how in both Stevenson’s first book and his essays in this period, there is an important and consistent interest in resisting proprietary rigidity more generally that necessarily goes against the colonialist aesthetics that Treasure Island otherwise takes up. As we will see, his devaluation of literature in “Talk and Talkers” has to do specifically with an aversion to print media’s fixed form and the attendant authorial rights of a relatively new, commercial print culture. Stevenson specifically used the occasion of an authorial feature in the Idler Magazine called “My First Book” to focus on Treasure Island’s collaborative—­and, as other scholars have pointed out, even plagiaristic—­production. In Treasure Island, meanwhile, parroting and pirating become closely associated in a manner that unravels the proprietary rights of both speech and authorship. This chapter’s arguments will

36

Chapter One

follow a specific thread of Stevenson’s that connects the poetics of adventure with unauthorized transfers of speech. To do so, I argue, is necessarily to unspool speech into a more general sense of talk, in which untethered ownership between interlocutor bodies renders untenable any project of trying to police proprietary transfers of language. It bears mention that “the parrot” is a rather overdetermined figure in any discussion of speech and empire. As Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie D. Holm have succinctly put it, the parrot “has become a kind of locus classicus for the articulation of [the kind of] colonial ambivalence” that, again, Homi K. Bhabha has famously theorized with respect to his account of mimicry and the ambivalence of hegemonic speech.2 But in revisiting parroting as connected with eavesdropping (and specifically by way of Stevenson’s avowed interest in everyday talk’s unproprietary, and improper, mediations), I am disarticulating parroting, especially when discussed in the context of empire, from the poetics of mimicry and subversion. Rather, I see parroting as part of a more expansive poetics of drift and waywardness that unseats ownership and imagines the naturalness of unsovereign speakers and subjects.3 As such, my sense of parroting is related to Judith Butler’s insight that “utterance can be turned, untethered from its origin,” and that consequently, “there is no possibility of not repeating.”4 Though the arguments in this chapter will draw on a poststructuralist sense of the universally prosthetic and detachable nature of speech, its central concern will be to insist that conceptions of the sovereignty of speech are grounded in racialization and colonialist logics of property that have not always surfaced in these accounts. In Stevenson’s adventure romance, there is a useful deconstructive impulse toward untethering word/body dyads into talk that simultaneously—­if less wittingly—­unwinds the racializing assemblages that nevertheless maintain these dyads in the story. Finally, I note that the novel is most often read in terms of its interrogations of class politics in a manner that disregards race—­and often also gender.5 But my argument is that if we hold in view the central importance of proprietorship, possession, and control in negotiating the aesthetic distinctions between “gentlemen born” and “gentlemen of fortune” in Stevenson’s tale, then the contours of racialization’s role in consolidating colonialist power become clearer—­even in this text in which both women and non-

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37

white characters are scarce and functionally absent. When Locke articulates the purpose of language (see the second epigraph to this chapter), he notably mentions parrots to elaborate a distinction between proper and improper use of language—­which, in Locke’s philosophy of natural rights more generally, services his central notion of man as a property-­owning being.6 As Carolyn Lesjak has recently argued, in the British nineteenth century, Locke’s philosophy of natural rights and property was invoked in racialized contexts to mark the poor, colonized subjects, and Indigenous people as unfit tillers of land.7 In this circular logic that Lesjak articulates, the unfitness of persons determined whether land was “unused,” and consequently the land became terra nullius for the taking by those fit to own.8 As I will contend, a similar method of adjudicating “fitness” by means of proper use delineated who could own speech, stretching from Locke into the Victorian period, with the racialization of speech becoming increasingly explicit in the late nineteenth century. We can observe in Treasure Island that the physiological and characterological parameters of who was fit for speech—­or, who used it with sufficient self-­possession—­took on shapeshifting aesthetics of embodiment that were key to the maintenance of the late Victorian era’s proliferating colonial hierarchies. As this book will also demonstrate more broadly, the flexibility of this regime in defining the terms of speech ownership enabled an ongoing exercise of power within a changing media landscape, one that had to contend with admitting more and more “unfit” interlocutors. Talk and Adventure Poetics

In Treasure Island, the ways in which speech wanders in an unauthorized manner enable the novel’s idealized poetics of adventure. We might begin with the rather simple observation that the novel’s plot is directly catalyzed by this wandering: Squire Trelawney accidentally recruits the pirate John Silver on board the Hispaniola through his uncontrolled “blabbing”; Silver’s duplicity is revealed when Jim eavesdrops on him. When Stevenson extols the particular virtues of everyday conversation in “Talk and Talkers,” he is specifically drawn to talk’s liability to risky, wayward exchanges. As Glenda Norquay has also argued, Stevenson’s interest in the pleasures of “gossip” is

38

Chapter One

related to a serious commitment to a theory of “vagabond” reading.9 Reading “Talk and Talkers” with Treasure Island, one might conclude that the wayward movement of speech not only enables adventure, as with the propelling force of Trelawney’s blabbing and Jim’s eavesdropping, it also figures adventure poetics. We might recall that in Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of chronotopes, “adventure-­time” is suited to “suddenly” and “at just that moment,” such that adventure becomes formally vulnerable to “random contingency.”10 Protagonists, adrift, meet unforeseen elements and encounters. For Stevenson, this too is the thrill of everyday talk. Talk, also unfolding “at just that moment,” thus operates through a poetics that is homologous with that of adventure. The squire’s blabbing and Jim’s opportunity to eavesdrop not only cause adventure’s unspooling, but are also, in and of themselves, unintended, “sudden” instances of the unexpected. That speaking and hearing are constantly subject to such accidents is a rather mundane observation about everyday talk’s openness to contingency as well as the importance of its experiential, co-­constructed qualities—­aspects that, again, are practically given in observations elsewhere made by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists.11 In a late Victorian fiction of empire, however, what might this structural similarity between the poetics of talk and that of adventure yield? Stevenson’s adventure romance presents a distinct opportunity to think through the issues central to this book: the entanglement of speech with British imperialism, the stakes behind racialized delineations of fitness and ownership, and what possibilities open up when speech tips into talk’s unstable movement within and between mediating bodies and environments. The importance, to Stevenson, of talk’s formal similarities to adventure poetics warrants some further underscoring. In one sense, the clear linking of the two in Stevenson’s “Talk and Talkers” essay makes his conception of talk quite proximate to the distinction that I am drawing between speech and talk: talk begins with a delinking of speech from ownership. As mentioned in the introduction, Stevenson’s own observations about talk and conversational embodiment also tend to emphasize not singularity or ownership, but mediated co-­experience. Again, idealizing the ability of a “good talk” to warm one’s heart, brain, and blood perpetuates un-­selving effects, dissolving ownership between interlocutors and the boundary between

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39

interior perception and external environment. As Michael Silverstein has described everyday speech interactions, interlocutors “come to define each other cumulatively through the indexical power of deployment of this or that little contributory piece of verbal signage, gradually yielding a fairly coherent picture of who—­that is, sociologically, what—­they are in relation to cultural norms and thus to each other.”12 That is, identity is constantly made through accumulative and relational micro-­actions in everyday encounters; the provisionality of the accumulative and relational also suggest, however, that identity is unmade through the same mechanisms. In a different passage drawn from “Talk and Talkers,” however, the adventure poetics of Stevensonian talk becomes complicit with consolidating imperial subjectivity: From time to time . . . talk becomes effective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat’s cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting.13

Here, talk operates not only as uncertain adventuring, but as conquest and colonialist knowledge acquisition. Associating exploration, conquest, and sensations of homosocial “ardour” with the best of what talk has on offer, the passage tries to yoke together experiential and distinctly embodied pleasures that allow interlocutors to lose themselves, yet also acquire a colonizing subjectivity. Talk and adventure alike, Stevenson suggests, generate “giddy” feelings through the frisson of being imperiled by risk: maybe falling off before reaching the summit of agreement, before the point of “joint discovery.” An emphasis on sensation further underscores Stevenson’s avowed preference, elsewhere, for what he considered to be romance’s distinctly immersive qualities. As a proponent of the “romance revival” of the 1880s, Stevenson idealized romance’s capacities to plunge readers into virtual worlds: to read romance is

40

Chapter One

“absorbing and voluptuous,” such that readers are “rapt clean out of [them] selves,” bodies evacuated from their ordinary lives and filled instead with stories “in [their] ears like the noise of breakers” and “a thousand coloured pictures [in] the eye.”14 Such immersion is imagined as allowing readers to stand in place of the protagonist; in late Victorian boys’ empire fictions, the reader is typically invited to join the band of brothers against the savage others. Yet, the seams connecting discovery, conquest, and knowledge that hold a colonizing subject together arguably unravel in the dissolution of talk that ends the excerpt above. While the experiential pleasures of the unexpected “joint discovery” are upheld, limited agency pools around the threat of words “unwound,” which are ultimately formed transiently into a “mere cat’s cradle.” Thus, progress and knowledge itself are illusions or temporary impressions. We might also note the harmony won by the two talkers as they compete “for first utterance,” and find themselves only accidentally “beside” each other: such harmony has little to do with control wielded by either interlocutor. Neither a directed, linear form nor one oriented toward a quest-­like progress, talk and its poetics of random contingency contain the possibility of lifting adventure away from its imperialist undercurrents. Édouard Glissant has brought attention to the poor logic of this precise sliding between discovery, knowledge, and imperial conquest, warning: “Let us not start by confusing discovery and conquest.”15 Defamiliarizing the originary moment of contact between peoples (discovery) as one that did not have to end in colonialism (conquest), Glissant’s poetics of relation opens up a speculative space for more egalitarian interchange that might have been—­and that we might yet work toward. Europe’s indefensibility—­to borrow Aimé Césaire’s indictment—­owes not to contact itself, but its aftermath: an ethnocentric projection of universal knowledge based on a collapsing together of scientific pursuit and geographical discovery. Glissant elaborates: This project of discovery and ascendancy was taken to be an absolute value. It was even asserted that both geographical discoveries and conquests of science were driven by the same audacity and the same capacity for generalization. Territorial conquest and scientific discovery (the terms are interchangeable) were reputed to have equal worth.16

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For Glissant, this collapse becomes pervasive and engenders an abstract universalism that spreads contagiously into other areas of Western culture and understanding. But if we reframe discovery—­or, for that matter, adventure—­as producing nothing more (or less) than contact and relational potential, then colonial relations need only be an (erroneous) beginning, and the work of refiguring this beginning can continue onward. As mentioned in the introduction, Glissant proposes the term errantry (errance) to capture his ideal poetics of relation, in order to mark a difference from colonizing adventure. Though the wandering colonizer may be “nomadic,” Glissant explains, his trajectory remains “arrowlike,” because “conquerors are the moving, transient root of their people.”17 In other words, the home from which a conqueror hails remains a strong and undisrupted point of reference as he travels away—­or even disowns, as with exile—­this home. Yet, according again to Betsy Wing, Glissant’s use of errance distinctively preserves an archaic sense of “sacred mission” to avoid being misread as opposing “mere wandering” to the colonizer’s transient root: one must have careful regard for one’s position in relation to others.18 In other words, Glissant’s poetics of relation is not abstract, but material and transformative, just not rooted. Stevenson’s adventure poetics—­even as it resists linearity, progress, and purpose—­rather sticks to this arrow-­l ike nomadism that retains an originary orientation to the imperial center. But catching the resonance of “error,” too, in Glissant’s errantry, I refigure Treasure Island’s adventure poetics against itself, through to a more definitively anticolonial poetics. To put it another way, I am arguing that Stevenson’s adventure romance begins to theorize the possibilities of disowned speech and the emergence of talk, but stops short of according them anticolonial potential. As we will see from the text, parroting and eavesdropping seem at once threatening (where racialized bodies that are unfit to own words are evoked to underscore the threat of unauthorized transfer), and also natural and inevitable. This inevitability opposes the logic constantly deployed by protagonists seeking to maintain tight associations between speech and authorized embodiments. Although the seeming naturalness of parroting and eavesdropping clearly disrupt the ordering of class and imperial administration within Treasure Island, I emphasize, again, that nonwhite bodies are actually spec-

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tral in Treasure Island. That raced native figures typical to other adventure romances are noticeably absent, while the racialization of piratical embodiment remains operational, renders Stevenson’s adventure fiction distinctive. Unlike R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), considered an important model for Treasure Island, or later, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911), for instance, the closest “native” figure, the marooned Ben Gunn, turns out to be a white Englishman after all, upon Jim’s closer inspection. Given that Stevenson’s romance shares many other elements with contemporary adventure fictions, including pirates and protagonists involved in active scenes of fighting, the absence of racialized Indigenous figures (whether as Friday-­esque figures, or as violent opposition to the European adventurers) and enslaved Black persons—­especially given the story’s setting on the Atlantic during the eighteenth century—­seems a particular choice that runs counter to expected conventions. In my reading, the spectrality of race in Treasure Island is, in fact, crucial for how the text negotiates a more intensified unraveling of speech and the aesthetics of self-­possession—­and, by extension, of colonial proprietary logic. Idle Talk and Piratical Poetics

A contextual glance at Treasure Island’s purported process of composition and road to publication offers some additional insights into Stevenson’s view of orality: there is not, as might be expected, an idealization of vocal singularity and presence in a bygone era not yet subject to the alienation of modern media. In Stevenson’s own account of writing his adventure romance, several important departures from such a view are apparent from his interest in talk’s association with “idling” and an orientation against authorial property. These interests are tied together because idleness—­ among some of Stevenson’s contemporaries, such as the socialist William Morris—­was already regarded more broadly as an important mode of inattention (or “truancy,” as Stevenson puts it in an 1877 essay, “An Apology for Idlers”) that could resist modern life’s many overly productive, capitalist imperatives.19 Writing for the “My First Book” feature in The Idler in August 1894, Stevenson famously claims that the novel began with a map he drew with

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his stepson Lloyd Osbourne during play. What has escaped commentary, however, is Stevenson’s insistence that the story was further developed with a co-­creative scene of oral storytelling.20 Before a purported scene of spontaneous, intergenerational collaboration among Stevenson, Osbourne, and his father while at Braemar cottage in the summer of 1881, the novel begins with wayward talk and homosocial unity between boys and boys-­at-­heart.21 As a publication, The Idler (1892–­1911) emphasized complementary ideals, including within its pages travel writing and a feature called the “Idler’s Club” (a callback to eighteenth-­century conversational culture, with a specific reference to Samuel Johnson’s essays), and generally upholding slow movement against industrial modernity. As Barbara Korte has noted, as well, this late Victorian counterculture of idling “against busyness” is steeped in the wayfarer’s movement pitted specifically against the beginnings of modern mass tourism.22 Whether idle talk or idle travel, the key is slow aimlessness—­and, as Korte also explains, with a sense of drift that is as much about mental as physical movement.23 Offering an additional context, Stephen J. Arata has linked the mental component of idleness to a rigorous resistance of late nineteenth-­century pedagogy that emphasized singular focus or attention. In this oppositional context, idleness is “attention [that] is diffused, not centered on any one object or set of objects or ideas.”24 Especially for Stevenson, as a defender of romance, this aimlessness or diffusive attention entails responsiveness and aliveness—­to others, to one’s environment, and to one’s (always transforming) self. Thus, when Stevenson locates the origins of Treasure Island within idle scenes of talk, he is drawing from this discursive space of resistance to a variety of different, but related, features of late nineteenth-­century modern life: purposive travel, directed attention, commercial productivity, media, and so forth. One of two epigraphs to “Talk and Talkers” explicitly repurposes an adage from Benjamin Franklin as an act of resistance—­a parroted misuse. Quips Franklin: “As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence.”25 Mediated through Stevenson, however, the adage works against American (Protestant) industriousness and purpose, and idleness signifies a desirable form of subjective inattention that ought to be “account[ed] for” as rigorous resistance against a cult of productivity and an acquisitional orientation toward knowledge. Idle words and idle silences

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that drift without fixed purpose or attention are, for Stevenson, a salutary aesthetic and way of being that counters book-­learning and the belief that “all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope.”26 In Stevenson’s account of Treasure Island’s creation, we see the explicit staging of the conflict between a slower mode of diffusion and modern productivity as a dramatic media encounter: as the story goes, Treasure Island was not originally intended as a novel but merely a daily scene of interactive storytelling, until the family was interrupted by a commercial publisher bursting onto the scene. Stevenson claims that the initial period of developing Treasure Island (then called The Sea Cook, after John Silver) at Braemar involved an easy “complacency”—­quick writing at a pace of a chapter per day and readings out loud at midday.27 That is to suggest that writing became productive because it was not the primary aim; rather, the two activities of writing and talk circulated one into the other, in a kind of meta-­conversational loop of shared experience. As Victoria Ford Smith has discussed, intergenerational collaboration saturates the production of Treasure Island on many levels: from the jointly generated map to Stevenson’s open acknowledgment of plagiarizing Defoe, Poe, and Irving, to the incorporation of Stevenson’s father’s suggestions during the daily readings.28 Co-­ authorship at Braemar is, in effect, talk functioning harmoniously, much in the way that Stevenson idealizes in the passage from “Talk and Talkers” referenced above: talk’s “joint discovery” decenters ownership, evades singular aims, and casts aside industrious productivity in favor of experiential excitement. In this carefully crafted origin story, the material environment of nonlinear, idle remediations (of a picture into writing into talk into writing) is also crucial to Stevenson’s figuring of himself as a reluctant first-­time author. Literature is the shadow of a good talk’s many moving parts.29 The arrival, however, “ex machina  .  .  . [of] Dr. Japp”—­an ambassador for Young Folks magazine publisher, James Henderson—­upon the idealized scene of homosocial conversation demonstrates idle talk’s vulnerability to unwanted ruptures and unauthorized interlocutors.30 When Alexander Japp arrives at Braemar, the temporary period of idealized, idle conversation comes to an abrupt end: Japp is Coleridge’s Person from Porlock on a mundane commercial errand who breaks the harmonious flow of a co-­ creative endeavor.31 Stevenson’s account suggests that if Japp had not come

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along, the adventure of The Sea Cook, like a good talk, might have unwound its cat’s cradle of daily, enlivening converse, and the sensations experienced by the immediate interlocutors would soon dissolve.32 After the interruption, Stevenson notably registers a different embodied reaction, with emphasis on a break from the previously delicate traffic between writing and talking: his “mouth was empty; there was not a word of Treasure Island in my bosom.”33 Stevenson here stalls—­a lmost machine-­like. Before print’s commercial purpose and the specter of financial gain, talk’s co-­creative, idle freedoms are chilled to silence. Here, Stevenson’s description offers a somewhat technical glimpse of talk: as opposed to nostalgia for the tribal storyteller (in line with Benjamin’s account of the storyteller’s singular “aura”), orality as a partially human-­embodied, technical system of parts clashing or moving together is a far stranger, material, and modern form. After the “accident” of the extrafamilial interlocutor and his commercial purpose, Stevenson proceeds not only to describe his stalled words, but also how he fixes the rupture: I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of M. Du Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale; and behold, it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished Treasure Island.34

While en route to Davos, and engaged in specifically “idle” activities—­ thinking on other things, reading popular French detective novels—­ Stevenson recovered something of the earlier co-­creative functioning. The process of journeying, both literalized in the physical travel to Davos and metaphorized as the mental indirection of thinking other things, resists the fixed ending that Japp’s interruption had occasioned. To be sure, in abstracting his resumed writing into a mere simile of talk’s poetics (“flowed . . . like small talk”), Stevenson suggests that the complete recovery of Treasure Island’s originary “small talk” at Braemar would be impossible. But the emphasis this description places on process counteracts, in a measure, the forces of arrival and destination that Japp had purportedly unleashed.

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Stevenson’s rather insistent account that what his public had come to regard as his first literary success was rooted in experiential aspects of idle talk is also a clue to Treasure Island’s piratical form. The Idler’s “My First Book” feature expected celebrity authors to share methods of their production with a readership keen on conventional explanations to confirm authorial agency, craft, and ownership. As Monica F. Cohen has noted in her study of nineteenth-­century fictions about pirates, such fictions were often drawn to working against increasingly hegemonic efforts to consolidate and regulate literary piracy: “the pirate becomes a vehicle of profound tension between an emergent ideal of intellectual property and a literary culture whose emphatically collective, derivative citational character tends to confound claims of individual originality and ownership.”35 In his own contribution to The Idler, I argue that Stevenson centers talk as a site of decentered, unfixed mediations to justify a collaborative, piratical method of “patchy” composition. The final text of Treasure Island registers Stevenson’s aesthetic commitments to talk’s and piracy’s shared resistance to ownership. For one, Stevenson’s origin story of textual constraint migrates into the diegetic structure, which is a narrative framed by coerced writing: Jim begins, “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island . . . I take up my pen.”36 The sixteenth chapter, where Dr. Livesey interrupts Jim with his own account of the events that happened on board the ship (while Jim was gone on the island) coincides with the point at which Stevenson claimed his “mouth went dry.” These elements register the story’s conversational past, and its interruption. The proem that accompanies the text, meanwhile, orients the novel toward a conversable, contingent future, where “the hesitating purchaser” might choose to buy, or not: “If . . . the old romance, retold / . . . Can please as me they pleased of old, / The wiser youngsters of today: /—­So be it, and fall on! If not /  .  .  . So be it, also!” (37–­38). Disavowing commercial or personal interest, Stevenson tries to retain a talk-­l ike acquiescence to interlocutor whims. “The old romance, retold / Exactly in the ancient way” testifies that textual pirating is a form of parroting, linking the unauthorizing capacities of literary plagiarism and talk. In what follows, I attend to parroting and pirating together in the text in order to tease out the ways in which the novel’s racialized—­but ultimately white—­piratical

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bodies become an experimental site for unauthorizing colonialist logics of speech. Such anticolonial unauthorizing procedures, I argue, are latent in the idle resistance that Stevenson assigns to talk—­even if his “boys’ story” of empire struggles to fully countenance them. Parrots and Pirates

Treasure Island develops an aesthetics of self-­possession that regulates the extent to which certain bodies can or cannot own speech, but at the same time revels in the difficulties of adjudicating speech rights by means of such aesthetics. Stevenson’s adventure fiction imagines how to distinguish between speakers and parrots, motivating racializing mechanisms to demarcate “put together” versus “patchy” embodiments—­only to also render these distinctions untenable. Parroting, which instantiates mimicry’s misfittedness between words and bodies, is closely associated with the pirate bodies, which externalize a patched-­together aesthetic through clothes and missing or prosthetic body parts. Even though all of Treasure Island’s main characters—­ pirates or not—­are ultimately white Englishmen, I nonetheless track demarcations that are cued to class and disability through an account of racialization and colonialist taxonomies. In so doing, I have in mind Ann Laura Stoler’s work on race and coloniality’s historical importance to the development of these “other,” discriminatory distinctions. In earlier work, Stoler draws on Foucault’s “racisms of the state”(in his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France) to point out occluded connections between colonialism and the history of sexuality.37 More recently, Stoler has offered a more expansive conceptual shift, arguing that our scholarly work on colonialism has not sufficiently appreciated the “mobile essentialisms that produce racism’s protean qualities.”38 Treasure Island’s adjudication of who has rights to speech thus occurs, through racialization’s “mobile essentialisms,” across what might be called its “differently white” characters. The primary rift divides rights to speech between patchy pirates versus put-­together professionals or aristocrats, but the full dynamics of class, disability, and gender that enter into the production of this rift are legible only if we attend to these “mobile essentialisms” of racial demarcation grounded in Britain’s still expanding colonial project.39 In the opening scene of Treasure Island, a piratical body’s invasion of

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calm at the sleepy Admiral Benbow Inn is notably mediated through a disordered melee of words and bodies. Eventually, this melee is contained by the doctor and magistrate, Livesey, but this initial confrontation stages an important clash between two types of bodies in the narrative: one that presents a contradiction between “manner” and external appearance (Billy Bones) and one that does not (Livesey). The aesthetic distinctions this initial scene makes provide a blueprint for the story’s metonymic demarcations between villains and protagonists, pirates and proper Englishmen, parrots and speakers. According to a boy’s naïve and therefore “natural” view of Bones, he is a “tall, strong, heavy, nut-­brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white”; although he speaks “coarsely,” he yet “seemed like a mate or skipper, accustomed to be obeyed or to strike” (46–­47). By contrast, Livesey is “neat, bright,” “with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners” (50). The narrative teaches readers in this moment that the piratical body is not only externally scarred and badly stitched together, but also split between external appearance and internal subjectivity (as read from his surprisingly authoritarian manner). The magistrate, by contrast, is a seamless coordination of clothes, cleanliness, pleasant manners, and whiteness of a different quality than Bones’s “dirty, livid white.” If we take Stevenson’s adventure poetics seriously, however, both Bones and Livesey qualify as poor talkers, in that neither is an “idle” talker. Though oppositional in their aesthetic and different in the affective charges they circulate—­the former roaring and erratic, and the latter calm and unbudging—­both are quite rigid in their interactional capacity. Bones drunkenly forces his fellow lodgers nightly into a one-­sided discourse, alternately silencing them with a slap on the table or “fly[ing] up in a passion of anger” when a question is posed, or not posed (48). Jim Hawkins’s description of Bones’s nightly storytelling suggests a ghastly scene of mesmerizing zombification, with the lodgers forced to “bear a chorus to his singing,” ventriloquizing piratical words as the inn shook with “Yo-­ho-­ho, and a bottle of rum” (48).40 By contrast, Doctor Livesey curtails the lively aural/oral scene of Bones and the lodgers with his unwavering tone, “perfectly calm and steady” (51), accompanied by a regularity of “drawing briskly at his pipe

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between every word or two” (50)—­but one can hardly miss, in such wooden descriptions of Livesey, that Stevenson is inviting his boy readers to disidentify with this stodgy specimen of adulthood. As Bones jumps up to attack Livesey, the doctor does not move and effectively puts a stop to Bones with a threat that he will draw up an order to hang him. His speech typically ratifies itself through textual affinity—­in addition to Livesey’s access to drawing up official orders, he frequently pens letters, and practically pounces on the documents and treasure map that Jim eventually retrieves from Bones. Livesey’s monotone control aspires to be as immutable as writing (Stevenson calls print “dogmatic”), unresponsive even to the threat of material violence.41 On the one hand, his unresponsiveness marks a safe and desirable composure, but, on the other hand, it marks his rigidity and incompatibility with idleness and romance. Their confrontation in this opening scene usefully encapsulates the tensions between the self-­possession of speech and the thrilling instabilities of talk that will remain important throughout the novel. As Jim admits, Bones’s presence was an exciting one “in a quiet country life” (49). And despite Livesey’s initial triumphs, as well as the eventual defeat of Silver—­the most illegibly piratical, parrot figure in the narrative, as we will see—­speech’s closural coherence is everywhere resisted by what might be described as talk’s entropic forces. Trelawney claims that “by the merest accident, I fell in talk with [Silver],” leading to the decision to bring the pirate aboard the Hispaniola; and when in conversation with Smollett, who tries to rein in speech with his reticence (“[he] never spoke but when he was spoken to, and then sharp and short and dry, and not a word wasted” [98]), Trelawney tends to unravel Smollett’s composure and desire for economy and perfectly utilitarian, referential speech. In the third epigraph to this chapter, Smollett offers an idiomatic expression to civilly complain about Trelawney’s loose lips, but Trelawney mistakes him for being literal (“ ‘Silver’s parrot?’ asks the squire”), so Smollett is forced to say more (“ ‘It’s a way of speaking,’ said the captain”). Such exchanges take on mundane and comedic qualities—­ and, as I will discuss in chapter 3, similar effects based on the farcicality of everyday interaction are motivated by George Meredith to explicitly “take down” tales of “big action” (in a word, adventure romance). The eminently charismatic (silver-­tongued) John Silver accelerates

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these unravelings of self-­possessed speech with his exceptional aesthetics. In colonialist terms, I read Silver as an “internal native” whose mimicry of the English colonizing masculine subject is most troubling because it is too perfectly imperfect. By this, I mean that the outward “signs” that should signal Silver’s lack of self-­possession—­h is missing leg and his attendant parrot-­like “hopping”—­rather end up conferring upon him the status of the mimic that passes. In other words, Silver passes as a “native speaker” rather than a “native” because he is eccentric enough to convey the integrity of a complete, individual self: his disability effectively becomes a “quirk” worthy of Trelawney’s blabbing or Captain Smollett’s reticence. Rey Chow’s reflections on “postcolonial languaging,” specifically in recalling an incident in graduate school when a professor ascribed her “clarity” to a “colonial education,” usefully gloss why “too perfect” an imitation becomes a giveaway of mimicry.42 Exactitude earns a patronizing form of praise from the native English speaker, whose motive—­though unknown to him—­is less about Chow and more about the consolidation of his own nontypicality. Chow first observes that “the clarity of my writing was not really mine or about me, but the outcome of a particular condition.”43 Rather, for the professor, she was “simply exhibiting the effectiveness of a particular colonial regime’s governing mission,” and “linguistic clarity . . . was the manifest symptom of successful political and ideological subjugation.”44 If parroting (post)colonials must stand for deindividuating typicality, then the spectrum on which they are allowed provisional rights to speech begins to collapse on itself somewhere on the way from inexact to too exact imitation. The figure of John Silver is the abyss that enacts this collapse, an irresolvable problem for colonialist logic because his perfectly imperfect speech renders him, from the point of view of speech’s aesthetics, identical to the native speaker—­but yet, he must be ontologically a parrot in the imperial world that Treasure Island conjures. How could the protagonists have known that this “passing” mimic was an unauthorized imitator of other people’s speech?45 The moment when Jim eavesdrops on Silver from the apple barrel offers epistemological relief that Silver is just a mimic after all, but Jim’s simply just happening to fall asleep in the apple barrel seems somewhat of a deus ex machina. What gives the pirate away as a parrot is his verbatim repetition to his followers of the flattery

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that he had previously doled out to Jim. In that moment, Silver’s charming speech is revealed to be inauthentic and unspontaneous—­l ike the English of the (post)colonial subject, it is safely too wooden, too precise. But this form of wooden flattery, too, feels entirely unlike the Silver given in the narrative. It remains the case that none of the “true” English gentlemen would have known otherwise, had Jim respected the rules of speech’s authorized circulations: as I will discuss later, one can eavesdrop on Black Dog, but one has no standing to eavesdrop on Silver at this particular moment in the narrative. Silverstein notes that in the exchange of speech, “the vast majority of identity work goes on unawares,” especially for native speakers; from such a perspective, respecting the rules should be easy and seemingly natural. In Jim’s act of eavesdropping—­which is not exactly accidental—­he violates “natural” rules of ownership that he ought to have respected for Silver. It may be relevant, too, to point out here that Silver was developed in the image of Stevenson’s friend W. E. Henley, who lost a leg to tuberculosis as a child. By all accounts, Henley shared Silver’s “way of talking to each” (Treasure Island, 97)—­hardly a too exact mimic in what we might call his deft code-­switching between aristocrats, men of professional distinction, and mutinous pirates. Henley would praise Silver in the Saturday Review as “so smooth-­spoken and powerful and charming.”46 Later, Lloyd Osbourne would recall Henley’s “quality . . . of exalting those about him; of communicating his own rousing self-­confidence and belief in himself,” concluding that “in the presence of this demigod, who thrilled you by his appreciation, you became a demigod yourself.”47 Here, as with Stevenson’s articulated ideals in “Talk and Talkers,” who speaks what is less important than the capacity of bringing about “thrilling” and elevating sensorial transfers between interlocutor bodies. Meanwhile, marked variously by scarring, missing body parts, unclean and ragged clothes, or drunken behavior, piratical bodies like Bones, Black Dog, Blind Pew, and Israel Hands reach a level of grotesque incoherence achieved through a mode of excess that I argue is racializing, in addition to their collective brownness, Blackness, and animalistic characteristics.48 In Silver, disability and his connection to parrots (his embodiment but also his pet, “Captain Flint”) certainly link him to these other pirates, but the narrative “forgives” these apparent deficits, much in the same way it forgives

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the members of the protagonist group who find it difficult to take control of speech (as I have said, minor eccentricities demarcate someone truly at home in his speech). Any apparent inconsistency in this logic—­that “just enough” un-­self-­possessed characteristics actually authenticate one—­is “resolved” by the narrative’s suggestion that Silver possesses the same kind of whiteness as Livesey: “plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling,” with a “great, smooth blond face,” a “clean and pleasant-­tempered landlord”—­ notably, a property owner (85). The natural boy’s first look at Livesey and Silver alike communicates to him a sense of integrity and legibility (“one look at the man before me was enough,” Jim confesses of his first encounter with Silver, retrospectively doubling down on his categorical distinction from the other pirates [85]). But I think we can trace in the self-­possession enacted by Silver—­as opposed to Livesey or Smollett—­a different orientation to speech-­as-­property that embraces parroting, a certain freedom from speech’s colonial constraints. As Jim recollects his initial conversations with Silver at the port of Bristol, he unfolds an idyllic and idle scene worthy of the kind of unstructured talk that Stevenson idealizes—­and it is anchored in parroting: On our little walk along the quays, he made himself the most interesting companion, telling me about the different ships that we passed by, their rig, tonnage, and nationality, explaining the work that was going forward—­ how one was discharging, another taking the cargo, and a third making ready for sea; and every now and then telling me some little anecdote of ships and seamen, or repeating a nautical phrase till I had learned it perfectly. (89)

To parrot with Silver, as revealed in the pedagogical turn at the end of this passage, is to embrace the adventure poetics that underlies this conversation: environmental contingencies shape their subjects, responsive to the ships that pass along the quays.49 Jim also experiences the thrill of “joint discovery” in a manner deeply resonant with Stevenson’s idealization of talk as a “giddy and inspiriting” adventure that, as I have argued, simultaneously contradicts its own poetics with its clear desire for imperial subjectivity. Here, Silver shares his explanatory mastery over the nautical landscape with Jim, who is, for a time, allowed to inhabit—­v ia parroting—­another’s

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point of view. Silver’s explicitly teaching Jim how to parrot ultimately suggests reveling in what Chow—­or Derrida—­m ight think of as playing with speech’s prosthetic nature and the experiential pleasures of detachability. Silver teaches us that feeling immersed and at home is a matter of mimicry and repetition that is not secondary, melancholic, subversive, or even mocking (after all, Silver just wants to place his money in English banks and live a sober, married life).50 The detachability of speech from individual persons might be a potent means for a different freedom, what I would characterize as freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech. Moments of speech’s supposed failures, such as an aphasic moment, might be reconceptualized as “forms of unveiling . . . the untenability of ‘proper’ (and proprietary) speech as such,” according to Chow.51 Stevenson might even say that recognizing this untenability allows the pleasures of “losing oneself ” in talk—­the pleasures, we could add, of not having to be self-­possessed. If the threat to colonial worlding that this pedagogic exchange presents—­as an idealized scene of idle talk, parroting, and un-­selving—­seems too great, I argue it is mitigated by a key erasure of race: Bristol in the eighteenth century was a major hub for the slave trade, and Jim and Silver at the busy docks would not have been able to miss the sight of Black people. As Suk-Koo Rhee has pointed out, “the cargo” that Jim glosses over includes human cargo—­a more glaring omission given that later, while resting on a “land-­locked gulf ” in Spanish America (thought to be Havana) after the “dark and bloody sojourn” (222) on Treasure Island, Jim finds it necessary to comment on and distinguish between the Black, Indigenous, and mixed-­ race people that he observes around him.52 As Andrew Loman has shown, Treasure Island references the transatlantic slave trade in at least a few other key instances, including Silver’s mention of Corso Castle, a British fortress near Accra, where traders imprisoned African people before transporting them as cargo, and Jim’s likely namesake, Sir John Hawkins, who led the first slave-­trading expedition under Elizabeth I.53 These “evocations,” according to Loman, alongside Silver’s interracial marriage to a free Black woman who manages his accounts and the Spy-­Glass Inn in Bristol, together unsettle the otherwise conventional forms of racialization in Stevenson’s adventure romance.54 But more than this, I suggest that it is important to notice where raced, nonwhite bodies do and do not show up. That Jim’s scenic de-

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scription of the Bristol docks omits the sight of Black persons allows for a safe flirtation with imagining what it might be to exist—­while parroting with Silver—­as an Englishman outside of colonialism’s proprietary constraints. After Silver has been “revealed” as a mimic and a villain, nonwhite bodies might appear safely again, and take their place among other un-­self-­ possessed and differently white bodies within the colonial order. Refiguring Robinson Crusoe

I elaborate briefly on the delicacy of this colonial order by turning here to Ben Gunn, the marooned figure on Treasure Island who is notably mistaken, at first, by Jim, to be one of the “cannibals” he “had heard of ” (121). Gunn is racialized in much the same way as other patched-­together pirates like the “nut-­brown” Bones, but Gunn is the only character who is actually mistaken—­a lbeit momentarily—­as not a white Englishman. As with Silver, the episodes with Gunn begin to reach beyond the limits of colonial worlding while making race ultimately spectral. Here, the threat of a cannibal native is materially raised before being safely exorcised. As a literary figure, Gunn is at once clearly plucked from a colonialist genealogy inaugurated by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and a “lurking nondescript” who, unlike Crusoe, is entirely unable to (re)construct any semblance of normative social hierarchies on the island. Alone on Treasure Island, Gunn is bereft of any companion that might catalyze more definitive social relations, and this crisis is specifically registered as a problem of speech degeneration. Specifically, Gunn shows patterns of parroting that put him in community with Silver, but because he lacks the speech of others to parrot, he becomes something of a murky entity until the arrival of Jim. Gunn’s presence opens up the possibility that parroting is the natural state of the human, and also that the kind of selving that the maintenance of the colonial world requires is merely achieved through mirroring and imitation of and by others—­and is not some greater natural or God-­g iven reality enacted through human society. As Eric Jager has argued, the divine authentication of Crusoe’s speech is at the center of how the castaway (re)constructs proper social relations on his island. Crusoe suffers, as well, a problem of selfhood perpetuated by sol-

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itude’s “psychological and emotional strain,” but he ultimately resolves this problem by trading up different conversational partners: first himself, then a parrot, Friday, and finally, God.55 Crusoe finds in God an apt partner for (re)developing his capacity for speech—­for Crusoe requires a more “original” listener to sanction the originality of his own speech. Friday and the parrot alike are consigned to derivative mimicry, with any sense of Friday’s subjectivity, outside his interpellative naming in the (re)constructed colonial order, foreclosed. Crusoe, specifically, is saved from the real-­life Scottish privateer and castaway Alexander Selkirk’s linguistic fate: according to his English chronicler, slave trader and later royal governor of the Bahamas Captain Woodes Rogers, Selkirk had “so much forgot his Language for want of Use, that [he] could scarce understand him, for he seem’d to speak his words by halves.”56 Selkirk’s problem, speaking halves of what must be received by a legitimized interlocutor, is relieved in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by God’s reception and renovation of Crusoe’s speech. On Gunn’s secular island, however, there is neither a divine source for original speech, nor an Indigenous figure like Friday, nor even a parrot: instead, we find Gunn parroting himself.57 When Gunn encounters Jim, the first interlocutor he has had in three years, his speech patterns suggest that he has been speaking both halves of a conversation: “Just you mention them words to your squire, Jim”—­he went on: “Nor he weren’t, neither—­that’s the words. Three years he were the man of this island, light and dark, fair and rain; and sometimes he would, maybe, think upon a prayer (says you), and sometimes he would, maybe, think of his old mother, so be as she’s alive (you’ll say); but the most part of Gunn’s time (this is what you’ll say)—­t he most part of his time was took up with another matter” . . . Then, he continued—­“then you’ll up and say this:—­ Gunn is a good man (you’ll say), and he puts a precious sight more confidence—­a precious sight, mind that—­in a gen’leman born than in these gen’lemen of fortune, having been one hisself.” (126)

That Gunn tries to script what Jim will say to the squire with parenthetical second-­person directives suggests that he has been playing both sides of conversation for some time. As with Selkirk, who speaks his words by halves, the arrival of new bodies does not immediately bring relief to Gunn’s

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“broken” speech patterns. As Jim later remarks of Gunn, “he kept talking as I ran, neither expecting nor receiving an answer” (127). But whereas Selkirk demonstrates a mimetic obsession with absent bodies, Gunn’s self-­ parroting conjures these bodies from his own speech. The problem, then, is not so much parroting itself, but that there were no other living bodies to parrot. Like Silver, Gunn wants Jim to parrot his words, but he is keen on making distinctions between himself and the other pirates, telling Jim that, despite his stint also aboard Flint’s original crew, he is now on the side of “gen’lem[e]n born.” He tries to authenticate himself through the figure of “a pious mother” and his current state of returning to prayer. Prayer, however, is just an empty form, and Gunn needs the flesh and blood of another white Englishman to relieve this “lurking nondescript’s” uncertainty: “I could now see that he was a white man like myself and that his features were even pleasing . . . He was clothed with tatters of old ship’s canvas and old sea-­ cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin” (122). In other words, the narrative suggests that Gunn is only white—­and only even human—­in relation to other persons: without sociality he might be anything at all, including a nonwhite native or a wild animal. Although Jim allows for the authentication of Gunn as “a white man like myself,” Gunn’s parroting nature simultaneously authenticates Silver’s more knowing embrace of the colonial order’s fragilities. In the end, what could be more natural than Silver’s (female) parrot—­the gendered significance of which I will discuss in the next section—­whose animal cries resound with a mimicry that Jim cannot help but hear, mediated through his own body, in his dreams?58 Evidently, the usual mechanisms that ascribe to speech originality, ownership, and a natural presencing are here unraveled by mimicry’s naturalness in the absence, albeit temporary, of the colonial order. Eavesdropping with, and on Stevenson

In closing this chapter, I revisit two contrasting scenes of eavesdropping for what they reveal about the practical difficulties of trying to adjudicate between authorized and unauthorized transfers of speech. As I have said,

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I see eavesdropping as the other side of parroting’s mimicry: one is hearing words meant for others, and the other is speaking words belonging to others. Unlike “overheard” speech—­which John Stuart Mill famously ascribes to poetic lyricism—­eavesdropping entails illicit rather than accidental hearing. Thus, both eavesdropping and parroting work antagonistically against speech as property. It may also be useful to recall that at stake for Mill’s distinction between poetry as overheard and eloquence heard is the hierarchization of solitude over sociability, specifically through the argument that “the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener” is necessary for generating poetry’s “peculiarity,” which is “feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.”59 Overhearing and eavesdropping, meanwhile, both signal the speaker’s unconsciousness of a listener, but the distinction made as to whether the listener is innocent or not actually gets at a similar hierarchization of individual over group ownership of speech. In overhearing, the accidental listener ostensibly has no nefarious plans to refigure the speaker’s words against himself. Eavesdropping, by contrast, more clearly encodes the listener’s intent to steal the speaker’s words for purposes the speaker may not sanction. Thus, we could conclude that overhearing suggests adherence to an implicit contract of an authorized transfer of speech, whereas eavesdropping’s intentionality suggests a breach of this contract. Eavesdropping listens on different terms than the ones that have been drawn up. In Treasure Island, Jim repeatedly receives speech not meant for him, but adjudicating where overhearing ends and eavesdropping begins proves no simple matter. Yet the stakes are always high. Take, for instance, Jim eavesdropping on Black Dog and Billy Bones at the inn, which is narrated quite simply as an authorized illicit transfer. Jim’s listening is admittedly illicit, since Black Dog has asked him explicitly not to eavesdrop—­“None of your keyholes for me, sonny”—­but Jim demonstrates no hesitation in confessing he “did his best to listen” (54). This initial scene instructs readers in exceptions to the rule of speech transfer: because the speakers are lawless, piratical outsiders, they are excluded from the usual rules and rights to speech. Black Dog’s claim to speech is rejected by Jim, on the basis of the pirate’s unfitness as a speaker. By contrast, listening in on Silver in the apple barrel raises a significant problem, since the fitness of the speaker—­the perfectly imperfect parrot—­makes it impossible to ascertain mimicry. If, at the time

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of being hidden, Jim did not know that Silver was not a “native speaker,” what justifies his staying to eavesdrop? Jim’s retrospective narrative of how he hid in the apple barrel works hard to make his eavesdropping sound like overhearing. The ends eventually justify the means, but Jim is still faced with the problem of having decided to eavesdrop on a man whose manners and general embodiment were unassailable, whose private ownership rights to speech ought to have been respected as a matter of natural course. Jim is therefore left to explain: why did he not get out of the apple barrel upon waking to Silver’s voice, if he did not know, at that point, that he was a parrot/pirate? The resolution—­in which Jim claims quick apprehension—­feels unsatisfying: “before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in extreme of fear and curiosity; for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone” (100). Yet, another problem emerges from this attempt to shorten the time between his waking and comprehension of the situation. Specifically, Jim interrupts the dialogue with a narrative judgment of Silver (“this abominable old rogue”) when he reveals himself to be a parrot (“addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used to myself ” [102]), but Jim’s quick apprehension of piratical discourse (“by this time I had begun to understand the meaning of their terms” [103]) is confessing himself, too, to be a quick-­learning parrot. As with parroting, then, adjudications of eavesdropping also produce forms of irresolution and contradiction that deeply challenge speech’s rules of proprietorship and by extension, colonial selfhood. And yet, colonial selfhood is part of an order that both Jim and Silver are keen to uphold. Crucially, however, it is from this very exchange between Silver and his followers below deck (nearly entirely written as dialogue) that we learn that Silver has a different understanding of what is natural to speech: in his parroting, he reveals that he indeed desires the formalism of the colonizing self, but knows there is nothing natural about that form. But neither does he harbor any melancholy nor sense of loss accompanying such an insight about parroting: as he offers verbatim words of flattery, he confesses in a matter-­of-­fact way that he wishes to amass material wealth in order to invest it in a bank, to purchase a coach, to have standing to serve

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in Parliament.60 When Israel Hands professes that he would like to drink, Silver preaches sobriety. Silver re-­creates and inhabits colonialist and bourgeois forms with an ease that is neither natural nor exactly derivative or secondary; he thus offers an instructive contrast to a figure like the melancholic Captain Hook of Peter Pan, who endlessly mourns his inability to master what he calls “good form.” For Hook, “good form” seems to stand for a whole constellation of embodied actions and speech that are frustratingly natural to the boy Peter, and unattainable no matter how hard Hook tries to parrot. Both pirates may be read as (post)colonials, but Silver believes in neither original ownership nor secondariness when it comes to form. Hook’s mistake is to believe in speech’s colonialist terms of proprietorship. I end this chapter with these scenes of eavesdropping for an important methodological reason: namely, that eavesdropping might be a way to read both with and against Treasure Island, in a manner that motivates listening as refiguring speech into a poetics of talk. According to Pooja Rangan, listening is an agentic act that either authorizes or refuses the racialized politics of speech. When Jim eavesdrops on the pirates, he decides to listen in a way that colludes with hegemonic power, making visible—­and racializing—­piratical, parroting bodies.61 What would it mean to listen in on Stevenson, in a way that does not collude with Treasure Island’s colonial limits? To eavesdrop on Stevenson is to listen in on his eminently aural/oral tale as an unauthorized hearer who might then decide to “steal” what they hear for different ends. As it stands, by virtue of my own legibility as not-­ your-­t ypical Stevenson scholar in a very real sense, as an Asian American woman, I could not do otherwise than to be eavesdropping on Stevenson. And yet, I like to think of eavesdropping on Stevenson as more in line with what he valued in the adventure poetics of talk, in spite of adventure fiction’s entanglements with imperial subject formation. The critical stakes of eavesdropping on, rather than with, Stevenson might be illustrated more clearly through a brief comparison with a different reader of Treasure Island. In the Broadview edition, the scene of Jim’s eavesdropping on Billy Bones is accompanied by an editorial note: “What is being said between Black Dog and Bones is for the reader, as for the eavesdropping Jim, tantalizing” (55n1). In this seemingly unremarkable aside, Sutherland, a white male British scholar, here names an affective kinship

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between Jim and “the reader,” which in turn interpellates both the scholar and all possible readers-­to-­come into sharing Jim’s communal sensibilities within a hailed body of authorized listeners. Yet I argue that the descriptor “tantalizing” here does quite a bit of work: on the one hand, it signals the illicit nature of Jim’s breach, and so consolidates the apparent universality of the rules of speech transfer. On the other hand, its mildness here serves the function of forgiving Jim’s very minor transgression as a bit of boyish mischief—­and by extension, that of the readerly community that the scholar has just called into being. Sutherland is a good reader of Stevenson: he follows an immersive ideal for reading romance; he is “rapt clean out of [himself]” tumbling into Jim’s tantalizing world, ready to stand in place of him. But different effects, of at least equal interest, are possible if one eavesdrops on Stevenson. For one, the discomfort of not quite being able to stand in place of the protagonist in this “boys’ own” fiction prompts a different kind of kinship with Jim: as I have just argued, Jim evidently feels an embodied discomfort as he eavesdrops on Silver (feelings of curiosity, fear, tantalization, guilt, duty work through him as a jumble), revealing an inability to perfectly deploy the rules of speech. Even as Jim correctly identifies which bodies can be eavesdropped upon, his self-­consciousness about his own embodied discomfort often aligns him more with the patchworked pirates than with Livesey or Smollett. “Hearing,” as Rangan argues, “is complicit in and complexly intertwined with vision in distinguishing between idealized and ‘other’ voices,” but Jim evidently does not feel this complicity to be very natural.62 Treasure Island ends with Jim confessing that he cannot help but hear the piercing screams of Silver’s parrot, Captain Flint, in his dreams (“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”). He reveals in this final bit of narration that he is, through and through, a parrot and eavesdropper both—­for it is his own body that speaks and hears words that are not his. I suggest that one way of eavesdropping on this final moment is to listen for the purpose of making perceptible what the text labors to exclude: gendered and raced bodies. As I have argued, Treasure Island makes race spectral or absent in moments when actual nonwhite bodies might prove too threatening as speech unravels into talk. As an eavesdropper, I wish to refigure the female parrot’s screaming, at the end, as gendered and raced talk that refuses to allow the scene of the

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white male English colonizer’s speech to occupy the entire stage. In making the English boy whom both Silver and Livesey would have liked to shape a medium for parroting and eavesdropping on words that have been long divorced from any “original” body, the parrot “Captain Flint” un-­selves the colonial male subject(s) that have tried to name her—­even suggesting that it is on her embodiment that the contrast of self-­possessed speech most wholly rests. As both a gendered, and raced figure, the parrot resonates two other bodies that the narrative of Treasure Island excludes by consigning to an undisclosed outside: Jim Hawkins’s mother and John Silver’s wife. Both women become successful innkeepers and account managers, savvy in their capacity to manage money (in stark contrast, we might mention, to Ben Gunn, who finds the treasure but loses the portion eventually allocated to him in a matter of days). In relation to one another under colonialist hierarchies, the Black wife may be the white wife’s mimic, alongside Silver’s mimicry of English “gentlemen born.” But by listening differently to the parrot screaming “Pieces of eight!” as a scene of gendered and racialized speech, we could hear how both women, though ostensibly consigned to some elsewhere incompatible with adventure, have the last word—­and Silver’s wife even more so than Jim’s mother. Jim’s mother is allowed a brief presence at the beginning of Treasure Island, and ousted from the margins as Jim leaves and the adventure begins, while Silver’s wife is entirely given as hearsay mediated variously through Silver, Trelawney, and Jim. Still, the latter gains an opacity that feels more significant as the abyss against which white male colonizer speech emerges triumphant. Though Silver’s wife remains opaque to those who speak of her, to eavesdrop on this speech might also be to hear differently how the men are mediated and rendered un-­self-­possessed in dialogue with this ultimately unmuteable presence—­much in the same way that Jim cannot help but repeat and hear the parrot in his sleep. To eavesdrop in this way, too, is to attune differently to this final moment: to register the excitement or perhaps relief of yielding oneself to talk that belongs to no one, rather than simply registering the text’s ambivalence about the colonial project. To remain stuck with ambivalence as the final pronouncement—­ often the payout of literary criticism, especially when the object is a fiction of empire—­is to remain within terms set by coloniality, often through the

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silent assumption that the literary text is a closed system, and that the critic cannot unmake this “work of its times.” Often, these assumptions of closure are part of a liberal gesture: that one should not read into a text what is not there, for fear of giving a colonialist and racist text too much credit. But what gets missed in such a gesture is that the critic is not an acousmatic speaker. Embodied in the ways that we are—­inevitably as eavesdroppers with our own parroting purposes—­it is perhaps more honest to say that to read a text is to talk with it: it is to mediate the text with our presence and to let it mediate us.

TWO

Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker’s White Cosmopolitics You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. —­D r a c u l a’s talk as recorded by J o n a t h a n   H a r k e r in S t o k e r , Dracula But it is not simply because the Creole language is a component of my identity that I am worried about its possible disappearance; it is because the language would also be missing from the radiant sparkle, the fluid equilibrium, and the ability to endure in the disorder of the chaos-­monde. The way that I defend it must take this into account. — ­É d o u a r d G l i s s a n t, The Poetics of Relation

W h at does it mea n to be multilingual, a speaker of multiple languages? To begin with, to speak more than one language might be thought of as a form of accruing cultural and economic capital. Once appended to capital, such understandings are naturally liable to allying with accumulative, neo-­ imperial logics of “acquisition”—­a word that not so innocently gives away the possessive ways in which we still regard speech and language learning. And yet, it is less clear what acquisition entails, what ledgers prove one’s successful ownership of a new language. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when Dracula pleads with Jonathan Harker to tutor him so that he “may learn the English intonation,” evidently the Count does not believe that his acquisition is complete without the desired “native” accent (despite the fact of his grammatical precision, large vocabulary, and perfect literacy).1 One 63

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could imagine a different speaker—­Van Helsing, for instance, who is bothered by neither his Dutch accent nor his departures from “proper” English grammar—­having a completely different relation to acquisition. Jonathan Harker, meanwhile, seems to prefer limited acquisition, being content to look up foreign words in his dictionary, especially if the language is non-­ European. The picture that emerges just from this small sampling of multilingual speakers in Stoker’s tale suggests something that rings true in our own, “globalized” moment: the standards of language acquisition depend on one’s relationship to power, revealing not only that some languages are more hegemonic than others, but also that some bodies—­and the manners of speaking attached to them—­are more hegemonic than others. Such points about language and hegemony may seem obvious; indeed, it might be said that postcolonial critique’s most important legacy has been its collective thinking on matters of language and power, and the problem of language and belonging “after” colonialism.2 From Frantz Fanon’s declaration that “to speak is to exist absolutely to the other” to Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s well-­k nown debates on African languages to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstruction of speech’s ideologized terms of representation, one might say that there is not much more to parse about the differences among Dracula, Van Helsing, and Harker.3 Yet, as I argue in this book, there is more to think about when it comes to finding alternatives to speech as linguistic belonging. “Belonging,” which is imagined as vouchsafed to one who speaks their “mother tongue”—­otherwise known as the native speaker—­encodes some fairly viscerally adjudicated, aesthetic demarcations against nonnative intonations or “accents.” Linguists and sociologists have attempted to decondition accent bias by noting that everyone “has” an accent (again, a formulation that emphasizes possessive logics), but such prejudices have proven especially intractable. For instance, discrimination against accents has been especially difficult to litigate, as in the case of Fragante v. Honolulu (1989), in which a US District Court (D. Haw.) ruled against plaintiff Manuel Fragante’s claim that his being denied a job with the department of motor vehicles because of his accent violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Mari J. Matsuda has chronicled how a linguist testified that “Mr. Fragante sp[oke] grammatically correct, standard English, with the characteristic accent of someone raised in

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the Philippines” and, as well, noted “a history, in Hawaii and elsewhere, of prejudice against this accent . . . that will cause some listeners to ‘turn off’ and not comprehend it.”4 “In the functional context of the trial,” everyone understood the plaintiff, but the final ruling denied discrimination by race or national origin, maintaining that the accent stood independent of these protected categories.5 The ruling also concluded that the accent “hampered” Fragante’s “oral communication skills,” assigning the deficit to his person and not to the listener who has “turn[ed] off.”6 Accent bias is not easily overcome, whether by litigation–­or, for that matter, by force of mind. In Monolingualism of the Other: or, the Prosthesis of Origin (1996), Jacques Derrida confesses, at some length, that he has “contracted a shameful but intractable intolerance” for his own French Algerian accent in spite of his own deconstructive practice.7 As Rey Chow has discussed, this particular moment is notable for its contradictions when read alongside the philosopher’s primary concerns: a seeming “pursuit of linguistic purity, gauged at the level of speech despite Derrida’s famous critique of phonocentricism.”8 Chow puzzles, as well, over Derrida’s choice to perform the affective charge of such contradictions, his “anguish” that “he cannot forgive himself for such visceral reactions.”9 After confessing his “intractable intolerance” for his own Algerian accent, Derrida continues to play with various other discursive formulations of the contradictions in which he finds himself: “there I go again, speaking about offenses in spite of what I have just disclaimed”; “I therefore admit to purity that is not very pure”; “it is, at least, the only impure ‘purity’ for which I dare confess a taste”; and finally, “no revolt against any discipline, no critique of the academic institution could have silenced what in me will always resemble some last will, the last language of the last word of the last will: speak in good French, in pure French.”10 For Chow, this moment of hyperbolic performance is not just postcolonial melancholia; rather, Derrida points to the untenability of the visceral as truth, such that even when a monolingual habitus feels visceral, there is no “purity” in it. And thus, any language, whether the colonizer’s or one’s “own,” entails no more possibility of belonging than others. The native speaker, consequently, must be entirely done away with as a category, and our attachments to native speech may be little more than a feeling that one finds difficult to get over, even if you happen to be Derrida.

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From these examples, it seems that paralinguistic elements like “intonation” (Derrida adds “rhythm,” too, to the mix of that which he cannot stand in his own speaking) are key sites for investigating the intractability of speech’s proprietary logic. To put this a different way, I argue that unraveling colonialist measures of “acquiring” multiple languages warrants a closer look at multilingualism’s affective charges, specifically in how visceral, critical feelings adhere to embodied, nonlinguistic aspects of talk that the “purity” of speech would like to clear away. These might include, besides “having an accent,” stuttering or dysfluency, or gestures that may be judged overly compensatory for when one cannot “find” the right words. In this chapter, I seek different approaches to multilingual embodiment through reading, in Stoker’s Dracula, scenes of multilingual speech that are associated with losing control because one “has” too many languages in them—­ and doing so against this acquisitive, proprietary formation. The scenes at the core of my attention will not be of Dracula himself, but of Eastern Europeans interacting with Jonathan Harker and one another, clustered at the beginning of the novel before the further disclosure of the multimedia network’s extent. I argue that these “un-­self-­posessed” communications, though marginal and largely unassimilated to the text, might be regarded as openings into a world of talk that could unravel the self-­possession of monolingual speakers and, as well, the new media network in the novel that gathers the “diverse”—­transnational, inclusive of women—­white bodies together through the organizational force of collation. These Eastern European figures mark the limit—­more so than Dracula—­of whose speech late nineteenth-­century racialization could admit to an “Angloworld” that was to unite the West under a developing understanding of whiteness based on one’s distance from an English-­fi rst modernity.11 Because of its status also as the limit of who can be included as human in the text, the multilingual Eastern European body is crucial for thinking beyond speech’s “failures” to produce fluency to an admissible alternative: an embodied experience of communication and language that is not concerned with to whom speech belongs. When Glissant writes about Antillean Creole (see the second epigraph to this chapter), he offers an important counterpoetics to multilingual dysfunction. He clarifies that his interest in multilingualism is not primar-

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ily a matter of identity (by contrast, Matsuda blithely notes from a functional perspective that “your self is inseparable from your accent”),12 but rather he is most concerned that the world would lose something from its stew of languages, its chaos-­monde—­a more general condition of aesthetic “disorder” he describes as having no “preestablished norms.”13 There is something, I believe, of this chaos-­monde in Dracula’s depiction of Eastern Europe’s “whirlpool of languages,” which clearly escapes the understanding of the practically monolingual Harker. Even Dracula—­though a colonizing, acquisitive figure himself, as the scholarship on the novel has variously argued—­eschews a particular model of singular selfhood in his embrace of multilingual (and many-­blooded) being. As a result, his desire to get the English intonation exactly right is not melancholic or anguished, because he is not looking to fully inhabit the “monolingualism of the other.” As evinced by his many coffins, Dracula wishes to have infinite “habituses,” none greater than any of the others. It is this desire to mediate different languages equally in a manner that maintains their distinction while unifying them in a singular body that seems of a piece with the chaos-­monde: “Chaos-­ monde is neither fusion nor confusion: it acknowledges neither the uniform blend—­a ravenous integration—­nor muddled nothingness. Chaos is not ‘chaotic.’ ”14 Dracula’s limitation, however, is that he is a ravenous integrator of speech and of blood, and thus, in my mind, certainly no anticolonial figure. But we might read his apparent concern about his English intonation as a different orientation to language relation that sits aslant from the protagonist group’s preference for monolingual multimedia. Dracula’s desire to perfect his accent is markedly not the colonized subject’s wish—­as might be hoped for by the colonizer—­to parrot everything just right or too perfectly; rather, he is the acquisitive polyglot who is an Oriental who has dared to become an Orientalist (and consequently, monstrous). In Dracula’s other multilingual bodies besides Dracula himself and Van Helsing—­though scant of reference, and foreclosed as legitimate speakers by the terms of the monolingual new media network—­I argue that we might find easier openings into alternative communications that take the form of multilingual talk. Talk, unlike speech, resists enduring logics of colonialist acquisitiveness in relation to language, logics that continue to underlie “cosmopolitan”

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multimedia forms in the present. These forms at once devalue and racialize multilingual bodies, while upholding technological advances in artificial intelligence and language learning as global, universal goods. In also touching on some of the directions taken by social media platforms and language apps in the twenty-­fi rst century, this chapter begins to articulate how, in the 1890s, a distinct Anglo-­A merican genealogy of speech entangled itself with media in ways that have been maintained into the present.15 A note before proceeding further: my approach to Stoker’s novel will be noticeably selective in that I will focus on small portions of the text that will be of most use for disarticulating the colonial logics of speech that construct the novel, and which the novel, in turn, upholds. Thus, the account of Stoker’s novel that I present here will seem rather partial. However, my approach to Dracula seeks this limited engagement not only because the multilingual figures with which I am concerned fall out of the narrative (as does, not incidentally, Dracula’s speech) after Harker’s initial account of his journey, but also because I want to resist the ways in which the vast body of Dracula criticism has often replicated the aspirations of the novel’s multimedia collation toward explanatory closure. As the existing scholarship has demonstrated, Dracula has yielded up seemingly endless, plausible allegorical possibilities; or, in some readings, such as Jack Halberstam’s, monstrosity serves as a referential technology that can point to anything that bourgeois, civilized white Victorian society wished to disavow.16 I will, nevertheless, engage a portion of this work on Dracula and the many insights that have been generated through engagement with Stoker’s novel. Thus my “resistance” to Dracula criticism comes from a place not so much of overturning other readings as of adopting a slightly different method. My analysis takes off from select parts of the novel to construct a negative space of multilingual talk that is not “in” the text, but on which what I will call its “white cosmopolitics” of media nonetheless depends. In taking up this form of engagement, I am trying to remain mindful of critical aesthetics and their effects—­especially in working with material as “worked over” as Dracula both in criticism and adaptation.17 I constellate these small glimpses from the novel with other material taken variously from theoretical sources—­some which may be more familiar to the field of Victorian studies, and others less so. In a manner, however, true to the nov-

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el’s own form, I am attempting a different kind of collation that specifically runs counter to that which is undertaken by Mina Harker, yet also spins off from it. Monolingualism, Media, and Racialization

From Dracula’s desire to perfect his intonation to Mina’s record of Old Swales’s Yorkshire dialect (in the so-­called Whitby episode) to Lucy’s fascination with Texan Quincey Morris’s code-­switching in and out of slang, Dracula is a novel explicitly engaged with the status of the English language in the late nineteenth century. As Christine Ferguson has summarized in her account of how the novel negotiates multiple Englishes, debates over English standardization produced a wide range of contemporary attitudes: some felt that dialects were part of a “faddish modernity”; others felt that they were a vital alternative to scientistic language; still others disavowed dialects as primitive and atavistic; and some elevated them to the status of a “lost” oral culture in need of saving.18 Dracula registers these debates acutely in its orchestration of different Englishes in remediated, typewritten form, specifically also situating regional concerns about dialect within the larger context of the circulation of English across the globe, as the British empire hurtled toward its prewar zenith. Ferguson ascribes to Stoker’s text a more progressive agenda: in her view, Dracula evinces a “clear fascination with the potential of English to metamorphosize, break down, and conceal as much as it reveals,” and ultimately, the Count’s defeat owes to his all-­too-­conservative desire for linguistic purification (his prescriptive grammar and goal of acquiring the “correct” intonation).19 The group that defeats him, by contrast, “represents the diverse ways in which English can be spoken, heard, and mediated”—­a diversity that Ferguson is right to ascribe to Darwinian notions of survival.20 Such kinds of diversity, however—­and the Darwinian politics of survival and adaptation that attend this diversity—­are, in my view, more a window into a cosmopolitics that tries to elide what it fights to keep homogeneous. English can be diversely “spoken, heard, and mediated,” but the terms of this diversity rests on an “English only” jingoism that, at its most “altruistic,” pleads that global communities cannot be built from the

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Tower of Babel (Glissant: “It is possible to build the Tower—­in every language”).21 Monolingualism, rather, remains a powerful unifying medium in the novel precisely because of how it enables inclusionary diversity. In this manner, monolingualism functions similarly to Mina’s typewriting, which, as Richard Menke argues, converts different accounts into a seemingly neutral body of information.22 Franco Moretti, who sees Dracula as an allegory for the bourgeois nineteenth century’s inability to admit monopoly capitalism as the logical conclusion of liberalism and free trade, has likewise argued that the narrative’s linguistic telos, which moves from “initial idiosyncrasies” toward an “amalgamated Standard British English,” neutralizes the threat of difference through selective inclusion.23 Such logic goes as follows: Britain demonstrates its capacity for liberal inclusion in order that it cannot be faulted for excluding Dracula, the monopoly capitalist par excellence who would reveal Victorian capitalism to itself, “a capitalism which is ashamed of itself.”24 Meanwhile, race stands ready as a grounding technology to accommodate this logic that adjudicates between admissible and inadmissible difference. Admissible difference—­assimilable to liberal inclusion, which does not tolerate dissent that might interrupt purportedly neutral, universal structures—­has been a central mechanism for colonialism’s continued functioning. At the end of the century, race became increasingly entangled with language and philology in particular ways that tended to obscure the workings of white supremacy below the surface. H. G. Wells, for instance, was a vocal opponent of taxonomic, generalizing categories, whether of nation or of race: as Duncan Bell has put it, “humanity, for Wells, was composed of a fluid mosaic of unique individuals not homogeneous groups that could be ranked and compared”; thus, for Wells, a unified language would be the necessary foundation for a “New Republic.”25 Drawing from Wells’s most overtly racist work, Anticipations (1901), as an example, however, Bell traces how Wells’s disavowal of racial categorization in favor of linguistic unity did not exempt him from racism—­or for that matter, from eugenics: Wells’s “New Republic,” as articulated in Anticipations, would eventually “establish a world-­state with a common language and a common rule” that would “tolerate no dark corners where the people of the abyss may fester, no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant plague-­preservers.

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Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come—­ white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test.”26 Wells would continue to disavow Anglo-­Saxonist movements espoused by some of his contemporaries, but his own recourse to racial classification and beliefs that should “the people of the abyss” remain to “fester” in the modern world, they ought to be exterminated, reveals that his focus on language remains consistent with the white supremacist groundings. The purportedly neutral term “efficiency,” moreover, gives away some racialized aesthetic assumptions about speech and communicative transfers. In Dracula, monolingualism’s medium-­like qualities maintain a not-­ quite-­ above-­ the-­ board colonialist structure of a “common language,” English, which stretches to accommodate more “non-­native” speakers of English and more dialectal variety. We could easily imagine Mina’s final typescript voicing Wells’s sentiment with a slight variation: “Whatever men—­or women—­may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come . . . the efficiency will be the test.” The sentiment of “efficiency” readily conveys how empire’s racializing technologies were becoming integrated into optimistic, inclusive visions relying on the unifying capacities of global Anglicization and new communication technologies. In the novel, the newly expanded field of “included” speakers is delimited by their mutual consent to (the efficiency of) English-­only mediation, which, by extension, means that they consent to joining an emergent aesthetic of a “globalizing” world: that is, the proliferating valences of a positively imagined global connectivity that the late nineteenth century was just beginning to articulate. In its moment, Dracula registers the unevenness in the ideological forging of such an abstracted and smooth community of global mediation (a notion that may seem banal in the age of social media and its marketing techniques).27 As we will see, consolidating an endlessly flexible form of white cosmopolitanism requires a certain laboriousness. Where “inefficient” multilingual speakers appear, rifts in the “common language” materialize, yielding openings to resist the emergent, technologically savvy “Angloworld” that the twentieth and twenty-­fi rst centuries have largely taken for granted. It seems no accident, given the novel’s entanglement with contemporary projects to Anglicize the world, that the successful exclusion of Dracula from the human band depends foremost on the inadmissibility of his multilingual

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body. Our first, known glimpse of Dracula through Jonathan Harker, crucially, offers very little in the way of visual forms of Victorian racialization that one might expect: he is a “tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.”28 We are, however, keyed into his inhuman difference through how he speaks: “The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:—­” (22). His racialization is produced not from skin or savage affect, as might be expected from a late Victorian fiction on empire, but from a certain quality of estrangement issuing from an immodern formality (courtly gesture) paired with the multilingual body’s inability to control intonation. We find ourselves, nonetheless, circulating within the familiar realm of speech and ownership: here, we find not an obvious parrot in the sense of Stevenson’s patchy pirate-­colonials, but a threateningly difficult-­to-­ place figure of an oral, multilingual past that must be excised because he will not join the English-­unified, cosmopolitan multimedial network. Katy Brundan has rightly remarked that “the fact that we overlook Dracula’s linguistic mastery reflects a projection of our own relatively monolingual environment.”29 I pick up on this description of monolingualism as environment to further comment on its relative invisibility to the novel’s many critics because of its status as a medium. It is a medium in the same sense as Marshall McLuhan’s electric light, to which the media theorist assigns the form of a container, thereby activating a value-­neutral abstraction that also evades materiality. Monolingualism is the container, in Dracula, of the diverse new media technologies (which are content, as well as media of their own) and also of the bodies that are in turn mediated through the technologies. As a milieu or environment, monolingualism becomes a substance that easily escapes notice. Monolingualism functions, moreover, according to a logic similar to a form of open-­m inded, liberal detachment that Patricia McKee has identified in her important account of racial capitalism in the novel. McKee argues that open-­m indedness enables a shift from a material to a symbolic form of spatial domination at a time when “the dark places of the earth” were quickly disappearing, late in the century, as material spaces for exploration, conquest, and appropriation.30 The West, in a nutshell, needed

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to redefine space in terms of an increasingly simulacral form of capitalist circulation and accumulation: since power could no longer accrue to the mobile, imperial adventurer, it shifted to the abstracted mobility of the white cosmopolitan subject’s detached mind. McKee gives the example of Mina as modeling this detachment in her touristic relation to Whitby, as “she recognizes the town in a series of representations” through her ability to collate likenesses from her readings.31 Likewise, the group that defeats Dracula is constituted by “persons never taken in,” “characters [that] personify the movements and uses of capital as they enter speculatively into representations of different cultures.”32 This form of open-­m inded wandering, “capable of reproducing Eastern as well as Western views,” redefines spatiality and power away from the limitations of the material and toward capital’s endless symbolic realms.33 Monolingualism operates like open-­m indedness in that both function as environmental media that enable endless accumulating of content and accommodating of diversity as long as this diversity does not disrupt the form of the larger medium. Open-­m indedness, as a disciplinary aesthetic that scholars such as David Lloyd and Elaine Hadley have assigned to liberal political forms emerging in the mid-­Victorian period, has been duly noted as producing a distinctly normative, white male middle-­class subject, even as its detachment tries to render invisible racialized, gendered, and classed production.34 Understanding how monolingual English is a medium in the same manner and with the same ends as liberal open-­m indedness offers further insight into the functioning of what Alexander Weheliye has usefully called “racializing assemblages.” Drawing on the work of scholars he calls “heterodox Deleuzians,” in conjunction with powerful thinkers in the Black feminist tradition, such as Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, on how race works, Weheliye cautions against excluding race from understanding assemblages, as race performs a central function in processes that consolidate colonialist hierarchies of the human:35 Racializing assemblages articulate relational intensities between human physiology and flesh, producing racial categories, which are subsequently coded as natural substances, whether pure or impure, rather than as the territorializing articulations of these assemblages.36

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That is to say, conceptually, “racializing assemblages” afford resistance against the reification of race when we talk about empire, which can produce a resistance to theorizing race (instead of what race is, we need to know how it works).37 The point remains that racialization has launched and continues to launch seemingly endless associative processes that naturalize who is fully human, partially human, or nonhuman. But assemblages in themselves, Weheliye points out, are not necessarily good nor bad, and for this reason they might also work to dehierarchize, or “deterritorialize,” the human. Monolingualism in Dracula demonstrates how racialization remains knottily dependent on the notion of owned speech, even as the notion shapeshifts to accommodate a more diverse set of (white) bodies and collective ownership. Van Helsing’s sloppy speech, unforgivingly recorded by the phonograph and thereafter transcribed, clearly evinces less self-­possession than Dracula’s courtly and excellent English. But the terms of owning speech have changed: whereas in Treasure Island, piratical/parroted speech indexes incomplete, patchwork bodies racialized as nonwhite, in Dracula, Van ­Helsing’s clear lack of control over a language not his own is assimilated into a monolingual network of white cosmopolitans. In Dracula, again, what’s important is giving one’s consent to a collectively maintained but English-­ led or -­owned medium of monolingual hegemony, rather than individually owning one’s words. In exchange for this consent, the likes of Van Helsing earn their membership within a collective white body that is whole and integrated through its diverse deviations from standard English and its various accents or intonations. In other words, Dracula’s ultimate estrangement issues not from his ability to speak multiple languages or the fact that his intonation is off, but from his refusal to submit to an English-­fi rst modernity. Consequently, he is also disallowed from sharing in this collective ownership of whiteness itself.38 Indeed, the ways in which the text denies whiteness to Dracula in its visual descriptions may support this point: whiteness is either atomized to his teeth (“sharp white teeth”) or his ears (“his ears were pale”), or rendered indirectly as an impression rather than a visual surface: “the general effect was one of extraordinary pallor” (23–­24). This clash between the colonialist management of an English-­only, multimedia space, and Dracula’s premodern multilingualism might be of par-

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ticular interest to Stoker, given that Irish racialization, as David Lloyd has demonstrated, was closely intertwined with orality throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As Lloyd’s work on Irish “oral space” and its co-­evolution with “colonial modernity” has argued, “the mouth is the privileged corporeal signifier of Irish racial and cultural difference.”39 Lloyd focuses on the emplaced nature of forms of orality disavowed by colonial modernity—­from keening (loud mourning) at funerals to singing, storytelling, debate, and gossip at pubs and prisons—­which he recognizes as “non-­modern” forms of resistance to colonialism’s managerial systems. These, too, are forms of disordered speech delegitimized through their connection to racialized bodies that, in some manner or other, are imagined as lacking control and as excessive in speech and performance. Dracula, too, is racialized through the “oral space” that he takes up, but his sin is not his inability to control his intonation, but his resistance to the multimedial “Angloworld.” To get a bit more granular as to the precise ways in which monolingualism facilitates the production of white cosmopolitics through the proliferation of racializing assemblages, I turn to one particular moment in the novel: when Lucy writes to Mina about her three potential suitors, lingering on Quincey Morris’s interesting talk when he slips—­deliberately, for effect—­into slang. In addition to her interest in his use of slang, Lucy finds compelling the content of his travels.40 In describing her experience of hearing Morris’s exciting stories, Lucy includes a seemingly unnecessary comparison that the modern reader might register as just another one of Victorian literature’s many “casually racist” moments—­not unlike the mention of John Silver’s African wife.41 Lucy writes to Mina: “I sympathize with poor Desdemona when she had such a dangerous stream poured in her ear, even by a black man” (59). Nina Auerbach’s editorial note for the Norton edition suggests that Lucy’s invocation of Othello’s Blackness here alludes to Morris’s position as “a man from the southern United States” (59n3). To spell this out further, I note that Lucy specifically invokes the now canonically recognized triangulation between white woman, Black man, and state power.42 The racial politics of Othello’s early modern Venetian world is not identical to that of the postbellum United States, but Lucy’s subjectification of the white woman by offering her a proper name, and her denial of Othel-

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lo’s, points to a foundational anti-­Blackness that has encoded and continues to encode the human as white. The unremarkability, in the text, of Lucy’s “even a black man” rather consolidates anti-­Blackness as a crucial foundation of a long genealogy of what Wynter calls the singular genre of “ethnoclass Man” that has “overrepresented” himself as the only admissible form of humanity—­since before Othello.43 It is important to note that Blackness in Lucy’s remark goes further than conditioning the inadmissibility of Othello’s (poisonous?) “stream” of speech; it also enables a genealogy of the white woman subject whose “sympathy” cannot be interrupted “even by a black man.” As Auerbach suspects, there is more to untangle in Lucy’s free associating between Othello’s Blackness and—­v ia Morris’s Americanness—­enslaved Black persons in the United States. If enslavement definitionally excluded Black people from owning their bodies, then Black people also could not own their speech. In the attenuation of Black speech into an abstracted comparative tool that ultimately allows a strange genealogy of pseudo-­sovereign, white woman subjects to emerge in relation to white men, Black “speech” arguably goes missing from the text into another space of talk. Of a similar literary moment, Julie Beth Napolin observes that the double mediation of the “talk” of a Black woman in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness enables the text’s refusal of language itself to Blackness.44 Napolin shows anti-­Blackness operating here—­or, more precisely, anti-­Black femininity, analogously to how Xanthippe gets banished from Socrates’s death chamber for her inadmissible, grief-­fi lled talk: she is “an ignored object adjacent to the master scene” of speech.45 More than an adjacency, I would add: Black soundings are an attenuated surround that becomes the negative background, from which the master scene of white speech emerges with clear contours. As I will argue in the next section, Dracula’s multilingual Eastern European bodies—­and their function within racializing assemblages that take up Orientalist tropes—­signal a different limit of the human, but one that nonetheless connects to the assemblage that forcefully consigns Blackness to a mute elsewhere. If Blackness speaks no language, the East speaks too many languages. Multilingualism repeatedly gets devalued through the distinction between its un-­self-­possessed features versus monolingualism’s enabling of immanent control. In Dracula, storing multiple languages in one body is conceptualized as a bad media system, one that is always losing

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control of the body (unless, of course, one is the Count who cannot die, and who has had endless time to “acquire” languages, though even he cannot fully manage intonation). Though the novel includes just a few scenes of multilingual bodies other than Dracula’s or Van Helsing’s, as with the brevity of Lucy’s mention of Othello, these moments can nonetheless unfold important entwinements of speech with the logic of colonialist rights to property. And, as well, these scenes might serve as points of departure to figure alternatives to owned speech that might undo what Saidiya Hartman has memorably named “a racial calculus and political arithmetic” that endures in various forms of our present as part of the afterlife of slavery’s and colonialism’s extractive and destructive proprietorship.46 Multilingual Bodies Talking

Across his body of work, Glissant arguably practices a form of media theory, though a version that—­against tendencies to articulate complete “media systems” and teleological historical shifts—­registers mediation’s aesthetic disorder, which he names poetics. Turning his attention, for instance, to modernist poetry and computer systems in the 1990s, media that subscribe to a binaristic code that dogmatically classifies any formal difference as a virus, Glissant remarks that Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound each registered computing’s technological shift by composing works that are themselves systems.47 As Glissant explains, this is due to the sense that computing’s instantaneousness (what Marshall McLuhan referred to as the electric flash) would soon threaten poetry’s prior hold on immediacy. But, in Glissant’s view, the computer does not threaten poetics in this way, because he has a different vision of poetics: Every computer system, through its very instantaneity, makes us familiar with unilingual revelation and renders the sudden flash ordinary—­but, from the viewpoint of a multilingual scintillation, the aforementioned system is incapable of “comprehending.”48

Characterizing computer code as “unilingual,” Glissant goes on to clarify that such monolingualism refuses relationality, engaging a mere “code totality” that has nothing to do with any true totality (which, in an always provisional poetics of relation, is unperceivable from any one position and

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in flux). By contrast, “multilingual scintillation,” or what he elsewhere calls “the drama of languages” (fodder for the chaos-­monde), is the provenance of poetics, which, unlike binaristic code, can admit accidents of difference as not a virus, but something to be entered into relation with, to be engaged on its own terms.49 Holding Glissant’s thinking in view, and his resistance to new forms of monolingual “code totality” in the modern world, let us turn attention to chaotic multilingual embodiments in Dracula in order to conceptualize resistance to the “code totality” of white cosmopolitics newly supported through the novel’s monolingual media system—­both in and of the novel itself. If we attend closely to how the marginalized multilingual bodies show up in the novel, we perceive that they inevitably disrupt the transformation by which consent to monolingualism creates admissible, self-­possessed speakers. What’s more, they provide opportunities to theorize anew selves that are un-­self-­possessed, whose disordered speech (however diminished in the text) might offer a portal into an anticolonial realm of talk. Indeed, it may be the brief and unremarkable appearance of the various villagers and peasants whom Harker passes en route to Dracula’s castle in the text that renders these figures potentially insurgent in the ways that matter for my account of talk. The picturesque crowds of peasants, the incapacitating fear (rightly) felt by the landlord and landlady at Bistritz, Harker’s repeated emphasis on his own confusion at the mixture of languages swirling about him: all this signals a quaintness of everyday life that evades the frame of imperial anxiety and destabilizing fears of reverse colonization. Imperial anxiety and reverse colonization are part of what Anjuli Raza Kolb has noted to be the “center-margin geometry that [has] shape[d] so much Stoker criticism.”50 Raza Kolb, by contrast, takes an interest in the ontological dimensions of the later part of the British empire, in which “the circulation of matter, material, and media is the dominant logical system.”51 Like Raza Kolb, I am also interested in dimensions of late empire that the center-­periphery model can unintentionally obscure. Turning my focus away from the “consuming ontologies” (as Jennifer Wicke has put it) of both the mass media network (and, as I have argued, the white cosmopolitics that contains it) and vampirism, I now stay with the clumsy, mixed-­up, fearful,

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paralyzed, stammering, and “ridiculous” (Harker’s descriptor) multilingual bodies in the novel’s first chapter, in order to bring to the surface possible alternative, nonconsuming ontologies.52 As Edward Said has argued, because the Orient is definitional for the Western “image, idea, personality, [and] experience,” Orientalism is a matter of both “ontological and epistemological distinction.”53 That the encounter between monolingual and multilingual bodies (as Harker moves East) is a matter of different forms of knowing is directly registered in the following exchange between Harker and the landlady at the Golden Krone, where he stays for a night before arriving at Dracula’s castle: Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a hysterical way: “Must you go? Oh! Young Herr, must you go?” She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again: “Do you know what day it is?” I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again: “Oh, yes! I know that! I know that, but do you know what day it is?” (12)

When Harker says that she has “lost her grip of what German she knew,” and that she has “mixed it all up with some other language I did not know at all,” he seems at pains to imply something about multilingualism and epistemology. The landlady, who tries to know too many languages, gets mixed up and confused in her heightened state of fear. By contrast, Harker, who only knows a little bit of German to get by, does not know at all the other language she is speaking. Somewhat counterintuitively, it is Harker’s not-­ knowing that marks his control over language, and his control over his own body—­h is possession of just enough German, his ignorance of all other, inconsequential folk languages.54 By contrast, the landlady is, in effect, a broken-­down media system, a multilingual body with too many languages in storage, such that knowing too many languages results in an unknowing: she loses her German because she knows too many other languages. As a result, she glitches in her capacity to communicate.

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Yet the woman talks back with knowledge of a different kind. She asks if Harker knows what day it is, to which he predictably responds with a piece of calendrical knowledge. Her response, which is to twice repeat that she knows his knowing, and to repeat her question about whether he knows what day it is, without clarification, insistently rends open a space for another way of knowing, perhaps inarticulable as speech. As she subsequently reveals, the day is St. George’s Day, and evil will be unleashed at midnight. If, as Harker suggests, it is his monolingualism that enables him to maintain the certain kind of knowing that he privileges as absolute (empirical, secular, calendrical, colonial), then, on the other side of this, it is the landlady’s “drama of languages” that enables her to know but then to suspend Harker’s knowledge, thereby making room for alternative epistemologies. It is Harker, she will go on to specify, who does not “know where [he is] going, or what [he is] going to” (12), her mixing of where and what in the same question about geography meanwhile dissolving colonialist orientations toward mapping land and territory. As Brundan has noted, Stoker may have had Arminius Vambéry—­the polyglot and professor of Oriental languages in Budapest—­in mind when writing Dracula. Stoker evidently expressed some admiration for Vambéry, describing him as “a wonderful linguist, writes twelve languages, speaks freely sixteen, and knows over twenty.”55 How might we square Stoker’s appreciation for multilingual knowing with Harker’s perspective on not-­ knowing, which, I argue, the novel ultimately condones? One answer is that Vambéry is exceptional—­as is Dracula, both of them capable of multilingual storage that would be detrimental to most other bodies.56 He is the polyglot who marks the edge of what is deemed plausibly human. I look now to the details of how most other embodiments fail not only at producing admissible speech, but also, more generally, at being selves at all. Not unlike the piratical, patchwork bodies described in Stevenson’s tale, the figures Harker passes on his journey are described as a mix of material that does not feel complete, coherent, or seamless: The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course petticoats under

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them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-­white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. (11)

In the main, these Eastern European bodies, somewhat ungendered as well, exhibit problems of scale that are externalized onto their clothing. Rather ornamental in nature, they are “picturesque” subjects that seem entirely made of surfaces. As Anne Anlin Cheng has argued (though specifically in relation to the “yellow woman” as the figure par excellence of such ontology), thinking through the framework of “ornamentalism” offers a way to approach personhood as “the minute, the sartorial, the prosthetic, and the decorative.”57 The resonances of the sartorial in the descriptions of Eastern European bodies do not follow exactly the same logic as what Cheng parses in relation to “yellow woman” ontology (as synthetic resistance to subjects defined by interiority), but these figures from Dracula do seem to occupy a similar position of “perihumanity,” which Cheng describes as “produced out of the fusion between ‘thingliness’ and ‘personness.’ ”58 Harker also tells us that these “perihuman” subjects (whose conditions of personhood seem entirely determined by their too-­large sartorial ornaments) are not “prepossessing” (11), unlike the perihumanity of Asian femininity that Cheng describes. Derived from the verb “prepossess,” the adjective “prepossessing” signifies an “attractive” or “pleasing” aesthetic quality or categorization.59 The verb, however, gives a better clue as to how such an aesthetic gets adjudicated. When used transitively with an object, to “prepossess someone” is to strongly influence them with a “feeling” or “notion.”60 More literally, such influence is achieved by taking possession of someone completely, ostensibly through possessing someone else’s senses and judgment before they have a chance to do so for themselves. These bodies of Eastern Europe, then, are at bottom unable to possess others, incapable of self-­possession (as shown in their disordered speaking), and “wanting in self assertion”—­as Harker elaborates, in this metonymic chain of signification (11). I will add, to this existing chain, that these figures are essentially not full selves at all; rather, they are perihuman selves circulating somewhere close to the networks of signification that cross ornamentalism with Orientalism’s capacious “distribution.”61

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Cheng, who situates her theory of ornamentalism alongside and slightly aslant from Black feminism’s project of renovating the human itself, enables a way to more clearly name the processes of racialization underpinning the Orientalist discursive sphere. Referencing Spillers on the “grammar” that has accorded Black women a “zero degree of social conceptualization,” Cheng notes that in racial logic’s intricate orders of dehumanization, Orientalism “relies on a decorative grammar.”62 In attending to the surface-­ driven grammar of Eastern European bodies in Dracula, I am trying to find a fuller understanding of how multilingual bodies are always already racialized bodies. The logic that multilingual bodies are bad at controlling themselves because they are trying to store too many languages is an after-­ the-­fact justification for an already racialized perihumanity. What I am tracing goes something like this: multilingual bodies are defective because they are in possession of too many languages, yet these bodies precede such logic as less-­than-­human specimens with a fixed, ontological status of “not prepossessing” (and therefore incapable of actually possessing anything at all, including language, let alone themselves). As with all such racial logics that have made and maintained the ongoing colonial order, both expansive (metonymic) and circular features enhance its durability and apparent unassailability. Here I flag some different markers of surface that also lend themselves to constructing the form of perihumanity I am tracing as part of Dracula’s grammar of the racialized multilingual: gesture and other not-­quite-­ linguistic, often affectively charged elements of embodied movement. Though these elements will be of greater concern to chapters 3 and 4, I introduce them briefly here. As Harker travels East, gestures and embodied feeling are specifically hierarchized below words, where body movements specifically compensate for the failure to possess and therefore produce words. Not even admissible as a supplement to speech, then, the embodied movements of Eastern European bodies mark communicative failure that is tagged to thing-­like, picturesque personhood. Upon receiving Harker, landlord and landlady bow and smile, they look “at each other in a frightened way,” followed by the landlord “mumbl[ing] out that the money [from Dracula] had been sent in a letter” (12). They then cross themselves, and “refused to speak” (12), this refusal perhaps one small place from which to imagine their lack of speech as something otherwise than a lack. As Harker

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continues on his journey, fellow passengers continue in this vein of flawed, embodied communication through “a strange mixture of fear-­meaning movements” (16), and peasants emit “a chorus of screams and a universal crossing of themselves” (17). When the driver meets Dracula (though, at this point in the narrative, we don’t yet know it is him), he stammers out his reply (17). Harker’s body—­at least for the time being—­remains flawless and hidden behind the acousmatic screen of his words, as expected. But also, he specifically does not have to resort to gestures or embodied feeling because he limits his store of languages. He picks out repeated words from the “whirlpool of languages” and checks them in his polyglot dictionary (which, he lets us know, he takes out “quietly” [13]). Again, the logic of this excerpting is crucial to the not-­k nowing that, as I have argued, structures Harker’s superiority. He seems constitutively unable to learn these other languages, but such monolingualism (or, rather, a kind of monolingualism plus, since he does know some foreign words, and imperfectly a “safe” language, German) is not a liability for English male subjecthood,—­rather, a necessity for its beautification. As Harker forgets his “ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene,” he does admit that if he had “known the language, or rather languages” of the passengers, he “might not have been able to throw them off so easily” (14). In the world of the novel, of course, Harker’s monolingualism here renders him vulnerable to harm, and the multilingual passengers have the upper hand. But the manner by which Harker is able to keep his aesthetic judgment intact through his unknowing—­h is capacity for taking in the “beauty of the scene”—­is ultimately vouchsafed by the reader who knows they are reading a story with Gothic generic elements.63 In the world outside the novel, it remains correct not to admit too many foreign words, so that one might have just enough to hold them all with control and self-­possession. Multilingual Talk and the Global Village

One of the central capacities of the “uncontrolled” multilingual bodies I have discussed in this chapter is that they are illustrative of a different model of linguistic mediation: namely, they instantiate languages mediating bodies, rather than bodies knowing and mastering language. This latter

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capacity—­a colonialist one, as I have been arguing—­is a matter of storage and space where too many languages lead to embodied dysfunction. But the former gives up mastery as a desired outcome: rather than trying to own language, these bodies allow language to be experiential, in the manner of words passing through and interacting, in relation with other words, and also with features of embodiment that are not primarily linguistic or paralinguistic. The distinction I am drawing here between media as storage and media as experience is indexed by the distinction between speech and talk with which this book is centrally preoccupied. As I have suggested in this chapter and the last, with emphases on at least two different “problems” of speech and mediation (words wandering into the wrong bodies, bodies storing too many words), resistance to colonialist stakes in propertied logic may be found in the most mundane operations of talk. The multilingual bodies that the narrative threatens to objectify by means of the picturesque nonetheless orient us toward a resistant—­and directionless—­flux. These bodies mediate relations among languages, gestures, and environmental changes, and are consequently always in motion without reaching any “point” of stasis. The movement by which they are always being constituted functions completely awry from the containing procedures of miniaturization that the picturesque, allied with Orientalist racialization, uses to fix the meaning of a perihuman ontology. If we understand such fluidity in relation and noncontaining mediation enacted in these embodiments specifically as features of talk, we can point up the enclosing limitations of speech, its reified structures of ownership and mastery. As we will see in the chapters that follow, “failures” of mediation that show up in two novels known especially for their “bad” literary dialogue are, alternately, failures of owned speech and self-­possession. In both Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors and Conrad and Ford’s The Inheritors, bodies that chronically lose control over their speech are explicitly threats to the colonial order. The “bad dialogue” in both, I will argue, affords particular opportunities to attend closely to everyday talk’s paralinguistic and nonlinguistic elements, especially where they break aesthetic strangleholds of fluency, efficiency, and proportion that are idealized to speech, and which ground affects of self-­possession. Meredith’s biting satirical fiction and Conrad and Ford’s dystopic science fiction, however, ultimately motivate

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genre conventions toward limiting what these texts can imagine: in both, the end of speech and self-­possession means the end of the world rather than an end to coloniality. Before concluding this chapter, however, I return to my opening question as to what it means to be multilingual. I recall once again the peculiar intractability that seems to attend the notion of the “native speaker,” which remains, to this day, arguably sacrosanct. With every job advertisement that lists native proficiency as a must, however, the specter of a dysfluent multilingual talker is raised. Meanwhile, the polyglot becomes something of a genius exception, a self-­possessed multilingual speaker who somehow manages to store and “master” many languages; his incarnation is usually Western and male (though not necessarily so), and his genealogy, Orientalist. Dracula’s monstrosity further limns the exceptionality of the polyglot, territorializing him as excluded from the category of the human. Multilingualism, as a consequence, is more a condition essentialized to immigrants, or those whose lives and histories have “survived” coloniality of different forms, and who must learn the hegemonic language in order to have a place within the global economic order. For the normative “native speaker” within the current neoliberal order in the West, language learning gets defined mostly as an inconvenience to be solved by artificial intelligence, or as a luxury when there are the resources and time to acquire languages according to a calibrated aesthetic of adornment or supplementation (the utilitarian view of language acquisition for business, or tourism, resonates with Jonathan Harker’s delicate calibration of his language storage capacities). The racialized distinction between multilingual immigrants and an elite form of language acquisition/supplement (accorded predominantly to socioeconomically privileged white “native” speakers of English) has been explored, for instance, in linguistic anthropologist Jonathan D. Rosa’s fieldwork at a primarily Latina/o high school in Chicago.64 Rosa’s account demonstrates how a discriminatory conception of “languagelessness” associated with deficiency and incompetency pervades characterizations of Latina/o students; Rosa also connects these “covert racializing discourses” to US policies and curricular programming decisions in bilingual education, and to troubling designations of linguistic incompetency assigned to bilingual or multilingual speakers in the census.65 For instance, Rosa notes

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a slippage in how the principal of the school (herself a bilingual speaker and of Puerto Rican descent) uses the term “bilingual” to signal “Limited English Proficiency” (LEP), and widespread assumptions—­a mong teachers and the school leadership—­that students at the school were not “good” at either Spanish or English (despite the lack of any empirical evidence for such a claim).66 Rosa concludes, apposite to my arguments linking speech’s proprietorship to selfhood, that personhood is essentially denied to those who have been racialized as possessing no language—­and racialization’s flexible assemblages allow that “any racialized group can be faced with linguistic stigmatization involving ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness.”67 Meanwhile, institutionalized academic practices in literary studies have not been immune to attitudes toward multilingualism that differentiate between groups of multilinguals. Programmatically, in US universities, non-­ English language and literature departments and comparative literature departments are disappearing before English departments, which, to varying degrees, will likely remain “core” to a liberal arts education for some time (“language requirements” are meanwhile retained in many English departments in an embellishing manner, as monolingualism plus). Meanwhile, Aamir Mufti has brought important attention to the ways in which even the idea of World Literature, in its promises of multilingual representation, ultimately traces its lineage back to Orientalism’s drive “to make the world whole for the first time” according to “[Western] cultural logics of the modern bourgeois world.”68 Thus, “an unmediated and uncritical notion of the vernacular or particular . . . has never been able to mount an adequate critique of the ‘cosmopolitan,’ global, or universal,” since the very notion of that particularity has “itself been constituted through the processes of the latter [i.e., the cosmopolitan].”69 Because these processes constructing globality are conducted through the hegemony of the English language, World Literature’s multilingualism remains Anglo-­ globalist in its character. Arguably then, this puts World Literature in close proximity with the rise of Global Anglophone studies, a field that, as Nasia Anam has pointed out, seems particularly lacking in an analytic because it has been, at least in its origin, an invention of market forces to smooth over the work of language learning and translation.70 Either perceived as too difficult to achieve “fully,”

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or as obsolete because of new technologies, or because of a sense of global capitalism’s totalizing reach, multilingual competency—­notwithstanding its contrastive value with incompetent multilinguals learning English for less specialized, elite reasons—­seems, at present, an increasingly contested good, if even a good at all. Building on Mufti’s scholarship, Siraj Ahmed has argued that we cannot ignore the fact of the colonialist foundations, too, of the literary humanities writ large—­which, he demonstrates, still underlies postcolonial and comparative approaches in the form of enduring philological methods. Ahmed traces how the eighteenth-­century origins of the “new philology”—­most notably the contributions of William Jones, a jurist under the East India Company rule—­has bequeathed to the contemporary study of literature a universalized method of engaging authoritative texts as “vessels for historical knowledge.”71 According to Ahmed, Jones’s “protodeclaration of the Indo-­European hypothesis, comparative studies of languages, literatures, and mythologies spanning from India to Italy,” replaced “Babel’s confusion with a critical method that could know humanity across space and time”—­ and this critical method, the new philology, was itself a universalist, unifying force that postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and Weltliteratur have not moved beyond in their reliance on authoritative texts at the expense of other kinds of discursive formulations and “native experience.”72 Put another way, multilingualism became disciplined under colonialist methodological aesthetics, where even sophisticated commitments to language’s “common resistance to referentiality” in postcolonial studies fell into a trap of a totalizing, containing sort of logic.73 Like English as a monolingual medium—­whether in the form of Dracula’s multimedial network or the production of Global Anglophone studies—­multilingual study based in certain kinds of authorized, literary traditions has not entirely escaped the grip of colonialist forms of (silent) proprietary exclusion. As a response, Ahmed seeks to read “traces” of nonauthoritative discursive formulations as they are, inevitably, appropriated into authorized texts.74 In this chapter, I have been arguing that Dracula’s racialized multilingual speakers and their nonassimilation to cosmopolitan media provide a different workaround to the proprietary imperatives of colonialist texts and methods. Against the developing milieu of monolingualism and white

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cosmopolitics, they occasion fissures in the colonial logic that was seeking to extend proprietary speech rights into the territory of new media. Specifically where un-­self-­possessed multilingual speakers “fail”—­glitching into the gestural, stammering bodies, stalled by emotion—­we might rather refigure them as mediators of language that operate outside the imperative of “mastering” language. “Storage” is not a problem if one views multilingualism as an uncircumscribed experience, open to unevenness and difference—­a different kind of fluency that is not smoothness or even pacing, but flux. Such a view offers a counterpoetics to how popular language-­learning businesses entirely embrace an ethos of efficient and effective acquisition.75 As Michael Silverstein has argued, Standard English in the United States becomes commoditized into a “thing” that one could buy and possess, if one is unfortunate enough not to “have” it already.76 In its most extreme form, this belief in technology’s remediation of the human body’s inefficient labors of language learning instantiates itself in the promise of artificial intelligence, and a future that would render language learning obsolete. At the end of the nineteenth century, W. T. Stead thought that telepathy would be the natural extension of electric communications; in our twenty-­fi rst century, Elon Musk boasts that his company, Neuralink, will eventually create a downloadable program that will make communication across different languages instantaneous. Both would like to do away with bodily mediation’s inevitable failures and inefficiencies. But what such utopic, technophilic beliefs miss is that they are made possible through the corporeality of the disavowed multilingual talker. In Dracula, this is the deficient Eastern European; today, it may be the immigrant with a low-­wage job “struggling” to learn English at the margins of their “free” time in an ESL class. Both are racialized figures that are made to embody everything that seems embarrassing (or “ridiculous”) about not being in control of one’s speech. Meanwhile, if the well-­resourced, white American student studying abroad for the summer finds that they cannot keep up with a language learning app’s “bite-­sized lessons,” and makes too many gestures to compensate for dysfluency, they may very well be in a position to laugh at themself, which is to say, to “laugh it off” (the “it” being everything that one might find incompetent, inadequate about a different nonnative speaker). If we were to suspend this racialized notion of “inadequacy” (at produc-

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ing the right possessive affects that have been assigned to native speakers), we might not only restructure our relationship to the condition of multilingualism, but also experience new affective registers tied to refigured, nonproprietary aesthetics. For instance, when the contemporary Chinese writer Yiyun Li receives the concerned question as to why she has abandoned her native Chinese, she counters: “Their concerns about ownership of a language  .  .  . allow me secret laughter. English is to me as random a choice as any other language. What one goes toward is less definitive than that from which one turns away.”77 Here, Li keys into the tired—­and tiring—­ways that speech is policed and defined around ownership, the same central assumption that I still find necessary to dislodge, as well. As it did for Derrida, that speech should be tied to ownership at all occasions an affective revelation—­but here it is not an intractable shame, but secret laughter. I am drawn to this unexpected response (given that we might rather expect anger toward the policing “concern” that she may lose her originary “identity”). What Li does here, with laughter, seems important: a comic sensibility she will not disclose nonetheless throws the terms of the “native speaker” (and by extension, the entire category of “identity”) out the window. I suspect that the seeming novelty of her secret laughter may owe, at least in part, to the historical circumstance that English is not exactly a colonial language for this former citizen-­subject of the modern Chinese state. In any case, Li’s example indexes one possible opening into a different way of experiencing multilingualism that refuses colonialist proprietorship and white cosmopolitics—­and it is perhaps right to allow her experience to remain unparsed (or, to borrow from Glissant, opaque). That her refusal involves a form of dismissal, too, seems important: as a gesture, dismissal evades the dialectic of power and resistance that sometimes threatens to limit anticolonial work. I close this chapter by invoking McLuhan’s overdetermined notion of a “global village”—­often used to reference the internet’s connective possibilities—­in order to reflect briefly on some of the most pressing concerns about speech and new media today, and what the opacities of multilingual talk, as described in this chapter, might reveal about these contexts. The term “global village” tends to be associated with McLuhan predicting the internet in the 1960s, and popular debates about the nature of this “village” tend

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to circulate around whether or not the internet has created more community or more dissensus. But these debates have been limited to an unquestioned imperative of the “global village” as the given, inevitable medium, which, like the monolingual multimedia network in Dracula, tends to accommodate difference in a limited way that assures certain grounds remain the same. If we look at the grounds of McLuhan’s coinage, we find that the Catholic media theorist’s identification of the “electric age” is part of a Christologically inflected history of (Western) media, which moves from orality to literacy and then to the electric age’s global village. Literacy, for McLuhan, is “civilized” man’s fall: a state of dissociation and separation from a purportedly more integral, and innocent, stage of oral tribalism. In articulating this tripartite history, McLuhan comes very near to suggesting that the twinned sins of colonialism and ecological devastation are central to this second stage, extrapolating that literacy and the industrial age’s “breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) ha[ve] been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike.”78 But by and large, his description of Western man’s power over man and nature seems somewhat a matter of preordained, “extrahuman” fact.79 The nineteenth century may be a fall for Western man, but is a necessary one in the telos of Christian becoming. The global village of the electric age is, for McLuhan, the unfolding of a welcome third act, where “contemporary awareness had to become integral and inclusive once again,” a state of redemption from the industrial age’s “dissociated sensibilities.”80 Contemporary, secularized uses of the “global village” to describe the internet might imagine that they have nothing to do with McLuhan’s theological basis for his media history.81 Yet, as Jonathan Sterne has argued, histories of communication continue to inadvertently naturalize this Christian schema from the so-­called Toronto school of Catholic media theorists, ignoring important developments, for instance, in music, dance, and architecture that might provide a richer, less colonialist sense of media history—­if we follow Ahmed on the critique of enduring philological preoccupations with text.82 I note, moreover, that when McLuhan frames the global village as a return (“once again”) to oral, “tribal man,” he means a return

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with a difference.83 Specifically, he observes that “the barbarian or tribal man, then as now, was hampered by cultural pluralism, uniqueness, and discontinuity,” but that with the global village, such “hamper[ing]” difficulties of difference would be smoothed over by a “kind of organic interdependence among all institutions of society.”84 Not so much a sense of smooth transnational commerce—­as the global village is often understood—­but a unity of form/medium that facilitates some greater, integral organicism. There is something of Stead’s Athenian agora in McLuhan’s “village,” as well as something of Dracula’s monolingual multimedia network.85 McLuhan’s global village insists on the organicism and wholeness of the substrate (whether electric light, binary code, or the internet itself), which the violent, barbaric, tribal village ostensibly lacked. Essentially, it marks only a slightly different iteration of Mina’s monolingual, typewritten assimilation of multimedia against the Count’s multilingual, material circulation. One might safely claim that the internet today is multilingual. But arguably, its various platforms operate through a similar logic where an invisibilized medium is imagined to bring back the immediacy and presence of village life, while excising its “atavistic” elements. It has become clearer in recent years that the utopian, earlier hopes that the medium could bring global unity-­in-­d iversity would be untenable. Shortly after the 2016 election, for instance, in the wake of clear evidence of Russian interference with US media, Mark Zuckerberg would not fault his global village, but “movements for withdrawing from global connection.”86 The medium is necessarily connective; thus, those bad actors that would refuse to participate in “global connection” will be definitionally excluded from the medium (they are not global, they are isolated, they are left behind like the oral tribe, and unassimilable like the multilingual speakers, insufficiently fluent and stuck in the “whirlpool of languages”). The echoes of who is excluded in order to define the contours of the late nineteenth-­century mediascape seem strong in our twenty-­fi rst century. In Stoker’s canny articulation of the twinned development of empire and media, the anticolonial surround of the immodern and multilingual villagers forms a palpable commons that we could see as refusing the compromised and itemized selves that assimilate to the milieu of “global community.” This surround may be opaquely beside, under, above—­in a

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word, everywhere the dominant connective milieu articulates itself as the only giver of legitimized speech and communication in the form of speech transfer. But it might be of use to regard these opacities with an estranged curiosity that I think Li magnificently captures with her “secret laughter”: a curiosity capable of tolerating our own moments of bad, deficient, “blunders” of speech and moving beyond to an understanding that these are co-­present—­not primitive, not “tribal” in the racist sense—­forms of communication that are always already at whatever the latest master scene of speech might be. Beginning with this curiosity, we might then consider how these opacities might disarticulate the unnatural madness of our “given” media infrastructures. I will take up this final concern more fully in this book’s conclusion, but I will warrant briefly here that even the Draculas of our present (Russian bots? anarchist hackers? QAnon?) are figures that require our confrontation, in their difference and disruptions to the milieu’s smooth functioning: defining them as unable to join our “global village” will not mean their elimination.

THREE

George Meredith’s Profuse Inarticulacy As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate. —­O s c a r W i l d e on George Meredith, in The Decay of Lying But there was more; there was remarkable fulness, if only he could subordinate it to narrative . . . his mind had been too busy on the way for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents at the call for them. — ­On the character Skepsey, from G e o r g e   M e r e d i t h , One of Our Conquerors

In “The Decay of Lying” (1891), Oscar Wilde describes George Meredith through a perplexing set of paradoxes that are framed, however, as statements of exception (see the first epigraph to this chapter, above). A writer who masters everything except language or a novelist who does everything except tell a story seems impossible, because we tend to think of writing as made up entirely of language and novels as made up entirely of stories. The final turn of Wilde’s statement, that the artist is everything except articulate, is more pun than paradox: the artist is not art-­iculate. What exactly is Wilde highlighting here, as a critic pronouncing on—­and ultimately praising—­Meredith? What is Wilde signifying about language and novelistic form, and the potential limits of both, if Meredith masters “everything” except what seems to be most essential to both? And what obtains in Wilde’s disarticulation of articulacy in the punning final statement of exception? Wilde’s zeroing in on the paradoxical feeling of the novelist’s unmastery of both language and storytelling, and art that evades articulacy, on 93

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the one hand, and his “everything”-­ness, on the other, keenly captures an aesthetic mode of discomfiting profusion that is always struggling against a glassy, narrative surface on the brink of shattering, in Meredith’s work.1 As this chapter argues, the potentially anticolonial effects of such aesthetics are particularly observable from how narrative form deliberately degrades speech into talk in Meredith’s late novel, One of Our Conquerors. A deeply critical account of a prototypical English “conqueror” in the moment of the late nineteenth century, which chronicles the slow and embarrassing collapse of New Imperialist and capitalist Victor Radnor, the novel has also been singled out as exemplarily concerned with language and incoherence by both Meredith’s contemporaries and more recent scholars. For many contemporary commentators, the sense of inarticulacy in Meredith’s novels transferred over to the authorial body itself: in Margaret Oliphant’s critique of Meredithian dialogue, she supposes a connection to Meredith as one who “likes . . . to hear his own voice”; according to a reviewer of One of Our Conquerors in the Saturday Review, the novel showcases “the author’s usual faults of incoherence, prolixity . . . intensified.”2 As I will argue, the sense of critical disgust and, sometimes, even rage inspired by Meredithian prolixity and inarticulacy owes strongly to metabolized notions of speech and embodiment that Meredith sought—­deliberately, as I think Wilde also recognizes—­to disarticulate. Meredith remains fairly marginal among Victorian novelists. But I argue that a stylistic forcefulness in rendering life’s excessiveness in fiction, despite the limits of language and novelistic form, makes him an illuminating figure for understanding the fragility of articulacy in colonialist world-­ making. Gillian Beer’s defense of One of Our Conquerors likewise notes how the novel “is self-­consciously . . . about language and the limits of language,” evincing a “lost faith in language as communication” while yet “struggl[ing] to render the full complexity of experience into words.”3 Succinctly, Beer concludes of Meredithian style in this late novel: “He worried at language.”4 Meredith’s “notoriously  .  .  . clotted, tortuous prose” (as editor Margaret Harris has put it) also makes an important intervention within well-­k nown fin-­de-­siècle debates on realism and the art of fiction.5 I argue that if we situate an aesthetics of profuse inarticulacy in Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors alongside particular concerns about fiction as a distillation of real

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life (as publicly discussed by Henry James, Walter Besant, and Robert Louis Stevenson), the cracks of late nineteenth-­century fiction’s attempts to hold colonialist selves and colonialist worlds together begin to emerge. In an unexpected but important sense, One of Our Conquerors also makes for an interesting comparison with Treasure Island: while it is true that Meredith’s novel stays close to trivial incidents—­parties, concerts, drunk conversation, social visits, errands—­in the life of its deeply ironized “one,” the novel’s dive into the dramatic potential of triviality explicitly satirizes adventure romance’s “big action.” As I have argued, in Treasure Island, the aesthetics of self-­possessed speakers sutures together a masculinist imperial “conqueror,” even as the adventurous, wayward logics of parroting and eavesdropping begin to undermine such selving. One of Our Conquerors opposes the scope of adventure romance’s plot and action, but also enacts a pull in the same direction as Stevenson’s unraveling of speech’s proprietary logics. In this chapter, I characterize Meredith’s handling of speech as disarticulation in order to specifically emphasize a meticulous, and somewhat imaginatively microsociological, dismantling of speech into the abyss of talk.6 The narrator remarks in the first chapter: “if a man’s mind is to be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to an army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses for tardy, forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of matter you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to have made his acquaintance.”7 By ostentatiously claiming that the scale of a tale of conquest is commensurate with that of an intricate look at a single mind, Meredith both revokes the romance of conquest and proposes that there is enough dramatic action at the scale of everyday cogitation to fill a novel of more than five hundred pages.8 Although the small amount of extant criticism on One of Our Conquerors has understandably focused on the psychological concerns of the novel (Meredith’s dissection of the conqueror’s mind might certainly be characterized as psychological realism), I make the case here that Meredith is as focused on the mind “inside” as he is with bodies and environments “outside.” The novel disarticulates articulacy on different levels that are porous to one another, including character dialogue, characterological embodiment, character bodies in relation to the material environment, and

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the “speech” of inner cognition. That is, Meredith obsessively pursues what cannot be unstuck from linguistic utterance; he does not shy away, for instance, from trying, however awkwardly, to capture in print gesture, other elements of physical embodiment, “vocalic” features like tone and pacing, or environmental interruptions to mind and body, such as the weather.9 On all these levels, an ideal of controlled articulacy attached to speech gets disaggregated into a series of linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic processes that, more often than not, act in disconcert. Thus, the “lack of firmness in character-­drawing” that the Saturday Review critic laments is part of the novel’s intended aesthetic. This aesthetic, moreover, un-­selves the English conqueror into an embarrassingly contourless and provisional figure, dissolving his cognition and embodiment with the environment and other people at the scale of mundane scenes of everyday interaction.10 Such processes of un-­selving, as we will see, do not end with the border of this particular character, or even with the borders of the novel itself.11 The second epigraph to this chapter—­a description of Radnor’s servant Daniel Skepsey at the moment he is called on to report his impressions of France after traveling for an errand—­explicitly registers how a feeling of profusion exceeds the powers of narration itself: a “remarkable fulness, if only he could subordinate it to narrative” (165). At the moment he is specifically hailed to speak, a working-­class character glitches, but not because of incapability: rather, he experiences, arguably quite profoundly, speech’s “subordinating” surface, a hegemonic outer layer under which this “remarkable fulness” teems. In this moment, the narrative handles this character with a marked gentleness that also includes a caustic word about the art of fiction: “Things had happened, numbers of interesting minor things, but they all slipped as water through the fingers; and he being of the band of honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction, drearily he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was far from feeling” (165). In such acts of speech that stall on the threshold of tipping into talk, as mediated by one of the novel’s more sympathetic characters, the profundity behind what Harris names “clottedness” becomes especially palpable. This clottedness, I will ultimately suggest, is impelled by coloniality’s many subordinated experiences of humanity, clamoring in tones, sounds, and gestures that narrative, when articulate, tends to refuse. In Meredith’s

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critical and deeply scathing tale of a late nineteenth-­century English conqueror, the “common man” as Skepsey surfaces in this clamor. Yet, we might read such moments of profuse inarticulacy experienced differently by the working-­class body as capacitating ones in pointing out who and what else the self-­possessed colonial subject cannot—­and should not—­ finally digest. Empire, I am suggesting, is thus more foundational to this “condition of England” novel than might be readily acknowledged. One of Our Conquerors (initially titled, A Conqueror in Our Time) was written in between the two Anglo-­Boer Wars and at the height of the “scramble for Africa,” during ongoing imperial rivalries between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, and with the recent defeat of Charles Parnell and William Gladstone’s First Home Rule Bill: all this is important to why Radnor is an inarticulate figure about to burst his seams. Though the scenes of One of Our Conquerors are trivial, we are meant, evidently, to connect these incidents to larger relations of history, ideology, class, and gender.12 The novel may not be asking us to connect what Radnor cannot hold to a broader commons that might include nonwhite, colonized people—­whom English conquerors do not typically engage as passers-­by on London Bridge (a clash with a working-­class character after Radnor falls down on London Bridge is the novel’s important opening exchange, which I will engage in detail later). But Meredith’s disarticulation of Radnor’s self-­possession and brief glances into the profundity of what lies on the other side of inarticulacy’s embarrassment, through characters like Skepsey, rend open a heterotopic space where anticolonial critical praxis might intervene.13 Anticolonial selves are “there” in the narrative “surround,” a term I borrow from Fred Moten, on which I will further elaborate later in this chapter. It may be of use, additionally, to point out that the narrative makes explicit that Radnor has made his money from racial capitalism: he speculates in violent and extractive “philanthropic” projects in South Africa, India, and South America. But I am arguing that such direct textual references are somewhat beside the point, in that Meredith’s relentless focus on bodies and environments on the edge of overflow already points to the untenability of self-­possessed conquerors—­and, by extension, the existence of other modes of communication that are already being conducted, sub rosa, within and through the colonizer’s body. “In his time” it is the colonizer,

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Meredith incidentally demonstrates, for whom profusion will be the most discomfiting, because it is he who is most singularly wedded to the aesthetic fiction of his speech. The Art of Fiction and the Inarticulacy of Real Life

My sense of Meredith as running after what cannot be captured in language or novelistic form for the sake of inarticulate aesthetic effects understands the novelist as occupying a somewhat peculiar position in relation to late nineteenth-­century “art of fiction” debates. Wilde’s praise of Meredith in “The Decay of Lying” is based on his estimation that he “is not a realist,” and rather, “by choice he has made himself a romanticist.”14 But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Meredith embarks on a project of a deliberately awkward and undistilled realism that becomes “romance” because of the perverse boldness (at least in Wilde’s view) of its aesthetic vision. His is “a garden,” Wilde writes evocatively, surrounded by “a hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses.”15 In situating Meredith’s profuse inarticulacy within remarks made by Besant, Stevenson, and Henry James that conceptualize fiction as the articulation of real life, my aim here is to indicate the ways in which Meredith’s style both departs from and remains contiguous with contemporary discussions staked in fiction’s connections to colonialist worlding. Drawing especially from Elaine Freedgood’s recent account of how critical valuations of realism’s narrative unity have constituted a form of “aesthetic racism,” I argue that a territorializing impulse takes shape in the late nineteenth-­century debates on fiction in relation to real life, and that this impulse is discursively mediated by notions of articulation and speech.16 In tracking this discursive field, I am interested specifically in how speech in relation to talk functions synecdochically to account for what the novel is in relation to real life. The logic of part for whole develops roughly along these lines: speech as the idealized distillation of talk signifies the novel as an idealized distillation of real life. As Stevenson puts it, for instance (though, as we have seen in chapter 1, he is a defender of life over fiction): “life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.”17

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Walter Besant, in his Royal Institution lecture of 1884 that provoked James’s more widely known “Art of Fiction” essay in Longman’s, also frames fiction as a paring down of life’s messy edges. While delineating one of the specific uses of the novel, Besant tellingly asserts that a novel teaches readers how “to talk, and enriches their speech with epigrams, anecdotes, and illustration.”18 In another essay, “Of the Writing of Novels” (1888), published in Atalanta, a British monthly that promoted literary careers for middle-­class women, Besant suggests that amateur writers practice writing dialogue by first transcribing drawing-­room or dinner-­table conversation and then distilling it to become more “brilliant and incisive.”19 He mandates that in fiction, “talk must be crisp, it must never drag, and above all it must not be too long.”20 I regard these comments specifically about articulated speech as part of Besant’s broader understanding of fiction as not only a distillation of what Stevenson calls life’s “brute energy,” but also something of an improvement or remediation. In other words, for Besant, that fiction could instruct readers on better articulation in speech stands for the whole of the relation of fiction’s remediation of real life. Especially given his reputation as a more “middle-­brow” writer who also founded the professional organization known as the Incorporated Society of Authors (in 1884, the same year as his lecture), Besant’s engagement with advice on writing fiction has strong resonances with the art of conversation manuals I discussed in the introduction. Besant’s interest in articulated speech, too, seems grounded in a broader project of naturalizing a particular aesthetic of self-­possession, especially when we might detect, as in this rather overstated sentiment, a sense of embarrassment about too-­embodied speech: “nothing is more inartistic than to be constantly calling attention in a dialogue to a gesture or a look, to laughter or to tears.”21 Such a sentiment arguably runs along the same axis as J. P. Mahaffy’s delineation of the physical attributes of unnatural speakers. Though without the apparent racializing physiognomies that Mahaffy explicitly includes in his manual, there is a strong sense in Besant of disowning embodiment that rhymes with Mahaffy’s more obviously colonialist logics of selving proper, proprietary speakers. For Besant, as well, the arts of civility—­whether fiction or conversation—­had a connection to his political commitments to what he called a “United Federation of the English-­Speaking States,” an Anglo-­

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Saxonist greater imperial polity that he publicly advocated for in his other writings.22 Stevenson’s apparent appreciation for talk’s unruly energies—­and, as I argued in chapter 1, its potentiating poetics of adventure—­offers a counterpoint to Besant’s view that art ameliorates excess by distillation. At the same time, I point out that Besant and Stevenson are aligned in at least two important ways: first, and more obviously, on the pronouncement of real life’s inarticulacy; and second, in constructions of masculinist subjectivity premised on colonialist aesthetics. For Besant, the “daily life of the world” is “monotonous,” and thus requires a novelist to “select, suppress, and . . . arrange it”: here, Besant gives us a familiar view of colonialist articulation as territorializing and taxonomizing.23 For Stevenson, by contrast, daily life “is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant,” and as a result, art, which is “in comparison . . . neat, finite, self-­contained, rational, flowing and emasculate,” performs a neutering function.”24 Even adventure romance brings about a geometric “simplification of some side or point of life,” at best a shadow of the experiential sublimities of real life.25 As with Stevenson’s fond regard for talk’s heat, staying for a while in the blood (as opposed to literature’s shadowy coolness), Stevenson defends life on the grounds of its appeal to embodied sensations that thrill the adventurous subject: “Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind—­the seat of wonder, to the touch—­so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly—­so imperious when starved.”26 Stevenson’s romance of real life’s “thunderous inarticulacy” and “brute energy” idealizes an adventure poetics, as I have argued, that fails to move beyond the imperial imagination even as it tries, in other ways, to embrace nonproprietary logics of speech and selfhood. In the midst of these positions, I locate Meredith’s more sidelined work as different in its embrace of inarticulacy in fiction, which nonetheless takes from Besant the sense of real life’s specifically embarrassing profusion, and from Stevenson, the sense of striving to capture this profusion in literature. Meanwhile, James’s “Art of Fiction” essay, to which I now turn, attempts a different negotiation of the same problematics of articulation and excess, but in some important ways, a Jamesian view of the relation between fic-

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tion and real life seems more proximate to the workings of Meredithian aesthetics. First, following Freedgood and also others, such as David Kurnick and Dora Zhang, I point out that critical valuations of James have often mistaken the author’s remarks on unity to indicate diegetic closure against real life. Rather, as each of these scholars separately indicates, the kind of unity that James was looking for was Aristotelian and dramatic; thus, when James asserts that art actually had no need to “compete with life,” he did not mean to be antimimetic, but rather simply disagreed with the methods of capturing real life. As Zhang argues, James and other modernist novelists were still committed, through different modes of description, to mimesis, though of a more “perceptual and affective” quality than a visually empiricist one associated with the realist novel.27 I add here that in rejecting the “internecine distinctness” that Besant posits between parts of the novel like “description and dialogue, incident and description,” James disavows a certain kind of articulation in fiction, but not articulation itself. James is still concerned with capturing “the conditions of life in general,” but he takes issue with Besant’s positivist selectivity. Rather, James is attuned to another space of real, experiential essence, to which Zhang has brought important precision through her readings, specifically, of Jamesian social atmospheres: environments that are “information rich” and profuse, yet difficult to capture in language.28 Linking James’s interest in the plenitude of “ ‘microscopic-­molecular’ levels of sociality, the innumerable ‘minor forms of relation and of kinds of interaction among men,’ ” to the sociological imagination of Georg Simmel, Zhang shows us in detail how James finds ways to contain this plenitude in articulated form.29 Thus, we might characterize James’s art of fiction as not a closing-­off of real life so much as a workaround to the tension between excess and articulation with which the others are concerned: the problem of life’s inarticulacy remains “unresolved.” If we turn specifically to what James says about speech, we find that his critique of Besant’s “literal opposition of description and dialogue” ostensibly admits that one cannot dispense with embodiment and scenes of utterance, but he does not wish to bring the description of these bodies and scenes into view—­at least not in the novel. As Kurnick has illuminated in his reading of two novels from the 1890s published in the wake of his

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attempts to write for the stage, the problem of fiction that James seemed especially concerned with in this period was its “failure to be theater, its distance from embodiment and the social event of performance.”30 Kurnick’s readings of The Other House and The Awkward Age focus on how both novels are “designed . . . to feel wrong—­as if they were written in some impossible genre, and with the purpose of creating for the reader a sense of cognitive discomfort and sensory blockage.”31 In particular, Kurnick focuses on how both novels are profusely dialogic while providing very few details about character bodies or settings, while also seeming to locate theatrical staging in an undisclosed or inaccessible elsewhere. This view of James in the 1890s brings him closer to Meredith, in the sense that both are attuned to the perceived limitations of fiction in face of capturing all of the physicalized “data” that come with the stage, and even more so with real life. Meredith, too, aims to convey discomfort to the reader, though his is a discomfort of dilated, rather than parsimonious, description of physical bodies and settings as well as interiority, and of dialogue, and finally the co-­constitutive relations of all these things. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, James is no fan of Meredith’s for the very reason of his perception of Meredith’s excessiveness in his novels. Commenting on Meredith’s novel Lord Ormont (1894), for instance, James expresses “critical rage” and “artistic fury” at the “quantity of extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and alembifications.”32 Here, once again, I note that a particular intolerance for uncontained form in fiction gets expressed in terms of inarticulate speech. We are left with Meredith carrying forth with a nonthunderous, profuse inarticulacy, seemingly giving his readers a “bad” form of plenitude that often, as we have seen, inspired strong negative responses. In now turning to the novel’s lengthy and dilated first chapter, which narrates the conqueror’s slipping and falling on London Bridge, I demonstrate how narrative aesthetics in One of Our Conquerors provokes a sense of intolerance as part of a satirical articulation that also tries to implicate its reader in such feeling. As Meredith himself claims of this particular novel, he has on offer “a strong dose of most indigestible material.”33 Profuse inarticulacy, as we will see, is enacted to degrade the articulate and articulated self-­possessed subject into a common humanity that, though limited to England’s white

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subjects in Meredith’s novel, yet sanctions, in its logic, a reading that could disarticulate the colonialist borders of the novel itself. Meredith’s Transcriptive Disarticulations

One of Our Conquerors begins—­like other novels of Meredith’s, including The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885), also late novels but better known—­w ith an initial chapter and/or preface that offers something of an introductory roadmap of what is to follow, accompanied by authorial statements on style and genre. The first chapter disarticulates Victor Radnor’s wishes for a plot that would unfold grand ambitions—­for gaining wealth, for achieving parliamentary office, for becoming a symbol of English national strength—­through a painstakingly paced narrative of how “our conqueror” can barely manage a vexing interaction with a passerby on the street. A slip and fall on London Bridge during a gusty day lays him low, and an insult from a member of the working class causes Radnor to become inarticulate in his speech and in his stream of thought: he loses an “Idea” that he cannot recover for the rest of the novel, though he returns often to suggest that this “Idea” would enable him to become, finally, the strong and beloved leader of his nation. Our hero’s great expectations are quickly dissolved before they have even had a chance to form, and as he falls, midway across the bridge, he is quickly undone by a profusion of micro-­clashes and relations between inner and outer things and actions: minds, wind, bodies, banana peels, smudged waistcoats, facial expressions, words. Before turning to the details of this important first chapter, I take a brief detour to mention the preface-­like opening chapter to Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885), which offers some direct statements on Meredith’s positioning within the art of fiction debates, and the novelist’s particular interest in what might be described as a transcriptive imagination. Understanding the transcriptive mode of Meredith’s approach to “real life” will be important for my reading of One of Our Conquerors, which will try, among other aims, to disentangle Meredith from what I perceive to be an over-­focus on psychology and mental operations as the primary locus of his profuse dissections of character.34 In the first chapter of Diana of the Crossways—­a novel specifically based on diarist accounts of the real-­l ife scandal

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of Caroline Norton, granddaughter of Richard Sheridan—­Meredith sets out a developmental trajectory for the novel, one that will one day transcend the “silly cancelling contest” of “rose-­pink and dirty drab” (that is, the poles of sentimentalism and naturalism).35 At that point, Meredith contends that “we can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive,” when “Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so pretty as rose-­pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight.”36 A few lines later, he contends that the “modern transcript, read[s] the inner as well as exhibiting the outer.”37 In Diana of the Crossways, Meredith’s primary subject is a sympathetic one: a heroine who manages to transcend, at least to a degree, society’s fraying and narrow-­m inded gossip. In this novel, at least, the art of fiction’s aspiration toward “wholesome, bearable, fructifying” selves seems to rely in no small part on the life that would be honestly transcribed. The central aim of One of Our Conquerors, by contrast, is to show the hero to be no hero: here, the transcription, striving just as much toward honesty, records deeply undelightful characters, who, as I have said, have seemed unbearably inarticulate to generations of the novel’s critics. I would like to take this suggestion of transcribing inner and outer conditions in Diana of the Crossways, however, to demonstrate how Meredith motivates a sense of exhaustive recording in One of Our Conquerors that diffuses its focus across linguistic, paralinguistic, nonlinguistic, and environmental, as well as psychological and cognitive, features to capture the reality of how we are, all of us and especially those who would imagine themselves conquerors, disarticulated and un-­selved at the scale of everyday social interactions. In purporting to transcribe, it might be said that there is a strong sense of the anthropological, as well as sociological, in Meredithian aesthetics. We could, for instance, register in how Meredith handles realism something akin to what linguistic anthropologists Susan Gal and Judith Irvine describe as the scaling-­up from seemingly mundane, everyday scenes to the wider beliefs and organization of human societies: Social scenes are the crucibles in which ideas (knowledge, conjectures, guesses) are formulated as communication and communicative forms are

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taken as tokens of knowledge. Social encounters—­face-­to-­face or in some other medium, even with oneself, and in all their linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects—­a re the means by which we as participants and as observers obtain access to communicative forms and to the wider organizations of knowledge in which some forms exist.38

As I will suggest, we might read the first chapter of One of Our Conquerors as a pursuit of what micro-­relations contribute to one very brief social encounter, culminating in a bit of dialogue in which Radnor receives an insult and is knocked off his game, so to speak. This avowed interest in disarticulating—­at the scale of “the infinitely little”—­an everyday social interaction shows itself as having the grander ambition of disarticulating the “wider organizations of knowledge” that have worlded what Meredith took to be England’s decline in the late nineteenth century. Meredith’s transcriptive disarticulations also resonate with a Goffman-­ esque quality of trying to correct against “the sins of noncontextuality . . . the assumption that bits of conversation can be analyzed in their own right in some independence of what was occurring at the time and place.” From the “microanalyst’s” known penchant for moments of discursive color in describing his own work, we could also identify a distinct sense of comedic unwieldiness that attaches, too, to how the profuse inarticulacy of “real life” migrates into Meredith’s narrative aesthetics. Goffman writes evocatively, for instance, of how his work may be characterized as “pinning with our ten thumbs what ought to be secured with a needle.”39 This comedic sense of shared inarticulacy, and specifically comedy’s role in the laying low of our conqueror and ourselves that Meredith’s novel seeks to achieve, enacts a reaching beyond the dressing down of satire into a more democratic territory based in commonness.40 Incidentally, one example Goffman gives in delineating how any linguistic exchange is necessarily constituted through endless contingencies of “environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another’s response presence,” is an accidental tripping.41 As he clarifies, “when someone trips over another, offers an apology, and has that apology graciously accepted, the acceptance is not simply a reply to the apology; it is also a response to an apologized-­for delict . . . observe that the initial

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delict, although clearly a non linguistic act, is as fully a part of the interchange as the words that follow the trouble in attempting to deal with it.”42 In other words, a noncommunicative motion of the body must become—­by the rules of social ritual—­meaningfully a part of the so-­called interaction order. Meredith similarly unfolds the accidental tripping of Radnor crossing London Bridge as a catalyzing event that cannot be unstuck from the social interaction to come, and which therefore needs to be rendered in his transcriptive narrative: He was unhurt, quite sound, merely astonished, he remarked, in reply to the inquiries of the first kind helper at his elbow; and it appeared an acceptable statement of his condition. He laughed, shook his coat-­tails, smoothed the back of his head rather thoughtfully, thankfully received his runaway hat, nodded bright beams right and left, and making light of the muddy stigmas imprinted by the pavement, he scattered another shower of nods and smiles around, to signify, that as his good friends would wish, he thoroughly felt his legs and could walk unaided. (1)

The speech tag “he remarked” might signal that “unhurt, quite sound, merely astonished” are bits of Radnor’s speech, though without the conventional quotation marks and the otherwise extensive focus of this passage on the expressive movements of his body, it could also be a translation of his embodied gestures into words. Arguably, the passage indicates that Radnor’s many small, performative uses of his body to communicate his recovery and good humor are indistinguishable from his speech, and indeed from his thoughts as well. The way in which Radnor’s embodied communications and expressions are focalized here also motivates something like the free indirect discourse of body language, which rather comedically ironizes this conqueror’s far too strenuous efforts to recover his self-­possession: we can sense already that Radnor is about to fall apart. After this uncomfortably dissected scene of his body language, Radnor realizes that the help he had received from a passerby has led to the dirtying of his signature white waistcoat, and his expressions of displeasure at this discovery lead to the insult for his “ ‘dam punctilio’ ” by a working-­class character (3). The remainder of the chapter traces the lingering impact of this interaction begun with an accident, and how the word “punctilio” cows Radnor into inarticulacy and a sense of cognitive disorder that he arguably

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never recovers from in the remaining five hundred pages of the novel (“it banged the door and rolled drum-­notes; it deafened reason” [4]). That the insult also comes out semi-­consciously as a part of Radnor’s own speech in another, subsequent conversation, conducted when he is not quite sober (not himself at all, as John Locke might have it), also has the effect of bringing attention, once again, to Goffman’s “obvious but insufficiently appreciated fact that words we speak are often not our own.”43 The narrative takes us through the precise details of how the word “punctilio” remains sharp and cutting within Radnor’s mind and body, and how attempts at “recovery” require difficult-­to-­calibrate interchanges between his inner speech and impressions available to be taken in from his environment: He gained [recovery] rather from the imperious demand of an animated and thirsty frame for novel impressions. Commonly he was too hot with his business, and airy fancies above it, when crossing the bridge, to reflect in freshness of its wonders; though a phrase could spring him alive to them; a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous, condemned to admire in despair of outstripping, like Satan worsted; or when a Premier’s fine inflation magnified the scene at City banquets—­exciting while audible, if a waggery in memory; or when England’s cherished Bard, the Leading Article, blew bellows, and wind primed the lieges. (6–­7)

The passage suggests the conqueror typically feels secure in an abstracted state of self-­possession, “too hot with his business, and airy fancies above it,” but phrases can “spring him” into a state of porousness that desires to take in London’s scenes. It is, quite obviously here, an imperialist’s (imperious) appetite for conjuring the foreigner’s jealousy, the Premier’s boasts, or the journalist’s blather for his own edification. Such fragments of speech stand ready to feed his self-­possession; through them, he consolidates the definite lines of his humanity as the consummate Englishman at the center of London and of the world. The conqueror once again recovers his composure, having digested—­at least for the time being—­these other bits of speech alongside “punctilio.” But whereas these phrases, either conjured from within or heard from without, are easily incorporated as part of Radnor’s regular diet of speech, the cut of “punctilio” yet seems to have opened him up to his environment

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(“he was lightly kindled” [7]). He takes in London scenes through metabolizing them with his usual phrases, but by the chapter’s close, we find Radnor turning over the menacing figure of the Jew overtaking England as “our despot-­k ing of Commerce,” incorporating his business partner Mr. Inchling’s particular “dread of Jews,” “dreaded Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks: latterly Germans hardly less” (10). As the scene closes on Radnor, the conqueror has been laid low not only by his fall, but by the fall’s plunging him into losing his words while not being able to extirpate another’s from his mind. Eventually, he cascades into losing his thoughts as someone else’s speech about foreigners forms a metonymic flank that cuts off his cognitive circuitry of self-­possessed inner speech. Our English conqueror is, already, a mess of internal and external interchanges of material, cognitive processes, environmental contingency, and bodily constitution—­h is own, and those of others. The rendering of these conditions by means of a transcriptive aesthetic disarticulates the narrative itself, and evidently the second chapter anticipates some resistance from readers in offering an apology for the first. Just as Radnor unsuccessfully tries to digest the London landscape into imperial symbolics under his control, Meredith’s novel is trying to narrativize too much. As Matthew Sussman has complementarily argued, Radnor’s cogitations in the first chapter are “the movements of a mind in dialogue with itself and others,” noting further that a shift to first-­person plural close to the end of the chapter (“we cannot relinquish an idea that was ours; we are vowed to the pursuit of it”) indicates an extension that suggests conversation’s collective ownership.44 I will argue in the next section that the narrative’s self-­d isarticulation, alongside instances in which profuse inarticulacy is mediated through the novel’s more sympathetic characters, offers us some glimpses into a common world of talk, where profuse inarticulacy emerges as something different—­and with it, different affective associations that depart from the awkward, the embarrassing, the satirical. An “Everlasting Flood of Weak, Washy Talk”

In One of Our Conquerors, bodies overflow and cannot hold speech, but the narrative treatment of overflow differs depending on the particular characters that happen to be mediating.45 I show here that turning to different

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instantiations of profuse inarticulacy—­particularly in working-­class characters and women in the novel—­permits easier modulations into a form of talk that breaches the novel’s own limitations within a colonialist framework. The modulations I attempt are informed, again, by a faith in the project of aesthetic alterability that Wynter sees as central to the project of criticism: first disarticulating our own viscerally felt, cognitive patterns, and then trying to rethink this disarticulated material into anticolonial configurations. Here, I read these moments of differently mediated profusion in the novel as already logically reaching beyond disarticulation. In the next and final section, I will draw from perspectives on common subjectivity from Fred Moten and José Esteban Muñoz to bring attention to what the novel fails to disarticulate in its own colonialist “digesting.” I see Moten’s and Muñoz’s conceptual framings—­f rom the “surround” and “undercommons” to the “brown commons”—­as extending Glissant’s project into our present. I will provide a fuller account of these more recent approaches to questions of subjectivity and aesthetics later, but I offer here a telegraphic account of how my arguments will unfold. Both Moten and Muñoz foreground the indeterminacy and opacity of somatic and sonic experience, in ways that are especially apt in relation to Meredith’s methods of laying low an English hero. That is, as I have been arguing, against the grain of many of his own contemporaries, the novelist does not shy away from disarticulating the conquering, imperial body into an entropic and mundane site of indeterminate relations. As we will see, both Moten and Muñoz also helpfully connect features of somatic and sonic experience—­variously in scenes of performance and orality—­to different configurations of commons that evade hermeneutic problems associated with dialectical models, in which, as I have noted, some postcolonial accounts of hybridity and ambivalence have also been entangled. Moten proposes an “undercommons” that surrounds or is fugitive, rather than occurring in between, while Muñoz presents a “brown commons” premised on attunement to touching rather than fusing or capturing.46 These models, anticolonial in their orientation, do not seem entirely at odds with the logic of Meredith’s own glimpses into common life, as limited as they are to a white English imaginary. Radnor’s demise—­a descent, finally, into madness—­over the course of the novel is plotted with a transcriptive dilation similar to that narrating his

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fall on the bridge. The plot (which I will summarize quickly here, since the novel may be unfamiliar to many readers) may seem more dramatic than as rendered, given Meredith’s minute focus on everyday social interactions to narrate Radnor’s undoing. His demise might be aptly captured by a familiar locution: death by a thousand cuts. We follow, nonetheless, a Melmotte-­ian arc as Radnor tries to wait out the death of his wife, the aging Mrs. Burman, whom he had married for money, so that he can marry his younger mistress, Nataly, a former attendant to Mrs. Burman. Meanwhile, Radnor has jealously guarded the secret illegitimacy of his relations with Nataly, with whom he has a daughter, Nesta, laying upon Nataly a difficult burden of continuing to circulate within “Society” to keep up appearances. Radnor’s plan is to seek a financially sound marriage for Nesta, which would provide a foundation for his successful incorporation into the elite center of English culture and society; then, upon Mrs. Burman’s death, he might plot his way into becoming a parliamentary leader of the civilized world. Things go awry, and Nataly dies minutes before Mrs. Burman; the novel ends with our conqueror contained within a sanatorium, at best a “ ‘likeness to himself,’ ” speaking bits and pieces of his old life, and dying shortly thereafter (511). This final image of Radnor is something of a mockery of a great “Undelivered Speech” he was supposed to have given, only to have had to leave the stage that night, after having Nataly’s death whispered to him.47 I turn again to Skepsey, whom, as I have argued above, the narrative treats with a certain gentleness. In contrast to Radnor, there is a sense of this character as consenting to a fluid form of mediation by speech—­or at least, a giving over of himself to what I describe as a noncannibalistic relation to speech, where bits and pieces of language that do not belong to him are allowed to move quickly within and through him. Below, “Skepsey in motion” (the title of the chapter in which this passage occurs) mediates a cacophonic current of others—­similar to what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, but, as I will indicate, with some important distinctions: He heard no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many: on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of mind at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him. His

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master’s business and friends, his country’s welfare and advancement, these, with records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad accordance by his fervour of velocity. (103)

Skepsey’s swift mediations here mirror his “themes,” which are variously gathered under his evangelical fervor for boxing and sports—­the means, he believes, for improving English masculinity so that the nation might mount a successful challenge against other, competing European imperial powers. Though the narrative treats Skepsey’s fervent patriotism with a comedic and miniaturizing touch (“active little machine”), it is a light one, such that Meredith clearly grants the working man a characterological giftedness in his “sensitivity to the commonality of life,” as Judith Wilt has argued in her discussion of the novel.48 As Anna Maria Jones has likewise pointed out about Meredithian comedy, his is not a comedic mode that works through “ ‘detachment and control,’ but [is] rather about acknowledging one’s complicity in the ridiculous, the fallible, and the correctable.”49 Wilt explains that Meredith is committed to an immersive inhabitation of “the center of the world,” which obtains from an identification with the “common man.” The immersive center, Wilt argues, resists both Radnor’s egoistic optimism and the journalist Colney Durance’s satiric and aloof pessimism (Wilt sees Durance as something of a foil for Radnor). Durance is notable among the novel’s many characters, serving as a stand-­in for a detached omniscience that Meredith’s narrator ultimately refuses, though is also complicit within. In One of Our Conquerors, Durance’s form of satirical journalism fails to overcome its own conquering ethos, while in The Inheritors, as we will see, journalism is the central means by which a conquering posthuman race of Fourth Dimensionists takes over the world. Meanwhile, of the various characters of the story, Wilt singles out Skepsey as one with the most “common sense” in comparison with others, though in his case, it seems to draw from a certain naïveté, evinced, for instance, by how he does not always understand what Durance is saying.50 I echo Wilt’s insights here, and further argue that Skepsey’s capacities for commonness also owe to the affordances of having a nonproprietary relation to the world. Skepsey could not possibly own property, and may be, in effect, closer to being owned—­

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though I want to be careful here in distinguishing the position of a white English servant who is eventually allowed admission into the normative plot of marrying a woman with whom he will then patriotically serve the nation—­denied, of course, to Radnor—­from that of an actually enslaved person. Moreover, he negotiates, in certain moments, a different way of being in the world that resists the centripetal forces of both egoistic conqueror and aloof satirist. Thus, there is a way in which Skepsey transforms or at least reframes, from within, Radnor and Durance (and perhaps Meredith himself, as an extension of Durance). The “indigestibility” of Meredith’s narrative takes the form of profuse inarticulacy, but Skepsey’s velocity and indeterminacy as a subject—­more a machine powered by external inputs recalled at random than a self-­ determining actor—­render digestion somewhat moot. The favored object of critique for many of Meredith’s novels is egoism, and as Anne Anlin Cheng has remarked, albeit in a psychoanalytic context, “our ontological survival depends on the cannibalism of the other, that such colonization forms the basis of our profound narcissism, which in turn enables the consolidation of our identities and subjectivities.”51 Skepsey does not operate through colonizing forms of digesting, ordering, orchestrating, or articulating others for the purpose of consolidating them under his singular identity. He has his “themes,” but they are “chopped and tossed and mixed in salad” (further rendered as a passive construction with Meredith’s “all being”) through the force of his “velocity” and not by some central, organizing consciousness. While I read Skepsey as a heteroglossic force in the Bakhtinian sense of a centrifugal force that works against the centripetal forces of language centralization, I also think that his embodied mediations of speech evade Bakhtinian novelistic form, which the theorist characterizes as “orchestrating” or “absorb[ing] and digest[ing]” heteroglossia.52 This account of Skepsey, in contrast to the earlier passage in which he is hailed to speak of impressions of France, offers a glimpse into a different way of living beyond profuse inarticulacy: there’s no profusion or inarticulacy here, because, unrestrained, he is not trying to digest others into the hold of his identity. He is, rather, occupying a space of subjective “undecidability and contamination,” giving up the singular, proprietary self and making way for “objecthood,” “invasion,” and “contagion,” different terms that Cheng proliferates in moving toward an anticolonial method that recognizes ra-

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cialized dynamics bequeathed to us by coloniality, while refusing to accept curative logics that remain tied to getting a hold on our selves.53 Elsewhere, the imperative to digest, to cannibalize, to hold evidently causes great suffering for characters like Nataly, who have the least access to autonomy while also remaining at the center of Radnor’s world. Like Radnor and Skepsey, Nataly buckles from conditions of profuse inarticulacy created by the injunction to be self-­possessed: for Nataly, more so than for Skepsey—­since she is repeatedly forced to entertain others at Lakelands, the property that Radnor buys in the country to remove his family further from Mrs. Burman in London—­there is no break from this injunction. She is trapped playing a part in a drama staged by others. A passage where Nataly speaks with Victor about her predicament near the novel’s end offers a good example of how Meredith sometimes depicts this profuse inarticulacy in a nonsatirical manner that makes a clear bid for reader sympathy. Here, the felt discomfort of inarticulacy as a condition forced upon her—­not only that she is not allowed to speak (the secret of their marriage’s illegitimacy), but also that she must manage the gossip circulating around her—­a lso emerges with embodied details (tears, especially) that Besant would think best held back: Her breast heaved, and the wave burst: but her restraining of tears froze her speech. “Victor! Our Nesta! Mr. Sowerby is unable to explain. And how the Miss Duvidneys! . . . At that Brighton!”—­The voice he heard was not his darling’s deep rich note, it had dropped to toneless hoarseness: “She has been permitted to make acquaintance—­she has been seen riding with—­ she has called upon—­Oh! It is one of those abandoned women. In her house! Our girl! Our Nesta! She was insulted by a man in the woman’s house. She is talked of over Brighton. The mother!—­t he daughter! And grant me this—­that never was girl more carefully  .  .  . never till she was taken from me. Oh! do not forget. You will defend me? You will say, that her mother did with all her soul strive . . . it is not a rumour. Mr. Sowerby has had it confirmed.” A sob caught her voice. (445)

It’s hard to parse what Nataly is saying, as she jumps from one incomplete thought to another interrupting one. Even with the immediate context of what is happening in the novel—­Nesta getting talked about because she

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has remained a loyal friend to Judith Marsett, the known mistress of an army captain—­Nataly’s heavily punctuated speech, “chopped and tossed and mixed” like Skepsey’s thoughts (and, characteristic of Meredithian dialogue, interrupted by dots and dashes), indubitably strains reader attention. But whereas the view of Skepsey is focalized by the narrator, here the scene of Nataly’s speech is given through the gaze of Radnor as he notes “his darling’s deep rich note . . . dropped to toneless hoarseness.” Nataly is thus offered up to readers profusely mediated by others: both in how her speech is cut up by other people’s words—­the worst of it, as she imagines, “The mother!—­the daughter!”—­and in how we share the conqueror’s gaze. Without the same guiding narratorial treatment of character that is especially prominent in this late novel of Meredith’s (often described as Meredith’s didacticism), I read Nataly here as something of a dare against those who might draw back from her apparent excess, wanting to contain her, as Victor does. If we share in his feeling, we become even more complicit in her destruction than we are already forced to be, from how the narrative places readers in an immersively voyeuristic position in relation to Nataly. Should a reader detect in themself uncharitable thoughts and impulses to contain this woman, then they become an adjunct to the system of patriarchal power that demands that all of us, regardless of our own positions in relation to such power, show self-­possession through being able to hold what the world may say about us, with imperious command. Meredith shows us that the embarrassment is our own—­not hers. Meanwhile, “the mother!—­the daughter!” migrates from the mouths of Society to Nataly to Victor (“ ‘The mother!—­the daughter!’ had swung a pendulum for some time during the night in him, too” [447]), and finally into the name of the chapter itself. This last bit of overflow of character speech outside the narrative into a chapter title itself is a distinction reserved for Nataly in the novel—­as if to signal that this apparently weak, overflowing inarticulacy will finally flood over any dam that anyone might erect, including the author himself. It seems apt, here, to apply Oliphant’s particular charge against The Egoist—­that it is a novel made up of an “everlasting flood of weak, washy talk”—­to the potential overflow of Nataly’s tears (a few lines later, “the wrinkles of a shiver went over her, and the tone was of tears coming, but she locked them in” [446]) and of the speech of

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others that she does manage, if barely, to contain but which reduces her to inarticulacy. The novel, however, would seem to welcome the flood, both in how the narrative handles “Skepsey in motion” and in how the speech that Nataly mediates spills outward beyond the diegesis into the paradiegetic space of a chapter title. For critics like Oliphant, the inarticulacy reaches its worst extreme as an “everlasting flood of weak and washy talk,” but One of Our Conquerors’s treatment of Nataly prompts several pointed questions: how is a flood weak? Is not a current of speech that runs through different characters and jumps across diegetic levels more powerful than one “held” by a single character? Undigested Commons

These questions, for me, are a way into conceptualizing the possibilities that might “overflow” what we might now call the novel’s own “digested” elements. One of Our Conquerors disarticulates England’s place in the world, and is, in some ways, quite far reaching in its refusal to digest its many characters into an articulated, novelistic whole.54 While the frequent references to England as the “Island” gesture toward an outside that disarticulates the nation, One of Our Conquerors works toward closure against the colonial world “outside” in the manner in which it includes plenty of intermittent references to imperial exploitation that materially support the domestic scenes. This inclusionary, incorporative mode of reference is at best a form of acknowledgment that runs against Meredith’s own aesthetics: arguably, the novel is worse off for such inclusion. For instance, in a passage focalized through Nesta’s too-­generous—­because innocent—­v iew of him, Radnor is described as a “a beneficent speculator” who had made his money through “the Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America, his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor” (73). In this list-­like, flattening form (despite focalization’s mildly attenuating effects), the people suffering at the hands of New Imperialism’s extractive violence are digested as an incidental “outside” to the novel’s borders. To be clear, in pointing out how the novel digests empire while striving

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otherwise for an “indigestible” aesthetic I have been calling profuse inarticulacy, I am not saying that One of Our Conquerors should have handled these references otherwise. Rather, I am interested in where it might take us if we read with the grain of Meredith’s openings into common life and the disarticulation of conquerors, through to a refiguring of profuse inarticulacy into a more open and messy form of talk that a character like Skepsey, at times, models. With this in mind, I turn to a particular passage that delves into Radnor’s cognitive processes, from which we might begin to modulate Meredith’s detail into a commons that exceeds the novel’s colonialist foreclosures against nonwhite lives counting in the profusion that is overflowing articulacy’s hold.55 Here is an instance of Radnor trying to transform what is common into articulate speech so that he might possess it, that he might then become self-­possessed—­but, as expected, at the edge of failing to do so: Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London citizen of good estate has reproached his country’s poets for not pouring out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of notions begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would pay to have them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in his bulk; they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them scored on the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. (7–­8)

This passage, also drawn from his musings shortly after his fall, shows Radnor seeking to put himself back together through motivating the “form and fire” of eloquence to shape the “multitudinous larvae of notions” that originate, explicitly, from the outside “scene” and not from him. Yet, “he feels them big; he thinks them human in his bulk,” this moment indexing—­if in a very attenuated way—­something of the commons moving through and beyond him. If the satirical force of such choice phrases as “multitudinous larvae of notions” and “Londinensian,” or the confused contradiction of “pouring out, succinctly” comedically cuts Radnor down, their profusion is arguably capable of resounding much more than what Radnor’s inarticulacy tries to hold. What is an awkward neologism like “Londinensian” struggling to contain? Are there limits to what it is trying to contain, given this particular moment of Britain’s intensified competition with other imperial powers?

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Why stop at the borders of London if other moments of the novel “know” that Londonensian-­ness is built on the backs of Africans working in underground diamond mines and gold mines, on closed compounds? Or at the expense of Indian access to agricultural wealth during the British Raj’s turn to its empire for an alternative source for cotton? Or to the long-­lasting detriment of South American economies, political systems, and people in the wake of Britain’s competition with other European powers to build railways to transport raw materials and minerals to imperial centers? I turn now to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s collaborative theorization of the “undercommons,” in which they conceptualize the “commons” of a Black radical tradition as located not in the gaps of rupture, but in the “surround,” and in “fugitivity,” to find a critical method that may be adequate to the task of undoing the ways in which One of Our Conquerors digests nonwhite sufferers under British imperialism. In conceptualizing an “undercommons,” Moten and Harney are writing against normalized political procedures through to a commons that such politics has tried to ignore: “even when the election that was won turns out to have been lost, and the bomb detonates and/or fails to detonate, the common perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere, here, around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts. Meanwhile, politics soldiers on, claiming to defend what it has not enclosed, enclosing what it cannot defend but only endanger.”56 I find the hedging in “the common perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere” compelling for its rigorous reaching for a sense of emplacement that is not ultimately beholden, in some manner or other, to the entwined territorial logics of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. The “elsewhere” is “here, around, on the ground” in a capaciously contradictory conception of space that seeks to leave behind the disarticulated materials of the colonial relation. The somatic and sonic aspects of the “surround” crystallize in Moten’s Black and Blur (2017), the first of a trilogy of essays gathered under Glissant’s phrase, “consent not to be a single being,” in an insistence on the “not in between” as anticolonial praxis. “Not in between” is the title of the first essay in Black and Blur, which takes as its central subject German anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s interviews with the Congolese artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. Moten opens with a “detour” into reading C. L. R. James, in Black Jacobins (1983), on Haitian revolutionaries Toussaint Louverture and Jean-­Jacques Dessalines. I am going to follow the logic of a detour now, as

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well, to delve into this moment of Moten reading James, before returning to suggest it may not be a “stretch” to read Meredith through Moten. Contextually, the reading of James on Louverture and Dessalines helps frame Moten’s examination of how Tshibumba makes aesthetic disruptions of the ethnographer’s politics to articulate a “postcolonial future.” He achieves these cuts to the ethnographic text through strategies of material and sonic excess that refigure not just colonial but also neocolonial aesthetics (for instance, the “woke” ethnographer who “takes pains to recover the exigency and surplus of oral performance”).57 In the way James delineates a key contrast between Louverture and his former lieutenant, Moten detects a crucial push away from dialectical form’s in-­betweenness (oscillation between two poles) toward something outside, in excess of the dialectic—­what Moten names an “exterior lyricism,” an “energy” with “phonographic weight.”58 Moten’s reading of the moment James narrates, when Dessalines jumps into the trenches at the battle of Crête-­à-­Pierrot and talks to his troops before they miraculously defeat the French, emphasizes James channeling the radical energy that also courses through Dessalines in the trenches. As I think should be evident in the passage quoted here, Moten channels James channeling Dessalines, sharing in sonic and somatic features of talk that has broken free, finally, of speech. This talk carries with it the excess energy of an “undercommons”: And Toussaint, all hooked up and bound to the French, trapped in the noman’s-­land between liberty (abstract-­subjective-­telic-­white) and independence (national-­ objective-­ present-­ black, the position Dessalines seemingly naturally slips into) hips us, by way of James, to the need for something not in between these formulations. For James, the desire is for something not in between darkness and enlightenment, something not in between Dessalines and Toussaint. And we’ve got to think what it means not just for Dessalines to take the men into his confidence but to talk to them. We’ve got to think the form of that talk as well as its content, in untutored and broken dialect, unretouched, addressed to his followers and not to the French, sounded and not written and rewritten, seemingly unmediated by the graphic, and, finally, concerned not with liberty but with independence. The opposition between Toussaint and Dessalines, between

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(the desire for what is called) enlightenment and (the adherence to what is called) darkness, between direction to the French and direction to the slaves, is also between speech and writing. Dessalines leaps forward; he jumps into the ditch, sounding, descending.59

It is worth quoting this passage at length if just for how efficiently yet thoroughly Moten parses the different dimensions of the Europe/Africa dialectic. At the same time, Moten foregrounds the unexpected force of talk cutting through the typical dialectic of writing and speech under coloniality: Dessalines’s soundings in the ditch—­“untutored and broken dialect, unretouched”—­exceed speech even in its disarticulated forms. Dessalines descends, moving in another direction than the in-­between. This is, moreover, a form of “phonographic weight” that has nothing to do with new media technologies of the West. Put another way, Dessalines does not just constitute the “Africa” side of the dialectic (what Moten calls the “national-­objective-­present-­black”), but also enacts pressure from “the external and externalizing force of a sound not in between notes and words, not in between languages.” Moten gives us “the not-­in-­between of accent” as an instance of a radical sonic element of Dessalines’s talk, one “that bends the regulatory musicological frame of notes, the hermeneutic insistence of the meaning of words, the national imperatives of European idioms, the dialect that reconstitutes dialectic as reason, historical motive, liberatory polyrhythm” (8). In other words: the forms that cannot be recorded by the writing of Dessalines’s talk as speech constitute the energy elsewhere from the dialectic, that therefore bends, if not eventually breaking, it. With this sense of talk as the source of radical anticolonial energy, and of indeterminate emplacement that exceeds the center/periphery dialectic, I turn back to Meredith by way of the journalist Durance’s interpolated tale in One of Our Conquerors, which satirizes English imperialism. A serial-­in-­ progress, the so-­called “Rival Tongues,” is given in the narrative indirectly as bits and pieces of informal conversation and letters: as such, much like the other references to empire, this story of empire is digested into the novel, and, moreover, through multiple levels of nested narrative. Durance’s tale makes a mockery of different European powers, and Russia, vying to insti-

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tute their respective languages in Japan—­an aspiring empire occupying a secondary position to the others. Durance’s chief target is Meredith’s own: English conquerors. The English delegation consists, in Durance’s tale, of two fervently religious missionary figures who embark on their journey without the backing of their government (the institution-­backed German delegation, an academic accompanied by his precocious daughter—­whom Nesta immediately takes an interest in—­forms a notable contrast). It is reported that the story ultimately ends with the suicide of one of the Englishmen, because of indigestion: a “depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise, and no longer relieved by the practice” (433). The detail of this Englishman’s demise may be incidental. But as another “one of our conquerors” subject to an eviscerating takedown, he is clearly meant to be linked to Radnor. That both cannot hold the languages and worlds they purport to control, and that both are specifically disarticulated at a mundane and visceral level that scrambles mind and body in highly embarrassing ways, seems important. Arguably, the Reverend Dr. Bouthoin of “The Rival Tongues” is more at the center of One of Our Conquerors than Radnor: he is a body “digested” into the diegesis of the novel’s characters. Yet, what do we make of the circumstance that this multiply digested character cannot digest—­quite literally—­an imperial other? Without trying to recuperate Meredith’s text, I want to stick, for a time, with this detail of literal indigestion and what might break out from it. While the Reverend Dr. Bouthoin’s self-­destruction contains his disarticulation in a manner that is arguably also achieved in Radnor’s death (in a way, both merciful ends for conquerors that Meredith—­and Durance—­have subjected to seemingly endless embarrassments), I still wonder what sounds below the novel’s layers of mediation and digestion of such a figure, in the moment his indigestion renders him literally unable to hold together his form. To my mind, there are enough digested references to “Africa” to justify a sense that the indigestion of this character before his suicide opens up the world of the novel to an “outside” of “untutored and broken . . . unretouched” talk from a Black surround that does not just resist articulacy’s hold, but refigures disarticulation into the flood of something more. The most notable may be the circumstances surrounding the death of the wife

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of globetrotting Captain Dartrey Fenellan, in an undisclosed location in South Africa. Radnor regards Dartrey with great jealousy: “Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the place of the burial. He heard without seizing it. A simulacrum spectre-­spark of hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy. Dartrey—­Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and dishonoured him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa to be free of the galling” (34). Here, “Africa” is further digested by the “utterance” of a Dutch name, such that Radnor’s “envy” may be most immediately about the dead wife, but also about the ongoing Anglo-­Boer rivalry. Having access to “Africa” becomes the condition of English “freedom” in an imperial imaginary that scales from the personal to the national. “The Rival Tongues” elides Africa in its primary focus on Anglo-­German imperial rivalry, but one can easily imagine that the African continent was the ultimate terrain on which this battle of languages was fought, and Meiji-­era Japan becomes something of a triangulated “other” empire with enough of a capability for speech that it might emerge alongside the other global, Western powers as something of a junior partner (upon linguistic absorption).60 Once again, as evident in the moment of Lucy thinking about dialect and referencing Othello in Dracula, or the consigning of Silver’s wife to a mute elsewhere, Blackness may seem “outside” the concern of these fictions of empire, but as I hope I have shown, Blackness as a constitutive muteness beyond inarticulacy rather foundationally underlies how imperial selfhood is formed. If, in Durance’s story, the East functions as capable of becoming a “rival tongue” after all—­ in Bouthoin’s undoing by Japanese food—­A frica’s languageless “surround” establishes the conditions for Western speech to emerge. From the refigured perspective of “the surround” rather than muteness, it becomes amply evident that the lack is in the conqueror’s hearing and not in Black speech. To close this chapter, I will question to what extent a commons forged from different distances from speech and its self-­possessed aesthetics is possible. From the disarticulated English conqueror and the emergent talk of the white working-­class figure to the degraded languages of the East and the Black surround, is a wider and more heterogeneous conception of talk capable of imagining where these different forms of commons might touch?

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For Meredith, at least, the yearning for some other common language outside or beyond the egoism of speech seems clear. In the brief description of Dudley Sowerby, heir to an earldom and Nesta’s preferred suitor in the view of both Radnor and Nataly, as he struggles to accept Nesta after knowing the truth of her parents’ marriage, it is suggested that “instinct” is at the bottom of this common—­but inarticulable—­condition of the human:61 Even at his darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him the right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude for pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a stammering speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this Nesta Radnor’s character would have said a brave word, but for her deeds bearing witness to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous temperament. (419)

We perceive, once again, the metaphorics of indigestion marking another would-­be conqueror’s struggle, and a connection between the condition of feeling profuse with that which cannot be articulated into good form. Instinct stammers as a “small advocate” in this divided self, the “brave” party but unable to speak, except with a stammer, in the particular environment of the “Court of the wigged Facts.” Ascribing to Dudley an instinct to do right, and assigning instinct’s inarticulacy to the conditions of the social environment and not instinct itself, signals a different common realm that Meredith imagines as transcending the social. But reading for coloniality shows us that a true commons cannot transcend the social. As José Esteban Muñoz has usefully theorized in a manner complementary to, if different from, Moten on the undercommons, a “brown commons” arises from life that persists under the duress of norms that do not support its flourishing. The duress may be felt or registered differently across this commons, which, for Muñoz, begins with human life but expands into “feelings, sounds, buildings, neighborhoods, environments, and the nonhuman organic life that might circulate in such an environment alongside humans, and the inorganic presences that life is very often so attached to.”62 But the key to developing a sense of commonality among these differences is, Muñoz suggests, a form of affective attunement—­especially, as he has elaborated, toward illegitimized affects that disrupt normalized

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affects of white civility. To be clear, queer and feminist Latinx figures who directly motivate performance toward recasting these illegimized affects—­ such as “excessive” emotionality—­as modes of being and experience that refuse the self-­possessive ideal of a national white affect in the US context, are the origins of Muñoz’s path toward a brown commons. From these aesthetic refigurations and revaluations of affective excess, which are, of course, attuned to the social world and all of its investments in coloniality and racialization, Muñoz’s thinking moves laterally outward into what feels like a potentially infinite, or at least indeterminately plural, brown commons. This method, in particular, works through a mode of touching but not capturing difference across a pluralizing commons. To my mind, the way in which Muñoz’s “sense of brown” holds indeterminacy in view while also not foreclosing the possibility of a commons that ends up being quite capacious is where I see his work touching Glissant’s “poetics of relation.” To return to Meredith’s awkward, excessive Londinensian-­ness: Muñoz tells us that the city is “not just an enclosure of nature but . . . its own commons that is teeming with potentiality for the kind of living otherwise, the kind that a full engagement with the commons might help us actualize.”63 In the seemingly circumscribed worlds of London errands and country entertainments, the “buildings,” “neighborhoods,” “environments,” the furniture that Nataly is constantly buying, do “touch”—­and quite materially so, as I have been arguing—­lives of colonized people discarded at the expense of Radnor’s swelling of wealth through his investment in diamond mines, cotton, railroads.64 They are no less mixed in the profuse inarticulacy of Radnor’s “Londinensian” feeling. We could begin with these “wrong” and embarrassing affects associated with inarticulate, white bodies, but we need not end with them. What if, rather than joining with Durance and Meredith, we read through—­w ith Muñoz and Moten—­to sound and feel out nonwhite commons that hover over, surround, interrupt the novel’s nationally bound, English selves? Again, we could rethink the Babel of the commons as not a fall, but an opening into other ways of expression and mediation that have persisted around, below, amid the colonizer’s fluent speech. I would like to think, given Meredith’s commitment to disarticulation and the possibility of less egoistic forms of communication, that he might not have been entirely against such an anticolonial repurposing of his work.

FOUR

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s Dysfluent End of the World “You don’t understand. . . . She. . . . She will. . . .” He said: “Ah! Ah!” in an intolerable tone of royal badinage, I said again, “You don’t understand. . . . Even for your own sake. . . .” He swayed a little on his feet and said: “Bravo. . . . Bravissimo. . . .” — ­F o r d M a d o x F o r d , from The Inheritors (before Conrad’s edits) We speak nearly in each other’s language as it is possible for two inhabitants of this Babel to do. —­F o r d on Conrad, in a letter to Olive Garnett about their collaboration

In 1901, w henJoseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story was published, “it was received by the English critics with a paean of abuse for the number of dots it contained.”1 So writes Ford in his memoir of Conrad, published in 1924, almost a quarter-­century after their collaboration on the first of three novels they wrote together (their other co-­authored novels, Romance and The Nature of the Crime, were published in 1903 and 1909, respectively). The first epigraph to this chapter is a snippet of conversation between the first-­person narrator, an English journalist named Arthur Etchingham Granger, and a wealthy Germanic heir, Duc de Mersch, who is financing an imperialist endeavor in Greenland, before Conrad’s editorial revisions filled out some of the “dots.” To say the least, no self-­possessed speakers are at hand in Ford’s efforts to capture real-­life conversation, a goal he makes explicit in further noting: “If you listen to two Englishmen communicating by means of words, for you can hardly call 124

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it conversing, you will find that their speeches are little more than this: A. says, ‘What sort of a fellow is . . . you know!’ B. replies, ‘Oh, he’s a sort of a . . .’ and A. exclaims, ‘Ah, I always thought so . . .’ ”2 Ford claims that “allusions and unfinished sentences” are characteristic of “all conversations, and particularly of all English conversations.”3 On one level, Ford’s example exchange between Englishmen A and B simply thematizes and formally suggests features typically associated with modernism: how to capture, in literary form, the experiential difficulty of knowing others and the muddled relays of intersubjective understanding. Meanwhile, such difficulties of perception and communication—­and their attendant problems of interiority and psychology—­have seemed especially germane to the characterization of both Ford and Conrad as impressionist writers: one thinks readily, for instance, of James Dowell’s “it is all a darkness,” or Marlow’s “meaning . . . not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze,” obscure modes of perception that are central to the narration of The Good Soldier and Heart of Darkness.4 More recently, scholars such as Daniel Wright and Megan Quigley have brought greater attention to textures of linguistic imprecision (in such “forms” as fuzzy logic and vagueness), examining Victorian and modernist fiction alongside Anglo-­A merican debates on philosophical language that unfolded during the early to mid-­t wentieth century.5 This focus on what we might think of as the formal formlessness of linguistic imprecision, I suggest, might be extended out beyond linguistic concerns. I argue that Ford’s interest in the possibly degenerating conditions of English speech—­especially his insistence on using typographic features like ellipses and dashes that so annoyed his critics (“asthmatic” dialogue, as one reviewer of The Inheritors put it)—­is markedly bent on using print markers to convey speech’s uneven production through embodied processes. The narrative of The Inheritors brings a very close attention, in particular, to the observable “failures” of speech tagged to dysfluency: the uneven stops and starts in speech produced by that imperfect machine, the human body. This places the concerns of The Inheritors in kinship with Meredithian profusion, but from the other side of withholding words and proliferating narrative gaps (with equally intolerable effects, according to contemporary critics).

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This final chapter seeks, via its unusual choice of a romance with strong elements of science fiction—­a generic anomaly in both Conrad’s and Ford’s careers—­to bring together as explicitly as possible this book’s various arguments about the tenuous conditions of speech under late nineteenth-­ century media and empire, and the possibilities of an anticolonial poetics of talk in the wake of speech’s destruction. I will demonstrate how this self-­ professed “extravagant story” unfolds a spectacular breakdown of speech’s proprietary logic within a story of the full collapse of Anglo-­European imperialism and the world. The plot roughly bases this collapse on Ford’s critical stance, at the time, against politicians like Joseph Chamberlain, who served as secretary of state for the colonies from 1895 to 1903, and media barons like Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), whose ownership of both the Daily Mail and the Times arguably made him the single most important person responsible for popular opinion during the height of Britain’s New Imperialist endeavors before World War I. According to Robert Green, Ford was particularly afraid of the state’s growing power over the individual: how reforms at home constituted a form of “social imperialism” that was continuous with Britain’s decisions to enter into costly conflicts abroad, such as the Second Anglo-­Boer War, fought from 1899 to 1902.6 In The Inheritors, Chamberlain and Harmsworth are the inspiration for two ruthless Fourth Dimensionists, a posthuman alien race that eventually takes over the world in three dimensions through calculated manipulations of an existing imperial scheme (the above-­mentioned endeavor in Greenland, standing for Leopold II’s atrocities in the Belgian Congo) and an existing system of mass media. Meanwhile, a woman Dimensionist at the center of power insinuates herself into the family life of the journalist and narrator Granger, also tricking him into doing her bidding by letting him believe that she may be a romantic interest. Ford’s avowed focus on dysfluent Englishmen, whose bodies enact forms of speech failure that resemble technical breakdowns of fragile media systems (and, as I will argue, via such breakdowns undergo a process of racialization, as well as feminization), offers distinct opportunities to observe precisely how an utterly dystopian view of modern media and imperial decadence yet refuses, in the end, the possibility of anticolonial futures. As we will see, in The Inheritors, white male hegemonic English bodies are the

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primary sites of irrecoverably disintegrating speech, and as such, they disarticulate the eloquence that is somehow still vouchsafed to a figure like Kurtz. By contrast, The Inheritors brooks no English (or, for that matter, European) heroes, nor even the possibility of members of a less hegemonic class of white figures (pirates, Americans, members of the working class, or women) pointing the way toward less proprietary futures. Instead, the narrative takes various forms of English masculine subjectivity—­f rom world leader to popular novelist to middling journalist—­and subjects them to a dissective transformation of speech into debased forms of dysfluent talk: stuttering, gibberish, murmurs, spasms, and the like. These men become disabled bodies, incomplete and spectral from the perspective of the Fourth Dimension’s so-­called “higher space,” as the world built by humanity ends. Composed around the same time as Heart of Darkness, Conrad and Ford’s The Inheritors in my view serves as something of a companion text to the generically very different canonical novel, in which the “extravagance” of scientific romance affords a complete dismemberment of English selfhood that Conrad’s imperial romance cannot fully countenance. Yet, as we will see, these instances of disarticulation fail to move beyond a typified view of debility, which is taken up to vouchsafe humanity, by casting disabled bodies as remnants of a universal man unmarked by race. I will argue that the elements of science fiction in The Inheritors become an important limitation for all of its scathing critiques of New Imperialism at the turn of the century. Specifically, the enactment of rather stark disarticulations of speech’s reliance on colonialist logics of property through a dysfluent first-­person narrator’s account of other, even more dysfluent, soon-­to-­be former colonizing subjects within the broader network of Anglo-­European “key players” is paired with making recourse to an alien race of invaders to reserve humanity for these no longer sovereign subjects. That is, the dysfluent, middle-­of-­the-­road Englishman comes to stand for what is left of humanity, even in his imagined demise. This logic of a universalized remnant, we could observe, is also baked into Ford’s intent in capturing “all conversations, and particularly . . . all English conversations.” In the novel, the extravagant break into a story of the Fourth Dimension enables the relocation of the human in the dysfluent white male body, while fluency gets exported to a technological beyond that is imagined as posthu-

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man and postracial—­though, for important reasons I will discuss later, not postgender. The alien race of Fourth Dimensionists, led by a woman, communicates through a perfect form of telepathic fluency that effectively dispenses with (three-­d imensional) human embodiment. In their manner of perfecting a form of fluent speech that has evolved beyond the need for technology, I suggest that the Dimensionists depicted in The Inheritors resemble posthuman figures in the imaginaries of the late twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries. As I will elaborate later in this chapter, the scientific and widespread cultural interest in an empirically verifiable spatial Fourth Dimension—­a lternatively called “higher space,” and theoretically provable by mathematics—­was not as fantastical a notion as it might seem at our present juncture. For Conrad and Ford, the Fourth Dimension provides a distinct and serious heuristic for philosophical inquiry into a purportedly unthinkable “beyond” after Western coloniality has destroyed itself and the world it has made. The Fourth Dimension’s conceptual apparatus, in particular, homes in on disintegration and fragmentation—­whether of the observer or of the observed, since they are theorized as entangled—­as material indicators of perceptive incompletion. In The Inheritors, the Fourth Dimension’s fragmentation of three-­d imensional perspective picks up on late nineteenth-­century anxieties about media’s effects on human bodies and proprietary speech communities, offering, however, a fantasy of wholeness restored in higher space. By way of the Fourth Dimension, then, The Inheritors directly poses the question as to what futures are possible should the entire system of Anglo-­European imperialism, having neared its territorial zenith in the late nineteenth century, definitively break apart. I argue that a different orientation “beyond” coloniality that is not necessarily trained on futurity, however, is already occurring—­and has always occurred—­as the interstices that The Inheritors itself ironically draws attention to in its ample use of dots and dashes to signal stilted, incomplete speech. In dysfluent speech, the interstices open up into everything that speech disavows of talk. As I will suggest, anticolonial thinking might begin with what The Inheritors touches but misses about nontranscendent logics of race, gender, and disability that buttress its limited narrative possibilities. Though itself a novel eminently preoccupied with gaps and what it fails to understand,

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what it thinks it misses is an unthinkable wholeness of future-­being, rather than what already makes up that which it has wilfully and reiteratively consigned to an inaccessible, imperceivable abyss. Racializing Assemblages and the Modernity of “Babel”

Not unlike Stevenson, who retrospectively emphasized Treasure Island’s collaborative exchanges of orality and writing, Ford reminisced in 1930 that he and Conrad “had got so used to reading our own works aloud to each other that we finally wrote for the purpose of reading aloud the one to the other.”7 According to Edward Garnett, who introduced the two authors, Ford also based the narrator of his story “Seraphina” (which would later become Romance) on Conrad’s style of conversation—­h is “mannerisms,” and “hoarse[ness], each utterance ending with a dying fall of suspension dots.”8 By most accounts, however, their collaborations were difficult, with none of the harmony that Stevenson assigned to read-­a louds and shared storytelling at Braemar. With vivid, embodied language, Conrad writes to Garnett that “the expenditure of nervous fluid was immense,” and other accounts from the authors’ circle of friends describe a difficult period of conflict marked significantly by Conrad’s bouts of depression.9 Later, Ford reports that the writing of The Inheritors—­which was primarily his work—­ was punctuated by scenes of Conrad’s raucous insults, in which Ford “sat at the desk writing and reading out what [he] wrote whilst behind [his] back [Conrad] stormed and raved and declared that every word [he] produced was the imagination of a cretin.”10 Elsewhere, in a letter to Olive Garnett, Ford offers a softer account of what might be called their dysfluent collaboration by casting “this Babel” as a given condition of “inhabit[ing]” modern life (the second epigraph to this chapter).11 But this universalizing gesture actually does more to unmask racializing dynamics that are closely attendant upon scenes of degenerating speech—­including the ones so vividly documented as having occurred between Ford and Conrad. Ford’s comment about the difficulties of Babel is tinged with the recognition of Conrad’s Polishness. According to Ford, Conrad “was a foreigner who never till the end of his life spoke English other than as a foreigner,” who also suffered paralysis before public speaking, though “he could write with

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a speed, a volubility, a banal correctness.”12 We can hear some resonances in these judgments, arguably, of how Stoker describes Dracula’s grammatical precision but imperfectly accented speech, though with a stronger sense of Conrad’s in-­person dysfluency as a disability remediated by his fluent writing. As Daniel Martin has argued, however, Victorian understandings of the dysfluent body were perhaps more complex than we might assume. In a brief but fascinating account of reactions to Joseph Faber’s “Speaking Machine” known as Euphonia, exhibited in 1846, and Henry Monro’s medical treatise On Stammering (1850), Martin identifies a “claustrum poetics” focused on “the speaking body as porous and prone to invasion” that framed vocal production as “an epidemiological concern about the transmission of voices throughout the social body” (to which, ostensibly, any body, marked as disabled or not, would be vulnerable).13 Though the reactions to Euphonia and concerns of Monro’s treatise were looking to identify and contain an uncanny sense of the speaking body’s porousness, Martin argues that their uncertainty as to the crypt-­l ike origins of dysfluent speech ultimately “opens up histories of voice to multidirectional networks and assemblages of bodies.”14 I add here that the the exhibition of Faber’s Euphonia in London’s Egyptian Hall, which featured, as part of its display, the head and torso of a male “Turk” whose speech was controlled by bellows, also keys us into the central role racialization was playing in trying to delimit who was mostly likely to lose control over their speech. We might recall here, as well, J. P. Mahaffy’s uncivilized, unconversational “Mohammedan Tartar” who begins his account of the ideal art of conversation. As Michael North has observed, Conrad’s keen understanding of the racialization of undesirably uncontrolled speech is clearly apparent in his referring to his own English words sounding like “gibberish”—­a term, North observes, that he also ascribes to James Wait in The N—­ of the “Narcissus” (1897).15 Choice comments from Conrad’s associates—­H. G. Wells’s on his “wonderful Oriental style,” or others on how he “chattered and screamed like a monkey”—­meanwhile vividly display something of Conrad’s lived experience within the literary circles he frequented.16 North further argues, in his reading of Narcissus, that Conrad’s awareness, in effect, of the “Babel” produced by coloniality’s global reach, by the century’s end, is registered in his formal workarounds to the problems of “how to represent to a mono-

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lingual English public the many different languages of the East Indies.”17 The racializing of sonic qualities into “murmur, rumor, matter, tumult” (a list North compiles from Conrad’s descriptions of speech in the Indies) becomes one frequent strategy, which Conrad also subverts in a passage where English sounds the same way, from afar.18 As North describes, Conrad’s attunement to “seemingly asignifying aspects of language, the tone, rhythm, the accent,” is also part of an outsider’s perspective on what the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (a contemporary of Conrad’s) calls “phatic communion.”19 The phatic mode, in Malinowski’s initial coinage, denotes language that functions as social glue (what we might describe today as “small talk”) as opposed to transmissive or reflexive language.20 In Malinowski’s ethnographic account (based on “examples . . . taken from savage life”), the phatic mode is clearly downgraded as a less intellectual and more primitive endeavor, a form of orality unconcerned with meaning and only concerned with generating a rudimentary “atmosphere of sociability.”21 That Conrad’s fiction is particularly attuned to alienated rather than immersed experiences of “phatic communion” might be linked to his biography as someone made painfully aware of his linguistic difference from the “native speaker” of English.22 Although he motivates such alienation to flatten distinctions between the language of the colonizer and that of the colonized, I argue that “Babel” still cannot help but signify the apocalyptic logic of its biblical origin, where too many languages occasion the end of civilization.23 Glissant, again, refigures Babel against its originary apocalyptic myth, wresting it, as well, from the accompanying colonizer’s perspective that alternately mourns a loss of “phatic communion” or casts it as a primitive condition that might safely cordon off the deluge of new, multilingual speakers into modernity (that is, these nonnative speakers of the hegemonic language glitch and become stuck in the phatic, much like the Eastern European peasants Harker encounters on his journey, who cannot be assimilated into cosmopolitan multimedia). In insisting that Babel rather serve as “the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility,” Glissant offers a compelling experiential alternative to “phatic communion,” once again, in the form of being “gripped by vertigo.”24 Vertigo operates on the same plane of the visceral as communion, but specifically it rejects the secure bound-

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edness of communion in favor of dizzying movement and the sense of spinning outward. Vertigo may be a feeling that is also aware of itself, while the kind of communion that the colonizer both longs for and rejects as primitive is definitionally unaware in its perfect inhabitation. Thus, vertigo as a feeling reconfigures the problems of speech that both Ford and Conrad raise out of their status as problems at all: dysfluent speech and the sense of linguistic alienation are incipient conditions of possibility for a different kind of embodied cosmopolitan experience, one that takes disorientation as requisite for the political struggle of establishing more equal relations between groups across the globe. It is worth clarifying, as well, that Glissant’s focus on multilingual conditions as vertigo-­inducing offers an alternative affective experience to Derrida’s deconstructive drive, which attempts endless (because never complete) escapes from entanglement. Recall, in Monolingualism of the Other, that Derrida generalizes the condition of prosthetic languaging, where speech belongs originally to no one, not even the colonizer, though he may feel it to be so; and then, to escape making this a metaphysical statement, acknowledges—­indeed, rather performs—­h is own inability to avoid the shame that he feels over his Algerian accent while speaking French.25 Keeping in mind the challenge vertigo poses to both communion in speech and endless escape from language through a Derridean form of play, I will turn to The Inheritors to further observe its spectacular stagings of speech’s degeneration into dysfluent talk as part of the plot of Anglo-­ European imperialism’s demise. The characters incidentally experience, quite often, something like vertigo when the material landscape of their three-­d imensional plane threatens to dissolve (alongside Englishmen’s speech). Watching Gurnard, a Fourth Dimensionist in league with the woman who engineers the toppling of the Greenland scheme, Granger sees only a “half hidden pallid oval; nothing that one could seize upon”; looking at Churchill, an Englishman cut from the cloth of Old World heroes, Granger similarly finds the world to which he subscribes dissolving into two dimensions, as “he stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat.”26 Such descriptions draw from the popularly circulated analogy that explained why the Fourth Dimension could not be perceived by the sensory apparatus of three-­d imensional bodies: if

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a being was stuck in the plane of two dimensions, an intersecting three-­ dimensional figure could only be perceived in cross-­section as a flat shape that morphs as the three-­d imensional being moves about (the primary conceit of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions [1884], to which I will return later). Granger’s two-­d imensional descriptions here signal, with some awareness, his limited perspective: how he sees the dissolution of his world, but not what is imperceptibly beyond it. In correspondence with this dissolving world and the bodies that make it up, the speech of the narrator and his compatriots is always falling apart. Though they converse in their “native” English, the simple tasks of phatic communion prove difficult; they struggle to eke out words, and are painfully aware of how they assume (or fail to assume) the postures, tones, accents, gestures, pacing, and so on required for a “natural” state of fluent coordination of language and embodiment. Ford blamed what he felt to be the degenerative effects of emerging mass media on why Englishmen seemed so dysfluent in his time, and The Inheritors ends up registering these impacts in its sustained critique of an emerging interview (and celebrity-­ chasing, consumerist) culture.27 In our modern Babel, Ford muses, “no speech of one character should ever answer the speech that goes before it. This is almost invariably the case in real life where few people listen, because they are always preparing their own next speeches.”28 The novel’s many critics, though they disagreed with Ford’s particular mimetic approach to dialogue, by including so many dots, nonetheless understood dysfluent bodies as defective in the same manner as the novel does—­f raming dysfluency as disability (and the novel, by extension, as bad art).29 According to a reviewer from the Daily Chronicle, for instance, “the style is spasmodic, the dialogue gaspy; the interlocutors would seem to suffer from shortness of breath, as well as from confusion of ideas. We cannot find words strong enough to express our irritation at that asthmatic dialogue.”30 Such strong attitudes of irritation and disgust when it comes to dysfluent bodies in Conrad and Ford’s novel appear to share something essential with the prurient interest in physiognomies of inarticulate speakers in the Victorian art of conversation manuals. It is not just that the reviewer is annoyed at embodied dysfluency; “irritation” pools specifically around the specter of a disabled body that the

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reviewer himself conjures, and which would seem capable of visiting contagion upon the body of the reviewer himself, as he “cannot find words . . . to express [his] irritation.” This conjuring of disability and contagion, I argue, must be read more closely with the racializing assemblages that such conjuring necessarily entails. I borrow the term “racializing assemblages,” again, from Alexander Weheliye, whose critique of European theoretical models for biopolitics (specifically, Giorgio Agamben and Foucault) with reliance on the work of Black feminist scholars (including especially Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers) reveals the “invisible” yet grounding ways that race configures understandings of the human, even in critical theoretical work ostensibly oriented against hegemonic power. With an emphasis on race as an ongoing process in the service of maintaining conditions of coloniality, the term “racializing assemblages” conceptually points us toward disarticulation and reassembly work that must be vigilantly and endlessly attended to. Weheliye has argued, specifically with respect to Foucault, that the French philosopher treats as distinct “ethnic” and “biological” racism, as articulated in this passage from “Society Must Be Defended”: “Quite naturally, we find that racism—­not a truly ethnic racism but racism of the evolutionist kind, biological racism—­is fully operational in the way socialist States (of the Soviet Union type) deal with the mentally ill, criminals, political adversaries, and so on.”31 Weheliye elaborates that Foucault situates biological racism as within the same race, and ethnic racism as coming from elsewhere; thus, his analysis occasions “the ontological anteriority of alien races,” and the philosopher “never interrogates the bare existence of racial difference and those hierarchies fabricated upon this primordial notion.”32 Likewise, Ann Laura Stoler has demonstrated that, while colonization is central to Foucault’s analysis of racism, he reads racial discourse as emerging not from colonization but from “internal conquest and invasions”—­the biological racisms “within Europe’s social fabric.”33 Weheliye, drawing from Wynter, essentially reverses the direction of Foucauldian analysis to ground the colonial encounter’s generativity of racial hierarchies, which then move flexibly into assemblages that produce other demarcations across disability, class, or gender. Classed and gendered bodies are also conjured more subtly in the reviewer’s mention of “spasmodic,” which recalls the quashing of Scottish,

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working-­class poets like Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith by the likes of Tory Critic W. E. Aytoun and Matthew Arnold, in an earlier moment.34 The racializing assemblages that buttress these kinds of demarcations of humanity and subhumanity, increasingly Darwinian into the nineteenth century, wrought through the supposed legibilities of classed, gendered, and disabled bodies, are extraordinarily flexible in how they maintain hegemonic positioning. As I will argue, tracking such assemblages specifically through sites of dysfluency in The Inheritors reveals the intricate ways in which colonialist possession has encompassed our enduring notions of speech and the sense of new media technologies as extending—­and regulating—­the territories of speech. As I have argued throughout, imperial territorializing is something of a substrate that binds speech and communication technologies; The Inheritors happens to be a novel that makes this quite explicit. The novel captures the contradiction whereby speech’s extensions by media are territorial consolidations, while also serving lofty ideals about freedom and democratic participation. These imperial dynamics of speech and liberalist extension, I argue, are laid bare by the novel, which also drifts curiously, if inadvertently, toward an anticolonial poetics based in dysfluency’s capacity to break apart the racial circuits that hold colonial selfhood and colonial worlds together. Put a different way, I am arguing that The Inheritors both trades in and disarticulates the racializing assemblages that uphold colonialist property rights and their attendant violence and resource-­gathering. As a political allegory, the work is ostensibly anti-­imperialist in its negative orientation toward the grand civilizational telos that violent New Imperialist projects, including the Belgian Congo, traded in. But the novel fails to engage any possibility of where its own disarticulations of coloniality might bring us next. Instead of querying where the resulting dysfluent, white male English bodies that the Fourth Dimensionists leave behind might go next, and what it might mean for these normative and hegemonic bodies to become racialized as disabled, feminized, and otherwise dehumanized, the novel instead reconstitutes the dream of fluent speech and self-­possession to be borne by a posthuman alien race. Consequently, the narrative is able to leave behind the human as a category, broken beyond repair. Essentially, this suggests that the racialization of white male bodies leaves no possibility for the

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continuance of the human race in any form. Indeed, we might think of the broken state of the white male bodies left behind amid the destruction of the European colonial projects as akin to Giorgio Agamben’s description of bare life. As part of Weheliye’s critique, Agamben’s schema ignores racialization, and falsely theorizes that there can be a universal human subject that is “left over” (never mind the fact that his example par excellence of bare life, the Muselmann of the Nazi concentration camps, is thoroughly a “racio-­religious label”).35 If, however, un-­selved, dispossessed speakers did not signal the end of humanity, what “shiver of a beginning” can we imagine from the broken assemblages presented in this particular novel? How can we read the vertigo that these displaced, dysfluent subjects experience, against a textual assemblage that sees this experience as a condition of disability as degeneration (but which evinces, nonetheless, at least a theoretical interest in worlding “beyond” Western colonialism, albeit displaced onto a posthuman imaginary)? These are questions that the remainder of this chapter will take up. Dysfluency, Media, and the Fall of Empire

That The Inheritors seems a generically dysfluent novel because it tries to combine so many different genres has been a problem for many of its readers, but in what follows, I argue that there may be more logic to such dysfluent form than the novel’s many critics have generally noted.36 I will discuss its generic dysfluency in greater detail, demonstrating that the novel is, in addition to imperial romance, science fiction, and political allegory, also sensation fiction, a condition of England novel, and turn-­of-­the-­century fiction on the sordid conditions of mass media (most exemplarily, I am thinking of George Gissing’s New Grub Street [1891], but also Henry James’s The Reverberator [1888], and other, shorter works such as The Aspern Papers [1888] and “The Death of a Lion”[1894]). While my aim is not to restore or advocate for some desirable coherence to the novel, or to “rehabilitate” the novel, I will illustrate how the story of imperial collapse goes cannily together with the story of mass media’s decadence, and how dysfluent talk grounds this narrative of decline, even as the narrative does not allow talk to emerge as a new beginning. The Inheritors marks the end, in effect, of the

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jingoistic Steadian dream of prosthetic media uniting the Babel created by modern imperialism. Subsequently, as we will see, the device of the Fourth Dimension, “extravagant” as even the authors themselves admit, is especially suited symbolically as well as materially to uniting territorial claims of media and of empire—­as well as disarticulating them both. We might even read The Inheritors as an early conceptualization of “media empire,” by now a rather unremarkable and obvious description of the state of things in the age of social media companies and ever expanding global corporate interests. Writes Granger, reflecting on his own position as a journalist in relation to the Duc de Mersch: “I saw the apotheosis of the Press—­a Press that makes a State Founder suppliant to a man like myself ” (73). Before delving more specifically into how the dynamics of emerging mass media go hand in glove with empire, I offer a brief rehearsal of how late nineteenth-­century media developments unite with the political allegory of the novel, simply at the level of the novel’s plot. In line with Gissing’s novel on the state of journalism at the century’s end, The Inheritors stages a struggle between artistic and moral integrity, on the one hand, and material necessity, on the other. The protagonist Granger is a reluctant hack writer who finds that he must “live,” yet hangs desperately onto a sense of himself as transcending the debasement of such compromise. Having decided to write for a Dimensionist man called Fox (the Harmsworth figure) for a paper named The Hour, Granger finds himself helplessly entangled and complicit in the media empire that would go on to puff up and then crash the Greenland scheme. The crash then creates enough instability to topple the existing imperial order. Crucially, the means by which the Dimensionists engineer their takeover of the world is their superior capacity to get at “the inside of things”—­a form of conquest from the inside out that aligns them with a disrespect for privacy already very much at play within the dynamics of late nineteenth-­ century media. The Dimensionists are, in effect, data miners (and mind readers who communicate via telepathy), information seekers who represent the dystopic side of Stead’s harmonious assembly of the world united by a common consciousness (and led by Great Britain and/or the United States). The Inheritors demonstrates that this ethos of information-­seeking, as well as taxonomization and the ordering of these data, was already baked

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into the media empires inaugurated by figures like Harmsworth, though achieved by blunter tools than Dimensionist mind reading.37 One such technology, the personal interview, relatively new in the 1890s, receives detailed treatment in The Inheritors, in particular as a crude technology for capturing information and cataloging others. To “get at the inside of things” is the avowed purpose of Granger’s column for The Hour, ironically known as “Atmospheres,” for which he is charged to conduct interviews with a series of political celebrities and artists in their own homes. As Matthew Rubery has indicated, by the 1890s, the personal interview was not just a feature of the media landscape, but had become so culturally ingrained as a mass-­market form that it “dramatically influenced the way audiences thought about private life” writ large.38 Examining literature by Henry James explicitly interested in the subjective impact of a “dynamic of intrusion and revelation” that characterizes the interview, Rubery concludes that this journalistic form had already reshaped more general intersubjective relations between individual people by the final decades of the nineteenth century.39 The Inheritors, too, is a work particularly keen on theorizing that the journalistic “dynamics of intrusion and revelation,” as distilled in the personal interview, had become de rigueur in English life. The very first scene strongly suggests an interview-­like dialogue, conducted between Granger and the unnamed Dimensionist woman, whom he meets for the first time as they walk together, en route to Dover. In bits of repetitive talk punctuated by the pause of dashes that indicate his nervous dysfluencies, Granger makes bumbling, formulaic attempts to categorize the woman by way of pinpointing her nation of origin, beginning with American (and later developing into an ineffectual list including Australian, English, Prussian, Semitic, “Sclav,” Circassian). Granger regards his failures to catalog her as losing the game of conversation: “In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority—­superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud of my conversational powers” (2). Before the Dimensionist, Granger is reduced to stuttering, his usual role as “intruder” reversed into his own inadvertent “revelation” through his losses of self-­possession. Later, when he goes in to interview

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Churchill (who is supposed to be the Conservative member of Parliament and later prime minister, Arthur Balfour) for his “Atmospheres,” Granger is confronted by Churchill’s aunt, yet another woman (though not a Dimensionist) who “seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf, before I had given my first answer to her first question” (41). Suffice it to say that the world of The Inheritors is one in which the predatory, information-­ seeking norms of an “interview society” bent on winning power by cataloging one another make up the status quo of all conversations.40 Dysfluency seems the distinct result of Englishmen buckling under the strain of this late nineteenth-­century version of virtual media shaping “real life.” Women, in particular, seem troublingly skilled at these particular games of conquest played out on the platforms of mass media.41 In The Inheritors, then, the logic by which the Fourth Dimensionists take over is simply a continuation of media trends already in existence and perpetuated by humanity in three dimensions. The interview, especially, formally encapsulates a more generalized will to discovery and knowledge—­in effect, an imperialist conquest of the interior. When the cataloger in power is a Dimensionist, however, there is no game at all, for the victor triumphs without any need for competitive jostling in communication. By contrast, the interview played out as a game consists of inefficient transmissions: it is a deeply dysfluent media system. In How to Write for the Press: A Practical Handbook for Beginners in Journalism (1899), Arnold Bennett registers an important tension between real-­life speech’s dysfluency and the written interview’s pretense of fluency: The conversational [interview] is probably the most natural, and in some respects it is the most difficult to write; for it requires some deftness in writing dialogue to make it appear as natural and easy running as it should be. It reports, or pretends to report, a leading question by the interviewer, and then sets down in colloquial phrasing the reply of the interviewee, with perhaps a remark as to the apparent mood of the latter in his speaking.42

Bennett’s section on “The Art of Interviewing” takes for granted as natural the curious practice of “writing dialogue” that purports to transcribe the “actual meeting,” yet it signals an awareness that transcription does no such thing. Whether inadvertently or not, Bennett raises the specter of dys-

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fluency: the writer must “pretend to report” fluency to erase all traces of speech that was not “as it should be.” A concern to minimize stiltedness emerges also out of Bennett’s suggestion, later in his account, that it is best that an interviewer refrain from taking shorthand notes during the meeting, in order to relieve the interviewee from any sense of “worry.” In sum, talk’s perceived imperfections require remediation in the print version of the interview, which fulfills the fantasy of fluent, self-­possessed speech through the pretense that it is a mere “report.” If Bennett’s advice is that a journalistic technology must maintain the illusion that self-­possession and fluency are natural, The Inheritors moves in the opposite direction by revealing a more accurate transcript of everyday talk’s messy dysfluency, and the lie that structures any idea of media as extending the proprietary logic of speech. Sovereign speaking subjects are nowhere to be found, in the first place, and the fluencies afforded by print rather emphasize the gap that remediation seeks to obscure. The Inheritors also posits that these technologies are rendering the human body even more dysfluent: again, as Ford theorizes, conversational gaps among Englishmen owe at least in part to the fear that their words may be called to account. Such a view might seem unremarkable in itself, but a bid for its mimetic deployment in fiction is notable: by contrast, for instance, characters in James’s The Reverberator rather gain capacities for greater fluency, as if always aspiring to print media’s perfectible form.43 In other words, Jamesian dialogue suggests that modern media creates media-­savvy subjects that are capable of re-­embodying themselves, in effect, as cyborgs that seamlessly accommodate themselves to virtual and real worlds (however dismayed James’s fiction might be about this new, modern subjectivity). The Inheritors, meanwhile, makes a point of emphasizing the laboriousness by which characters try to generate fluent speech for their publics. Here, for instance, is Granger mocking the popular novelist Callan’s laborious interview talk before a crowd of admirers: “He—­spoke—­very—­slowly—­ and—­very—­authoritatively, like a great actor whose aim is to hold the stage as long as possible” (15). Callan’s direct speech is similarly presented: “  ‘A—­remarkable woman—­used—­to—­l ive—­in—­the—­cottage—­next—­ the—­m ill—­at—­Stelling’  ” (17), or “Photography—­is—­not—­an—­A rt” (18).44 Callan’s pauses, I argue, are at once markers of dysfluent speech and

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telegraphic exchange, signaling that he cannot transcend the dysfluencies of his own body although he may desire a form of fluency associated with the rushing speed of the wireless.45 Incidentally, around the same time that the em dash became an acceptable substitution for ellipsis in literary prose, the International Morse Code standardized the length of the dash in telegraphic communications.46 I read Callan’s dysfluent speech as directly produced by his relation to media technologies because of the ways in which Granger’s descriptions almost always emphasize the popular author’s enmeshment with media objects: the wireless telegraph, the Kodak camera, the typewriter, as well as “every kind of literary knick-­k nack” from book holders to “piles of little green boxes with red capital letters . . . and big red boxes with black small letters” (18–­19). Though Granger describes these objects as actively bending their wills toward helping Callan achieve the “appropriate attitude,” this blurring of lines between subject and objects goes both ways. Granger’s image of Callan amid book holders, boxes of letters, writing lamp, typewriter, and different types of paper in the “small hours of the morning” suggests a man who has become reified by the communication system that disseminates his personality efficiently and wirelessly to the world. Callan’s embodiment enacts a tension between the human body and increasingly efficient communication technologies: breakdowns are imminent not only in his speech but also in his “disconcertingly furtive eyes” while he tries to keep “his face . . . uniformly solemn” (15). Unsurprisingly, the arrival of the Dimensionist woman at Callan’s home confirms Granger’s unflattering impression, as Callan is drawn into chaotic and involuntary disclosure: “She affected reverence for his person, plied him with compliments that he swallowed raw—­horribly raw,” and then he “made little confidences as if in spite of himself; little confidences about the Hour, the new paper for which I was engaged” (24–­25). The moment signals a particular pattern of dysfluent speech: Callan shifts from slow speech that nearly seems blocked by its own regulatory effort into unregulated disclosure, a feature of stuttering’s characteristic alternations between blockage and streams of fluency. None of the Englishmen of the story, least of all Granger himself, is spared such a close look at their respective dysfluencies. I am arguing, ultimately, that the dysfluent white male body serves troublingly as a metonym

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for the downfall of imperialism, contiguous with the media empires that support imperialism’s territorial expansions, both materially and symbolically. Scholars in disability studies have pointed out how dysfluency in a society driven by capitalist values has been regarded primarily as a fixable and individual condition in a manner that consolidates the supposed normality of fluency. In this late nineteenth-­century fiction of empire, I argue that we can see more clearly the entanglement of this kind of politics of class and disability with the intensification of Western imperialism. As characters buckle under the strain of too many media prostheses, The Inheritors suggests, ultimately, that men are not made for such scales of power—­on one level, a surprisingly anticolonial, and antipatriarchal, insight. But such a view still depends on defining dysfluency as failure, rather than, as Joshua St. Pierre has pointed out, a “dialogical” condition “constructed by both a speaker and a hearer.”47 Not only does the narrative regard dysfluency as failure, but its recourse to dystopian science fiction places the dysfluent subject at the center of an apocalyptic schema that renders unthinkable the anticolonial possibilities of anything but fluent speech: if the Englishman cannot speak, then it is the end of the world for all. All that remains is a melancholic, human remnant. Yet, as I will argue, the peculiar gendering of the Fourth Dimension, which Ford and Conrad likely draw from the existing discursive landscape of the Fourth Dimension (observable both in literary works and in popular scientific writing), provides an opening to rethinking the racialization of dysfluency—­and the possibility of dysfluency as an experience unfolding already existing anticolonial and antipatriarchal worlds that populate the novel’s “gaps.” Gender, Fluency, and the Fourth Dimension

In The Inheritors, the Dimensionists are described as unfeeling beings that have transcended not only embodied inefficiencies, such as those of communication, but also moral ones. Granger characterizes them as a “race clear-­sighted” (9), with a “coldness” (37, 78) and “self-­possession” (78, 82) that his limited, three-­d imensional perspective can only begin to perceive. They are, in the political allegory, greater imperialists than the old imperialists, for they do not get bogged down by the hypocritical entanglements

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of violence and liberalism (de Mersch’s Greenland project justifies its “rooting out” of “barbarian” “Esquimaux” for the greater good of a “model protectorate of the world, a place where perfect equality should obtain for all races, all creeds, and all colours” [68]).48 Since the Fourth Dimensionists are postracial and posthuman, the kinds of distinctions and ordering projects that define and occupy the lives of three-­d imensional beings are for them merely games to be played to prepare the way for the inevitable Fourth Dimensionist inheritance of the earth. As a device, the Fourth Dimension enables the broken-­down heroes of the Anglo-­European imperial order to remain human, in effect casting off the possibility of anticolonial human relations into the apocalyptic abyss. Yet gender operates as something of an exception to this logic of transcending human distinctions, despite a certain degree of clarity by which Granger’s pretend “sister” evades the role of lover that he wishes to cast upon her. In the end, when Dimensionist takeover is clear even to Granger, the Dimensionist meets Granger’s protestations of love with the explanation that he is “only the portrait of a man—­of a man who has been dead” and that there is “no bridge” on which they could meet between the planes of their respective dimensions (92–­93). Yet this conversation overall is marked unusually by the Dimensionist’s dysfluency, and in the hesitations of her speech’s dashes and ellipses, we are to trust Granger’s sense that “there was a tension somewhere, a string somewhere that was stretched tight and vibrating” (113). That there is a plausible connection here partially rescues Granger from the role of pathetic, unrequited lover. In another part of the narrative, when Granger intuits a heterosexual intimacy between Gurnard and the Dimensionist woman, his belief is eventually confirmed by the Dimensionist’s confession that she is to marry Gurnard (though, of course, we do not know what “to marry” means to the Dimensionists, since they are translating their more fluent telepathic communication for the understanding of three-­d imensional beings). This gendering of the Dimensionist takeover, as narrated in the first person by a somewhat misogynistic narrator who observes a British world going to pieces, resembles the dynamics that eventually also play out in Ford’s most studied novel, The Good Soldier (1915), which, according to Karen Hoffman, enacts (via American narrator James Dowell) a crisis of masculinity that understands its intersections between imperialism and pa-

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triarchy. As Hoffman notes, The Good Soldier registers “the increasing instability of the gentry system” and its correspondence with anxious territorial consolidations abroad; in The Inheritors, Granger is part of a long line of estate owners (like Edward Ashburnham, the eponymous “good soldier”) but is himself a struggling literary writer (had he not given up his ideals to work for the press).49 In addition, The Inheritors draws discursively from a feminization of so-­called “higher space” that courses through contemporary literary and scientific works alike. This particular context, I argue, affords latent perspectives that we might draw upon to untangle, and even to begin to remake, the racializing assemblages of Ford and Conrad’s novel. Writers including H. G. Wells, Edwin Abbott, George Macdonald, and Charles Howard Hinton wrote scientific romances featuring female characters who possess some form of privileged sensory access to higher dimensions that depends upon their disintegrating embodiments.50 While disintegrating female embodiment is typically a negative marker of volatility and hysteria (especially within the context of medico-­scientific thinking in the 1890s), in at least some of these articulations of disintegration in relation to higher space, gendered embodiment becomes a negative capability that enables not only greater perception, but also crossings into higher dimensions. In Abbott’s Flatland, for instance, where a society of plane beings are sorted into a hierarchical class structure (the greater the number of angles, the higher one’s position), women are merely line segments, but this embodiment specifically affords, in some situations, an advantageous perspective: when, for instance, a male Flatlander observes her head-­on, to him she is a mere point, but she herself knows that she is a line. This confers upon the woman a threatening capacity for near invisibility that, together with her capacity to impale others with her body, renders her especially fearsome within the domain of closed, domestic interiors. Irreducible to binary views of sexual difference, the women of Flatland thus pose a physical as well as an ontological threat, enacting, in effect, a different form of knowing that ruptures boundaries typically policed by patriarchal authority: between materiality and immateriality, self and other, life and death. Like Donna Haraway’s famous cyborg figure of her “Cyborg Manifesto,” a woman in Flatland thrives on “boundary confusions” and “undermines the justifications” for various hegemonic programs, including

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(in Haraway’s list), “patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, and other unlamented-­isms.”51 In “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway specifically questions the way in which “American socialists and feminists” have tended to regard “ ‘high technology’ and scientific culture” with necessarily “deepen[ing] dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism,” and proposes a more radical embrace of “kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”52 The women in Flatland feel proximate to the politics of Haraway’s cyborg insofar as they embody a disintegrative state of being within the patriarchal and classist world in which they live. Meanwhile, the Dimensionist in The Inheritors also shares with Haraway’s cyborg a technologized embodiment, one that is particularly traceable to her speech, which Granger suggestively characterizes as fluent in a similar manner as print and as mechanical as the phonograph: I can’t remember her exact words—­t here were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that appealed to me—­t he commonplace rolling-­down landscape, the straight, white, undulating road that, from the tops of the rises, one saw running for miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering down through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerable skylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recited by a phonograph. (9)

The book and the phonograph function here as comparisons, but the progression of Granger’s description of her speech suggests a material evolutionary process into cyborg bodies that bridges his lower dimension to her higher one. The specificity of speaking like a book, and then a phonograph recitation of writing, and finally “a parody of a scientific work recited by a phonograph” in the unwinding of Granger’s articulations rehearses a developmental history of media. Specifically, Granger’s fumbling around to come up with a proper analogy for her speech neatly traces the phonograph’s development from its initial derivation from writing/print technologies to its use as an aid to print and finally to its independence as a potentially transcendent (because parodic) form of communication.53

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The gendering of higher space in the Victorian context also shares with Haraway’s manifesto a vision of female futurity that leans on the figuring of disintegration-­as-­possibility. A key difference is that disintegration, in the instances of Granger’s perception of the Dimensionist as a cyborg, or Flatland women’s invisibilizing embodiment, is provisional, en route to a higher vision of a more objective and greater whole, whereas Haraway sees in the reassembling potential of cyborg embodiment an infinite horizon for feminist futures. As Deanna Kreisel has argued with regard to the Fourth Dimension, this feminized vision of a greater whole merely serves a male-­centered, “compensatory fantasy” in light of the perceived disintegration of the domestic sphere at the century’s end.54 When Granger is afforded brief sensory experiences of the totality of higher space, he is typically in the presence of the Dimensionist woman. In a singular description near the end of the narrative, her embodiment instantiates a definitive ideal: “She stood motionless, an inscrutable white figure, like some silent Greek statue, a harmony of falling folds of heavy drapery perfectly motionless” (113). In this particular vision, which is supposed to stand for the universal, an “inscrutable” yet perfect figure of white womanhood stands as “motionless” and outside time and space as Keats’s Grecian urn. Against the crumbling colonial order marked in the text as assembled by white Anglo-­European patriarchy, an ostensibly posthuman, postracial, and protean figure of a white woman reinstates a lost sense of wholeness.55 One of the Fourth Dimension’s greatest proselytizers, British mathematician and science fiction writer Charles Henry Hinton, makes frequent recourse to a similar vision of higher space. In his essay “Many Dimensions” (1896), Hinton describes procedures of sensory praxis that might yield to an individual the capacity to perceive the Fourth Dimension firsthand. Hinton was known for devising a system by which one could memorize the shape of various cubes, which would then yield momentary visions of higher space, but in this essay he allowed that there were different ways to “commun[e] with space”—­such as staring beyond the symbolic meaning of print into the material being of type and paper.56 Specifically, while looking at “badly printed paper, reading fearful tales,” “creased tawdry papers  .  .  . with no form in themselves or in their contents,” Hinton embarks on a literal form of “surface reading” that attends to geometric forms in the material of ink

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and paper.57 Here is his description of what emerges, for him, in this practice of looking at geometry: And then I have felt as one would do if the dark waters of a manufacturing town were suddenly to part, and from them, in them, and through them, were to uprise Aphrodite, radiant, undimmed, flashing her way to the blue beyond the smoke; for there, in these crabbed marks and crumpled paper, there, if you but look, is space herself, in all her infinite determinations of form.58

Higher space in Hinton’s utopian vision is Aphrodite arising like a new Moses parting the waters of three dimensions, at once infinite yet determinate, bathed in the radiance of light too difficult to describe by means of the concreteness of (three-­d imensional) print. While the Fourth Dimension heralded new, utopian political futures for Hinton, for the male protagonists of Ford and Conrad’s fictions, the Fourth Dimension meant the end of humanity. Yet what might be at stake, in both, to make recourse to this gendered vision of what is also clearly raced as the eternal formlessness of white womanhood? For one, the shared vision demonstrates the inextricabilities of race and gender, which Haraway’s manifesto ostensibly also makes explicit in the chain of “-­isms” she proliferates in her declarations of how the cyborg body might refigure the assemblages that have worlded our present. At the same time, Haraway’s cyborg also reiterates an imperializing gaze, especially in its operative use of lateral link-­making—­troubling in its flattening, for instance, between historically distinct groups of nonwhite women, such as the Asian factory worker and inmates at a Santa Rita jail. As Alison Kafer has pointedly asked: “are there not differences between the kinds of activities and subjectivities Haraway links here—­protestor and worker, jail and factory, Asia and the United States—­that need exploring? Or, what about the layers of history and assumption that lead to the differences in scale in Haraway’s parallel, a single jail in a town in California versus the much more general, and generalizable, ‘Asia’?”59 Without attending to these distinctions, both figures are in danger of becoming symbolic objects convened by white feminism.60 If we triangulate Haraway’s feminist cyborg with Hinton’s Aphrodite and the Dimensionist of The Inheritors, we can observe three related figures

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that yet depart from one another in telling ways, and which can aid us in unraveling, with greater precision, the protean assemblages that make up the figure of the white woman. To rehearse these relations and departures, first: Hinton’s Aphrodite shares utopian energies with Haraway’s cyborg, but the latter locates disintegration as a capability of feminist embodiment (which may then be infinitely reshuffled into better political relations), whereas the former locates disintegration in the flawed perceptive machinery of the lower dimensional male body. Conrad and Ford’s vision is consequently distinct in its dystopic projections onto female embodiment, but as with Hinton’s vision, the locus of disintegration is actually the male body. What seems uniquely productive in The Inheritors is the novel’s refusal to decide between wholeness (gendered feminine) and disintegration (gendered masculine). The Dimensionist figure leaves male bodies broken in her wake, yet her theoretical wholeness, idealized as she may be in Granger’s momentary, Hintonian vision of her as a Greek statue, is an untenable political alternative because her race evolves beyond humans. Put another way, she arguably mediates a related form of white cosmopolitics as instantiated by Mina Harker’s remediations and collation. The Dimensionist, however, has evolved so far into the technological system that she transcends the woman who manages and collates, and no longer works for the imperial project as we know it. Gender, and not race, therefore, becomes the primary distinction that articulates the new New Imperialism from the old New Imperialism. But the Dimensionist’s merging with technology arguably marks her as whiter than her dysfluent male counterparts. Her fluency, as I have argued, is the product of continuous evolution from forms such as interview talk, where characters like Callan seek, but fail to find, such fluency through technological prostheses. As such, gender enacts—­in reverse—­racialization upon male bodies, since the likes of Granger, Callan, Churchill, or the Duc de Mersch will never be able to produce the white “currents” of her speech. Indeed, even the male Dimensionists of the story, both Gurnard and the Fox, cannot rival her fluency. In particular, Fox, who stands on the other side of the Dimensionist woman because he has let himself feel empathy for humanity, is described as “sibillating” (32), and regularly enters “fits” and spews “gibberish” (131). Spasms, gasps, confusions, sibillating, fits, gibber-

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ish, and more are the endless proliferations of terms that racialize the dysfluent male bodies in the text. Whiteness consequently is able to become the property of cyborg-­like figures who have evolved beyond them, and who are, in fact, whole and seamless beings on the other side of the third dimension.61 This is, of course, how the plasticity of racialization works; how it can always reshuffle its logics to retain what Wynter refers to as race’s “extrahuman ground.” This is a way for whiteness to remain safeguarded as transcendent through the figure of the white woman, whose forms of imperialist power have never really been as legible, given their derivation from and sometimes resistance to logics of colonialist patriarchy. Gender here gives away the game, though, as a remainder that sticks to the novel’s imagining of an otherwise posthuman race: that is, that racial hierarchy must be maintained at all costs, even if it should mean the destruction of patriarchal structures, and of mankind itself. In other words, whiteness tries to get off scot free, through the displacement of colonialism’s conflict onto gender and the adoption of the rather extreme position that if Anglo-­European colonialism as we know it should end, so too will the world. Such logic enables the fantasy that all other possible worlds will be ruled by whiteness, even if at the cost of an apocalyptic rift on gendered lines. *

*

*

But what might we do with the dysfluent, un-­selved, and now also racialized male bodies left behind in the novel’s third dimension? After all, though humanity is vouchsafed to them, they are by no means the superior beings, nor (following Haraway), are they able to motivate disintegration toward a cyborg politics of new, lateral relations. Yet I suggest that these racialized male, dysfluent figures ironically potentiate, from within a text that thematizes unbridgeable gaps of understanding, an emergent anticolonial theory of speech and selfhood refigured around gaps. I suggest that we might read dysfluency not so much as figuring inability to understand a coming form of white, techno-­feminine futurity, but a mimetic approximation of the gaps that constitute what Bhabha alternately reads as the ambivalence of colonial discourse. These gaps, however, need not be imagined as absence or lack that needs filling, or as losses to regard under a postcolonial condition of melancholy. Rather, beyond the idea that ambivalence in the master’s speech en-

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tails heteroglossic conditions, we might think of dysfluent speech’s gaps as pointing toward a different model for speech—­one that recognizes gaps as already pregnant with the many other processes that make up talk, besides the words we speak. What if we were to imagine that what is unthinkable from within existing frameworks of colonial worlding—­what the Fourth Dimension allegorizes in the novel—­is an anticolonial poetics of relation that has always been occurring, and not some utopian or dystopian future to come? Put another way, I am suggesting that anticoloniality occurs not so much in the gaps, but as the gaps—­which are, if we attend (as I argue Meredith does) to the profusion that speech cannot digest, not really gaps at all. The material and disintegrated parts of talk that dysfluency makes so palpable in the novel, therefore, are not valuable just because disintegration makes possible different futures, as Haraway’s cyborg might conceptualize. Talk’s profuse processes of knitting and unknitting are important in themselves as they unfold, because they constitute the vertiginous experience of Babel’s “chaos-­monde,” which, as Glissant suggests, means that the anticolonial is always already occurring and densely populated. To experience the profusion that rather constitutes dysfluency, I am suggesting, is to give our selves over to an experience of talk that leaves off from speech’s imperative of self-­possession. When Granger observes the Dimensionist in conversation with Gurnard and Duc de Mersch, he describes her “self-­possession” as “almost perilous” (62); at the same time, he himself goes through a process of disintegration: “Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—­she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empressé, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine” (62–­63). In this scene of talk, speech itself is excluded, and the observer enters into an altered state of truncated sense perception that—­ without a mind, or thoughts—­sees only “the attitudes of conversation.” In a rather unusual formulation of the male gaze, Granger here is evacuated of content, and reduced to a single body part, which susceptibly takes in impressions produced by other bodies. Un-­selved, Granger for a moment experiences the “perilous” wholeness of another self, occupying the position of a feminized male body that resists the violence of the colonizing other. Sensing only the negative space, grasping the “gaps” in speech rather than

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the meaning it possesses, Granger leaves behind the speaking mind that has historically consolidated power to the likes of himself for a different kind of existence. But by casting this relationship of colonizer and colonized as a battle between genders, The Inheritors itself misses the negative space of racialization that props up this confrontation. The Dimensionist woman wins the game against patriarchy, so that whiteness gets to extend its speech rights indefinitely into whatever form modern media will take next.

Conclusion

The r ea dings in this book have focused mainly on talk as that which late Victorian fictions of empire try—­w ith strenuous disavowal—­to keep at bay, even as speech disintegrates along the seams of colonialist worlds stretched thin. Unauthorized transfers of parroting and eavesdropping strain the proprietary dyad of speech and bodies; multilingual speakers are faulted for having too many languages in them, their gestures too compensatory; the profuse inarticulacy of conquerors is chaotic and embarrassing; dysfluent conquerors signal the end of the world but not the end of coloniality. Throughout this book I have argued that such scenes of disordered speech nonetheless open up into an abyss of talk that may not really be as catastrophic as these fictions imagine. In this conclusion, I offer a brief discussion of how white supremacist aesthetics of speech forged in this moment of uncertain territorialization of empire and media have carried over into the twenty-­fi rst century. There are, evidently, some cozy intimacies between the conditions of speech in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the United States in the first decades of the new millennium, especially amid the rise of social media empires. As also explored in this book, one way that we can track speech’s enduring collusion with proprietorship forged under Western colonialism is by no152

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ticing visceral reactions to moments when speech seems un-­self-­possessed, or when we feel dispossessed of it. Notably, within the public discursive sphere of the US empire at present, free speech—­a protean naturalized right that is also, ostensibly, speech in its most liberatory invocation—­has become something of a lightning rod for strong reactionary feelings, on both the right and the left. In the context of recent antipathy against transgender persons, for instance, Grace Lavery has pointed out how a liberalist free speech defense against restrictive “correctness” is itself constrained by property rights over language. When noting that antipathy to transgender persons in practices of deadnaming and misgendering comes from the perception that transgender “people are forcing others to change the way they are speaking,” Lavery brings attention to the same problems of speech’s proprietary foundations that I have discussed in this book.1 The “paranoid fear that someone else is coming to dispossess us of our language” becomes a pathway by which liberal tolerance enters into a shared game with a fascistic right, and practices that are abusive become conflated with “views” that ought to be aired in the name of democracy.2 Lavery’s point is useful here in illustrating, in a contemporary context, how we can track the persistence of speech’s idealized anchoring in property, and the differential distribution of rights to speech, through affect—­ namely, antipathy.3 In Dracula, we also detect antipathy against the figure of the Count, whose monstrous shapeshifting and refusal to conform to the developing norms of monolingual media’s proprietary politics arguably place him closer to what Lavery identifies in the panicked reaction to transgender bodies. The visceral reactions that this book has focused on, however—­ specifically to disarticulated, un-­self-­possessed speech—­primarily take the form of embarrassment, mockery, intolerance, disgust, or a shrinking away that might make us think of the idiomatic use of “cringe” in the present. What can we uncover, I wonder, by beginning with these kinds of feelings, as they play out in a twenty-­fi rst century that has arguably realized both the Steadian dream of a hegemonic “Angloworld” extended across the globe, and the dystopian apocalypse of Babel in internet form? But first: the stickiness of speech and its proprietary aesthetics after the moment of “crisis” I have been discussing through late Victorian literary examples is succinctly captured in the climactic final scene of the film The

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King’s Speech (2010), which chronicles George VI overcoming his stutter to broadcast, via radio, a speech enjoining the world to fight with Britain against Germany on the brink of World War II. As George VI, played by Colin Firth, takes his place before the microphone, accompanied in the background by the funereal second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, the camera alternates between close-­up shots of the king’s terrified face and his equally nervous inner circle, consisting of his wife and daughters, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. We see Logue and the queen relaxing as he begins, and as Logue coaches him into getting past the word “peoples” as part of his address to “my peoples both at home and across the world,” the camera pans over the switchboards of empire: Jamaica, Kenya, the Leeward Islands. As the king’s speech continues without a hitch, the camera lingers alike on old and young white men at bars, white crowds on street corners, and white aristocratic families in their homes. Near the end, the music crescendos dramatically into a brief but culminating major chord, as the camera pans over the gates of Buckingham Palace, only to quickly return, this time with the full orchestra, to the doom-­fi lled beat of the funeral march. Although the speech ends with the king’s triumphant “we shall prevail,” as the queen sheds a tear and looks to the future Elizabeth II, the musical accompaniment seems to suggest that the British empire is already over. And indeed, what the film generally elides (save for the switchboards), is the coming of decolonization after the war, including the end of British rule over India and violent partition, and Jamaican independence in the final year of George’s reign. By distilling its focus to a clash of imperial powers, and in effect showing that if the colonizer can get ahold of his speech and extend it by means of the radio’s smooth and direct broadcast, then the world will be secured, the film arguably fantasizes a resolution to the problems of disarticulated speech that existed at the turn of the twentieth century. That this film allows for the resolution of colonialist anxiety—­which is tied both to how some characters mock this final Emperor of India’s stuttering, and how his supporters hope to save themselves from feeling embarrassed for him—­while The Inheritors does not bears some relevancy to why we feel that the film is a good piece of art, and the novel, an embarrassing failure. It seems impossible, I will admit, to avoid getting swept up into the immense

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relief of not having to feel embarrassed for this important white man at this important moment—­even knowing what such a myth that sells imperial nostalgia obscures. Given the ease by which video recordings or bits and pieces of recordings get circulated and remixed through social media, we evidently remain a culture with many uncomfortable feelings—­mediated through our endless “takes”—­about self-­possessed and un-­self-­possessed performances of speech by our political leaders. In the introduction, I referenced the confirmation hearings of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court as an insidious instance of how racial logic permeates the adjudication of speech. Again, exceptionalizing a Black woman for her poise and articulacy operates by means of a logic similar to that by which Locke’s parrot consolidates that this kind of poised, articulate speech ultimately belongs, safely, to white male colonizers. Here, I want to contrast Justice Jackson’s behavior with that of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his famously unpoised performance during his Senate confirmation hearings, in order to further parse the ways in which liberal culture manages embarrassment in the context, in this instance, of a deeply unsympathetic white male leader. As he fought back angry tears while denying Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault, it is of no surprise that he weaponized a Lockeian defense of consistently conscious selfhood: “It is not who I am, it is not who I was.” In a reaction-­piece for the New Yorker in the immediate aftermath of Kavanaugh’s un-­self-­possessed speech, Michael Lista offered the “take” that Kavanaugh’s tears were embarrassing not because of the crying, but because the crying had to do with a loss of privilege/property/power on the part of a member of a group that had typically been guaranteed these things at least since the beginnings of the American republic. Citing the robust and longstanding tradition of the Western man of feeling, Lista claimed that it was not Kavanaugh’s lack of self-­possession (performed or otherwise) that was embarrassing, but rather his “crybaby” antics: that is, not the tears, but that they were attributable to a white conqueror not getting what he had historically had vouchsafed to him. In the twenty-­fi rst century, Lista concluded that the “woke” white man ought to be stoic.4 But this “take”—­as expressed by Lista—­seems to suggest that the liberal visceral reaction also takes the form of embarrassment for Kavanaugh. Is

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such feeling not inextricable, given the claims in this book, from a racialized colonialist aesthetics that has also tried, historically, to maintain privilege and property to Kavanaugh-­l ike embodiments? In my mind, even a mockery of Kavanaugh’s un-­self-­possessed tears has a hard time entirely steering away from a fear of dissolving speech into the abyss of talk that is white supremacist in its aesthetic premise. Part of what is embarrassing about Kavanaugh, made more obvious in former president Donald Trump’s equal intolerance for his tears, is that he is not behaving like a property-­owning, white man of the ruling class. Trump, certainly, would not be embarrassed for Jackson had she “lost” her self-­possession as Kavanaugh did, though he surely would have mocked her. But I perceive some unfortunate intimacies between the various shades of mockery and embarrassment about un-­self-­ possessed speech on the left and on the right. On the left, a mockery of Kavanaugh’s un-­self-­possessed tears may be gleeful, and our embarrassment, were a progressive leader of a minoritized group to similarly stumble, would be unhappy, but both feelings share with a rightist embarrassment for Kavanaugh and mockery of this hypothetical progressive leader, the Lockeian premise that personhood takes shape through an Anglo-­Saxonist proprietary aesthetic of speech. It might be said that Anglo-­A merican speech finds itself, once again, in crisis—­w ith our culture’s almost obsessive inability to look away from the un-­self-­possessed moments of its leading white men: not just Kavanaugh, but Trump, and now, Joseph Biden, also a known stutterer whose frequent gaffes have often been narrativized as cognitive decline. Meanwhile, social media have sped up our responses to such scenes of disordered speech. As Jared Marcel Pollen has recently pointed out, there is an “unceasing tendency toward narrativization” by all of us, en masse, through the speedy channels of a platform like Twitter.5 As a novelist, Pollen’s central question is: what happens to literature and literary form in such times? Referencing Stéphane Mallarmé’s sense that “literature would become more like the news—­f ragmented, polyphonic, democratic” in order to compete with periodicals in the late nineteenth century, Pollen notes that the speed-­up of the present poses even more of a challenge for literary arts. What becomes of literature, asks Pollen, extending Mallarmé’s concerns from an earlier moment into our present, in a culture oversaturated by narrative in the form

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of “updates and incorporations—­the master pattern that is being configured and reconfigured by all of us, all the time, every minute of every day”?6 The fictions of empire at the center of this book might answer: it is the end of literature, and the end of the world. But recall, from my discussion of Dracula, that Glissant has a different answer to the version of this question as presented by Mallarmé and other modernist writers in the Western canon. Giving us a perspective from the 1990s, Glissant says that poetics is not threatened by the computer’s “code totality,” though its “instantaneity” might make poetry’s epiphanic “flash” seem ordinary. What computers cannot rival, according to Glissant, is “multilingual scintillation,” which I take to mean all kinds of difference, not just of language strictly, but something like talk’s poetics in all of its dispossessed, un-­self-­possessed, and chaotic figurings and refigurings. Glissant suggests that literature need not be restricted by the goal of keeping up or summing up, nor should literature mourn the failure to do so. Poetics need not speak its ownership—­a colonialist limitation—­in any context, whether literature, media, or everyday scenes of communication. In closing, I pause to briefly consider what we can learn from what the late Victorian fictions in this book disavow—­namely, the anticolonial poetics of talk—­about the surround of everyday communication. We could observe that the unauthorized transfers of speech that seem threateningly natural in Stevenson’s adventure romance form most of our mundane interactions with one another. That is to say, we constantly mediate speech that is not our own or ours to receive, whether in real life or online (when we recirculate or remix words, images, audio, or videos on social media, we could say that parroting and eavesdropping are mainstream). Meanwhile, we might remind ourselves that the condition of being multilingual is not a failure of storage or broken transmission, as Stoker’s Jonathan Harker might think, but a differently oriented experience with its own possibilities. We could, for instance, try to tolerate, and even begin to value, the disorientation of trying to speak a language that we do not feel “at home” in. Then, we might begin to feel more than a pitying form of empathy, or embarrassment, for the “nonnative” English speaker who appears to be “struggling” in our English-­only classrooms, and from there to refigure the poetics of our classrooms toward shared anticolonial futures. We are, as Meredith’s character

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Skepsey embodies, always “in motion” at the level of the infinite, minute interchanges of the body and mind with and between themselves, and with others and the environments that meanwhile enter into these interchanges. These infinitudes disarticulate us, render us inarticulate, un-­selve us. As we know from Conrad and Ford, the perfect fluency of speech is just a fever dream of imperialists. Thus, talk ought not to be the negative space against which self-­possessed speakers emerge as consistent and singular persons, but a universally vertiginous experience through which even privileged Anglo-­A merican subjects might begin to see that we are all, in fact, collectively made and changeable persons made and unmade through communication. This does not mean, of course, that anything goes or that we are all some idealized, imprecise collective being. Rather, relation involves a strenuous negotiation of where we stand with respect to others, at any given moment (though that “where” is always shifting)—­yet without losing a sense of what Butler calls the “condensed historicity” of any utterance.7 At the very least, I am suggesting we try to orient ourselves toward the sense of such vertiginous conditions as entirely ordinary rather than as part of a Manichean allegory of good vs. evil, our selfhood vs. the abyss. The point, in other words, is not that the white man’s speech is authorial because of its capacity to pronounce that the darkness consigned to Africa is also in England (“this also has been one of the dark places on earth”); rather it is just that he also merely talks. As scholars and students of literature—­closely attuned, as many of us are, to articulation, precision, and control both in the aesthetics of writing and practices of citation and attribution—­we are not very used to thinking about what it truly means to be mediated by others, to be subject to changes in and outside ourselves, even at the scale of an everyday exchange. The apparent indignities of being subject to such changes to our articulacy as speakers and subjects can feel disorienting in the most seemingly inconsequential, everyday interactions. At an academic conference, for instance, disorientation might follow furtive glances exchanged after scanning one another’s nametags; eavesdropping on a bit of talk not meant for you; realizing that the person you passed on talking to probably noticed, or that maybe you were the one passed; producing a dysfluent “spiel” for your dissertation or book. All of this is the surround of talk into which the articulate presen-

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tation or pointed question dissolves, and yet we continue to defend the ideal of speech as if the rest of it were not occurring and did not matter. Although these are scenes of interaction within a very small circuit of interlocutors, I invoke them here because they crystallize in miniature how visceral it has become, in such spaces and many others, for any one of us to want to restore articulacy and self-­possession, at the expense, however, of not only consigning a great many others who cannot participate in such spaces to an abyss of talk, but also limiting our own capacities for engaging with one another.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Édouard Glissant’s section on errantry and exile begins with an open reference to Deleuze and Guattari: “rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997], 11). 2. Glissant’s approach to relation and contingent selfhood in a world indelibly changed by Western colonialism is also resonant in Alicia Mireles Christoff’s readings of novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 3. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 20–­21; Betsy Wing, “Introduction,” in Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xvi. 4. For an interesting defense of not-­k nowing as a form of tact, see David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), who argues that tact resists the “exploitative knowing” of free market liberalism, and may be traceable to a lineage of essayists from Charles Lamb to Walter Pater (2). 5. Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes toward a Deciphering Practice,” in Mbye B. Cham, ed., Ex-­iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 237–­79. 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), 275. 161

162 Notes to the Introduction

7. E. A. W. St. George, Browning and Conversation (London: Macmillan, 1993), 30. 8. For a study of conversational culture in relation to periodical culture from the 1760s to the 1830s, see Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–­1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9. Rosetta Young, “Big Talk: The Nineteenth-­Century Anglo-­A merican Novel and the Rise of the Upper Middle Class,” PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2019. Young’s argument includes a fascinating revision, through the tracing of this fantastical economic quality to dexterous speech, of traditional views of the realist novel and its separation from late nineteenth-­century romance. 10. Roger Boswell, The Art of Conversation (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1867), 23. 11. J. P. Mahaffy, The Principles of the Art of Conversation (New York: Macmillan, 1887), 2. 12. Andrea Kaston Tange, Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature and the Victorian Middle Classes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), has brought emphasis to domestic architectures of the Victorian home as metonymic resources for self-­making; I add here that we might view these spaces as further emplaced through the activity of (proper) conversation as forms of speech only possessable by, and transferable to, some bodies. 13. Charles Lunn’s preface to the second edition of The Philosophy of Voice (London: Balliere, Tindall & Cox, 1875), an elocution manual that found a crossover audience in a more popular realm, offers some self-­conscious remarks about the technicality of the physiological descriptions of voice production. 14. Stanley M. Bligh, The Ability to Converse (London: Henry Frowde/Oxford University Press, 1912), v. 15. Mahaffy, Principles, 4–­5. 16. [Jane Francesca Wilde], Social Studies (London: Ward & Downey, 1893), 58. 17. How to Shine in Society; Or, The Art of Conversation (Glasgow: George Watson, 1860), 22. 18. I am thinking in particular of Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012) and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015). 19. Boswell, Art of Conversation, 30. 20. Mahaffy, Principles, 107. 21. Mahaffy, Principles, 30. 22. See Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 23. Aaron Worth’s Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–­1918 (Columbus: Ohio State Univer-

Notes to the Introduction 163

sity Press, 2014), is a notable exception. As Worth remarks in the introduction to his work, “ ‘the imperial network’ may have joined ‘the imperial archive’ as a convenient critical commonplace, but recent studies of nineteenth-­century information technologies have, by and large, kept the colonial world at the margins” (6). For a broad-­ranging history of the role of Western technology in Western imperialism, see Daniel Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 24. Mahaffy, Principles, 1. 25. See Rei Terada, “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals,” Radical Philosophy 205 (Autumn 2019): 11–­22. Terada further develops the ideas in this essay in her book, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2023). 26. See especially Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243–­61; Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); and essays in Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 27. In Conversation: Why Don’t We Do More Good By It? (1886), George Seaton Bowes criticizes this general tendency in conversation manuals to focus on classifying its negative forms, indicating that the practice may have been somewhat controversial. See Henry Hitchings, Sorry! The English and Their Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), 247. 28. “The Art of Chatter,” The Speaker, 2 December 1899, 243. 29. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 333–­34. 30. Locke, Essay Concerning, 340. 31. Locke, Essay Concerning, 341. 32. John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 33. Locke, Essay Concerning, 402. 34. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme,” in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 90–­105, on this crucial distinction between Foucault’s mapping in The Order of Things and Wynter’s genealogy of Man. 35. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—­A n Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 264. The shock, Wynter argues, of encountering

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people who were, in fact, inhabiting the supposedly uninhabitable “Torrid Zone” of the earth launched a decisive shift toward modern racialization (280). 36. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 315–­17. 37. Wynter, “Unsettling.” 38. According to Jackson, “ ‘the animal’ is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass,” and the racialization of blackness is, in fact, characterized by an extraordinary “plasticity . . . a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially ‘everything and nothing’ at the register of ontology” (Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World [New York: NYU Press, 2020], 3). 39. Jackson, Becoming Human, 146. 40. Jackson, Becoming Human, 144. 41. Jackson, Becoming Human, 145. 42. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, argues that the education of Indian subjects in English literature throughout the nineteenth century as a matter of colonial management must be understood as crucial to the production of English literary study as a discipline, while Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), offers an important counterpoint to hegemonic imperial discursivity in her account of the “indigenization” of the English novel in nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Indian writing. Brantlinger’s work includes Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–­1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–­1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 43. Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals, includes a chapter on mimicry and “going native.” On the mimicry of white Europeans captured in colonial locations, including India, North Africa, and Afghanistan, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–­1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 44. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Macaulay’s Speeches: A Selection (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 258. As Macaulay further notes, English—­i n competition with other Western languages—­was easily superior in its “ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations” (350). 45. I think this genealogy is well substantiated by reading Wynter and Peters together; as well as Duncan Bell’s trilogy on discursive formations of imperial federation, liberalism, and empire, and most recently—­a nd most pertinent to the ge-

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nealogy of speech I am positing here—­the development of an “Angloworld” political imaginary during the late nineteenth century. Jed Esty, The Future of Decline: Anglo-­A merican Culture at Its Limits (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), also sheds light on shared cultures of “superpower nostalgia” in declinist thinking in Britain and the United States. 46. On English Language Learner (ELL) stereotypes, I draw in part from my own experience as a public school teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) at a middle school in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, serving primarily low-­i ncome immigrant students from different parts of Latin America and China. At the time, students problematically classified as “Limited English Proficient” (LEP) were tracked into my classroom for the core subjects of math and English language arts; when mainstreamed into other content areas as part of a more progressive move toward integrated language learning, the perception was common that they were not getting anything out of their experience in the integrated classroom. Meanwhile, content-­a rea teachers had not been offered any pedagogical support on integrated language learning, and were encouraged to set up ELL students with remedial worksheets and rote language-­learning programs. In a 2014 report from the Council of the Great City Schools that advocates for a more progressive curriculum for ELLs through “raising expectations” and “instructional rigor,” I am struck by the way in which the recommendations for dedicated time for targeted English learning relies on a binaristic understanding of how “elements that are already typically known to native English speakers . . . must be systematically developed by ELLs,” despite ongoing and robust debates in linguistics that have not resolved questions of generativist vs. constructivist language learning in either L1 (first language) or L2 (second language) learners (A Framework for Raising Expectations and Instructional Rigor for English Language Learners [Washington, DC: Council of the Great City Schools, August 2014], 6). On public perceptions of Black leaders and public mockery of Asian accents, there are unfortunately numerous incidents from which we might draw. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s performance at the Senate confirmation hearings for her appointment to the US Supreme Court specifically drew comments on her “poise” from Ted Cruz and Joseph Biden alike, in a manner that harmfully suggests a racialized exceptionality; a quick Google search will readily bring up videos of former president Donald J. Trump mocking Asian speakers of English from 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019. 47. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Massachusetts Review 57, no. 1 (2016): 14–­27. 48. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1969–­1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 108. As Brantlinger has pointed out, as part of a critique of Trilling’s appreciation of this authenticity, the novel’s overall sense that Kurtz (like Conrad himself) is “an artist, a ‘universal

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genius,’ and a quite powerful eloquent ‘voice’ as well,” severely limits any critique of imperialist atrocities in the Congo (Rule of Darkness, 271). 49. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. John G. Peters (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2018), 134. 50. Two recent books in Victorian studies and the political aesthetics of empire also motivate “poetics” in a similar manner: Nathan Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Nasser Mufti, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 51. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 134. 52. Anjali Prabhu, “Interrogating Hybridity: Subaltern Agency and Totality in Postcolonial Theory,” Diacritics 35, no. 2 (2005): 76–­92, clarifies an important distinction between how Glissant conceptualizes dialectical relations, as opposed to Homi K. Bhabha on hybdridity, situating Glissant’s reach toward a posited totality within a Marxian utopic mode, which he also revises through a “refusal to abandon radical difference” (82). For Glissant, this draws from the “disjunctive experience . . . of the Caribbean world-­v iew, whereas for Bhabha, it is the hybrid that, when sought out, can disrupt what is otherwise known and knowable in a linear modality” (88). 53. Jakobson gives more and less obvious examples of the aesthetics of a nonliterary language: less obvious, the sense that “Joan and Margery” rather than “Margery and Joan” “sounds smoother”; more obvious, the effectiveness of the political slogan, “I like Ike.” See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds., Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 70. 54. S. I. Salamensky, “Dangerous Talk: Phenomenology, Performativity, and Cultural Crisis,” in Salamensky, ed., Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16. 55. Husserl introduces the concept of the “life-­world” to carve out phenomenology as a discipline to complement the objective sciences, pointing out that “objective science itself belongs to the life-­world,” including “its theories, the logical constructs.” Though these are “not things in the life-­world like stones, houses, or trees,” they are nonetheless continuous with such things as “human formations” that depend on the given of the life-­world for their construction. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophies, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 130. 56. Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 3. 57. See Goffman’s introduction for his remarks on being a “microanalyst of interaction” and the attendant difficulties of such a project of “pinning with our ten

Notes to the Introduction 167

thumbs what ought to be secured with a needle” (Goffman, Forms of Talk, 2); see his first chapter on “response cries”; his second chapter on “footing”; and for “delicts,” passim, but especially the section on response and apologizing for “delicts.” 58. Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 61. 59. I am thinking, in particular, of Christoff’s readings of Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 60. See “Discourse in the Novel,” in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 292. 61. Here, I see a homology between my argument about talk and Annabel Kim’s about excrement in Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which sees in modern French literature’s preoccupations with excrement a material and universal leveling potential that fulfills what is not fulfilled in the liberal ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. 62. In Of Grammatology, Derrida reads against a “metaphysics of presence” that he variously identifies in work by figures including Plato, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Claude Lévi-­Strauss, each of whom privileges speech as primary and writing as secondary. In his section, from Part II, on “Nature, Culture, and Writing,” discussing Lévi-­Strauss, Derrida deliberately reads against the anthropologist’s notion of “the proper name,” which he has mistakenly regarded “as the unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being”; rather, as Derrida argues, “all societies capable of producing . . . their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general,” revealing the “always already” nature of writing in speech. In linking Lévi-­Strauss’s misperception to his “ethnocentric oneirism,” Derrida brings light to the same chain of significations (proper-­property-­proprietary, and so on) that I am interested in, as well, in the colonial fictions that disarticulate them (see the subsection of “The Violence of the Letter” called “The Battle of Proper Names,” in Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 109). 63. George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors, ed. Margaret Harris (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 10. 64. Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) connects a singular speaker’s (for instance, an actor’s) “aura” to his immediate presence: “there can be no replica of it” (in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 1968], 229). I see the Benjaminian notion of an aura (ascribed to persons or to original works of art), which becomes attenuated in mechanical reproductions like photography, as part

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of the idealization of speech’s claims to original ownership and control. By contrast, the “presencing” of Radnor under Meredith’s treatment is that of a body’s too-­embodied and awkward losses of control. 65. Notably, many contemporary critics expressed their disapproval of “prolixity” in Meredith’s prose, and held that the style of his writing seemed too much like badly controlled speech: inarticulacy, as Wilde would put it (though as praise), or, as Margaret Oliphant would describe The Egoist, “an everlasting flood of weak and washy talk.” Margaret Oliphant, review of The Egoist, in “New Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 128 (September 1880): 404. 66. Austin’s famous delineation of two kinds of speech acts characterizes illocutionary force as enacting what it says in the moment of its utterance, and perlocutionary force as producing certain effects in the wake of an utterance. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 67. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 68. Butler, Excitable Speech, 82. 69. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin also holds that “it is precisely the individuality of the speaking subject that is recognized to be that style-­generating factor transforming a phenomenon of language and linguistics into a stylistic unity” (262). 70. Butler, Excitable Speech, 82. 71. Spivak, “Subaltern,” 275. 72. According to Spivak, the European intellectual becomes transparent because he is neither the Subject “irreducibly presupposed by” their analysis of “power and desire,” nor the subaltern who ought not to be spoken for by the theorist (“Subaltern,” 279). Reading a slippage when Deleuze says that “the person who speaks and acts  .  .  . is always a multiplicity” and therefore he cannot represent “those who act and struggle,” Spivak pointedly asks, “Are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak?” (275). 73. Spivak concludes, famously, that the subaltern cannot speak, because she disappears between two “interlocking” dialectical articulations: either “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (patriarchal imperialist fantasy) or “The women actually wanted to die” (Western feminist projection) (“Subaltern,” 92–­93). 74. Spivak, “Subaltern,” 271, my emphasis. 75. See Tim Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–­1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); in the latter, Glissant is a central figure in Watson’s account of

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a post–­World War II “literary turn” in anthropology. See Nasser Mufti, “Hating Victorian Studies Properly,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 3, special issue on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (2020): 392–­405. Historian Catherine Hall’s work on race and anti-­Blackness in how Baptist missionaries regarded African Jamaicans in the several decades running up to the Morant Bay Rebellion is also important to mention here; see Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–­1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 76. See Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of Jamesian Poiesis,” in Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds., C. L. R. James’s Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 63–­91. 77. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 280. 78. As I will also register where relevant in the following chapters, that Stevenson, Stoker, and Conrad occupy linguistic and cultural positions alienated from standardized, hegemonic English and Englishness intersects with their particular sensitivities to speech, ownership, and the language of empire. 79. Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 16. 80. Worth, Imperial Media, 4. 81. W. T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review 19 (1886): 654. 82. Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-­America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 34, notes that the term “English-­ speaking peoples” “invoked an alternative conception of the racial polity” in the late nineteenth century. See also Bell’s third chapter, “Americanizing the World: W. T. Stead and Cecil J. Rhodes,” 100–­151. 83. Tanya Agathocleous, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 121. 84. Agathocleous, Disaffected, 124. 85. Bell, Dreamworlds, 38. 86. Reading Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), for instance, Worth elucidates two different models of imperial enthusiasm and anxiety. Worth argues that Corelli’s Romance imagines a limitless Christian empire that draws on both electric technologies and submarine telegraphy; Haggard’s She, meanwhile, draws on early cinematic technology to explore media extension and storage as capacities for imperial power, both the “primitive” form of Ayesha’s capacity to project photographic images onto water, and Western photography and cinema (Imperial Media, 36–­59). 87. To be fair, for Marshall McLuhan, who coined this phrase, the supposed progression he maps from orality to print to the electric age is far bumpier. McLuhan’s impact on media history will be further examined in chapter 2.

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88. Noah Smith, “Interview: Marc Andreesen, VC and Tech Pioneer,” Substack, 12 June 2021, http:​/​​/​noahpinion​.substack​.com​/​p​/​i nterview​-marc​-andreesen​ -vc​-and​?​c urator​=​MediaREDEF. 89. Talk, as I am defining it—­a negative space against which speech emerges—­no doubt troubles this Athenian imaginary even in a space that is invitation-­ only, as Clubhouse has been; the kind of norms and affect policing (“Clubhouse is a thoughtful and generous place”) do as much to reveal the anxieties about what it unspeakably defends against as to regulate its “positive” uses. See www​.clubhouse​ .com for the various framings of its affective norms. Related apps like Discord, more popular and not invitation-­only, have become the center of debates about the regulation of speech and harm, in the wake of hate groups convening on such platforms. 90. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1, vividly offer up a sense of this unruly diversity, with the following list, ranging “from the kaleidoscope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, and kinetoscope to the stereograph, photograph, telegraph, typewriter, player piano, telephone, phonograph, and early film.” 91. See Ivan Kreilkamp’s reading of the “phonographic logic” of Kurtz’s final pronouncements, which ultimately questions the efficacy of the storyteller’s last words in the modern world. Not yet entirely obsolete, as Walter Benjamin claims, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the status of the storyteller in Conrad’s novel is indeterminate: “In this Edison-­haunted, electrical text . . . the power of [Kurtz] is inextricable from an uncanny verbal ability that vacillates between presence and absence, distance and terrifying clarity. This is also the vacillation of the phonograph.” Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 201. 92. See Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), on the proliferation of print ephemera (maps, panoramas, for instance) for imagining virtual travel and the impact of this sense of virtuality on realism. See John Plotz, Semi-­Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), for an account of a “perennial residence in a state of mental quasi-­ abstraction” that resounds into our present having begun with the Victorian era (3). Meanwhile, I have also found Dickens a useful figure for registering shifts in Victorian print media, especially when it comes to theorizing the effects of print on human embodiment. His period of fame—­stretching from before the widespread use of the steam press until after its adoption—­a nd his continuous engagement with journalism and management of periodicals render him an important reference point in imagining the human impact of print’s scaling upward in the 1860s. To take just one evocative example, in one of his semi-­autobiographical “Uncom-

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mercial Traveller” essays (All the Year Round, August 1860), Dickens jokes that his “first large circulation” was when he “printed” himself by moving from one dirty piece of furniture to another in a chamber at Gray’s Inn—­suggesting a certain unease with print’s disembodying, severing effects. See Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. Daniel Tyler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13. 93. Susan Zieger, “Tobacco Papers, Holmes’s Pipe, Cigarette Cards, and Information Addiction,” in Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 54–­86. 94. Zieger, Mediated Mind, 78. 95. See Richard Menke, Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies 1880–­ 1900: Many Inventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9. In making this argument about the human body, I am also thinking of what Josef Vogl has similarly argued, with the telescope as his example, in which technology “denatures” embodiment as much as it is imagined to extend it: the view afforded by the telescope fragments the eye into an imperfect optic instrument. See Vogl, “Becoming-­Media: Galileo’s Telescope,” trans. Brian Hanrahan, Grey Room 29 (2007): 14–­25. 96. See Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). I see the sense of orality in the eighteenth century that McDowell discusses as part of a continuous genealogy that moves through the nineteenth century into the development of the orality and literacy school in the mid-­t wentieth century. Predecessors of Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, after all, included anthropologists like Jack Goody and Edmund Carpenter, who delineated evolutionary perspectives on media and literacy premised on racist views of tribal Africa set against a civilized (if fallen) Europe through ethnographic research. 97. McDowell, Invention, 4. 98. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 14. 99. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 47. 100. Peters, Courting the Abyss, 1. 101. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Talk and Talkers,” in Stevenson, Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 150. Chapter One Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Amy R. Wong, “The Poetics of Talk in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–­1900 54, no. 4 (2014): 901–­22. Reproduced with permission. 1. See Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), on a form of imperial boyhood that would progress into a

172 Notes to Chapter One

romanticized, militaristic Victorian masculinity defined against the weakness of effeminate, savage darker races. 2. Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie Holm, “Introduction,” in GoGwilt and Holm, eds., Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 4. See Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). 3. To be sure, the parrot’s longer literary history, especially stretching back from the nineteenth century, has rendered it a productive figure for thinking different models for sociality and selfhood. For instance, see Manushag Powell on two eighteenth-­century periodicals created by women (one anonymous, and one by Eliza Haywood) that reappropriated the figure’s feminized associations with transgression, promiscuity, and excess to “voice risky political positions” (Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-­Century Periodicals [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012], 172). Holm’s reading of Defoe’s Poll argues that the parrot’s avian sympathy (“Poor Robin Crusoe!”) rather breaks from eighteenth-­century concerns about intersubjectivity, knowing, and authenticity, and toward a valuation of aesthetics and form (“ ‘O Friends, There Are No Friends’: The Aesthetics of Avian Sympathy in Defoe and Sterne,” in GoGwilt and Holm, eds., Mocking Bird Technologies, 23–­37). Sarah Kay’s account of medieval troubadour genealogies argues that the parrot has long encoded a mimetic alternative to lyric originality that “enables subjective renewal and hence, potentially, subjective change” (Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013], 23). 4. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 93, 102. 5. See, for instance, Robert P. Irvine on “Romance and Social Class,” in Penny Fielding, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 27–­40; Christopher Parkes on the significance of the British Civil Service to Treasure Island and Stevenson’s patrilineal family connections to civil engineering (“Treasure Island and the Romance of the British Civil Service,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 31, no. 4 [2006]: 332–­450); Naomi J. Wood on Treasure Island as a “romance of money” negotiating between the gold standard and silver’s inflation and ample supply as beneficial to the common man (“Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure Island and the Romance of Money,” Children’s Literature 26 (1998): 61–­85). 6. Owning land, for Locke, becomes a natural right through one’s labor to instrumentalize it with efficient use: “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property” (Two Treatises on Government; Second Treatise, ed. Peter Laslett [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 290).

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7. See Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 31–­35. As Lesjak demonstrates, the Lockean metric that God gave land over to “the use of the industrious and rational” became an important means of justifying not only enclosure but also “European colonial and imperial projects more generally” (31). 8. Lesjak, Afterlife, 31. 9. Glenda Norquay, Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007). 10. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 92–­95. 11. Alessandro Duranti, for instance, characterizes the development of linguistic anthropology as an attempt to study language as “forms in relation” rather than “forms in isolation,” departing from linguistics in the 1960s: “Linguistic Anthropology: History, Ideas, and Issues,” in Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 5. 12. Michael Silverstein, “The Voice of Jacob: Entextualization, Contextualization, and Identity,” ELH 81, no. 2 (2014): 514. Like Goffman, Silverstein is interested in trying to specify thick, “nonreferential indexes” that accompany “verbal signage” in any interaction, which might “code sociological relations of personae in the speech situation”—­for instance, relative social status as measured by any given metric between the “personae,” as described in “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description,” in Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, eds., Meaning in Anthropology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 32. 13. Stevenson, “Talk and Talkers,” in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 56–­57. 14. Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 151. 15. Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 56, emphasis added. 16. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 56. 17. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 14. 18. Betsy Wing, “Introduction,” in Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xvi. 19. See, for instance, Stephen J. Arata, “Stevenson, Morris, and the Value of Idleness,” in Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, eds., Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). 20. Many critics have noted the constructedness and fictions of this origin story, not to mention the necessarily fictive nature of memory (see, for instance, John Sutherland’s introduction to the Broadview edition [Toronto: Broadview Press, 2012]). Who drew the map (Stevenson or Osbourne, for instance) is one

174 Notes to Chapter One

such point of contention. For my purposes this debate is of less importance; I read Stevenson’s essay for what it can tell us about his longstanding interest in orality, talk, and modern media. 21. Fanny Stevenson, Stevenson’s wife, was also at Braemar, but Stevenson doesn’t include her in the account of Treasure Island’s composition, though he does mention collaborating with her on a volume of “bogie stories” in another context, while they lived at Kinnaird with his parents. Her absence from the Braemar collaboration on Treasure Island perhaps creates safer conditions for unraveling patriarchal and colonialist constraints (that is, as part of boys at play). 22. Barbara Korte, “Against Busyness: Idling in Victorian and Contemporary Travel Writing,” in Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi, eds., Idleness, Indolence, and Leisure in English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 215–­34. 23. The kind of slowness described here is not unlike the purportedly anticapitalist “slow” movements of the present—­slow food, slow media, even slow professoring, for instance. 24. Arata, “Stevenson, Morris,” 6. 25. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (Waterloo, IA: U.S.C. Publishing Co., 1914), 15. 26. See Stevenson’s “Apology for Idlers,” in Virginibus Puerisque (New York: Scribner, 1887), 114. Stevenson’s idle talk, however, also takes some cues from contemporary discussions of conversation: there are clear resonances, for instance, with J. P. Mahaffy’s preference for “the natural, easy flow of talk” and “following the chances of the moment, drifting with the temper of the company” (Principles of the Art of Conversation, 4–­5; see also discussion in my introduction, above). 27. Stevenson, “My First Book,” The Idler 6 (August 1894): 6. 28. Stevenson’s late-­i n-­l ife collaborations with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne on The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-­Tide (1894) are especially well known; Stevenson also wrote three plays with W. E. Henley, Deacon Brodie (1880), Beau Austin (1884), and Admiral Guinea (1885). See Victoria Ford Smith, “Family Dynamics: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne,” in Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017), 92–­141. 29. Sociolinguistic approaches that attend to “talk-­i n-­i nteraction” often regard storytelling as a form of conversation. In the practice of “conversation analysis” (developed by Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schlegoff, whose work departed from speech act theorists and linguists to revalue everyday talk as worthy of close, systematic study), recipients of a story by their presence are active participants even when they may not be sharing equal space in utterance. According to Charles Goodwin and John Heritage, stories are, first and foremost, “modes of action situated within interaction” (“Conversation Analysis,” Annual Review of Anthropology

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19 [1990]: 284). See also Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capp, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), on co-­ construction and co-­narration involved in everyday conversation. 30. Stevenson, “My First Book,” 7. 31. Ironically, Alexander Japp once likened Stevenson’s presence to Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner . . . [who] could fix you with his glittering e’e, an he would, as he points his sentences with a movement of his thin, white finger,” in “Robert Louis Stevenson,” Argosy 59 (February 1895): 232. 32. One of the more fictive moments in “My First Book”—­see Sutherland’s introduction to the Broadview edition on Stevenson’s plans for Treasure Island, worked out in advance with James Henderson, the editor at Young Folks for which Japp was a scout. 33. Stevenson, “My First Book,” 8. 34. Stevenson, “My First Book,” 8, emphasis added. 35. Monica F. Cohen, Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-­ Century Popular Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 2–­3. Cohen’s chapter on Treasure Island also explores Stevenson’s use of stage conventions—­a ligned with the literariness and “citational effect” of pirates, who had receded from the historical scene by the late nineteenth century—­to characterize his pirates. Their speech, which employs lots of imitation and the conventions of “eye dialect,” Cohen notes, functions through a certain campiness. 36. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, ed. John Sutherland (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2012), 45. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically within the text. 37. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 38. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Instabilities in Our Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 14. 39. In thinking capaciously about coloniality, I have in mind, again, the work of Sylvia Wynter, whose corrections to and extensions of Foucauldian epistemic concerns are important for British literary studies, despite a belated recognition of Wynter’s interventions in these contexts. In chapter 2, we will see Count Dracula trying to transcend the giveaways of mimicry assigned to the colonized subject—­ his too-­g rammatical English, learned from books. Again, the right to speech, in my reading of Treasure Island, offers one particular site from which we can begin to attend, with some precision, the various shapes that racism’s protean qualities took on under late nineteenth-­century British imperialism. 40. Bones’s coordination of this chorus may also be thought of as a scene of parroting; I describe this scene as zombification, however, to contrast the way in which the narrative later distinguishes between a pleasant, potentially even sanc-

176 Notes to Chapter One

tioned, form of parroting that Silver practices, and a fearful form of forced ventriloquizing. Though ultimately, this distinction might not even hold in the text. 41. In “Talk and Talkers,” Stevenson calls print “found, wooden dogmatisms” (145). 42. Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 37. 43. Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 26, emphasis added. 44. Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 36. 45. At the same time, the printed text uses eye dialect to mark some words, such as “dooty,” to signal Silver’s difference. Such distancing effects seem to go against romance’s immersive ideals, though Stevenson may have had in mind other excitements and experiences enabled by dramatic irony and the anticipation of when and how the characters would find out about Silver. 46. [W. E. Henley], Saturday Review 56 (8 December 1883): 738. 47. Lloyd Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (New York: Scribner, 1924), 53–­54. 48. It is important to emphasize, however, that these are still white Englishmen. Readers are reminded of their whiteness through various comments voiced by different characters that express a sense of imperial pride for England’s fierce pirates: Jim tells of revelers at the inn “saying [that Billy Bones] was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea” (Treasure Island, 49), and Trelawney later muses that “the Spaniards were so prodigiously afraid of [Captain Flint] that . . . I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman” (Treasure Island, 75). 49. Marah Gubar has a different reading of this moment, contending that “the parrot serves as a haunting symbol of voicelessness and an utter lack of autonomy,” marking Jim’s tendency to give himself over to Silver’s repetitious didacticism—­a tendency that Gubar says he must overcome as part of the narrative’s cultivation of skeptical (child) readers. See Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 84–­ 85. Ian Duncan, writing on Kidnapped, notes a perhaps related Stevensonian focus on the “hyperreal mimesis of bodily sensation” articulated together with the physicality of topography: the narrative is “sensitive to the subtle movements of psychology as well as to the loom of the weather, the contours of landscape, and the body’s pangs”; see introduction to Kidnapped (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xxiv. 50. Reflecting on the melancholia that typically characterizes the colonized subject’s relation to spoken language, however, Chow argues that if the condition of alienation from spoken language is universal but only more acutely felt by postcolonial subjects, then perhaps other affective responses to “languaging as a type of prostheticization” are possible (Not Like a Native Speaker, 14). 51. Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 15.

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52. Suk-Koo Rhee, “Laundering Treasure in Stevenson’s Treasure Island,” International Research in Children’s Literature 13, no. 1 (2020): 15–­30. 53. Andrew Loman, “The Sea Cook’s Wife: Evocations of Slavery in Treasure Island,” Children’s Literature 38 (2010): 1–­26. 54. In his later South Sea tale, “The Beach of Falesa” (first published in the Illustrated London News in 1892), Stevenson would chronicle–­in an avowed turn to realism–­t he marriage of white trader to an Indigenous woman as a legitimized partnership: though at first a falsified scheme thrust upon the narrator, Wiltshire, by an immoral Kurtz-­l ike figure who pretends to have magical religious powers to manipulate Indigenous people, Wiltshire eventually legalizes his marriage to Uma and the narrative ends with his not-­entirely pessimistic speculation, via his mixed race children, about different potential futures after colonialism. 55. Eric Jager, “The Parrot’s Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 23 (1988): 319. 56. Quoted in Jager, “Parrot’s Voice,” 316. 57. As Bristow has argued in his tracking of the “Robinsonade” into the nineteenth century, secularization and the popularization of the British empire later in the century corresponded with a pull away from the genre’s didacticism (Empire Boys). 58. This moment also seems reminiscent of the end of Lewis Carroll’s second Alice adventure, Through the Looking Glass (1872), which closes with Alice asking her cat whether she was a part of the Red King’s dream or if he was a part of hers. 59. John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” in Thomas Collins and Vivienne Rundle, eds., Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 1216. 60. Mark Hanna’s Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–­1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015) demonstrates that English piracy from the sixteenth century to the beginnings of the eighteenth century was not so much seen as outside the law in this earlier period; indeed, some pirates colluded with colonial administrators. It was only as colonial political administration became more systematized that pirates came to be “othered” (no longer potentially beneficial, economically, for imperialism). Silver’s support for the colonial project makes him a more historically accurate figure than critics have perhaps acknowledged, at least in this sense. 61. Rangan specifically points out the racialization of “minoritized voices . . . circumscribed in advance as objectified skin—­even when they are acousmatic,” while the standardized speech of a white, male voice “resist[s] objectification even when their bodies are visible.” See Rangan, “The Skin of the Voice,” in James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds., Sound Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 137. 62. Rangan, “Skin of the Voice,” 146.

178 Notes to Chapter Two

Chapter Two 1. Of Dracula’s unidiomatic “make error,” Nina Auerbach (Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Auerbach and David H. Skal [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997], 26n) has suggested that if an error is intended by Stoker, then it could either indicate the Count testing Harker to see if he corrects him, or simply show that the Count’s “mastery” of English is inevitably—­a nd ironically—­compromised. I tend to read it as the latter. 2. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, the “post” in postcolonial, as in postmodernism, does not so much index a temporal shift as serve as a “space-­clearing gesture” capable of getting beyond the terms and the structures given by colonialism; he also regards the postcolonial intellectual who prefers “neotraditional” art as not properly postcolonial, for the too quick abstraction into a globalized view that rather privileges the Western gaze and its inattentiveness to local conditions (in the African context, for Appiah). See “Is the Post-­in Postmodernism the Post-­ in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 336–­57. 3. Whereas Thiong’o advocated for writing in Indigenous African languages as an attempt to resist the ongoing conditions of colonialism, Achebe held that the “Africanization” of English from within would better ensure the global survival of African languages and Africanness. 4. Mari J. Matsuda, “Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction,” Yale Law Journal 100, no. 5 (1991): 1337. 5. Matsuda, “Voices of America,” 1338. 6. See Fragante v. City & Cty. of Honolulu, 888 F.2d 591 (9th Cir. 1989). 7. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 46. 8. Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 22. 9. Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker, 22. 10. Derrida, Monolingualism, 46–­49. 11. See Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-­A merica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), also discussed in the introduction. 12. Matsuda, “Voices of America,” 1329. 13. Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 94. 14. Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 94. 15. See Tanya Agathocleous, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), chap. 3 (“Review: Worlding White Supremacy and Indian Nationalism”), 111–­4 4, on Stead’s Review of Reviews and the entanglement of white supremacy with mass media in the late nineteenth century.

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16. See Jack Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993): 333–­52. 17. I am thinking here, especially, of Sylvia Wynter’s term “social effectivities” in describing what criticism makes and does in the social worlds from which it issues and in turn touches. See “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes toward a Deciphering Practice,” in Mbye B. Cham, ed., Ex-­iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 237–­79. 18. Christine Ferguson, “Nonstandard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker’s Dracula,” ELH 71, no. 1 (2004): 229–­49. 19. Ferguson, “Nonstandard Language,” 231. 20. Ferguson, “Nonstandard Language,” 241. 21. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 109. 22. Meanwhile, as Menke points out, Dracula is a fetishist of a more material and immodern type of media, including earth, blood, and bodies. The neutrality of the newly constituted information system, however, sheds data that have not been converted (Richard Menke, “Words Fail,” in Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies 1880–­1900: Many Inventions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], 137–­57). 23. Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review 136 (1982): 77. 24. Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” 75. 25. Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, 180. 26. Quoted in Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, 185. 27. In the more halcyon days of Facebook in 2009, for instance, founder Mark Zuckerberg had this to say about the social network’s mission: “The idea is that these connections—­whether friendships, affiliations or interests—­exist already in the real world, and all we’re trying to do is map them out . . . We think that as it becomes easier to connect and share across the social graph, people—­as well as companies, governments and other organizations—­w ill share more information about what is happening with them. As this happens, the world will become more open and people will have a better understanding of everything that is going on around them.” This rather banal marketing language nonetheless captures something of the capaciousness and flexibility with which a liberal, white cosmopolitics seamlessly courses through modern media ontologies as a milieu, as I have suggested. While racialization may not be obvious in the same ways as in the Victorian context, we could certainly track how Zuckerberg adopts the notion of mapping what purportedly already exists in order to elide how colonialist representational claims tend, rather, to make the terrains that they exploit. The affective pose signaled in “all we’re trying to do” renders invisible and benign the violence of the “we” that maps, the owners of the medium who are clearly distinguished from “the world” and “people” later given identities and understanding through the medium.

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The final turn, that “the world” and “people” will then derive agency from the medium’s inclusion of them, is liberal—­a nd settler colonial—­logic at its worst: having assumed that “they” have no prior forms of life worth living, “we” will be giving them a better (and only) way to live. See Chaim Gartenberg, “What Is Facebook? Just Ask Mark Zuckerberg,” The Verge, 8 March 2019, www​.theverge​.com​/​2019​/​3​/​8​ /​18255269​/​f acebook​-mark​- zuckerberg​-definition​-social​-media​-network​-sharing​ -privacy. 28. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David H. Skal (New York: W. W. Norton, 19997), 21. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically within the text. Halberstam’s (“Technologies”) discussion of anti-­Semitism in the novel likewise notes that visuality and physiognomy are deemphasized in the novel’s uses of racialization; rather, Dracula seems interested in the expansive, indexical discursive features of late nineteenth-­century anti-­Semitism, and how these features are of a piece with the Gothic mode’s proliferation of different traits under the signification of the monstrous. 29. Katy Brundan, “The Polyglot Vampire: The Politics of Translation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 52 (2015): 7. 30. Patricia McKee, “Racialization, Capitalism, and Aesthetics in Stoker’s Dracula,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36, no. 1 (2002): 42–­60. 31. McKee, “Racialization,” 57. 32. McKee, “Racialization,” 47. 33. McKee, “Racialization,” 47. 34. See Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-­Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), on “liberal formalisms” in the mid-­Victorian period (from specific imaginings of disinterested yet embodied frames of mind to structures like the ballot box) that helped constitute a new, modern political subject that we have inherited today. See David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), which closely scrutinizes the role of aesthetic theory in the formation and sustenance of the liberal humanist subject. 35. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 47. Weheliye cites Rosi Braidotti, Brian Massumi, Kara Keeling, Jasbir Puar, Elizabeth Grosz, and Manuel DeLanda as “heterodox Deleuzians,” whose work frees Deleuzian thinking from “the snowy masculinist precincts of European philosophy” to read assemblages within the “milieus” of “racialized minority discourse or queer theory.” 36. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 50. 37. According to Zarena Aslami, Victorian studies has weakened the energies of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 1990s, allowing the category of “empire” to

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sideline or occlude further inquiries into how race functions: “empire has seemed to displace race, to stand in for it, to colonize it” (“Buffer Zones: Notes on Afghanistan, Race, and Empire,” special issue: “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 3 [2020]: 436). 38. In “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–­91, legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris famously lays out the case as to how whiteness itself became a form of property, tracing the roots and genealogy of this proprietary logic to the various legal justifications of slavery and of Native American displacement in the United States. 39. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–­2000: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3. 40. Lucy’s English womanhood stays within appropriate bounds here, in that her fetishizing interest in Morris’s slang and stories effects a miniaturizing inclusion of the American’s cowboy imperialism into the broader project of Western colonialism. 41. As Carolyn Betensky rightly argues, the many moments of “casual racism” in Victorian literature require more care from our criticism than an explanatory contextualization followed by emphatic disavowal; see “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature,” Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 4 (2019): 723–­51. 42. Jenny Sharpe’s argument in Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) that the notion of English women being raped by native men did not circulate widely in the discursive imagination before the Indian Rebellion in 1857 is also important to this triangulation. Sharpe’s account traces the precise history of “English womanhood” as “cultural signifier for articulating a colonial hierarchy of race,” thus offering resistance against abstracting readings of race and sexuality based on repression and fetishization (4). 43. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—­A n Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–­337. 44. In the scene, a Russian harlequin Marlow meets recalls that the woman had “talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don’t understand the dialect of this tribe.” Julie Beth Napolin, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 152. 45. Napolin, Fact of Resonance, 153. 46. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 6. 47. See section on “Concerning the Poem’s Information,” in Poetics of Relation, 81–­85. 48. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 83.

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49. Programming languages on top of binary code might be characterized as multilingual; here, Glissant is referring only to the base computer code’s continued reliance on binary code. 50. Anjuli Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 102. 51. Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire, 102. 52. See Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 467–­93. 53. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 2–­3. 54. In the unfolding debates about what language should rule the world, German was considered both a rival and sometimes a viable alternative to English. If the world did not end up being led by English-­speaking peoples, then German-­ speaking peoples, at least according to Wells, “exhibited remarkable technological prowess and had the most ‘efficient’ middle classes in Europe” (Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, 159). 55. Quoted in Brundan, “Polyglot Vampire,” 8; from Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 317. 56. In describing Dracula’s multilingual capacity, Brundan cites Benedict Anderson’s claim that nations are forged through monolingualism, and his observation that mortality is an important factor in people’s inability to become “sufficiently” multilingual (“Polyglot Vampire,” 2). 57. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 18. 58. Cheng, Ornamentalism, 18. 59. See “prepossessing, adj n.2,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2021), http:​/​​/​w ww​.oed​.com. 60. See “prepossess, v n.1a,” OED Online. 61. Said, Orientalism, 12. 62. Cheng, Ornamentalism, 5. 63. As Kandice Chuh recently discusses, this ability to perceive beauty has (since Kant) served as the central mechanism by which the Western male subject has beautified his soul against nonbeautiful others. See The Difference Aesthetics Makes: The Humanities after Man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 64. Jonathan D. Rosa, “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2016): 162–­83. 65. For instance, legislation and curricular programming since the federal Bilingual Education Act of 1978 have repeatedly favored transition into standardized English classrooms as soon as possible, as a result of racial discrimination against Spanish-­speaking students (Rosa, “Standardization,” 171–­72); US census language

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includes such categories as “linguistically isolated” to describe families and communities where English proficiency is limited (174). 66. In my own experience as an ESL teacher at a Brooklyn middle school (see note 46 in introduction), I also noticed that despite the fact that Chinese students often shared the same socioeconomic status as Latinx students and, as well, educational disruptions in the home country, Latinx students were far more likely to be regarded as “languageless.” 67. Rosa, “Standardization,” 164. 68. Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 35. 69. Mufti, Forget English!, 52. 70. Nasia Anam, “Introduction to ‘Cluster on Forms of the Global Anglophone,’ ” Post45, 22 February 2019, https:​/​​/​post45​.org​/​2019​/​02​/​i ntroduction​-forms​ -of​-the​-global​-anglophone​/​. 71. As Ahmed puts it, “the colonial utility of philology lay here: because it identifies tradition with texts alone, it provides sovereign power a ‘traditional’ lineage from which native experience itself is exiled” (Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018], 38). 72. Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel, 26–­27. His aim is to address Erich Auerbach’s unanswered query as to how “literature,” a concept with a strictly European provenance, can ever hope to be adequate to non-­European forms of writing” (21). 73. Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel, 36. 74. Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel, 19. His account follows the “traces” specifically of Vedic mantras, scribal dharmasastric manuscripts, regional sharia manuals, and performances by Brahmanic and Islamic jurists. 75. The widely known Duolingo, for instance, markets “quick, bite-­sized lessons,” served on the go for both the busy cosmopolitan subject who wishes to acquire language for “real-­world communication skills,” and the nonhegemonic language learner who needs “the basics.” Competency’s affective rewards, meanwhile, are emphasized through a process of gamified learning and the ability to “earn points and unlock new levels.” 76. See Silverstein, “Monoglot Standard in ‘America’: Standardization and Metaphors in Linguistic Hegemony,” in Donald Brenneis and Ronald K. S. Macaulay, eds., The Matrix of Language Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 1998), 284–­306. 77. Yiyun Li, “To Speak Is to Blunder But I Venture,” in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (New York: Random House, 2017), 142. 78. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 85. 79. See my introduction on Wynter’s argument that the “extrahuman” grounds

184 Notes to Chapters Two and Three

of medieval Christianity were maintained into the development of racialization after the first colonial encounter, essentially suggesting that this Judeo-­Christian substrate of coloniality has been maintained into our present. 80. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 253. 81. Silicon Valley elites have a fondness for McLuhan; for instance, see Marc Andreesen’s quoting of McLuhan in Danco, “The Medium Post Is the Message,” newsletter on Substack, 24 May 2020, https:​/​​/​danco​.substack​.com​/​p​/​t he​-medium​ -post​-is​-the​-message. McLuhan’s subtleties are probably insufficiently appreciated when he’s drawn upon to justify utopian futures of the internet; in particular, arguably anticapitalist orientations orbit his disdain for the written word and the “mechanical age,” as well as his optimism about electric worlding. See Jarrett Cole in an essay on resonances between McLuhan and Raymond Williams, derived in part from their common intellectual trajectory from New Criticism: Cole, “Marshall McLuhan and Cultural Studies: The Battle Royal of New Criticism,” Winnsox 1 (2020) https:​/​​/​w innsox ​.com​/​journal​/​a rticle​/​m arshall​-mcluhan​-and​- cultural​ -studies. Meanwhile, as Anna Shechtman has compellingly argued, McLuhan’s imprecision and contradictions as a scholar and popular figure (usually a charge against him in academic circles), might be read indexically or, as she puts it, through his “command of media’s metaphors”: “we might see in McLuhan’s parade of media metaphors not a flat ontology . . . but a form of disambiguation that teases out the multiple meanings, the overdetermination, of the media concept” (“Command of Media’s Metaphors,” Critical Inquiry 47 [Summer 2021]: 662).  82. See Jonathan Sterne, “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,”Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2011): 207–­25. 83. McLuhan’s conceptions of oral tribalism, again, are premised on anthropological work that sets a tribal Africa against a civilized (if fallen) Europe in its “research.” 84. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 87, 357. 85. In the sense that McLuhan believes “we everywhere resume person to person relations as if on the smallest village scale” (Understanding Media, 255). 86. Gartenberg, “What Is Facebook?” Chapter Three Parts of this chapter have been drawn and adapted from Amy R. Wong, “Late Victorian Novels, Microsociology, and Bad Dialogue,” Narrative 27, no. 2 (2019): 184–­ 202. By permission of Ohio State University Press. 1. Jami Bartlett, “Meredith’s Ends,” in Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of Reference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), offers an interesting reading of The Egoist through the lens of analytic philosophy and, more specifically, the work of G. E. M. Anscombe. Bartlett also concentrates on Meredith’s profusion of

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detail (his “accretive metaphors, aphorisms, and characterizations” [37]) while pursuing a different explanation for his “ends.” According to Bartlett, Meredith writes descriptions of intentional action that deliberately “short circuit the slide from details to their interpretations” in a manner that refuses “accommodat[ing]” reader expectations that narrative should link details of an action and characterological intent (43–­4 4). Instead, Meredithian scenes “stack up without developing,” frustrating readers in order to demonstrate particular philosophical problems of language and narrative, and to signal the hermetic opacities of reference (47). 2. Oliphant, [Review of The Egoist] in “New Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 128 (September 1880): 375–­404, at 404; Review of One of Our Conquerors, Saturday Review, 23 May 1891, 626. 3. Gillian Beer, “One of Our Conquerors: Language and Music,” in Ian Fletcher, ed., Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 266, 275. 4. Beer, “Language and Music,” 275. 5. Margaret Harris, Introduction to One of Our Conquerors (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 3. 6. Here again, I am thinking of Peters’s formulation of the “abyss” against which liberal traditions of speech have always been constituted, as discussed in the introduction. 7. George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors, ed. Margaret Harris (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 10. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically within the text. 8. Meredith’s second chapter, titled “Through the Vague to the Infinitely Little,” offers an apology for the slow pace of the first chapter, pleading that characterization requires such detail—­a nd that the profusion of what is in motion at this microscopic scale is, in fact, quite fast-­paced. 9. Vocalics, or paralanguage, refers to the “non-­phonemic but vocal component of speech, such as tone of voice, tempo of speech, and sighing, by which communication is assisted.” See “paralanguage, n.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2021), https:​/​​/​w ww​-oed​-com​. 10. Saturday Review, 626. 11. Potentially, then, we might regard Meredith as having subjected himself, as an authorial body, to such formlessness, providing some justification for how critics like Oliphant have characterized his prolixity—­t hough, as I will argue later, porous inarticulacy seems importantly a part of Meredith’s desire to stand amid the “common man,” as Judith Wilt has also argued (The Readable People of George Meredith [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975]). 12. One of Our Conquerors seems more extremely bent, according to David Howard, toward Meredith’s “habit of concentrating on trivial incident and charac-

186 Notes to Chapter Three

ter” in his oeuvre. See Howard, “Rhoda Fleming: Meredith at the Margin,” in Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, 143. In thinking about triviality in Meredith, I am also reminded of the valences of Wilde’s alternate title for his Society comedy The Importance of Being Earnest: “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” 13. In an argument structurally homologous to mine, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), reads “wishfulness” in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss taking the form of a capacitating overflow. Departing from readings of Maggie Tulliver’s death in the flood as negating or escapist, Christoff argues that the many other instances in which the novel is concerned with the uncontainability of yearning and longing permit readers to wish beyond the novel itself: “Tears spill from Maggie’s eyes, books burst their bindings, minds meet somewhere outside themselves, and nations extend into empires” (85); hence, “readers, especially readers of color can also use their wishfulness to expand the novel, to let it exceed and overflow itself, to let it make contact with them” (107). 14. Elsewhere in this essay, Wilde—­a s voiced by Vivian in the Socratic dialogue—­charges a lengthy (and rather unexpected) list of authors with falling into the “modern vice” of realism’s dull truthtelling; the list includes Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, James Payn, Henry James, Hall Caine, and Margaret Oliphant, among others (Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 298). 15. Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 298. 16. Freedgood, Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 139. As the story goes, what has typically been regarded as the high realist novel was meeting its end by the late nineteenth century, yielding to a hodgepodge of experimental genre fictions and styles that would eventually resolve into proto-­modernist and modernist forms of fiction. Freedgood challenges this developmental narrative of realism, tracing its construction to far more recent mid-­t wentieth-­century origins of literary historical projects to “make realism great”: these projects prove colonialist in their orientation (22). From J. Hillis Miller’s smoothing over of intrusive narrators with the concept of omniscience to Fredric Jameson’s and D. A. Miller’s totalizing narrator as “ideology itself,” Freedgood argues that narrative unity became the characteristic by which realism was transformed into a pivotal arrival and departure point for novels (27). Not only this, but criticism’s suturing together of ruptures across diegetic worlds tends to consolidate the realist novel as a technology by which readers could comfortably inhabit a colonizer’s experience of many-­worldedness, with a relative sense of safety and containment. 17. Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance,” Longman’s Magazine 5 (1884): 142–­43. 18. Walter Besant, “The Art of Fiction” (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1885), 10.

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19. Walter Besant, “On the Writing of Novels, Part 1 and 2” Atalanta 1 (1887–­88): 165. See John S. Caughey on Besant and Atalanta, in “Learning Fiction by Subscription: The Art and Business of Literary Advice, 1884–­1895,” in Anneleen Masschelein and Dirk de Geest, eds., Writing Manuals for the Masses: The Rise of the Literary Advice Industry from Quill to Keyboard (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 47–­77. 20. Besant, “On the Writing of Novels, Part 1 and 2,” 374. 21. Besant, “Art of Fiction,” 34. 22. Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, 17–­18. 23. Besant, “Art of Fiction,” 16. 24. Stevenson, “Humble Remonstrance,” 142. 25. Stevenson, “Humble Remonstrance,” 147. 26. Stevenson, “Humble Remonstrance,” 141. 27. Dora Zhang, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 21–­23. 28. Zhang, Strange Likeness, 70. 29. Zhang, Strange Likeness, 69. 30. This particular comment refers to Kurnick’s reading of The Other House (1896), which was initially planned as a play, and finally converted back into a play in 1909, though it was never staged. See Kurnick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 126. 31. Kurnick, Empty Houses, 110. 32. Quoted in Donald Fanger, “George Meredith as Novelist,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 16, no. 4 (1962): 317. 33. Quoted in Harris, “Introduction,” 3. 34. Some readers have focused on the ways in which “inner life” is characterized as inarticulate speech across Meredith’s oeuvre. For instance, V. S. Pritchett has associated Meredith’s style with “the broken syntax of speech-­i n-­t he-­m ind,” in George Meredith and English Comedy: The Clark Lectures for 1969 (New York: Random House, 1969), 105. Anne C. Toner has studied Meredith’s use of the dash and dots to express the limits of language, and she also points to features across Meredith’s writing that take an interest in entanglements of inner cogitation, speech, and writing: where “bodies becom[e] text, speech is often seen, and gesture mimics punctuation” (“I’m to talk italics,” as one character says in The Amazing Marriage [1895]; one “hears blanks, dashes,” according to the narration in Beauchamp’s Career [1875]). See Toner, “ ‘Explorations in Dot-­a nd-­Dashland’: George Meredith’s Aphasia,” Nineteenth-­Century Literature 61, no. 3 (December 2006): 323–­31. See also Toner’s revised chapter on Meredith in Ellipsis in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which discusses both The Egoist and One of Our Conquerors as instances of Meredith’s use of ellipsis to create aphasic speech (138–­50).

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35. George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 13. 36. Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, 13. Meredith’s comments on fiction here would seem to resonate with Wilde’s characterization of Meredithian art as a garden full of thorns and roses. 37. Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, 14. 38. Gal and Irvine, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 90. 39. Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 2, 32. 40. Sometimes, in scenes of direct speech, his narratives explore the comedic effects of pitting two unmatched speakers, potentially across a chasm of class or gendered difference, often producing satirical effects that assign stylistic traits of in/articulacy to privileged groups. As Erin Greer has argued, in The Egoist, Meredith mounts an implicit critique of Miltonic ideals of marriage-­a s-­conversation through the novel’s foregrounding of the inequities in what J. L. Austin would later call illocutionary force, or the power of speech to produce certain effects, within a social field defined by unequal relations between men and women. See “Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith’s The Egoist,” in Garry L. Hagberg, ed., Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 41. Goffman, “Interaction Order,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983): 2. 42. Goffman, Forms of Talk, 41. 43. Goffman, Forms of Talk, 3; noted also in my introduction. 44. Sussman, “Meredith’s Style,” in Daniel Tyler, ed., On Style in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 244-­62. Sussman also points out that, for Meredith, comedic effects specifically issue from what the author names the “assemblage of minds” that make up society, “with its purest form being constituted entirely by speech” (255). From The Egoist, Sussman reads exchanges in which “the speakers engage in an acoustic theatrical mirroring,” where “each human personality constitutes the synthesis of a theme with its variations” (255). In Meredithian dialogue, one often loses track of who is uttering which words, since speech tags tend to be sparse (even as plunges into a comedic, microsociological sublime are common). 45. Here I am also reminded of James Phelan’s notion of “mediated telling,” which describes how dialogue can serve a narrative function and contribute to a novel’s diegesis, in Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017). Posing an alternative to Seymour Chatman’s longstanding story/discourse distinction, Phelan argues that

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“while the scene of dialogue is itself an event in the story world, that dialogue is also doing a lot of mediated telling (as much as any passage of narration), and that mediated telling . . . is an integral part of the ethical dimension of the passage” (19). Phelan’s concept signals an attentiveness to characterological embodiment that I see as complementary to my own interests in defining talk as constituted not just by dialogue but by bodies and environments in interaction with one another. 46. I also have in mind Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr’s sense of an “imperial commons,” which seeks to reflect empire as “an assemblage—­a far-­flung, reticulate, and vascular patchwork of spaces joined by mobile subjects of all kinds” in their account of ten “books” that changed the British empire, though as they make clear, “the book turns out to be a radical sign of the ‘chaotic pluralism’ of imperial authority and legitimacy,” as many of these books negotiated multiple material lives in circulation (and recirculation) in other forms of print including ephemera (see “Editor’s Introduction,” in Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014], 2). Burton and Hofmeyr’s collection of essays also focuses on the ways in which book history can disrupt empire’s possessive logics. 47. “Undelivered Speech” is taken from the penultimate chapter’s title, “The Night of the Great Undelivered Speech.” 48. Wilt, The Readable People of George Meredith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 49. Anna Maria Jones, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 115. According to Meredith in his Essay on Comedy and Uses of the Comic Spirit, first published in 1877, “you may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes” ([London: Archibald, Constable & Co. Ltd., 1905], 87). 50. Wilt, Readable People, 208. 51. Anne Anlin Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2008): 98. 52. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 292, on “orchestrating”; see his “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 62, on “absor[bing] and digest[ing]” heteroglossia. 53. Cheng, “Psychoanalysis,” 92. 54. Fred C. Thompson has negatively characterized One of Our Conquerors as distinct in “the very density of its population,” its “swarms of people, each with an

190 Notes to Chapter Three

idiosyncrasy meant to fill out the portrait of modern England” (“The Design of One of Our Conquerors,” SEL Studies in English Literature 2, no. 4 (1962): 463–­80, at 464). Emily Steinlight’s Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), a study of crowded novels with “surplus” characters and the aesthetics of a developing “biopolitical imagination,” might be of particular interest to consider alongside Meredith’s novel. 55. See Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), on the ways in which “counting” as enumerable and “counting” as “mattering” became entwined in the nineteenth-­century imaginary. Chatterjee explores the “gendered and racialized tension between a countable person and someone who ‘counts’ ” in nineteenth-­century literature that “reveals a gap between the ideals of quantification and its objects . . . [C]ounting is a trope that deliberately references the bureaucratic energies of the nineteenth century around personhood [especially, the census], while remaining rife with possibilities for understanding a ‘one’ otherwise” (11). 56. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2013), 18. 57. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17. 58. Moten, Black and Blur, 6. 59. Moten, Black and Blur, 7. 60. See Matthew Seligmann, Rivalry in Southern Africa: The Transformation of German Colonial Policy (London: Macmillan, 1998), on the developing rivalry between Germany and Britain in the early 1890s, and the signaling of the German Reich’s economic interests in the region before the infamous “Kruger telegram” in 1896, in which Kaiser Wilhelm II congratulated the president of the Transvaal Republic for beating back the British in the so-­called “Jameson Raid,” launched by Cecil Rhodes. 61. Somewhat relatedly, in her argument about the novel’s concerns with the limitations of language, Beer (“Language and Music”) has suggested how music brooks these limitations in the text. 62. José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, ed. Joshua Chambers-­L etson and Tavia Nyong’o (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 2–­3. 63. Muñoz, Sense of Brown, 5. 64. I am thinking here of Elaine Freedgood’s arguments in The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), in which she reads the materialist histories of objects—­i ncluding curtains and mahogany furniture—­against the symbolics of domesticity through to their entanglements with enslavement, colonialism, and extractive violence.

Notes to Chapter Four 191

Chapter Four Parts of this chapter have been drawn and adapted from Amy R. Wong, “Late Victorian Novels, Microsociology, and Bad Dialogue,” Narrative 27, no. 2 (2019): 184–­ 202. By permission of Ohio State University Press. 1. Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), 145. 2. Ford, Conrad, 143. 3. Ford, Conrad, 143. Aaron Fogel, in his survey of dialogue in Conrad’s novels, draws on these comments about speech from the collaboration with Ford, to argue for a preponderance of forced speech across Conrad’s oeuvre (Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985]). 4. “It is all a darkness” is famously repeated by the muddled narrator of Ford’s The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915); the meaning outside the “kernel” is the narrator’s description of Marlow’s mode of perception at the beginning of Heart of Darkness (1899). 5. Daniel Wright argues in Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) that reasoning that seems fallacious concerning sexuality (contradiction, tautology, vagueness, and generality) in the Victorian novel does not signal repression, but rather affords more nuanced ways for authors like Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Henry James to approach the linguistic and representational difficulties of erotic desire. Wright posits that the realist novel predates twentieth-­century ordinary language philosophy (for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin) as offering important challenges to formal mathematical logic. Megan Quigley’s Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) more directly connects the modernist aesthetics of canonical authors (Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce) to particular philosophers of language in the early twentieth century (Charles Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and his translator, C. K. Ogden) that debated the various positions on the spectrum of ideal to pragmatic language. 6. Green, “Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors: A Conservative Response to Social Imperialism,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–­1920 22, no. 1 (1979): 56. 7. Quoted in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 114. 8. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, 114. 9. Joseph Conrad to Edward Garnett, 26 March 1900, in Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895–­1924, ed. Edward Garnett (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merill Co., 1928), 168; Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, 117–­30. 10. Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences of James, Conrad, and Crane, ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1999), 155.

192 Notes to Chapter Four

11. Quoted in Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, 129. 12. Ford, Return to Yesterday, 153. 13. Daniel Martin, “Speaking Machines and Ghostly Phantoms: The Claustrum Poetics of Voice and Dysfluency,” Victorian Review 46, no. 1 (2020): 1, 4–­5. 14. Martin, “Speaking Machines,” 5. 15. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 40. 16. North, Dialect, 51. 17. North, Dialect, 41. 18. North, Dialect, 42. Reading Conrad’s earlier novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), Julie Beth Napolin deploys a method of listening for “audibility” that argues that Almayer’s wife’s opening cry in Malay (“ ‘Kaspar! Makan!’ ”), though unrecognizable to Conrad’s English audience, nonetheless makes a “demand . . . not to hear a ‘voice’ but rather to hear difference and to recognize its imperative on the scene” (The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form [New York: Fordham University Press, 2020], 41). Napolin’s figure of “resonance” registers sound as relation between speaking and hearing, and the plural possibilities of this relationship depending on how we listen to colonialist texts; the sounds of Blackness North here ascribes to figures like James Wait, Napolin encourages us to read as “[B]lack resonance,” as a form of “acoustical criticism that takes up rather than refuses its materiality” (85). 19. North, Dialect, 47–­51. 20. Roman Jakobson later extends the phatic to encompass language that functions to manage the channel of communication (for instance, to maintain or close it). 21. Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, eds., The Meaning of Meaning (London: K. Paul, Trend, Trubner, 1923), 315. An “atmosphere of sociability,” meanwhile, shows up as the raison d’être of various art of conversation manuals as an index of civilizational progress; such contradictions illustrate the protean and plastic nature of racial logic. 22. See also my discussion of the untenability of “native speaker” as a category, in chapter 2. 23. See Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-­Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), which argues that Conrad is a central figure for registering the incoherent dynamics of a particular “invention” of “the West” at the turn of the century. GoGwilt traces the discursive formation of “the West” as a reaction to twentieth-­century decolonization as well as to the Bolshevik revolution. Increasingly, according to GoGwilt’s account of Conrad’s shifts from the 1890s into the early twentieth cen-

Notes to Chapter Four 193

tury, Conrad would bristle at the Slavic associations reviewers like Edward Garnett would affix to him, as he also registered through his writings the ways in which “the West” took on a racialized character whose geopolitical mapping was playing out uncertainly through his own personal experiences. 24. Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 109. 25. See discussion in chapter 2; as Rey Chow explains: “[Derrida] seems to derive a certain enjoyment from granting [his visceral shame] a performative status in the fraught terrain of postcolonial languaging,” such that “language [might remain] in a spectrally withheld rather than fully ontologized state” (Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as Postcolonial Experience [New York: Columbia University Press, 2014], 27). 26. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, ed. David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 60, 55. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically within the text. 27. In The Good Soldier, the wife of narrator John Dowell, Florence, is described unfavorably as someone who, “in matters of culture,” “[gives] the impression of having only picked up” things from a devalued and feminized form of consumption associated with cursory glances over many different publications: before trying to impress the older and more cultured Leonora, Dowell “found Florence some days before, reading books like Ranke’s History of the Popes, Symonds’ Renaissance, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic and Luther’s Table Talk.” See Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 49. 28. Ford, Conrad, 201. 29. Contemporary disability activists have pointed out how stuttering occupies a kind of liminal space within understandings of disability. As Joshua St. Pierre has put it, the status of stutterers as “neither clearly abled nor disabled” often leads to the “expect[ation] to perform on the same terms as the able-­bodied,” and not to do so then becomes “interpreted as a distinctly moral failure” (“The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1, no. 3 [August 2012]: 3). 30. Review of The Inheritors, Daily Chronicle, 11 July 1901. 31. Quoted in Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 59. 32. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 62. I also discuss this as an important distinction between Foucault and Wynter in the introduction. 33. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 60. 34. “Spasmodic” was a derogatory term coined by W. E. Aytoun in his 1854 review of Alexander Smith’s poetry, but the extension of Aytoun’s term into the

194 Notes to Chapter Four

broader lexicon meant that it became a marker, as well, of working-­class activism’s association with convulsive, chaotic embodiment, effeminacy, and sensationalism. At the same time, women poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning repurposed spasmodic poetry’s energetic focus on embodied experience to articulate a particular philosophical orientation toward a “totality of truth to which creative poets enjoyed privileged if fitful access,” according to Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–­1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 340. 35. Weheliye characterizes this racial slur for Muslims in the following terms: “as an exemplary limit case for biopolitics, racism, humanity, bare life, and sovereignty, the Muselmann must shoulder a very heavy burden in Agamben’s typology of bare life,” whereby “far from exceeding race . . . the Muselmann represent an intense and excessive instantiation thereof, penetrating every crevice of political racialization” (Habeas Viscus, 54). 36. Ford himself called his work an “allegorico-­realist romance”; see Max Saunders, “Empire of the Future: ‘The Inheritors,’ Ford, Liberalism and Imperialism,” International Ford Madox Ford Studies 12 (2013): 125. Green regards the novel’s political aims as rendered “too impressionistic and shadowy” (“Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors,” 56). Susan Jones has linked the performative “extravagance” of the story to Marie Corelli’s sensational scientific romances, zeroing in also on how the male authors respond (via the Dimensionist figure) uneasily to the success of a popular woman writer who drew on popular scientific trends (“ ‘Creatures of Our Light Literature’: The Problem of Genre in The Inheritors and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds,” Conradiana 34 [2002]: 107–­21). David Seed, in his introduction to The Inheritors, notes that the nonrealistic characters from the Fourth Dimension have occasioned the most consternation about genre. 37. It seems apt to draw from contemporary twenty-­fi rst-­century notions of data-­m ining when thinking about what this novel regards as emergent; in particular, I am thinking here about the ways in which algorithm-­assisted data-­m ining is effectively a form of mind reading that seeks to catalog us from the minimal transmissions of our clicks and where we linger, when scrolling. 38. Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 109. 39. Rubery, Novelty, 109–­40. 40. Rubery draws on Paul Atkinson and David Silverman’s observations on a postmodern “interview society” from “Kundera’s Immortality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self,” Qualitative Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1997): 304–­25, in order to observe the spread of a similar ethos in the context of late nineteenth-­ century Anglo-­A merican media. 41. See again, Susan Jones on Corelli’s skilled manipulations of publicity and media as a potential source for Conrad and Ford (“ ‘Creatures of Our Light Liter-

Notes to Chapter Four 195

ature’: The Problem of Genre in The Inheritors and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds,” Conradiana 34 [2002]: 107–­2 1); and Susan Zieger’s account of the “information addict,” which included both men and women, in The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). See also Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859–­1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), which looks at the feminization of technological and occult channeling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based largely on the sense of women’s embodied susceptibility to automatism and sympathy. 42. [Arnold Bennett], “The Art of Interviewing,” in How to Write for the Press: A Practical Handbook for Beginners in Journalism (London: Horace Cox, 1899), 56, emphasis added. 43. According to Rubery, “characters with virtuoso skill manipulate, misdirect, evade, and deflect questions without ever formulating a clear response that might put them at a disadvantage in terms of the balance of information” (Novelty, 125). 44. Potentially a satire of Hall Caine. See John Attridge, “Ford and Conrad,” in Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, eds., An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford (New York: Routledge, 2016), 26. 45. Dysfluency and “telegraphic” style are not necessarily opposed. In linguistics, “telegraphic” describes a spare style of speaking—­t ied often to aphasia—­t hat involves the omission of key grammatical elements (see Claus Heeschen and Emanuel A. Schlegoff, “Aphasic Agrammatism as Interactional Artifact and Achievement,” in Charles Goodwin, ed., Conversation and Brain Damage [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], 235). 46. See Anne C. Toner, Ellipsis in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 120. 47. St. Pierre, “Construction of the Disabled Speaker,” 3. 48. See Hensley, Forms of Empire, which traces literary form amid the development of the modern liberal state’s constitutive if seemingly paradoxical relationship with violence. 49. Karen Hoffman, “ ‘Am I No Better Than a Eunuch?’: Narrating Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier,” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 3 (2004): 30–­46, 32. 50. See Wells’s The Wonderful Visit (1895), Abbott’s Flatland (1884), and Macdonald’s Lilith (1895); Abbott and Hinton are discussed in my text. Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-­Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013) meanwhile traces the Fourth Dimension’s impact on abstract art. 51. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­

196 Notes to Chapter Four and the Conclusion

Feminism in the Late-­Twentieth Century,” in Cary Wolfe, ed., Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 20. 52. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 14–­15. 53. In the run-­up to Edison’s so-­called “talking machine,” inventions by M. Leon Scott and W. H. Barlow, as detailed in George Prescott’s Speaking Telephone, the Talking Phonograph, and Other Novelties (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1878), only had the capacity to produce ink etchings that corresponded to the vibrations made by sounds. These “logographic” etchings were then transferred to various other surfaces including glass and finally wax—­which eventually enabled the phonograph’s “talking” capacities (300). 54. Deanna Kreisel, “ ‘The Discreet Charm of Abstraction’: Hyperspace Worlds and Victorian Geometry,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (2014): 398–­410. 55. Here again, I am thinking of Stoler’s sense of “mobile essentialisms that produce racism’s protean qualities,” as mentioned also in chapter 1. 56. Charles Howard Hinton, “Many Dimensions,” in Scientific Romances, vol. 2 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1895), 33. 57. Hinton, “Many Dimensions,” 33. N. Katherine Hayles has characterized the patriarchal power of print as specifically tied to the notion of books as content: the fantasy of “not having a body, only a speaking mind” (Writing Machines [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002], 32). 58. Hinton, “Many Dimensions,” 33. 59. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 113. 60. This is a critique that Haraway has accepted; and, as Kafer has noted in her own discussion of the manifesto’s trained focus on disabled embodiment at the expense of making visible the specific political practices that disability enacts, Haraway’s cyborg does leave open the possibility of such refigurings of itself. 61. In her consideration of Frankenstein’s radical feminist vision, and what a contemporary adaptation like the film Ex Machina (2014) misses in its recourse to a posthuman imaginary (not unlike what The Inheritors enacts), Ronjaunee Chatterjee has cautioned against “contemporary horizons of the posthuman that, in some of their hasty attempts to do away with questions of the human altogether, endlessly reproduce their own limitations” (Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century Literature [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022], 160). Conclusion 1. Grace Lavery, “Grad School as Conversion Therapy,” blog post, BLARB, 29 October 2018, http:​/​​/ ​blog​. lareviewofbooks​.org ​/​essays​/​g rad​-school​-conversion​ -therapy​/​.

Notes to the Conclusion 197

2. Lavery, “Grad School as Conversion Therapy.” 3. In his theory of “the distribution of the sensible,” Jacques Rancière includes the differential between “speech and noise” as one of the ways in which a normative aesthetic distinguishes groups in order to maintain the concentration of power to particular classes of people. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. 4. See Michael Lista, “The Tears of Brett Kavanaugh,” New Yorker, 4 October 2018, https:​/​​/​w ww​. newyorker​. com​/​c ulture​/​c ulture ​- desk ​/​t he ​-tears​- of​-brett​ -kavanaugh. On the question of what tears mean, and how we read moral legibility and national feeling in the twenty-­fi rst century, I am persuaded by Jane Hu’s argument that as global capital shifts eastward, the Anglo-­A merican “man of feeling,” conventionally understandable in national contexts, is giving way to a more global generic subject capacitated in Asian diasporic fiction and film, who torques melodrama’s national economy of feeling into a more flexible form in a global context. See “Ang Lee’s Tears: Digital Global Melodrama in The Wedding Banquet, Hulk, and Gemini Man,” Verge: Studies in Global Asia 7, no. 2 (2021): 151–­76. 5. Jared Marcel Pollen, “Into the Maelstrom,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 July 2022, https:​/​​/​w ww​.lareviewofbooks​.org​/​a rticle​/​i nto​-the​-maelstrom​/​. 6. Pollen, “Into the Maelstrom.” 7. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.

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INDEX

Abbott, Edwin, 133, 144 Ability to Converse, The (Bligh), 5 accents, 74, 133; Asian, 17, 165; bias, 64–­65; discrimination against, 64–­65 Accra, 53 Achebe, Chinua, 17, 64, 178n3 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (Defoe), 55 aesthetics, 21, 109, 158, 172n3, 189–­ 90n54, 191n5; anticolonial, 94; as “bad,” 10, 25; colonialist, 35, 87, 100, 155–­56; of coloniality, 3; critical, 68; of embodiment, 37; Meredithian, 100–­101, 104, 115; narrative, 102, 105; neocolonial, 118; of nonliterary language, 166n53; nonproprietary, 89; of profuse inarticulacy, 94–­95; proprietary, 153–­54; racialized, 23; rethinking of, 25; of self-­possession, 1, 23, 42, 47, 49–­50, 95, 121; of un-­self-­possessed, 18; white supremacist, 152

Africa, 119–­21, 158, 171n96, 184n83; “scramble for Africa,” 97 Agamben, Giorgio, 134, 136 Ahmed, Siraj, 87, 90, 183n71, 183n72, 183n74 Agathocleous, Tanya, 27 Almayer’s Folly (Conrad), 192n18 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 12 American empire, 13, 153 Anam, Nasia, 86 Anderson, Benedict, 182n56 Andreesen, Marc, 28 Anglicization, 71 Anglo-­A merican speech: colonialism and racial logic, entanglements with, 21; self-­mastery, 32 Anglo-­Boer Wars, 97, 121, 126 Anglo-­European imperialism, 126, 128 Anglo-­Saxonist movements, 71, 99–­100 Angloworld, 27–­2 8, 66, 71, 75, 153, 164–­65n45 213

214 Index

Anscombe, G. E. M., 184–­85n1 anthropology: literary turn in, 168–­69n75 anti-­Blackness, 76 Anticipations (Wells), 70 anticoloniality, 150 Antillean Creole, 66 “Apology for Idlers, An” (Stevenson), 42 Appiah Kwame Anthony, 178n2 Arata, Stephen J., 43 Arnold, Matthew, 134–­35 Art of Conversation, The (Boswell), 5 art of conversation manuals, 4, 7, 10, 31, 133; class politics, 8; common sense, 5; conversation, as dying art, 6; race, 8; sociability, atmosphere of, 192n21 “Art of Fiction” lecture (Besant), 99 “Art of Fiction” (James), 99–­101 articulacy, 17, 23, 93–­96, 155, 158–­59, 188n40 artificial intelligence, 68 Asia, 147 Aslami, Zarena, 180–­81n37 Asian American studies, 26 Aspern Papers, The (James), 136 Athens (Greece): Athenian agora, 27, 32; Clubhouse (app), 28 Atkinson, Paul, 194n40 Auerbach, Erich, 183n72 Auerbach, Nina, 75–­76 Austen, Jane, 5 Austin, J. L., 191n5; illocutionary force, 22, 168n66, 188n40; perlocutionary force, 22, 168n66 Awkward Age, The (James), 102 Aytoun, W. E., 134–­35, 193–­94n34 Babel, 69–­70, 87, 130, 133, 136–­37; chaos-­monde, 150; of the commons,

123; difficulties of, 129; internet, 153; myth of, 2, 131 Bahamas, 55 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 111–­12, 168n69; chronotypes, discussion of, 38; heteroglossia, notion of, 20–­21, 110, 112 Balfour, Arthur, 138–­39 Ballantyne, R. M.: Coral Island, The, 42 Barrie, J. M., 42 Bartlett, Jami, 184–­85n1 “Beach of Falesa, The” (Stevenson), 177n54 Beer, Gillian, 94, 190n61 Belgian Congo, 126, 135 Bell, Duncan, 27–­2 8, 70, 164–­65n45 belonging, 16, 20, 57, 64; language, 65; speech, 66 Benjamin, Walter, 45, 170n91; aura, concept of, 167–­68n64; “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The,” 167–­68n64 Bennett, Arnold, 139–­40 Besant, Walter, 94–­95, 98, 100–­101; “Art of Fiction” lecture, 99; “Of the Writing of Novels,” 99 Betensky, Carolyn, 181n41 Bhabha, Homi K., 7, 15, 18, 36, 149, 166n52 Bhaduri, Bhuvaneswari, 24 Biden, Joseph, 156, 165n46 bilingual education, 85–­86 Bilingual Education Act, 182–­83n65 biopolitics, 13, 134, 194n35 Black and Blur (Moten): somatic and sonic aspects of surround, 117 Black feminism, 82 Black Jacobins (James), 117 Blackness, 75–­76, 121, 192n18; racialization of, 164n38

Index 215

Black studies, 8, 26 Bligh, Stanley M., 6; Ability to Converse, 5 “Bloodchild” (Butler), 14–­15 Bolshevik revolution, 192–­93n23 Boswell, Roger, 7, 9; Art of Conversation, The, 5 Bowes, George Seaton, 163n27 Braemar (Scotland), 43–­45, 129, 174n21 Braidotti, Rosi, 180n35 Brantlinger, Patrick, 15, 164n43, 165–­66n48 Bristow, Joseph, 171–­72n1, 177n57 British empire, 4, 11, 13, 15, 17–­18, 69, 78, 154, 177n57, 189n46; racial logics, legacy of, 25–­26 British imperialism, 117; racism, 175n39; and speech, 38 Brontë, Charlotte, 191n5 Browning and Conversation (St. George), 4 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 193–­94n34 Browning, Robert: conversational poetics of, 4 Brundan, Katy, 72, 80, 182n56 Burton, Antoinette, 189n46 Butler, Judith, 36; condensed historicity, 22, 158; Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 22; speech acts, critique of, 22 Butler, Octavia: “Bloodchild,” 14–­15 Byerly, Alison, 29, 170–­71n92 Caine, Hall, 186n14 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 21, 23–­2 4 Caribbean: anticolonialism, 25; as location, 25; as thought, 25 Carpenter, Edmund, 171n96

Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking Glass, 177n58 Césaire, Aimé, 40 Chamberlain, Joseph, 126 Chatman, Seymour, 188–­89n45 Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, 190n55, 196n61 cheap print, 6 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 81–­82, 112–­13 Chicago (Illinois), 85 China, 165n46 Chow, Rey, 7–­8, 50, 53, 65, 176n50, 193n25 Christianity, 13, 183–­84n79 Christoff, Alicia Mireles, 20, 161n2 Chuh, Kandice, 182n63 Churchill, Winston, 138–­39 Civil Rights Act: Title VII, 64–­65 class, 6, 10, 31, 41–­42, 97, 134, 144; class politics, 8–­9, 36; and disability, 47, 142 Cohen, Monica F., 46, 175n35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 44; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 175n31 Colley, Linda, 15 Colligan, Colette, 29, 170n90 colonialism, 1–­2, 9, 24, 47, 77, 83–­84, 98, 115, 136, 144–­45, 152–­53, 161n2, 181n40; admissible difference, 70; colonial modernity, 75; colonial selfhood, 58; conquest, 40; discovery, 40–­41; English, as common language, 71; race-­t hinking, 13; racial logic, 21 coloniality, 4, 13, 61–­62, 84–­85, 94–­96, 122–­23, 128, 149, 157, 175n39; aesthetics of, 3, 100; disarticulations of, 135; and race, 47 colonization, 134 comparative literature, 87 condensed historicity, 22, 158

216 Index

Conrad, Joseph, 85, 131, 158, 165–­66n48, 169n78, 191n3, 192–­93n23; Almayer’s Folly, 192n18; Heart of Darkness, 17–­18, 76, 125, 127, 165–­66n48, 170n91; Inheritors, The: An Extravagant Story (with Ford), 1, 10, 26, 28, 32–­33, 84, 111, 124–­2 8, 132–­51, 154, 194n36; Nature of the Crime, The (with Ford), 124; Polishness of, 129–­30; Romance (with Ford), 124, 129 Coral Island, The (Ballantyne), 42 Corelli, Marie, 29, 194n36; Romance of Two Worlds, A, 169n86 Corso Castle, 53 cosmopolitics, 69 Council of the Great City Schools, 165n46 Count Dracula: as acquisitive figure, 67; Angloworld, resistance to, 75; courtliness of, 72, 74; English-­fi rst modernity, refusal to submit to, 74; as fetishist, 179n22; fluency of, 16; grammatical precision, 130; mimicry, 175n39; multilingualism of, 71–­72, 74–­75, 91, 182n56; as polyglot, 80, 85; racialization of, 72, 75; shapeshifting of, 153; and whiteness, denial of, 74. See also Dracula (Stoker) COVID-­19 pandemic, 28 Cruz, Ted, 165n46 culture industry, 29 “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway), 144–­47 cyborg politics, 145, 149 cyborgs, 140, 144–­46, 148–­49 Darwin, Charles, 8–­9, 13–­14, 16, 69, 135 data-­m ining, 194n37

“Death of a Lion, The” (James), 136 “Decay of Lying, The” (Wilde), 93, 98 declinism, 26 decolonization, 154, 192–­93n23 deconstruction, 21 Defoe, Daniel, 44, 172n3; Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The, 55; Robinson Crusoe, figure of, 54–­55 DeLanda, Manuel, 180n35 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 23–­2 4, 161n1, 168n72 Derrida, Jacques, 53, 66, 89, 193n25; deconstructive drive, 132; Monolingualism of the Other, 132; Of Grammatology, 167n62; phonocentrism, critiques of, 21, 65; prosthetic languaging, 132 Dessalines, Jean-­Jacques, 117–­19 dialects, 17–­18, 20–­21, 121, 181n44; broken, 118–­19; “eye dialect,” 175n35, 176n45; as faddish modernity, 69 Diana of the Crossways (Meredith), 103–­4 Dickens, Charles, 170–­71n92 digital age, 29, 31 disability, 9–­10, 48, 50–­52, 128, 193n29, 196n60; and class, 47, 142; contagion, 134; as degeneration, 136; dysfluency, 130, 133 disability studies, 142 disarticulation, 11, 21–­22, 32, 93, 95, 97, 109, 116, 120–­21, 123, 127, 134; and self-­d isarticulation, 108 Discord (app), 170n89 Dobell, Sydney, 134–­35 Dowell, James, 125 Dracula (Stoker), 1, 10, 26, 28, 30, 64, 72, 80, 92, 153, 157; allegorical possibilities, 68; anti-­Semitism in, 180n28; code-­s witching in, 69; collation, 66,

Index 217

68–­69, 73; cosmopolitics, 69; Eastern European bodies in, 76, 81–­82, 131; Eastern European languages, 66–­67, 88; English intonation, 63, 67; monolingualism in, 71, 74, 83, 90–­91; monopoly capitalism, allegory of, 70; multilingual bodies, 77–­79, 82, 84; multilingual talk, 68, 78, 87; “native” accent, 63; Othello, references to in, 121; Othello’s Blackness, invocation of, 75–­77, 121; owned speech, 74, 77; perihumanity, 81–­82, 84; racial assemblages, 76; racialization, uses of, 180n28; as racialized, 87–­88; racialized talkers, compensations of, 32–­33; Whitby episode, 69, 73; white cosmopolitics, 68, 74. See also Count Dracula Du Bois, W. E. B., 25 Duncan, Ian, 176n49 Duranti, Alessandro, 173n11 dysfluency, 2, 10, 88, 129–­30, 132, 150, 152, 158; in Inheritors, The, 32–­33, 125, 127–­2 8, 133–­36, 139–­43, 148–­49; racialization of, 142 East India Company, 87 East Indies, 130, 131 eavesdropping, 158; between authorized and unauthorized transfers of speech, 56, 152; gendered and raced bodies, exclusion of, 60–­61; as illicit transfer, 57; mimicry, as other side of, 56–­57; overhearing, 57, 58; and parroting, 35–­36, 41–­42, 56–­58, 61–­62, 95, 152, 157; as poetics of talk, 59; and speech, 56; in Treasure Island, 38, 51, 57–­59 Edison, Thomas, 196n53

Egoist, The (Meredith), 103, 114, 168n65, 188n44, 184–­85n1, 188n40 Eliot, George, 161n2, 191n5; Mill on the Floss, 186n13 Eliot, T. S., 17, 20 Elizabeth I, 53 Elizabeth II, 154 empire, 74, 91, 97, 180–­81n37; fiction of, 21; Victorian fictions of, 1, 3, 7, 10, 17–­18 England, 27, 97, 102–­3, 105, 108, 115, 136, 158, 176n48. See also Great Britain English imperialism, 119 English language, 71, 182n54; as global language, 16; hegemony of, 26, 86; instruction of, in public schools, 17; status of, 69 English Language Learner (ELL), 165n46 Englishness, 169n78 English as Second Language (ESL), 165n46, 183n66 English-­speaking peoples: Anglo-­ American white supremacy, 16; as term, 169n82 errantry, 2, 41, 161n1; as situated, 3 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 34; Brazilian parrot, status of personhood, 11–­16 Essay on Comedy and Uses of the Comic Spirit (Meredith), 189n49 essentialism, 144–­45 Esty, Jed, 25–­26, 164–­65n45 ethnic racism, 134 ethnic studies, 26 eugenics, 70 Europe, 40, 119–­20, 134, 171n96, 184n83 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Butler), 22 Ex Machina (film), 196n61

218 Index

Faber, Joseph: “Speaking Machine,” 130 Fabian, Johannes, 117 Fanon, Frantz, 64 Ferguson, Christine, 69 fictions of empire, 1, 21, 121, 142, 157. See also Victorian fictions of empire First Home Rule Bill, 97 Firth, Colin, 154 Flatland (Abbott), 144 Fogel, Aaron, 191n3 Ford, Christine Blasey, 155 Ford, Ford Madox, 85, 158, 191n3; Good Soldier, The, 125, 143–­4 4, 193n27; Inheritors, The: An Extravagant Story (with Conrad), 1, 10, 26, 28, 32–­33, 84, 111, 124–­2 8, 132–­51, 154, 194n36; Nature of the Crime, The (with Conrad), 124; Romance (with Conrad), 124, 129 Forms of Talk (Goffman), 19 Foucault, Michel, 13, 23–­2 4, 47, 175n39; racism, analysis of, 134; “Society Must Be Defended” (lecture), 134 Fragante v. Honolulu, 64 Fragante, Manuel, 64 Frankenstein (Shelley), 196n61 France, 112 Franklin, Benjamin, 43 Freedgood, Elaine, 101, 190n64; realism’s narrative unity, as form of aesthetic racism, 98; narrative unity, and realism, 186n16 free speech, 12, 153 free trade, 70 Freud, Sigmund, 20 futurity, 146 Gal, Susan, 104 Garnett, Edward, 192–­93n23; “Seraphina,” 129

Garnett, Olive, 124, 129 gender, 9–­10, 16, 33, 36, 47–­48, 97, 128, 134; race, 147–­48; and sexuality, 14 George VI, 153–­54 Germany, 153–­54, 190n60 Gissing, George: New Grub Street, 136–­37 Gladstone, William, 97 Glissant, Édouard, 1, 35, 40, 63, 66, 69–­70, 89, 109, 117, 157, 161n2, 166n52, 168–­69n75; anticolonial imaginary, 11; Babel, 24, 131; chaos-­monde, 150; errantry, 2, 41, 161n1; computer code, as unilingual, 77–­78, 182n49; media theory, 77; poetics of relation, 123; poiesis as anticolonial aesthetic labor, 18 global capitalism, 86–­87 Global Anglophone studies, 86–­87 globality, 29, 86 global mediation, 71 global village, 92 Goffman, Erving, 105, 107, 166–­67n57, 173n12; everyday life, interaction order of, 21; Forms of Talk, 19 GoGwilt, Christopher, 36, 192n–­93n23 Good Soldier, The (Ford), 125, 143–­4 4, 193n27 Goody, Jack, 171n96 Great Britain, 27, 47–­48, 70, 97, 116–­17, 137, 152–­53, 190n60; New Imperialist endeavors, 126; superpower nostalgia, 164–­65n45. See also England Green, Robert, 126, 194n36 Greer, Erin, 188n40 Grosz, Elizabeth, 180n35 Guattari, Félix, 2, 161n1 Gubar, Marah, 176n49

Index 219

Hadley, Elaine, 73, 180n34 Haggard, H. Rider, 169n86, 186n14 Halberstam, Jack, 68, 180n28 Hall, Catherine, 168–­69n75 Hanna, Mark, 177n60 Haraway, Donna, 149; “Cyborg Manifesto,” 144–­47; cyborgs, 148, 150, 196n60 Hardy, Thomas, 20, 161n2 Harmsworth, Alfred (Lord Northcliffe), 126 Harney, Stefano: undercommons, 117 Harris, Cheryl I., 181n38 Harris, Margaret, 94 Hartman, Saidiya, 77 Havelock, Eric, 171n96 Hawaii, 64–­65 Hawkins, Sir John, 53 Hayles, N. Katherine, 196n57 Haywood, Eliza, 172n3 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 18, 76, 125, 127, 165–­66n48; Kurtz’s speech, 17; “phonographic logic,” 170n91 Hegel, G. W. F., 8 hegemony: of English language, 86; and language, 27, 64; as monolingual, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 14 Henderson, James, 44 Henley, W. E., 51 heteroglossia, 20–­21, 110, 149–­50 Hinton, Charles Howard, 144; Aphrodite, 147–­48; “Many Dimensions,” 146–­47 historicity, 8. See also condensed historicity Hoffman, Karen, 143–­4 4 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 189n46 Holm, Melanie D., 36 Howard, David, 185–­86n12

How to Write for the Press (Bennett), 139 Hu, Jane, 197n4 humanism, 144–­45; becoming human, 14 Husserl, Edmund: life-­world, 19, 166n55 hybridity, 18, 166n52 idleness: inattention, as important mode of, 42–­4 4; and romance, 49; slow aimlessness, 43 Idler, The (magazine), 42–­43, 46 illiteracy, 30 imperial imaginaries, 21 imperialism, 8, 17, 26–­2 8, 35, 132, 136–­37, 141–­42; and patriarchy, 143–­4 4 inarticulacy, 2, 10, 94–­95, 98, 102, 102, 106–­9, 122, 168n65; in fiction, 100–­101; of real life, 100 Incorporated Society of Authors, 99 India, 97, 154 Indian Rebellion, 26, 181n42 Indigenous peoples, 13, 37, 42, 53 industrial age, 90 Inheritors, The: An Extravagant Story (Conrad and Ford), 1, 10, 26, 124, 154; bad dialogue in, 84; dots and dashes, use of, 128; dysfluency in, 32–­33, 125, 127–­2 8, 133, 134–­36, 139–­43, 148–­49; Fourth Dimensionists, 28, 111, 126–­2 8, 132–­33, 135–­39, 141–­43, 145–­48, 150–­51, 194n36; higher space, 144, 146; media empire, as early conceptualization, 137–­38; New Imperialism, critique of, 127; postgender, 127–­2 8; posthuman, 127–­2 8; postracial, 127–­2 8; racialization, 151; racializing assemblages, 135 Innis, Harold, 171n96

220 Index

internet, 90; as multilingual, 91 Irvine, Judith, 104 Irving, Washington, 44 Jackson, Ketanji Brown, 155–­56; poise of, 165n46 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, 14, 164n38 Jager, Eric, 54 Jakobson, Roman, 19, 166n53, 192n20 Jamaica, 154 James, C. L. R., 25, 117–­18 James, Henry, 5, 94–­95, 98, 138, 186n14, 191n5; “Art of Fiction,” 99–­101; Aspern Papers, The, 136; Awkward Age, The, 102; “Death of a Lion, The,” 136; Other House, The, 102, 187n30; Reverberator, The, 136, 140 Jameson, Fredric, 186n16 Japan, 119–­21 Japp, Alexander, 44–­45, 175n31 Johnson, Samuel, 43 Jones, Anna Maria, 111 Jones, Susan, 194n36 Jones, William, 87 Joshi, Priya, 15 Joyce, James, 77, 191n5 Kafer, Alison, 147, 196n60 Kanda Matulu, Tshibumba, 117 Kant, Immanuel, 182n63 Kavanaugh, Brett: “crybaby” antics of, 155; self-­possession, lack of, 155–­56 Kay, Sarah, 172n3 Keats, John, 146 Keeling, Kara, 180n35 keening, 75 Kenya, 154 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 176n49 Kim (Kipling), 21 Kim, Annabel, 167n61 King’s Speech, The (film), 153–­54

Kipling, Rudyard: Kim, 21 Korte, Barbara, 43 Kreilkamp, Ivan, 170n91 Kreisel, Deanna, 146 Kurnick, David, 101–­2, 187n30 Lacan, Jacques, 20 Lamb, Charles, 161n4 language, 10, 13, 55, 74, 79, 82, 101, 110, 122, 124, 157; accent bias, 64; acquisition of, 67–­68, 85, 183n75; acquisition of, and power, 64; apps, 68, 88; asignifying aspects of, 131; belonging, 64–­66; Blackness, 76; body language, 106; chaos-­monde, 63, 67, 78; colonial, 89; of colonizer and colonized, distinctions between, 131; control over, 79; cultural and economic capital, accruing of, 63; dispossessed, 21; as embodied, 129, 133; as experiential, 84; as fetishistic, 23; as global, 68; as hegemonic, 64, 85–­86, 131; and incoherence, 94; institutionalized, 20–­21; language bias, 3; as languageless, 86, 183n66; learning of, 85–­86, 88, 165n46; limits of, 94; mastering of, 83, 88, 93; mother tongue, 64; native speaker, 64–­65; novelistic form of, 20–­21, 94, 98, 112; ownership of, 63, 89; philology, 70; philosophical, 125; poetics of talk, 19; pragmatic, 191n5; property rights over, 153; proprietary transfers of, 36; purpose of, 34, 37; and race, 70; scientistic, 69; as social glue, 131; spoken, 176n50; storage of, 85; storytelling, paradoxical feeling, 93–­94; unified, 70; universality of, 5; vertigo, 132; white supremacy, 70–­71 Latin America, 165n46

Index 221

Latinx studies, 26 Lavery, Grace, 153 Leeward Islands, 154 leisure, 4–­5, 9 Leopold II, 126 Lesjak, Carolyn, 37, 173n7 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 167n62 liberalism, 14, 70, 142–­43, 161n4, 164–­65n45 Limited English Proficient (LEP), 165n46 Linguistic anthropology, 19, 173n11 Linley, Margaret, 29, 170n90 Lista, Michael, 155 literacy, 29, 63, 90, 171n96 literary humanities: colonialist foundations of, 87 literary turn, in anthropology, 168–­69n75 literary studies, 20, 86 Li, Yiyun, 89, 92 Lloyd, David, 73–­75, 180n34 Locke, John, 17, 107, 172n6, 173n7; consciousness, 11–­12, 15, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 11–­16, 34; language, purpose of, 37; natural rights, 37; and parrots, 11–­13, 37, 155; personhood, 31, 156; selfhood, claims to, 11–­12, 14–­15; self-­possession, 15 Logue, Lionel, 154 Loman, Andrew, 53 Lord Ormont (Meredith), 102 Louverture, Toussaint, 117–­18 Lunn, Charles, 162n13 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 164n44; “Minute on Indian Education,” 16 Macdonald, George, 144 Mahaffy, J. P., 6–­8, 99, 130, 174n26; Principles on the Art of Conversation, 5

male gaze, 150 Malinowski, Bronislaw: phatic communion, 131 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 77, 156–­57 “Many Dimensions” (Hinton), 146–­47 Martin, Daniel, 130 mass media, 29, 136–­37, 139; white supremacist, Anglo-­A merican world, key to, 27 mass print, 29; class-­i nfected worries of, 6 mass tourism, 43 Massumi, Brian, 180n35 materiality, 72 Matsuda, Mari J., 64–­67 McDowell, Paula, 30, 171n96 McKee, Patricia: open-­m indedness, 72–­73 McLuhan, Marshall, 27, 72, 169n87, 171n96, 184n85; electric age, 90; electric flash, 77; global village, 89–­91; oral tribalism, 184n83; Silicon Valley, fondness for, 184n81 media empire, 26 media landscape: as fragmented, 8 media theory, 77 melancholia, 176n50 Menke, Richard, 30, 70, 179n22 Meredith, George, 32, 49, 85, 93, 100, 118, 125, 157–­58, 167–­68n64, 184–­85n1, 185n8, 185n11, 185–­86n12, 188n36, 188n40, 188n44; aphasic speech, and ellipsis use, 187n34; on comic perception, 189n49; dash and dots, use of, 187n34; Diana of the Crossways, 103–­4; didacticism of, 114; disarticulation, 22, 95, 97, 116, 120, 123; egoism, 112, 122; Essay on Comedy and Uses of the Comic Spirit, 189n49; inarticulacy, 98, 102, 168n65, 185n11; inner life, as

222 Index

Meredith, George (cont.) inarticulate speech, 187n34; Lord Ormont, 102; as marginal figure, 94; One of Our Conquerors, 1, 10, 21–­22, 26, 84, 94–­97, 102–­17, 119–­23, 189–­90n54; prolixity, disapproval of, 168n65 Miller, D. A., 186n16 Mill on the Floss (Eliot), 186n13 Mill, John Stuart, 14, 57 mimicry, 2; by Count Dracula, 175n39; as derivative, 55; eavesdropping, 56–­57; by John Silver, 50, 53, 56, 61; hegemonic speech, ambivalence of, 36; and parroting, 47, 55–­58, 61; of parrots, 15–­16, 55–­56; in postcolonial theory, 15; and speech, 56; subversion, 36; white mimicry and “going native,” 15, 164n43; unconscious acts of, 15 mimesis, 101 “Minute on Indian Education” (Macaulay), 16 modernity, 43, 66, 69, 74, 131; colonial, 75 monolingualism, 70–­71, 74, 83; code totality, 77–­78; diversity, 73; as environment, 72; immanent control, 76; mortality, 182n56; open-­m indedness, 73; white cosmopolitics, 76, 87–­88 Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida), 132 Morant Bay Rebellion, 168–­69n75 Monro, Henry: On Stammering, 130 Moretti, Franco, 70 Morris, William, 42 Moten, Fred, 97, 109, 118–­19, 123; Black and Blur, 117; undercommons, 117, 122

Mufti, Aamir, 26, 86–­87 Mufti, Nasser, 25 multilingualism, 68, 86–­87; acquisition, imperial logics of, 63–­64, 66; affective charges, 66; as Babel, 2; aesthetic disorder, 66–­67; colonialist proprietorship, refusal of, 89; devaluing of, 76; dysfluent, 85; dysfunction, 66; identity, 66–­67; immigrants, essentialized to, 85; inadequacy, racialized notion of, 88–­89; of internet, 91; losing control, 66, 82; native speakers, 85; polyglot, as genius exception, 85; self-­possessed, 85; storage, 88; as uncontrolled, 83; white cosmopolitics, 89 multivocality, 20 Muñoz, José Esteban, 109; brown commons, 122–­23; sense of brown, 123 Musk, Elon, 88 “My First Book” (Stevenson), 35, 42–­43, 46 Napolin, Julie Beth, 76, 192n18 Native American displacement, 181n38 Nature of the Crime, The (Conrad and Ford), 124 Neuralink, 88 New Grub Street (Gissing), 136–­37 New Imperialism, 26, 127, 135, 148 New Journalism, 27–­2 8 new media, 27 Norquay, Glenda, 37–­38 Norton, Caroline, 103–­4 North, Michael, 130–­31, 192n18 object relations school, 20 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 167n62

Index 223

“Of the Writing of Novels” (Besant), 99 Ogden, C. K., 191n5 Oliphant, Margaret, 94, 114–­15, 168n65, 185n11, 186n14 One of Our Conquerors (Meredith), 1, 10, 21–­22, 26, 104, 110–­11, 117, 119, 121, 123, 189–­90n54; bad dialogue in, 84; disarticulation, 95, 105, 109, 115–­16, 120; inarticulacy in, 94–­95, 102–­3, 106–­8, 112–­15, 122; London Bridge section, 102–­3, 106; narrative aesthetics in, 102, 105; narrative surround, 97, 109; un-­selving in, 96 Ong, Walter J., 35, 171n96 On Stammering (Monro), 130 orality, 31, 34–­35, 42, 45, 74, 90, 169n87, 171n96; Irish racialization, intertwined with, 75 oral traditions, 30 Orientalism, 79, 81–­82, 85–­86 ornamentalism, 81, 82 Osbourne, Lloyd, 42–­43, 51, 173–­ 74n20, 174n28 Othello (Shakespeare), 76 Other House, The (James), 102, 187n30 other, 9 Parnell, Charles, 97 parrots, 13, 16, 34, 36, 47–­48; and disability, 51–­52; language, proper and improper uses of, 37; personhood, 12 parroting, 16, 52–­53, 56, 59, 175–­76n40; and eavesdropping, 36, 41–­42, 58, 62, 152; and mimicry, 47, 55, 61; as natural state, 54; ownership, unseating of, 36; as ventriloquizing, 175–­76n40 Pater, Walter, 161n4

patriarchy, 117, 144–­46, 149, 151 Payn, James, 186n14 Peirce, Charles, 191n5 personhood, 11–­13, 31, 81, 82, 156, 190n55; colonialist, 16–­17; denial of, 86 Peter Pan (Barrie), 42; Captain Hook, and “good form,” 59 Peters, John Durham, 12–­14, 32, 164–­65n45; abyss, 185n6 Phelan, James: mediated telling, 188–­89n45 Philippines, 64–­65 phonocentrism, 21, 65 piracy, 177n60; and talk, resistance to ownership, 46 pirates, 10, 42, 47–­48, 51–­52, 54, 56, 60, 127, 176n48; “eye dialect” of, 175n35; literary piracy, 46; as othered, 177n60; as parrots, 16; as postcolonial, 59; racialization of, 16 plasticity, 14, 164n38; of racialization, 149 Plato, 167n62 Plotz, John, 29, 170–­71n92 Poe, Edgar Allan, 44 poiesis, 24; Glissantian, 18; Jamesian, 25 “poetics of talk,” 18–­19 Pollen, Jared Marcel, 156 postcolonialism, 65; melancholy, condition of, 149 postcolonial languaging, 50 postmodernism, 178n2 postcolonial studies, 7–­8, 87 postcolonial theory, 2, 11, 15, 21, 25, 180–­81n37; and language, 64 posthuman, 111, 126, 128, 135–­36, 142–­43, 146, 149, 196n61 positivism, 144–­45 postracial, 143

224 Index

Pound, Ezra, 77 Powell, Manushag, 172n3 Prabhu, Anjali, 166n52 Principles on the Art of Conversation (Mahaffy), 5 print media, 35, 170–­71n92; patriarchal power of, 196n57 Pritchett, V. S., 187n34 Puar, Jasbir, 180n35 public sphere: working-­class readers, 6 Punch (magazine), 7 QAnon, 92 Quigley, Megan, 125, 191n5 race, 36, 53, 65, 127–­2 8, 181–­82n37, 194n35; as biologized, 14; colonial hierarchy of, 181n42; coloniality, 47; gender, 147–­48; language, 70; as ongoing process, 134; race-­t hinking, 8, 13; racializing assemblages, 73–­76; as spectral, 42, 54 racialization, 9, 16–­17, 26, 36–­37, 42, 53, 66, 72, 74, 82, 123, 130, 151, 163–­ 64n35, 180n28; of blackness, 164n38; of dysfluency, 142; mobile essentialisms, 47; Orientalist, 84; plasticity of, 149; of white male bodies, 135–­36 racial capitalism, 72 racializing assemblages, 73, 134–­35 racial logic, 13, 23; colonialism, 21 racism, 17, 70, 175n39, 194n35; aesthetic, 98; biological, 134; casual, 181n41; ethnic, 134 Rancière, Jacques, 197n3 Rangan, Pooja, 59–­60, 177n61 Ray, Prithwis Chandra, 27 Raza Kolb, Anjuli, 78 realism, 186n16 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Turkle), 31

representation: multilingual, 86; and speech, 64 republicanism, 4, 5 Reverberator, The (James), 136, 140 reverse colonization, 78 Rhee, Suk-­Koo, 53 Rhodes, Cecil, 27, 190n60 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 175n31 Rogers, Woodes, 55 Romance (Conrad and Ford), 124, 129 Romance of Two Worlds, A (Corelli), 169n86 “romance revival,” 39–­40 Rosa, Jonathan D., 86; languagelessness, conception of, 85 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 167n62 Rubery, Matthew, 138, 194n40, 195n43 Russell, Bertrand, 191n5 Russell, David, 161n4 Russia, 97, 119–­20. See also Soviet Union Ruti, Mari, 20 Sacks, Harvey, 174–­75n29 Said, Edward, 8, 79 Salamensky, Shelley, 19 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 167n62 Schlegoff, Emanuel, 174–­75n29 Sea Cook, The (Stevenson). See Treasure Island (Stevenson) Seed, David, 194n36 selfhood, 10, 14–­15, 20, 29–­31, 54–­55; colonial, 135; consistency of consciousness, 11–­12 Selkirk, Alexander, 55–­56 “Seraphina” (Garnett), 129 Sharpe, Jenny, 181n42 She (Haggard), 169n86 Shechtman, Anna, 184n81 Sheridan, Richard, 103–­4

Index 225

Silicon Valley, 28, 184n81 Silverman, David, 194n40 Silverstein, Michael, 39, 51, 88, 173n12 Simmel, Georg, 101 Skokie (Illinois), 12 slavery, 76–­77, 181n38 “slow” movements, 174n23 Smith, Adam, 14 Smith, Alexander, 134–­35, 193–­94n34 Smith, Victoria Ford, 44 social media, 7, 31, 68, 152, 155–­56 “Society Must Be Defended” lecture (Foucault), 134 sociolinguistics, 19 Socrates, 76 South Africa, 97, 115, 120–­21 South America, 97, 115, 117 Soviet Union, 134. See also Russia “Speaking Machine” (Faber), 130 speech, 1–­2, 7, 30, 32, 67, 97, 101, 170n89; accents, 66; aesthetics of, 9, 152, 156; Anglo-­A merican, 156; Anglo American, and concept of abyss, 12; Anglo-­A merican empire, 11; Anglo-­A merican genealogy of, 68; Anglo-­A merican speech, and colonialism, 21; Anglo-­A merican understandings of, threats to, 8; antipathy toward, 153; aphasia, 195n45; bad aesthetics, 10, 24–­25; “bad” form of, 15–­16; belonging, 20, 64, 66; Black speech, 76; bodies and dialogue, 10; British imperialism, 38; colonialist dynamic, 9; colonialist logics of, 46–­47, 68; colonialist notions of, 10–­11; colonial proprietary logic, 42; colonizer, 26; “cringe,” 153; crisis in, 13, 16–­17, 20, 28–­29, 153–­54; degraded speakers, 17; detachability, pleasures of, 53; disarticulated, 154; disarticulations

of, 21; as disordered, 75, 156; disordered scenes of, 33; disowned, 41; dysfluency, 66, 130, 149–­50, 158, 195n45; dysfluency, and written interview fluency, 139–­40; eavesdropping, 56; egoism of, 122; in everyday talk, 10, 38–­39; “failures” of, 66; fluency/fluent, 4, 135, 140, 158; genealogy of, 164–­65n45; gestures, as overcompensatory, 66; gossip, 37–­38; guarded proprietary aesthetic of, 24; heteroglossic conditions, 149–­50; ideal of, defense of, 158–­59; as idealized distillation of talk, 98; imperialism, function in, 17; indexical power of, 39; linguistic belonging, 64; listening, as agentic act, 59; mediation, 84; mimicry, 56; narrativization, 156–­57; natural, 10; v. noise, 197n3; owned, 84; and ownership, 72, 74, 89; “overheard,” as poetic lyricism, 57; personhood, 86; power, exercise of, 37; proprietary ideals, 13; proprietary logic, 65, 140; proprietorship, 152–­53; proprietorship, and selfhood, 86; “purity” of, 66; racialized aesthetic assumptions about, 71; racial logic, 155; representation, 64; secret laughter, 89, 92; selfhood, 100; self-­possession, 49–­50, 52, 84–­85, 95, 135, 140, 155; sovereignty of, 22–­23, 36; speech transfer, 92; stuttering, 66; talk, distinction between, 38, 98; telegraphic style, 195n45; territorial control, 8; territorialization of, 4; transfers of, 35–­36; uncontrolled, racialization of, 130; verbal signage, 39; vertigo, and failed speech, 18–­19, 132. See also talk

226 Index

speech acts: illocutionary force, 168n66; perlocutionary force, 168n66; sovereignty of, 22 Spillers, Hortense, 73, 82, 134 Spivak, Gayatri, Chakravorty, 3, 7–­8, 64, 168n72; “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 21, 23–­2 4; sati, practice of, 23–­2 4; subaltern speech, 23, 168n73 Stead, W. T., 27, 29, 88, 91, 136–­37, 153 Sterne, Jonathan, 90 Stevenson, Fanny, 174n21 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 72, 94, 157, 169n78, 174n28, 175n31, 176n45, 186n14; “Apology for Idlers, An,” 42; “Beach of Falesa, The,” 177n54; bogie stories, 174n21; “brute energy,” 98–­99; eavesdropping on, 59–­60; everyday talk, interest in, 35–­38; gossip, pleasures of, 37; idle talk, 174n26; Kidnapped, 176n49; literature v. everyday talk, 34–­35; “My First Book,” 35, 42–­43, 46; orality, view of, 42, 173–­74n20; romance, immersive qualities of, 39; stage conventions, use of, 175n35; talk, as giddy adventure, 52; “Talk and Talkers,” 34–­35, 37–­38, 43–­4 4, 51; Treasure Island, 1, 10, 16, 26, 34–­61, 74, 80, 95, 129, 172n5, 173–­74n20, 174n21, 175n35, 175n39, 175–­76n40; unruly energies of talk, appreciation of, 100; unstructured talk, 52; vagabond reading, 37–­38 St. George, E. A. W.: Browning and Conversation, 4 Stoker, Bram, 169n78, 178n1; Dracula, 1, 10, 16, 26, 28, 30, 32–­33, 63–­64, 66–­85, 87–­88, 90–­92, 121, 130–­31, 153, 157, 175n39, 179n22, 180n28, 182n56 Stoler, Ann Laura, 47, 134, 196n55

storytelling: as form of conversation, 174–­75n29 St. Pierre, Joshua, 142, 193n29 stuttering, 138, 156; as liminal space, 193n29 subaltern speech, 2, 7–­8, 23–­2 4, 168n73 Sussman, Matthew, 108, 188n44 Sutherland, John, 59–­60, 173–­74n20 talk, 2–­3, 21, 25, 41, 47, 67–­68, 136, 140, 150; as abyss, 17–­18; anticolonial realm of, 78; as conquest and colonialist knowledge acquisition, 39; as defined, 170n89; discovery and conquest, 40; disorder of, 32; as dysfluent, 132; everyday talk, 34–­37; as giddy adventure, 52; idle, 44–­46, 48, 53; instabilities of, 49; and literature, 34–­35; multiciplicity of, 20; ownership, delinking of speech from, 38; piracy, resistance to ownership, 46; poetics of, 18–­19, 157; rituals, series of, 20; as speech, 119; speech, distinction between, 38, 98; surround of, 158–­59; talking cure, 20; unruly energies, 100; unstructured, 52. See also dysfluency, eavesdropping, inarticulacy, multilingualism, parroting “Talk and Talkers” (Stevenson), 34–­35, 37–­38, 43–­4 4, 51 Tange, Andrea Kaston, 162n12 telepathy, 88 Terada, Rei, 8 territorialization: crisis of, 10–­11 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, 64, 178n3 Thompson, Fred C., 189–­90n54 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 177n58 Toner, Anne C., 187n34 Toronto school of Catholic media, 90

Index 227

Transvaal Republic: Jameson Raid, 190n60 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 1, 26, 34, 74, 80, 95, 129, 172n5, 174n21, 175n35, 175n39; adventure poetics of, 41; aesthetics of self-­possession, 47; Ben Gunn in, 54–­56, 61; Billy Bones, Jim Hawkins’ eavesdropping on, 38, 51, 57–­59; Blackness in, 51, 53; Broadview edition of, 59, 173–­ 74n20; brownness in, 51; class and disability, 47–­48; class politics, 36; colonialist logics of speech, 46–­47; development of, 42–­43; diegetic structure of, 46; eavesdropping in, 38, 51, 57–­61; idle talk, roots in, 45–­46; Jim Hawkins, kinship with, 59–­60; John Silver, 56, 58, 60–­61; John Silver, mimicking of, 50, 53, 56, 61; John Silver, parroting of, 58–­59; John Silver, self-­possession of, 52; John Silver, silver-­tongued speech of, 49–­51; ; John Silver, as villain, 54; map in, 42–­4 4, 173–­74n20; mimicry, 16, 50–­51, 57; nonwhite bodies in, 53–­54, 60; nonwhite bodies, as spectral, 41–­42, 60; opening scene of, 48–­49; origins of, 43–­46; parroting, 58–­59, 61, 175–­76n40; parroting and eavesdropping, 35, 41–­42; parroting and pirating, 35, 46–­47, 50–­52, 58–­59, 74; pirates, racialization of, 16, 51; piratical form of, 46; plagiarizing in, 44; plot of, 10, 37; poetics of adventure, 37; poor talkers in, 48; racialization in, 53; spectrality of race, 42, 54, 60; speech, wayward movement of in, 37–­38; whiteness in, 52 Trilling, Lionel, 17, 165–­66n48

Trollope, Anthony, 191n5 Trump, Donald, 156, 165n46 Turkle, Sherry, 7; Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, 31 Twitter, 156 United States, 16–­17, 27, 75–­76, 137, 147, 152, 181n38; racial logics of, 25–­26; Standard English in, as a “thing,” 88; superpower nostalgia, 164–­65n45 Vambéry, Arminius, 80 vampirism, 78–­79 vertigo, 18–­19, 131–­32, 136 Victorian fictions of empire, 1, 3, 10, 17–­18, 38, 72, 152; anticolonial poetics of talk, 157; boys’ empire fiction, 40. See also fictions of empire Victorian literature, 8, 11, 23; casual racism in, 181n41 Victorian racialization, 17 Victorian studies, 2, 7–­8, 11, 25, 68–­69, 180–­81n37; Foucault, importance to, 13 Viswanathan, Gauri, 8, 15 vocalics, 185n9 Vogl, Josef, 171n95 Wait, James, 130, 192n18 Watson, Tim, 25, 168–­69n75 Weheliye, Alexander, 136, 180n35, 194n35; racialized assemblages, 73, 134; “Society Must Be Defended” (Foucault) lecture, critique of, 134 Wells, H. G., 71, 130, 144, 182n54; Anticipations, 70; “New Republic,” 70 Weltliteratur, 87

228 Index

white cosmopolitics, 73, 75; code totality of, 78; monolingualism, 87–­88; multilingualism, 89 whiteness, 52, 66, 149, 151; collective ownership, 74; property, as form of, 181n38 white supremacy, 16, 27–­2 8, 70–­71, 152, 156 white womanhood, 147 Wicke, Jennifer, 78 Wilde, Jane Francesca, 6 Wilde, Oscar, 5–­6, 94, 168n65, 185–­ 86n12, 186n14, 188n36; “Decay of Lying, The,” 93, 9 Wilhelm II: “Kruger telegram,” 190n60 Wilt, Judith, 111 Wing, Betsy, 3, 41 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 191n5 Wood, Naomi J., 172n5 Woolf, Virginia, 191n5 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 167–­68n64

World Literature, 86 World War I, 26, 126 World War II, 154 Worth, Aaron, 26, 28, 162–­63n23, 169n86 Wright, Daniel, 125, 191n5 Wynter, Sylvia, 1–­3, 24, 73, 109, 134, 163–­64n35, 164–­65n45, 175n39; coloniality of being, 14; ethnoclass Man, 25, 76; extrahuman authority, 13, 149, 183–­84n79; genealogy of Western humanism, 14; rethinking aesthetics, 25; social effectivities, 179n17 Xanthippe, 76 Young Folks (magazine), 44 Young, Rosetta, 5, 162n9 Zhang, Dora, 101 Zieger, Susan, 29–­30 Zuckerberg, Mark, 91; on social network, mission of, 179–­80n27