Gothic Utterance

Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic

Jimmy Packham

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices – from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants – dead or otherwise – and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.

PART I

Gothic Utterance and Selfhood

1

Deadly Locution and Delphic Shrieks:
Haunted Significance and the Self

The American nation and its citizenship has been imagined, Christopher Looby notes, as being somewhat strangely ‘spoken into being’. Through the ‘legitimating charisma’ of vocal utterance – ‘the medium of unconstrained willful subjectivity’ – inherited models of political and cultural organisation could be ‘justified discursively rather than accepted automatically’. Moreover, such work operated alongside ‘a fearful sense’ of the new nation’s ‘foundationless instability and fragile temporality’, rather than a feeling of ‘its primordial rootedness’.¹ In this chapter, I am interested in the ways in which, within this context, American Gothic literature has grappled with the relationship between voice and subjectivity. My focus here is on the disorderly Gothic voice in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, and the interrogation in their writing of the relationship between voice and authority and the extent to which the subject is determined by – or in control of – their voice.

This study begins with Poe as the writer of Gothic fiction to most thoroughly deconstruct the connection between voice and self. I am especially interested in the ways in which Poe imagines an essential connection between voice and death and his examinations of the precarity of the human subject seeking to substantiate itself, and its humanity, through utterance. The chapter then turns to consider the disruptive power of the Gothic voice in Melville’s Pierre (1852). I explore how individual subjectivity – specifically that of Pierre Glendinning – comes under pressure in encounters with wild and disorienting voices, whose utterances undermine the narratives of national and familial exceptionalism on which the identity of Melville’s all-American hero is predicated. Emphasising the peculiarly American dimensions of an utterance-based identity crisis, this discussion is rooted in speech acts that speak to issues around (white) American genealogies, and the commensurability between the subject’s unknowable past and the nation’s supposedly ahistorical foundations. Taken together, Poe and Melville suggest the difficulty of locating authority in utterance, and both offer narratives that refute the viability of a coherent or cohesive national figure (or body) sustained by its enthrallment to its own self-mythologising voice.

Edgar Allan Poe: articulate mortis

In listening to the voices that emanate from the Gothic poetry and prose of Edgar Allan Poe, we encounter a cacophony of strange, and strangely deathly or deadly, utterances. Above all, Poe’s corpus explores the relationship between the body and the voice, the extent to which the articulate voice (voice as the bearer of language) is fundamental in the constitution of the bodily self and the manner in which identity can be located in acts of utterance. Across his most Gothic works, he undertakes an extensive consideration of the intertwining of the voice and death: the speaking subject is imagined as sustaining itself beyond the apparent death or traumatic collapse of the body, as in the case of M. Valdemar, while fully-fledged subjects can be seemingly spoken into being, as Morella and Madeline Usher are wrested from the tomb and back into the world.

By hearing in the voice what Mladen Dolar has called ‘the intimate kernel of subjectivity’, Poe’s Gothic tales and poetry puzzle out what it means for the self, for identity, to reside somewhere so nebulous: the voice is that which neither in nor out of the body, it is that which is ‘surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the nomore-body’.² Slavoj Žižek alludes to the fittingly Gothic quality of the voice when he acknowledges the ‘spectral autonomy’ it acquires when we enter ‘the symbolic order’. Hearing the voice, Žižek argues, always involves ‘some degree of ventriloquism’, ‘as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks “by itself”’.³ The listener, this seems to suggest, has to work to re-place the voice within the body from which it has emanated but to which it is not definitively attached in any tangible sense. The voice as spectral agent figures the voice as both a ghostly presence – immaterial and intangible – and as something with its own uncanny agency. The voice may be (to invoke a tactile metaphor) the malleable substance into which language is impressed and through which language gains presence in the world, but the voice is not entirely obliterated in the process: the voice continues to signify around the edges of language as remainder, as supplement. Even as the voice is the glue which ‘holds bodies and languages together’, it is may also be heard as a rupturing force within the speech of the subject.⁴

What, then, might the impact be on the self if one’s own voice can be ventriloquised or replicated by others – by the Other? To whom might that voice or that self belong? What happens to the self if your voice fails you, if voice and speech are wrenched apart from one another or if the voice will not cease at death? And what is the result of a catastrophic failure of language, of there being only a single word available to you through which to sustain a semblance of selfhood? Poe engages with each of these questions in order to push at the limits of imaginable selfhood and the contingency of one’s participation in the world. Poe’s Gothic utterances serve also to bring self and Other inextricably together, urging the self either to recognise itself or to lose itself in/to the Other, and to acknowledge the (illusory) constitutive boundaries of the human in the presence of the articulate nonhuman. In what follows, I address Poe’s presentation of the difficult relationship between body and voice through several representative texts, beginning with the deconstruction of the relationship between voice and self as evident in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1842), ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845) and ‘The Raven’ (1845), and concluding with a reading of Poe’s satire of an expressly American voice in ‘The Man That Was Used Up’ (1839). We see first how Poe theorises voice’s relationship to the body and self-consciousness; next, how Poe complicates our seeing voice and speech as an essentially human quality by positing the human as mechanical and the animal as a viable interlocutor; and finally how Poe approaches these questions within a tale lampooning a specifically American subjectivity.

‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ concerns a man condemned to death by the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo in the early nineteenth century and subjected to an array of increasingly imaginative tortures. Its ahistorical horrors and Blackwoodisms notwithstanding, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ reads as an elaborate deconstruction of voice and the emergence, through voice, of a subject’s consciousness and participation in the world of culture or symbolic order. It examines the ways in which our ‘being-in-the-world’, as Heidegger puts it, our efforts to participate and grapple with our ‘thrownness’ in the world, depends upon the voice as the connective link between self and Other, self and world; and it does so by illustrating the opposite, by presenting the estranged and alienating voice that takes us out of the world, out of the symbolic order, establishing, in the end, a fundamental relationship between voice and death.⁵

The narrator connects the height of his suffering with an awful consciousness of his own estranged voice: ‘By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me’.⁶ That is, it is only once the subject hears something of horror in their own voice – as they speak in a voice that does not seem to belong to them, but which speaks back to the subject as if from beyond or without them – it is only then that the victim is a ‘fitting subject’ for a torture that depends upon total severance with the world at large.⁷ For Derrida, ‘hearing-oneself-speak is lived as absolutely pure auto-affection’; it is that which is capable of generating what Dolar has called ‘an elementary formula of narcissism that is needed to produce the minimal form of a self’.⁸ If confrontation with the voice renders the life of the subject audible and available and thereby helps consolidate the subject as a living presence, it goes that with an awareness of one’s spatio-temporality one’s death becomes imaginable, too. Poe, then, introduces the prospect of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’ as a Gothicised utterance not to emphasise the emergence of the subject into language and the world of culture, but as that which at the same time speaks back to the subject of its mortal contingency and precariousness. This precariousness is rendered all the more overt as Poe’s tale signals its understanding that the voice is always only very obscurely connected with the body, situated somewhere in-between internal self and exterior world.

The narrator recalls his trial as that which precipitates the making-strange of speech and voice:

The sentence – the dread sentence of death – was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution – perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel . . . I saw the lips of the black-robed judges . . . I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded.⁹

The doubled implications of ‘the dread sentence of death’ gestures towards both the judgement of the Inquisitors and, moreover, the prospect of a death-dealing utterance, a deadly sentence. For it is on receiving (or, indeed, hearing) this speech act that the narrator suggests he has encountered ‘the last of distinct accentuation[s]’ and that his death is enacted figuratively first in his removal from the world of language, ahead of his more bodily destruction. At the same time, the voices he can hear seem ‘merged’ into a multiplicity which signifies only vaguely as an ‘indeterminate hum’ and which the narrator imaginatively connects with the inhuman noise of machinery whirring – a feature Fred Botting has also noted Poe deploys in other tales of disorderly speech.¹⁰ Following this, the narrator is plunged into a world of speech that seems devoid of voice, a site of utterance without content: he witnesses the judges’ lips ‘writhe with a deadly locution’ as he sees them ‘fashion the syllables’ of his name even as ‘no sound succeed[s]’. At the moment, then, that the narrator is sentenced to death – figuratively killed-off by the act of utterance – he inhabits a space in which voice and speech are no longer conjoined.

What is perhaps most striking about the narrator’s account of his death sentence in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ is the oddly visual emphasis he places on attempting to fathom the voices to which he is subjected: ‘I saw the lips . . . I saw them writhe . . . I saw them fashion the syllables of my name’. The markedly visual nature of this moment – akin to our straining to hear the sounds of horror conjured up in paintings like Munch’s The Scream (1893) or Bouguereau’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862) – displaces the utterance from the aural domain of the voice to the domain of the gaze. As gaze and voice both function in crucial ways in the development of self-consciousness – most notably in Lacanian theory¹¹ – their intertwining at the moment the subject is sentenced to death suggests the breakdown or dissolution of these indices of subjectivity. It is, moreover, a failure to hear what might be termed the language-inthe-voice, especially when the visual quality emphasised here is read in conjunction with the ‘indeterminate hum’ of the voice. In the wake of his sentence, fully removed from language, the narrator recalls only a sense of the ‘tall figures that lifted and bore me in silence down – down – still down’ into his notional tomb.¹² What follows in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ might, in light of this, be read as an evocative illustration of the subject’s re-emergence into consciousness, language and the world of culture.

As the narrator reawakens and becomes cognizant of his surroundings, stumbling awkwardly around his cell to fathom the nature and limits of his world, he grapples at the same time with the difficulty of sustaining consciousness:

Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound – the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch – a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought – a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state.¹³

The process illustrated here goes through several distinct stages: first, awareness of motion and sound specific to the self; second, awareness of motion, sound, and touch; next, consciousness without thought; finally, consciousness with thought. This is no jubilant re-emergence into consciousness, however, but one suffused with ‘shuddering terror’ – Poe’s Gothic awakening into terrible, murky self-awareness. The Gothic modulations of the subject’s voice-without-language are emphasised as he comes to terms with his environment: he ‘alternately laugh[s] and howl[s]’ as he contemplates his impending doom, and he envisions death as ‘a relief, oh, how unspeakable!’ As the burning roof of the chamber illuminates the depths of the pit into which he must inevitably fall, as the walls close in around him, he finds himself ‘refus[ing] to comprehend the meaning of what I saw. At length it forced – it wrestled its way into my soul – it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason. Oh! for a voice to speak! – oh! horror!’¹⁴

Here, Poe’s protagonist expressly draws attention to his own lack of voice, as if the possession of voice might mitigate the incommunicable horror he has encountered by abjecting, as utterance, that which has ‘burned itself in upon [his] shuddering reason’. The only comprehensible speech act the narrator utters in the duration of his imprisonment – mere moments before his miraculous deliverance – is a yearning for death: ‘“Death,” I said, “any death but that of the pit!”’.¹⁵ The narrator, thus, externalises his voice just once in order to evoke the obliteration of self. But we might also see in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ how Poe posits death and horror as the fundamental wellsprings of voice, utterance and Being. It is in the presence of death that our voices demonstrate their greatest potential for speech and creative utterance – so...