Review of Steven Connor's "Beyond Words" (2014)

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of California, Berkeley] On: 20 June 2014, At : 07: 42 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Textual Practice Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rt pr20 Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations a Chris Eagle a Goet he Universit ät Published online: 18 Jun 2014. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Textual Practice, 2014 Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 07:42 20 June 2014 Book review Chris Eagle Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 224 pp., $39.00 (hbk) While reading Steven Connor’s new book Beyond Words, I was reminded of a remark the American linguist Charles Hockett made in his Course in Modern Linguistics.1 Addressing what he perceives to be the limited value of unedited speech for the study of language, Hockett writes the following: Recent research suggests that much can be learned about a person through a close examination of his unedited speech. The particular ways in which he hems and haws, varies the register of his voice, changes his tone quality, and so on, are revealing both of his basic personality and of his momentary emotional orientation. But since (if our assumption is correct) phenomena of these sorts are not manifestations of the speaker’s linguistic habits, it is proper to ignore them in the study of language, basing that study exclusively on edited speech (p. 143). This remark reflects one of the dominant attitudes of twentieth-century linguistics, namely, that language is best approached not in terms of the idiosyncrasies of individual usage, but rather in terms of its deeper grammatical structures. It is safe to say there is no view more foreign to the spirit and the letter of Steven Connor’s Beyond Words, a book that dedicates itself entirely (we might even say lovingly) to unedited speech, to hems and haws, or as Connor’s own subtitle tells us, to ‘Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations’. In this, Beyond Words is best situated within that growing call in contemporary theory to re-root language in its embodied origins as vocality. Connor’s closest corollary here is certainly Marc Shell’s 2006 cultural Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 07:42 20 June 2014 Textual Practice history Stutter, but his work also shares much in common with Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Echolalias (2008) and my own recent books Dysfluencies (2014) and Talking Normal (2013). Like all of these texts, Beyond Words endeavours to understand language in its most imperfectly unedited state. It takes language, in other words, less as the well-oiled differential machine of structural linguistics than as a finicky old guitar, quick to fall out of tune, missing a string or two, yet still capable of a gorgeous variety of expressive sounds. The precise subject matter of this book is a collection of ‘quasilocutions’, as Connor calls them, neglected moments of noisy vocality like ‘the lisp, the gasp, the sigh, the rasp, the whistle, the hiss, the brrr, the prrr, the snore, the sniffle, the crepitus, the croak’ (p. 34). These phenomena are grouped in the book phonetically into a series of chapters (ten in total), each dealing with the vast phonological and cultural histories associated with these different sound patterns. Although the structure of Beyond Words may be loosely phonetic, Connor insists at several points that his primary concern ‘is not with phonetics, but with the phenomenological phantom of the voice and its noisy infiltrators and fellow-travellers’ (p. 36). The end-result is a playful ‘phonophenomenology’ of our speaking bodies, informed throughout by a remarkable number of related fields: Aristotelian philosophy, comparative linguistics, speech pathology, musicology, anthropology, and mysticism, to name only a few. Over the past decade, Connor has produced a series of such works of cultural history on surprising topics ranging from magical objects to skin to flies. In this context, his 2001 book Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism would be the most relevant, and it is regularly referenced by Connor himself in Beyond Words. As in his other cultural histories, Connor strikes a chord somewhere between George Steiner and Bill Bryson. He comfortably mixes analysis of Aristotle with personal anecdotes such as his mother’s impressions of the German language and his own experience of sudden hearing loss. His highly digressive approach to his subject matter has, not surprisingly, its strengths and its drawbacks. Connor’s associative leaps are consistently fascinating; however, some important connections do get overlooked in the relentless stream of obscure citations. Take, for example, his approach to Finnegans Wake in his chapter on stuttering (Chapter 2). Connor cites the best-known passage of the Wake, the so-called washerwomen episode, as an example of the relation between voice and our natural environment. Yet the fact that the central character of Finnegans Wake (the archetypal father figure known in Joyce studies by his acronym ‘HCE’) is in fact a stutterer strangely goes unmentioned in a chapter on stuttering. Similarly, when Connor addresses the ‘pernickety’ pronunciation history of the aspirated /h/ in modern England, one would expect at least some mention of Shaw’s 2 Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 07:42 20 June 2014 Book review Pygmalion or of Eliza Doolittle’s struggles in My Fair Lady to give voice to those hurricanes of ‘Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire’, especially when the context is the sociolinguistic implications of pronouncing certain sounds properly. Of course, for every one of these missed opportunities for greater synthesis, Connor provides us with a dozen unexpected discoveries that will send most readers rushing gratefully back to the archive in search of more information. For this reason, the ‘Further Reading’ section provided at the end is certainly appreciated, though a more comprehensive bibliography might have been preferable. The most sustained argument of Beyond Words has to do with a set of questions related to language’s potential for what is sometimes called ‘iconicity’ or ‘mimeticism’. Are the vocal sounds we make wholly arbitrary? Do certain words imitate things in the world better than others? For Connor, these types of questions about the possible proximity of word and thing always teeter quickly towards mysticism. As such, almost every chapter of Beyond Words is dedicated in part to some aspect of language magic, or ‘mouth-mysticism’ as he calls it (p. 104). Over this terrain too, Connor guides us through another remarkable series of examples: folkloric, mystic, and theological customs that share some belief in the incantatory power of language. He also returns again and again to the related topic of onomatopoeia, assessing the fittingness of a catalogue of different sound patterns for the things they denote. Ultimately, Connor connects these folk theories in the magical properties of speech, and in the inherent rightness of certain sounds, back to the Platonic question of the potential non-arbitrariness of the sign. This view that certain words might bear a mimetic correspondence to things – often called ‘Cratylism’ after the eponymous Platonic dialogue – ends up being vehemently dismissed by Connor. Despite his strong objections though, one cannot help but detect a certain sympathy on his part for these phono-semantic fantasies. Theories of the possible inherence of language to the world, he insists, are certainly ‘erroneous, but the error has a distinctive form and force’ (p. 104). His argument against such theories, in short, is that while language might radiate a certain iconicity, this is always more a matter of what we ourselves project onto language. Certain sounds feel more ‘right’ than others (e.g. ‘grr’ to denote harshness) because we project certain qualities onto the articulation of those sounds, and language is malleable enough of a medium to bend to our Cratylist whims. Any iconicity or mimeticism we find in language, in the end, ‘is not preformed, but performed, not given but made’ (p. 126). Performance is an important word for this text in particular, because one of the most rewarding elements of reading Beyond Words is in watching how Connor in a sense performs his own raw material. By that I mean the style of the book enacts a distinctive form of wordplay in which he renders 3 Downloaded by [University of California, Berkeley] at 07:42 20 June 2014 Textual Practice for us a sensuous experience of vocalic sounds in the richest terms possible. When speaking of sibilants, his sentences themselves become suddenly slippery, full of the very same effects they are describing. In the case of plosives like /b/ and /p/, he renders their phonaesthetic pleasures through the vivid metaphor of ‘a bag of wind rapidly alternating between a superbly englobed and dribblingly deflated condition’ (p. 130). While detailing the highly precise set of sounds that make up a word like ‘specificity’, Connor plays with /p/ and /t/ sounds to convey the difficulty many native speakers have with this word. Beyond its playfully mimetic style and digressive arrangement, the real achievement of this book is the way it lovingly directs our attention to scores of neglected vocal phenomena. Much like Gérard Genette in this regard, whose book Mimologics stands as a kind of ur-text for Beyond Words, Connor has an equal knack for coining new terms – like ‘phonophenomenology’ (p. 15) or ‘phonopolitical force’ (p. 11) – all of which serve a legitimate purpose in distinguishing and clarifying the minutiae of unedited speech. Elsewhere, I have suggested the term ‘dysfluency studies’ as a helpful heading under which to group works like this that locate the very essence of language in its imperfections, its idiosyncrasies and fragilities, and in my estimation, Beyond Words offers a valuable and highly pleasurable contribution to this still-developing approach to the study of language. Chris Eagle Goethe Universität # 2014 Chris Eagle http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2014.913372 Note 1 Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 4