Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck.
Connor sees his history as more than just a catalogue of ventriloquism practices and practitioners; his book is simultaneously an inquiry into the changing sociocultural assumptions about the voice as it pertains to source and subjectivity. The book’s most lasting contribution to conversations on voice lies in his conception of the “vocalic body”: a “projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice” (35). The vocalic body is a “body-in-invention” that, through the phenomenological experience of a seemingly sourceless voice, is “in the course of being found and formed” (36). This definition acts as the foundation for Connor’s wide-ranging history of ventriloquism, which begins with Delphic oracles and ends with twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular films, including Toy Story and The Exorcist. Before the eighteenth century, the ventriloquial voice issued from a supernatural realm and was accounted for as the voice of God, demons, or angels. In the twentieth and twenty-first, ventriloquism is seen as sub- or inhuman utterance. Sandwiched between these conceptualizations of ventriloquism as superhuman and subhuman, however, is the period in which Connor is the most invested: the nineteenth century. According to Connor, the nineteenth-century (informed by secularism) uniquely conceptualizes ventriloquism “as the manipulation of human voices, as dramaturgy” (43). In this cultural moment, ventriloquism briefly becomes a medium for “exploring relations between selves and their voices” (43).
Part V of Connor’s book picks up where my historical area begins, the turn of the nineteenth century, when ventriloquism developed into “an art of spatial illusion” (254) rather than a supernatural event. Connor discusses famous ventriloquists of the century, including Charles Mathews, whose monopolylogues are said to have inspired Dickens’s performance of his characters in his public Readings. Dickens earns mention in Connor’s discussion of fiction on ventriloquism as well, though only briefly before his in-depth reading of Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist. Connor argues that ventriloquism in Valentine Vox, unlike in the Gothic Wieland of the late-eighteenth century, retains no power except for the power to create comical mayhem and “infinitely renewable delight” (323). Part VI concerns the influence of mechanism, mechanized speech, and the phonograph on ventriloquism in the second half of the nineteenth century. He devotes an entire chapter to the use of gramophones and sound technology in Victorian spiritualist practices, a topic also pursued by John Durham Peters and Leigh Eric Schmidt. This chapter could provide historical contextualization for my own analyses of ghostly technological voices in works such as Hardy’s “The Voice,” Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Japanned Box,” and George du Maurier’s Trilby.
