Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller
Kreilkamp’s project seeks to combat the notion—explored by Ong among others—that the voice is lost with the advent of print culture, as orality becomes a relic of preliterate societies. Kreilkamp argues, by contrast, that the voice is alive and well in print culture, particularly in the Victorian novel: “Victorian print culture was also a vocal culture” (3). Interested in the “mythology of the storyteller” in Victorian fiction, Kreilkamp argues that the novel does not displace and usurp the oral storyteller, but rather reincarnates the figure of the “charismatic speaker as the author” (23). The “imaginary-voice-in-writing” (29) of the author-as-speaker/storyteller redeems print culture in an age nostalgic for “pure orality” and suspicious of print as a depersonalizing medium. Kreilkamp organizes his book as a series of case studies, mostly studies of canonical novels (Disraeli’s Sybil, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). He rigorously contextualizes each reading with discussions on Victorian shorthand, the phonograph, and other sociocultural developments relevant to the voice in writing. His chapter on Browning’s The Ring and the Book stands as the one exception to his focus on Victorian fiction, and even here Kreilkamp holds that the dramatic monologue is inherently novelistic in the way the form depicts an imaginary voice on the page. All chapters examine how gender, class, technology, politics, and biography affect the figure of author as storyteller (or the resistance to this trope).
Like Griffiths, Stewart, and Nowell Smith, Kreilkamp takes the imagined voice in/of literature as his point of departure. Kreilkamp is the most historically and culturally oriented of the four and is unique in his focus on (almost) exclusively Victorian fiction. My interests and approach are similar to Kreilkamp’s, though I find the receiving end of the imaginary voice more compelling. I want to consider the Ear and the Victorian Listener, as I lay out in my review essay.
