Prins, Yopie. Voice Inverse.
Why do we assume that Victorian poetics are transcriptions of the “voice” of a speaker, the speech of a unified psychological entity? This question lies at the center of Prins’s essay on “voice” in verse—or, more accurately, “voice inverse,” since Prins holds that the voice of poetry is not a transcription of utterance, but rather a metaphor constructed by the impersonal mechanism of meter. Prins responds to a wave of criticism on Victorian poetics that, as she argues, mistake the metaphor of “voice” in verse for the representation of literal human voice. This line of argument is typified by Griffiths who—even as he challenges the univocality of poetic “voice”—holds on to “an account of writing as the voice of an absent person” (45). This, Prins holds, betrays a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the human; theorizing Victorian poetics as a transcription of speech is an insertion of “the human in the places—or poems—where it is least certain” (46). Prins suggests combatting the anthropocentrism of this “lyric humanism” through a return to what she calls “historical prosody.” She recommends reading meter as “marks of culture, not limited to the expression of a speaking subject” (54). For Prins, meter is an historically-contingent graphic pattern, not a transcription of a transhistorical human voice capturing the interiority of a speaker.
Prins’s knee-jerk reaction to the anthropocentrism of examinations of poetry as personified voice is characteristic of the phonophobia following in the wake of Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. In her suspicion of scholars who collapse the metaphor of voice in poetry and the idea of personhood and interiority, Prins offers an important but familiar warning: the “voice” of printed poetry (and prose) is not an inscription of the utterance of singular subjectivity, but a construction of the impersonal technology of meter. This seems, to me, rather obvious. The question for me, then, is what does such a warning bring to bear on an analysis of the influence of reading aloud—literal “voicings” of texts—on Victorian literature. Does accepting Prins’s critique of work on poetic voice prohibit inquiries into voiced literature and the aural experience of poetry? Catherine Robson—with her analyses of the “life cycles” of recited poetry—seems a compelling and perhaps unexpected interlocutor here. For while Prins sees meter as historically-specific “graphic forms,” Robson sees meter as influenced by the memorization and recitation practices of a poem’s readers. By focusing on reader response and not authorial intent, Robson introduces a thoroughly historicized approach to meter as literally voiced and informed by voice without assuming that voice in verse captures the interiority of an author’s or speaker’s hallucinatory subjectivity.