Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices.
Stewart’s is a book about the somatic and cerebral affect of silent reading, the reading of what Tennyson calls “silent-speaking words.” Or, Stewart argues, of “silence speaking,” as, in the imagined aurality of Tennyson’s coinage, the t fuses with the s to form the homophone ce. For indeed, Stewart is interested in phonemes that misbehave, that “will not stay put within the morphemes apparently assigned by the script” (5). His model of “phonemic reading”—which attends not to the presence of voice in text, but rather to the “presence to evocalization of any text when read” (3)—recuperates stylistics and the aural by responding to and incorporating concerns raised by deconstruction and post-structuralist linguistics. This reading takes as its primary concern what Stewart calls the “phonotext”: not the graphic marks of linguistic signification, but that “latent musculature of silent enunciation” (29) that, in its momentum, causes slippages, drifts, and elisions at the sites of lexical borders. In his first chapter, Stewart takes Shakespeare as his proof case for this “transegmental drift” as he examines the different but ever-present phonemic ambiguities in Shakespeare’s sonnets and Hamlet, a prompt text for literal voicing. He then devotes a chapter to the “unique sort of rhyme” (66) made audible in these transegmental slippages, a rhyme that does not “toe the line ends” (67), but rather echoes in phonemic clusters that lurch backward (or, more rarely, forward) across the lexemes on the page. After contextualizing his method of phonemic reading in a dense genealogy of linguistics, spanning from the structuralists to the deconstructionists, Stewart turns to examples of what he calls “over(r-r)eading” (145)—when a sound overtakes another in a sequence, blurring words’ adjacent edges—in poetry and prose. His poetic examples span the English canon, starting with Donne and Milton, dipping into the Romantics, listening in to Tennyson and Hopkins, before finishing with Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Dylan Thomas. For fiction, he concentrates—not surprisingly—on Dickens and other Victorians (the Brontes, Eliot, Hardy and Conrad). James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, with their metalinguistic fiction, each gets his or her own chapter on their distinct employments of “phonemic fluency” (261).
As both a work of theory and a model of reading, this book is helpful. Stewart challenges phonophobic moratorium on studies of the voice in literature following deconstruction while also productively opening up close reading to what is heard between words, not just what is seen in them. And even while Stewart defines his phonemic reading as one concerned “not with reading orally but with aurally reading” (2), his attention to the slippages of silenced enunciation could converse interestingly with the enunciation exercises and “oral gymnastics” of elocution manuals like Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.
