Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers, Dec 2020

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

This article reconstructs the underexamined stage history and reception of one of the most popular stammering figures of the nineteenth century: the bumbling aristocrat Lord Dundreary, as performed by E. A. Sothern. Dundreary originated in Tom Taylor’s comic melodrama Our American Cousin, which premiered in 1858 and is best remembered today as the backdrop of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Sothern rewrote and expanded the originally minor part and received acclaim for his portrayal on both sides of the Atlantic for several decades. This praise centred on Sothern’s performative blend of stammering and lisping speech used to animate Dundreary and amuse audiences. Dundreary’s unprecedented dysfluent stardom is situated within the context of nineteenth-century vocal discourse’s frequent hostility to modes of speech that deviate from social norms of fluency, pace and articulacy. In particular, the theatrical culture from which Dundreary emerged construed a dysfluent actor as a liability while celebrating a dysfluent character, illuminating an evaluative schism between innate and performed vocal disability. Prescient of contemporary vocal hierarchies, Dundreary’s reception demonstrates that entertainment value mitigates the stigma that otherwise accrues to dysfluent voices. Dundreary obtains cultural centrality as a dysfluent speaker on stage in a manner foreclosed to dysfluent speakers offstage.

This article takes a dysfluency studies approach to representations and expressions of voice and dysfluent speech in Robert Browning’s minor dramatic monologue ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’ (1864). Browning’s speaker, an American spiritualist medium named Sludge, is vile and repugnant in his casuistry and sophistry as he defends his deceptions after being caught as a cheat during one of his séances. While Browning’s contemporaries recognized ‘Mr Sludge’ as a mockery of the real-life American medium Daniel Dunglass Home, the monologue relies on one central metaphor of the medium’s stuttering and stammering body that challenges broader Victorian assumptions about the relationship between speech, voice and elocutionary practices. Throughout this article, G.K. Chesterton’s claim that Browning’s critique of spiritualist practices is paradoxically a ‘warm and sympathetic thing’ becomes the keystone for understanding the monologue’s contributions to modern thought about the pleasures and vitality of dysfluent speech. Fundamentally, Browning’s exploration of the spiritualist’s deceptions and conjuring of the voices of the dead reflects broader medical analogies beginning in the 1840s that linked the causes of dysfluent speech to invasive and contagious voicings.

This paper seeks both to expand the range of what counts as political action for dysfluent voices and to find resources that can generate critical breaks within neo-liberal modes of power. With the Cynics, I suggest that some truths – like dysfluent lives are worth living – cannot be told by a talking head. I accordingly map three possible modes of truth-telling within the lexicon of parrhesia: therapeutic, Platonic and Cynic. Therapeutic truth-telling is an apolitical enunciation that indexes a model of authenticity and is limited to speaking truth about oneself and the world in a normalizing register. Platonic parrhesia is a form of equality-based political discourse that aims at inclusion. In this mode, the parrhesiastes, like the talking head, must fashion their body as a pure vessel of truth to be recognized as such. Cynic truth-telling, finally, is a radical embodiment of critique that seeks rupture rather than understanding. Taking up the motto of the Cynics – ‘deface the currency’ – perhaps dysfluent voices can find resources to ‘de-face’ speech and its mythic power that has become entwined with capital.

Jacques Derrida’s early critique of Husserlian phenomenology discusses the production of the ‘phenomenological voice’ as the consummate model of human consciousness. Challenging Husserl’s conviction that consciousness is produced from the self-enclosed act of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’, Derrida points to vocality as the complex site of the self’s relationship to presence and exteriority. The internal division between hearing and speaking, he argues, introduces difference into the generation of conscious life. The use of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) as a prosthetic for stuttering provides an opportunity to engage Derrida’s insights on the connection between consciousness and voice with an ear to the speech of people who stutter. DAF, which may reduce or increase dysfluency depending on the speech of the user, introduces a series of delays, alterations and supplements to speech that underwrite the heterogeneous experience of conscious life. What can the philosophy of deconstruction add to conversations about the function of DAF, and what can theory about and experiences with DAF teach us about the self’s presence to itself and the role of alterity in shaping speech? What does stuttering teach us about the necessity of dysfluency for all speech? This article examines the relation between the voice and the phenomenological voice, and between stuttering and prosthetics. Concluding with an analysis of Richard Serra’s experimental recording, Boomerang (1974), it argues that voice is always already prostheticized with alterity, and that in hearing-oneself-speak we exist with voice in an expansive and unfinished conversation with our own mystery.

This article argues that dysfluency, music and Blackness, because of their distinct relationships to time, have the power to forge alternative temporalities and help us heal from ‘temporal subjection’. As a Black composer who stutters, I write from first-hand experience. With reference to my own recordings and scores, I examine the ways I use musical techniques like loops and rubato to create these alternative temporalities. Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music – work that I continue today.

In 2018, designer Conor Foran presented his work on Dysfluent Mono, a typeface that represents the vocal repetitions of stammered speech, at the symposium Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers at University College Dublin, Ireland. In 2020, Foran self-published the first issue of Dysfluent Magazine, a magazine about the positive experiences of people who stutter that is set exclusively in Dysfluent Mono. Maria Stuart and Daniel Martin had the occasion to interview Foran on his work in both typography and advocacy for people who stutter.

Review of: Dysfluent, Conor Foran (ed.) (2020)

60 pp., https://www.dysfluentmagazine.com, p/bk, £10

Review of: Lipsynching, Merrie Snell (2020)

New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 200 pp..,

ISBN 978-1-50135-234-8, p/bk, £21.99

Review of: The Performative Power of Vocality, Virginie Magnat (2019)

London and New York: Routledge, 240 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-42934-033-8, e-book, £37.79

Review of: Teaching Strategies for Neurodiversity and Dyslexia in Actor Training: Sensing Shakespeare, Petronilla Whitfield (2019)

New York: Routledge, 218 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-42945-859-0, e-book, £31.49