Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic by Jimmy Packham (review)

Reviewed by: Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic by Jimmy Packham Xavier Aldana Reyes Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic. By Jimmy Packham. (Gothic Literary Studies) Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2021. xi+252pp. £70. ISBN 978–1–78683–754–7. In June 2022, Amazon demoed a new experimental Alexa feature that can turn the voices of dead relatives into digital assistants. If the prospect of having spectral grandparents read bedtime stories to one's children feels more disconcerting than comforting, chances are the thanatic dialectics enacted by this AI–human exchange come too close to the acoustic nightmares explored in Jimmy Packham's Gothic Utterance. It is hard to argue with its main premiss that 'the Gothic is a noisy genre' (p. 4), full of disconsolate human wailing, clamorous shrieks from beyond the grave, ambiguous ventriloquizing, mechanic mimicry, and invisible things going bump in the night, the study of which benefits from an understanding of 'the intersection of affect and signification' (p. 17). Part of a recent turn to the sonic aspects of the Gothic that includes Isabella van Elferen's work on music—Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012)—and Matt Foley's writings on 'vococentric' fiction—Gothic Voices: The Vococentric Soundworld of Gothic Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)—Gothic Utterance pays close attention to 'what is being spoken and by whom', as well as 'how it is uttered and how that voice is captured and operates on the pages of the Gothic text' (p. 3). After a poststructurally inflected discursive teasing out of the Gothic properties of the human voice, the Introduction and subsequent chapters move on to consider the importance of the voicing processes that take place in the nineteenth-century North American Gothic fiction that forms the primary corpus (selected works by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Victor Séjour, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles W. Chesnutt, Ambrose Bierce, and Stephen Crane). This is vital to mention because, for all its valid genre-encompassing postulations on speech and noise, Gothic Utterance is first and foremost a dissection of key nation-building myths and spaces (the frontier, the wilderness, the plantation, the Civil War) that falls squarely within a long tradition of historicist studies of American Gothic literature comprising, among others, Teresa A. Goddu's Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), Allan Lloyd-Smith's American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2004), Charles L. Crow's History of the Gothic: American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), and Maisha L. Wester's African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Packham is keen to highlight the 'transformational potential' (p. 14) activated by the speaking voices of the repressed as well as the life-affirming messages afforded by their 'scrutiny of nationhood, citizenship and the ethical underpinnings of intersubjective encounters' (p. 22). Gothic Utterance is convincing in its defence of sonic horror as an experience that teaches 'the valuable difference of otherness' (p. 197), but where it really excels is in the mesmeric End Page 263 infusion of new life into much-trodden novels and short stories that will be very familiar to nineteenth-century specialists. Since the book is about voices, it feels incumbent upon this reviewer to comment briefly on the author's, especially because rarely does one encounter such lucid, accomplished, engaging, and authoritative writing in a first monograph. Packham's perceptive ear for language and the complex, self-imposed task of rechannelling inchoate sounds back into meaning showcase a level of stylistic precision that feels like a triumph in itself. The author's approach is also indicative of why the Gothic continues to be such a popular critical vector for contemporary researchers across disciplines. Its existence at the interstices of the representational and the analytical, as well as its interest in agencies and topics that often eschew or exceed them, makes it a powerful tool of cultural interpretation that extends beyond the thematic into, in this case...