5—
^{[Evocalizing Prose:]}
Sterne to Dickens to Lawrence

A transegmental prose too? Can a sentence or paragraph from a novel, in any degree like a line or quatrain from a sonnet, be found to invite phonemic reading? Prose doesn't work this way, one is told. In the language of prose fiction, by contrast with poetry, less seems to go on than to go forward, less texture than direction—in Jakobson's phonological terms, less arranged equivalence than simple combination. Wouldn't, in fact, the overeading of literary prose, as against verse—given the former's very different tempo and specific gravity—amount to a willful over-reading after all? The answer, in the negative, rests with an understanding of the transegmental effect as a function, in considerable part, of chance, to which prose is as open as verse. Not ordinarily a phonological nuance consciously tuned to a hairbreadth band of registration, the transegmental phenomenon involves instead as much contingency as craft, as much equivocal slippage as exquisite precision. The graphonic in poetry—and, by extension, in prose—is rhetoric crossed with risk, a hazard of syllables and subsidiary phonemes. It is thus wordplay in a very particular sense, a gaming both with and against the odds. Prose, at least before Joyce, is often thought to be more "transparent" than poetry, assumed to give the close application of a deconstructive analysis, as before it of a New Critical reading, more trouble, less action: less scriptive thickness on the way to the described. But this assumption is no more shielded from local surprise than from theoretical disproof. Vagrant, refractory, the stray phoneme in prose can—to use a scriptive dead metaphor—still make its mark in the syntactic shuffle. Put thereby into silent play in prose fiction, though usually more at ease than in verse, are, once again, the reader's passive vocal muscles: the solicited body in the poise of its constantly shifting activity of withheld enunciation, labile and always just a little precarious.

"Undercraft" As Subtext

In that book of play, that game of a book, Tristram Shandy , Sterne writes that "'tis an undercraft of authors to keep up a good understanding amongst words, as politicians do amongst men—not knowing how near they may be under a necessity of placing them to each other" (7.19.502), itself a strained phrase with its own nine-word inverted displacement of "near" from its grammatical completion "to each other." In some very different cases, however, the tang of verbal propinquity can become explosive. An unguarded collocation may accidentally suffer a strange textual fate well beyond the ken of a given character, even one who may articulate part of its words. At the opening of Slawkenbergius's Tale, that story of the man burdened with an enormous length of (euphemistically designated) nose, the protagonist so endowed overhears the trumpeter's wife planning to touch the notorious organ when he sleeps. His fury is immediate:

No! said he, dropping his reins upon his mule's neck, and laying both his hands upon his breast, the one over the other in a saint-like position (his mule going on easily all the time)—No! said he, looking up,—I am not such a debtor to the world—slandered and disappointed as I have been—as to give it that conviction—no! said he, my nose shall never be touched while heaven gives me strength.
(4.247–48)

In the adamancy of his refusal, conveyed by an inverted grammar ("said he") bringing the s sounds into adjacency, the speaker has three times accidentally named the cause célèbre—that salient member whose mere designation will not be denied—across the recurrent transegmental slip of "No s aid." Even the word will out, let alone the body part. Given the regular demarcations of a fictional text, what is particularly unusual about this slippage is that it effects a transgression across the boundary of quoted dialogue and narrative discourse. It brings up into direct quotation, up from what we might loosely call the "unconscious" of the subtending text, an acoustic irony—an "undercraft"—that contaminates the uttered thoughts of a character. The protagonist speaks only his refusal; through us as silent readers, the text subverts that defiance by blurting out—right under his own nose—the noun in question, a return of the repressed under the ban of negation.

Sterne can be even more explicit about the intrigues of orthography. At one point he deliberately foregrounds the sound of the shapes of words, the phonetic articulation of written characters—before, or at the very moment of, their passing into phonemic relation with the lexeme they inaugurate. In

Tristram's alphabet of love, there is a partial list of love's attributes, each categorized by the first letter of its designation, "A gitating, B ewitching, C onfounded" (8.13.551), and so forth. It is the middle term there that is of particular interest in its teasing out the possibility of a phonetic rebus, activated only when B (pronounced "be") provides by elision a phonemic continuity with the word it opens. This is the bewitchment of the phonotext itself in a nervous commuting between letters as signs and letters as names. Exactly a century later, such play with letters—as not just the constituent thingness of words but as words in their own right—inflects a well-known passage in Dickens's Great Expectations , related in turn to Cockney humor and based on the phonetic rebus as a transitional stage on the way to literacy. The young Pip, just learning to write, scribbles a note to Joe on his chalk slate:

mI deEr JO i opE U r krWitE wEll i opE i shAl soN B haBelL 
4 2 teeDge U JO aN theN wE shOrl b sO glOdd aN wEn i M 
preNgtD 2 u JO woT larX an blEvE ME inF xn PiP.
(7.75)

Beyond the Cockney "hable" for "able," Pip traces, instead of words, both numerals ("four" and "two" as prepositions) and letters ("i M" for "I em," that is "I am"; only accidentally for the contraction "I'm"). When the novice writer gives in valediction "inF XN Pip," the letters stand for "in-eff-ection" but also, if the phonemic readout starts a split second too late, for "in f-ection," that sickness so often lurking on the underside of love in this novel.

This play with the sound of letters, related to the detachments of syllables as separate words, can make its (phonic) mark in less expected fictional contexts. Charlotte Brontë's way with words, her "undercraft," is given over to one of Jane Eyre's own central protestations in the novel. Rochester, insistently anticipating their marriage, has addressed her prematurely as the second Mrs. Rochester. In response, Jane immediately blushes, discomfited because "you gave me a new name—Jane Rochester; and it seems so strange" (24.227). The conversation that ensues, in which she refuses his offer of jewels and finery, may be read as an attempt to recover the lost integrity and singleness of an original name. It may indeed be heard to climax precisely with a disintegrating play upon both her unmarried names. Bedecked as he wishes, Jane would be unrecognizable: "And then you won't know me, sir; and I shall not be your Jane Eyre any longer, but an ape in a harlequin's jacket" (228). To which she adds in an afterthought (and after a dash), as if reflecting further on the suddenly no more than nominal self she is in danger of abdicating: "—a jay in borrowed plumes." To pronounce (upon) the name he would have her surrender is to enter upon a homophonic irony in which "Ja/ne" must resist being spoken-for (disyllabically) as a "jay/in" plumage.

Her answer—in a word—in a name—is Never. To hold to her full name as Jane Eyre, the Jane she has always been "'ere" now—the name of a woman whose continuity of spirit cannot be squandered—would after all, in an extension of the subtextual rebus inflecting this passage about the giving and taking of names, amount to being a "Jay Ne'er." As an ironic internal echo, "Jane" is therefore thrust into spiritual dissonance with "jay in"; as a phonemic allegory, we might say, the echo constitutes a syllabic degeneration of the name, recuperated only by the transegmental nudge—outside of an immediate and functioning syntax—of "Jane Eyre" toward "Jay Ne'er." If one needs a context for such rebuslike biplay beyond the multiple (and activated) puns on Jane's last name ("'ere," "air," "ire," "eyrie," "heir," including her dream of "a fairer era of life" [11.86]), one need only remember Rochester's own overt internal echo in advising her to "Dread . . . remorse" whenever inclined "to err, Miss Eyre" (14.120): in other words, to fear those recriminations that engulf the self is "miser/y."

In Villette , Brontë's verve for euphony and internal echo is developed considerably beyond even the lush, studied texturings of Jane Eyre . An unmistakable transegmental effect can be heard, for instance, in the passing description of a cultivated park landscape, "a well-planted round" no more symmetrically trimmed than Brontë's own prose in rendering "the green swell of ground surrounding this well " (33.471). Sometimes, too, the phonemic swell and overflow can be simply comic, as in the polyglot humor by which the French-speaking professor of literature pronounces "Williams Shack-spire" (28.416, 417), a phonetic "fusion" through "doubling"—here the doubling back of the surname's first sibilant to a meaningless pluralization of the first name. In the famous phantasmagoric chapter "Cloud," in which Lucy wanders alone at night in an opium-induced fog through the hallucinatory doings of a city festival, the prose is even more heightened, more convoluted: "The effect was as a sea breaking into song with all its waves ," the next sentence then picking out, picking up on, the initially unbonded sibilant and w for the cross-lexical paronomasia of "The sway ing tide swept this way ." Prose of this order seems to feed on the dream logic that permeates this first-person rendering of a half-conscious, drugged cognition.

The most ingenious—or fortuitous—effect of all, perhaps, appears in the next chapter's prolongation of this opium haze, when Lucy looks on unseen at an exercise in social power on the part of her eventual fiancé, who she at this point thinks is amorously inclined toward his ward, Justine Marie. Lucy's eavesdropping finds him brushing off the petulant jealousies of a suitor with a most concise gesture of body language; in Lucy's account, however, each tiny rivalrous parry in this miniature comedy of manners takes on the proportions of an epic joust. At his most decisive moment of high-handed self-confidence,

Lucy's hero, albeit on behalf of another heroine, appears invincible, as "with the ruthless triumph of the assured conqueror, he drew his ward nearer to him" (39.565). Given the martial imagery of this phrasing, the very proximity of the desired object emerges as itself a weapon—indeed, as transegmentally suggested, a weapon as good as any sword (s = ward ). Whether accidental or "stylistic," such displacements and condensations in the articulated responses of Lucy's waking dream serve to enunciate the released fantasies of the heroine in this episode of half-delusional projection. Prose itself, submitted to phonemic reading, thus psychoanalyzes the language of the unconscious—Lucy's or, if you will, Brontë's—beneath the neo-Petrarchan rhetoric of combative eroticism.

Sounds Switched

Before either Brontë or Dickens, Thackeray had more systematically entered the field of phonemic breakdown, through Cockney travesty, with The Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush , a "Sometime Footman in Many Genteel Families," who affects hard words in a relentless barrage of phonetic misspellings. The first installment, "Fashnable Fax and Polite Annygoats," was published in Fraser's Magazine in November of 1837. With much of the humor revolving around just such garblings of received English as represented by the title, the persona's frequent orthographical malapropisms—"metafizzix," for example, in the first sentence—sometimes include an unwitting punlike overtone at the syllabic level, in this case on the short-lived heady effervescence (or "fizz") of such speculation.^[1] Though well past the advent of classical discourse theory in Foucault's sense, where the full arbitrariness of signifying practice was institutionalized, still colloquial comedy like Thackeray's recalls an earlier objectification of the word as malleable object, inviting subdivision into other units and combines of meaning. Malapropism of this sort indeed frequently parodies the notion behind the preclassical interdict described by a scholar of homonymics in the French language as a "prudish mania . . . in the seventeenth century, which threatened to impoverish the language by avoiding at all costs any word with an evil-sounding syllable. We can be sure that the gaulois punster had his share in that."^[2] In Thackeray's Yellowplush Papers , the loss of one subsidiary syllabic cluster ("stances") in "circumstances," for instance, is compensated for by the vaguely risqué transcription "suckmstansies" (292), accompanied by "sins" for "since" in the same sentence. So, too, with the hint of a Cockney happiness in "appetites" contorted to "appytights" (303). This last example is drawn from "Mr. Yellowplush's Ajew," an installment which concludes with an apology for the writer's "violetting the rules of authography" (300). The title's own cross-lexical biplay at "—'s Ajew" certainly harbors a provocative second syllable in its

phonetic transcription of the French noun of valediction. This is a syllable released by the tempting displacement from possessive to contractive grammar across the functional shift of the apostrophe. Such a promotion of syllable to seme, with the wrench it causes to internal segmentation and its consequent demotion of the lexeme, all but inevitably entails the adjacent risk of syntactic homophony, in other words, of junctural—or dyslocutionary—punning. It may well be this same ear for ironies of enunciation that later leads Thackeray, in Vanity Fair , to house the spendthrift, debt-ridden Sir Pitt (serpent, surfeit) Crawley at "201" on Curzon Street, Mayfair—the satiric "to owe one" getting him exactly where, as we now say, he "lives."

Three years after Thackeray's Yellowplush , the Victorian comic magazine Punch began its long publishing history, including on the second page of its first number some "lessons in Punmanship" by "Mr. T. Hood, Professor of Punmanship." The question "Why is a fresh-picked carnation like a certain cold with which children are affected?" invites the daft transegmental answer: "Because it's a new pink off (an hooping-cough)." As it happens, this junctural conundrum is a particularly clear illustration of Punch 's tendency toward a lower-class London norm of pronunciation. After considering such traits as elisions, glides, and the general slurring of syllables, one linguistic study of substandard Cockney dialect instances under the heading "Grammar" the very lexical mutation by which the n of "an" gets attached to the succeeding syllables, as in "at a nend"/"a nold man."^[3] This, in turn, serves to instance in a synchronic dimension such diachronic transformations as "a nadder" into "an adder" mentioned in Chapter 3. In literary send-ups, as in Thackeray's lexical farces, these consonantal displacements tend to operate in the same spirit as the extrusion of perverse semantic fragments from within polysyllabic words. A case in point from a narrative epistle by a Cockney maid in that first number of Punch, "super-silly-ous" (17), demonstrates its signified, in effect, mocked by the travesty of its own signifier. For an even more brutal murdering of the language, there is this later conundrum from the same first issue: "Why is a defunct mother like a dog?—Because she's a ma-stiff" (21).

The unspoken logic by which in Jane Eyre the heroine's name, already textualized by title, is then in a particular context decontracted into "jay in" (or even the unwritten "Jane Ne'er") can now be seen as the inconspicuous literary equivalent of a riddling alphabetic joke like "Q. When is a word like a bird's nest? A. When it has a J. in it." Or some such journalistic conundrum as "Q. Why won't Jane ever say yes? A. Because she thinks she's Jane Ne'er." A comparable micropoetic drift of wide ramifications for a novel's plot occurs in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights , to which Charlotte's preface offers a rhetorical clue. Charlotte writes that her sister's story is a tale of "perverted passion and passionate perversity." This very pattern of symmetrical inver-

sion, of rhetorical chiasmus, may well have captured, in a single hinge of phrasing, some deep structural logic of the novel's plot. From a different perspective, Frank Kermode has suggested that the inscribed names discovered by the narrator Lockwood at the institution of the retrospective plot—Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton—become, in fact, a narrative rather than alphabetic "rebus."^[4] They write in reversible sequence the passage of the first Catherine Earnshaw through her love for Heathcliff to her Linton marriage, while at the same time, read from right to left, they inscribe the return progress of her daughter, the second Catherine (Linton ), back through a marriage with Linton Heathcliff to a restorative union with Hareton Earnshaw . This inverted parallelism is, Kermode might have noted, a form of structural chiasm, a crossing over and return, a switch. If the encompassing plot dynamic of Wuthering Heights follows the pattern of reversal and return, the crisscross of the chiasm, then a reader might expect to find this pattern evidenced even in the microstructures of the text, its subsyntactic negotiations.

This expectation is borne out, for instance, in a piece of Yorkshire invective from the dialogue of the servant Joseph. When Linton Heathcliff, Edgar's son, is first presented at the Heights, Joseph is so contemptuous of the frail thing that he suspects the creature is in fact a girl child who has been substituted: "'Sure-ly,' said Joseph after a grave inspection, 'he's swopped wi' ye, maister, an' yon's his lass!'" (20.169). Even nurse Nelly Dean calls the child a "changeling" (27.217), recalling Heathcliff himself in his original role as a kind of changeling figure, a gypsylike creature introduced into the Earnshaw family to bear "the name of a son who had died in childhood" (4.39). Given Heathcliff's role as a wild and unlegitimated surrogate for the dead heir, the idea of the "swopped" identity has immediate resonance. Though Hareton is the new heir apparent, the "'heritin'" one, as it were (like Jane Eyre, in fact, finally come into her name as Heir to a family fortune), it is precisely from the furious disrule of the Earnshaw blood that Hareton is being weaned by Cathy's softening—but to Joseph, demonic—influence. This is the influence that Joseph in his diatribe rejects with an unwitting transegmental pun, twice activated. "Poor lad . . . he's witched " (32.243), moans Joseph, and later, "It's yon flaysome, graceless quean, ut's witched ahr lad" (33.251). Across the lexical chasm passes the stray sibilant that turns the accusation of witchcraft back again to the theme of the changeling "swop" as structural chiasm—a double crossing of blood ties, a switching of emotional as well as genetic allegiance. Erotic magnetism mediating between demonism and familial alliance offers up the theme of the novel in the hissed drift of a single phoneme: the microgrammar of narrative.

Taken Letterally

As any cursory overview of Victorian fiction would suggest, it is Dickens, follower of Sterne and precursor of Joyce, who is the great microgrammarian of the premodern novel. His effects can be passing snags in the syntax of narration or, at times, ironic miniaturizations of an entire fictional or thematic structure. In his first novel, the Pickwick Club, philologically if not phonologically inclined, debates the supposedly mysterious runic inscription, "+ / BILST / UM / PSHI / S.M. / ARK" (11.217), adjudged finally to be "neither more no less than the simple construction of—'BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK'" (11.228), accompanying the illiterate graffitist's "+" for X. Beyond the curious reflexive nature of this inscription about inscription, part of the puzzle for the Pickwickians in decoding this cryptogram has implicitly to do with grammatical ambiguity. Yet honoring the comma and thus reading the four monosyllables not as a transitive clause but as a possessive phrase, we encounter a transegmental slide that opens back onto the entire history of sibilance within the genitive construction. This comic example has such a classic status, indeed, that it provides, unidentified, the heading for the appendix in Otto Jespersen's Progress in Language on the "his-genitive, " as in Chaucer's "Here endith the man of law his tale," a phenomenon that often becomes "practically indistinguishable" from the old flexional "s-genitive ."^[5] Though Jespersen notes that the "similarity is of a purely phonetic nature" (324), he does not go on to distinguish the effect of such a weak-stressed "his" pronunciation (in its closeness to "'s") in regard to the various nouns it might follow. In the case of his own unexplored Dickensian example, "BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK" abuts the s of the surname with the elided enunciation of "HIS." This also seems the case, for instance, with a transitional example Jespersen does not give—transitional between Chaucerian and Cockney English—namely, Dryden's "the latter part of Lisideius his discourse" in the Essay of Dramatic Poetry , a phrase that appears to invite, as silently pronounced, a more complete conflation between types of genitive, both pronominal and inflectional.

In view of evidence yet to come, it may not seem too much to claim that Dickens thus enters the history of the novel as the tacit and intuitive historian of language, dialect, and their convergence in the private idiolect of any reading, silent or out loud, private or communal. In a transegmental appellation that just precedes "Jay Ne'er" in literary history, from the genealogical chronicle that opens Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickensian comedy reads like the punch line of a conundrum out of Punch . Asked to pronounce with his last gasp the name of his grandfather, Toby Chuzzlewit answers—in words that

"were taken down at the time and signed by six witnesses"—with the following confession: "The Lord No Zoo." The joke turns expressly upon the difference between script and enunciation, upon the ambiguities that ensue from a tension between graphic and phonic signifiers, between textuality itself and voice. We are told that searches through the titles of England subsequently produce "none at all resembling this, in sound even." This is because the sound is taken to be the garbled homophone of a proper name rather than a common idiomatic clause—to be, in other words, syntactically homologous with the expected class of answer. The zealousness of the six mortal scribes only exaggerates this farce of transcription, one which plays, as we know, on what linguistics would now term the disambiguation of segmental boundaries through stress, pitch, and juncture. Once the verb knows gives up a sibilant to the pronoun who, the nonsensical proper name "No Zoo" is precipitated from this auditory collapse. Genealogy is deconstructed by parodistic phonology; as with any fictive character in Dickens, only more openly here, origin and lineage are entirely linguistic. Since lexical conflations and displacements of this sort involve an unsettled progress across the grammatical sequence, they come to represent the lower limit of syntactic manipulation. Not wordplay exactly, nor even syllable play, they engage language at a shifting point where morphophonemic and grammatical structures intersect: the vexed juncture between words, syntax in debate with itself. What happens everywhere by accident may thus at times be admitted—made unmissable—as a scripted pun.

Or not. Dickens's phonic gestures in this vein are by no means restricted to the overt comic mode of lexical farce. In his picturesque, Romantically tinged descriptive passages, we may also find such an easing of lexical boundaries, usually in conjunction with a fuller battery of phonological effects than deployed in his comic writing. As often before in these pages, Dickens's textual mechanics seem to invite an analytic coalition of Jakobson and Riffaterre. In The Old Curiosity Shop , an exemplary syntactic mobilization, heavily embedded and dramatically built, sets the stage for a transegmental drift. The narrator is remembering in his troubled half-sleep the earlier sight of Nell amid the clutter, curios, and decay of her grandfather's shop:

I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms—the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air—the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone—the dust and rust, and worm that lives in wood —and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
(1.56)

Typical of Dickens, there is the impacted adjectival clotting of "old dark murky rooms." In Jakobsonian terms, its combinatory axis finds projected upon it not only the alliterating k 's but the abutting, potentially elided d 's, along with the lengthening chiastic reversal of "mur" into "room." Sub-alliterating with the k 's, the guttural g 's of "gaunt," "ghostly," and "grinning" prolong the alliteration and so bind the passage across its syntactic expansion, as does the more dramatic chiming (or Sterne-like "undercraft" again) of "dust" and "rust" or "worm" and "wood."

This last pairing, however, introduces a curious semiotic possibility of the sort that Riffaterre's terminology is uniquely adept at drawing out. The "agrammaticality" here is the unsettling echo not between "worm" and "wood" but of another collocation altogether, a variant intertext from the proverbial. In the iambic tread of this phrasing, Dickens has separated, and by alliteration set off, a verbal "paragram"—I will here be rehearsing again the whole range of Riffaterre's terminology—a paragram generated from an unsaid "matrix." This is a "variant" that "actualizes" only by "displacing" its idiomatic alternative through "conversion" and "expansion." The poetic variant performs, in other words, by evoking even while avoiding a buried "seed phrase" whose detection by the reader is the very "production" of this text, the materialized "semiosis" of its "poetry." With the openly courted Freudian implications of his method, then, Riffaterre's terms would help to explain how the redistributed cliché "wormwood," covertly naming here the bitterness of discrepancy between youthful bloom and environing waste (the compound word actually turning up in the text, in the idiomatic doublet "gall and wormwood," eight chapters further on [9.116]), is dispersed across the early syntagmatic sequence, made clausal rather than phrasal. It is a semiotic return of the repressed, a return masked but still activated. Amid such acoustic company we arrive at that last complex, suspensive phrase, "and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber , smiling through her light and sunny dreams." It is one thing to add the wholesale recurrence of the phonemic nexus lumber to the list of paronomastic bonds in the passage. It is quite another to notice the dreamlike displacement and condensation which transmute the sibilant at the juncture of "this lumber "—thus discovering, at the heart of its portrayed decay, that sleep of the just which will be spelled out a phrase later in the gentle slide of the narrator's own half-waking remembrance.

By the time such reverie succeeds to the child's living nightmare, the ferocious, stunted Daniel Quilp has been introduced as her alter ego, a figure mysteriously associated with his "wharf-side" activities, marginal, precarious, until he goes to his death by falling from that wharf. The reader is repeatedly teased by the echoic interplay of the "dwarf" (as he is incessantly

called) and his "wharf" ("'The fence between this wharf and the next is easily climbed,' said the dwarf" [67.618])—two mutually implicated lexemes whose teleologies seem destined to converge in such an inevitable (though never actually scripted) nexus as the "fated wharf." Instead, we get only the flashing memory of his last scene in the closing chapter's mention of his widow leading "a merry life upon the dead d w(h)arf's money" ("Chapter the Last," 666). Just as Quilp drowns, however, Nell's virtually simultaneous death—in another part of the country and of the story—does involve a more directly insinuated cross-lexical ambiguity, one that epitomizes the double valence of her fate: not only a willing assumption of and to glory but also a willed escape. In the context of a thickening iambic alliteration—"f or ev ery f ragile f orm f rom which [Death] lets the panting spirit f ree, a hundred v irtues rise"—this paragraph of meditative omniscient generalization closes with an orthodox truism whose transegmental pressures bear more directly upon the specific case of Nell: "In the Destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven" (72.659). Paradoxically lighting the way to heaven, the track of death is transformed to a route of divine access: that is the figurative sense of the conceit. More "grammatically" than rhetorically taken, however, and with more reference to the special case of Nell's release, the "dark path" becomes a "way," in the sense of means, "of light "—to but also from.

How often, and to what effect, does the Dickensian text break in this way from its graphic layout to audit its own interstices? There is a quasi-anagrammatic instance—surreptitious to the point almost of a cryptogram—in Hard Times , where the circumlocution of indirect discourse masks, even while implicating, the circus destination of the rendezvous with Tom. In passive, euphemistic phrasing ("caution being necessary") we read how "it was consented that Sissy and Louisa should repair to the place in question, by a circuitous course; and that the unhappy father, setting forth in an opposite direction, should get round to the same bourne by another and wider route" (3.7.211). Diversionary tactics characterize even the prose itself that hides the unsaid "circus"—in what phonology calls a "circumsyllabic bracket"—at the far edges of "cir cuitous ." Such eccentric orthographic puzzles aside, I am more interested now in effects which are heard—in one sense or another—across the normal contiguities of the syntagmatic axis. In the more calculatedly evocative prose of this same novel, we may encounter such a rugged terrain of consonants as in a phrase like "the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by thick grass" (3.6.202), where the underground deeps disgorge their own inverted steepness across the phonemic grade "black (c)rag ged." In a more markedly dramatic moment, at the climactic confrontation between the heroine, Louisa, and her intolerant father, Mr. Gradgrind "saw a wild dilating

fire in the eyes steadfastly regarding him" (2.12.166). What the reader hears rather than sees, well before we find the noun "eyes" written out, is the clichéd phonemic matrix "wild-eye(d)" glinting into audition on the way to its own phrasal dilation or circumlocution.

In the lampooned mumbling of lawyer Tangle in Bleak House , a deferential, drawling, grammatically effaced elision creates, among other effects, his notorious portmanteau conflation of "My Lord" (otherwise "Lud") into "Mlud" (1.4). This vocative not only names the human equivalent of the elemental muck outside but offers a phonetic anagram for the psychological as well as the legal "mud(d)l(e)" into which Chancery precipitates its victims. From the language of debased literacy and power to the underworld of untaught mumbling is, as the novel's ear for dialogue inscribes, not so great a distance. The illiterate crossing sweeper, Jo, in summing up his "mental condition" by saying repeatedly that he "don't know nothink" (16.274), speaks in a double negative that produces by its final thickened phoneme a segmental collapse of the two words "no think" into the tautological "nothing" that occupies his mind. The logic of such conflations as "Mlud," of course, requires what we might call silently hearing them aloud. Since in prose fiction they are usually found in dialogue, they may thus appear to introduce no active textual tension between phonic and graphic expression. On the page preceding the muddied diction of the courtroom drawl in Bleak House , however, the narrative prose itself makes such a (lateral) move. Occulted there within the normal order of third-person syntactic accumulation from word to word falls a conflationary disruption that might well be felt to utter more than is written.

Amid the sedimenting sentence fragments from the opening panorama of November mud and fog, we read of "Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle." Preceding the images of fog as drooping, creeping, and "cruelly pinching," this nonmetaphoric phrasing may offer one of the earliest hints of such full-scale personification allegory, set up even earlier by the first description of the weather as "implacable" (1.1) — an elemental force incapable, like an angry deity (or juridical behemoth) of being appeased, even by human sacrifice. Pronounced by way of assonance with two long o 's, the participle of "smoke lowering" could only render the adjacent "down" redundant, except as a stylistic device of pleonastic overkill. More likely is the alternate pronunciation equally common in Dickens's day, even in this spelling: indicating the intransitive participial form "louring." Probabilities aside, this is a radical ambiguity at the scriptive — and, so far, entirely lexical — level. Once the second and more cogent alternative ("smoke louring" rather than "smoke lowering") is admitted, however, both in the common figurative sense of "louring weather" and in its own faint personification of the smoke as "frowning," a second, more dismantling ambiguity is introduced. It

performs not only a semantic substitution but a momentary destabilization. For in the immediate vicinity of "lower" (pronounced "lour"), the closing velar phoneme /k/ of the noun in "smoke lowering" readily clings to the next word. It thus forms the synonymous slip "glowering," rephrasing the alternative verb "lower" in a more unequivocal personification yet. The two alternative phrases inhabit virtually the same lexical space, foggily deliquescing into each other. Yet the second alternative, "glower" rather than "lower," violates juncture and instantaneously reweaves the elapsed phonemic sequence upon which the syntactic chain is mounted. It is thus less scriptive, more phonemically cryptic. As such, moreover, it simultaneously confirms and extends that demolition of reference in a certain line of deconstructive reading, engaging as it does the specifically phonemic rather than generally grammic trace. The obscuring fog of this London weather emerges of course primarily as symbol, or extended metaphor, for the misty obscurantism of the court, especially its stale oratorical smoke screens. In just this sense it is appropriate (again I am returning to de Man's terms and, again, with a linguistic rather than merely textual stress) that the faint prosopopoeia which sketches the billowing pall as a personified genius loci, frowning down from the chimney tops, should be the function of a strictly verbal density turning to ambiguity — if not to downright referential murkiness. Even before the tenor of legal discourse is attached to this prolonged vehicle of atmospheric pollution, there is no glowering here, no louring, or even lowering, no "expression" at all except in the linguistic sense of mere slippery words: a sustained giving-face to blankness, satiric in this case, demystifying, corrective, but no more able to secure its referents than is the vacuous rhetoric of the court.

On the comic front again, allegorical tag names in Great Expectations are repeatedly the source of a morphophonemic contortion — as with "Jane Eyre" or "Hareton" in the Brontës — that plays between eye and ear in the manner of the Cockney punning in Punch .^[6] When Pip is harangued at Christmas dinner by his so-called uncle, one Pumblechook, the next sentence describes the reaction of another guest with the words: "Mrs. Hubble shook her head" (4.57). Dickens is a master of the homophonic near-miss. Later, instead of this scene's inferred phonetic kinship between "chook" and "shook," what surfaces in Pip's revenge fantasy is the physical violence lying latent in the first two syllables of the enemy's name: "I used to want — quite painfully — to burst into spiteful tears, fly at Mr. Pumblechook and pummel him all over" (12.125). Words are again pummeled — or, in Foucault's favored term, "pulverized" — into the disclosure of their hidden subsidiaries. The loutish (and similarly named) Bentley Drummle in London is a later avatar of this pummeling violence, in its physical rather than verbal form, while his friend Startop seems named (by the narrator, of course) in a virtual phonetic

anagram of "Upstart." This is a novel in which eccentric naming also provides onomastic clues to secret lines of influence or filiation. The convict Magwitch is aurally linked to his own long-lost daughter, Estella, by a flustered solecism on Joe's part, in a scene where he affects "an air of legal formality" in reporting Miss Havisham's wishes secondhand to Pip. Which-ing and that -ing in every direction, Joe transliterates the gist of Miss Havisham's message as follows: "'Would you tell him, then,' said she, 'that which Estella has come home and would be glad to see him'" (27.246). In this overreaching slip of the tongue, as in a Freudian parapraxis, the nonce value of the relative pronoun "which" (extraneous as syntactical marker) turns out momentarily to revise, in a kind of double grammar, the preceding relative pronoun "that" into a demonstrative adjective. Heard as such, it takes as its subject a homophonic pun on "witch," thus characterizing the preternatural temptress of Pip's destiny and hinting at her genealogical descent from "Magwitch ." It is she whom Pip has already named to Joe, by a nervous act of syllabic conflation upon which the latter is quick to pounce, as "Miss Est-Havisham" (15.139). In both cases, through a semiotic irony beneath the momentary syntagmatic collapse, illiteracy turns agrammaticality into satire. At the same time, the elision of an h even within the telescoped coinage "Estavisham," in recalling Joe's pronunciation of her name as "Avisham," further invokes the general Cockney latitude with aspirates.

A more distant echo of this slang, if not the farce often associated with it, may even be heard in a very different passage of evocative solemnity in Little Dorrit . In the famous description of a radiant and rayed sunset spreading over London like a "crown of thorns" transmuted to an aureole, or "glory," Mrs. Clennam is pictured leading Amy Dorrit through streets suddenly calmed from the day's traffic, streets where "the worry of the day had almost worried itself out, and few but themselves were hurried" (2.31.862). As everywhere in Dickensian description, and in this case through a homophonic ambivalence, the outer is the sign of the inner, here evening quiescence of mental relaxation, hurry of spiritual vexation. To evoke this, the tempo of reading seems itself thematized. As the collocation "were hurried" collapses toward — if not quite into — the rushed or slurred disyllable "w(h)urried," the anxious pace of the protagonists seems obliquely reinscribed into the phonemically activated subtext of internal rhyme ("worry"/"hurry"). Where another writer might have written simply "few but themselves hurried," Dickens has by transegmental maneuvering (or good fortune) verged upon the lax enunciation of a Cockney dropped h at the syncopated matrix of an anything but humorous moment in a heightened melodramatic panorama. This is not comedy, and in no way would it directly measure an incursion of Cockney slang — or the satire thereof — into Dickensian rhetorical practice in his own narrative voice. Yet

both Dickens's parodic slurrings and his melodramatic elisions together share a common intertextual backdrop. This is that popular journalistic mode of sound play that may well have heightened the awareness of his Victorian audience to phonological aberrations — or the chance of such — falling well this side of overt puns.

Alphabedding

We have, so far, ranged between that potential breakdown in lexical segmentation under syntactic pressure which is always latent in the narrative "voice" (whether Pip's or his author's) and those less textually unsettling effects which, though based on the same tension between lexicon and sequential enunciation, are still readily naturalized as the mere transcription in dialogue of a given character's slips and eccentricities. In Our Mutual Friend such phonogrammatic slippages, between words as well as within a single lexical boundary, again gather particular weight and force around the illiteracy of a single character, Mr. Boffin, and the farcical expertise of his tutelary minion, Mr. Silas Wegg. Coming into a fortune, Mr. Boffin has decided to compensate himself for the deficiencies of his education by purchasing at once the two functions of literacy: both a secretary for writing and a "literary man" for reading. In Boffin's attempt to explain to Wegg where his new money comes from, a mild contretemps ensues from his malapropism about the "will of a diseased governor," a phonetic stab at "deceased." Naturally enough, this prompts a question from Wegg about the sick man's fate — "Gentleman dead, sir?" — which triggers, in turn, an inappropriate expletive in Boffin's rejoinder: "Man alive, don't I tell you? A diseased governor?" (1.5.94). The intense design of such slips raises an issue more generic than simply linguistic. When Bakhtin charges that "Stylistics has been . . . completely deaf to dialogue," he means that it has not traditionally been able to absorb the mixed nature of reported speech, its play of private idiolects and dialects, within the overarching "voice" of the novel when conceived as a monolithic inscription, "a hermetic and self-sufficient whole, one whose elements constitute a closed system presuming nothing beyond themselves, no other utterances."^[7] Two things need to be said in this regard about the Dickensian comic prose under scrutiny here. Not only does a sense of Dickensian stylistic ingenuity invade dialogue from the precincts of so-called omniscience, generating what we might call a "dialogism" between a character's slip and the textual (the authorial) motivation behind every malapropism; even within quoted speech, a single word may be seen divided against itself in a metalinguistic oscillation of alternatives. One could further argue, following Bakhtin's terms, that an unconscious pun quoted from a character models the double-voiced nature of

the novel at its encompassing structural level, the word in dialogue with its own double take.

Dickens, and he is not alone among novelists in this, goes farther. In a knotty anticipation of modern linguistics, Dickens often renders morphology itself dialogic through his homophonic echoes and lexical slippages. In that last passage from Our Mutual Friend , for instance, he does so through a foregrounded irony of miscognition, the word "diseased" jostling both phonic and semantic paradigms at once with its unvoiced but intended double, "deceased." It is not that the alternatives are explicitly bandied about in an overt dialogue format. It is not even that Wegg mishears Boffin's word. It is rather that the word itself emerges into voice, into parole , by an accidental dialogic slide within the imperfect langue of the speaker. The slip from c to s does not take place transegmentally but, rather, within the same morpheme, the same syllable; it is nevertheless as illustrative here as Jane Eyre dialogizing her own first name with "jay in." Read as a reductio ad absurdum of the entire notion of dialogism, Boffin's intended utterance is outered as its own other to begin with. This point has a methodological corollary: as against familiar stylistics, the graphonic reading of dialogue — just as of other prose and poetry — is dialogic by definition. In such reading the phonotext is found generating its own evocalized feedback.

In that same scene from Our Mutual Friend , Boffin, impatient, moves on to explain how it is impossible for him to master reading at this late stage in his life. He does so in a passage carefully worked over by Dickens at the manuscript stage: "'Now, it's too late for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books. . . . But I want some reading — some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging Lord-Mayor's Show of wollumes' (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas)" (1.5.94).^[8] Rarely does a manuscript variant lay open so completely the laboratory of Dickens's compositional processes. Even that earlier and more purely homophonic malapropism, the horticultural rather than morphological "alphabeds" for "alphabets," seems (if I make out the changes correctly) to have been revised at the draft stage. The latter appears crossed out in favor of the former as if by "association of ideas" from the no longer dead metaphors of "shovelling and sifting." Then, too, these very metaphors are elsewhere associated with the activity of raking through the novel's symbolic dust mounds, those piles of litter, debris, and excrement that command a considerable price on the scavenger's market. In any case, Boffin's is a homophonic slip on the dentalized phonemic closeness, despite alphabetical distance, of /d/ from /t/. In literary-historical terms, Boffin's malapropism anticipates Joyce's twofold punning in Finnegans Wake on the collective noun of English lettering, first

"allaphbed" (18.18) and then, a few lines later, "allforabit" (19.2). That last version puns, Boffin-like, on the ill-sorted bits and pieces that make up the alphabetic system, while also, with an added twist of Joycean etymological irony, capturing the synecdochic naming of the whole ("all for") by the mere "alpha" and "beta" that lead it off.

Another example from Our Mutual Friend moves as close as the novelist gets to the cross-lexical punning of Punch . Lawyer Lightwood means to be correcting Mr. Boffin about a London locale, whereas Boffin assumes him to be filling in the name of Lightwood's companion, taking "Doctors' Commons" as "Doctor Scommons" (1.8.136). The designated place is heard as a proper name in this multiple impropriety, violating the complete range of graphic signifiers at once: punctuation, capitalization, and lexical segmentation. It is the rupture of literacy by a lingual energy not unrelated, again, to Dickens's own style, for ex nihilo it generates a potential fictional character on the spot, risen from the blank crevices of the said. At the same time, this parthenogenesis from the baffled head of Boffin is a metalinguistic joke on the elevation of a "Common(s)" to a proper noun. In the comic genealogies of Dickensian wordplay, Doctor Scommons's — true ancestor is the Lord No Zoo. He or it, Scommons the name as lapsus, is also directly akin to the brand of conundrum punning in Punch which happens to increase in frequency and lexical ingenuity in the early 1860s, just as Dickens was composing Our Mutual Friend (published serially, 1864–65). If George du Maurier's contributions to Punch, beginning in 1860 and given greatest fanfare with his collected parodies of Cockney French in "L'Onglay a Parry" (14 January 1865), converge suggestively with Dickens's staging of the confrontation of Podsnap and the "French gentleman" in Our Mutual Friend (1.11), then it is just as likely that other linguistic ironies in Punch may help to account for the increased incidence of transegmental illiteracies in this novel. One does indeed find numerous indirect precedents for Doctor S. scattered through the 1863 Punch Almanack , a volume appearing at the start of each publication year. In the "Answers to Conundrums" segment ("Questions, by some accident, have not yet occurred to us"), we find not only the onomastic play on "Victor You-Go," himself a master of the holorhyme, but also "A weeping Will (oh!)" (3). Farther along in this number, we may well think of the mudling Jo from Bleak House in connection with the "Con by a Poor Crossing Sweeper. — Why is a birch-broom like a weeping willow? Because it's a thing as (s)weeps" (10; with the elision typographically marked). Evidence of Franglais punning, also depending on elision, appears two pages later, when the French drama critic is accosted by the English civil engineer who propounds that "the railway locomotive was the greatest 'succes de steam ' that he had ever known" (12). The subsequent number for 3 January 1863 offers the following

example of junctural ambiguity, turning on the highbrow habit of accentuated t 's: "The Effect of Dining Out. — SMITH hearing JONES remark that their host BROWN talked 'like a book,' exclaimed, 'Why yes, of course he does, isn't he a tome?'" (9). Equally far from lowlife Cockney punning, there is the "Easy French Translation" of 21 February 1863: "'MON PETIT CHOU.' A Term of Endearment first addressed by Cinderella to her glass slipper" (73). More in the Dickensian spirit of such a one-word-into-two homophonic malapropism as Ham's "drowndead" in David Copperfield (3.83) is "the gentleman" in the 17 January 1863 issue of Punch suddenly understanding the literary cliché "the moaning of the tide" when, once arrived at Brighton, he realizes (breathily) how the "sea sighed" (29). In the Punch Almanack for the very year in which Our Mutual Friend began serialization, in fact, one of the recent series of conundrum answers that go begging for questions is a Cockney pun on "novel" itself: "The difference is merely that the one is an-ut, while the other is an-ovel" (12).

Back, then, to the textual environs of Doctor Scommons. He is misbegotten in the same chapter that begins with Mr. Boffin approaching the lone and underemployed clerk ensconced in the "dusty eyrie" of Lightwood's office. That dehumanizing noun "eyrie," for nest, lends itself to a homophonic collapse into its own preceding modifier — producing the suddenly four-syllabled portmanteau term "dustiary." This coinage not only renames the clerk's confine or keep of dust, but further — through etymological associations with the ary of breviary or bestiary , for instance — faintly evokes the product as well as the labor of transcription in the context of this very book of dust. We shall shortly return to Our Mutual Friend as the ironic "dustiary" of London life, concentrating finally on the lexical pulverizations that compose the unspoken matrix of the entire novel: the liturgical formula "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" as a principle of linguistics as well as of biology and economics, a principle of radical disarticulation. We shall do so, however, only after a desultory audition of related transegmental effects in those Victorian and early modern novelists who hold the place — at the literary level of what we might call "applied linguistic history" — between Dickens and Joyce.

Before this, another earlier — and prototypical — example from Dickens. Perhaps no episode in his novels, or in any novel before Joyce, mobilizes the transegmental possibilities of prose discourse more notably than does a proleptic moment in Great Expectations . Mobilizes them in connection not just with textual traverse but with the slippages and misshapings of the unconscious-structured-like-a-language. In a novel whose very pattern of characterization seems to play out the possibilities of dream projection, with figures like Orlick and Drummle the dark avatars of Pip's desire, the narrative discourse itself undergoes a displacement and condensation that provides a

paraphonic matrix of one entire plot line. It does so in a way that not only derives as directly from Punch humor as anything else in Dickens but that in the process restructures such verbal farce within a context even more explicitly concerned with that difference between read and enunciated language which in its own way redoubles the textual condition itself that conveys the joke. The sequence of effects in question begins with a sight-reading of the said. There are words Pip doesn't know; but in the company of his harsh and carping wife, Joe is afraid to instruct the child too openly. Instead, he silently mouths the answers to Pip's also shaped but unspoken first question: "What's a convict?" The result is that "Joe put his mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I could make out nothing of it but the single word 'Pip'" (2.45).^[9] In the dream logic of the novel's displaced and subterranean guilt (phonemically activated as much as is that opiated, dreamlike first-person report of Lucy Snowe in Brontë's Villette ), this is course one good answer in and of itself. In a manner cognate with the process of receiving the text as a whole, any text — the process, that is, of registering the visible signs of a "suppressed" articulation — Pip tries again to read the shape of Joe's lips. The question this time is about the source of the guns being fired, and the answer attempted, we later find out, is "the Hulks" — or prison ships. "At this point," however, all we are told is that "Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word that looked to me like 'sulk.'" Since this gets Pip nowhere, he finally asks Mrs. Joe, who answers gruffly "From the Hulks!" — at which point, like a Cockney riddler, Pip queries "And please what's Hulks?" — reiterating his previous misapprehension in the form of a homophonic (transegmental) pun on "What sulks?"

This isn't any longer what he means to ask, merely what is said at the level of the phonotext — and answered four times over in the course of the novel in the described person of Bentley Drummle, agent of Pip's unconscious retaliation against Estella. Described explicitly as "sulky" in all of his early appearances (25.225; 26.234, 237; 38.327), Drummle is the "answer" to Pip's earliest questions about criminal violence, the reification of the boy's unconscious slip of the tongue — indeed, a character described as boasting in his own right "a large awkward tongue" (25.225). On the way to Drummle's later appearance in the text, this early transegmental irony about "what-s = (h)ulks" is mediated in transit at the appearance of Pip's other brutal (and tongue-associated) counterpart, Orlick , after the first act of violence committed against one of Pip's enemies. Orlick has just returned to town from his bludgeoning of Mrs. Joe with the criminal's leg-iron linked by association to the guns originally fired from "the Hulks." We don't know this yet — but it is spelled out by the text, one might say, even before it is disclosed. This verbal

inference takes place when — by narrative accident, as it were, but discursive stratagem — we are reminded of those earlier guns by the "mere" atmospheric fact that the "signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along the course of the river" (15.146). By such echoes is the discourse of the unconscious kept up in this novel: the return of the transegmental repressed. Kept up — and brought up, uncannily, into the haunted present of the narrator's retrospective vantage. For "rolled sulkily" and "rolls hulkily" are separated at the phonotextual level only by the least distinction in the junctural force of a dentalized sibilant. Carried phonemically, the auditory memory does indeed break "upon us again, and again," time out of mind, mind out of time.

"The Other Side of Silence"

From Adam Bede forward, there is a general — and generally disregarded — sound texture in George Eliot's most expository style, let alone her dialogue. Whether "intended" by Eliot in the jovial spirit of the dramatic moment or not, certainly the context of the harvest supper in Adam Bede prompts a thick-tongued pun at the conclusion of a rowdy communal drinking song: "Then drink, boys, drink! / And see ye do not spill . . . For 'tis our master's will " (53.564), the last a contemporary term for liquor good or bad. At the earlier inception of the book's seduction plot, textured by a more muted internal echo, there is the fateful kiss between Hetty and Arthur that recalls "Eros himself, sipping the lips of Psyche" (13.182); or there is Hetty described "like a child hugging its toys in the beginning of a long toi ls ome journey" (15.203), a phonemic disassemblage of the lexeme itself within an image that anticipates the later "Journey in Despair" chapter. Even at the book's tragic turn we recognize Eliot's analytic ear for the "dileck" (2.60) in Adam's bitterness against Hetty's seducer, who has "been false to me, and 'ticed [an assimilative fusion for "and (end/t)ticed"] her away" (39.453). In the subsequent confrontation between Dinah and Hetty, the latter's heart is opened with a prayer that begins by invoking the deity who has seen to "the depths of all sorrow" (45.496). Well before this climactic moment, however, another, more preternatural fusion of reduplicating phonemes may eerily be heard to augment the denotative, connotative, and etymological associations of the sufferer's last name, Sorrel (the "sour" or bitter herb); I refer to the predic(a)tive undertone of a grief fated from the start of the narrative to descend upon her in her selfishness, the anticipated sound of "all sorrow" chiastically reversed, as it were, to the ominous and open-ended "sorrow 'll." In this way do words "sinnify" (18.234) in Eliot's moralized textual weave. Thus is foretold the destined grief that, by every imperative of story, will come, that must in one form or another have its will of her — whatever sorrow 'll also do in the long run, within Eliot's punitive economy, by way of redemption.

In The Mill on the Floss , George Eliot's penchant for internal echo and muted paronomasia remains very much in evidence. It is especially apparent in those moments of representational duplication when the play of signifiers is aligned with the signified of an explicitly auditory experience. Philip Wakem can deploy his own vocal harmonics, for instance, in saying that "Certain strains of music affect me so stran gely" (5.1.266). Similarly, narrative voice has earlier harmonized both vowels and consonants to evoke the heroine's response to the mill's "resolute din, the unresting motion of the great stones, giving her a dim delicious awe at the presence of an uncontrollable force" (1.4.26). The verbal shape of "resolute" echoes against its approximate synonym in "unresting," while the adjective "great," modifying the rumbling of the stones, reverberates by a kind of anti-pun with the grating which it transmutes into solemnity, a transformation framed by the consonantal gentling of "din" into "dim." The climactic phrase "dim delicious awe," beyond its frontal alliteration, may also borrow some of its quiet force from the phantom transegmental gemination of an unwritten d in the aural ambivalence of "dim(med ) d elicious awe."

Middlemarch continues Eliot's experiments with internal echo and its thematizations. At one point the narrator quotes Shakespeare's "to hear with eyes" sonnet (27.183) as a prototype for the divinization of another's unsaid longing. This paradoxical image provides the kind of auditory metaphor for intuition established earlier with the famous account of that unworkable hypersensitivity which would cause us to "die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" (20.135). Once alerted to the proliferated sound play of Eliot's prose, one may come to suspect that the complex paronomasia, reversing and overrunning itself, of such a line as "di(e) . . . li(e)s . . . sid(e) . . . sil(e ——)," in its crossing of chiasmus with alliteration, may not simply be stationed to instance a kind of textual hearing-with-eyes. It may further be designed, at a metanarrative level, to model the whole discursive logic of internal echo, recurrence, and repetition-within-variation: as the linguistic equivalent of those filamented layerings of felt correspondence in the represented world of the novel, those hidden patterns and detonating convergences too intense for direct apprehension. Echoism and phonemic mutation in Middlemarch can be particularly striking in passages of negative characterization or satire, as in the paragraph summarizing Dorothea's marital entrapment after the honeymoon in Rome, where a transegmental drift serves momentarily to echo, at the semantic level as well this time, the metaphoric trap of the heroine's entire marital life. Dorothea finds herself submitting to "a moral imprisonment which made itself one with" — was, in other words, repeated in — "the chill, colorless , nar rowed landscape" (28.189). Only for a

moment, and only in (phonemic) passing, Eliot has named that insidious ensnarement which is the result of all psychic narrowness in this novel.

A later passage, more satiric than melancholy, orchestrates just as fully what we might call the "aural subtext" — the phonotext — of Eliot's patterned discourse, its auditing of the phonemic rumble on the underside of silent script. Its transegmental effect offers, in fact, the perfect occasion for recasting its phonotextual dynamic in terms familiar from the most influential of earlier stylistic commentaries on this novel in the general context of prose fiction and its poetics. In "Fiction and the 'Analogical Matrix,'" Mark Schorer discusses the tendency for subdued or dead metaphors in Eliot, as in both Jane Austen and Emily Brontë before her, to draw strength from an underlying figurative network that highlights them by alignment with others of their kind. Among the many such figural filiations in Middlemarch , Schorer suggests, are those that accumulate to the proposition "Consciousness is a stream."^[10] Metaphors of current, depth, flow, channeling, muddying, and so forth, cohere within this pattern, under an analytic scrutiny that is a clear Anglo-American forerunner to the operation of the "matrix" in Riffaterre's semiotics. The ordinarily neutralized or buried metaphor in Schorer's treatment, animated by a larger figural context, may in Riffaterre's later vocabulary be read as the "paragram" of such an unsaid cliché: in the particular instance at hand, of "life is like a river." Anticipating a modernist insistence on the "stream" of consciousness — even a poststructuralist inscription of such process in the metonymical cascade of syntax — such figuration operates, in the following description of Rosamond Vincy, within the recast transegmental semiotics of a matrix/"paraphone" structure: "Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams " (76.536). The internal echo is so close that it renders the first phrase proleptic, at least in retrospect. This late in the novel, no sooner does the dead metaphor "shallow" surface from its "analogical matrix" than its associations wash across the plural inflection of "natures " to generate, however subliminally or subvocally, the suddenly metaphoric "stream" out of the sibilant ligature with "dream." The metaphor thus precipitated is semantically outlawed as anything but the paradigmatic alternative and accusatory other to the vanity of Rosamond's stagnant dreaming — a term, in other words, inoperable except as anti-pun, or antiphonal variant. Yet such a metaphor nonetheless raises the daunting specter of those "deepest streams " that get phonically deepened in the subsequent phrase — in all their implied dominion over Rosamond's desire to reroute them. Such transegmental irony, as it cuts up and across words, can thus cut both ways. Whereas in Dorothea's case her conjugal immurement may be as pitiably snaring as it is narrowing, a

daydreaming nature as "shallow" as Rosamond's is only mocked rather than commiserated in being momentarily misread as powerfully "streaming."

With Eliot's style working, in such undercurrents, with and against the apparent contour of script — its surface rippled with euphonic emphases above and beyond the manifest expository flow, its phonotext given to drifts as well as echoes of sound — her novels provide a sustained test case for a graphonic reading of prose fiction. As we have seen by now, however, this contrapuntal reading is aural rather than oral and is thrown into relief by such a very different stance toward literacy in action as that demonstrated by her early hero Adam Bede. In direct proportion to his identification with the characters in the Bible about whom he reads, to his phenomenological engagement with the "world" of the text, his own silent enunciation is lifted through lip movement toward voice. When he is caught up by that sacred text which provides him at once with "history, biography, and poetry," there are passages, we are told, where "his lips moved in semi-articulation — it was when he came to a speech that he could fancy himself uttering, such as Samuel's dying speech to the people" (51.542). As if his marginal literacy returns him to that state — and stage — of cultural transition from oral to silent reading discussed in the Prologue, Adam reverts to an epoch when all narrative was theatricalized, declamatory. The drama of Eliot's narrative texture, of course, is of a different order, its articulations repressed rather than partial, sub- rather than semi-vocalized.

At the same time, the whole question of articulation can be threaded back into the thematic of Eliot's fiction as part of the dramatic irony of characterization. This is made plain, for instance, amid the continuing phonic experiments of Eliot's prose, by the treatment of Grandcourt's speech defects in Daniel Deronda , the "broken discourse" and "toneless drawl" of his emotionally impaired mutter, with its "languid inarticulate sound" (29.362). Grandcourt's not even clenched, merely desiccated, inner speech surfaces in measured pauses and blanks, an effete depreciation of all converse that persists at one point until he "ceased his slow delivery of sentences" (30.393). Within a page we hear again of the resumption of "his low voice" (30.394). Between these two phrasings, taken as "languid articulations" in the slack spirit of the man himself, emerges the transegmental irony that renders the very specification of his utterance redundant, "his slow delivery" inevitably characterized by "his (s)low" speech. (In the self-exampling nature of this flaccid articulation, Grandcourt is the reverse counterpart of the forthright Dorothea in Middlemarch , who attempted to speak up to her husband in "hard distinct syllables" [20.139], as hard as those required by the enunciation of that first dental juncture.) Grandcourt's penmanship, too, is of a piece with his aristocratic "drawling," for when he deigned to write, he "scrawled with ease"

(25.332) in an "indistinct handwriting" as uninvigorated as his monotone. According to a subsequent description, the "little pauses and refined drawlings" (27.347) of that monotonous talk are described, as with the clipped phrasing from Middlemarch just above, so that an extreme articulation—this time contrary to the enunciation described—is necessary on the reader's part to mark the juncture between those last two words. If we submit to this textual impedance and its attendant labors, we have in other words momentarily redeemed ourselves from the charge of slackness leveled against the villain in the phrasing at issue. In this way, his utterance and inscription are not simply rendered as the antithesis of the narrative's flow; they set up a contrapuntal drama in our own processing of the phonotext. At the same time, it is just as likely that the quick pace of our own reading will generate elsewhere an opposite, if related, irony against the grain of script. In Grandcourt's tired sketch for Gwendolen of his previous life, we hear his tedium and torpor indicated (and transegmentally indicted) across the terrain of his phrases—if, that is, we respond to his manner in satiric kind this time, with anything less than a hyper-articulation in our own silent voicing: "His answers to her lively questions about what he had seen and done in his life, bore d rawling very well" (29.371).

Polarized by Grandcourt, Gwendolen's neurotic inwardness is charted in part by similar microlinguistic registrations, description burdened by the unsaid: "Hers was one of the natures in which exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to c urdl e and d ecl ar e itself" (31.404). Not only do the compound verbs "curdle" and "declare" seem to implicate each other by an almost anagrammatic logic of consonants, but the "infusion of dread" that precipitates this reaction presses upon the phrase of latency, "ready to"; by an overlapping internal echo, it thus generates a shudder of redundancy bursting the seams of sequence—"infusion of dread read y." Coming even closer to a fully activated lexical mutation through transegmental drift is a clause like "Gwendolen's will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway" (35.477). The expected idiom "in its small (girlish) way"—or, alternately, "in its (small) girlish ways"—almost manages to assert itself by an (imperfect) elision between sh and s in "girlish s way," a tongue-twist of phrase that does not quite come off. It is just this sway that is balked by Grandcourt's willful negations of desire; at which point consciousness turns further inward, perverse, and this novel concerned with "the language in which we think" (19.247) begins to read like its streaming transliteration.

Climaxing in this very manner the fateful story of Gwendolen and Grandcourt, there is a distracting lexical collapse in Gwendolen's trembling account of his drowning, a narrative elicited from her by Deronda's sympathetic hearing of her plight. Recalling the virtually mortal panic that led to her

failure to save Grandcourt, Gwendolen says hauntedly, in an accent and cadence not her own: "I had stept into a boat, and my life was a sailing and sailing away—gliding on and no help—always into solitude with him , away from deliverance" (56.760). Judith Wilt has argued persuasively that the italicized male pronoun refers not to Grandcourt alone, the obvious antecedent, but to memories of the abusive stepfather whose entrapping presence Gwendolen had just a moment before been comparing, in effect, to Grandcourt's.^[11] This is not the only odd double inflection in the passage. Unless its predicate is taken to include a compound and redundant substantive, the strange wording of "my life was a sailing and sailing away" encourages the unsettling shift from gerund to participle—from the noun phrase "a sailing" to the adjectival form "a(-)sailing." This probable phrasing, though, is neither colloquially convincing in Gwendolen's dialogue nor grammatically stable even as an intrusive rhetorical heightening. It makes sense, it reads , only as a dislocated verbal symptom of a traumatic disturbance. It is thus a phrasing in two ways retrogressive: temporally (as a returning memory) and segmentally (as a junctural reflex, one word turned back upon its predecessor). My life, Gwendolen means to say in at least every sense but the lexical, was "assailing and sailing away," at once punishing and vanishing, both an assault upon and a desertion of desire. The death of the violating male was her only way out, her only way back.

In a very different fashion, in Jude the Obscure , an idiomatic compound of article plus verbal form inscribes—writes, that is, though at the level of the phonotext alone—an equally devastating irony in the last conversation, before his suicide, between Sue Bridehead and her prematurely morbid teenage "stepson," nicknamed "Father Time." Though she has just explained to him that they will soon have yet another mouth to feed, she remains, in a typifying irony, too prudish to explain further that this has not come about entirely by free choice. The narrator having recently mentioned that the boy "had learned to use the Wessex tongue quite naturally by now" (5.7.246), we are doubly alert to such densities and accidents in his speech as noted with Joseph's extreme Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights . Thinking that it is a deliberate cruelty on Sue's part to increase the family misery with another hungry being, the boy groans out, "O God, mother, you've never a-sent for another" (6.2.264), meaning, of course, that she "should never have" voluntarily "sent for" a new child. At the subtextual level of ironic malapropism, however, his objection to her "assent" scores against her entire life with Jude, with whom she has grudgingly succumbed to sexual intimacy in order to keep him from returning to his first wife, the boy's own mother.

"The Vulgarization of Our Tongue"

Farther from Dickens than Hardy or even George Eliot in the spectrum of Victorian novelists, at the opposite pole from a popular and fluent narrative style, falls the mannerist prose of George Meredith. From the dialect of minor lower-class characters to the most orotund reaches of the narrative voice, transegmental thickenings inflect his text and complicate its phonemic reading. The titular hero of his first novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , anxious about detection after a rick-burning episode, casts his adolescent fears into paronomasia: "I wish you hadn't given them the scent , though. I like to look innocent " (4.37)—and this in a chapter whose title, "Arson," seems to pun on his own status, Our Son, as scion of an ancestral line. Even his former nurse, Mrs. Berry, speaks with overlapping internal rhyme in bemoaning women's lot: "The best of women's too soft . . . more's our sor row" (37.413), where the lament sets in even before the plural pronoun has been traversed. At the very center of the novel, the parodistic evocation of love on the wing gathers to a head in the image of Richard on his wedding day bursting in his pride like "a cock-robin in the dress of a gentleman, big joy swelling out his chest" (29.289; my emphasis). A sentence later, in a deliberate twist of idiom, the transegmental capper: "All is s well"—redolent of the Cockney joke from Punch "All's swell that ends swell" (see note 6). Meredith's high-toned verbosities often draw strength from a secret affiliation with the "undercraft" of the underclasses, his humor sociolectic as well as lexical. In The Egoist , the learned avocational linguist, Dr. Middleton, brings this to a quirky focus in his split verbal personality, delighting in Cockney puns while fortifying the bastions of "correct" enunciation. Making fun of his daughter's stumbling effort to warn him of a rift between herself and her intended, Dr. Middleton takes only pedantic verbal heed of Clara's cryptic "We have differences" when followed by her elliptical "He and I—I accuse myself," a truncated phrasing in which the second "I" has at last, and at least, managed to assert itself free of the unwanted coupling. But Dr. Middleton hears only sloppy speech: "And let me direct you, for the next occasion when you shall bring the vowels I and A, in verbally detached letters, into collision, that you do not fill the hiatus with so pronounced a Y. It is the vulgarization of our tongue," he concludes in a metalinguistic travesty, "of which I y-accuse you" (19.149). As Robert Martin Adams glosses this moment in his edition of the novel, "Where she speaks her heart, he hears only phonemes" (149). Elsewhere, however, Dr. Middleton shows himself a master of that transegmental punning designed to tamper with hiatus and coerce new junctures. Alluding to the comic sayings of "Joe Miller's jest book," an earlier Victorian compendium of low wit, Sir

Willoughby's phrase "Joe Millerisms" is revised by Dr. Middleton, in a homophonic jostle reminiscent of Dickens's "Doctor Scommons," to the more Irish sounding "O 'Millerisms" (29.247; Meredith's emphasis). Hierarchy, patriarchy, can contain the "vulgate" only when it is voluntarily deployed, an ironic intertext rather than an accidental lapse induced, for instance, by female anxiety in the face, and grip, of male privilege. But while Dr. Middleton is hoist on his own petard of preciosity, Meredith has it both ways.

The convolution of Meredith's prose, with its simultaneous tendency toward the dense and the rarefied, is never more unremittingly worked in its wit than in the late novel Diana of the Crossways (1885). This is, in fact, the story of a female novelist of extraordinary stylistic dexterity and finesse, whose style often sounds indistinguishable from Meredith's own. It is a style unabashedly given to the ironic possibilities of internal echo, as with the long u sound in the first description of the heroine's regrettable husband, Warwick, portrayed with "eyes of that half cloud and blue , which make the kind of hue less grey, and are chiefly striking in an authoritative stare" (6.60). The h of "hueless" is certainly weak enough to be folded into what amounts to a chiastic pattern of assonance and alliteration, even as the transegmental adhesion from the consonant in "of " creates a homophonic alternative in "v iewless grey," thus anticipating the blank stare of his irresponsive authority. The husband of the other heroine in the novel, Diana's friend Emma, also comes in for a satire turning on the play of a single phoneme, in a passage augmented by Meredith in revision. In a long speech of remorse over his infidelity, Sir Lukin's "All I can do is to pray" is preceded by three sentences of expletive added at the manuscript stage, the last and nearest being the self-accusatory "A Common donkey compared to her!" (26.247).^[12] In the immediate vicinity of "donkey," the term "pray" is contaminated by that all but onomatopoetic sound called "braying," an antiphone of subliminal derision. Of the heroine, Diana, upon her reentry into society, we hear that she "gathered its current topics and scattered her arrowy phrases" (39.369). Beyond the partial rhyme of "gathered" and its antithetical "scattered," there is the cross-lexical (and entirely pertinent) hint of rare in "her arr owy phrases." We shall find one such phrase alluded to shortly in a comment on her suitor, Redwood, a reticent man warmed in his matrimonial hopes by recalling how Diana "had once in his hearing derided the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of Mrs." (41.386)—as if indeed it were spelled "Miss-hiss." The heroine's own maiden name comes under fire as well when attempts are made to patronize her with it. Rousing her strength for a political struggle in the midst of personal hardship, Diana rejects the sympathetic and conciliatory nickname "Tony," based on her middle name, Antonia. In reaction, she forges an obscure pun on the noun "atony," for languor, want of tone, enervation—presumably in

this context for a sense of being out of sympathy, out of patience, finally out of tune with those who would curtail her passion: "Tony me no Tonies; I am atony to such whimpering business now we are in the van of the struggle" (29.290); Meredith's emphasis). With its play on lexical if not vowel "hiatus," such rebarbative punning is worthy of Dr. Middleton in The Egoist , especially since her "arrowy" jest comes to an even sharper point if and when one knows that "atony" is not only pronounced with a short o , rather than the long o of the unsaid antiphrase "a Tony," but that it has a specifically linguistic denotation as well. Referring as it does to a lack of syllabic stress, the term "atony" thus becomes a self-illustrative near-homophone of the article plus proper noun. A similar lexical maneuver operates against the textual grain—but very much in keeping with the metaphoric gist—of a climactic phrase from Meredith's "Ode on the Comic Spirit": "the music of the meaning of Accord." Where harmonized meaning is figured as music, the resulting "accord" gets figured at the same time in lexical terms as "a chord," a dyadic phrase in its own right that picks up the earlier, twice-reiterated (anapestic) beat of article plus noun. This is the "music of the meaning" of any prose, too, that is attuned to textuality in its phonic as well as graphic—its graphonic—overtones.

"Shadow and Adamant"

We are concerned here with the bedrock of syntax under alleviation by the shadow play of the lexicon. But not all style invites phonemic reading in this way. There are only rare moments in Henry James, for instance, when the sound shape of words is recruited for something like an overt rhetorical effect. The explicit mention of a "droll" sound in The Ambassadors seems to give special point to a phonemic biplay verging on the anagrammatic as well as chiastic form, when "with a sound half-dolor ous, half-droll and all v ag ue and eq uiv ocal, Chad buried his face" (11.1.288). The Janus-like pattern by which "dolor" and "drollery" mutually reconstitute each other at the level of the signifier adds verbal texture to the tragicomic dimensions of the scene. For the most part, however, James is not likely to roll words around on his tongue so much as thoughts—or, at least, not phonemic clusters so much as diction. His shadows and adumbrations are largely semantic, his primary means syntactic. Even a Jamesian variant of the transegmental syllabic effect is likely to be more directly cerebral—or metaphysical—than those in George Eliot, for example. When Brydon in The Jolly Corner is brought face-to-face with the ghost of his former self, his recoil, his instinctual disavowal, is phonotextually mediated. The ghost moves his hands away from his face to reveal a "bared identity . . . too hideous as his " (476; James's emphasis). With the aspirate itself a ghostly function, phantasmal but no less accusatory, the idiomatic "as is" is thereby cross-lexically asserted as the surfacing of a repressed matrix,

through an elision that actually posits and predicates the protagonist's spectral existence in the Other.

On the subject of the actual death moment, rather than its supernal afterimages, the drifting phoneme may often mark a mortal transgression as well. Death scenes in the Victorian and modern novel, with their complex recruitment of fictive tropology, their sheer style on the verge of the unevidenced, are quite likely to exert a peculiar torsion on the combinatory logic of word sequence.^[13] Jude the Obscure's penultimate despairing utterance, "And I here" (6.11.320), is a declaration of presence that turns to a self-willed imperative of absence, of death, across the transegmental slide of "And die here." Without such a manifest lexical regrouping of sound clusters, there is still a peculiar densening and interplay of syllabic matter in certain renderings by Conrad of the death moment. When the helmsman in Heart of Darkness is fatally speared through the chest, "the luster of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness" (47). Conrad's phrasing produces a paronomastic gradience that suggests fatal blankness as merely a hairbreadth away from the stare of life, and this even at the textual surface—as if death were the transition precipitated by the "lance" hiding in the elided noun of "inquiring g lance." After the murder of Verloc in The Secret Agent , when one of the knife thrusts administered by his wife at last finds its lethal opening in the rib cage, the narrator stands back for a generalization about such a fate that is also a roulette spin of contingent syllabification: "Hazard has such accuracies" (11.212). In Conrad's most famous death scene, again from Heart of Darkness , the last half-dozen syllables of Kurtz's death gasp are "The horror! The horror!" (71). With all the narrator's emphasis on Kurtz's voice, the incarnate presence of the man in his portentous enunciations, their mystery and unaccountable force, and indeed given the narrator's later lie to Kurtz's unnamed Intended that "the last word he pronounced was—your name" (79), we may well hear Kurtz's last utterance phonemically displaced into a continuous thought: "The whore or the horror!" In the now-indistinguishable alternatives of desire and depletion, and with all seductive idealism prostituted for power, this hearing would also figure the doubling of Kurtz's jungle consort with the deluded mourner back home. Such is the potential "accuracy" of a phonic "hazard."

Ford Madox Ford is certainly not what one would call a syllabic or phonemic stylist, and yet the inevitable elisions of the English language can occasionally play into his hands. In The Good Soldier , the bloodless narrator, Dowell, describes his own role in relation to his ailing wife as that of a "sedulous, strained nurse" (8), where the very notion of professional qualification in the more familiar adjective, "trained," is an anti-pun written off by the prolonged tedious fact of his makeshift responsibilities. By contrast,

E. M. Forster is frequently inclined to a euphonic, though often ironic, chiming of syllables, even in his nonfictional prose. He writes in Aspects of the Novel , for instance, about those "divings into and dividings of personality" (112) that characterize "fantasy." Divided from within, the first participle is wedged open into the name of the very operation that produces it. This is the poetic in Forster's prose, his plastic way with diction. He, in fact, defines the poetic impulse in this broad sense in his 1907 novel, The Longest Journey , where in a self-exampling fusion of syllabic matter he writes of "the union of shad ow and ad amant that men call poetry" (15.154). The bond of the ferrous and the ephemeral is held there in the blended emphasis that makes the second noun a kind of phonemic portmanteau, telescoping material from both the preceding noun and the conjunction that yokes them. A similar syllabic realignment of the conjunction "and" appears in Howards End as the passing shadow of a not quite so adamant transegmental meld. Margaret Schlegel is coming to recognize the gap between classes; though culture has "worked" for her, "during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophical man" (14.115; my emphasis). A syntactic increment seems calibrated there to evoke a signified increase. In a transegmental drift, that is, the disyllabic sequence "wide an d" offers the first partial enunciation of the participle "widen ing" to follow. If we borrow the phrase "the union of shadow and adamant" to characterize such phonological blendings—with the scripted words holding the place of the adamant, the inalterable, while spectral phonemes seem to play across their surface and blur their boundaries—then the union of the inscribed vocable and its aural equivocation, of text and silent enunciation, lends Forster's definition of poetry a morphophonemic as well as a metaphysical cast. Or to borrow from Conrad again, it might be said that in the poetry of prose "hazard has such accuracies."

Forster as prose poet is of course outstripped, among his great contemporaries, by Lawrence as well as by Joyce and Woolf. In a passage explicitly devoted to the "so wide and so widening" play of concentric rings on the surface of water, Lawrence's own prose achieves a rippling overlap of phonemes in the transegmental mode. In the famous "Mooney" chapter of Women in Love , the reflection of the moon on the water, imaged as a "ragged rose," is repeatedly shattered. As its image reintegrates itself at the center, "the rays were hastening in in thin lines" (19.239), where the threefold repetition of "in" as or within a syllable is matched by the transegmental blur of "were has tening." Telescoped there by an elision of the h (recalling the Jamesian "as [h]is") is the phantom aftertone, the phonic wake, of the verb "race" as well as an auditory radiation of "rays." Similarly, amid the massive (and arguably visible as well as audible) alliteration in the immediately

preceding image of the scattered moon, we note the fl alliteration transforming itself into something more like the anagrammatic diphone of Saussure:

fl ying asunder in fl akes of white and dangerous f ire. Rapidly, like 
white birds, the f ires all broken rose across the pond,  fl eeing in
clamorous conf usion, battling with the fl ock of dark wav es that were
 f orcing their way in. The f urtherest waves of l ight, fl eeing out,
 seemed clamouring against the shore for escape.
(19.239; my emphasis)

The recurrently successive but suddenly noncontiguous pair of letters actually bridges a lexical gap in the penultimate italicized instance: to form—by liaison rather than elision this time, and in anticipation of "fleeing"—the phrase "of light ." At this level of phonotextual pressure, there lies between The Old Curiosity Shop and Women in Love no wider a gap than the lexical one their own phonemes are able to overleap.

For all the sporadic modernist activity in the way of transegmental drifts, it may still be that no single text before Joyce's Ulysses brings lexical dispersion into such direct thematic consideration as does Dickens's Our Mutual Friend , as we had begun to see. There is, though, a curiously Dickensian moment early in the first act of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest that should—with its harking back to the Punch -style alphabetic humor of Thackeray as well—serve to route us round again for a final look at the "shovelling and sifting at alphabeds" in Dickens's last completed novel. When Ernest Worthing attempts to reveal that his name is really "Jack," his friend Algernon six times objects, in as many sentences, that "Ernest" is his incontrovertible essence. "It's on your cards," he adds, in a definitive last stroke. "Here is one of them . . . Mr. Ernest Worthing, B. 4, The Albany." As part of a theatrical phonotext, the "B. 4" can well be heard by an audience as a phonetic rebus for that time "before" the present reversal, that time when Jack's pseudonym was still in service. In this way, Wilde's designation of the Room of One's Other reminds us by homophonic irony that the past efficacy of a ruse never survives the moment of its exposure.

Dickens's Dustiary Revisited

The New Yorker cartoonist who pictured a wide-eyed Dickens in profile on a publike barstool, under hanging beer tankards and over the caption "Dickens' First Encounter with a Martini," looking bemused at the bartender's question "Olive or twist?" (27 September 1987) may well have thought he was making his own kind of joke, not Dickens's. In the context of this chapter, however, Boz's double take of authorial recognition would be itself twofold, on grounds not only of storytelling but of punning, of naming and wording together. We

left off our initial investigation of Our Mutual Friend with the slurring of "dusty eyrie" into "dustiary." With this symbolically freighted collapse in mind, a word more is in order about Victorian wordplay outside the precincts of major fiction, especially about the contemporaneous ambience of Cockney humor. In 1865, during the second and final year of the serialization of Our Mutual Friend , the 28 January number of Punch ran "A Cockney's Epitaph," a perfect epitome of the thematized accidents to which transegmental malapropism can lead. Facilitated by both the dropped h phenomenon and the junctural slippage of n before vowels, a single sliding consonant guides the irony along a syntactic arc representing life's temporal duration: "Think! 'From the cradle to the grave!' my brother, / A nurse take you from one, an 'earse to the t'other." This exceeds the linguistic bounds of the Punch epitaph for the Cockney cook, "Peace to his hashes," for instance, which is simply a pun on a single butchered lexeme. In the rhyming epitaph above, the segmental ambiguity between an nurse and an hearse —almost a textbook example, beyond Cockneyism per se, of what linguists debate as the proper disambiguation of juncture, as in "a name" versus "an aim"—involves a syntactic conundrum at the smallest compass, a question of when exactly one word cedes to its successor.

Nearer yet to the thematic material of Our Mutual Friend , and far enough back in time to be a conceivable influence on Dickens's comic style, is a Cockney music hall song of the sort we know the young Dickens to have won approval from his father by performing.^[14] Singer Robert Glindon (1799–1866) included among the ditties that made his reputation a song called (no less) "The Literary Dustman," published for the first time in 1832.^[15] Boffin's eagerness to become not only the "Golden Dustman" (in the titles to chapters 4 and 5 of book 3) but a literary one as well (if not literate, and if only by proxy) lend special prophetic point to this earlier composition, where the speaker boasts a "liberal hedication " (his emphasis on the Cockney pun), learning "all my letters" from a "turnpike man," and finds it odd—"a co-in-side-ance queer"—that the name of Adam, who "vos the fust man," is also his own, "the fust of Dustmen!" Here is Wegg's semiliterate braggadocio, as Dickens will separate it off from Boffin in their symbiosis of ambition. Here, too, is even the sense of a given name whose "coincidence" invites speculation (though Wegg-of-the-wooden-leg will later refuse to speculate on his). In addition, by that associative logic of syllabically apt malapropism which characterizes much of the humor in early Thackeray or Punch , as well as that of Wegg later, the songtext's italicized "hedication, " along with the typographically inflected "co-in-side-ance" in the chorus, may be said to put, respectively, the head ("hed") back in learning and the adjacency ("side" by "side") back in fortuitous convergence. Dickens's "drowndead" is only one of many later counterparts.

In returning to similar lexical disintegrations in the "dustiary" of Our Mutual Friend , then, we can examine them further as part of a deliberate congeries of social fragmentation and splintered utterance, the shavings and leavings of a rendered empire in decline. As a matter of fact, the ironies of "dust" and debris in the novel are closely concentrated around the linguistic comedy between Boffin and Wegg in the precincts of the dust mounds themselves. Such effects are associated there, in part, with Wegg's bodily dismemberment, his own limb cast off into a circuit of waste and reclamation. In the chapter wryly titled "Mr. Wegg Looks After Himself" (1.7)—meaning both the idiomatic "looks out for himself" and, more literally, "goes in search of his lost limb"—a manuscript addition clarifies a similar pun: "I shouldn't like to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person" (1.7.127). Dickens had originally stopped the joke at collect myself but pressed it further into affectation with "like a genteel person" above the line.^[16] This works to underscore the idiomatic connotation of "collectedness" as an air of composure, while highlighting all the more by contrast the starkly literal sense of attempted recomposition of Wegg's very body through the recovery of the disarticulated member.

Mr. Wegg, of the amputated leg, sells it to Venus, the "articulator of human bones" (1.7.128), and when he is later able to arrange the sale of his own verbal articulation to the inheritor of dust, Mr. Boffin, he wants to use the money he gets in return for his words to rearticulate his body with the missing leg. This is money symbolically unburied, in turn, from the same partly fecal heaps that are passed on to Boffin in the Harmon will and in which another version of that will is rumored to be buried. Remarkably interknit in their symbolic complicity, these details can be seen to triangulate with one another as follows: partly organic debris linked with money (filthy lucre) along one axis, money with language (ill-gotten literary gain) along another, and language with organicism and anatomy ("articulation") and its breakdown along the third.^[17] Formed here is in fact a grid isomorphic, as we will further see, with that triumvirate in the so-called human sciences—biology, economics, and linguistics—that is so crucial for Foucault's sense of the nineteenth-century "Sciences of Man."

Elaborating the axis of filth and money in Our Mutual Friend is a set piece that performs its satire not only by invoking shredded paper as legal tender but by involving as well the additional disintegration of words inscribed upon another kind of paper currency known as text. In a passage augmented by several manuscript insertions (as italicized), Dickens is describing the air of London streets thick with litter:

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it

come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.
(1.12.191)

The second two additions contribute to the personification of this flying detritus, and together the three inserted verb phrases, along with the five others in series, accumulate with the inevitability of the collected and distributed debris they portray. The metaphor that transforms this whirling matter into "paper currency," into the circulating currents of an economic model of free exchange, is the most explicit mention in the novel of that waste which is money, rather than just of the scene of heaped incidental wealth (the mounds). Framing this paragraph is a refrain that links the "paper currency" more explicitly yet with the euphemistically named "dust" mounds. "The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit," and so on. Then, right after this paragraph about "currency" as the dusty leavings of a violent wind, we read again: "The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled." Thus routinely repeated, the internal echo of the monosyllabic "sawed" against its homophonic extension into "sawdust" works to suggest the latter as building upon an elided, sawed-off, shaved-down, or otherwise disintegrated version of the former—"sawdust" thereby emerging as the transegmental double of "sawed dust." Anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that the cultural concept of "dirt" should be taken to cover not just residue but the residuum of all categorization, less refuse or leftover than that which is conceptually refused by a given society.^[18] In this sense, Dickens's symbolic dirt, his mounded and mounting dust, figures ultimately the residualization of the human organism itself—in the liturgically familiar ashes and dust that survive the vacated life of the body. When, in turn, language falls to pieces into an association with dirt and money, not only is its material basis pulverized but its communal function is excluded, escaping that categorization known as normative linguistics. The stretch of narrative prose we have been reading is far tamer in its verbal demolition than more drastic collapses elsewhere, of course. Yet the phonemic splintering of a lexeme here—the frictional erosion at the mutual border of the implied matrix phrase "sawed dust"—does give evidence of morphology, of structure itself, caught on the trace of its own disintegration, however much domesticated in this case by the social consensus of an idiomatic contraction.

This same degenerative logic continues to pursue and traverse the linked symbols of Dickens's novel. If dirt is extraneous, if language reverts to dust

and dirt, or at least to molecular leavings, and if other, more familiar kinds of dust are designated as refuse even while being returned to circulation for their exchange value as currency, and, further, if anatomical debris (such as a superfluous limb) is the stuff of rearticulation for profit—then the question arises whether articulation in the other sense, as language, is also part of that monetary nexus analyzed by economics. Wegg would be the first to hope so, as he designs to sell his words. And Boffin would seem to think so as well, given his eccentric financial metaphor on the subject of his marginal familiarity with the English alphabet: "I don't mean to say but what if you showed me a B, I could so far give you change for it, as to answer Boffin" (1.5.94). Words beginning with b are for Boffin a paradigm that can be shaken down, separated, made to pay. Like economics, linguistics concerns a system of exchange, as indeed do the life cycles of biology. The body, money, and language—in Foucault's terms, biology, value theory, and philology (organic science, economics, linguistics)—thus converge upon Wegg the reader-for-pay in his association with Mr. Venus, the corporeal articulator. It is in the latter's shop, too, that the disarticulated limbs and organs of his inventory are called the "human warious" (1.7.126), a Cockneyism that itself brings together mortal anxiety ("wary") in a portmanteau articulation with "various." The reciprocal logic is complete: if dust, figured as money, can be personified as wayward windblown agencies in the London streets, then people, itinerant or otherwise, can be reduced to the flux of exchange value.

The denouement of humanist investigation in the conjoint epistemological crises of (1) biological, (2) economic, and (3) linguistic discourses in the late nineteenth century, as Foucault argues, may thus be satirically witnessed in Our Mutual Friend by the fact of (1) a body part being (2) sold off to (3) the (figurative) articulator. The commodification of the biological or anatomical structure of the living organism, the microeconomics of the body itself, is here carried to parodic lengths in the marketing of skeletons for schools of art—to be used, in ironic turn, as models for representation. This travestied economy by which pieces of organic life pass as commodities into the realm of aesthetic reproduction is also matched at the level of metafictional irony by the manner in which the "literary man," Wegg, retails his linguistic powers, such as they are, through an economy of verbal dissemination in which words, whether or not one can be given "change" for them, do have their price. Then, too, in their unwitting play, such words can be made to pay out more than expected. Like the syllabic malapropism of Thackeray's Yellowplush three and a half decades before, Wegg's misplaced "authographic" stabs can strike gold, as when his version of Gibbon, "Decline-and-Fall-Off," hits upon a homophonic pun in the preposition. By discovering the word within the word,

he thus brings to light all that (shortly restated) "declining and falling off" that lays empires low (1.5.96).

In the masterly comic scene that sends Wegg on his way to strike his devil's bargain with Boffin, the vocal production he is about to market is, in fact, momentarily shattered. His words are broken down into other words, disintegrated into subsidiary—and subversive—fragments of lexical sense. The dismembered antihero becomes once and for all the disarticulated voice, a shambles of syllabification that ends up speaking in tongues the darkly coherent truth. Central here to the satiric agenda of the novel, its attack on the money ethic of Victorian society, is a play-by-play displacement of words—a lexical splintering into phonemic shards—that anticipates by over a decade the journalistic ingenuity of rhymes like these from the Cockney poem, "Echo's Answers," in the Punch number of 18 August 1877:

INQUIRER: What's the first requisite for taking pleasure?

ECHO: Leisure .

INQUIRER: The second (for a slave to matrimony)?

ECHO: Money .

The Dickensian setting for a related lexical farce has Wegg taking a convulsive coach journey to visit Mr. Boffin near the former residence of the miserly John Harmon, a residence called disparagingly in the neighborhood "Harmony Jail." Wegg struggles valiantly to get out his questions about this odd name:

Mr. Wegg's conversation was jolted out of him in a most dislocated state.

"Was-it-Ev-verajail?" asked Mr. Wegg, holding on.

"Not a proper jail, wot you and me would get committed to," returned his escort; "they giv' it the name on accounts of Old Harmon living solitary there."

"And-why-did-they-callitharm-Ony?" asked Wegg.

On accounts of his never agreeing with nobody. Like a speeches of chaff. Harmon's Jail; Harmony Jail. Working it round like.

"Doyouknow-Mist-Erboff-in?" asked Wegg.
(1.5.98)

And so forth. Even the twice repeated nonidiom "on accounts" suggests the obsessive ledger keeping of the miser in question. The phrase "dislocated state" was added in the manuscript to introduce the hyphenated dyslocutions to follow, even as the hyphens suggest a slurred continuity within the cantering

resyllabifications. Nowhere does Dickens more intriguingly mark the phonically bridged gap that always joins phonemes, no matter how clearly they are segmented into lexemes. In this and other such lexical emergencies, the accentual discriminations of pitch, stress, and juncture are reduced to the accidents of physical discomfiture. Out of such violence in this case, finally, breaks the satiric truth.

Syllabically divided against itself, through false gemination of the /v/, the phrasing "Ev-verajail" releases perhaps a faint trace of the "veritable," answered at once by the explanation that the term was only figurative, a "species" of nonsensical wordplay, or "chaff." But, of course, Dickens's own chaff, his linguistic spoof, has "worked round" the word "species" to the (in context self-referential) "speeches." It is at just this point—with "callitharm-Ony"—that we come upon a quintessential moment of disarticulation in this novel symbolically preoccupied (notably through Mr. Venus, the boneman) with literalized articulations. Like a Cockney echoist, Wegg brings out the "harm" (rather than the money, but then the one is the other) in "Harmony." It is a species of revelation chafing at the phonemic overlap of two unsaid non-etymological components. Cued by the mercantile pun behind the mangled idiom "on accounts," the matrix of the whole passage—in Riffaterre's terms, the unsaid moralistic cliché behind the irony of "Harmony"—is the harm rather than peace, the imprisoning fixation rather than freedom, that money brings. The semiosis of this comic poetry is thus glimpsed in the interstices of the narrowest agrammaticality, the violated succession of the syntactic nexus itself. "Harm" and "money," imbricated within a single phonemic span, encode the paired sins that at one and the same time cannot speak their names, cannot be simultaneously verbalized. They are there in the text not as a written but as a silently overheard interdependence, a reciprocal satiric indictment plumbed beneath or between inscriptions, in both senses sounded without being said. As with Boffin before, though here to Wegg's own active annoyance, dialogism assaults his utterance from within, divides and conquers intent, rends the blurted question to render its own answer double-voiced despite itself. Once again in Dickens the syntagmatic axis snaps at its lower limit, speaking in tongues from the lucky breaks of lexical segmentation.

If this suggests a more radical reading practice entailed by Dickensian fiction than criticism ordinarily supposes, guided by less complacent assumptions about a textual system by no means entirely exhausted by graphic signification, even though positing no grounding authorial voice behind its phonic play, if in fact this destabilizing play appears born of a syntax at odds with the very words that constitute it on the skid, and if all this, despite the debts to Victorian humor, sounds more like Joyce than like Trollope, then we are ready for a further contextualizing of its verbal farce. It is time to locate

more precisely this late but typifying achievement of Dickens, this symbolic text of articulation and its discontents, within Foucault's "archaeology" of literary history in relation to linguistic science. In the section of The Order of Things on "Articulation," there is an unspoken anticipation of that linguistic principle eventually formalized as "double articulation," the twofold system of relational differences between sounds as well as words. Such are the categorical or paradigmatic distinctions whose emergence in the nineteenth century serves to explode a classical philosophy of discourse into the first stirrings of modern philology. Foucault traces to this point what we might call the representational imperative seen to govern classical attitudes toward language. The axiomatic assumptions of this attitude are found to carry an unquestioned confidence about language's signifying power into the smallest fractional units of the word, whether fragmented or regrouped. In this representational episteme, syllables, even single letters, were read as referential, in order that "all analysis of verbal sings . . . be retained within discourse itself."^[19] As mentioned in the Prologue, this amounts to "a search for the obscure nominal function that was thought to be invested and concealed in those words, in those syllables, in those inflections, in those letters that the over-generalized analysis of the proposition was allowing to pass through its net" (101). Every word, no matter how utterly—or unutterably—splintered into its constituent elements, still concealed "dormant names" (102). These subsidiary agents in discourse's "immense rustling of denominations" would, according to Foucault, once silenced by the philological revolution, reemerge again only as counterrevolutionary agents in a modernist poetics. They appear there with a renewed sense of the given word inflected by its hidden verbal undersong, its singing of cryptic names in counterpoint, its thinging of language. The glory of articulation, though called now its "enigma," is seen again as an invincible "pulverization" in which every disintegrated structure produces a new integer, every rupture the nub of another utterance.

In briefly following out Foucault's periodization of linguistic "science" across the last three centuries—by way of those British literary landmarks (or "archaeological" strata) considered so far in this chapter on the accidents and "undercraft" of prose—we can indeed conveniently begin with Sterne. An entire verbal episteme is on display in Tristram's alphabetical list of love's attributes (including the transegmental glimmer of "B ewitching"). To read such a textually reflexive moment as Sterne's self-conscious nod at an eighteenth-century discoursing on (and of) the letter, however, would in no way oblige us to find in Dickens's verbal disintegrations—thematized as disarticulation—some nostalgic or regressive gambit at the metalinguistic level. If Dickens follows in the tradition of Sterne, he is also forging the tradition of Joyce. On the evidence of Dickens's sublexical punning, Victorian

language theory (in comic practice), having moved beyond a philosophy of pervasive discourse into the realms of philology—and having been virtually allegorized as an "anatomy" of utterance in Dickens's last novel—appears there to press at the very threshold of modernism. Which is a way of saying that the sketch of the nineteenth-century linguistic episteme that Foucault has drawn, when transposed to Victorian experiments in comic prose, provides not just the archaeology of a philological epoch but a far more circumscribed theory of what that era came to know as the "portmanteau." It is a concept mastered by Dickens, named by Lewis Carroll, and passed spectacularly to Joyce. Smash one word and you emancipate another, pulverize and you eventuate, dismantle and then manifest anew. In Wegg's case, when his self-serving questions are disarticulated under pressure, the text reticulates in response a cryptic truth: "And-why-did-they callitharm-Ony?" This voluble amputee, trafficker in an impaired verbal facility, becomes more obviously than ever—and precisely on this symbolic quest to "collect himself"—the prophetic decentered voice of that prose-poetic dismembering that defines "modern" writing not as discourse but as sheer text. The imperium whose decline and falling off he most notably chronicles, therefore, is an empire of signs, and he does so as the "literary man" whose explosive powers have always resided silent in writing's assault on literacy.

The interests of Dickens the intuitive philologist here converge with those of Dickens the empiricist of talk, of oral expressiveness. Language as voice is the meeting ground of both these signal late-Romantic preoccupations. And Wegg's coach ride is their allegory: a miniature picaresque of vocalizing. We are all of us Weggs in motion, readers for "profit" if not for monetary gain, jostled by the fits and starts of language in our attempted engagement with plot. The vehicle that transports us in the service of a motivated reading, a reading whose locus in another sense we already inhabit and define from the start, is a complex engine of verbal sequencing that now and then exposes the jog trot of evocalized textuality, of graphonic processing. Taking fractured dictation from the virtual unconscious of the text, Wegg's disarticulated stammering turns the enunciating body from single source into conflictual site. It is a site whose delegated occupation by us as readers requires in turn the substitution of our own voicing bodies, querying through Wegg's proxy the name assigned to the very space of secondary reading—his reading out loud, and haltingly, to Boffin in the environs of "Harmony Jail." It is toward such a designated scene of reading—yet one at the same time already in process, already reflexively staged—that both the signifying as well as the signified activity of this very "passage" ushers us by our own silent "delivery." To attempt an extreme localization of Bakhtinian terminology, one might say that the "chronotopicity"^[20] of Wegg's ride—the space-time relationship of his race

across the urban cobblestones of mid-Victorian London—is redoubled by our own reading pace across the lines of print. It is our textual chronotope, in other words, that dialogizes his language—double-voices it, voices its doubles—in sync with his own segmental syncopations. Novel by novel—or, more accurately, text by text—Joyce will turn such a farcical picaresque of articulation into the linguistic epic of a speaking tribe.