Word of Mouth: Gossip and American PoetrySomebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative

Both of these books study the effects of various filters on the conveyance of information in literary texts. Word of Mouth focuses narrowly on one such filter: how the voices, audiences, narrative structures, and social functions of gossip operate in the work of four mid-twentieth-century American poets (Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and James Merrill). In contrast, Somebody Telling Somebody Else ranges across two hundred years’ worth of literary and popular novels, short stories, and memoirs in pursuit of what Phelan calls a “comprehensive” (63) rhetorical theory of how authors, narrators, and other tellers interact with audiences to shape a narrative’s “cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions” (258). Word of Mouth follows some prominent trends in poetry scholarship, most notably a historical poetics concern with what has come to be called lyric reading. Somebody Telling Somebody Else resists some prominent modes of reading in literary studies, notably in its overt defense of authorial intention and implicit endorsement of the ideal reader. Both are ambitious in their claims. Both offer insightful close readings that will motivate readers to revisit, or read for the first time, the primary texts they study. And, despite their strengths, each could stand to be a bit more like the other.Word of Mouth focuses on how long, ostensibly antilyric poems engage the lyric tradition by incorporating and manipulating elements of gossip: a performative discourse in which, like John Stuart Mill’s description of the lyric, information is “overheard” as much as heard and that, like the lyric, creates a sort of “publicly circulating privacy” (19). Gossip and gossipy passages in such poems, Bennett contends, have the effect of queering the relationship between poetic modes, revealing in presumably antilyric texts “a nonoppositional relation to the lyric that confounds the lyric/anti-lyric binary that continues to structure debates in poetic theory” (17). Additionally—and especially in the context of the midcentury’s Red and Lavender scares—gossip’s unofficial, ephemeral, gendered, judgmental, sexually charged, and sotto voce circuits of information also offer potential queer literary and communication archives (hence the grouping of Stein, Hughes, O’Hara, and Merrill). By taking the supposedly transparent vernacular of everyday life and revealing its opaque attributes, such poems challenge our assumptions about the shallowness of gossip as a communicative dynamic.Readers less interested in historical poetics shoptalk, or less inclined to add to their bedside tables Stein’s 225-page-long Stanzas in Meditation (1956) or Merrill’s 560-page-long The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), will nonetheless enjoy Bennett’s taxonomy of ways that literature imagines and reimagines gossip as an expressive mode. Stein, for example, imagines gossip “as a style of listening” as well as talking (42). In “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (1951)—the center of Bennett’s most readable and illuminating chapter—Hughes records the gossip of Harlem’s stoops and street corners in a “counter-archival practice” that “resists reductive assumptions about the transparency of minority lives and writing” (83). In “talking not only to but about himself,” O’Hara “unexpectedly deviates from established notions of good gossip” (167) thus giving rise to the appealing category of “bad gossip” (129). And Merrill’s gossipy Ouija board sessions become a form of queer worldmaking, a “means of recognition and pleasure, rather than disavowal and dread” in homophobic America (187).Word of Mouth has four chapters plus a coda that tries to suggest affinities between gossip’s “appropriated language” and contemporary poems in “collage-based, documentary, procedural, and aleatory” writing traditions (228). Phelan’s book, by contrast, has thirteen chapters that, in somewhat more scrambled but far more expansive fashion, examine how the various information sources in narrative prose (authors, implied authors, narrators, and characters in dialogue with each other) affect the delivery of information and how that delivery affects audiences. In constructing its own taxonomy charting how “the feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phenomena, and readerly response” (10) works, Somebody Telling Somebody Else reaches across generic, historical period, and national boundaries, incorporating nearly every type of literary narrative possible, from crime novels to memoirs, literary fiction to graphic texts. The authors studied include Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Joan Didion, George V. Higgins, Homer, Franz Kafka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, David Small, and Mark Twain.Phelan’s miniature, sometimes thrilling case studies address a wide range of questions. When and why, for instance, do readers believe what unreliable narrators have to say? Why do readers believe unreasonable things from reliable narrators or forgive narrative impossibilities? Why do readers forgive surprise endings and open-ended narratives and find “fruitless and frustrating” texts to nonetheless be “revealing and rewarding” (158)? Phelan explains how information filters work differently in fiction and creative nonfiction to constitute the two as distinct genres, and he offers compelling ways to understand the interplay between implied authors and their narrators. Better appreciating the complex methods that writers use to mediate information for their audiences, he convincingly argues, can help restore the notion of “authorial agency” to literary studies—locating that agency not in “the flesh-and-blood author,” but in the implied author orchestrating a narrative’s informational filters (205).Phelan’s shortest chapters flash by in fifteen pages; Bennett’s are about fifty pages each. And in this and other respects, each could benefit from being more like the other. I would have gladly accepted shorter chapters from Word of Mouth if Bennett had constructed a longer, still queer American tradition including the likes of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman or else deepened the Cold War landscape via poems like Sylvia Plath’s “Lesbos” (1965) or “Jilted” (1992). Both approaches might further illustrate—this time from the lyric side of the “lyric/anti-lyric” divide—how gossip troubles the binary of Bennett’s concern. If gossip can be seen as “appropriated language,” for instance, then its presence in lyric poems would, among other things, potentially complicate the notion of lyric subjectivity and lyric voice.In turn, I would have welcomed more from Phelan’s short chapters—especially the fifteen-page chapters on Morrison and Lahiri. Phelan regularly claims his approach is valuable for scholars more interested in theme and content, and adding additional material on Morrison and Lahiri or complementary texts might more effectively show how writers filter information related to potentially contentious politically and socially charged subject matter. I kept wondering, for example, about the informational dramatics of double consciousness or about texts deliberately written for multiple readerships or to cause controversy, both of which would not only seem to showcase additionally complex rhetorical strategies but would also complicate the notion of the ideal reader upon which Phelan’s analysis relies but otherwise leaves unquestioned. In other words, I suppose, both books open space for further study. Given the large claims they make, however, I would very much like to have heard more from the authors themselves.