Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes by Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie D. Holm

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes by Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie D. Holm Julien Weber Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie D. Holm. Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes. New York: Fordham UP, 2018. Pp. 293. US$125.00 hardcover, US$35.00 paperback, US$34.99 ebook. Mocking Bird Technologies is a collection of essays that meditate on the poetics of bird mimicry in different literary traditions and contexts. The role of birds is examined in poems and novels that range from eighteenth-century English literature to postcolonial Indonesian and South African literature. As the editors explain in their [End Page 428] preface, one of the main goals of the volume is to respond to the emerging global turn of comparative studies by exploring a literary topos that crosses over languages and continents while reaching back to a foundational problem of the discipline: mimesis. By introducing a space between the words Mocking and Bird, the title of the collection foregrounds an ambivalence at the core of the question of bird mimicry. The technologies of mocking birds can either refer to the ability of some birds to mimic humans (or other animals), or to the way humans attempt to represent birds. One of the strengths of the volume is indeed to bring close attention to the first sense of bird mimicry without eluding the problems surrounding the human representation of birds. While several essays explore the agency of fictional speaking birds in literary works, or the philosophical and poetic questions raised by speaking birds, others examine how speaking birds have been used in the fashioning and refashioning of a wide range of human technè, including lyric form and colonial tools of regulatory power. The volume also has the ambition to give more visibility to differences among the signifying practices of speaking birds. Careful not to subsume all mocking birds under the category of the “parrot,” itself already widely documented in colonial and postcolonial literature, the editors emphasize how starlings distinguish themselves from parrots by their ability to mimic not only human words, but also other birds and other nonhuman sounds. Unlike parrots, starlings’ mimicry is not a function of their captivity or their contact with articulate language. This opens up to a better consideration of the paralinguistic element informing both human and nonhuman uses of mimesis. Moreover, the starling trope foregrounds questions of cultural difference, since the name of “starling” has come to designate a European species while “mynah” refers to a variety of different species across southern Asia. Studying starlings and mynahs accross different philological traditions might then, according to the editors, “open for consideration multiple genealogies of bird mimicry throughout history”(19). Christopher GoGwilt’s essay “Of Mimicry, Birds, and Words: The Technology of Starling Song in European, American, and Indonesian Poetry” is the most explicitly related to the book’s ambition to carve theoretical space for the starling. Through a reading of European, American, and Indonesian poems, GoGwilt attempts to demonstrate a threefold hypothesis: first, that starling technology is an interspecies matter; second, that it spreads across different cultures, traditions, and languages; and third, that it challenges us to think of mimicry in nonlinguistic or paralinguistic terms. His readings of Schubert’s Ungeduld, Lorie Graham’s starling poem, and Puto Oka’s The Song of the Starling aptly illustrate the diversity of starling tropes across the globe-as mimicks, counterpoint to the European nightingale or tropes for bare life. The essay also convincingly identifies specific aesthetic means by which the paralinguistic mimicry of starlings manifests itself in art and poetry: through the mimicry of the mill’s sounds in Schubert, the intertwining of sound and visual registers in Graham, and the uttering of a mute soliloquy in Oka. While the examples GoGwilt [End Page 429] discusses are very suggestive, the compressed form of their analysis sometimes hampers the clarity of the argument. It might have been useful to devote more space to the discussion of one example, so as to address more consistently the aesthetic and poetic issues at the core of the third part of the hypothesis. In...