• Collected
• Article

The ventriloquist’s dummy: writing and the gut

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I was never very keen on ventriloquism. It was popular on TV — animal dummies that were meant to be cute, and those rather creepy dolls sitting on the knees of some equally creepy and not very funny men (other than Shari Lewis I remember them all as men); disturbing films like Magic and Dead of Night, stories where the dummy takes on a demonic life of its own. They scared me silly, but perhaps what disturbed me most was not the doll but the bloke with his hand up its bottom. Anthony Hopkins as the unbalanced, increasingly deranged Corky, twice as scary as his foul-mouthed wooden sidekick, Fats, who’s merely an unsubtle manifestation of Corky’s psyche as he descends into madness.

The traditional ventriloquist’s act involves a dummy that’s frequently world-weary, drunk, droll or childishly amusing and almost always outspoken: rude to the ventriloquist, somehow in opposition. The ventriloquist apologises to the audience on behalf of their transgressive ‘friend’ and, if the act is skilful enough, we almost forget that the dummy’s not a ‘real,’ autonomous being — as in some of the best novels, perhaps, when a fictional protagonist can temporarily become more alive to us than the flesh-and-blood human sitting beside us as we read.

I can’t say ventriloquism ever really crossed my mind until I was doing some research around an apparently completely unrelated topic: the gut. I came across the word ‘gastromancy’ – gastḗr meaning belly, manteíā meaning prophecy – and discovered that ventriloquism, which itself comes from the Latin venter meaning ‘belly’ and loqui meaning ‘speak’, has its origins in Ancient Greece, through the work of gastromancers. I learned that the spirits of the dead were thought to live in the gut of the gastromancer and to speak through them. The ghostly voices would gurgle away in the gastromancer’s gut before rising up into his throat and out of his mouth — a spew of prophetic words and profound ‘truths’. Premier league gastromancers achieved the extra impressive feat of having the dead spirit speak through a nearby tree, or rock, or even a goat. They had clearly perfected the art not only of speaking without moving their lips but of throwing the voice. Gastromancy was big business. But then Christianity came along and set about denouncing it as one of the dark arts. It didn’t take long for a few hapless belly-prophets to be burned as witches and for the serious work of prophesy and divination to morph into a form of entertainment much closer to the ventriloquism we recognise today.

But the two are not far removed from one another, are they? The spirit speaking through the belly-prophet and the transgressive dummy, arguing with the rational, ‘public’ character of the ventriloquist, saying what the ‘vent’ could never say, upsetting the apple cart and, frequently, speaking the truth. The inner voice, residing in the gut of the ancient Greek, manifesting in the ventriloquist’s dummy.

Perhaps because I was thinking about ventriloquism, I started to notice the word popping up all over the place in relation to writing: a novelist praised for her ‘ventriloquial’ talent, the creative writing course entitled ‘The Writer as Ventriloquist — Mastering Voice and Tone’. It’s a rather fancy way of stating the obvious perhaps — that a writer frequently inhabits the voices of others, can appear to ‘become’ another. Perhaps the ventriloquial writer does so in a particularly clever or startling way. Putting words into someone else’s mouth. Animating the inanimate. Speaking in tongues. A writer might be described as a ventriloquist if she is particularly skilled at writing from first-person viewpoints that are very clearly not her own. And yes, there is something about how imagination and memory often work together that, for me anyway, can make writing feel like an act of conjuring ghosts. But I started to think about the writer not as the ventriloquist, but as the dummy; not as the gastromancer, but as the spirit of the dead.

We talk about ‘gut feeling’ don’t we? Sometimes we choose to ‘go with the gut’ or follow our ‘gut instinct’ over logic or reason, and usually when we say this we imply that we were right. Gut knowledge is powerful and usually authentic and we know instinctively that our intuition somehow resides in our intestines. A strange idea perhaps, though not so strange — as any scientific researcher in this field will tell us, the mind/gut connection is a very real thing and in a way the gut is our second brain; ‘gut feelings’ are not simply the preserve of Ancient Greek prophets. And so it perhaps makes sense that just as the ventriloquist’s dummy so often speaks the unpalatable truth, undercutting the ventriloquist’s social niceties, so the gut expresses the deeper, sometimes unconscious, truths and knowledge that we might struggle to access through our careful, conforming, conscious minds. The writer as the dummy; the gut as the dummy.

I have wayward guts. Inflamed, out of control and ridiculously over-sensitive. Since long before they made me think of ventriloquist’s dummies, my guts have reminded me of a very intelligent rescue-dog my mum used to have; a watchful, intuitive animal, quick to learn and with a highly developed sixth sense. But. He regularly refused to toe the line and if anyone knocked the front door or brought food into a room, or sometimes for no apparent reason at all, he would go into his nervous breakdown mode, spinning round and round very fast, screaming as he tried to bite his own tail. Usually he succeeded whereupon he would stop spinning and try to run away from himself, leaving a little trail of blood along the floor and up the skirting board. My guts are like that dog — highly strung and clever and crazy. I sometimes think they’ll be the death of me; I sometimes think they know me better than I know myself. If I’m the respectable ventriloquist, smiling at the crowd, my guts are definitely the dummy. And, as a writer, I have an unfortunate theory, that in order for anything I write to feel ‘true’ or ‘real’ or ‘honest’ it needs to come from my gut. Oh dear. Nobody in their right mind would want to write from my gut!

For me, writing from the gut is…well…partly about writing without the censorious editor, or ventriloquist, getting too much in the way. Not quite the same as stream of consciousness or automatic writing; I think it’s more to do with being unafraid to write what might at times feel transgressive, impolite, disorderly. Or using the process of writing to discover who we are — perhaps it’s what E. M. Forster meant when he said “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” And it has to do with freeing the voice or allowing the tongue to slip; as the psychoanalyst Lacan suggested, through slips of the tongue we discover our own voice. It’s something I find difficult to do; it’s my form of writers’ block, I guess, my inhibition. If I were a ventriloquist, my dummy would frequently stutter, or forget its lines, or ask me to speak on its behalf; then, at the show’s climax, it would spontaneously combust.

My friend Andrea is in therapy. She says she likes to have something to do on the train when she’s off to see Dr Cardiff (so-called as it’s where he lives). Andrea knows all about my wayward guts and now I’ve got her into ventriloquism. On recent journeys to and from Cardiff she’s watched YouTube for hours, and now she says she’s bought a book on how to do it yourself — how to speak without moving your lips. ‘Gokkle of Geer.’ For a minute, when she tells me this, I think she’s lost the plot — Andrea as a ventriloquist? But then I realise she’s kind of joking. And it’s a metaphor. ‘Therapy’s hard’, she says. ‘I wish I could do it without moving my lips. I wish a little puppet thing could sit on my knee and say all the probably awful things that I don’t even know are inside me waiting to come out.’ Her puppet would be a talking guinea pig, she says (don’t ask), and, because she would be so skilfully throwing her voice and not moving her lips at all, she wouldn’t feel responsible for a word it spoke. Apparently she blurted all this out to Dr Cardiff who pointed out that whilst it would be fine for her to, say, hide behind her hands a bit if she felt embarrassed or ashamed by some of the things she might say to him, he would hope that the process of therapy would not enable her to deny her feelings but rather to own them and thereby work them through with him. So far, Andrea says, they’ve reached a kind of compromise with a special code for when she might be trying to talk about something difficult: he’ll start by asking her if the guinea pig has anything to say, or she’ll say ‘The guinea pig asked me to tell you…’. I think Andrea and Dr Cardiff have quite possibly both lost the plot. But I’m going to try it myself. On my own. For writing. I’m going to imagine the ventriloquist’s dummy – not a guinea pig but possibly a very intelligent, crazy dog – is writing my next book of poems or a play. I’m going to let it take the pen from my hand, hear what it has to say.

It’s Andrea I have to thank for discovering the YouTube films of ventriloquist Nina Conti with her hand-puppet Monkey – especially the extraordinary series Nina Conti, in Therapy which kind of enacts all the things I’ve been thinking about ventriloquism, the gut and creativity — and therapy. I can’t bring myself to call Monkey a dummy — ‘puppet’ sounds nicer, but in my head, Monkey’s not that either. Monk, as Nina Conti affectionately calls him, is a foul-mouthed, morose, spectacularly rude, very cute, very funny, very complete creation and all the more extraordinary because pretty much all of Nina Conti’s routines are improvised. She speaks of Monk as the ‘proper pen in her hand’ and he is definitely, for my money, speaking from Nina Conti’s gut. He is the slip of her tongue, the freeing of her voice. She’s said herself: ‘I try not to get in the way of what I think Monkey would say’. ‘Monkey is the truer me.’ ‘I try to give Monkey free rein but it’s dangerous. It means that he’s entitled to the first thought that occurs, the one we’re conditioned not to say.’ In an interview in the Independent newspaper she remembers a recording she’d made of the late, great Ken Campbell, her mentor and one-time lover, telling Monkey about creativity: ‘Schiller said “there is a gatekeeper in the mind and it’s the gatekeeper that stops you being creative”. It’s your job, Monkey, to kill off the gatekeeper. She can’t do it — you can! Kill off the gatekeeper so that we can go raw into spontaneous imagination and creation’.

Yes, Ken! Yes, Monkey! Yes, Andrea and Dr Cardiff! Let’s do it!

You might also like: