Dysfluent Messengers

The article argues that the treatment of angelic speech in B. Catling’s fantasy novel The Vorrh and its two sequels The Erstwhile and The Cloven (2012–2018) lays the groundwork for a conception of dysfluency that counters a trend of literary theory which exploits verbal disability as a metaphor for a defamiliarized and idealized state of language. Catling’s desire to explore an “alternative” view of dysfluency, influenced by his lived experience of a stutter, manifests through a multifarious depiction of verbal disability as both creator and destroyer of meaning. The dual role of dysfluency across the Vorrh trilogy permits Catling to explore gnostic tensions between the disclosure of knowledge and its obfuscation, epitomised by his choice to place the words of divine revelation in the mouths of aphasic messenger angels. The article positions the “alternative” as a different kind of theoretical framing, one which is not overloaded with qualitative terminology and does not treat topics such as disability as monolithic, but which focuses instead on the opportunities afforded by diverse experimentation.