Carwin the Biloquist

Carwin #0.5

by Charles Brockden Brown

Carwin the Biloquist (1798, 1805) is a story fragment by American author Charles Brockden Brown. A prequel of sorts to the novel, Wieland, Carwin the Biloquist provides backstory for the character of Carwin, a man with the uncanny ability to perfectly mimic any voice.

Carwin the Biloquist is an unfinished story that traces the life of Carwin before meeting the Wieland family. Having discovered his power at a young age, Carwin first manipulates his family before striking out on his own, eventually meeting a wealthy man named Ludloe who encourages his intelligence and curiosity, but remains unaware of his biloquism. The two travel to Europe, where Carwin learns of Ludloe's membership in an occult society before setting out to discover its secrets. Carwin the Biloquist by Charles Brockden Brown is a masterpiece of horror and Gothic fiction with emotional depth and psychological intensity.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Charles Brockden Brown's Carwin the Biloquist is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Genres: Gothic, Horror

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1805

About the author

Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.

Reviews

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska]

I gave it three stars in an initial rush of disappointment, when I realized it stopped halfway through, but it's probably more like 3.5, just because of the many bizarre and fascinating subthemes in it. Secret societies, utopian colonialism, love as delusion, and of course - biblioquism!
Alas, none of the themes are all that well developed, and the text could definitely use some editing. Ultimately, while I absolutely do not regret reading it, I'm mostly left wishing that the author hadn't abandoned the project!

[Ash]

*Read as part of the Penguin Classics edition (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...)*


Reading Memoirs immediately after Wieland proved to be a shocking experience. As my review of the latter more than indicated, the biggest problem I’d had with it was its deliberately-obtuse syntax -- like the worst anime filler, it was thick, drawn-out, and served no other purpose than to artificially-inflate the product beyond an acceptable length.

Well, in the months between publishing Wieland and starting Memoirs, something must’ve happened to Brown as he has almost-completely abandoned that style in favor of a stream of consciousness far more akin to your standard English template: legible sentences and commonplace grammar dominating the work page-after-page-after-page.

Unfortunately, it’s still not without its flaws, the largest being that it’s incomplete. Now Brown lived a good five years following his absconding of the product, making his reasons for the abandonment a mystery, though ultimately the truth matters little as the fundamental question is whether or not the book is worth finishing: an inquiry I heartily say no to. Brown, in my opinion, had no substantial influence on the development of American prose, and even if historians argue otherwise, any impact of his has been washed away in favor of infinitely-better alternatives.

There’s also the blatant truth that Memoirs fails at its very purpose of enlightening us about the titular character. Now, I did cite Carwin’s backstory as a plothole in Wieland, and it remains one regardless of the existence of Memoirs (if you need to read supplementary material to understand a work, then said work has failed at its job); however, I was still willing to give Memoirs a chance in light of the intriguing details Wieland had hinted at regarding a murder accusation against Carwin, as well his host of enemies.

Alas, you don’t get answers to any of that either, with Memoirs ironically succumbing to the same problems its predecessor did: introspection for introspection’s sake. Of course, being a self-professed “memoir,” this was to be expected in some capacity, but just like with Wieland, there’s simply too much. Carwin weaves endless sentence after endless sentence about his thought processes regarding some facet of life, whether it’s his relationship with his father or friendship with a rich pr!ck named Ludloe, and while interesting at first, it quickly loses its luster the second you realize Brown is going to repeat the same points for paragraphs on end. And yes, I say paragraphs instead of chapters because there are none: in fact, Brown has completely done away with punctuation Cormac McCarthy-style (Rest in Peace sir), and when you combine this tactic with the aforementioned dronery, you get POV confusion during conversations.

I wish I could say something positive, but I honestly don’t want to in view of the book being deserted - if Brown himself saw it unfit for publication, why should I pick up the slack? It’s slightly better written insofar as you can actually parse the wordage without needing an English Degree (like moi), yet falls prey to other pitfalls like pointlessly-extended clauses in service of forced contemplation. Carwin does admittedly have an interesting background involving his abusive upbringing and the contemporary machinations of Ludloe, but it’s not enough to warrant parsing through endless text, and just when things are starting to get interesting (the infamous murder and some revelations regarding Ludloe), we get an abrupt “to be continued.”

So yes, spend your time elsewhere and leave Memoirs at the library: it’s best left forgotten.


NOTES
-The development of the biloquist talent is just as laughably magical as its existence.

-A lot of philosophical discourses shape the backbone of Ludloe and Carwin’s interactions, but as they were (predictably) drowned under the sludge of their other statements, I can’t affirm whether anything revolutionary was coined by Brown here.

[David C Ward]

A somewhat disjointed fragment of a gothic novel whose narrator is a “biloquist”, or in modern terms, a ventriloquist. Amoral and unfocused, he uses his talent for deception (eg convincing a priest a saint is speaking to him) before being taken under the wing of a mysterious, indeed devilish, patron. Interesting not least because of how it counters early American Enlightenment ideology that truth was self evident and sense was common; ironically, the narrator’s name is Frank which he is anything but. .

[Emma Stark]

I loved reading about Carwin's search for knowledge over the course of his life. The ending was a bit abrupt and strange, leaving more questions than answers about what Carwin does before the events of Wieland. It shows the both the value and the frightening attributes of truth and also explores how Carwin's gift of ventriloquism can delude and mislead people, causing pain even when he uses it with the best intentions.

[Anna Kwan]

This book is a good (if incomplete) companion story to Wieland by Brown. Otherwise, it's kind of hard to judge on its own.

[Catherine]

Reading this weirdly made me appreciate Wieland more––likely due to Wieland 's ability to actually expand on the themes set forward. Brockden Brown attempts to stoke interest in the tensions between supernaturalism and rationality, as well as utopianism and self-reliance, but it falls flat.

[Michelle Chien]

The father of American Gothic, but ventriloquism scares me so... :(