Echo's Voice

The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude

Mary Noonan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351568920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachen

Helene Cixous (1937-), distinguished not least as a playwright herself, told Le Monde in 1977 that she no longer went to the theatre: it presented women only as reflections of men, used for their visual effect. The theatre she wanted would stress the auditory, giving voice to ways of being that had previously been silenced. She was by no means alone in this. Cixous's plays, along with those of Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), Marguerite Duras (1914-96), and Noelle Renaude (1949-), among others, have proved potent in drawing participants into a dynamic 'space of the voice'. If, as psychoanalysis suggests, voice represents a transitional condition between body and language, such plays may draw their audiences in to understandings previously never spoken. In this ground-breaking study, Noonan explores the rich possibilities of this new audio-vocal form of theatre, and what it can reveal of the auditory self.

CHAPTER 1
Voice and the Auditory: Connecting Theory and Theatre

According to psychoanalyst Denis Vasse, the voice is the crossing from self to other, the traversal of the divide or rupture that creates self and other: in transgressing these limits, the voice creates them, and voice can only be located in the crossing of the borders separating self from other, never in either one. What we are given, then, when we allow the voice of the other to sound in the resonance chamber of the body, is a momentary inhabiting of the space between place and knowledge, body and discourse, space and time, where the dialectic of self and other is played out. The sounded word originates in the silence of the self, in the silence of death that is synchronous with the spoken word of life within the self: the sounded word reverberates with the silence of death in which it originated: 'The silence of death is the place where the word of life meditates.'¹ The voice, therefore, also speaks of the perpetual crossing between life and death within the living subject.

For Vasse, voice is the in-between of body and discourse, of presence to self and representation. More than this, voice is the manifestation of presence in discourse: in serving as the dividing-line that demarcates the difference between the orders of presence and representation, voice in a sense makes both presence and representation available, accessible to the subject: 'Beyond the concept of which voice is the operator, there is neither presence nor knowledge. Voice is the in-between where both knowledge and place originate.' (p. 185) In this sense, voice is the original site of difference, the possibility of co-existence of two different orders of being: bodily presence and representation. For Vasse, this is an essential point: voice is not either physical presence beyond language or the body in discourse, it is the perpetual movement between matter and concept. Language both constitutes and regulates the subject, who is the subject of language in both senses of the term: created by it and subject to its laws. For language is the place of the other, and it is this place that the subject goes on to inhabit: 'Voice frees the subject from the corporeal image and makes him inhabit the dwelling place of his name. From this disencampment springs both the desire to live and the desire to die' (p. 213). Therefore, the voice is where the human reality of the subject can be located. Any discussion of the materiality of voice will need to pay some attention to the characterisation of 'presence' as a suspect notion in the postmodern context. Michelle Duncan, in an essay about the operatic voice, provides a careful reading of Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence, which leads her to conclude that although Derrida convincingly makes the case that the subject's experience of an absolute presence in speech is an illusion, he does not claim that that experience is a fallacy.² Voice's enigma has to do with its multiplicitous nature, according to Duncan, and beyond 'meaning' or 'logos', there is an effect that comes from the 'force of vocalisation [...] a "truth" revealed through the act of singing [...] This truth is revealed through the performance of the voice, a performative force beyond both music and libretto, beyond the hermeneutics of performance' (p. 297). For Duncan, voice is a resonant operation with physical effects. Voice 'emits a "knowledge" inaccessible or inadmissible to the kind of knowledge legitimised by meaning culture' (p. 299). In the context of operatic performance, an avowal of the material voice 'requires us to open both mind and body to the wonder of resonance and to postpone analysis: to postpone translating voice into the pre-determined cognitive categories the mind has at its disposal and to simply wait and listen' (p. 300). Voice has the agency to touch, to act on the body of the listener.

The relational nature of voice is a subject that has been of interest to philosophers. Alice Lagaay comments that voice is always, to some extent, an appeal to another: 'As soon as a sound is recognised as voice, I become aware that someone is (possibly) trying to say something, possibly to me and possibly requesting my response.³ Voice is therefore a reaching or stretching of self toward the other. Agent of the initial fissuring of the mesmeric specular image in which the subject was locked, the voice is also located at the point of emergence of the categories of space and time for the subject, separating here from there, before from after. Voice therefore carries and articulates incessantly the mark or scar of the birth of the subject into language and the place of the other, into time and space, into life and death.

For Guy Rosolato, the voice is the greatest force of emanation that the body possesses, and the infant begins to sense at a very early stage that there is an irradiation from her (relatively immobile) body toward a vaster space, a reaching in all directions, above and beyond the limits of the visible world. Rosolato insists on the corporeal nature of voice: the voice is a physical map or register of psychic and physiological traces of the individual past, bearing the marks of 'infraliminal sounds' (i.e. sounds below the threshold of consciousness), of an 'infrasonorousness', 'that infinitesimal cultural activity',⁴ a range of sounds that are repudiated by culture, repressed in the making of the speaking, signifying body. The speaking adult has reduced the large variety of sounds she once was capable of making — the minute muscular movements of larynx and breath, for example — to a narrow range of 'acceptable' sounds that enables effective linguistic communication. Examination of the liminal sounds of which the infant is capable reveals a 'turning-point', a time when the infant, while still controlled or 'spoken' by her own voice as the reflexive response to bodily stimuli, begins to sense that she may control her vocal production, thereby effecting changes on her environment.

In voice, therefore, are the germs of the nascent subject's sense of her own power, autonomy and agency — a fragile moment of turning that is perhaps revisited by the voice whenever the ego feels threatened in later life. The voice, therefore, tells of the speaker's subjective history. This fact is attested to by voice teachers in particular. According to Cicely Berry, for example,

[...] Our voice is our sound presence, and is the means by which we commit our private world to the world outside [...]. It is tied up with how we think of ourselves [...] and with the image of ourselves we wish to present. It is therefore bound absolutely to our own self confidence, and so is particularly sensitive to both criticism and to feelings of unease [...]. We find our voice changes according to how we feel our status to be at any given moment. [...] the voice is very sensitive to our own ego.⁵

Rosolato notes that the infant's experience of its voice provides it with its first sense of spatial relations, of the relationship between inside and out, of entry and exit, due to the fact that the voice is simultaneously spoken and heard by the speaker, as if a permanent 'acoustic mirror' were in operation. For Rosolato, the subject acquires a sense of corporeal space by virtue of a tension between the visual and auditory modes. He distinguishes between the two modes on the basis of the fact that the ear can determine sounds (circulatory, digestive, repiratory, muscular and osseous) coming from within the body. On this basis, he postulates that a correspondence is established in early lite between exterior, anterior and vision, on the one hand, and interior, posterior and hearing on the other. In other words, the voice can penetrate the barriers to vision, and the ears can on certain occasions hear what cannot be seen.

Therefore, for both Vasse and Rosolato, voice is the site of a simultaneous, contradictory co-inhabiting of both the originary passivity and beginnings of vocal control and the jubilatory surpassing of origins and accession to vocal control, language and intellectual prospection. Vasse expresses this in terms of a traversée or crossing, voice as the perpetual transit between two orders of being: in crossing the limits of body-presence and of discourse, in causing and perpetually inhabiting the rupture between body and language, voice makes both orders accessible to the subject.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud writes that 'the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface'.⁶ Throughout the 1970s, Anzieu developed his work on what he called the 'skin ego', finally publishing a book on the subject, Le Moi-Peau, referred to in the previous chapter, in 1985. In this work, he describes the formation of a primitive psyche or pre-ego, which originates in bodily sensation. Touch is the first sense to develop embryonically and thus, according to Anzieu, the skin is the basic reference point for all the various sense data:

The development of a Skin Ego is a response to the need tor a narcissistic envelope and guarantees the psychical apparatus a sure and continuous sense of basic well-being. [...] By Skin Ego, I mean a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body.⁷

For Anzieu, the skin ego is 'a containing, unifying envelope for the self; a protective barrier for the psyche, and a filter of exchanges and a surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible' (p. 98). The skin ego, then, consists of a number of protective 'psychic envelopes', psychic representations based primarily on tactile and auditory experience. The 'sonorous envelope' is chief among these psychic containers, according to Anzieu:

Parallel with the establishment of the boundaries and limits of the Self as a two-dimensional interface anaclitically dependent on tactile sensations, there forms, through the introjection of the universe of sound (and also of taste and smell), a Self as a pre-individual psychical cavity possessing a rudimentary unity and identity. The auditory sensations produced when sounds are made are associated with the respiratory sensations which give the Self a sense of being a volume which empties and re-fills itself, and prepare that Self for its structuring in relation to the third dimension of space [...] and to the temporal dimension.

(157)

Therefore, early experiences of sound provide a primitive sense of the self's location in space and time. This immersion in sounds provides the infant with a sense of unity from the outside; it precedes the Lacanian mirror-stage in the development of the subject. Echoing Rosolato's notion of the acoustic mirror, Anzieu refers to a 'sound mirror or audio-phonic skin', which plays a primary role, prior to the mirror stage per se, in the psyche's acquisition of the capacity to produce meaning, and later to symbolise. He asserts that early sound experience constitutes a primary factor in mental development: the mental faculties operate first on acoustic material (p. 158). The sound space, then, for Anzieu, is the first psychical space. Within this space, a range of worrying sounds are discerned by the infant: 'external noises, painful when they are sudden or loud; worrying internal gurglings which cannot be localized in any one part of the body, cries [...] in response to hunger, pain, anger and deprivation of the object' (p. 170). It is the mother's voice which provides the first experience of harmony, 'the human voice speaking or singing, with its inflexions and constants so quickly taken as characteristic of a particular individual' (p. 171). This first experience of harmony prefigures the sense of unity as a 'self'. Anzieu's image of neonatal life is one of the infant inhabiting a cavernous sound space, where there are 'rumblings, echoes and resonances', and in which the maternal voice, ideally, provides the first sense of ordering of chaos and protection from a disharmonious environment.

The sonorous envelope is directly responsible for the infant's ability to imagine fusion with the mother. Anzieu describes the neonate as immersed in a 'bath of sounds' composed of sounds coming from the baby and from his environment, primarily the sounds of the mother's voice. Because of the bilateral nature of this experience — sounds entering and leaving the body — the sound envelope produces 'a space-volume permitting bilateral exchange, a first (spatio-auditory) image of one's own body, and a bond of actual fused reality with the mother' (p. 167).

Discussions of the nature of voice often focus on the role of the maternal voice in the formation of the subject. Kaja Silverman, in her book The Acoustic Minor, provides a comprehensive overview of work theorising voice, and the maternal voice in particular. Her primary concern is the role of voice in cinema, but her argument is of relevance here, as it sets out to establish that the theoretical work which figures the maternal voice as a 'sonorous envelope' is based on a fantasy, an 'after-the-fact' construction or reading of a situation which is fundamentally irrecoverable. Most of the theorists whose work is discussed by Silverman are grouped together as those who characterise the maternal voice as a blanket of sound, extending on all sides of the new-born infant:

For Guy Rosolato and Mary Ann Doane, the maternal voice is a 'sonorous envelope' which 'surrounds, sustains and cherishes the child'. Julia Kristeva conceives of it as a 'mobile receptacle' which absorbs the infant's 'anaclitic facilitations'. Didier Anzieu refers to it as a 'bath of sounds', while for Claude Bailbe, it is, quite simply, 'music'. Michel Chion also subscribes to this general definition of the maternal voice, although he gives it a much more sinister inflection; within his account, that voice not only envelops but entraps the new-born infant.⁸

Part of Silverman's project in this book is to show how in classic Hollywood cinema, the female voice is virtually always confined within the diegesis, within the narrative framework, and is always synchronised with body, while male voices occupy the position of disembodied voice-off or voice-over, interiority thereby being identified with discursive impotence, and exteriority with discursive potency. She suggests that it is the maternal voice that is the original prototype for the disembodied voice-over in cinema, as, accordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Voice and the Auditory: Connecting Theory and Theatre
• 2 Desire in Language: Nathalie Sarraute's Theatre of Interpellation
• 3 'A Sound-Mirror or Audio-Phonic Skin': Voice and Listening in the Theatre of Marguerite Duras
• 4 Song of the Forbidden Body: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous
• 5 Un Corps vivant de symbôles: Noëlle Renaude's Staging of the Writing Self
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index