The Matter of Voice

Sensual Soundings

Karmen MacKendrick

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823270019
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Philosophers for millennia have tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. Nevertheless, voices resonate among bodies, among texts, and across denotation and sound; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. But voices are also meaningful—they give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstractions, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They can be neither reduced to neurology nor silenced in abstraction. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all words. Through explorations of theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and semiotics, all interwoven with song, The Matter of Voice works toward reintegrating our thinking about both speaking and authorial voice as fleshy combinings of meaning and music.

CHAPTER 1

The Matter of Voice

The prose itself is indestructible. It is all of a piece. It is a living person speaking. Mark Twain put his voice on paper with a fidelity and vitality that makes electronic recordings seem crude and quaint.

—URSULA LEGUIN, “Reading Young, Reading Old”

We’ve started to hear them already—dead authors can speak in surprisingly lively voices. I have mentioned the distinctiveness of the spoken voice. But what of the writing voice? “[I]n the language of literary criticism,” writes Cavarero, “voice is today a technical term that indicates the peculiarity of the style. . . . This use is interesting above all for the way in which it recalls a vocal uniqueness that is implicitly understood to be removed from the acoustic sphere.”¹ This implicit understanding creates its own difficulties, and I have already noted that others imagine writing voice a bit differently. Yet even those who speak well may find writing infuriatingly awkward, and written voices often end up flattened or stilted. What might it mean for one to find an authorial voice, a voice proper to one’s writing self? It is a question challenging enough to provoke encouraging advice columns in venues ranging from The Chronicle of Higher Education, to writers’ blogs, all the way to full books on the subject, and plenty of them.²

The stereotypical academic voice has not been an especially pleasing one. Perhaps the emphasis on meaning over sound, the desire to strip the sensuousness from sense, forces us into a torturous style. Maybe, more kindly, that style is just an effect of the desire to put into recalcitrant language the complex knots of our thinking—which may well come to us in words, but seldom in full or connected sentences.³ So how, then, does one develop an authorial voice, if it matters at all, whether by happenstance or by habit or by very deliberate effort? Where do those lively voices—and, for that matter, the pedestrian plodding—come from?

The most attractive authorial voices (those that are most intriguing, I mean, rather than pretty) have a persistent liveliness to them, a sense of life in the body. Work written with the intent of finding a personal voice often sounds stilted and artificial—precisely the opposite of the language in which one could feel at all like oneself. Of course, we are most often concerned with finding our voices when we are young and a little insufferable, so it may be no wonder that our voices would emerge so pompously—and that we then find ourselves stuck in them.

We often sound like those who speak around us, and so, too, we come to sound a little like those we read (for those of us who read a great deal, our speech may even begin to sound like what we’ve been reading). Let me dwell a bit on what it is to listen to text. It is true that we no longer move our lips when we read, and we can read much more this way, and in many more places—but we have to wonder, too, what we might have lost when we shifted our reading to silence.⁴ (Beyond aural questions, too, what do we lose as we cease to heft volumes, turn pages, smell paper?) This loss seems especially important if we try to hear voices that are a little different, that come in from the edges, that aren’t quite like the voices we have already heard. Can we do anything other than try to understand them—can we let them resonate in our chests and our throats and our ears? Would we gain anything, if we did? (It will be obvious that I suspect an answer.) Wayne Koestenbaum writes in The Queen’s Throat, “The throat, not the ears, receives the diva: the throat, organ from which ‘I’ speak.”⁵ He adds, “Listening, your heart is in your throat.”⁶ When we hear voices by listening as deeply, as physically as possible, we will also receive the voice in the throat, and will understand another part of the sense.

There are dangers in voicing another too nearly, of course. A department chair once asked me casually, “So, what do you tell students who want to write like you?” “Don’t!” I blurted, with an unintentional honesty that seemed to startle him a bit. But I do think that to write as if to set a model is probably a horrible idea. It is hard enough to attend to one’s own voice, without intending to make it the voice of a generation of others. Nor is it much better to try to sound specifically like someone else. We have all read, and many of us have committed, writing that is too directly imitative. Usually the effect is less like tribute and a little bit closer, uncomfortably close, to parody. I think I would be easy to parody, but the exercise doesn’t strike me as especially useful (which could be a defensive response).

Except, perhaps, as an exercise in listening: we mimic in order to hear. As Kramer writes of his own (rather good) imitation of Henry James, “This voice is something we perceive in the way that we ourselves voice, or intone, the Jamesian language in our mind’s ear. We have to imagine this voice, and to do that we have to imagine its tonality, its timbre, its pace, its flow, its quality.”⁷ Subvocalizing, we catch that image in our throats.

My dissertation advisor and I once mused on the strangeness of finding a voice, shortly before he had to deliver a lecture on the topic. All that I could add to his ideas was the suggestion that one must attend first to the subject matter, which has a way of telling one how it needs to be said (a slow, annoying, and roundabout way, to be sure). Or, as the poet Richard Wilbur puts it—more succinctly and more elegantly, as one would expect of a poet—“I have the feeling that the material chooses the form.”⁸

This doesn’t mean that one should write, for instance, frivolously of some matters, ungrammatically of others, or with as many semicolons as possible for others still. Instead, it means that one has to listen to the sort of thing one needs to say, to hear it before one writes it. This is a difficult concept to express; luckily, others have already done so, at least in the realm of fiction. Ursula LeGuin writes that she has a sense of inhabiting her characters bodily in order to tell their stories—or to let the characters tell them. Of the process, she says: “It is better to hold still and wait and listen to the silence. It’s better to do some kind of work that keeps the body following a rhythm but doesn’t fill up the mind with words. I have called this waiting ‘listening for a voice.’ It has been that, a voice. But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.”⁹ Voice tells body. There is, for LeGuin, no separate sense of “meaning,” but she does say that she finds stories far more satisfying than essays, which for her are more about concepts, and therefore harder to embody.

Virginia Woolf is only slightly more abstract, but helpfully so, in her description of style. She, too, begins with a very bodily sense—a sense of rhythm:

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.¹⁰

For LeGuin, the body makes a story that the (bodily) voice may tell; when we cannot find the (rhythm of) words, we should move rhythmically in the flesh and wait for the words to follow. For Woolf, the rhythm of the sight or emotion that wants to be described makes words to fit its waveform. Both writers are virtuosos with words, but for both, words follow not concepts, but something even more evidently physical than speaking. The classic philosophical idea that words outwardly express an inward meaning will not do.

My intent in fumbling toward the idea that one must listen to the subject matter is not altogether different from these formulations. One must listen in order to speak or to write. Jean-Luc Nancy gives us some hint as to the reasons that this might be particularly difficult in philosophy, in a way that might well extend to theorizing more broadly. In “Récit Recitation Recitative,” he writes,

In all the cases of philosophical and methodical path, the result is presupposed. This presupposition can remain relatively undetermined, like Cartesian intuition, Kantian freedom, or the Hegelian absolute; but it still remains a preliminary position, an already formed reservation and the provision for the journey. Despite the impressive travels philosophers can accomplish, despite the distances they cover, their paths harbor a secret immobility. This immobility stems from their gaze, fixed . . . on the idea of the result: of the fulfillment and the resorption of tension.¹¹

The gaze may fix on immobility, but an immobile voice is no voice at all. The very condition of sound is vibration. Voices move. They move in time, according to rhythm and tempo. They move, rhythmically and speedily, in the body. They shift pitch and volume and timbre, and there is a rhythm to these shifts as well. We in the academy have tended to write as if writing could be voiceless, given only to the eyes as the quickest route to the intellect.

The sheer difficulty of finding the writerly voice in the sense of style makes more sense if we consider writing as the physical act that it is, even if that is not all that it is. Whenever we attend closely and consciously to complex physical activity, we tend to get in our own way—the same happens if we pay much attention to the act of speaking, in fact. “Get yourself out of the way” is often sensible advice, however difficult to follow, and we can get in our own way bodily as well as in our psyches. But there is a possibility that one could be in the way very differently. Perhaps, rather than putting oneself as a barrier between the sense and the sound, one could be that through which the voice resounds, as Nancy suggests:

The word person might be considered as derived from personare, “to resound through,” just as the voice of ancient actors reciting the drama had to speak through a mask. Not a person as interiority—unless we understand interiority as nothing but an infinite antecedence always more withdrawn into the very utterance of exteriority: the unsupposable, impossible to submit supposition of a subject of speech.

The narrator is the necessary, improbable supposition of the narrative. He is the anteriority of the narrative to itself. The anteriority of the voice in itself.¹²

The voice is in the words, yet before them; its rhythms await the concepts as much as the converse. We become not in the words we generate as expressions or externalizations of our interior concepts, but in our emergence into an existing discourse (Foucault would be delighted). Thus, some writers find that they can best work using different personae for different voices—for the different manner of things that there are to be said. (The pleasure of the stage name is not dissimilar: “It was with names,” says Cavell, “as I will find Rilke to say about the liberation of masks.”¹³) The only way to think this matter well is to avoid reduction or a simplistic sense of primacy. We risk reduction in several ways.

Not So Simply

I should be proud if I could convince a single teacher that the isolation of any mode of thought is misleading.

MARY EVEREST BOOLE, Logic taught by love: rhythm in nature and in education

The first is to focus too narrowly on language as if it were somehow incorporeal. Many theorists have become skeptical about theory’s focus on language; skeptical, that is, of the effects of the deeply influential and by now infamous “linguistic turn” across the humanities and social sciences. This skepticism arises particularly out of the concern that language became the focus of theorizing to the exclusion of all else, as the notion that “everything is a text” truly took hold of the intellectual imagination—in ways that thinkers like Derrida, who spoke that (in)famous line, are unlikely to have intended.¹⁴

The claim that all is text, which was meant to insist upon the central role of interpretation in knowledge, irritates philosophical realists, who want to argue for the more commonsensical notion that there is an extralinguistic reality not especially dependent on interpretation. It annoys historians, who like their texts to have context. It aggravates those whose influence by Marx disposes them toward history’s material conditions. More recently, it has grated upon those who want to focus on body, particularly those interested in complicating old images of bodies as whole, self-contained, and singular material mechanisms—though it has irritated them, too, with its refusal to be An Object.

To be sure, voice in theorizing can take on a particular position not identical with language. Derrida, as Kramer notes, “takes voice as the privileged medium of a presence (of self, consciousness, truth, authority, divinity) that continually slips away from its invocation.”¹⁵ Pedersen points out the link to authorial demise: “The concept of literary voice is often linked to certain post-structuralist thinkers who position their work in opposition to the authenticity discourse of the physical voice which has been termed phonocentrism by Jacques Derrida. The critique of the phonocentric reading dominated the debate on voice in the literary criticism of the late 20th century, which was led by Derrida and continued in the post-structuralist tradition, for instance in the writings of Roland Barthes.” Emphasizing bodily process, she continues, “The fantasy that the author is breathing behind his text is challenged in Derrida’s and Barthes’ theorization of the literary voice as something fundamentally different from the audible and speaking voice.”¹⁶ Pedersen and Kramer both note that the perception of voice is complicated further in the Lacanian work of Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, who do not find full presence in voice, but something more elusive, possibly dangerous, “felt most often as the punitive, unloving, and in a sense nonliving voice of law,”¹⁷ as Kramer writes.

Against these deliberately discorporate abstractions, theory takes a turn to the somatic—and not to the phonetic. Language might not be entirely ignored in this turn to bodies, but it is subordinated to corporeality, and especially to neuroscience, instead of vice versa. In a sharply observed essay on “The Affective Turn,” for instance, Patricia Clough notes,

Affect and emotion . . . point just as well as poststructuralism and deconstruction do to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Hearing Voices
• 1. The Matter of Voice
• 2. Speaking to Learn to Listen
• 3. Thou Art Translated!
• 4. The Voice in the Mirror
• 5. Original Breath
• 6. The Meaning in the Music
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index