Just been listening to a very interesting Radiolab episode that featured the following story....
"In the mid 1950's, a blind seven-year-old boy named Joe Engressia Jr. made a discovery that changed his own life and many others. While idly dialling information on the family telephone, he heard a high-pitched tone in the background and started whistling along with it. Slowly, he learned to recognise all kinds of tones, pulses, clicks and beeps that the phone system used to talk to itself. And when he got good at decoding those sounds, he became the grandaddy of a whole movement of like-minded obsessives known as "Phone Phreaks".
Basically this guy learned to speak telephone!!!!How cool is that. Lends something interesting to musings from a few weeks ago on the telephonic voice / body / grain and the signification of the dial tone.
I thought I'd make a quick diagram of the voice and it's existences/ avenues of being. When I being to think about The Voice I always find myself straying away from strict voco-centric enquiry onto much larger themes in Language, Music or Oral. It's so easy to do this (well for me I feel) because the voice is so slippery, it can shift from the essence of presence to the horror of un-presence at the flick of a switch, and so when thinking around voice I feel I always need to squint at this spectral, ontologically autonomous entity(▲) rather than get my teeth into much more tangible ideas concerning the territories that Voice shifts through or effects.
(▲) That I suppose makes The Voice so fascinating to think about/around.
Ariel the Siren, Ariel the Mermaid trades her beautiful, beguiling voice for human legs...
From the H.C. Anderson tale:
"But if you take my voice,' said the little mermaid, 'what have I left?'
'Your beautiful form,' said the witch, 'your gliding gait, and your speaking eyes; with these you ought surely to be able to bewitch a human heart. Well! have you lost courage? Put out your little tongue, and I will cut it off in payment for the powerful draught.'
'Let it be done,' said the little mermaid, and the witch put on her caldron to brew the magic potion.
There is nothing like cleanli- ness,' said she, as she scoured the pot with a bundle of snakes; then she punctured her breast and let the black blood drop into the cal- dron, and the steam took the most weird shapes, enough to frighten any one. Every moment the witch threw new ingredients into the pot, and when it boiled the bubbling was like the sound of croco- diles weeping. At last the potion was ready and it looked like the clearest water.
'There it is,' said the witch, and thereupon she cut off the tongue of the little mermaid, who was dumb now and could neither sing nor speak."
cut to after she's drank the potion and has lost her voice and her tail (tale?!!?)
"When the sun rose on the sea she woke up and became conscious of a sharp pang, but just in front of her stood the handsome young prince, fixing his coal black eyes on her; she cast hers down and saw that her fish's tail was gone, and that she had the prettiest little white legs any maiden could desire; but she was quite naked, so she wrapped her long thick hair around her. The prince asked who she was and how she came there. She looked at him tenderly and with a sad expression in her dark blue eyes, but could not speak. Then he took her by the hand and led her into the palace. Every step she took was, as the witch had warned her beforehand, as if she were treading on sharp knives and spikes, but she bore it gladly; led by the prince, she moved as lightly as a bubble, and he and every one else mar- velled at her graceful gliding gait.
Clothed in the costliest silks and muslins she was the greatest beauty in the palace, but she was dumb, and could neither sing nor speak. Beautiful slaves clad in silks and gold came forward and sang to the prince and his royal parents; one of them sang better than all the others, and the prince clapped his hands and smiled at her; that made the little mermaid very sad, for she knew that she used to sing far better herself. She thought, 'Oh! if he only knew that for the sake of being with him I had given up my voice for ever!' Now the slaves began to dance, graceful undulating dances to enchanting music; thereupon the little mermaid, lifting her beautiful white arms and raising herself on tiptoe, glided on the floor with a grace which none of the other dancers had yet attained. With every motion her grace and beauty became more apparent, and her eyes appealed more deeply to the heart than the songs of the slaves. Every one was de- lighted with it, especially the prince, who called her his little found- ling; and she danced on and on, notwithstanding that every time her foot touched the ground it was like treading on sharp knives. The prince said that she should always be near him, and she was allowed to sleep outside his door on a velvet cushion."
Lots of parallels and opportunities can come out of Ariels rather myopic trading with the witch. However the situation is not quite a complete tracing of the Echo and Narcissus tale - in Echo and Narcissus (well according to the Ovid version I've been feinding over) the love is not mutual, Echo loves Narcissus and would like to tell him that she loves him but cannot, Narcissus, nymologically, only loves himself and has no time for Echo. In Hans Christian Andersens tale the love between the Prince and the Mermaid is painfully mutual. The tragedy of not being able to vocalise love is where a predicament that both The Mermaid and Echo share (or harbour - Bore!?!):
"Day by day she became dearer to the prince; he loved her as one loves a good sweet child, but it never entered his head to make her his queen; yet unless she became his wife she would never win an everlasting soul, but on his wedding morning would turn to sea- foam.
'Am I not dearer to you than any of them?' the little mermaid's eyes seemed to say when he took her in his arms and kissed her beautiful brow.
'Yes, you are the dearest one to me,' said the prince"
Whereas Echo could only echo, the last fragments of Narcissus' sentences and twist his words, twist his meaning, warp his logos through re-uttering his last breath (E.g. "are you here?" - "Here!" etc)... through the forest at a distance; The Mermaid has the exact inverse of this problem. She has her love in her arms (unlike Echo), she has the proximity that Echo yearned for, but, importantly,..... not the capability to communicate verbally.
The other mode of communication, a mode prior to linguistics is action, and both The Mermaid and Echo find themselves in positions to express their love through action at the end of their tragedies, they both resort to expressing their love through action after the verbal, vocalistic opportunity to do so is rendered impossible. Echo's ultimate act is to fling her arms around Narcissus:
"To throw her longing arms around his neck.
He bolted, shouting 'Keep your arms from me!
Be off, i'll die before I yield to you.'
And all she answered was 'I yield to you'"
The Mermaid also has an opportunity to express her love through her own actions, she has to kill her love to lift her curse (to die upon the prince's wedding night unless it is to her). The Prince is to be wed to someone else and she is given the opportunity to kill her love:
"The little mermaid drew aside the purple curtain from the tent and looked at the beautiful bride asleep with her head on the prince's breast. She bent over him and kissed his fair brow, looked at the sky where the dawn was spreading fast, looked at the sharp knife, and again fixed her eyes on the prince, who, in his dream called his bride by name. Yes! she alone was in his thoughts! For a moment the knife quivered in her grasp, then she threw it far out among the waves, now rosy in the morning light, and where it fell the water bubbled up like drops of blood.
Once more she looked at the prince, with her eyes already dimmed by death, then dashed overboard and fell, her body dissolving into foam."
Echo expresses her love overtly and is shunned, The Mermaid makes the ultimate expression of love covertly, she saves the princes life and sacrifices her own unbeknownst to the Prince. This shows action as of greater truth than love but there is a darker facet to these two tragedies - they both re-inforce the 15th century proverb: "A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd.". Let's examine Echo's fate after acting boldly:
The nymph, when nothing could Narcissus move,
Still dash'd with blushes for her slighted love,
Liv'd in the shady covert of the woods,
In solitary caves and dark abodes;
Where pining wander'd the rejected fair,
'Till harrass'd out, and worn away with care,
The sounding skeleton, of blood bereft,
Besides her bones and voice had nothing left.
Her bones are petrify'd, her voice is found
In vaults, where still it doubles ev'ry sound.
Whereas The Mermaid, who committed the ultimate act of love, who committed self sacrifice - but covertly, finds a silver lining in her tragedy:
"You have suffered and endured, raised yourself to the spirit-world of the air, and now, by your own good deeds you may, in the course of three hundred years, work out for yourself an undying soul.'
Then the little mermaid lifted her transparent arms towards God's sun, and for the first time shed tears.
On board ship all was again life and bustle. She saw the prince with his lovely bride searching for her; they looked sadly at the bub- bling foam, as if they knew that she had thrown herself into the waves. Unseen she kissed the bride on her brow, smiled at the prince, and rose aloft with the other spirits of the air to the rosy clouds which sailed above.
'In three hundred years we shall thus float into Paradise.'"
Check out this hilarious example. She's basically sat in a Weatherspoons with big Z, they jokingly argue over who gets more pleasure from sex, men or women. Zeus/Jove thinks women do, Hera/Juno thinks men do. So they ask Tiresias because he's transgender. Check out Hera's reaction:
While these events according to the laws of destiny occurred, and while the child, the twice-born Bacchus, in his cradle lay, 'Tis told that Jupiter, a careless hour, indulged too freely in the nectar cup; and having laid aside all weighty cares, jested with Juno as she idled by. Freely the god began; “Who doubts the truth? The female's pleasure is a great delight, much greater than the pleasure of a male.” Juno denied it; wherefore 'twas agreed to ask Tiresias to declare the truth, than whom none knew both male and female joys: for wandering in a green wood he had seen two serpents coupling; and he took his staff and sharply struck them, till they broke and fled. 'Tis marvelous, that instant he became a woman from a man, and so remained while seven autumns passed. When eight were told, again he saw them in their former plight, and thus he spoke; “Since such a power was wrought, by one stroke of a staff my sex was changed—again I strike!” And even as he struck the same two snakes, his former sex returned; his manhood was restored.—as both agreed to choose him umpire of the sportive strife, he gave decision in support of Jove; from this the disappointment Juno felt surpassed all reason, and enraged, decreed eternal night should seal Tiresias' eyes.—immortal Deities may never turn decrees and deeds of other Gods to naught, but Jove, to recompense his loss of sight, endowed him with the gift of prophecy.
Also - getting voco-centric again. Socrates didn't write, he only spoke, and he heard voices telling him, oddly, what not to say and do. Pythagoras would give his lectures from behind a curtain....we can add another ancient philosopher to the list of 'those who had issues with the voice': Cratylus! I found him mentioned on a podcast about Heraclitus. Basically Cratylus didn't like words, he took the Heraclitian notion of flow to the nth degree and felt that even words were transient, shifting and useless for communication (to put things crudely)....so he chose to be mute (Cratylism), and would hold up his finger instead of speaking up about matters, it's interesting that he felt so strongly about language, word, the voice and logos - but also a shame, otherwise he could've shouted after his mentor Heraclitus and told him not to run up into the hills and live off herbs (which probably lead to his demise).
1) Mladen Dolar, "The Metaphysics of the Voice" from A Voice and Nothing More
2) Lacan, "The resonances of the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique", Part III of "The Function and Field of Speech and Language" in Ecrits
3) Jacques Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing" from Of Grammatology
4) Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice"
5) Luce Irigaray, "The Dialogues" and "Plato's Hysteria" in Speculum: of the Other Woman
6) Kaja SIlverman, "Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity" from The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
7) Sherry Turkle, "The Flight From Conversation" (New York Times article) and Franco Berardi, "Info-Labor and 'Precarization" from Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation
8) Mikhail Yampolsky, "The Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing"
9) Professor Barker, "Barker Speaks" and William Burroughs, "Cross the Wounded Galaxies"
10) Avital Ronell, "The Deaf" in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia and Electric Speech
11) Michel Chion, "Raising the Voice" and "The Voice that Seeks a Body" from The Voice in Cinema
12) Freya Jarman-Ivens, "'I Feel A Song Coming On': Vocal Identification and Modern Subjectivity"
13) Susan McClary, "This is not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson"
14) Ian Penman, "The Shattered Glass: Notes on Bryan Ferry" from Angela McRobbie ed, Zoot Suits and Secondhand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music
15) Kodwo Eshun, "Inner Spatializing the Song" and "Programming Rhythmatic Frequencies" from More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
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