blah-feme

the vocal fetish (i)

Here we have it laid out in all its giddying and disorientating grandeur, that passage from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):

Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohelloamarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after fifteen years, say.[i]

In this much quoted and analysed passage, Leopold Bloom, articulating what Richard Terdiman has referred to as modernity’s ‘crisis of memory’, imagines how it might be possible to remember the lost.[ii] Should we reduce them, he asks, to snapshots, to fragments, metonyms, synechdoches, leftover objects that operate in the manner of a kind of make-shift memento mori, a ‘gramophone on every grave?’ It is interetsing that, for Leopold, the voice, that texture, that sonic mark, like a characteristic walk that marks a person out as ‘what they are’, is precisely that which is leftover when the lost are gone, as if voice could only become audible as it leaves the body. Terdiman connects the ‘crisis of memory’ to a specific phase of modernity or, rather, a specific articulation of it, the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.[iii] How, then are we to understand this notion of voice as leftover, as remnant? What are the cultural-historical processes that incubate this notion and, what, precisely does this allow us to think about constructions of gender during this very long fin de siècle?

Let’s begin with this relation of voices and memories. One way to understand Leopold Bloom’s makeshift economy of fragmentary memories is as a negotiation of a very particular kind of loss characteristic of modernity, a loss that projects itself backwards in a fetishized investment in objects, details, metonyms.[iv] Bloom’s investment is not nostalgic, but is precisely about side-stepping that nostalgia: real things can stand for someone close, for a touch long since gone, and for an imagined organic connection with the other that never was; and those real things can be collected, ordered, catalogued, stored. In Virginia Woolf’s fiction as well, investments of this kind are made by her characters in order to close the circle of memory, to smooth over the fractious and debilitating discontinuities of modernity.[v] Clarissa Dalloway is given voice at the opening of Mrs Dalloway (1925) as someone fixated on details, the fetishes of modernity, in the now famous stream-of-consciousness narrative that intertwines her ruminations with those of Peter Walsh and the fate of the young shell-shocked soldier Septimus Warren Smith, who kills himself during the day on which the novel is set. Clarissa loves London, immerses herself in every extraordinary detail of its soundscape, gives herself to it fully:

... in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages; motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she love; life; London; this moment of June.[vi]

It is as if a voice were in all this for Clarissa, in the ‘high singing’ of the aeroplane and in the ‘leaden circles’ of Big Ben. She is immersed in thought as in the city itself, they flow one into the other: thoughts of her life, of loving life and the sound of Big Ben striking the hour:

The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.[vii]

The soundscape of London is what holds Clarissa together, what keeps her safe. The sonic envelope of the city is something in which she takes great pleasure and which she feeds on. And Peter too is fixated, distracted by the great city that booms around him, but for him it is a more visual fixation, an investment in reflections, surfaces, figures:

Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.) Oh these parties, he thought; Clarissa’s parties. Why does she give these parties, he thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of a man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his buttonhole coming towards him. Only one person in the world could be as he was, in love. And there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street. All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone—he, Peter Walsh; who was now really for the first time in his life, in love.[viii]

But it is Septimus, more most of all, who is invested in what Freud (and Marx before him) had termed the fetish; and Septimus is specifically invested in the fetish of the voice. This is an attachment to the sound that speaking makes, and to every sonic detail that his fragmented memory allows him to conjure up; he gives these fragments magical, mystical meaning, in line with Marx’s definition, in Kapital of fetishism:

... the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.[ix]

And for Freud too, the fetish is to be linked to a certain religiosity:

What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen). Such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied.[x]

So, for both Marx and Freud, the fetish (and fetishism) are to be connected to a religious investment in the ordinary life of things. Septimus’s investment in the vocal fetish is linked explicitly by Woolf to a religiosity at the heart of his psychosis:

“K . . . R . . .” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! ... But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion.[xi]

This voice, transformed into a life force that connects everything, as a network of filaments, ‘fibres’, is a voice at the heart of a machine, a networked machine that encompasses the world: in this manic moment, Septimus imagines a voice beyond the fetish, as in all things, as distributed. And it is precisely this deterritorialisation of the object that constitutes the action of fetishism here. The psychosis that dis-associates and re-associates the world for Septimus, that deterritorialises the object of desire, is messianic: ‘All taken together meant the birth of a new religion.’[xii]

In Mrs Dalloway, these three kinds of investment in the world of objects, the sonic-metonymic, the visual-metonymic and the messianic, jostle for attention in the narrative, each fracturing the stylistic cohesion of the text, each threatening to foreclose the teleology of that narrative and dominate it to the detriment of the others. What is particularly telling here is the extent to which Septimus in particular disturbs the subtle gendering of the fetish-investments of Clarissa and Peter: Sepitmus’s visions are precisely about refusing the duality of a Clarissa versus a Peter. His is an investment, we might say, in androgyny. The vocal fetish expands to fill every gap, smooths over all discontinuities, swells to infinite plentitude – the fetish of all fetishes, the compensator for all losses, an object saviour, a space between men and women.

[continued in next post]

---

[i] James Joyce, Ulysses. (New York: Vintage, [1922] 1961), 114.

[ii] Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

[iii] Terdiman concentrates his analysis specifically on Alfred de Musset, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud, and thus on what we might term the long fin de siècle. Ibid., vii-ix.

[iv] See David Lodge’s analysis of Leopold Bloom in ‘Metaphor and Metonymy in Modern Fiction’, Critical Quartlerly, Vol. 17 No. 1 (1974), 75-93. For a fascinating account of the fetish in early modern England, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Fetishisms and Renaissances’, in Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (eds.), Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 2-35.

[v] In her introduction to the annotated Penguin edition of Mrs Dalloway, Elaine Showalter suggests that the novel might also be read as in some sense a product of the First World War. Indeed, Woolf herself had suffered from bouts of psychosis during the Great War and Septimus could be said to constitute an attempt to exorcise her own illness. Elaine Showalter, ‘Introduction’ to Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin [1925] 1992), xxii.

[vi] Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin [1925] 1992), 4.

[vii] Ibid., 4.

[viii] Ibid., 52-3.

[ix] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990),165

[x] Sigmund Freud,

[xi] Woolf, Dalloway, 23-4.

[xii] Ibid., 24.

the vocal fetish (ii)

Woolf herself makes such a messianic investment in the voice in ‘Anon’, a late essay (1941), in which she evokes an archaic voice not unlike that which excites Septimus; she mythologizes the origins of literature, that enemy of orality (as romantic anthropology would have it), as cracked open in song, in the first orality of oralities:

The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon. Some one heard the song and remembered it for it was later written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it.[i]

And so the story of literature begins: the male voice in song breaks the ‘silence’ of the primordial forest, emerges, as it were, from the swamp and grounds literacy (and, so it would seem, modernity itself); song is both modernity’s beginning and its Other, its ground and its swamp; it is thus always already split. This masculine ground, this beginning, this split sung origin, is an inversion of the norm: in that other (patriarchal) paradigm, the one which Woolf seeks to disavow, modernity always begins not with the male cry, but with the cry of the siren, with the scream of the feminine at her abandonment by the male: European musics and literatures from the long turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century abound with images of these seductive sirens, deadly matriarchs, vicious seductresses and dominatrices, none of which is ever satiated by men’s return;[ii] these voices, the ones that stalk the fin-de-siècle misogynist imagination, are voices that are hungry, they must be constantly fed – they are hysterical, wanton, monstrous.

Woolf’s pointed inversion of this misogynist vision, then, is motivated by a specific and pressing need in her work to question, certainly by the time of ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), the gendering of origins and the gendering, more specifically, of writing – it is an inversion that sets out to bring into consciousness the gendered structure of the division of song from speech (and speech from script) in the hegemonic male imaginary; it also addresses the fundamental and devastating impossibility of that inversion; this is an inversion beholden always to that very same cultural logic it is seeking to undermine. Indeed, ‘Anon’, as Woolf points out in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ was often a woman:

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk–songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.[iii] 

Hence we are stuck with a dilemma here: how can it be that the originary cry that breaks the silence of the forest be both male and female (sometimes one, sometimes the other)? What was it about the specifics of the turn of the century moment that led to this disturbing androgyny of origins?

For Woolf, the voice in song works to both found and ground writing (notation), to set it in motion, as it were. At the very moment when the voice breaks the ‘silence’ of prehistory, it has already fallen under the disciplinary sway of scripture and it is here that it is detached from the body of Anon and made fetish. What is striking in Woolf’s modernist myth of vocality is its appeal to the voice in ‘song’ (a voice, that is, pointedly other than the everyday voices of Leopold Bloom’s imagination)  as in some sense primordial or pre-linguistic and yet only audible prescisely as it is de-oralised: the discipline of scribing, of making marks to record the apocryphal moment of modernity’s birth, is thus beholden to the moment of spontaneous oral abandon that precedes it and which works as its violent and disturbing Other – the violence of disciplining that singing voice is what battens down the spontaneity of that first violent abandon. And it is not that the scriptural disciplining must attempt simply to overcome or overturn this Other (although it surely attempts to do this): this pre-historical Other, the primordial birth pain of modernity, persists at the core of the Law of literacy, a persistence that Slavoj Žižek would no doubt term, drawing on late Lacan, a “nugget of enjoyment”[iv] and which, far from constituting an undoing of modernity, is absolutely key to its continued operation, as something to which real feeling subjects can attach themselves.

When evocations of that mythic voice are let loose into the urban cityscape of, for example, Mrs Dalloway, ‘thousands of years’ after the apocryphal moment of its emergence from the forest, it is all the more intense, all the more debilitating for its acute incommensurateness with the modernity into to which it is poured, and which it paradoxically grounds:

A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.

Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman—for she wore a skirt—with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.[v]

The sexless, ageless voice (note again the gender disruption here) interrupts Peter Walsh’s ruminations on the ‘icy’ Clarissa.[vi] The Woolfian articulation of the voice in song is as a kind of trace, a remainder out of place, as a staging of the jouissance that the woman felt during that enchanted moment, so many years ago, when she walked, in May, with her lover: her voice stages her expulsion from Eden, that moment when Law intervened in enjoyment and left only the fetish of the voice behind, an expulsion and an investment that Peter knows only too well and shares with Clarissa. Woolf imagines Peter as someone caught up, ensnared in this nugget of enjoyment, this material that persists and persists. He imagines it as permanent, as formidably material, beyond the reach of history (symbolisation):

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter…[vii]

The persistence of this material, then (this ancient voice before speech, before writing) is the key to its cultural work: it sticks in Peter’s throat and represents itself precisely as a blockage, a refusal, a nugget.

[continued in next post]

---

[i] Virginia Woolf, ‘Anon’, available in Brenda R. Silver (Ed.) ‘‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s last essays’, Twentieth Century Literature, 25 (1979), 356-441.

[ii] Julia Kristeva sees them all over in male literatures from this period. See Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 20.

[iii] Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, available in Suman Gupta and David Johnson (eds.), A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader: Texts And Debates (Routledge: London and New York, 2005), 118-127: 121.

[iv] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 93.

[v] Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London and New York: Penguin, [1925] 1992), 88-9.

[vi] ‘But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss on the cheek…’ Ibid., 88.

[vii] Ibid., 89-90.

the vocal fetish (iii)

These formidable specifics of song, of singing or, even, of songing, haunt late nineteenth-century and early modernist European literatures and musics. The terms by which song has consistently been bracketed off from speech are complex and constitute a fundamental problem for the cultural historian of the voice. For many at the long fin de siècle, the voice in song constitutes both an exception and a generality and these two structures cannot be held together. It is this incommensurateness of voice in song, I want to suggest in this series of posts, that occasions its fetishization. And that fetishization, rather than focussing just on an erotics of voice (on voice as object cause of desire) focuses on the redistribution of voice, on its disavowal, its cultural silencing, on its deterritorialisation, as we have seen in Septimus’s messianic visions. What song brings in this symbolic economy of the voice is the promise of enchantment, of an object that dissolves as it constitutes itself, a shortcircuit, a suture.

As has been well documented, the voice in song in the modern European imagination is of a different order from the voice in speech: numerous literary representations of the voice in song between 1878 and 1945 (for example, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future (1886), Maurice Renard’s ‘La Machine à parler’ (1892), Proust’s Memory of Things Past (1909-1922), Kafka’s ‘Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk’ (1924), Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924),  Musil’s ‘The Blackbird’ (1928) and so on) situate it squarely outside the realm of history, of speech, of writing, as somehow always already sticking out of the flow of discourse, an excess, but also a remainder, a stubborn stain, a mark, something that persists and yet, paradoxically, as something that has been and could again, any minute, be lost. It is that transience of the voice that marks modernist discourses on the voice in song even more intensely than they do imaginations of voices in speech: indeed, the difference between the two is one of the key problems that occupies the scant writings on the voice at this time.

The notion of a voice in song as, on the one hand, persistent and yet, on the other, as transient or ephemeral, can be usefully rethought around that other originary moment, oft told in hushed messianic tones in recent scholarships, when the voice of Edison speaks back to him, intoning, almost singing, incanting: ‘Mary had a little lamb’.[i] I do not want to suggest, in crude ‘determinist’ terms, that this moment transformed or amended the epistemological landscape after 1878 but, rather, that it contributed, among other things, to a thickening of the imagined worlds that attend death, memory and song: as Richard Middleton recently put it, ‘technologies reveal something that was already there’,[ii] they change things for us only in so far as we take up new relations with those things. We might say, for example, that recording technologies contribute to a specific kind of investment in the voice fetish in which memory and vocal production change their relation to one another very slightly, but also quite profoundly.[iii] As that relation changes, the imagination of the voice also takes on new forms. It is possible to understand these changes as stitched in to a procession of changes subsumed under the action of disenchantment, as part of what Jonathan Sterne calls the ‘Ensoniment’, the oral and aural counterpart to the Enlightenment.[iv] Hearing, listening and even sound itself become objects of scientific investigation such that voices fall under the sway of rational research, and with that rationalising impulse comes, inevitably, its dialectical opposite, a stubborn recuperative re-enchantment of voice.

This re-enchantment, linked, as we have seen, to a messianic fetishization of the voice, gets underway in the nineteenth century relatively quickly after Edison’s invention makes the news in 1878. The voices of the late Victorian imagination, newly spiritualised, are ever more ghostly and, simultaneously, ever more objectified; in fiction, those voices are captured in boxes, held in bottles, little clockwork fragments, tiny tins of vocal material, exchanged, in malevolent disregard for the silenced victims. There is one famous scene in Jules Verne’s 1892 novel Le Château des Carpathes in which the hero, Franz de Telek, storms the castle of the wicked Baron de Gortz to find him listening over and over to a recording of the last performance of the famous opera singer ‘La Stilla’ whilst gazing at her statue; we learn she had died of a heart attack on seeing the wicked baron in the audience and the Baron had, that night, secretly recorded that last performance. The implication here is clear: the female voice is ‘stolen’ and with it the lifeblood of the diva. The Baron both causes and in some sense (although monstrously) intervenes in death by means of the voice. When Franz accidentally shoots the box, the Baron screams “Her voice, her voice”.[v] Similarly, spiritualised re-imaginations of radio, the telegraph and the phonograph also abound in boulevard literary sources, on the popular stage and in the equally popular serialised narratives in subscription periodicals and Victorian and Edwardian spiritual evidence societies draw explicitly on new technological tropes to imagine connections with the dead. What is interesting, though, is the extent to which the ground for this technological troping had already been laid before Edison’s ‘box of tricks’ was even a twinkle in the eye of the inventor.[vi]

The phonograph, of course, is not alone in its entroping into literature and public discourse, but it has a particular kind of history in that its uses were imagined well before its invention. As early as 1589, Giovanni Battista Porta claimed he had ‘devised a way to preserve words, that have been pronounced, inside lead pipes, in such a manner that they burst forth from them when one removed the cover’.[vii] Porta’s claims are connected, of course, as much to an elaboration of the principles of the magic as to the principles of sound-reproduction per se, but that connection, that intimate stitching together of magic and the reproduction of sound, was far from excised by the modernists: the figure of he recorded voice as seducer, as enchanter, remains well into the late twentieth century.

Of course, other technologies also impacted on the imagination of sound and its distribution and contributed to an enrichment and intensification of technologically-informed imagery in public discourse. Indeed, in 1859, in his version of the Divine Comedy, author and mystic Josiah Bingham imagines a vision of Benjamin Franklyn, flanked by angels and an ‘Indian’, a vision aided with no less than a ‘galvanic battery’:

Above the head of the Indian floated another company of celestials encircling one spirit of expanding intelligence and wisdom, and who is well known to the political as to the philosophical world, By his side was a machine of which he designed to perform a most interesting and instructive experiment, and thereby enfold to me one method which angels employ to impart their tide of inspiring intelligence to the less unfolded and intelligent. On a more rigid examination of that curiously constructed machine, I found it resembled a modern galvanic battery, with a large wheel at the centre, which revolved at will.[viii]

The technological colouring of this vision is clear, the imagery intensely indebted to an imagination of telegraphy and all the stranger to us now for its juxtaposition with spiritualist imagery. This technologization of literary images was already part of the mainstream gothic imagination[ix] and takes hold substantially in nineteenth-century spiritualism in the latter half of that century with numerous references to ‘celestial telegraphs’, ‘divine radios’ and the ever-present haunted phonograph. Anxious imaginings of ghostly voices run through the later gothic imagination as voices that persist, stalk, haunt, seduce and overwhelm.

The phonographic structure of the short story ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890) by Lee Vernon (a pseudonym for Violet Paget), for example, is clear in its investment in the voice as an object or, rather, in a projected vocal aura attached to an object fetish; in this case, the narrative fixates on a portrait of the eighteenth-century male singer, Balthasar Cesare (nicknamed Zaffirino [sapphire]). The Norwegian composer ‘hero’ of the story is nauseated by the picture:

Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that instrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begotten of the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast calling, awakening that other Beast sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beast which all great art has ever sought to chain up, as the archangel chains up, in old pictures, the demon with his woman's face? How could the creature attached to this voice, its owner and its victim, the singer, the great, the real singer who once ruled over every heart, be otherwise than wicked and contemptible?[x]

This is not merely an investment in the object, although this is where the narrative resurrection of the voice of Zaffirino begins: throughout the story, the composer is haunted by the voice of the singer in the portrait (although he does not know that is what it is until some way through the narrative) and it follows him, cut loose from the painting:

I was leaning against a pillar, looking into the greyness of the great arches, when the organ suddenly burst out into a series of chords, rolling through the echoes of the church: it seemed to be the conclusion of some service. And above the organ rose the notes of a voice; high, soft, enveloped in a kind of downiness, like a cloud of incense, and which ran through the mazes of a long cadence. The voice dropped into silence; with two thundering chords the organ closed in. All was silent. For a moment I stood leaning against one of the pillars of the nave: my hair was clammy, my knees sank beneath me, an enervating heat spread through my body; I tried to breathe more largely, to suck in the sounds with the incense-laden air. I was supremely happy, and yet as if I were dying; then suddenly a chill ran through me, and with it a vague panic. I turned away and hurried out into the open.[xi]

What marks this out from the more commonplace gothic fetishes is its gender: it is precisely the malevolent male voice at work in this sexualised fantasy, and the composer wants to give himself to it completely. When, one night, unable to sleep (‘The night seemed perfectly stifling’), the composer wakes and follows the sound of that ‘wicked voice’ again. Eventually he stumbles on a sado-masochistic scene in which the ghostly voice of Zaffirino is sucking the lifeblood from a young woman:

On the sofa, half-screened from me by the surrounding persons, a woman was stretched out: the silver of her embroidered dress and the rays of her diamonds gleamed and shot forth as she moved uneasily. And immediately under the chandelier, in the full light, a man stooped over a harpsichord, his head bent slightly, as if collecting his thoughts before singing.

He struck a few chords and sang. Yes, sure enough, it was the voice, the voice that had so long been persecuting me! I recognised at once that delicate, voluptuous quality, strange, exquisite, sweet beyond words, but lacking all youth and clearness. That passion veiled in tears which had troubled my brain that night on the lagoon, and again on the Grand Canal singing the Biondina, and yet again, only two days since, in the deserted cathedral of Padua. But I recognised now what seemed to have been hidden from me till then, that this voice was what I cared most for in all the wide world.[xii]

The homoerotic potential of the composer’s investment in Zaffirino’s voice is intensified in the author’s description of the singer’s vocal quality:

The voice wound and unwound itself in long, languishing phrases, in rich, voluptuous rifiorituras, all fretted with tiny scales and exquisite, crisp shakes; it stopped ever and anon, swaying as if panting in languid delight. And I felt my body melt even as wax in the sunshine, and it seemed to me that I too was turning fluid and vaporous, in order to mingle with these sounds as the moonbeams mingle with the dew.[xiii]

The composer is on the verge of giving himself up to this malign voice when he is suddenly able to release himself from its charm, regain his composure

Suddenly, from the dimly lighted corner by the canopy, came a little piteous wail; then another followed, and was lost in the singer's voice. During a long phrase on the harpsichord, sharp and tinkling, the singer turned his head towards the dais, and there came a plaintive little sob. But he, instead of stopping, struck a sharp chord; and with a thread of voice so hushed as to be scarcely audible, slid softly into a long cadenza. At the same moment he threw his head backwards, and the light fell full upon the handsome, effeminate face, with its ashy pallor and big, black brows, of the singer Zaffirino. At the sight of that face, sensual and sullen, of that smile which was cruel and mocking like a bad woman's, I understood--I knew not why, by what process--that his singing must be cut short, that the accursed phrase must never be finished. I understood that I was before an assassin, that he was killing this woman, and killing me also, with his wicked voice.[xiv]

and, as if to emphasise the need for a re-assertion of his normative, active, heterosexual masculinity, he ‘takes control’ of himself and rushes down the stairs to try to gain access to the site of the nightmarish scene he sees before him; the mask of the fetish falls away. It is precisely in the nature of the fetish to both hide and reveal artifice: its modern usage came into English via the Portuguese feitiço, meaning made with artifice, fashioned, constructed. That sudden moment at which the fetish is unveiled as artifice, is also a traumatic moment: in a move that anticipates the nightmarish vision of Kafka’s short prose fragment ‘Up in the Gallery’,[xv] the composer plunges own the stairs into the circle below and is suddenly held in the grip of the fetish for one last blood-curdling moment:

... I heard the voice swelling, swelling, rending asunder that downy veil which wrapped it, leaping forth clear, resplendent, like the sharp and glittering blade of a knife that seemed to enter deep into my breast. Then, once more, a wail, a death-groan, and that dreadful noise, that hideous gurgle of breath strangled by a rush of blood. And then a long shake, acute, brilliant, triumphant.

The door gave way beneath my weight, one half crashed in. I entered. I was blinded by a flood of blue moonlight. It poured in through four great windows, peaceful and diaphanous, a pale blue mist of moonlight, and turned the huge room into a kind of submarine cave, paved with moonbeams, full of shimmers, of pools of moonlight. It was as bright as at midday, but the brightness was cold, blue, vaporous, supernatural. The room was completely empty, like a great hay-loft. Only, there hung from the ceiling the ropes which had once supported a chandelier; and in a corner, among stacks of wood and heaps of Indian-corn, whence spread a sickly smell of damp and mildew, there stood a long, thin harpsichord, with spindle-legs, and its cover cracked from end to end.[xvi]

So, in the end, there is nothing there. The voice, its power, the sado-masochistic scene are all gone, all past away and the synecdochic fixation on the legs of the cracked harpsichord underlines the logic of the fetish here: the fetish has to be cracked open, torn asunder, ripped from the alter in a final act of violent discipline, and brought again under the sway of teleological symbolisation, and the world of empty (mouldering) objects.

What the male voice in song does here is to test fundamentally the order of the commodity that Marx so brilliantly outlines and diagnoses in Kapital: its horrific function is to split asunder the charm of the fetish in a manner that threatens to overwhelm the masculine order of objects and to allow it to descend into passivity, homosexuality, death. The moment at which the composer nearly succumbs to the vocal charm is also that very same moment at which he can break its charm: ‘like the sharp and glittering blade of a knife that seemed to enter deep into my breast’. The problem that Lee is trying to negotiate in her short story is the problematic function of the male vocal fetish: most horror stories, as we have seen, fetishize the female voice and, even for Septimus in Mrs Dalloway, it is the grainy voice of his nurse that triggers his messianic visions (‘close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.’). But Lee seeks, rather, to examine how a fetishized male voice might work on another man, and her vision is highly eroticised.

When fetishes stand in for the feminine, especially in Freud’s analytical trajectory of fetishism,[xvii] they do so in order to stand for a feminine lack, and in Marx, they stand for the missing order of labour, man’s splitness from his labour:[xviii] in both cases, it is an object sought after by men, ‘belonging to’ the male erotic and symbolic economies. When that feminization of the object is disturbed, as in Zaffirino’s ‘wicked voice’, then the male is positioned with regard to the fetish as a hysteric to an absent signifier: the object stands in for a deadly obsessive attraction that can undo him. Between ‘enchantment’ and ‘ensarement’, it seems, there is a very delicate and dangerously porous boundary and gender is one of the resources that helps maintain it. Indeed, what holds these disparate imaginations of the voice together, then, is their commitment to the voice in song as in some sense enchanted and enchanting (from the Lain root cantare, to sing and incantare, to incant). The enchantment, literally the ‘ensonging’, works for these disparate authors and imaginers of vocal fetishes as a moment of epistemological uncertainty, but also, paradoxically, as a moment of raised or intensified consciousness: song interevenes in the flow of the everyday, changes things, puts the world out of sorts but can also bring a heightened knowledge, a sudden glimpse of the connectedness of things. In this sense, song might be said to have an agency all of its own; indeed we might say that the voice in song, for many at this very long fin de siècle, does an extraordinary amount of cultural work onto gender. Crucially, hen, very rarely indeed are such voices in song male, precisely because the order of the fetish is resolutely sexist.

[continued in next post]

---

[i] Both Jonathan Sterne and Friedrich Kittler are no less fetishizing or messianic in their representation of that originary moment: ‘Thomas Edison first heard his words – “Mary had a little lamb” – returned to him from the cylinder of a phonograph built by his assisstents in 1878, and suddenly the human voice gained a measure of immortality’ Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction: (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 1; ‘Wieder brüllte Edison in den Schallrichter, während er oder Kruesi die Kurbel drehten – diesmal das Kinderlied Mary had a little Lamb. Dann setzten sie die Nadel zurück, ließen die Stanniowalze ein zweitesmal laufen – und der erste Phonograph gab die gebrüllten Laute wieder. … “Speech, as it were, has become immortal.“ Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1986), 37. It is the advent of recording technology that makes Bloom’s ruminations on memory so resonant with our own imaginations of memory as supra-scriptural. In the digital age we have gotten used to the idea that writing is no longer analogue, no longer scriptural but can be subsumed within a range of archivings: we imagine the ideal digital archive, the complete set, the singularity of a world connected without leakage, without blockage. Septimus’s dream, messianic, psychotic, visionary, is the beginning of our dream and his fetish is ours.

[ii] Richard Midleton, ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Or, Imagine, I'm Losing My Religion: Musical Politics after God’, presentation on 31^st October to the Research Forum of the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. See also Richard Middleton, ‘ “Last Night a DJ saved my life”: Avians, Cyborgs and Siren Bodies in the Era of Phonographic Technology’, Radical Musicology, Vol. 1, 2006, http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk (17 May, 2006), 31 pars (accessed January 4^th 2008).

[iii] See again Sterne’s messianic investment in this story: ‘Once telephones, phonographs, and radios populated our world, sound had lost a little of its ephemeral character. The voice became a little more unmoored from the body, and people’s ears could take them into the past or across vast distances.’ Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction: (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 1.

[iv] Ibid., 2-3.

[v] See Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 167.

[vi] As Sterne puts it: ‘These are powerful stories ... but they are incomplete. If sound-reproduction technologies changes the way we hear, where did hey come from? Many of the practices, ideas, and constructs associated with sound-reproduction technologies predated the machines themselves.’ Audible Past, 1. Sterne calls his book a history of the ‘possibility of sound-reproduction’. Ibid., 2.

[vii] Giovanni Battista della Porta, Baptistae Portae Neapolitani Magiae naturalis libri viginti (Nijmegen: Apud Petrum Leffen, 1651), book 16, chapter 2. Cited in Charles Grivel, ‘The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth’, in  Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), pp.31-61: 43.

[viii] Josiah Brigham, Twelve Messages from the Spirit John Quincy Adams through Joseph D. Stiles, Medium (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1859), 416.

[ix] For more on this, see Dale Townshend, ‘Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics’, Praxis Series: “Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Nineteenth Century”, (December 2005) http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ (accessed January 20, 2008).

[x] Vernon Lee, ‘A Wicked Voice’, Haunting an Other Fantastic Tales (London: Broadview Press, [1890] 2006), pp. 154-181: 156.

[xi] Ibid., 179.

[xii] Ibid., 145.

[xiii] Ibid., 179.

[xiv] Ibid., 179.

[xv] Franz Kafka, ‘Auf der Galerie’, Erzählungen, ed. Max Brod (Franfkurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1998), pp. 117-8.

[xvi] Lee, ‘Wicked’, 180.

[xvii] See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality in The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 7: “On Sexuality” (London: Penguin, [1905] 1991), pp. 31-169: 64-68.

[xviii] See Marx, Capital, 165ff.

the vocal fetish (iv)

It was psychoanalysis that brought the fetish into common parlance and, although Woolf herself was hostile to Freud’s work, it was the Woolfs’ press, the Hogarth Press, that began to publish Freud’s works in English in 1921. It was also psychoanalysis that provided Modernist writers with a language with which to negotiate the complexities of modernity and to weigh up the toll it took on the inner life of men and women. But psychoanalysis consistently struggled to make sense of the vocal object, this lump of voice that sticks and persists and that struggle is writ large in Modernist fiction. Even after 1945, the voice remained problematic. Indeed, for Lacan, the figure of the voice remained elusive, and appeared in 1960, somewhat precariously, at the far right-hand side of his schema 2 of his graph of desire:

Illustration 11.1: Lacan’s Graph of Desire, Schema 2[i]

The trajectory from left to right is the flow of signifiers (signifier→voice) into which the subject retroactively ‘stitches’ itself ($→I(A)): the subject can only make sense of the ‘meaning’ it encounters in hindsight. Mladen Dolar has noted that the left to right vector in schema 2 above is puzzling:

In the famous graph of desire, one can find, maybe rather surprisingly, a line that runs from the signifier on the left to the voice on the right: there is the signifying chain, reduced to its minimal features, which yields, as a result or as a leftover, voice. A certain reversal has taken place: the voice is not taken as a hypothetical or something of mythical origin that analysis would have to break down into distinctive traits, no a diffuse substance to be reduced to structure, but rather the opposite: it stands as the outcome of the structural operation.[ii]

For Dolar, it is precisely in the act of symbolisation (of systematisation, of attempting to capture, discipline, hold down in the order of meanings) that the voice becomes audible. In other words, just as for Woolf the voice of Anon is audible precisely as it is murdered, so for Dolar ‘the reduction of the voice ... has left a remainder’.[iii] Persistence, remainder, leftover, lump: these are the ways in which voice comes to represent itself as ‘separated out’ from the symbolisation it underpins; in other words, there is no representational matrix, no language adequate to holding voice still or to holding voice in place long enough to make it speak to us as voice. And, finally, it appears not to matter here whether this voice is in song or in speech: for Lacan and Dolar, the voice is never complete unto itself, never whole, always partial and song makes absolutely no difference to that originary problem of the vocal fetish.

But it is precisely the voice in song, I want to suggest, that enables the modernist fetishization of the voice, or rather, it is in the silence about the voice in song, and about the male voice in song in particular, that most writings on voice from the long fin de siècle speak loudest about the voice. By this I mean to say that the structure of that omission opens up a space for us to think about voice and gender: the consumption of the male voice after the advent of recording technology is marked by an anxiety both about homoerotic identification with the voice and about its challenge to the resolute femininity of the fetish object itself (and the two, of course, are intimately bound up with one another) and that anxiety marks itself in the literatures of European Modernism as a peculiar silence about song. Song, it seems, stands in as a voice let loose from its duty to speak sense. It makes of voice stuff, leftover after the work of speech.

So why is it, then, that the male vocal fetish is so rare? As we have seen, in Verne’s 1892 Le Château des Carpathes, the sadomasochistic scene is cast as a male fixation on a feminine voice: the voice stands for the murder of the diva, and the technological ‘box’ stands for the mechanised body of the woman, held in a mortified state and endlessly consumed. In Lee’s structurally similar scene in ‘A Wicked Voice’, the voice is the aggressor, the half dead body of a woman is laid out on the sofa, ready to be consumed by that very voice itself. This distinction is crucial: the one voice is an eroticized voice, the other eroticizing, the one held in a box, the other mobile, let loose from its fetish-image. The impact of song and gender on the vocal fetish is quite telling here:

· song, as we have seen, intensifies the voice, turns it into formidable material, into stuff beyond speech, draws attention to its limits, its texture, its ontology but it does not fundamentally change it; it makes it more audible;

· gender brings that vocal stuff into a particular kind of erotic economy of objects, the one (the fetish of the female voice) to be collected, consumed or imprisoned, the other (the fetish of the male voice) ending the chain of signification, bringing ruin – one occasions desire, the other, fear and disgust.

Yet, it is precisely at this conjunction of desire and disgust that the fetish of gender itself can, I suggest, be made to speak differently. What if, contrary to this rather conservative configuration of the two vocal fetishes, we were able to imagine a fluid substitutability of the two fetishes? In other words, what if we could re-imagine the vocal fetish for ourselves as an emancipator? Perhaps we need to return to the figure of the messianic voice in Dalloway. There, voice, although gendered feminine for Septimus, is nonetheless endlessly distributable (‘And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body ... Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds.’). Perhaps the best way to break out of the modernist vocal deadlock is to think it in terms which we might term therapeutic.

To recast this in Lacanian terms, there will, we have to understand, always be a leftover, a lump, that cannot be assimilated to signification because total signification (the full assimilation of everything to the symbolic order) is a kind of death; but what remains after this less than comprehensive symbolisation nonetheless will always still speak of the death of reason. Lacan, we might say, speaks the fear that stalks the Modernist messianic logic of voice: when voice speaks as a voice in things, when it is intensified (that is, when voice sings), it speaks of the collapse of sense, of a potential psychosis. The voice in song, although different from that in speech, is an extreme instance of the same fetish in that both partake of the same fearful logic. Indeed, the one time when Septimus is haunted by a male voice is precisely that moment in Mrs Dalloway at which it becomes clear that he will not recover: ‘a voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead were with him.’[iv]

In the final analysis it appears not to matter that this is a voice in speech, for the fetish has the same structure as that of the voice in song in ‘Wicked Voice’: both voices enact a deadly shift in the listener, both voices represent death. The gendered difference here is that between the voice that can only be grasped through a kind of ‘perversion’ (the sadism of the Baron de Gortz in Verne’s novel) and the voice that sounds out death itself (the ‘wicked voice’). To move beyond this deadlock is precisely what the messianic move is all about. As Walter Benjamin put it, reading Ernst Bloch, the messianic is that which is fundamentally other to history: ‘Nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic.’[v] Modernist messianism, like that of Woolf in ‘Anon’, appears to hold the key to the breaking of the deadlock of the historical versus the empirical voice: it is not song per se that occasions that messianic turn, but song that marks out the ritual through which history can be renewed. It is, finally, the female voice of Anon that breaks the silence of the forest and inverts the grip of the logic of the fetish on the female voice. It is in that androgyny of the fetish that Woolf is able to imagine a voice beyond the historical specifics of gender, a messianic voice, a voice in song.

---

[i] The graph of desire is given a full account in Lacan’s contribution to a conference on ‘Dialectic’ in Royaument in September 1960. Published in English as ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, Écrits, trans. and ed. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 2006), 671-702.

[ii] Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’, Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl (eds.) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 7-31: 9.

[iii] Ibid., 9-10.

[iv] Woolf, Dalloway, 102.

[v] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theological-political fragment’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University press, 2002), 305-6: 305. The dating of this fragment has been the cause of some controversy. Adorno places it squarely among the later writings, 1937-8, whereas the original editors of the Gasemmelten Schriften place it among the earlier writings, 1920-1.

the late, the romantic ...

[In romantic criticism] we are faced, at once, with a fatal confusion between two selves: the one specific, particular, historical, and chaotic, the other capable of the lofty lucidity of total self-understanding. The gap between the two is so wide as to have become comically proverbial. (Paul de Man)

The nineteenth-century campaign to raise music to [a] lonely, sacred eminence was an exacting one, almost against nature. Undivided silent attention to a musical performance does violence to basic human impulses, among the most devout listeners as among the unlettered. (Peter Gay)

Word is that the German Idealists and Romantics were dreamy folk whose hearts leapt up when they beheld a rainbow in the sky. So they were. Yet in their own estimation the leap was always as much a result of a nervous disturbance in the heart muscle as of euphoria. (David Farrell Krell)

Tautology, hyperbole, repetition – in the many symbolic economies of the early German romantics, redundancy and intense figurative overdetermination often go hand in hand, as if the very act of representing the world were laden with expectations, meanings and promises that cut across or contravene that moment of imagining, that moment of making imagery and idea. And yet the various forms of romantic criticism – of scholarships that, ‘after’ Romanticism, have sought to capture and discipline that ‘epoch’ – have invariably been touched, on the one hand, by a certain over-heated interpretative fervour (as a kind of intense identification) and, on the other, by a certain detached analytical coolness, as if a ‘safe’ response (an antidote, even) to the ‘heat’ of the object of study were called for. For Paul de Man, it is the criticism on Friedrich Hölderlin in particular that plays out the tension between fierce identification with the poet and a theology of radical detachment, between an accounting for that lucid ‘self-understanding’ prophet and the chaotic-historical figure of the poet.

The tendency of romantic criticism to mimic its object is nowhere more intensely apparent than here: critics wheel in grand circles around the delicate obscurity of late Hölderlin, and yet pick endlessly through the ‘philological’ question of the poems’ constitution (elisions, order, punctuation). The duality revisits the core epistemological problematic of romantic criticism, encapsulated in the question as to whether we engage it as a coherent otherworld, a symbolic economy that can sustain itself, or ground it in its material specificity, connect it to places, people, times, material economies? As Paul de Man would have it, the choice for the critic of literary romanticism is between the hermeneutic and the historicist methods, between the ‘empirical self of the author and the self that appears as the speaking voice in the work’. (De Man)