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.
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