The Call of the Voice, The Cry of the Image (part II)
Continuing the comparison between Murnane and Roubaud
(This is the second of a two-part essay; the first, which ended by asking whether a particular grieving poet was engaged in mourning and/or avoidance, can be found here.)
And what’s Murnane’s narrator avoiding, in drifting from one image to the next, letting whatever twinkles at the edge of his vision decide where he’ll go, other than providing the straight account we seem to have been promised of the history of his curious phrase?
Maybe nothing.
Maybe the narrator really is just taking the time, now that he’s apparently retired, all the children out of the home and so forth, to do exactly what he wants, and do it at his own pace and with no hard and fast aim in mind. Early on, he does admit that “for much of my life I barely found time to observe, let alone reflect on, the teeming mental imagery that accumulated by the minute… Now, at last,… I am free to record my own image-history.”1
But in the midst of all his study “of colours and shades and hues and tints,” sound does occasionally break through2 The narrator has said nothing about the determination to guard his ears as well as his eyes. Just over fifty pages in, we’re informed that “On a certain morning sixty years ago… the distinctive, harsh-sounding voice of a man who seemed sometimes to sing and sometimes to narrate, all the while accompanying himself on a piano,” drew the narrator’s attention.3 The radio voice spoke in apparently comic fashion about being unable to recreate a certain chord he’d once heard. The narrator says that while he could understand someone being in such a situation, he would probably instead have been trying to recall “the precise shade of red that I had seen ten years before.”4 And his listening to music on cassettes is undertaken with trust in “the power of music to cause me to see what I had never seen with my eyes.”5 The man’s underlying loyalty, one might even say obsession, is to images and their creation, exploration, and solidification in memory. Sound seems to have no effect on, no ability to draw him away from, that commitment.6
When he listens to the radio while driving, it’s usually to a broadcast of horse races, on in the background in a way that doesn’t distract from his eyes taking everything in, however they’re doing it. And it’s not that he’s uninterested in the outcome; it seems much of this man’s life has involved some sort of horse-racing fandom, going to races, knowing the uniforms associated with certain families. And so it’s not unusual, even for someone not all that invested in things sonic, to excuse himself from a gathering and take his radio out onto the veranda to see what’s happening with a particular race. Only this time, when his overt aim is to listen, to pay more than distracted attention to what’s being aired, something changes.
The reception is bad; the broadcast comes through, but he’s in an area where two signals are interfering with each other, and finally the interview that’s been intruding upon coverage of the race wins out. It’s an interview with an author who’s in part describing the grand house she wants to build in order to host a writers’ retreat. As she describes it, the narrator tries to envision this would-be structure—but are his assumptions in line with her vision? Is her commitment to some vaguely spiritual practice knocking up against the narrator’s Catholic-school past—a legacy now shaping his understanding of what this retreat should look like? If author and radio listener could compare the visions they’re each constructing in their respective heads, would they match?
The interviewed author now lives in the narrator’s native country—but she’s originally from England, a place our narrator has never been, but whose literature he’s spent a lifetime reading, and of course imagining visually through that reading. And now here’s this English lady in his country, describing with all the assurance in the world a particular landscape and place that he seems to believe he should know. All along, our narrator's been the creator and keeper of the images he’s been wading around in—but now his impression is competing with an original to which he has only limited access, an original designed by a person surely not as intimately familiar with the area as he, a man who’s never even left his home country.7 Of course, he can’t stop and question her, speak to her, clear things up, as he would a text; her voice goes on indifferent to any of his desires.
And then, after listening to this woman describe her experiences reading something by Richard Jefferies, whom the narrator had read as a boy, our man can “no longer call the face to mind” that had been so much a part of the imagery he’d constructed while reading that book.8 Has this voice shaken things up for him in some way, somehow thrown his image generation out of whack—and is that why he’s decided he should rework this report for presentation to the author, so that he can find out how her envisioned retreat and his compare? Is this disturbance what finally drives him to finish this particular book, and in so doing, finally tell us how the phrase and concept of guarding one’s eyes came to him in the first place?
Whatever ensued because of the experience, what may have happened is that, in guarding his eyes, our man forgot completely about his ears.9
Roubaud has most certainly not forgotten about his own ears; he’s keeping just as strict a watch over them as over all of his other sensory organs, lest they cause him to feel something. The thought of listening to any of the tapes Alix made before her death leads to sensations of uselessness at best and anguish at worst.
“I can’t bring myself to listen to your voice again,” he admits;10 just like her photos, which are “dead, each and every one of them,” that recorded voice contains “nothing in it of your presence…. / in these shots and tapings you are the most irrevocably dead,” lacking as they do “Your smell, your taste, the feel of you.”11 The poet may not even recognize what emerges from the tape as a voice, period: nothing more than a sound.
His discomfort illustrates Mladen Dolar’s assertions about what the voice is: that mechanism that delivers a message, communicates a packet of information—but is not in itself that message or information. “If we speak in order to say something,” Dolar says, “then the voice is precisely that which cannot be said… it eludes any pinning down.”12 Of course, the voice belongs to an individual, is itself unique, and uniquely and inherently tied to that individual. We recognize the voice of someone we love as their voice and no one else’s—but what we perceive as that particular voice has nothing to do with recognizing or understanding the meaning of the message that voice is conveying. Or to come at it from the opposite direction, Pierre Schaeffer notes that in listening to the message a person is trying to communicate to us by speaking out loud, “I do not listen to [or I would say listen for] the sound of his voice.”13
The voice is separate from—not equivalent to—message or meaning, then. But at the same time, if that voice lacks the individuality that is an inherent part of voice as such, something is wrong. Think of a surveillance camera taking umbrage at your passing presence on the sidewalk: “Hi. You’re being recorded.” The voice is obviously that of a machine, an inanimate, non-feeling producer of sound—which bears all the same a strangely and unjustified passive-aggressive tone. Neither the camera nor its voice gives a damn whether you’re there or not, and you know it.14 All the same, that nonhuman attempt to produce in the hearer a very human sensation of cautiousness and guilt, maybe even fear, reflects Dolar’s assertion that “The impersonal voice, the mechanically produced voice… always has a touch of the uncanny.”15
And then if a human, as opposed to a mechanical, voice is present, as on one of Alix’s tapes, but the person who produced it is not, another sort of discomfort emerges. We’ve become so used now to the telephone and other sorts of communication devices that we may no longer find it strange to have a conversation with a disembodied voice. But anyone who’s been in a long-distance relationship will probably know that even between two living beings who are able talk to each other from different continents, and can now even see each other on a screen, it’s hard to get the full feel of each other’s presence when you’re not physically in their presence: there’s something missing when you don’t know whether they’ll walk by your side or rush impatiently ahead; how they’ll eat; what they’ll do with their arms while just standing there. Even if, on the other hand, just sitting together in the same location having a conversation, “Your smell, your taste, the feel of you,” is palpable, somehow part of the voice that’s doing and being something more than the mere vehicle of message delivery.
Roubaud might be unwilling to give in to the temptation to listen to those tapes because he knows on some level what it will mean: listening closely, probably intensely, to the voice that has become only a dead sound, trying vainly to find some living kernel in that sound to hold onto. But in making the recorded voice the object of study, he also risks turning it into some work or production penned in by the boundaries of time or tape length, transforming it into anything but the free flow of a voice just being a casual voice. The widower could stop the tape, rewind it, skip over certain parts, changing what’s heard into something other than its original state as speech into what Schaeffer called a sound object: “sound itself, considered as sound, and not the material object… that produces it."16 Something able to be removed from the original context of its creation, and if desired, manipulated in any number of ways. In this situation, potentially fragmenting, splitting, or in other ways making the voice-sound seem so alien, even if only through continual repetition, that there’s very little left of the complete Alix-ecology responsible for leaving behind those recorded sounds.17 Listening would assuredly feel something like the vocal version of contemporary people reviewing the digital photos they’ve snapped at an event or on vacation, so busy gathering all that postable material that they realize they never actually experienced anything that was right in front of them all along. The replay might severely curtail or erase the whole-Alix memory, essentially overriding a sense of the whole and leaving the grieving husband with only this truncated reminder of who she was.
And if he cannot truly listen to the real, living Alix—can’t take in living speech that demands an answer, or engage in interaction needed to keep a conversation alive—Roubaud also cannot call out to her, knowing that his own speech will be something less than speech if there’s no possibility of its receiving an answer:
The dead … declared present by being spoken to, are not in any possible somewhere either …
Saying your name means reigniting the presence you were before you disappeared
And at the same time gives this disappearance a status different from, and more than, pure and simple absence, a secondary status …
Your name can’t be killed (but shall remain… false).18
Brault and Naas point out that according to Derrida, “it is only ‘in us’ that the dead may speak”—and that if we fail to accept that fact, it “would be not only a form of denial but a betrayal of the dead friend, a failure to accede to the unique event the friend has undergone”— as Roubaud stated it himself, giving Alix’s death/disappearance a secondary status.19 This post-death fate of his wife is at least one of the realities Roubaud is struggling to accept, recognizing that not only can the dead speak only within our own heads and hearts, but also that only within those isolated heads and hearts may we speak to or address them. As the poet notes, the dead “are not in any possible somewhere,” floating around in the ether ready to hear what we have to say, or respond when we call their name.20 No one but we ourselves hear that appeal; to think it would actually succeed in drawing the attention of anyone exterior to our material world would give rise to the falsity of that call, simply by the fact that no actual call—no effective speech—is taking place.
In seeming to recognize so much that’s involved in the reality of Alix’s death—that she is no longer present in any way, that she cannot be contacted or interacted with by any means, that the photos and recordings she left behind cannot channel any living part of her—Roubaud would appear to be in mourning. But if we’re going by a simplified Derridean account, recognizing the responsibility to “interiorize” Alix, or her memory, to keep her alive within him, Roubaud seems not even to have gotten started with the process. He doesn’t, in fact, seem ready to mourn, avoiding all temptation to let who Alix was infuse him in any way, to let her (memory) live on in him.21 What seems to be happening here is instead a state of shock, of still being stunned at the simple fact of what’s happened.
What to do, then? Keep guarding his ears or his eyes, whether in his own way or Murnane’s, until the shock wears off? Be open to “being singalled or winked at” by other images or sounds, new or old, familiar or not, that might lead his heart toward some at least initial path of consolation or assistance? Roubaud wrote a sort of follow-up to Some Thing Black,22 in which he explores the idea of a plurality of worlds, and Alix’s potential place in them—but not having read that one yet, I can’t say at this point how or whether his mourning process moved into something Derrida would have declared mourning, whether it went any further, etc.
And what about Murnane’s narrator? Might it be too much to say that he has always been in something close to mourning—allowing winking images to take root and grow in his head, taking him as they do to elaborate visions of what was and what might have been, being faithful to them by allowing them to flower into their fullness, keeping them alive within himself, even if everyone else has forgotten the whole or the details? We might just call this basking in images an aesthetic form of nostalgia, especially bathed in all the light that it is. But it’s the voice—the interviewed author’s living voice that, in issuing its perhaps unintentional call,23 brings the narrator into a present or future bout of image construction—one he’ll have to join in, instead of pull together retrospectively—in order to complete.
What are we to do with all this sound and imagery? At the very least, I suppose, recognize the ways in which our senses are called—whether to temptation or fidelity or some of both at the same time. And maybe asking throughout, along with W. J. T. Mitchell, just what all of these sensations, however they appear, might want from us. It might be the best way of guarding our minds—or hearts or souls, depending on how deeply you believe in the capacity in any or all of those feeling organs—we’ve got.
Murnane, 21–22. Might we not all one day, bombarded as we are now with so much information of all sorts—visual, aural, textual—feel grateful to just stop and ponder everything we’ve not had time to let filter through? Indeed, if Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold are correct about the brain’s need for enough sleep to allow our dreams to sort through the day’s stimuli, that might be part of why Murnane’s book often feels so dreamlike. See Zadra and Stickgold, When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).
Murnane, 54.
Murnane, 56.
Murnane, 57–58.
Murnane, 97.
What might separate this guy from J.-K. Huysmans’s des Esseintes in À rebours is that the production of the latter seems like an imposed, put-on escape for a would-be aesthete who moves from perfumes to jewels to whatever in a tired effort to prove just how beyond the terrible everyday world he is. Murnane’s narrator, on the other hand, just seems open to, let’s say, the sparkle and the draw of the normal. He doesn’t need to construct anything or seal himself away from the world in order to find something worthwhile to do or think about.
And possibly additionally suspect because the author is a writer of fiction, about which our narrator seems unimpressed. Although at one point in his life, he devoured fiction “in the belief that I would learn thereby matters of much importance not to be learned from any other kind of book” (84), he now seems less enthusiastic about that general type of writing, “still willing to look into some or another work of fiction if I believe I am likely to remember afterwards even a small part of the experience” (104), which seems unlikely given his earlier admission that he can “recall hardly any” of the fiction he read during his earlier days (85).
Murnane, 107–8.
Or as Mladen Dolar says about posterity remembering only half of Lacan’s “two new” objects contributed to psychoanalysis, “although a new slogan, ‘the gaze and the voice,’ was quickly coined, it seems that all gazes were fixed on the gaze… while not all ears were open to the voice.” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 127.
Roubaud, “I Can Face Your Picture,” in Some Thing Black, 32.
Roubaud, “History Knows No Souvenirs,” in Some Thing Black, 110–11.
Dolar, 15. Note that what marks out the human voice from the cry of an animal—or even the shriek or cough of a human—is its tie to intelligible speech. See Dolar, 105ff.
Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, translated by Christine North and John Dack (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 75.
Obviously, the person who put the camera there does feel one way or another about your being there.
Dolar, 22.
Schaeffer, 8, n6. Consider, for example, the obscenity of fast-forwarding or rewinding the recording in play mode, turning the voice of Roubaud’s recently deceased wife into something sounding more like a cartoon chipmunk than a human woman.
In the recording, for example, how could Roubauld see the facial expressions she made while recording, note her bodily movements, the way she might have reacted physically to making a mistake? How to know or understand the unmentioned feelings she had while making those recordings? And etc.
Roubaud, “Apatriates,” in Some Thing Black, 84–85. Although speaking in particular about the situation of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan’s understanding of speech is entirely relevant here: “all speech calls for a reply… there is no speech without a reply, even if it is met with silence, provided that it has an auditor.” Quoted in Dolar, 192 n.15.
Brault and Naas, 9–10.
Roubaud, “Apatriates,” 84.
He knows, unlike the the protagonist of the first episode of Black Mirror’s season two, that believing that voice means anything without the real presence of its speaker, or that it will help a mourner get over the death of a loved one, is a dangerously addictive assumption to latch onto. See “Be Right Back,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris. Aired on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2013.
Jacques Roubaud, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995).
Why broadcast any sort of interview if not to issue some very broad sort of appeal to the listener (or viewer now, as the case may be)? Would it not be at least to buy my book, see my movie, call your senator—participate in some way in the conversation that’s being aired, if even only from afar, and without the speaker’s knowledge that their speech has indeed found its listener?