All the Dead Voices etc

Out of the old man’s memory, out of the undertow of Isolde’s aria, a voice reciting something once known: O lost . . . ghost, come back again . . . How does that go?

I’ve been reading Mladan Dolar’s book, A Voice and Nothing More. I’m struck, first, by two twin aspects of the voice : the voice as the guarantor of meaning and the voice as the obscure surplus that eludes sense. These turn out to be two facets of the same thing.

The voice gathers up and binds the clutter of letters or phonemes in a single sonority and so ensures their adherence to Meaning. It is the a-signifying envelope of sense, carrying significance but not of it. As such, it perpetually threatens to separate out along its own curve, gravitating toward pure sound, rebellious and self-delighting.

Or again, as Dolar says, Voice always seems pregnant with meaning as other mere noises do not. The voice seems directly to embody this very promise of meaning, without being exhausted by any particular significance.

The voice stands for a validity and power of address contained in meaningful speech but finally independent of it. The voice is this obscure excess that isn’t simply about meaning.

These twin aspects of the voice, as described by Dolar, seem to me related to two typical forms the voice takes in cultural products: the ghost-voice of melancholy or of the restless dead, unquiet and often scarcely audible (see quote above); and the sudden Word that punctures the present with some unanswerable warning or command.

Now both these voices are what is termed ‘acousmatic’ (‘it cannot be localised within the field of the visible’). Perhaps, in vaguely psychoanalytic terms, these two voices can be termed that of the mother (the original acousmatic voice, whose source the as yet uncoordinated child cannot localise) and that of the Father (but typically the Symbolic father, the voice of the deity). On the one hand, then, the call of some lost object; on the other, the unmediated Law.

If the above makes sense (it was written very quickly), I would be interested to hear from others who are reading or have read the Dolar book, or anyone who has thought about this question. I’m currently exploring how both kinds of voice inhabit the poetry of the early Yeats. There is what Yeats himself names the ‘pure note of Celtic sadness’, and there is a connected yet in some ways opposite voice, sudden and commanding, intervening in the frame of the poem yet somehow sourced elsewhere. This last is not the (melancholy) note of deferred sense but the sudden ‘report’ of delivered meaning.

update: Just came across this, which is very good. I'm also put in mind of my differences with D. over Bob Dylan's current voice. He thinks it has tremendous pathos because if its cracked quality, whereas to me it's not so much a noble voice that's been cracked as (to use an unfortunate expression) pure crack - a kind of wheedling, depthless nasal noise. A rather quaint way of putting it would be that for me it has no 'interiority', it's more like a wheeze, like the accidental noise produced by some defective ventricle.