qui
parle

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The following essay previously appeared in French as an entry in a Dictionnaire du corps published by PUF in 2007. The translation below is from the original, unpublished Italian manuscript.

Voice is so inherent to the human body that the body can be considered its instrument. The lungs, trachea, larynx, mouth and other organs of respiration and alimentation transform into organs of phonation. The first cry of the newborn is voice and breath: a sonorous, vital announcement of a singular bodily existence. As each body is always unique, so each voice differs from all the others. And as is typical of a living being, each voice develops along a temporal arc of existence and marks the physiological points on this trajectory. From infancy to maturity to old age, the voice remains unique but changes as the body changes, most conspicuously in the case of male puberty. The development of the body, especially that of the gendered body, manifests itself vocally. Though predisposed to the perception of sound in general, the human ear is, above all, tuned to this vocal emission that reveals singular bodies to one another. In contrast to speech, the voice puts hearing in play even before listening.

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In 1672 audiences at the Académie royale de musique in Paris witnessed a rather unusual spectacle: Les peines et les plaisirs de l’amour, a “pastorale” composed by Robert Cambert. A blend of ballet, spoken dialogue, and song, Cambert’s work in five acts is widely considered a forerunner of French opera. Although little of it survives beyond the libretto and the music of the prologue and first act, the event inspired one spectator to comment on the audience’s response. Titled “Sçavoir si la musique à plusieurs parties a esté connüe et mise en usage par les Anciens” (Whether part music was known to and used by the ancients), the text relates a dispute between two spectators at the start of the performance of Cambert’s “pastorale.” At first the disputants, Paleologue (Expert on Things Ancient) and Philalethe (Lover of Truth), quarrel over the value of the novel type of spectacle. Philalethe, who had been present at the work’s premiere, is utterly ravished. Showing no interest in the author and composer of the piece, much less in finding out about the designer of the stage machinery, his only concern is “to know how someone was able to produce such surprising things.” Paleologue, meanwhile, declares that the only thing he is amazed about is how people who have seen Italian opera in Venice can “admire so little.” But as the curtain rises and the violins begin to intone the overture, something unexpected happens.

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American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first transcontinental telephone conversation with another telephonic event. On July 29, 1939, a tribute call was placed between the bicoastal World’s Fair sites. Not much was said—the transcript records these ordinary lines:

“Hello, San Francisco. Hello, everybody, this is New York speaking. Greetings to you in San Francisco.”

“Hello, New York. This is San Francisco. Greetings and best wishes to New York.”

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David Bowie’s 1973 album Pin Ups consists entirely of covers—his versions of songs originally recorded by other British bands between 1964 and 1967. Pin Ups is the last of Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” albums—three in all, which feature Bowie in the guise of an androgynous space-alien rock star along with a band called The Spiders from Mars. The female model shown on the front album cover of Pin Ups is none other than Twiggy, the number-one pin-up girl of 1960s “swinging London.” But Twiggy is made to look nearly like Ziggy (the rhyme of these names is not coincidental). Or is it Bowie/Ziggy who is made to look nearly like Twiggy? Who is covering whom? Or as Judith Butler might ask rhetorically, which is the original and which the copy? This Butlerian question, which refers to heterosexual gender norms set over and against drag, is an appropriate one for the album cover, but less so for the album’s content. Although we may wish to trouble the concepts of “original” and “copy” in the realm of gender theory, in the realm of music and the history of the cover song these terms carry indisputable and sometimes material significance, such that probing the relationship between “original” and “copy” results in sharp distinctions rather than ambiguities. Cover songs were prevalent in the early years of rock and roll when recording practices colluded with the segregationist practices of format radio stations catering to regional white audiences. Songs recorded first by African American musicians were frequently re-recorded by white artists who bleached out the threatening blackness from the vocals and sanitized the lyrics while appropriating the rhythmic vigor, melodic inventiveness, and potential market share of the originals.5 As radio audiences and the music industry became more integrated, cover songs came to signify both individual interpretation and homage to a past or peer musician.

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In this essay I want to focus on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a poem of mourning revolving around the disastrous loss of a “powerful western fallen star,” where the catastrophic event of Lincoln’s death prompts the poetic subject to address a che vuoi? to the symbolic Other as the depository of his truth, that is, as that which is apt to legitimize and guarantee the role that the poet takes on as an elegist speaking in the name of the American nation. This symbolic role Whitman partially assigns to literary precedents that the poet both appropriates and revises; the other part he assigns to the figure of the dead Lincoln summoned to authorize poetic speech by guaranteeing that it tallies the occasion which it is called forth to commemorate. The poet also brings the object voice, that inert precipitate of enjoyment, into play within the frame of fantasy, and substitutes it for that which, in the Other, fails to authorize his speech.

Throughout this discussion, poetic voice will be approached within a Lacanian purview from two complementary angles that Lacan himself clearly distinguished when, upon being asked by Jacques-Alain Miller to clarify the distinction between the object of the drive, the object of fantasy, and the object of desire, he observed that there are several possibilities involving the function of the object.

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The present essay is a reflection on our recent production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Der Jasager (1930; The yes sayer). It raises various questions of interpretation concerning the opera and attempts to articulate how the direction and staging of the opera addressed these questions. Directed by Michal Grover-Friedlander in cooperation with the stage design of Eli Friedlander, this production was originally performed as the culmination of a year-long course at Tel Aviv University in 2010 devoted to Der Jasager. The following year the opera group Ta Opera Zuta was formed. The group is committed to the integration of research and performance in opera and music theater, concentrating on the specific questions raised by the staging of the voice. This integrative vision was realized in Ta Opera Zuta’s 2011 performance of the opera, which can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube at http://youtu.be/l2bIXCoFQUg. Thanks to European American Music Distributors for permission to reprint excerpts from the score of Der Jasager.

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The following pages present fragments of a written correspondence between Qui Parle and the poet, thinker, and artist Wayne Koestenbaum that took place in the first few months of 2012. The transcript published here has no claim to phonographic or documentary verisimilitude: the questions and answers are not necessarily presented in the right order, and they have been variously worked over so that the reader ought not to presume that the words necessarily correspond to the bodies or editorial bodies to which they are attributed. We hope that you enjoy this partial, improvisational, and provisory palimpsest (or fantasy) of an “interview.”

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A review of Pearson, Wendy Gay, and Knabe, Susan, Zero Patience: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011).

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