Beckett, Lacan and the Voice

Listening

This brief sampling suffices to grasp the crucial importance of the voice for Beckett, to the point where the practice of writing cannot be dissociated from its aural and vocal dimensions. As a young man, Beckett was fundamentally inhabited by listening, a disposition that was not exclusively reserved for his creative activity. Anne Atik records how he gave his interlocutors the remarkable impression of being the object of extremely attentive listening (14, 33). Simple sounds could have a persecuting impact upon him, as his official biographer, James Knowlson, notes:

He was hypersensitive to sounds. His cousins […] recalled him coming to the family home […] for the wake of their mother’s funeral, and sitting with his head down at the kitchen table, their mother’s hanging wall clock ticking noisily away behind him. He seemed dreadfully disturbed, then finally blurted out: ‘Look, I can’t go on another minute with this clock. You’ll have to stop it ticking!’ (1997, 614)

Paradoxically, listening to the most minute sounds also represented an activity in itself for Beckett, as Charles Juliet reports: ‘I asked him if he always remained for hours silent and inactive, listening to and observing what spoke and took place within himself. He repeated that hearing was becoming more and more important compared to the eye’ (Juliet, 42). In his house at Ussy-sur-Marne, in the Île-de-France region, he appreciated the emptiness and the silence of the countryside, responding as follows to a question asked by Charles Juliet: ‘– Mais quand rien ne se passe, que faites-vous? / – Il y a toujours à écouter’ (‘But when nothing happens, what do you do?’ ‘There is always [something] to listen to’, Juliet, 49). Listening thus appears to be inseparable from the background silence that gives form to sounds. James Knowlson observes: ‘Beckett is, after all, the great poet of silence, a silence which allowed him to listen to that internal voice murmuring away relentlessly in his head or which emphasised so dramatically the little sounds that so often pass unperceived. A fly buzzing around his worktable, for instance, was to make a companionable appearance later in his prose text Company[5] […]’ (2010, 19). Far from being impoverished manifestations, sounds seem to contain a whole world, as Beckett observes in the work of Proust:

Withdrawn in his cool dark room at Combray he extracts the total essence of a scorching midday from the scarlet stellar blows of a hammer in the street and the chamber-music of flies in the gloom. Lying in bed at dawn, the exact quality of the weather, temperature and visibility, is transmitted to him in terms of sound, in the chimes and the calls of the hawkers. (Pr, 83)

For Proust, as for the Beckettian character, the existence of the world is not considered as a compact whole that could be explored in its material breadth but, on the contrary, as being dependent on the sounds that communicate its essence: even visibility has no existence outside of the sounds that pass through it. It is thus that Proust resembles numerous Beckettian characters: lying—in the manner of a recumbent statue (Company)—and absorbing the voice that comes to him in the dark.

Other characters echo this practice of listening that Beckett shares with Proust. The narrator of Malone Dies explains:

When I stop, as just now, the noises begin again, strangely loud, those whose turn it is. So that I seem to have again the hearing of my boyhood. Then in my bed, in the dark, on stormy nights, I could tell from one another, in the outcry without, the leaves, the boughs, the groaning trunks, even the grasses and the house that sheltered me. Each tree had its own cry, just as no two whispered alike, when the air was still. I heard afar the iron gates clashing and dragging at their posts and the wind rushing between their bars. There was nothing, not even the sand on the paths, that did not utter its cry. The still nights too, still as the grave, as the saying is, were nights of storm for me, clamourous with countless pantings. These I amused myself with identifying, as I lay there. Yes, I got great amusement, when young, from their so-called silence. (MD, 200)

Silence offers exceptional conditions that reveal the richness of sounds. When the outer husk of existence loses its consistency, an infinity of sounds comes to life. Winnie also appreciates these sounds that help her to fill in her time between waking and sleep: ‘They are a boon, sounds are a boon, they help me… through the day. [Smile.] The old style! [Smile off.] Yes, those are happy days, when there are sounds’ (HD, 162). Or the blind man in Rough for Theatre I: ‘I can stay for hours listening to all the sounds’ (RT I, 233).

The relationship between writing and the voice goes much further than the desire to feel at ease with the materiality of words, as Ludovic Janvier emphasised. Beckett’s relationship to the voice is manifestly far more intimate and—for this reason—fundamental. James Knowlson notes that Beckett was ‘obsessed by the way that he heard the text in his head’ (1997, 502). This preoccupation led him to a concern for exactness that could make his experience of listening more difficult during performances of his plays. Regarding a staging of Endgame, Beckett asserted: ‘It will never be the way I hear it. It’s a cantata for two voices’ (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 163). This musical metaphor suggests that the text, in its very essence, is of a vocal nature—it is elevated to the dignity of a piece of music—and for this reason, it possesses a quality that persists in the realm of the author’s intimate experience, so that no punctual recreation can equal it. Beckett’s attention to musicality also enabled him to ascertain the exactness of a text’s rhythm, when it was translated into Hebrew (Atik, 74). His cousin John Beckett also testifies to Beckett sounding a gong for the recording MacGowran Speaking Beckett. He played the instrument ‘with terrific concentration’, producing a sound of ‘a gong in a house’, but heard as if it came from another room (in Tucker, 379).

The idea of the voice is not a figure of speech used to translate the author’s attachment to the sounds of words. Oriented by listening in his practice of writing, Beckett heard voices in the most literal sense of the word, and he gave form to them in his works. Mary Bryden notes, following André Bernold’s testimony, that Beckett declared ‘that he heard all of his texts in advance of writing them’[6] (2010, 364). Indeed, when Beckett objected to Albert Finney playing Krapp in December 1972, he pointed to the crucial question of the voice, declaring: ‘You hear it a certain way in your head […]’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 596). By contrast, according to Deirdre Bair (491), ‘Beckett told Magee that he was astonished when he first heard him speak because Magee’s voice was the one which he heard inside his mind’. Stanley Gontarski remarks, about the composition of That Time: ‘First, the earliest drafts of the memories were recorded in near final form, perhaps because Beckett was recording his own inner voice or unconscious’ (1985, 151). Martin Esslin describes this process more precisely: ‘When I once asked Beckett about his method of work, he replied that, having attained a state of concentration, he merely listened to the voice emerging from the depths, which he then tried to take down; afterward he would apply his critical and shaping intelligence to the material thus obtained’ (379–80). The process described here is not simple, since Esslin reveals three stages, each separated by a gap, by an essential rupture: the original voice emerging spontaneously, followed by the version noted down, then finally, the literary form. This is comparable to a patient in psychoanalysis recounting a dream: whereas the latter represents the ‘utterance’, what is crucial is his enunciation, the subjectivity that enters into play when one recounts and assumes a particular position with regards to this utterance (Lacan, 2013, 166). This ethical position enlarges the question of vocality in Beckett’s work beyond its sonorous quality. Mladen Dolar thus correctly emphasises: ‘Beckett’s literature, written as literature is, is at the same time the literature of the voice as no other, not only by virtue of its being close to the spoken idiom, but also by being sustained merely by pure enunciation which propels it forward […]’ [7] (2010, 58).

Beckett’s listening to what could be called ‘pre-existing’ or ‘proto-texts’—communicated from somewhere beyond prosaic reality—leads to texts where the narrators claim they content themselves with quoting the voices they hear, without assuming their content. Thus, in The Unnamable, the narrator declares: ‘But I don’t say anything, I don’t know anything, these voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and the thoughts of the devils who beset me’ (U, 341). In How It Is, we read: ‘then on my elbow I quote I see me prop me up thrust in my arm in the sack’ (HI, 8). These narrators appear to reproduce the attitude of Beckett listening to his inner voices to transpose them in written form.

A Complex Field

If the various questions outlined here highlight the importance of voice, sound, and listening for Beckett and his work, they also give an idea of the complexity of this field, its apparently multidimensional nature. It is therefore necessary to determine the different parameters of the question.

Let us start from the word voice, which has multiple meanings. It can refer to the sound produced by the throat of a human being, reverberating without. As a result of catachresis, the same phenomenon is recognised in birds or even other animals. The poet Lamartine speaks of ‘the voice of dogs’ (la voix des chiens), in the 1849 Preface to his Méditations poétiques. Inversely though, uncertainty remains since for Aristotle, voice requires the presence of a soul (Connor, 2009, 24). Steven Connor (2010) adds, however, that the voice does include the inanimate. The dictionary offers the following definition that highlights the physiological production: ‘A series of sounds produced by the larynx, when the vocal cords start vibrating under the effect of rhythmical nervous excitement; effects produced by these sounds’ (Rey). This field thus concerns all—or almost all—creations for the theatre. Does an emitter suppose the existence of a receptor, according to the norms established by communication theories? Not I, for example, provides for the presence of an Auditor on stage. However, rhetoric reminds us that the presence of a physical person is secondary when it comes to uttering: the function of the address is a factor inherent in all language, as the figure of allocution demonstrates.

The voice also supposes the source of an utterance: a character, a narrator. However, our conception of the voice is transformed when the latter becomes multiple. The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin regarding polyphony in the novel are well known. Concerning Dostoyevsky, he writes: ‘He juxtaposed ideas and conceptions of the world that, in reality, were totally separate and that ignored each other, and obliged them to enter into discussion’ (133). The voice here is thus the simultaneous presence of heterogeneous utterances that can be ascribed to different sources. However, for such a construction to be possible it requires effacing, to a certain degree, the subject[8] conceived as master of the words attributed to him: ‘The Dostoyevskian hero, as a man of ideas, is totally disinterested, insofar as the idea has actually taken possession of the deeper core of his personality’ (Bakhtin, 128). Such is also the case of a number of Beckettian ‘characters’ who are not considered as the authors of the utterances they give voice to: we can think of the Unnamable, traversed by words, of Listener in That Time who listens, on stage, to the voices that come to him from without. In these conditions, the utterances can no longer be attributed to the subject they affect: the ego is no longer their source. The voices are imposed from without, exposing the impersonal dimension of language, in that the latter pre-exists the subject. Such, for example, are the voices of How It Is or The Unnamable, which testify to a split in the narrating agent, so that the I who, apparently, pronounces the words denies he is their origin.

According to another meaning of the word, the voice is conceived of as an aural phenomenon, independent of any linguistic manifestation. It thus appears in music, in song, or in the sound produced by other musical instruments. Beckett’s expression ‘cantata for two voices’ (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 163) to describe Endgame is applicable here, as is the ‘mixed choir’ of Watt (W, 34). Despite this musical dimension, the voice remains related to language, to speech; Beckett resolutely situated his productions in the literary field based on writing. Indeed, even in music, the voice is not limited to vocalises, but is associated with the words of a text: the beauty of pure sound—the struggle for the supremacy of one or the other aspect of the work, or for their ever endangered balance—is well known. This question can be found in the work of Beckett, in plays—such as Not I and Play (Germoni, 27–56)—where the intelligibility of the text recedes as a result of the search for a purely aural effect; or in Words and Music where both aspects compete with each other (Ackerley, 2011, 57–76).

Beyond the field of sound, the notion of the voice also refers to the pleasure procured by the act of singing or speaking. In this respect one might think of vocal modulation—expressiveness of tone, physical and aural sound—which expresses the body and the affects of the person who vocalises, as Winnie speaks of it in her stereotyped formulation: ‘[…] song must come from the heart, that is what I always say, pour out from the inmost, like a thrush’ (HD, 155). It is no mere chance if the notion of the voice arises when it is a question of the way the narrative texts are appreciated for their lyrical qualities, or for the effect they produce on the reader: a certain je ne sais quoi emanates from them, which ensures their perceptible logic or cohesion, far beyond the empirical level made up of the syntactical, lexical or even phonetic formulations. It is a matter of a certain fluidity, the impression of a necessity or a driving force, that the reader can only adhere to, suspending his critical judgement. It is the souffle—both ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’—which permeates a literary text, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline explained most eloquently with the metaphor of his métro-tout-nerfs (underground train-all-nerves, Céline, 543) in his work Entretiens avec le professeur Y.

The term voice is also dependent on listening: indeed, to speak of a voice supposes an æsthetic judgement that distinguishes it from unimportant sounds, or noise, that one generally seeks to exclude. However, as pointed out previously, what most people consider as background noise is the focus of Beckett’s attentive listening. In this domain we must include sounds of all orders: those Malone listens to, seeking to identify them (MD, 200), or the bell that persecutes Winnie, penetrating her flesh like a ‘gouge’ (HD, 162). Once these sounds take on a signifying form—as is the case for Malone—they can be associated with the manifestations of a voice. In the same way, it is impossible to ignore the sounds that make the auditor suffer, insofar as they have a particular impact on him. Thus the policeman in Mercier and Camier: ‘With the hand that held the truncheon he drew a whistle from his pocket […]’ (MC, 93). The combined intrusion of the truncheon and the whistle sets off a violent reaction on the part of the novel’s two protagonists.

Is the voice limited to the field of the audible? The passage from Mercier and Camier draws a parallel between the sound of the whistle and the truncheon, suggesting that these two instruments have a similar function: both violate bodily integrity. If the voice supposes the existence of an auditor, such a restriction may appear to be arbitrary when the reality of the voice is not necessarily perceived by all present. The dictionary offers an ‘abstract’ definition of the word voice: ‘Discourse, speech that a human being feels within himself, that speaks to him, warning him or inspiring him’ (Rey). The voice is thus associated with the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia. Towards the end of Molloy, Moran describes his voices as follows:

And if I submit to this paltry scrivening which is not of my province, it is for reasons very different from those that might be supposed. I am still obeying orders, if you like, but no longer out of fear. No, I am still afraid, but simply from force of habit. And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fulfil in all its bitterness my calamitous part […]. (Mo, 126)

The reality of this voice that speaks to Moran cannot be called into question: no indication suggests that it is an invention or fantasy on the part of the character. And yet, the experience Moran describes is totally subjective: it cannot be supposed that others might be receptors of the same speech; no collective audience can confirm the reality of the phenomenon. To these parameters, it is necessary to add this voice’s imperative nature: it is the source of the orders Moran obeys. This is the appropriate moment to recall the common origin of the French verbs ouïr (to hear) and obéir (to obey), in the Latin oboedire (to lend one’s ear to, to be submissive to), composed from the prefix ob- and the verb audire. It is worth noting that Lacan emphasises the imperative dimension of language in this respect: ‘To listen to words, to lend one’s hearing [ouïr] is already to be more or less obedient. To obey is no different, it is to anticipate, in a hearing [audition]’ (1981, 155). Steven Connor shows how a voice without a visible source is—precisely because it manifests itself as voice—endowed with a particularly imperative force, with ‘the power of a less-than-presence which is also a more-than-presence’ (2009, 25).

This aspect of the voice is perhaps not without a certain relationship to the meaning of the word in the field of grammar, which—in Greek—distinguishes the active, passive and middle forms. It is a meaning that belongs to the logic of written language, and not to the phonetic dimension. However this opposition seems to be instructive as regards the manner in which one can be the bearer of an action—or be subjected to it—while still remaining its subject, and constrained to ‘obey’. Paradoxically, it is the subject of enunciation who desires, not the ego or the I which, as the subject of the utterance, believes himself to be autonomous. It is in this sense that Lacan underscores the equivocation caused by the French preposition de (of), between the objective and subjective genitives: ‘[…] a person’s desire is that of the Other, where the of gives the determination grammarians call subjective, that is to say that it is as Other that he desires […]’ (1966, 814). Contrary to the I, the subject submits to the determination that originates in the Other.

Where does this voice come from? What is its origin? Its source of emission? If the voice appears to be naturally anchored in the body, one may be astonished to notice that the voice Molloy and Moran perceive is detached from any visible source. In fact, the voice Molloy hears is in his head:

But it is not a sound like other sounds, that you listen to, when you choose, and can sometimes silence, by going away or stopping your ears, no, but it is a sound which begins to rustle in your head, without your knowing how, or why. It’s with your head you hear it, not your ears, you can’t stop it, but it stops itself, when it chooses. It makes no difference therefore whether I listen to it or not, I shall hear it always, no thunder can deliver me, until it stops. (Mo, 36)

This voice appears to come from without—it intrudes on Molloy—but it is also located within the character. The same principle applies to Beckett’s ‘listening’ to his ‘inner’ voices when composing his works. Instead of passing via the organ of hearing, they arise in the mind and nothing can oppose them: there is no obstacle, and the will is powerless to silence them. For this reason, the head should be conceived of as a metaphor expressing the absolute nature of this possession that leaves the subject no reserve, no shelter. The voice is an external influence that annuls any interiority.

In this tangle of heterogeneous aspects of the voice, silence cannot be ignored: in the terms of a paradoxical formulation, the voice is silence. Firstly, sounds are heard because they interrupt silence and appear to be embedded within the latter. Next, writing is also a medium of the voice insofar as it is language; it is however penetrated by silence, in that it is not addressed to hearing: in modern reading practice, written words are not usually pronounced out loud, and do not necessarily reach us via the ear. Such is the paradox that Louis-Ferdinand Céline put to work in his novels: ‘The emotion of spoken language through writing!’ (498). The same localisation of the voice is evoked: ‘The reader who reads me! it seems to him, he would swear it, that someone is reading in his head!… in his own head!…’ (545).

Not only does writing ignore the ear, but words can sometimes appear to be impregnated with silence, as the narrator of The Unnamable observes: ‘[…] the words are there, somewhere, without the least sound, […] drops of silence through the silence, I don’t feel it’ (U, 376). As Charles Juliet reveals, recording Beckett’s words, there is a very fine dialectic between speech and silence: ‘– L’écriture m’a conduit au silence. / Long silence. /– Cependant, je dois continuer’ (‘“Writing led me to silence.” Long silence. “However, I must continue”’, in Juliet, 21). One listens to silence, since it is founded on language. Silence is written, albeit with words. And yet, nothing guarantees that silence is actually soundless, that it is the embodiment… of silence. In this sense, Beckett’s writing offers us these paradoxical formulations: ‘[…] this deafening silence’ (TFN VII, 129); ‘screaming silence’ (TFN XIII, 154); ‘mute screams’ (HI, 46); ‘Silence at the eye of the scream’ (IS, 58); ‘No sound. [Pause.] None at least to be heard’ (Ff, 402). If one turns to silence to escape sounds, and the latter remain the manifestation of an unbearable voice, where can a way out be found? As Emil Cioran indicates, for Beckett ‘there was no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf…’ (49). What this formulation emphasises, notably, is that the voice often escapes any objective quantification.

A final aspect that merits evoking in this survey of the complexity of the notion of voice, is its dissociation from its physiological source as a result of its recording by a mechanical medium. The voice, which has its origin in the body, and which also involves the affective dimension of the speaker’s character, can also be separated from the latter, without ceasing to be a voice. The intervention of technology concerns a whole portion of Beckett’s work, starting with Krapp’s Last Tape—where the present Krapp listens to his old personæ—through to his late plays (That Time, Footfalls, What Where), including works for the radio. By means of recording, one can hear the voice of beings who have long since disappeared, and through the radio one can have access to absent voices. The technological support seems to give Molloy’s invisible voices their concrete reality. The difference is however inherent in the change of literary genre: by choosing to mobilise technological means, Beckett deliberately places the spectator/auditor in a position comparable to that of his characters, so that the voices impose themselves in their full reality: it is no longer possible to reject them or to relativise them as being the effect of some ‘hallucination’.