My name is Sarah Nooter and I teach in
the Classics Department. My voice
is going to work as hard as it can
to talk to you about the voice today.
The talk is called "The Mortal Voice on
the Ancient Greek Stage," and
what I want to talk about is really the
actual, literal voice part of speaking.
Most of the time when you hear
someone speak, what you're listening to
is the language, right? The voice is
happening, but it's not something you're
paying attention to. If you strain to
hear me than you might think about my
voice.
If i have a funny accent, you might
notice that. If I'm singing, you'll think
about my voice. If I cough that's a way
of forefronting voice. So I'm looking at
moments when the playwrights on the
ancient stage took--isolated, sort of--
vocal utterance instead of language.
So I'll be talking about animal sounds
and coughing a little bit and cries and
things like that. And before I get to
that I'm going to look at Plato. Plato
hates drama, as you may know. He hates
imitation, he hates poetry, but he's very,
very good at talking about it.
He's a contemporary of the playwrights,
and he's very skilled at getting to
exactly what makes drama so powerful, so
that's why I like to talk about him, even
though I disagree with him.
Here we go. This is a paper about the
outer limits of the human voice on the
Ancient Greek stage, as expressed by the
breakdown of language into nonsense. Here
I focus on instances of such nonverbal
vocalizing in Aristophanes and a satyr
play as against a couple of moments of
breakdown in tragedy,
so as to consider the range of
theatrical effects and implications that
such vocalizations might have. Before I
come to drama itself, however, let me
pause to consider what is at stake in
such instances of voicing, from an
ancient perspective. So here's Plato.
Plato's dialogues suggest that
the mimetic voicing has a
profound effect on those who hear these
voices but an even greater effect on
those who give voice. His many objections
to poetry and especially drama arise in
part from the belief that what we utter
makes us what we are, molding not only
our thoughts but also our voices and our
bodies. He writes as much,
ventriloquizing through
Socrates, as usual, in 'The Republic:' "Or
have you not perceived that imitations,
if they persist on words from youth,
settle into characters and nature and
body and voices and even in thought?
Yes, even so, he said." The idea here is
that voicing in the form of repeated
imitations--so this is the word
mimesis, you might know--has power over
the person who is voicing by impressing
itself upon his character, by changing
him.
It is the power of the voice when used
for false voicing that makes it so
dangerous to a person's moral being, and
a list follows of the things and people
that must not be imitated by citizens of
the ideal city, lest see citizens be influenced
badly by these vocal pursuits. The list
includes women of many sorts: women
who are wrangling, defying their husbands
boasting, lamenting, in love or in labor;
slaves; bad man, which includes cowards,
drunkards, and madmen; and also workers,
smiths, craftsman, and rowers. The list of
prohibited voices is capped by those of
nonhumans, including both natural
phenomena and animals. So this is another
passage from the same part of 'The
Republic:' "What then? Neighing horses and
bellowing bulls and babbling rivers and
the howling sea and thunder and all
such things-- will they [the poets] imitate them?
No, rather these will be off-limits to them,
he said, both to be mad and to act like
madmen." So this is a part of the Republic
where Socrates is imagining what the
perfect city would look like, right? And
this is the kind of stuff that we are not
going to allow in the perfect city. Since
it is vocal imitation that admits of
these problematic sounds, Plato suggests
that only a very debased poet privileges
it over narration to begin with. So
here's a description of a bad poet: "So
his style of speaking will derive
entirely from imitation of voices and
gestures, or will contain just a little
bit of narration." Imitated sounds, then,
really ought not to be espoused by the
human voice or the body by way of
gestures. If they are to be admitted into
poetry at all,
they should be distanced through the
filter of narration, an element entirely
missing from drama, whose absence
renders drama inferior and indeed
dangerous. You may know of certain plays
where you actually have a storyteller,
but Greek drama has nothing like that at
all.
In other words, the terrible power of
drama arises from its use of false voice,
voice that is not distanced from the
speaker's identity through narration, and
further, from the potential for this
voice to be deployed without speech--
which in Greek is "logos," so no "logos"--
in the form of a bull roaring, or something
like that. And this is the crux of the
problem for Plato. We have voices no less
than other animals and with many of the
same capabilities as theirs without the
intervention of "logos," or speech, the
distance lent by narration, our bodies'
speech and thought may easily descend to
the level of beasts with our souls
tumbling down. To the display of Plato,
Athenian playwrights did at times compel
their actors to imitate animals' voices
on stage and called for other
vocalizations that are either lacking in
language or pointing away from language
in meaning and affect, all this on top
of the problem that these voices are not
truly speaking from the actor's soul in any
case. They're all imitations;
they're all not real. In 'The Laws,'
Plato's Athenian stranger again
discusses the appearance of poetry in
"cries of beasts and men, clashes of
instruments, and noises of all kinds," and
he similarly disdains them. "The Muses,"
Plato asserts, "would never combine the
voices of beasts and men, whereas human
poets, who senselessly weave together and
completely confound these elements, make
laughing stocks of themselves and
destroy music in their desire for a
beast-like voice." If to Plato or
his speakers, the effect of this
non-linguistic voicing is at best
clownish and at worst fatally corrupting,
what is the counter-argument implicit in
the use of such voices in Greek drama?
What is gained when logos is lost?
Aristotle echoes Plato, but with less
apparent anxiety, in commenting that
animals and humans share the capacity
for voice but not language. Even if some
animals have voices, as he declares in
'The Politics,' human voices are different
from those of animals IN that we use
our voice to express speech or
structured language. If Aristotle's
perspective on animal utterance, as
lacking in language but still possessed of
voice, can be taken as broadly
representative of Ancient views, then we
can see how the use of animal
vocalization onstage could be a way to
highlight aspects of voice outside of
its linguistic capabilities. From animals
and from humans, at times, voice emerges
as embodied, meaningful, and especially
expressive, and the more so it is
non-linguistic. Non-lexical onomatopoeia
is one example of this kind of
vocalization. Such onomatopoeia is
defined by Derek Attridge as "the use
of phonetic characteristics of the
language to imitate sounds without any
attempt to produce verbal structures."
This category includes, for example,
mimicry of a dog barking--so in Greek,
that's baoo-baoo. These non-lexical sounds sit
at one end of a spectrum, the far end of
the complex hypotactic structures that
are often associated with poetic
language in the 5th century--
5th century B.C. is what we're talking about.
Yet alongside flights of syntactic
complexity, drama includes instances of
such aggressive sound play that logical
meaning may seem at points to subside in
favor of vocalized sound. Such a broad
vocal spectrum allows playwrights to
work with a great range of
conception of human life and to pay
particular attention to life on the edge
of human experience. There is predictably
both the light and despair to be found
at these extremes, both verity and fragility.
So now we'll talk about comedy.
What we have of Aristophanes forays into
this field gives us a sense of the
possibilities. One suggestive example
comes from 'The Birds.' So this is thought
to be somewhat of a representation of
the actual play 'The Birds. 'The Birds'
includes an entire chorus of men dressed
up as birds, 24 people on stage
with masks kind of like that, presumably
singing and dancing, and all song and
tragedies accompanied by an aulos
player--it's like a recorder--so that's that
guy in the middle there. 'The Birds' features
a character who is a Hoopoe. The Hoopoe
reveals that he has a checkered mythical
past, and he was once a human king named
Tereus. Tereus is an actual figure
from Greek mythology. Early in the play,
this Hoopoe summons the other birds onto
the stage, the ones who
become the chorus that we see over here,
and he does this in song. So I'm
giving you a clip of a little bit of the
song he sings, and I'm giving you the Greek--
although I assume most of you don't read
Greek--as well as an English translation.
And I'm going to highlight in blue
the parts that I've been
talking about which are not actual words
in Greek but are sounds. I'm going to
read this aloud in Greek:
[Ancient Greek]
So that's the first part there. It's two lines of
sounds, and that "io" sound becomes "ito."
"Ito" is actually a Greek word that means
"let him come," and the third line is, "Let
someone of my fellow feathered friends
come forth." And then the second part is:
[Ancient Greek]
So, here we start with a
line of a word repeated over and
over again that means, "hither, hither,
hither, hither," and then a bunch of
sounds.
Aristophanes plays with the notion of
the birds' foreignness to speech and with
the expectations of the audience, as he
bats the Hoopoe's voice back and forth
between speech and nonverbal song.
Initially the Hoopoe seems merely to
repeat his own name because in Greek the
name of the Hoopoe is "Eppops," so
those pop sounds are actually the name
of a Hoopoe. But these pop noises
soon shift to a phrase that is
also linguistically coherent, with the
sonic effects of the repetitions also
greatly enhanced by the metrical
variety of the song. So, remember that this is a
song. It happens to be one where the
meter is shifting all the time. The
Hoopoe's sound play with his own name
echoes a Sophoclean pun on the Greek word
for Hoopoe with the word "observer." So we
have just this little Sophoclean clip
where he wrote, "The Hoopoe, observer of his
own evils."
Little puns like that are not very
normal in
tragedy. This is an instance aural word
play that is unusually blatant for
tragedy. In 'Birds' then, the sound of the
Hoopoe's chirps not only mimics his
own bird-like name and performs with
metrical skill, but it also alludes to
the tragic incarnation of the
shape-shifting Tereus. The Hoopoe's history of
shifts in identity, dramatic genres,
and life-forms is thus signaled by his
shifts between broken vocalizations and
decipherable language. The Hoopoe's next
summons switches from coherent Greek--so
that's that "deuro" word that means
"hither"--to in comprehensible avian chirps--
that's the "toro." "Deuro" and "toro"
sound very similar--and rounds off sharply
with an -eek sound--that "teeks." The song
then veers farther and faster
into mimicry of bird sounds from "teeks"
to "kikabao," which in ancient scholias
thought was intended to imitate the
sound of an owl.
This ends with the "lirileeks," which has been
considered a fair attempt at a bird's
cry. So the song mimics birds, of course,
but at the same time it cuts against
straight mimicry with formal poetic
qualities, since that "lirileeks" is also a
perfect
anapest, a kind of metrical structure
that rhymes with "teeks." Thus the Hoopoe's
patterns of song and speech again imply
that he is caught between his original
human nature and his new avian identity.
The hero of the play, who was a person named
Pisthetaerus, claims that this bivalent
identity is an advantage and explains to
the Hoopoe, "You think all the
things that a man thinks and as many
things as a bird thinks." In much the same
way, the birds who come to constitute the
chorus have been taught the Greek
language but are still birds, as their
chirpy patterns of speech demonstrate. So
here's what the birds say when they
come onto the stage, and again the parts
that are just sound really not words are
in blue. So the birds sing out:
[Ancient Greek]
"Where is he who has called me?"
[Ancient Greek]
"What dear word then do you have
for me?" So the word "where" comes
right after those sounds, and it's
"pooh", so "puh-puh-puh-pooh," so it sort of grows out of
the sound, and
again the word "what" ("tinah") grows out of
the "tis" that have just come before it.
Like the Hoopoe, the birds of the chorus
are pulled in two directions. For them,
the non-lexical stutters of bird
sounds indicate their automatic animal
core, and the echoing words that follow
show their training in human language.
This comical state of limbo applies to
many of the themes of the play, such as
to the birds' city that is suspended in
the sky and to Pisthetaerus himself, the
hero who tries to be bird-like by
acquiring wings but remains staunchly
human and heart. 'The Birds' then plays
with the bending of ontological
boundaries between these forms of life,
but the incursions of nonsense into
speech help to show that the boundaries
remained nonetheless.
So here's what a gaggle of birds
looks like to your average
Greek person. What we have to imagine
of this chorus is that they come out, and
they're stuttering, and they don't speak
very well, but as the play goes on, they
actually become very coherent. And I
don't know if you have ever seen this
play, but what happens is that Pisthetaerus,
who is an Athenian, comes to the birds
and suggests that they make a bird city,
and that through their bird city they
can actually take over the universe,
which in fact they do. They take over the
universe by blocking the connection
between gods and men. So that's
the play. When the birds later cohere
into an actual chorus and acquire clear,
fluent Greek, free of all chirps and
stutters, they also develop the
wherewithal to fulfill
Pisthetaerus's plan of taking over the universe.
Their fragile grasp of human utterance
at first makes them easy dupes for
manipulation. Their subsequent hold on
language puts them in a position of
power on par with humans and ultimately
with the gods.
No we're going to jump to animals. A more
complex example of aural nonsense
comes from Aristophanes' 'Frogs,' a play
famous for its focus on the powers of
the stage and freighted with influence in
the history of literary criticism. So
here is a picture of a frog.
This is a coin from the 6th century B.C.
This is what they felt frogs looked like,
but actually I'm talking about a chorus
of frogs, so I I couldn't find an ancient
image, but i did find that. That is
probably closer to what you want to
think about as we move through this
passage.
So this play has the unusual feature of
having two choruses, one after another.
And the first one is constituted by the
souls of, what are called in the play, swan
frogs. Though they're known more commonly
just as frogs, their literal designation
as swan frogs, of which there is no such
thing,
points to the joke of their presence,
which is strictly an aural joke. These
frogs probably were heard but not seen
onstage, and thus are known only
through the sound of their song. They
proclaim themselves to sing beautifully
in the manner of swans, but they are
interpreted by the hero of the play, who
is the god Dionysus, as croaking,
disagreeable gibberish. When they sing in
full sentences, their song is about the
gods, activating the divine connotations
of music. When they croak nonsense,
mishmash of syllables, their sounds
strike the ears of Dionysus as dissonance
from the maws of beasts. Some of the
humor in the scene obviously arises from
the juxtaposition of a high-handed
musical rhetoric and croaking noise,
language and voice at play.
The frog chorus appear for just one brief
interlude, the crossing of Dionysus to
the far shores of Hades. In this play
Dionysus, the god, laments that because
Sophocles and Euripides have died,
there's no tragedy left in Athens, and
Athens is falling, and he needs to
go down to Hades and bring one of them
back. So the beginning of the play
involves him leaving Athens and making
his way across the River of the Dead
to go to the land of Hades. And as
he's crossing the river and rowing
across, he hears the songs of the frogs.
Charon, chauffeur to the newly dead,
presents the song of these frogs as a
solution to the problem of Dionysus's
self-professed inability to row the boat,
which he claimed with a declaration that he
is "inexperienced, unseafaring, and
unsalimis"--which means he didn't fight
in the Battle of Salamis. So in Greek
this is a very silly phrase. It sounds like this:
[Ancient Greek]
And so it's a phrase that's meant to
sound sort of ever sillier and perhaps
signals the movement that's happening
here from sense into kind of absurdity.
Charon replies to Dionysus that it will
be easy for him to row because as soon
as his oar strikes the water, he will hear
most beautiful songs. Charon then
identifies the swan frogs as the singers
of these songs. This joke rest on the
fact that song was actually used to
regulate the rowing of triremes in
Ancient Greece. Song, at its most basic, is
the combination of rhythm and shifts in
pitch, and an even rhythm, all apart from
melody, sound play, or words, can have the
literal effect in the world of
compelling the acts of many men to fit
together and fitting men into the world.
So we see this with marching songs and
in the ancient world, you would have a
bunch of men rowing and you would have
somebody keeping time. Charon
signals of frogs coming descent into
nonverbal voicing with his own final
utterance before the frog song, which is:
[Ancient Greek]
a line that is probably
best not rendered into English, but one
translator has suggested "heave-ho
heave-ho." Rhythm is on display for
lampooning here, as well as the power of
voice through rhythm to organize, spur,
and here also simulate movement. So I'm
going to show you two little excerpts
from a much longer song in the play (it lasts
about 50 lines or five minutes, maybe).
So that's Charon at the top, right in
the blue, and then the frogs
chime in. The first and second and final
line of their opening utterance--and
again this is all in song--is:
[Ancient Greek]
That doesn't mean anything,
It's just nonsense and among Classics
students, it's kind of a famous phrase.
And this line gets
repeated throughout the entire song,
which is kind of a call-and-response
song between the frogs on one hand and
Dionysus on the other. Dionysus is
presented as an unhappy participant, both
in the rowing and as an audience to the
song of the frogs, and responds to them
with ever more irritated cries of
frustration. The frogs continue blithely
with their song and emphasize its
musical qualities.
They proclaim it as
sweet sounding and then engage in some
name-dropping to puff up their divine
connections, claiming to have sung in a
festival for Dionysus himself.
They suggest further that they are
beloved of the lyre-loving Muses and
hoofed Pan, who plays tunes on the reed,
and of the harpist Apollo because of
their stewardship of the marsh reed, a
physical necessity for the instruments
of these gods.
Thus the frogs comically route their
musical value in the material of the
marshes. Dionysus and the frogs are
paired off, then, as antagonists in a sung
battle. After cursing their "coaxing" and
begging them to stop--
that's up here--Dionysus says, but go to
hell with this very coax, for there is
nothing aside from the coax. He then
assumes the cries the frogs cry of
[Ancient Greek] himself, so late in
the song he takes it over and sings
that on his own, and sings to them in
triumph that he will conquer them with
the "coax" and forever keep them from the
"coax." I have "conquered you with the
coax and so on." So what he
does here is he takes that little sound "coax," and
he puts an article in front of it and
makes it into a noun.
Thus by appending and
declining an article, Dionysus
transforms and domesticates the non-
lexical sound "coax" into a word "coax,"
which metonymically represents the whole
song and sound, and indeed the whole
existence of the Frog, since we can't see
them (we only hear them). In effect, he
turns the non-linguistic sound of "coax"
into a perfectly semantically acceptable
noun. Voice in his vocalization becomes
language. Dionysus manages his transformation
at the same time in the play that he
starts to come into his identity and
powers as a god, indeed as the god of
theatre and all such staged vocalization.
To beat the frogs is to conquer sound
with speech.
Now we move to satyr plays,
and there's a satyr. Other examples from
Greek drama showed that such nonverbal
expressions tend to appear when the poet
is bringing attention to the body and
the fragility of mortal existence, even
when this corporeal fragility is
humorous. I turn now to satyr
plays, a strange breed of romantic drama,
which were staged in Athens right after
the tragedies and written by the
tragedians themselves. So if you saw a
tragedy in Athens, you would go to a festival,
you would watch three tragedies by
say Aeschylus or Sophocles and then a
satyr play by that same playwright. These
plays, these satyr plays of which we have
little left, all featured a chorus of
satyrs with their leader, Silenus. So you
take this chorus, and you would drop them
into sort of strange romantic adventures
like kidnapping stories. So a satyr is a
kind of like half-man, half-goat creature
that you can see in this
representation. There's a tail, there are
like weird goaty ears, and there's also
a big phallus. And that's what we
think satyrs looked like as a chorus
onstage. Mark Griffith has written that
satyrs engage the Athenian
audience in an appealing fantasy,
suggestive both of a return to childhood
and drunken revelry. A long fragment of
one satyr play, Sophocles' 'Searchers,'
provides some basic examples of how
non-utterances are used as part of this
fantasy. So this is a long passage, and
I'm just going to look at a couple
moments from it.
This passage gives us the chorus
releasing ejaculations of surprise--
these are in blue, this [Ancient Greek]--and
nearly unpronounceable expressions of fright,
so [Ancient Greek].
I'll look more at this in a
moment. These kinds of vocalizations are
indexes of not emotions, but internal
bodily affairs. As, such they're sometimes
called corporeal sound symbolism.
They include everything from spontaneous
cries of emotion to acoustics of digestion--
so this is burps, hiccups, farts.
Satyrs are above all corporeal beings,
known for their addiction to bodily
pleasures like drink and sex. These
proclivities are visually marked by their
prominent phallus that you see over
there.
The physicality of the satyrs that we
see in voice like this is underscored
when they are ridiculed by their leader
Silenus. He suggests that they
are "lamenting in such cowardice they
will make a noise," which seems to mean
fart here.
The occasion of the satyrs' panic in 'The
Searchers' makes their would-be farting
all the more comic and absurd. Their
alarm and the sounds that express it are
provoked by their hearing the sound of
the lyre, a string instrument newly
invented by the lonely infant Hermes as
a source of comfort and pleasure. So the
story is something like the baby god
Hermes has just been born, he finds a
turtle shell, and he scoops out the
turtle, and he makes a lyre. And this is
the beginning of lyre music and in
Greece is the story. And the way that's
staged in this play is that the chorus
hear the sound, and they're terrified of
it. They don't know what it is, and then
it's explained to them over the course
of this and other passages that this
little baby God has created this sound. It's
very charming. As the satyrs learn more
about the auditory sensation of the lyre,
the vocabulary they use to describe its
music changes. First it is just a sound,
and later it is referred to
as a divine voice, and then as the voice
of a dead creature. Finally when the
satyrs understand the sound, they
pronounce it an "umphe."
"Umphe" is a word for divine voice that is
used exclusively in Greek literature of
authoritative utterances like those of
gods. And actually it's useful to know that
Ancient Greek has a whole range of words
for the voice, many, many more than we
have in English. Thus the chorus's
early inarticulate vocal emissions--their
"hoo-hoos" and so on--not only result from, but
also draw attention to the birth of a
new sound: lyre music, which is imagined
is born from the death of a turtle,
transforming a body from silent and bestiak
to melodious and divine. The satyrs,
beast-like themselves, bring the
corporeal excretory side of sound onto
the stage, just as the divine lyre can
also be heard, and perhaps undercut by
the vocalization of the body. We actually
have to imagine that lyre music is
playing and then maybe satyrs
are being shown as if
farting, probably with outside help.
Yet at the same time as these low
corporeal emissions are juxtaposed with
the melodies of the lyre, the lyre itself
is posed as another juxtaposition of
voice, a divine sound sings from a dead,
previously dumb beast, and an
inarticulate child makes song blossom
throughout the land, which is how
it's pictured.
In tragedy,
predictably, the role of nonverbal
nonsense diminishes, and the voicing of
animals is almost never found,
although there are nonetheless hints of
proximity to the world of animals and
infants whenever vocal nonsense
intrudes. Here the reduction of voice to
nonsense supplies a way to convey the
razor-sharp edge of human experience,
suffering that is so extreme that
sufferers depart from the realm of
representational language. Unlike the
mimicry of birds' songs or frogs' croaks,
these vocal expressions are not icons
are imitations of anything.
Rather they are indexes of pain. In the
broken voices of characters who are
otherwise pointedly articulate, the
departure from verbal language becomes
the most revealing aspect of these
passages, the very fact that the speaker
cannot maintain the business of
grammatical lexical constructions or
return to language only by force of a
repressive will. They are drawn into the
material of vocalization to display the
materiality and indeed the mortality
underlying their embodied existence.
In Aeschylus's 'Agamemnon,' we see voice
expressed with an incisive lack of
articulation, when the character
Cassandra begins her song with
apparently inarticulate cries of grief.
So Cassandra, you may know, is a character
from from the Trojan War story, who is
the only one who could see all the bad
things that we're going to happen, and
who warned the Trojans, but they didn't
listen to her. And she's always pictured
as as singing. She's very articulate, she
has a very beautiful voice, and so on, but
when she's brought onto the stage in
'Agamemnon' as a slave,
she is at first silent, and then
she starts her song in this way.
So, I will read this to you.
[Ancient Greek]
"O Apollo, O Apollo, O Apollo, O Apollo,
god of avenues, my Apollo, you have destroyed
me entirely and for a second time."
So the progression of sound in a sense
here is not dissimilar from the one
performed by the Hoopoe and the chorus
of birds in Aristophanes's 'Birds' that I
talked about before.
Cassandra's cries of "puh-poi" that we see in
blue here--so that's just inarticulate
cries that mean nothing--
fade into the coherent "O Apollo"--which is
"O Pollon," so it echoes the sound--which
transforms again into the stark verbal
declaration, "You have destroyed me," which
in Greek is a sound that is just like
the word Apollo, so [Ancient Greek],
as if it were kind of the same word growing
into something longer. The first two
lines are repeated as an echoing refrain
of [Ancient Greek], but these sounds
change through puns into meaning, with
the name Apollo sounding like and then
meaning destruction. The birds' sound play
in Aristophanes 'Birds' is played for laughs.
This one shows with searing clarity
Cassandra's movement from the terrifying
interiority of her mind into the
lucidity of conversant language. These
utterances occur soon after Clytemnestra--
who's the queen of Argos
who's taking in Cassandra as a slave and
soon will murder her--soon after
Clytemnestra suggests that Cassandra must
have only an unknowable foreign voice in
the manner of a sparrow. A little later,
Cassandra calls herself a nightingale,
who pronounces the name of her lost son
"itus itus," a name itself that becomes
a symbol of grief. There's some play in
these moments with the idea that
Cassandra is more animal than woman, more
a maker of sound and songs and a speaker
of speech.
Indeed, Cassandra is commonly understood
to dwell at a focal point between
identities: unmarried maiden, and yet
consort to Apollo, Agamemnon in Hades;
prophetic, yet pathetic. Here in Aeschylus's
rendering, she acquires also the
ambiguities available in voice, as her
words are revealed to be nonsensical,
yet incomparably fluent in lyricism
and metaphor. And all this from a girl
who speaks like a bird. Aeschylus
thus makes use of the edges of logos, or
speech, to allow voice to surface. This is
my last big example. This is from
Sophocles play, 'Philoctetes.''
Philoctetes is a Greek hero who we're told
was left on an island at the start
of the Trojan War because he had been
bitten on the foot by a snake. And he got
a wound from the snake, which was gooey
and smelled very bad, and it was always
making him cry out, and it disturbed all
the Greeks, so they just left him on this island,
and they went off to fight the Trojan
War. And they did that for a long
time, and then they were told by a prophet
that they couldn't win unless they went
and got him back. So they go back to the
island to get him, and they send in this
--according to this version of the story--
they send in this young man, Neoptolemus,
who's Achilles son, to go and
convince Philoctetes, by lying about who
he is and what he's there for, and to get
him off the island. When
we meet Philoctetes, he's a very noble and
wonderful man, and Neoptolemus, who's lost
his father, takes to him as a kind of a
son. Sophocles's hero Philoctetes also
stands out as a flamboyant vocalist of
nonsense and the most sustained sufferer
of physical pain on the Greek stage. He's
also one of the most vocally variable of
tragic characters, capable of
expressing his position in a panoply of
song, speech, and other marked linguistic
devices. Yet he is never more striking
than when his language breaks down into
the apparently non-lexical, as in this
passage. So it's a long passage, and I
won't read the whole thing, but
basically what's happening here is he's
about to leave the island with Neoptolemus,
and suddenly he has an attack, a terrible
attack of pain in his foot, and so he
has a past where he's trying to suppress
the pain because he doesn't want to be
left again, but the pain is is forcing
him to vocalize these cries, so he screams:
"Ah-ah-ah."
And Neoptolemus asks what's going on,
and he says, nothing, nothing, nothing, and
"Ah-ah-ah," and it goes on this way. And finally he
releases the series of cries:
[Ancient Greek]
"Do you understand, child?" And Neoptolemus
says, what, and Philoctetes says, "Do you
understand, son?" and Neoptolemus says, what's
happening to you?
I don't understand. And Philoctetes says,
How can you not understand [Ancient Greek].
The extreme quality of Philoctetes's
suffering is expressed by his inability
to suppress these incredible processions
of sound. How shocking would these sounds have
been to an Athenian audience? How much a
break from sense and meter? The opinions
of different editors of this text are
instructive here, for we see the limits
of our ability now to answer even these
most basic questions. One editor, Seth
Schein, asserts that Philoctetes's grief of
"ah-ah-ah-ah" are unmetrical. All tragedy is
metrical, so it's very odd to have
anything break out of the meter. But
another one insists that they form
segments of an iambic line and prints
the text accordingly. These editorial
choices indicate different notions of
the limitations of vocal expression in
tragedy. All commentators agree that the
most notorious series of cries, which is
this [Ancient Greek], is also
perfectly iambic. It's an actual iambic
line of Greek. But two editors tease out
more complex forms of sense from the
senselessness, with one connecting the
final four "puh-pahs" into an unbroken string
and showing that what we see then is a
sort of tricolon, a three-part series of
agony. Seth Schein again draws attention to
how Philoctetes's cries of "puh-pai" fit with
the language and themes of the play.
"Philoctetes's cry
conspicuously reiterates sounds suggesting
'pais,'"--which means child--"and 'papa'-- which
you can probably guess means
father. Yet this
interpretation threatens to suppress the
destruction wrought on language in this
passage and the complementary drawing of
attention to the material and mortal
voice here. A listener, no less than a
commentator, may well be tempted to try
to piece logical meaning back together
from these broken syllables. What results
is a variety of plausible ways of
reading
and experiencing this vocal flight that
invite further questions. Is Sophocles
showing how pain compels speakers to
shatter the boundaries of sense and turn
to the expressivity of nonsense? Or, that
even in this break from sense, semantic
and poetic structures of sense-building
remain intact?
Either way Philocteres allows the
audience to dwell in the experience of
voice overwhelming language, carrying its
materiality as expressed by several
series of popping P's, in which one can
probably hear the sounds of father and
child, roles that would lead the
protagonist back to coherence and
ultimately back to society. Such
desperate moments in tragedy reveal
an ongoing state of vulnerability that
is intrinsic to mortality itself and
reminds us that are semantically rich
locutions can dissolve into the babble
of vocalization at any time, a babble that
has no Aristophanic glee about it at all.
And yet there is a point of connection
between the gibberish of the birds and
the cries of Philoctetes, for Philoctetes
at his most distraught
screams like a beast in pain, but also, as
Schein notes, like a baby calling for its
father: papapapapa. These are the very
syllables earmarked by Theophrastus
some hundred years later, as a
paradigmatic manner of conversing with
an infan, with the P sound standing out
most prominently in the Greek. So he
describes somebody who he says is taking
a child from its nurse, chewing its food
himself to feed it, and then speaking in
Baby Talk, clucking and calling at Papa's
little name. And in the Greek that phrase
"Papa's little name" is all these little
P sounds again, like papapapa.
In fact, any string of repeated syllables
might call to mind the babble of babies,
for whom voicing chains that repeating
syllables is a standard method of
language acquisition, for babies of
course have no language, only voice. This
state of infancy contains both the
capacity and lack that we lose as
we acquire language, with a number of
phonemes we are able to decipher and
produce radically diminishing in the
first months and years of life. Alongside
our babble in infancy is a complete
alignment of body and self, with nary a
dishonest or evasive utterance escaping
our infantile mouths. This alignment of
body, voice, and truth is,
as we know, completely lost later in life,
a loss that perhaps allows for the sense
of fascination or even longing felt in
the presence of inarticulate human
voices. Is babble, nonsense, and gibberish,
then, always just below the surface, or is
it the sound of something lost? I have
been speaking of languageless
vocalization is an ever-present
potential, but it may also remind us that
there is in fact nothing truly
ever-present about us.
By the time a person is able to notice
that babble or non-lexical communication
exists in a separate sphere from
semantically communicative language, he's
no longer a baby himself and rarely
called upon to produce or notice voice
apart from language. Thus babble, pure
non-semantic voice, is more often
observed than emitted by those who do
observe it. It is a capacity of our
children, not ourselves. One is reminded
of Dolar's 'A Vocation of Infant and
Parental Communication,' in which he notes
that, "Babies do not only imitate adults,
as is so often suggested, but rather the
opposite. Adults imitate children. They
resort to babbling in what is no doubt
a more successful dialogue than most."
What makes such co-babbling seem
successful is the sense that one has
gotten beneath the evasions and
circularities of language, dug down to a
Rousseauian ideal of pure communication,
pure existence, and pure being that
cannot last.
Aristophanes, clearly aware of the
attractions of pre-verbal communication,
has his character in 'The Clouds' named
Strepdiades, who has an adult son,
reminisce nostalgically about just such an
exchange. He says, "Whenever you said 'bru,'
I understood and would bring something
to drink. When you asked for mamma I
would come bearing bread." These words 'bru'
and 'mamma' are not real words. In 'Clouds,'
this striking and even touching memory of
perfect communication arising from half-baked
childish vocalization contrasts
sharply with the mess of meanings made by
sophisticated rhetoric, that is speech,
at the end of the play. In closing, I
would suggest that the staging of the
most material and thus embodied quality
of voice is a means of grasping at some
most intrinsic part of the human
experience. Paying attention to the
embodied mortal voice in ancient drama
is, at its most successful, a means of
recovering a living expression of vocal
sound. And yet it is also an
acknowledgement that these voices are
trapped in time and lost in the past. We
cannot nail down the voices of the stage
or define them, yet nor should we dismiss
them. Cicero cites Demosthenes as being
asked the most important element of
oratory and answering, "Delivery," and then
giving the same answer were the second and
third most important elements too. As Shane
Butler writes on this passage,
"Delivery is more or less definitionally
comprised by those parts of an
oratorical performance that cannot be
transcribed." In this way, delivery is
precisely the aspect of Greek drama we
do not have and could not keep, even if
we had experienced it, a fact that
holds true for all perceptions of voice.
Drama combines the fleeting
temporality of existence, the corporeality
of actual people on a stage. Its
offering of presence and forthcoming
absence in the form of sound and
forthcoming silence is an act analogy
for the experience of having, if briefly,
a mortal voice. Thank you.
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