A phonograph, as B. explains at the outset, is a technological mechanism for recording the voice; not merely (or indeed perhaps at all) a mechanism for recording words, but rather for capturing the paralinguistic properties of speech, the sonic attributes that make listening a sensual, quasi-haptic experience. Vox is everything that verba (‘language’) appears to exclude, the roughness, softness, hoarseness and mellowness of the sounding body. And yet, as B. goes on to demonstrate, ancient literature developed its own devices, its own technologies for recording the elusive voice and making it virtually available to readers who receive it as auditors, not only contemporaneously but also, somewhat more radically, centuries later.
This is a book about absence. It is not sensory history as such, whose preferred modus operandi is the rearrangement of extant data to restore components of a soundscape. Rather than seeking to recapture sound or reinscribe its textual inscription, B. marks out instead the limits of its availability, providing an indispensable theoretical companion to the performance practice which is the (re)composition of sensory history. The paradox informing Keats’ conceit that ‘heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / are sweeter’ is drawn out as a paradigm of reception, namely that it is precisely those elements of spoken sound resistant to verbal rendition that produce the most profound affective and aesthetic impact. The recognition of this barrier, and the strategies which writers and readers can apply to render it soluble, form the essential substance of B.’s study. The comparable image used by B. by way of illustration is the synesthetic mise-en-abîme of a wine-cup rendered in Anacreontic verse by Aulus Gellius (Chapter 3), the evocative description of which recalls to the reader-listener the sensory properties which it simulates.
One way in which we can be brought to realise the sonority or musicality of poetry, rather than its semantics, is by attending to phonemic repetition (Chapter 2). This may in part be most vocally effective when it approaches nonsense, non-sense, stripping syllables of their referentiality in order to refocus on their physical attributes as sound. Unlike F. Ahl (Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and other Classical Poets [1985]) or J. Wills (Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion [1996]), B. does not pursue the allusive cross-references generated by Ovidian sound effects. Rather, he concentrates on their potential for opening onto what J. Kristeva calls ‘the space underlying the written [which] is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation … musical, anterior to judgement’ (quoted by B., p. 81). Surplus to the requirements of translation or (a certain mode of) literary criticism, such sonic abundance overflows the bounds of intellectual interpretation and seeks a connection via the corporeal.
Another distinction B. identifies between verba and vox (or between phônê in its capacity as psophos, ‘sound’, and phônê in its capacity as logos, ‘discourse’) is Donatus’ definitions of vox articulata, which can be written down, and vox confusa, which is resistant to notation (pp. 112–13). A voice can similarly be described as clarus and candidus, ‘clear’, or fuscus, ‘obscure’ (pp. 135–8), an epithet that appears to refer to the interference caused by bodily ineptitude, damage, emotion or strain. B.’s beguiling comparison of Nero's singing voice, notoriously exigua and fusca, to the husky tones of Billie Holiday exposes the value judgement that renders these descriptors pejorative. ‘I have been imagining Nero as a dusky-voiced torch singer’, B. suggests. ‘The emperor takes the stage to offer us his unforgettable rendition of Stormy Weather – which in Latin, as we have seen, would be Fuscitas’ (p. 142). Voices that minimise interference come closest to transparency, eliminating the idiosyncrasies of their instrument, the imperfections which – like scratches on the record or textual lacunae – cause glitches and stutters, recalling the auditor to the presence of the medium of transmission and the effort involved in (re)production.
B.’s touchstone in this respect is ‘experience’ (Chapter 4). Tragic experience is equated with suffering, tragedy a medium in which the body in pain ‘erupts into audibility. That is to say, it erupts into voice’ (p. 153) – not necessarily as intelligible logos, but in its purest form as Cassandra's wailing, Heracles’ sobs or Philoctetes’ bubbling shrieks. Voice acts as an index of pathos or, indeed, of acute trauma. Tragic pathos, however, is simulated; and here the other kind of experience comes into play, namely experience as professionalism. The trained voice (that is, the trained body) differs from the amateur voice in its capacity to utilise the psychophysical resources at its disposal in order that imagined pain might be represented effectively to an auditor. According to Seneca, professionally faked emotion can paradoxically prove more persuasive than genuine passion (De Ira 2.17). (See also J.R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting [1985], after Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien, on the professional manufacture of emotion.) Experienced voices know how to read – that is, how to embody – a written text. As shown by C. Berry, a pioneer of vocal training techniques for delivering Shakespearean English, resonant voices are those which minimise such interferences as the constricted throat that produces glottal fry (C. Berry, Voice and the Actor [1973]). It is not only voices which have suffered that make themselves intrusively heard over the fictional content a performer wishes to convey, but also those which are inexperienced. G. Bloom, in her study of Elizabethan stage vocality (Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England [2007]), points out that boys’ voices were particularly susceptible to cracking and disrupting the illusion of femininity, a comic possibility exploited by contemporary playwrights. The voice indeed functions as an index of bodily condition, but onstage the discrepancy between the material condition of the actor and the supposed condition of the character is one that would bear further anatomisation.
B.’s analysis of poetic texts as vocally instructive is likewise affirmed in the domain of performance theory and practice. Connection with the verbal content of a script, especially one in which the language is stylised (‘heightened’), is predicated on bodily absorption of its sound-patterns. For director Jean-Louis Barrault, Racine's tragic language functions as a score, a visceral ‘incantation’ of plosives, fricatives and cries enclosing an alexandrine heartbeat, his Phèdre ‘une symphone pour ochestre d'acteurs’ in which Phèdre is the dramatic soprano, Hippolyte the tenor, Thesée the baritone (J.-L. Barrault, Phèdre de Jean Racine: mise en scène et commentaires [1946], p. 22). Classical texts and their translations contain traces not only of their inherent musicality and vocal dynamics, but also of the movements prompted by their arrangement on the page and their demands on breath and bone (S. Harrop, ‘Physical Performance and the Languages of Translation’ in E. Hall & S. Harrop [edd.], Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice [2010], pp. 232–40). The voice that B. recovers from theatrical text could be further amplified by the testimony of theatrical practitioners.
B.’s final chapter argues that the devices exploited by Cicero to convert oration into a written medium enabled paralinguistic content to be encoded to an unparalleled degree. Tone, in other words, became style. ‘You can write Latin prose or Italian verse that sounds different from Cicero's or Petrarch's, but it is not easy, within the basic limits of decorum and sense, to make either medium make more sound than these two do’, B. observes (p. 171). Writers after Cicero ‘do not try to sound like Cicero; rather, they try to sound, like Cicero. That they usually wind up also sounding something like Cicero is a function of limits in the media they share with him’ (p. 195). Cicero effects a form of displacement, substituting for the fallible, excessive (but supposedly authentic) body the representational technology of written style and its illusion of iterability.
What B.’s elegant formulation permits is the coexistence of both the sublimity of vocal absence, nostalgia for the ‘Real’ – the unheard melodies, the lyre inaudible on Gellius’ wine-cup – and the cacophonous presence of actual voices, interrupted even as they are enlivened by materialisation in the indignity of an adolescent squawk or the pathos of Billie Holiday's Neronian rasp. Voice, throughout, is treated by B. as belonging to the individual, the solo vocalist self: the orator, the diva, the lyric poet. Chorality and the collective, tributary voice, however, is just as integral to tragedy as (it could be argued) it is to reception. Reception can be one-on-one, but its ‘erotics’, to borrow S. Sontag's term (quoted by B., p. 87), can also be promiscuously polyamorous; Echo calls you back not once, but many times; Narcissus, caught between two mirrors. There are as many voices as there are recipients, these flawed and fleshy playback devices, all of us more or less experienced, one way or another, more or less scitissimi. The Ancient Phonograph provides an approach to the concept of voice that deserves to reverberate throughout the study of Classical literature and its reception.
