Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Ancient Phonograph by Shane Butler
Shane Butler’s excellent new book makes a startlingly counterintuitive proposal: ancient literature is a medium for the voice. Butler puts this in a number of different ways, claiming, for example, that “literature may best be regarded as the use of language itself as a medium [sic], for the recording of something not linguistic at all” (24). This “something not linguistic” is voice: “the classical literary text emerged, in antiquity, not in spite of voices, or even for the voice’s sake, but as voice, written” (26); moreover, he claims that “the text is a vocal artifact that [End Page 555] cannot be reduced to language” (56). Butler never gives a straight-out definition of “voice,” but an eloquent early passage gives a strong hint at what he means:
We really do feel some very important emotions in our (racing) hearts and (quickening) breath and (tightening) throats, and we really do hear their effects not only in our own voices but also in those of others. Deep down, this is why Aristotle compares what is “in the voice” and what is “in the soul” to two halves of the same fractured matter: sometimes our hearts and our voices seem to break in precisely the same place. These are, of course, exceptional events, but they point us to the broader truth that speech is not simply something we use but, rather, something that happens to us, in us, in the Promethean clay of our bodies, whether that resonance is in our ears or in our deeper middles, generated by other souls or our own. Voice is the name we give to that event
(50).
Somehow, this passionate coincidence of heart and voice is communicated even in written texts. He means this literally: you are in the presence of Ovid’s voice, or Cicero’s voice, et al., when you read their texts. The reason this sounds preposterous, he thinks, is that we expect a voice to be something singular, something belonging to an individual and preserved with phonographic fidelity. Butler thinks there are a number of reasons we should not think of voices in this way: (1) even phonographs degrade and change what they record, so it is no objection that ancient writing doesn’t tell us what the voices of Cicero or Ovid “actually” sounded like; and (2) the voice that is recorded in ancient writing is not an individual voice but rather a general voice—not “a” voice, not “voices,” but “the voice.” Cicero’s voice and Ovid’s voice (and all the others in this capacious volume) are simply media of that coalescence of heart and breath he speaks of in the passage just quoted, which is utterly impersonal and common to all. Thus, in the well-known conclusion to the Metamorphoses, in which Ovid boasts or predicts that he will be “read by the mouth of the people” (ore legar populi), we are reminded of the fact that
the perceived specificity of the embodied voice need not always correspond to a radical specificity of its vocalizing bodies. Anticipating, in jarringly imperialist terms, the more benign Renaissance postulation of a “republic of letters,” (res publica litterarum), Ovid imagines Roman conquest as the manufacture of media players.
(74)
Those “media players” are human beings: ancient education, thinks Butler, was the site of the production of “playback machines” capable of generating the voices of the poets (and orators); he calls this “controlling for consistency among readers” (25), and he thinks it is central not only to the vocal transmission of ancient literature but also to the performance of modern opera (109–10).
The argument begins from the interface of body and breath in Aristotle’s theory of vocal production, leading to the claim (contra Derrida) that the voice is a passionate medium communicable as such through writing. Chapter 2 turns to Ovid and urges us to listen to the Metamorphoses as a resonant embodiment of Ovid’s voice (and, indeed, of Ovid’s self). Chapter 3 argues for the centrality [End Page...
