19th Reading: Voice Devoured
So the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is about to launch Talk Show, which I would very much like to see. Seeing as that is not likely, barring small miracles, I have to make do with the Research and Documentation pages of their website (nothing yet on the Documentation page).
The Research page has essays, excerpts from longer works, video clips and other “specially-curated content.” Most look interesting so I’ve added the links on this page to my sh*t to read folder. The first piece is an extract from Mikhail Yampolsky’s Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing and essay that “explores the relationship between the voice and cannibalism.”
The selection only looks at Antonin Artaud. Now the thing you have to know about Artaud is that he was brilliant but also without a doubt bat shit crazy. That is not the way snotty intellectuals like to put it, but it is the way I like to put it. Keep this in mind. Yampolsky looks at Artaud’s article The Torments of dubbing, a piece about French actors dubbing American films for next to nothing. Yampolsky posits that this at first glance positive article is complicated by Artaud’s “mistrust of the audible word.”
Because Artaud wrote a now lost screenplay for The Dybbuck, Yampolsky asks us to imagine the dybbuk, a revengeful possessing spirit from Jewish legend, along side the character in a dubbed film. The dybbuk steals the voice of the live human it possesses, the film star steals the voice of the underpaid French actor.
According to Yampolsky there an overtly satantic subtext to the article on dubbing, which points to how “ghoulish” it is that dubbing snatches the personality or the soul (I’m paraphrasing here).
It all boils down to Artaud losing his mind over this “question of reciprocal alienation of voice and body.” The extract does not resolve anything but leaves us with the King of Differance Derrida restating Artuad’s dilemma.
If my speech is not my breath (souffle), if my letter is not my speech, this is because my spirit was already no longer my body, my body no longer my gestures, my gestures no longer my life. The integrity of the flesh torn by all these differences must be restored in the theatre.
All this assumes the reader is familiar with Artaud’s idea of the Theatre of Cruelty, as outlined in The Theatre and Its Double. Which I won’t go into much since it has been a while since I read it. But in sassy Sheila shorthand, Artaud wanted to slap the audience around a bit- with shocking lighting, sound, performance- and in this moment of SM fun and games, would somehow lead to “a kind of severe moral purity,” to the truth.
See more progress on: Read and/or research 30 things from my sh*t to read folder for April 09