Abstract
In the opening slow-motion sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the hyperreal, innocence of suburban America is drenched in an intense white light, only to be superseded by the darkness, mystery and evil of an entirely different world beneath. The film manages the transition between these two realms via the ear: the protagonist discovers a severed ear in a grassy patch of derelict land; the camera descends upon the ear and then into it, twisting down the coils and convolutions of that most complex of organs, whose anatomy is so difficult to visualize and, relative to the eye, so poorly understood.
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. x–xxix.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 86–7; emphasis in original.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, London: Macmillan, 1977, p. 6
Steven Connor, ‘The Ethics of the Voice’, in Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, eds, Critical Ethics: Text, Theory, and Responsibility, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 233.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 155.
Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976, p. 153.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Humanities Press, 1962, p. 187ff.
Steven Sweeney-Turner, The Sonorous Body: Music, Enlightenment & Deconstruction, University of Edinburgh, unpublished PhD thesis, 1994, s. 10.4, at http://www.cyberscotia.com (accessed 15 Feb. 2002, no longer available online).
Thomas Bernhard, Histrionics: Three Plays, trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Theatrical memories are long and the disaster of fire, as Alan Read has shown, has a totemic significance in the social history of the stage. See Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 228–36.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, London: Nick Hern Books, 1996, p. 106.
Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 1985.
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 283.
Ibid., p. 284.
Jacqueline Martin, The Voice in Modern Theatre, London: Routledge, 1990.
Patsy Rodenburg, The Actor Speaks: Voice and the Performer, London: Methuen Drama, 1997, p. 383.
See Edmund Myer, Vocal Reinforcement: A Practical Study of the Reinforcement of the Motive Power or Breathing Muscles, of the Resisting Force or Resistance in Singing, of Tone Color, of Correct Thought, of the Resonant Cavities, [etc.], New York: American Publishing, 1891.
Jonathan Reé, I See a Voice: a Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses, London: HarperCollins, 1999.
Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator, trans. Kenneth Northcott, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 2.
Andrew Bell, ‘Helmholtz’s Piano Strings: Reverberation of Ripples on the Tectorial Membrane’, Cogprints: Cognitive Sciences E-Prints Archive, University of Southampton, 2001.
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© 2011 Simon Bayly
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Bayly, S. (2011). The Tonic of the Sonic. In: A Pathognomy of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306936_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306936_9
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