'Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing' by Mikhail Yampolsky
An extract from Mikhail Yampolsky's 1993 essay, which explores the relationship between the voice and cannibalism.
Antonin Artaud's article ‘Les souffrances du "dubbing"' (The Torments of Dubbing) appears to have been written in 1933.[1] Discovered soon after his death, it was published posthumously. At first glance, it appears to be a straightforward vindication of those French actors who sold their voices for pittances to American film companies engaged in dubbing their own productions for the foreign market. A closer look at the text will, however, reveal a connection between ‘Les souffrances du "dubbing"' and a whole constellation of aesthetic issues that transcend the narrow limits of the essay's ostensible topic.
On April 19, 1929, Artaud wrote to Yvonne Allendy to inform her that he was completing work on the screenplay for the film The Dybbuk, which was to contain ‘sound fragments': "I have decided to introduce sound and even talking portions into all my screenplays since there has been such a push toward the talkie that in a year or two no one will want silent films any more."[2] The script of The Dybbuk did not survive, but its very title is highly suggestive. A dybbuk is a character in Jewish folklore, a person inhabited by the spirit of someone who has died and who speaks through the mouth of that person. The ghost of the deceased torments the living person, causing him to writhe and to rave, forcing him to blaspheme against his will. This folkloric character obviously recapitulates, in its own way, the problematic of dubbing, though in an inverted form: in dubbing, the film star diverts the live actor of his voice: through the dybbuk, the voice of the deceased inhabits a living body.
Nevertheless, in both cases the situation remains much the same; the voice resides in someone else's body. Given his love for anagrams and of glossolalia, Artaud might well have identified one with the other, purposely retaining the foreign, English spelling of the word dubbing: dubbing - dibbouk.[3] The overtly satanic subtext of an article about dubbing, which is about something "thoroughly ghoulish" - the snatching of the personality, of the soul - is crucial.
The question of the reciprocal alienation of voice and body was by no means an academic one for Artaud; rather, it struck to the very core of the artistic problems that confronted him, tormented him, and, in the end, drove him to insanity. For Artaud the mistrust of the audible word - the word that exists prior to its utterer - is central. Its origins are obscure, for it is as if prompted and spoken by someone else - a predecessor - and in it the speaker loses his identity. The word is always a repetition; it never originates from within the body of the speaker. If Artaud strives to implant the word in the body, in breathing, in gesture, it is in order to restore the corporeality and individuality of its source. We must prevent "the theft of the word". Jacques Derrida describes Artaud's dilemma as follows: "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."[4]
Extract from Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing', trans. Larry P. Joseph, October, Vol. 64 (Spring, 1993), pp. 57-77
[1] Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3Gallimard, Paris, 1978, pp. 85-87.
[2] Ibid., p. 151.
[3] For a discussion of Artaud's anagrams, see Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘O stat'e Grazhiny Shimchik- Kliushchchinskoi', Kinovedcheskie zapiski 9 (1991), pp. 129-33.
[4] Jacque Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, p. 179.