For all the differences between their audiences and backgrounds, Rodenburg and Cavarero share much--not only philosophical presumptions but also rhetorical tactics. Both begin with evocations of the false voice, which is characterized as blandly aristocratic. (Compare Cavarero's opening treatment of the Calvino story to Rodenburg's biting description of the babbling London elite.) For both, however, the falsity of these voices is not an insidious trick, but a bald-faced lie; to the connoisseur of voice (a role they each claim), the voice can only tell the truth--even the truth of its own falsity. (For Rodenburg the voice is a "lie detector" [16]; for Cavarero, it cannot tell a lie [24]). For both, the true voice is arrived at through the body, especially the pre-linguistic body of the infant. And for both, the voice is not only "destined to speech" in general (as Cavarero often puts it), but destined to confessional, self-revelatory speech in particular. In fact, to hear Rodenburg tell it, she leaves a trail of weeping, confessing sex-crime survivors wherever she goes (see 87-8). These similarities should not, perhaps, be surprising. Although Rodenburg disavows it as the initial source for vocal work, they are both ultimately drawing on psychoanalytic thought--its hermeneutic of suspicion, its privileging of childhood experience, its confessionalism, etc.
For all the obvious similarities, though, there is also a major (though subtle) difference between their work. We might uncover it simply by asking, what is the quintessential mode of voice for each? For Cavarero, it is the phatic vocalization--that sort of verbal "pinging" that uses language simply to establish a relation. For Rodenburg, it is the urgent act of speech--not a "speech act" in the philosophical sense, but an vocal act so filled with doing that its vocalization equals its meaning (e.g., yelling "Stop!" to someone about to get run over by a car). Both modes render secondary the precise words spoken, but whereas Cavarero's phatic vocalization is entirely indifferent to the words that sustain it, Rodenburg's urgent speech only ditches the words once their vocalization has so perfectly captured their intent as to make them superfluous. Rodenburg's "voice" is interactional; Cavarero's, merely relational. In reacting against the grapho-centrism of Derrida, Cavarero simply goes too far in shaming the text. After all, as Rodenburg reminds us, we can "Make Sound and Sense" (7).
Nowhere is this virtuous circle between sound and sense (voice and logos) more evident than in Cavarero's case-in- point: poetic language. Despite Cavarero's claim that poetic words are chosen for "their metric value rather than their meaning" (80), no poet faces so binary a choice. In fact, the best poetic language occurs when metric value (and sound and tone and rhythm and mouth-feel) contributes to (or colors, or contradicts, but always lives in relation to) its meaning, and vice versa. In poetry, voice and logos aren't glaring at each other from across the room; they're dancing together. Paying attention to voice means watching, performing, and even choreographing this dance. In other words, I disagree with Cavarero's suggestion that "written discourse is an orphan" (209)--not only as it applies to poetry, but even moreso as it applies to dramatic texts, which are obviously designed to evoke, license, and restrain voices in such a way that voice and text mutually infect or enforce. We can absorb Cavarero's wonderful notion of the rhythmic, embodied, and unique voice without accepting her stark contrast of voice with text.
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