Barthes, Knight, Rodenburg, Cavarero: Tamsen Wolff (Princeton University)

All four authors are invested, implicitly or explicitly, in specific sound traveling from one mouth to another listening ear, as well as how a listener perceives a speaker’s vocalization. Barthes and Knight are arguably more generally concerned with the issue of inscribing vocality, describing, dissecting, and, in Knight’s case, teaching specific vocal sounds. Rodenburg and Cavarero focus their attention more on the individually embodied voice and, in Cavarero’s case, putting logos in its place. But the importance of a given listener’s perception of a voice informs all of the arguments made here, showing up in Knight’s description of Tilly’s groupies on the “beautiful” sounds his method demanded; Barthes’ subjective response to the voice of Panzera versus that of Fischer-Dieskau; Part One of Rodenburg’s argument in which she details the wide range of speaking habits that develop as a result of listeners’ judgments; and Cavarero’s belief that to consider vocal expression without considering the reciprocity of speech and listening is untenable. At the same time, the dual emphasis on speaking and listening in these texts contains curious floating assumptions about vocal truthfulness, or the question of what the distinctive voice reveals to the listening ear, and how the voice can be termed (as these authors variously do) “neutral,” “inauthentic,” “false,” or “true.” I’m interested in these claims, their points of overlap and divergence. When, for example, Cavarero refers to a “simple sonorous truth” (2), what does that mean? What could possibly be simple about the idea of truth or authenticity in vocal expression?

Cavarero provides an account of the entrenched hierarchy in philosophy between speech (semantics) and voice (phonics), placing an emphasis on the embodied singularity of the voice, and offering “a vocal ontology of uniqueness,” which is apparently new to philosophy. It’s not new to anyone who works in voice from a practical standpoint, as is clear from Knight’s approach to actors’ existing vocal histories and Rodenburg’s basic premise that an individual’s background and self is exposed in his or her voice. Not unlike Cavarero, Barthes embraces the geno-song (phonic) over the pheno-song (semantic), although he also makes Cavarero’s point for her about theory’s traditional rejection of the individual body in several ways, none more entertaining than his dismissal of the universally stupid lung. The idea of the “grain” even seems in part a way to bypass the question of the body in addressing the voice; or at least the grain of the voice cannot be reduced to the body, or to specific bodies.

Theoretically and practically, it seems to me straightforward that voices are unique, embodied, and rely on specific listeners, real or imagined. Rodenburg, who attends to the rights of the speaking person to be heard for who they are, stresses that there are no bad voices, only bad habits. According to Rodenburg, a person’s voice is always true to who he or she is, whether that voice is remarkably “free” of repressive habits or a complicated reflection of various forces that have adversely affected it. Knight is similarly interested in preventing the obfuscation or neutralization of sounds any one speaker instinctively wants to make or could potentially make. Both criticize the alleged “beautiful” or “neutral” sounds of a BBC or aristocratic voice (Rodenburg) or World or Standard English (Knight). Both are primarily concerned with opening up vocal potential, beginning with the body and the possibilities of expressive sound and moving toward comprehensible speech.

But when Cavarero wants to establish the primacy of embodied phonics, she does so in part by contrasting the deceptiveness of language with the truth of the voice. Moreover, the singular voice, unlike speech, “plays no trick…but rather unmasks the speech that masks it” (24). This sounds like a lot of work for the voice. And why if a voice is singular may it not also deceive? Why does the first preclude the second? Is singularity synonymous with truthfulness in this argument, and if so, could the opposite also be true? Like Tolstoy’s families (all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way), do all false voices sound the same whereas every true voice sounds distinctive?

This is the case in Cavarero’s first example, Calvino’s story “A King Listens,” in which all the voices of the court are heard by the King as a wash of false sounds, before the sole voice of an unseen woman singing registers what Cavarero describes as the “simple sonorous truth.” Indeed, almost all of the examples of the truth-telling power of the voice in Cavarero—from the pivotal character in Calvino to the Sirens to opera singers—are female singers. While the speaking voice is revealing, as Rodenburg would affirm, for Cavarero the singing voice attests definitively “to the truth of the vocal” (6). The power of singing is so far privileged here that Cavarero claims, “no woman is more mute than a woman who loses her singing voice” (119). This distinction between speaking and singing truthfulness is similar to the way in which speech, song, and dance in musical theatre often function in a hierarchy of authentic affect. A character becomes most articulate and emotionally truthful in song and dance (and characters are not necessarily in charge of their revealing, intuitive singing and dancing selves). This truth-telling narrative convention also dovetails with the exposure of a performer’s ability, which is revealed principally in song.

I don’t think there’s a question that aspects of who we are as individuals are revealed in our voices, and even in our breathing, but whether that information can be read clearly or accurately by anyone else is another story entirely, so the question of truth and the truth of what is revealed vocally seems nebulous at best. With all her listening experience, Rodenburg, for example, perhaps would have greater powers of perception than most. Yet, as Barthes puts it, emphasizing the singularity of the listener at least: “This phonetics—am I alone in perceiving it?... isn’t the truth of the voice to be hallucinated?” (184). Certainly the ear that hears is every bit as individual as the voice that speaks.

Barthes and Knight Response: Marlene Johnson (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

It has been twenty years since I have had to read Roland Barthes. A few key concepts arise for me in this reading, particularly his borrowed dichotomy between the “geno-text” and the “pheno-text”--what Cavarero in a somewhat clearer elaboration throughout her book calls the dichotomy between the “phonic” and the “semantic.” In seeking to articulate an idea that is, to use Barthes’ words, “ineffable”, i. e. the “grain” of the voice, he does not altogether clarify his meaning, but manages to obfuscate it. He is reduced to describing “grain” as “a space of encounter,” “a thrill,” “something directly in the cantor’s body,” “not original, yet individual,” something akin to the “geno-song” which “works at…the voluptuousness of its sound signifiers.” In contrast to this voice is the voice of the Culture—which according to Barthes requires its art to be clear, to translate an emotion, and to represent a meaning—“an art that inoculates pleasure (by reducing it to a known, coded emotion.)” A recent visit to a well-known Shakespeare Festival left me implicitly understanding this. The actors were precise, clear in their storytelling, and predictable. The show left me feeling bored and disengaged, even though it was fine professional work. Something deeper, something ineffable which could move and excite was lacking. The work did not seem to be connected to impulse or to flow from deep within the performer’s bodies.

This dichotomy between the moving phonic and the rule-governed semantic appears in Knight’s discussion of the history of William Tilley’s stranglehold on speech training (which did not truly include voice production) that came to be called first “World English” and later “Good Speech” with its sense of prescriptive, unchallenged superiority and a basis in “RP colonialism.” Knight lays out a model of a different kind of speech training that allows the performer to explore all kinds of sounds as opposed to the adjectival codes of “standard,” “cultivated,” “cultured,” “intelligent”--the codes of Good Speech—which Barthes might claim are lacking in depth and grain. Knight now regularly teaches this exploration model so that all sounds become available to the performer rather than only certain prescribed ones. The performer is then free to choose from a wide palette of sounds to create distinct dialects or characters.

The provoking question “Are we condemned to the adjective? Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable?” is one that compels me. In many ways my teaching of voice and body work in Alexander Technique—as well as acting methodologies in general—is seeking to ask this same question while trying to articulate something that is essentially ineffable. How do we balance technique, methodologies with the subject matter that is in essence ineffable, impulsive, and alive to get to the embodied grain?

I have used the Knight article before when teaching classes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I found it useful to give students a context for what they were studying. I read sections of the Barthes article aloud to my husband and both of us found Barthes to be murkier (there’s that adjective!) and seemingly purposely obscure. Since I don’t spend much time with Barthes, it is not surprising that I do not readily speak his language.

All of this raises for me other questions that are occurring while reading Cavarero’s dense and excellent account which pieces together from where and how this semantic preferencing has come into its insistent superiority over the practical, grained, embodied, “mother tongue.” I find it interesting that Barthes calls the lungs a stupid organ that gets no erection along with his degrading breath work in general. Compare his contentions concerning the lungs/breath with Cavarero’s points particularly in the chapter “When Lungs did the Vocalizing.” I am left to wonder how much breath work or impulse training Roland Barthes ever had. This to me points up some issues with theorizing—that too often the practical, the experiential, and the embodiment can get left out of the academic philosophical discussion of voicing and speaking.

Barthes and Knight: Marti Newland (Columbia University)

Both Barthes (1972) and Knight (1997) contribute to answering the question: How do we develop a language to analyze and teach vocal sounds with specificity? In “The Grain,” Barthes challenges the limits of language in interpreting music, a move that remains important among other structuralist-to-poststructuralist thinkers of the 1970s. With similar concerns about language use in musical interpretation, Norma McLeod, for example, argued for the centrality of musico-linguistic anthropology in her article “Ethnomusicology Research and Anthropology”(1974). What then accounts for “The Grain” becoming a seminal text in cultural studies? Barthes’ argument to change the musical object in studies of singing—from “music and language” to “language and voice” is the crucial contribution to this scholarship. Two of Barthes’ terms, “voice” and “grain,” however, could be more accurate in representing his ideas. (Vocal) sound is perhaps a better term for what Barthes intends in this use of “voice.” The sonic properties of speaking and singing can inform listeners about genre, ethnicity, and nationality in ways distinct from devocalized language. I agree with Barthes that these sounds are the object of inquiry in studies of singing, but the term “grain” to connote the speaking and singing products of vocal sounds seems unnecessary to me. While the term conjures materiality in vocal sound, attention to vocal mechanics is more accurate in addressing the materiality of singing.

Despite Barthes’ use of “voice” and “grain,” this essay is a foundation for the emerging field of vocal anthropology, lead by Steven Feld. Expanding on Barthes’ claims, Feld stresses to two prominent discourses about vocal sounds: the phenomenological (embodiment of spoken and sung performance) and the metaphoric (voice as a representational trope for power). Along with Aaron Fox (1994), Feld expands Barthes’ apparatus for analysis of music and language (Kristeva’s pheno-text/song and geno-text/song) into four categories: music as language, language in music, music in language and language about music. Barthes’ essay helped to open the critical conversation about music and language and I find the essay pedagogically useful in tracing the trajectory of the field.

The development of speech standards for American theater performance is (very) unfortunately understudied in Ethnomusicology. I find Knight’s overview significant for scholars and vocal pedagogues in many ways: 1) The fraught relationship between written and vocalized texts in elocution continues to emerge in anxieties about class and status on American stages. Inaccurate orthography is especially rampant in American art songs utilizing regional dialects. Better understanding the historical role of elocution in theater could strengthen current analyses of speaking and singing. 2) Knight’s suggestions for the future are not only worthy of vocal pedagogues’ consideration, but voice studies scholars as well. If Barthes were to follow Knight’s recommendation to isolate vocal sound change before prescribing a pattern (or genre norm) in his analysis of Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau recordings, I think that he would listen more closely to each singers’ use of his articulators and his timbre. Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau, or any vocalist, always already participate in pheno-song (the sound of the words) and geno-song (the timbre of one’s voice), but not necessarily in direct correlation with one’s first language (or class, or status, or ethnicity, etc) as Barthes explains. Listening for vocal sound change before language or musical genre norms foregrounds laryngeal function and stresses performativity, denaturalizing vocal sounds or “grain” from a vocalists’ subject position. 3) Finally, Knight’s celebration of narrow phonetic (print) transcription, though its use in the Tilly classroom proved painful for many students, helps us move closer to Barthes’ desire for a way to inscribe vocal sound on the page.

Observations on Barthes and Knight: Derek Miller (Stanford University)

Reading these two essays, I was struck by several issues, on each of which I will touch briefly. The first point is how different these essays are in their functions and in their approaches to voice. Barthes’ essay is addressed to music critics, philosophers, semioticians, and the rest of the cadre of intellectuals who engage with critical theory. Barthes is concerned that music criticism (and, I infer, writing on sound in general) fails to account for aesthetic, non-linguistic signification. Knight, of course, is writing to practitioners of voice training, offering a history and a critique of World English, and proposing principles for a more productive speech training, particularly for actors. The theory/practice divide between these two essays is thus extremely clear, and, in this respect, the essays make excellent touchstones for our conversation. However, the essays also emphasize different functions of the voice that may provide a key to thinking about the difference between theory and practice. Knight is ultimately concerned with speech, with phonetics, with enunciation, with dialect. In short, Knight writes about all the culturally encoded elements of spoken language that Barthes rejects as part of the pheno-song. For Barthes, what is interesting in a voice, the grain, is not something learned or acculturated, rather it is in and of and from the body. (Knight’s interest in speech training that allows an actor the flexibility to express character and his or her own identity within a standard dialect is the closest he comes to connecting sound and body.) Using these two approaches to home in on the theory/practice tension, I would ask: is what theory values in voice that which cannot be taught, which cannot be rehearsed, but only performed? Or, to invert the question, does practice demand nomination and indexation of sound in a manner that theory (or post-structuralist theory) necessarily rejects?

The second point of interest is the hidden voices behind these writers. For instance, I had occasion recently to read Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable, and that author’s friendship with and influence in Barthes was extremely clear to me in reading the latter’s essay. (The influence extends to Barthes’ praise for Fauré, a Jankélévtich favorite.) Barthes is, of course, always in extended dialogue with multiple authors, some of whom receive explicit citation (in this essay, Kristeva, Saussure), while others remain in the background, though clearly present in their vocabulary (Lacan, Jankélévitch). But Barthes’ writing rarely gives way to the language of others, his authorial voice (consistently transmitted by Richard Howard’s English translations) is clear and strong, if his ideas are occasionally obscure. Knight, by contrast, follows a more usual scholarly path of precise notation (footnotes), and his writing, while crisp and coherent, has relatively little character. (The joke about the Mid-Atlantic native speakers who call for help “faintly, but very very clearly” was a charming exception (179).) I am tempted, then, to say that “grain”, in the sense of that which eludes notation and is not allied with clarity of communication, is not something peculiar to voice, but is present in writing as well. Barthes is full of grain; Knight has relatively little. Knight’s writing is strong on pheno-song; Barthes emphasizes geno-song. In this sense, then, both essays are exemplary performances of that which they value in voice.

Third and finally, I hope that we can spend some time discussing voice and class. This was an extremely well-told element of Knight’s story, and Barthes struck me, this time, as very much in conversation with Adorno (particularly the paragraphs about grain and long-playing records). Voice is, of course, very much about class. (My father consciously eliminated some Pittsburgh inflections from his speech when he attended graduate school.) But is class merely expressed in the markers of dialect that can be transcribed in IPA? Or does the grain that Barthes admires also express class? Barthes hints, elusively, that grain might offer a way out of the elitist admiration for Schoenberg and Webern on which Adorno insisted. But is not Barthes’ own admiration for French mélodie (rather than German lied) itself a highly nationalist and classist preference. (Indeed the nationalist element is almost laughably strong.) Barthes’ argument about Panzera--that his voice’s “marginal, mandarin” status allowed him to transcend its bourgeois function--is exactly the argument that Adorno makes about Schoenberg. Similarly, as much as Knight wishes to avoid the overtly racist and nationalistic overtones of Standard Speech, any advocacy for voice training that serves a canonical repertoire necessarily reinforces that canon’s importance. It is, of course, far easier to throw stones than to build new houses, and I recognize that criticism of Knight and Barthes on these points ignores the sensitivity with which they approach class. But I remain unsettled about voice and class, and reading these essays together left me more uncertain than ever about how even to begin a conversation on this topic.

Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” and Knight’s “Standard Speech: The Ongoing Debate”: Laura Dougherty (Winthrop University)

I’m taken with Barthes’ suggestion of the grain of the voice as a space, (the space of encounter), a generative and germinating space, for how spatializing the production of voice, of mapping the movement enacted in that “encounter between a language and a voice” can work to express the gravity of voice. As we on this panel are all (presumably) invested and interested in the voice as a subject of practice and/or theoretical investigation, I need not argue here for the notion of just how weighty a subject and practice voice and speech is. In my research and practice with voice and speech, I am interested in how the practice of voice and speech offers or excludes access to our USAmerican stages (using “stage” broadly—playing space, as if any one place in/on which a performance happens is someone made a stage). I grapple with the questions of which stories in what style can be told on our stages because of an expected and presumed “neutral” voice, and for whose consumption. In this I think about the texts we produce, the actors who can perform in them and the audiences who have access to our performances because of that space created by voice.

While I appreciate Knight’s attention to the intricate role class has played in the genealogy of the practice of voice and speech in the US, I take exception with his notion that a sought-after “neutrality” “is actually merely anonymous” (178). Thinking of voice, as Bathes suggests, as a place where “significance explodes”, there is nothing anonymous in this presumed neutrality. Whose “neutral”? I am struck with how deeply steeped in identity markers of race, class, education, economic status and regional affiliation and citizenship any presumed “neutrality” is.

As I approach and work with voice and speech in scholarship and practice, I then turn my thinking to how I teach voice and speech given the gravity of the grain, the generative space of encounter of the voice (mindful of the specific trajectory of voice and speech practice and pedagogy in the US). This is of particular significance now to me as I teach voice and speech in South Carolina (and hail from the Boston area)—place plays a huge role in pedagogy, given the tension around southern dialects. (I can draw from this experience if our conversation moves toward pedagogy; I mention it here just to foreground my current moment in thinking and practice.)

[Untitled]: Andrew Kimbrough (University of Kentucky)

For me the story of the voice in the twentieth century—at least as heard in what we call, for better or worse, the “west”—may be summed up in the tensions Dudley Knight points to between the textual perspective of William Tilly and his ilk, and the perspective afforded the rest of us glued to our radios, TVs, and cell phones. At first glance we may find perverse the number of educators at the beginning of the last century who championed a correct way of speaking English that no group of English speakers actually employed. Or that such a fictitious manner of spoken English actually became a preferred manner of speech on respectable theatre stages. So while Knight makes a few passing gestures, I think a fuller exploration of the material factors that created this interesting and bizarre cultural artifact still could be teased out. Theatre critics and historians Bruce McConachie and Tobin Nellhaus have got us started with useful models of investigation in recent publications (see McConachie, American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War, 2006, and Nellhaus, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism, 2010).

Both employ contemporary versions of what is known as the Toronto School of Communication Theory, which had its genesis in the 1940s with economist Harold Innis of the University of Toronto. Innis proposed that human forms of thought and expression are in some respects dictated by dominant media of language use, be they oral, written, printed, or electronic. Marshall McLuhan did most to give the theory traction in the 60s, but because McLuhan quickly came to be viewed publicly as a crank and a shameless self-promoter, the theory fell out of the limelight—though it still could be found here and there in popular and scholarly discourses (see Kristin Linklater’s Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, for example). Bolstered in part by empirical studies in cognition, however, the theory is gaining in credence. It seems evidence exists to confidently propose that British and US societies at the end of the 1800s, after centuries of the cognitive conditioning afforded by writing and print, would actually envision, rather than hear, an idealized version of spoken English. Given the rapid incursion of electronic forms of communication in the twentieth century, however, the arch-textual perspective cultivated in the nineteenth century would give way to cognitive nodes of orality introduced through radio, telephone, records and cassette tapes, movies, and the computer. Thanks to electronics, the voice is making a comeback.

In discussing the voice Roland Barthes unwittingly skirts the textual/oral divide. Pheno-text derives from what can be studied optically: the verbal score and all that can be represented and dissected in writing. The geno-text, on the other hand, evades the discursive strategies indebted to the eye. The geo-text attends to the ear and those spaces of our psyche still attuned to the resonance of being communicated through sound. Along this line, Barthes completely misinterprets the impact of the phonograph and adopts instead the dread and negativity typical of pundits who value dated and cumbersome technologies as somehow superior to new and popular inventions (i.e., records and radio; see 184, 185, 187). He is unaware that electronic sound technologies have brought to his attention the existence of the geno-text in the first place. It would probably be blasphemous of me to suggest here that had Barthes been writing 70 years earlier he could easily have fallen in league with someone like Wm Tilly. But note his totally incongruous assertion, and non sequitur conclusion, that “what is produced at the level of the geno-text is finally writing” (185). Nothing of what he has written up to this point prepares for the leap of logic. Rather, Barthes relies on a truism of poststructural dogma that everything is textual, everything must be reducible to writing. Therefore, the argument must go, whatever we may think we perceive in the geno-text that resists language has to be a fiction; rather, as Barthes says later, something merely “shifts” in the “chain of the signifier” (187). For Barthes, the grain, that which should escape signification, is simply “the emergence of the text in the work” (188).

Fortunately we have approached a time in our (western) cultural history when the incursion of electronic forms of communication has greatly diminished the influence of textuality and encouraged new forms of expression, thought, and inquiry. We could not even discuss the voice outside of pedagogic concerns ten or twenty years ago because as a subject it was unnoted (notice the complete dearth of publications that theorize the voice compared to the plethora of speech manuals). Even Barthes ends his essay on an ambiguous note because, after all considerations of language and text, the body is still there. He ends up where Knight ends up, beckoning authentic voices. So at this point I am curious to know what is it about—for lack of a better term—the phenomenal dimension of the voice that they and others hanker after? Do we have a language with which we can discuss this dimension, or will it always resist language?

Performance Criticism—only without the performance: Christopher Grobe (Yale University)

What does Barthes’s essay have to say to a performer? It seems to me (if I may wax polemical) not much. The performer is excluded from Barthes’s regime because human agency is itself excluded. Notice the metallic and mechanistic metaphors that dominate every positive description of voice in action: “phonic metal hardens” (183), consonants are “patinated” (184), and vowels are “electronic” (184). Even an organic image like the “single skin lin[ing] the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings” (181-2) quickly gives way to the fleshless interplay of semiotic systems. In one of the essays many eerie personifications “melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work” (182). Melody explores; it identifies. The performer is nowhere to be seen. Or rather, there is a propped-up carcass and there is a melody/language, but in between, Barthes allows only the metallic, the robotic, the cybernetic.

This blindspot in Barthes’s thinking reminds me of the anti-theatrical bias common among scholars in one of my own specialty fields: the performance of poetry. The poet-critic Charles Bernstein, in his influential book Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, coins the term “aurality” (defined as “the sounding of the writing” as opposed to “orality and its emphasis on breath, voice, and speech” [13]) precisely in order to allow authorize the critic’s direct access to the fleshless “performances” of text itself.

However different they may be in their particulars, the theories of Barthes and Bernstein both generally rely on creating a vast, excluded middle. There is nothing, for either of them, between the cellular materiality of the body and the rarefied play of language. Look at how Barthes's parallel between “deep down in the cavities” of the cantor’s body and “deep down in [his] Slavonic language” (182) erases everything more out-in-the-world than tonsils or more down-to-earth than language-as-such. (Bernstein-ian critics, much like Barthes, always profess an interest in the body, while only admitting the minimum amount of well-hidden flesh necessary to experience transcendent texts. That is, to hear them describe it, lung/larynx/tongue-cooperatives perform for ear/brain- combines. After all, anything more would risk “emotive modes” and “expressive reduction” [Barthes 183, 184].) It is a mindset born of listening to recordings—of hearing machines “perform,” and every time the same. I contend that the vast majority of performance studies, of theater studies, and of voice training lie somewhere in this excluded middle.

Knight powerfully critiques “neutrality” and “clarity” as tacit standards of voice training, and in doing so, he might seem to agree with Barthes’s disdain for pheno-typical conventions. I doubt, though, that Barthes would escape his criticism. The idea of “grain”—when it even refers to an actual body producing actual sound, rather than a "grain" producing “writing” [185]—smacks of the reductivism/minimalism that most worries Knight. If only, Barthes cries, we could strip away the drab conventions of “dramatic expressivity” and adjectival musicality, we might get down to the direct and orgasmic encounter between “inner flesh” and outermost “language." (And there's supposed to be "perversion" [187] somewhere in this coupling between the Father's “phallic stature” and the “mother tongue” [182]? All I see is a heterosexual, intramarital screw.) I can see Knight raising an eyebrow at Barthes. I paraphrase him here, with bracketed substitutions from Barthes:

To suggest, as [Roland Barthes] does, that [the grain of the voice “is directly the cantor’s body”] is to suggest that all [pheno-typical structure and meaning] would be released magically if only [the “adjectival” conventions of expression and interpretation] could be released. But released into what? (Knight 180)

Well, into writing. Ultimately, the imperatives of criticism guide Barthes’s theories—to the exclusion of performance. Granted, he may only mean to “check [our] attempts at expressive reduction” (184) and avoid “reducing [the voice] to a known coded emotion” (185)—i.e., to defer the rush to familiar meanings. Sure, "The Grain of the Voice" may be a grain of salt, but it tastes like a salt-lick to me. As I stop to taste my own argument, though, I wonder: perhaps this is just the price we pay for polemic. If so, I apologize for my own brine.