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The Rhetoric of Seduction; Or Materiality Under Erasure

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The Rhetoric of Seduction; Or Materiality Under Erasure Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020 The Rhetoric of Seduction; or Materiality under Erasure MARCUS R. PYLE She doesn’t “speak,” she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the “logic” of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. —Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text And what is more sensual and significant than gapes? . It is intermittence, as psychoanalysis the body? Even a body laid bare still obscures has so rightly pointed out, which is erotic.”1 parts of itself. It is impossible to view a wholly Perhaps this tactical manipulation of the body constituted body all at once. From a catalogue is a way female characters in opera regain auton- of angles and perspectives, the viewer is left to omy within narratives that render their bodies piece the body together—the gaze tires itself try- partial.2 The body-in-pieces, instead, becomes ing to capture the body in toto. Is the body, then, only ever fully grasped via synecdoche? What happens when someone strategically deploys 1Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975 [1973]), 9–10. the fragmented body in order to seduce, ensnare, 2 “ Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, or entice? Roland Barthes asks, Is not the most trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota erotic portion of a body where the garment Press, 1988). 194 19th Century Music, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 194–208. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN: 1533-8606 © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/reprints-permissions. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2020.43.3.194. weaponized. The voice, deployed as material Nietzsche puts forth a theory that the “material MARCUS R. PYLE appendage, represents itself as whole, seemingly world, including the body, is nothing other than Rhetoric of without acknowledging its component parts the flux of . appearances.”4 With Carmen,an Seduction (resonant cavities, tongue placement).3 It emits aesthetic and epistemic shift that rejects invisi- itself from the body and penetrates the ear of bility becomes tantamount to opera. The drama the other; or, in Lacanian speak, it launches onstage is viewed as what Nietzsche described one body into the body of an other. Thus, in an as “bodily permeabilities and a communication act of strategic narrative essentialism, the char- through impulse and force, gesture and move- acter becomes more than what the composer or ment.”5 From this, we begin to see the (proto-) author imagined. modernist femme fatale as she who embraces To say “rhetoric of seduction” is to discuss the fragmentation of the Self and launches her the language of the body—a textualized, mate- body into the bodies of Others. In order to rial body, a body that speaks itself into existence, seduce, the femme fatale must fragment herself a body that penetrates its listening objects with and disseminate herself. The femme fatale is its voice. It is my intention, by focusing on she who uses her voice as body, as material, to femmes fatales’ episodes of seduction, to reeval- seize upon the other, crack herself up, and infil- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020 uate the material manipulation of the voice. By trate sites of restricted access—the orchestra understanding voice, considered here as a mate- and the motivic material of other characters.6 rial bodily appendage, we can begin to under- Carmen traces the life of the eponymous ciga- stand how the femme fatale uses the force of rette worker who exemplifies the travels and tra- her voice to exploit the symbolic boundaries of vails of life as a smuggler and fugitive and who authorial agency. That is to say, by voicing, the lures the soldier Don José into a messy love tri- femme fatale becomes wholly subjective in a angle. Ultimately, propelled by machismo and way that contends with authorial agency and ardor, Don José stabs Carmen to death while the narratological apparatuses that seek to rele- musing, “I was the one who killed her! / Ah! gate her to the condition of a mere object. The Carmen! My adored Carmen!”7 In the world of femme fatale, wielding her body—her voice, opera, the femme fatale trope peaked during her hips, her eyes—and reclaiming or essential- the fin de siècle—specifically within the period izing its synecdochic portrayal, becomes her from 1875 to 1937, beginning with the produc- ownsiteofauthorship. tion of Carmen and ending with Alban Berg’s Throughout this article, I will address two Lulu. Though Carmen inaugurates, sonically operatic women—Carmen and Salome. My rea- and textually, many of the tropes that come to sons for choosing Georges Bizet’s Carmen be utilized in depictions of the femme fatale, it (1875) as a precursor to modernist femmes fa- is Salome that thrusts the fatal woman in the tales, most especially Richard Strauss’s Salome consciousness of everyday life—spawning global (1905), are provoked by Nietzsche—“the middle Salomania. For Salome is considered the man,” so to speak. Nietzsche, who by the pre- miere of Carmen had grown disenchanted by Wagner, saw Bizet’s opera as the aesthetic and 4 philosophical standard bearer of opera. Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 116. Nietzsche, as Gary Tomlinson contends, rejects 5Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter the “metaphysics” of Wagner (by which he Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §1067. means the lofty philosophical underpinnings) in 6“ ” “ ” Voice is framed throughout this article as bodily material- favor of opera that dances and foregrounds ity, an extension of the body, a “vocal appendage.” the body as a site of subjectivity. Tomlinson Understanding voice as an extension of the body—either as argues that with this move to bodily materiality, appendage or as bodily fluid—has roots in voice studies theo- rists such as Brandon LaBelle, Kaja Silverman, Emily Wilbourne, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Janet Beizer, the latter of whom traces depictions of the voice as bodily fluid (especially female bodily fluid) in Romantic French liter- 3Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and ature by Bachelard and Flaubert. Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (New York: 7“C’est moi qui l’ai tuée! Ah! Carmen! Ma Carmen Bloomsbury, 2014), 1. adorée!” (act IV, sc. 27). 195 19TH seductress and femme fatale par excellence.The body, through a voicing-body. Their femmes CENTURY eponymous character is a virginal young prin- MUSIC fatales are wholly reconceived as representative cess, enamored of the incendiary prophet John of subjectivity. the Baptist, who is kept hostage in her stepfa- Examples of voice as an index of subjectivity ther’s, Herod’s, cistern. Her insatiable desire for or presence can clearly be found in Carmen; John the Baptist, and his unceasing rejection of Carmen’s singing voice and dancing body stub- her flirtations, leads Salome to seek alternate bornly refuse to be implicated in a system of means of possessing his body. She performs a excessive lack. Instead, Carmen links singing striptease, the “Dance of the Seven Veils” for to thought and rationality—hers is a phone Herod, and in return demands the head of John semantike, a signifying voice. (We may then the Baptist on a silver charger. In considering ask what exactly Carmen’s voice signs off on these two operas, I will be concerned with the or, rather, signs out of.) We see this phenomenon specific deployment of woman, as seductress again in Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1877) and femme fatale, in opera generally during the where Samson experiences the ecstasy of being late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. inhabited by the “misleading voice” (voix By focusing closely on two scenes, the mensongère) of Dalila in her aria, “Mon coeur Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020 “Seguidilla” from Carmen,andthe“Dance of s’ouvre à ta voix.” In this aria Dalila weaponizes the Seven Veils” from Salome (1905), I will her voice as a material sexual object, tumescent seek to show how the agential subjectivity and penetrating. The voice becomes a site of and material presence of the femme fatale opening. This phenomenon, of a body signing character are depicted—sonically, dramaturgi- and singing itself, arises in moments when the cally, and metaphysically. voice qua voice destroys the fabric of sound and the sounded world of the opera characters— SONIC,DRAMATURGICAL,METAPHYSICAL when it becomes what I call “phonocidal voice.” This phonocidal voice must not be taken as a Sonic depiction consists in the ability to reify perpetuation of lack by understanding it as a Self through sound, specifically through voice source of destruction and eradication. Instead, and voicing. Reify here has a positive sense; it the phonocidal voice is a source of deconstruc- denotes a character’s acquisition of an awareness tion and erratication.
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