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Filming Trauma: Bodiless Voice and Voiceless Body in Beckett’S Eh Joe

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Filming Trauma: Bodiless Voice and Voiceless Body in Beckett’S Eh Joe Chapter 4 Filming Trauma: Bodiless Voice and Voiceless Body in Beckett’s Eh Joe Svetlana Antropova 1 Introduction The television play, Eh Joe, first recorded in 1966, was first broadcast by BBC2 with Jack MacGowran as Joe, and Sian Phillips as Voice. At least thirteen ver- sions of this play have been preserved on tape making it Beckett’s most repro- duced teleplay. Eh Joe is practically staged in the dark cellar of Joe’s mind. MacGrowan de- fines this play as ‘the most gruelling twenty-two minutes I have ever had in my life’, and later he writes that ‘It’s really photographing the mind. It’s the nearest perfect play for television that you could come across, because the television camera photographs the mind better than anything else’.1 The camera performs the role of an all-seeing eye zooming in between the Voice’s speeches through- out the film, and at the end, the camera slowly dollies in to a close-up of Joe’s face. Jeanette Malkin writes that ‘this short film sets up a context and frame for the study of obsessive introspection of unwilled memory’.2 Samuel Beck- ett manages to scan the mind through unusual television devices: complete separation of camera and voice, limitation of the versatility of the camera, invisibility of the voice owner, partial inaudibility of words towards the end, and the photogenicity of an intensely listening face.3 Based on the principle of silent movies with a soundtrack of a woman’s voice added, Eh Joe records Joe’s silence and achieves complete vocacentricity. The screening, though simple in nature, reveals a very complex relation between the three presumably autono- mous objects: gaze/camera, the voice and the body/Joe. As a result, a shift from the signifier to the signified causes the character/body to become a sheer re- cipient for the flow of memory: Joe is transformed into a mere listener to a dis- embodied voice. Consequently, traumatic memory becomes the protagonist of 1 Ibid., 538. 2 Jeannette R. Malkin, Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama (Ann Harbour: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 37. 3 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 293. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/978900438593�_005 Svetlana Antropova - 9789004385931 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:21:37PM via free access <UN> Filming Trauma 53 the play. While focusing on the artistic representation of trauma on television, this chapter addresses the use of disembodied voice and its relation to ptsd in the screening of trauma. The Voice in Eh Joe embodies trauma, becoming form and content of this play. 2 Disembodied Voices Disembodied voices and voiceless characters become frequent entities/char- acters in Beckett’s plays, such as in Not I, Ohio Impromptu, That Time and so on. Although counterparts, they hint at the possibility of a unity, as the body normally houses a voice, and the audience always want to identify a disembod- ied voice and attach it to a certain body. But Samuel Beckett never fully grants this wish since no ‘host’ body appears on stage or in the film, voices function as autonomous entities. Obviously, a distinction emerges between a disembodied voice in the theatre and a disembodied voice in the cinema. One-directional, a bodiless voice in the theatre comes from a loudspeaker, that is, from one place, whereas in a film a disembodied voice tends to occupy all sonic space onscreen as well as off-screen: ‘Cinema has a frame, whose edges are visible, we can see where the frame leaves off and off-screen space starts’.4 A voice, therefore, be- longs to both spaces while an image always stays in a frame, which certainly creates dramatic tension, as no trace exists of the initial relation that links the voice to the image. Being in the screen and not, wandering the surface of the screen with- out entering it, the acoustmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension. He invites the spectator to go see, and he can be an invitation to the loss of self, to desire and fascination.5 In her analysis of the film The Attack, Tarraf gives a very interesting example of acoustmêtre – the phone call from Sihem before committing suicide bomb- ing. The call also replayed at the end of the film serves not only as a trauma trigger, but as a framing device as well. The ghost voice of a person no longer alive haunts Amin as he is trying to work through traumatic loss. Sihem’s voice though acoustmêtre still has a body through the images of her projected in the movie. The voice in Eh Joe, on the other hand, functions as a complete acoustmêtre, namely a voice acting as an acoustic presence, not connected to 4 Michael Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 22. 5 Ibid., 24. Svetlana Antropova - 9789004385931 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:21:37PM via free access <UN> 54 Antropova an image.6 Therefore it may be analysed from several perspectives: the voice as a material presence (speech), the voice as a being or a shade of an image, the voice as power and the voice as a theatrical object. This disembodied voice possesses all of the specific characteristics of the acoustmêtre: ubiquity, pan- opticism, omniscience, and omnipotence. Presumably, the voice of the woman heard in this play belongs to a dead per- son and resurrects Joe’s worst memories, the memories so intimate that only Joe can know. Hence, it establishes a victim-perpetrator relation. The Voice’s knowledge of Joe’s past gives it complete power over him and to make mat- ters worse the bodiless Voice possesses the ability to see, that is, panopticism. ‘Look up, Joe, look up, we’re watching you’,7 says the Voice. As the omnipresent Voice comes from everywhere, Joe has no place to hide from it. Consequently, Joe develops an obsession with the Voice. According to Michel Chion, bodi- less voices in the cinema take the audience back to an archaic stage, the first months after birth and the months of gestation, during which the voice was ‘everything and everywhere’.8 From this perspective, Joe’s room may read as a womb/tomb and the Voice as an umbilical cord that nurtures/tortures Joe with his memories, while trapping him in the complicated web of his past. Undoubtedly the first acoustmêtre in life is the mother, and the greatest acoust- mêtre of all is God, which bears relevance to this discourse, since the Voice in the film alludes to God and his ensuing punishment to Joe. Furthermore, the Voice guides the action and sets the pace for the film, and for the process of remembering. Joe, who remains obstinately silent, only mimes out his reac- tion to what the Voice is saying. Rodriguez-Gago states that these disembod- ied voices in Beckett’s oeuvre serve as ‘the aural traces of memory’,9 especially traumatic memories, since one of the major symptoms of trauma is the loss of an authoritative voice. Malkin even goes further and refers to Beckett’s voices as time- conflators: ‘his voices, remembering or remembered voices, develop in, cut through, and often conflate time’.10 The immaterial quality of the voice 6 Michael Chion provides the definition of a complete acoustmêtre as voice acting as an acoustic presence, not connected to an image. Michael Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 20. 7 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 363. 8 Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 27. 9 Antonia Rodriguez-Gago, ‘The Embodiment of Memory (and Forgetting) in Beckett’s Late Women’s Plays’, in Drawing in Beckett: Portraits, Performances and Cultural Contexts, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Tel Aviv: Assaph Books Series, 2003), 114. 10 Jeanette Malkin, Memory Theatre and Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Mich- igan Press, 1999), 38. Svetlana Antropova - 9789004385931 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:21:37PM via free access <UN> Filming Trauma 55 and its ability to travel through time parallels the materiality of a body trapped in the present moment. The disembodied voices in Beckett’s plays not only distort time or narrate characters’ memories but they become uprooted-from-the-body memories and gain a theatrical life of their own, and as a consequence the first personal pronoun singular of the discourse is lost and the character stripped of his past. The dissociation of a character from his own memories points to an identity disruption, the past self shattered to pieces and distorted by an outside narra- tor. The bodiless voice per se becomes a cinematographic device to represent dissociation, as a traumatic memory acoustically lives outside the body. In Eh Joe the Voice takes on the role of Joe’s troubled conscience as well as his trau- matic memory, narrated from a perspective of an outsider who once formed part of Joe’s life. The Voice belongs to his ex-lover, rendering the neutrality of narration unacceptable: the Voice blames Joe for his merciless acts and makes him responsible for causing pain to other women. In the analysis of a disembodied voice from psychoanalytical perspective, Sigmund Freud’s theory proves relevant. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter 3, Freud describes the occurrence of traumatic memories in rela- tion to hearing voices in one’s head, totally outside the control of the victim.11 Freud points out the importance of outside voices that may invade the head of a traumatised person. If we remember the Tasso’s legend Freud refers to in the abovementioned book, we may single out the importance of the outside voices, which can invade the head of a traumatised person and intensify the traumatic recall.
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