This week I will be looking at the strangeness of technology as it relates to sound, and in particularly the human voice. As I sit scrolling on my phone, I often wonder how other generations before the internet would feel about such time-wasting and such remote forms of communication. Even though my generation is truly the last to not have grown up with a smart phone or wifi (a fact which continues to blow my mind)—I still sense that I am too caught up in the digital life. On Sundays, my phone usually sends me a notification which tells me that I sat staring at its screen for 3 hours a day on average this week—I sometimes want to throw it in a river. I am clearly no luddite—however, I am interested in the anxiety and undercurrent of social fragmentation that technology has long given us. Art and history reflect past thoughts on such matters. I recently discovered Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine, written in 1930, which is a star-making monologue and provides an early draft of not only a cutting edge stage performance—one actor for an hour straight, with only a telephone as a prop—but also as a keen warning of the isolation and hopelessness one may experience when attached to a mythologized version of a former lover via the phone. At the time, the phone was a new way to hold on to ghosts of the past.
Jean Cocteau, The Human Voice original play written in 1930. This film adaptation features Ingrid Bergman (1966). Source
I'm glad you are tactless and you love me. Because if you didn't love me, and you were tactful, the telephone could become a terrifying weapon, noiseless and leaving no trace. Ah, me wicked? No. Hello? — Hello? — Oh darling, where are you? — Hello? Oh it cut off.
—Jean Cocteau The Human Voice
Noiseless and leaving no trace. Sounds like the internet. Much is being speculated currently about what were to happen if the cloud gets erased? Or if all those server centers that store our data get destroyed. There would be no digital history that isn't saved on physical devices. And yet, the damage would be done.
Cocteau was involved with the surrealists and dadists of the 1910s and 20s. The concept of "Vox Humana" or the Human Voice was heavily explored with sound poets of those movements.
One such example of a sound poem is Hugo Ball's Karawane (1917). The following video shows essentially a man dressed in construction paper and reciting nonsense—albeit with gusto—until being pummeled by objects thrown by the crowd and ushered off the stage.
This piece reminded me of the 1913 Russian anti-opera, Victory Over the Sun, that I wrote about in my MFA thesis here, which shocked a small number of unsuspecting playgoers during its chaotic first run at an amusement park.
Anyway, Raoul Hausmann, a Berlin Dadaist, wrote his Poèmes phonétiques in 1918, which are poems that are glottal, noisey, and void of grammar or syntax. The words are designed to shock, fume, and transcend language—detached from all known signifiers. Careful, this can get annoying after awhile, but fascinating nonetheless.
It turns out, the Russian futurists were on to something. The libretto in Victory Over the Sun uses a made up onomatopoeic zaum language by avant garde writer Aleksei Kruchenykh, and showcases how over-the-top primal/intuitive verbiage was in vogue.
The theme here being—oral traditions are constantly influencing literature, and these forms are performative, often-times wild, memorized, improvised (with theme and loose forms in mind), and melodic. An often under-studied (or outright ignored) aspect of modernism is its non-Western influences—African griots (storytellers, musicians, poets), Arabic qasida poets (qasida being three-part form that is often sung with beautiful drone-like music), and South Asian ghazals (think mystical/metaphysical Rumi-esque rhythmic, repeated refrains).
Bringing this back to Cocteau's La Voix Humaine and the telephone as a concept and theatrical device, I see humanity's desire for communication, for improvising conversations and for telling stories together. Desire for love, really. Ultimately though, the telephone which disappoints the eyes, and FaceTime which disappoints our sense of touch and presence, fall short to real life interactions—even though they offer us something. Even though telephone and video chat experiences can be indeed deep, fulfilling, even life-changing, there is always that moment of turning off the device or hanging up the receiver and retiring alone.
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