The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter Melissa Mueller Sarah Nooter. The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. x + 307 pp. Cloth, £75. In the dystopian world of Ben Marcus' novel, The Flame Alphabet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), adults are forced to flee the viral toxicity of children's voices: pre-adolescent speech transmits a deadly disease for which there is no cure. Children alone are immune. This novel was often on my mind as I read The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Voice in all its sublimity lies at the heart of both Marcus' novel and Sarah Nooter's beautifully written study. I finished both books feeling awed by the power of human speech, and thinking about how high-stakes an activity listening can (and should?) be. Nooter's new book invites us really to hear the words on the page, by listening attentively for both the vocalizations and how they are received, a back-and-forth that, as she deftly demonstrates, is central to Aeschylus' artistry, particularly in the Oresteia. Nooter is careful to disambiguate voice from both language and sound. She is interested in the materiality of voice, voice as a thing, an object—what Wallace Stevens in a poem that provides the epigraph to her introduction calls the "the"—that creates the sonorous surround and encompasses both the nonsensical "body-in-utterance" as well as the "performative agent of action" (2). "Voice" has often served as shorthand for "the figure of the poet" or for "authority in language," as it does, for example, in Simon Goldhill's The Poet's Voice, or in Nooter's own earlier work, When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Sound-scape of Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). There, she was by her own admission invested in a notion of voice as language, i.e., as linguistic structure (3). In this book, by contrast, it is voice as aural presence that matters most. But because mortal voice is almost always already entwined with language, how do we locate aural presence? Simply abstracting linguistic structure from speech doesn't do the trick. Human voice is more than sound. One of the many strengths, therefore, of Nooter's approach is that she leads us, through a series of close readings, to a nuanced and felt understanding of voice. The voices of "others" both divine and human (as well as animal) dominate the first two chapters. Starting from the immaterial voices of the gods, whose sounds, even to be comprehended by humans, must be channeled through the "machinery of mouths, larynxes, lungs, and hearts" (19), we work our way down the structuralist ladder, pausing briefly to listen to the voices of a semi-divine mortal (i.e., Achilles) and a human-sympathizing god (i.e., Prometheus, reduced to non-linguistic cries of pain in Prometheus Bound) before finally reaching the voices of women, children, and animals. Chapter 2, "Voice in Early Aeschylus [End Page 561] and Aristophanic Parody," introduces us to an Io whose vocal utterances in Prometheus Bound capture her complicated status. Part-cow, part-woman, the stuttering repetitions of "ti" (as in τίς γῆ; τί γένος; τίνα φῶ, Pr. 560) make audible Io's desperation, "if not yet her subhuman fragility" (86). Paradoxically, or so it seems, the mortal voice emerges most clearly at moments when human characters (often women) are in the greatest danger of losing their humanity. In her reading of the Suppliants, Nooter observes that (at 996–1001) Danaus describes the sexual ripeness and "bloom" of his daughters in terms befitting the animal realm (88). She notes the similarly inarticulate vocalizations uttered by both the Egyptian attackers and the women they pursue, humans on the verge of "becoming the animals that violent male lust makes of women" (93). Chapters 3–5 are devoted to the Oresteia (a chapter on each tragedy) and it is here that Nooter's aural/oral readings are at their best. The sonic emissions we recognize as voice are all embodied. As Nooter explains in Chapter 1, "voice, even divine or deadly voice, can be understood as an act that arises from within someone...