The place of the voice in Virgil’s Eclogues and in Holly Pester’s Eclogues for Idle Workers

Abstract

This essay identifies, analyses and works through a particular function of voice in Virgil’s Eclogues and Holly Pester’s Eclogues for Idle Workers: its way of creating place, while remaining itself unplaceable. The place simultaneously created and disrupted, or fled from, in both works, is the work place, which is also, in both works, the place of literary composition. The essay traces the implications of considering the voice thus as a point of generative disturbance through the two sets of Eclogues, introducing examples from Lypsinka and Sunset Blvd., as well as from Catullus’ and Horace’s Carmina, Virgil’s Aeneid and the folk song The Butcher and the Chambermaid as performed by A.L. Lloyd. I argue that the voice is present in both texts as an impersonal and alienating force, drawing on Mladen Dolar’s construction of every emission of the voice as ‘by its essence ventriloquism’, and on Denise Riley’s concept of the auto-ventriloquy of ‘inner voice’ (one does not speak, but is spoken). In Virgil’s Eclogues this force functions to create the place of song, while in Pester it allows its subjects to ‘live’ in the spaces and moments of endless deferral that make up workplace-time. The relation thus created between place and voice is one of mutual dependency, meaning that for Virgil, the displacement of the herdsman Moeris is the destruction of his song, and for Pester, that Magatha and Terry must speak their departure before it can be realised, and both the work and the poem can be brought to an end.