Voice Doubles: Auditory Identities in Michel Tournier’s “Tristan Vox”

Abstract

Voice is intuitively regarded as the irreducible kernel of subjectivity, as the token of presence, and as the sign of intentionality. Voice issues from the speaker's body, proclaims its presence, and expresses the speaking subject's singular identity. The characteristics of voice, of human speech, are not, nevertheless, as unproblematic as one intuitively conceives of them. Nor are the philosophical overtones of the metaphor of voice incontestable, however pronounced they seem. One does not have to align with Jacques Derrida's well-known and at the same time controversial critique of the so-called phonocentric tradition of Western metaphysics to regard voice as a polymorphous entity in spite of its singular manifestation. In literature and criticism, voice is no less polyphonic a phenomenon or concept (cf. Bennett and Royle; Aczel). In this article, I will trace the intertwined problems of voice and identity in Michel Tournier's short story (1978). (1) On the level of its characters, dramatizes voice and identity as paradoxically mutable. On its textual level, the short story can be read as analogously vacillating between different articulations and identities. In probing this double problematic of I will account for such interrelated issues as characteristic voice, name and naming, intertextuality, and the very sound of language. Radio Personalities is a story about a radio announcer, whose real name is Felix Robinet but who appears under the pseudonym Tristan Vox in his own midnight program. The show becomes considerably popular, and the listeners imagine Tristan, on the basis of his voice, as a romantic, handsome, and young-looking single, whereas, in reality, Felix is a balding and plump married man approaching sixty. Among his fan mail, Felix qua Tristan begins to receive letters, which refer to his private life and secret thoughts, from a woman who calls herself Yseut. Gradually Yseut's letters turn into seductive accounts, complete with graphic drawings of sexual acts. A radio magazine accidentally publishes, in connection with Vox's name, the photograph of a tennis player, who happens to correspond to the audience's image of Tristan's physical appearance. When the athlete, Frederic Durateau, comes to Felix's studio in order to claim compensation for the loss of his privacy, Felix's secretary, Mile Flavie, throws herself out of the window. Shortly before her death Mile Flavie confesses that she had written the letters signed Yseut. Returning home, Felix learns from his wife that she, too, had been writing under the pseudonym Yseut. While the shocked Felix is on a sick leave, Frederic Durateau begins the host the Tristan Vox show. Surprisingly, his voice sounds exactly like the original announcer's, and Felix finds out that his wife continues writing love letters addressed to (the new) Tristan Vox. The word radio stems from the Latin radius, beam, ray (Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. radius). Radio in the meaning of wireless telegraphy or telephony or apparatus for receiving or transmitting radio broadcasts is a shortened form of radiotelegraphic (or -telephonic) transmission or instrument (Webster's s.v. radio). Radio, hence, involves telecommunication, transmission of messages with the physical absence of one member of the process. In the most obvious form of radio communication is telephonic transmission, the voice in the absence of an interlocutor. Speaking into the microphone in his Paris studio, Felix Robinet addresses his absent audience all over France, for whom he materializes as a vocal image of Tristan Vox, rhetorically captivating the auditors within the radius of his voice and causing a variety of emotional effects. However, telegraphic transmission, i.e. telecommunication in writing, also figures in the short story, albeit more implicitly. Literary tradition, preceding fictional works and characters, inform many key aspects of including its very protagonist and title. …