Abstract

Speech, like sound, "exists only when it is passing out of existence."1 Although confounded with the very breath of life, speech dies on the lips that give it form. This undulation of air, whose speechprint is so personal that we have not been able to build machines to recognize it, is born in the body but effaces, forgets the body. This quality of speech, that it takes support form the body but does not reside there, has evoked a debate about the role of voice which was doubtless begun earlier but has never been so sharply discussed, I think, as in the present generation: Must voice and the concept of the speaking subject be defined as a unity? Can we validate a definition of the self and what it means to be human through a physiology of voice or a metaphysics of voice? The logical and chronological priority of empirical speech, of utterances seemingly unplanned and unwritten, is what is at issue in this debate.2· 1. Walter J. Ong, "The Word in Chains," In the Human Grain, p. 53.· 2. Spontaneous utterances are the subject matter of speech-act philosophy and sociolinguistics, disciplines that stress the social and communicative context which helps condition personal speaking. Such a privileging of voice also occurs in modern poetic theory, for example in Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and in statements by Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, but usually these writers show to what degree the oral must always remain a fiction in our era.Donald Wesling is professor of English at the University of California, San Diego. The author of The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity, he is currently writing a critique of modern metrical theory, The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and Interpretation