Abstract
This article approaches Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses through some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on expression and speech. Echo’s speech as portrayed by Ovid clearly illustrates how Merleau-Ponty describes speech in Phenomenology of Perception as a “paradoxical operation” through which we use words with already given sense and in that very process both stabilize and alter established meaning. Instead of reducing Echo to a moment of the identity and fate of Narcissus, I bring out Echo’s own voice and the expression of her subjectivity through creative repetition. The short dialogue between Echo and Narcissus makes manifest that Echo’s words cannot be reduced to a simple repetition of a clear and distinct original. Rather, her speech emerges in relation to an original that is only made present as an original of a repetition in that very repetition. Echo’s voice is disruption of the words she repeats and each repetition is also its own origin. Echo’s own voice is only made present when we listen to it as something other than a simple repetition of the voice of Narcissus. The fragments she returns through her echo, lose their fragmented character through modifying and altering their already given meaning. What Echo lacks is not primarily a voice of her own but rather an unbound origin which by itself remains mute and thereby runs the risk of not expressing anything at all. Echo is repetition but it is precisely as repetition that she is also originating speech.
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Notes
As usual, Tiresias’ words are overflowing with opaqueness and make manifest an ambiguity at the very core of expression.
While Nouvet’s reading of the myth in no way underestimates the role of Echo, it nevertheless puts Narcissus on center stage. Ovid’s story is, for Nouvet, first and foremost about ethical responsibility, which she traces etymologically to the obligation to respond to the call of the other. Her reading brings out Narcissus’ fate as punishment for his ethical crime of neglecting to respond to the call of Echo as to the other. Echo’s story is in Nouvet’s reading reduced to the function of manifesting Narcissus’ crime and she is thereby reduced to anonymity by being a representative for all the lovers Narcissus has neglected to answer. Gayatri Spivak argues that Nouvet’s reading is restricted by a long tradition of reading the story about Echo and Narcissus as one about Narcissus. This restriction leads her to understand Ovid’s unwillingness to reduce Echo to a simple echo in terms of a willingness to bring out Narcissus’ voice as lacking an echo. Echo is thereby reduced in a different way to merely a moment of Narcissus, not as the echo of his own voice. See Nouvet (1991, p. 104f), Spivak (1993, p. 31f).
Hollander (1981, p. 1).
Nancy (1991, p. xl).
Also the different accounts of Echo and Pan raise questions regarding the relation between origin and repetition. When Pan, after having failed in capturing Echo, causes her death, all that remains of her is her musical talent that comes to expression through repetition and imitation. Through her death, she ends up in some form of accordance with Pan whose music she echoes. He, on the other hand, continues to follow her and she continues to escape him in a movement where it is impossible to determine the boundary between origin and repetition.
Brenkman (1976, p. 306).
Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 389).
Merleau-Ponty (1969, p. 13).
According to Nouvet, it is precisely this radical understanding of the force of repetition that is brought to light in Ovid’s rendering of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. The echo, argues Nouvet, does not alter the meaning of the original expression afterwards but, rather, constitutes this expression from the very beginning. See Nouvet (1991, p. 107).
This is a reading Nouvet dismisses as too limiting. Instead she suggests that the feminine appears as an otherness that cannot be understood in established (and by now somewhat overused) terms of an Other, in terms of “tout Autre”, but must rather be understood as a continuous altering function, what we might call a continuous “othering” that is at the same time a “selving” (a rupturing selving that continuously opens the self towards the other and towards itself in an intersubjective rupture). See Nouvet (1991, p. 109). For an understanding of intersubjective subjectivity in terms of “selving” and “othering”, see Käll (2009).
Spivak (1993).
Ovid (1977, 3.339–510).
Nouvet (1991, p. 106f).
Narcissus offers, as Nouvet points out, the rather peculiar image of a speaker who does not hear himself speak. When he finally hears himself and recognizes his own mirror image, he is still unable to hear Echo, whether as his own echo or as the voice of another. See Nouvet (1991, p. 108).
Nouvet (1991, p. 107).
Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. xix).
Waldenfels (2000, p. 92). See also Stoller (2010). Merleau-Ponty subjects the phenomenon of expression to thorough interrogation throughout his philosophy and it holds a central place in his reconceptualization of subjectivity. See for instance Fóti (2013); Kwant (1969); Landes (2013); Waldenfels (2000).
Merleau-Ponty (1969, p. 35).
Here, by using the term diffraction, I hint towards the terminology used by Karen Barad in her Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007).
Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 183).
As Renaud Barbaras puts it, the sign is a gesture that “surpasses itself toward its sense, presents itself as always already significant” (2004, p. 43).
Waldenfels (2000, p 92).
Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 391).
Bernard Waldenfels identifies both this quality of preceding itself and remaining behind itself in excess of itself as operative to the event of expression, together with the notion of écart and the concept of translation. See Waldenfels (2000, p 96).
Merleau-Ponty (1969, p. 35).
A third transformation may actually be said to take place as Echo echoes through a cultural canon and is transformed into an artefact. Exploring this third transformation is beyond the scope of this paper.
Nouvet (1991, p. 105).
Sartre (1992, p. 461).
Sallis (1990, p. 2).
Quoted in Linnér (2005, p. 4).
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Acknowledgments
The seeds of this article were presented at the 2009 conference with the Nordic Society of Phenomenology hosted by the University of Tampere, Finland. An earlier different version was published in Swedish as “Reclaimad röst: Ekos eget eko” in G(l)ömda historier, edited by Johannes Siapkas and Dimitrios Iordanoglou, Uppsala 2011. I am grateful to everyone with whom I have had the opportunity to talk about the topic of this article and who have generously shared their own thought with me and commented on earlier drafts. I am especially indebted to Anna Danielsson for motivating me to think about echoes as physical phenomena, to Dimitrios Iordanoglou for discussions about the use and abuse of tradition, to Michael Deere for long talks about creative repetition and the vulnerability of subjectivity and to Linda Fisher for her critical questioning of my reading of Echo’s possibilities of expressing her own voice, which keeps me thinking about what it means to have a voice of one’s own.
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Käll, L.F. A voice of her own? Echo’s own echo. Cont Philos Rev 48, 59–75 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9317-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9317-x