Windbags and Skinsongs

Steven Connor

| Me Mihi Detrahis | Losing Face | Aegis | Stringing Up | Windbags | Blithering Idiots | Tattoos | Your Good Hands | Conclusion | References |

2. Losing Face

In order to answer Marsyas’s question, we will need an explanation for this prejudice against blown instruments. This will involve more than simply reading off the emblematic or symbolic meanings of the plucked and the blown. We are perhaps far from being sensitive enough to the cultural phenomenology of musical instruments, and, more particularly, the forms of bodily fantasy they represent. Before instruments acquire their specific values and associations, they enact a primary transformation of the human body. If the two extremes of human existence are the animal or biological being of the body and the power of thought and self-representation given by language, then the realms of sound, voice and music lie between body and language. They are no longer merely body, for they are the emanations of the body, the body put forth or doubled. But neither are they yet wholly language, in the sense of grammar, syntax, or semantics. Rather, they are the body of language, sometimes thought of as the inert mass or form out of which music will be shaped, or words selected, sometimes as an unchannelled impetus or power. An instrument, of whatever kind, is a paradoxical fixing in visible form of this possibility of bodily morphology. A tool performs work upon an object in the world, enabling it to be reshaped and re-produced. As its name suggests, an instrument also works as a mediation: it is instrumental. But the object of the work performed by an instrument is the body itself. An instrument is an image of this body transformed, or rather of its transformability, an effigy of the body’s possibility of remaking itself in sound, and, reciprocally, of the casting of sound in a bodily form.

Instruments provide precipitations in space of the many different postures and phantasms of what I have elsewhere <http://www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-818433-6.pdf>called the ‘vocalic body’ (Connor 2000, 35-42). These postures are usually ecstatic, involving various forms of stretching, twisting, unbalancing or doubling of the body. Here we might note that the very word instrument (from Latin instruere, to instruct) has acquired overtones suggestive not only of enacted purpose but also of torture. The Inquisition practice of ‘showing the instruments’ to potential victims of torture, Joan of Arc and Galileo being the most famous victims, perhaps resonates with the Christian idea of the ‘instruments of the passion – the lance, nails and crown of thorns – which were depicted in icons and stained glass, and celebrated in the medieval festival of the ‘Arma Christi’. The crooning bones and skins of legend and ballad retain this connection between suffering and music. When the body has become an instrument of torture to its owner, it can then become a musical instrument to preserve and recall that suffering.

One of the reasons for the discredit attaching to the pipe and other wind instruments in classical Greece is undoubtedly the predominance of vocal over instrumental music, and the use of the lyre as the instrument of choice to accompany the chanting or recitation of verse. As John Hollander observes, music without text was looked down upon by Greek theorists of music (Hollander 1961, 34-5). Where one might have expected the flute to be identified with the exercise of the breath and the voice, the highest faculties of the human, it was in fact the lyre which became identified with the voice precisely by leaving it free to be exercised. By engrossing the mouth, by contrast, pipes and flutes swallowed articulate language in a flood of sound. Contrasted with the Greek ideal of the unity of harmony, rhythm and language, writes Bruce R. Smith, ‘Marsyas’s piping is mindless noise…With no reference to cosmic harmony, with no embodiment of logos, his sounds appeal only to the senses, not to the intellect and soul’ (Smith 1979, 88-9). This prejudice is expressed in the Marsyas myth in the accounts of the laughter among the gods by the sight of Athena playing her new invention, the aulos. When she leaves the divine precincts and catches sight of her reflection in a stream, with its puffing cheeks and the ‘dreadful grimace into which the exigencies of the embouchure had twisted her face’ (Hollander 1961, 35). she immediately sees her colleagues’ point, and flings the aulos aside, with a curse for anyone who should pick it up. The reading of the myth supplied in the Ovidio volgare, a rumbustuous 15th-century paraphrase of Ovid with allegorical interpretations, carefully distinguishes the ways in which lyre and pipe are played in order to signify the superiority of the former.

Apollo conquered with the cithara, that is, with true, resounding arguments, and with strings rather than with voice: and this signifies that true knowledge comes from the organs of the heart. The cithara demonstrates this, for it is held on the left side, pressed against the heart, which shows that true knowledge comes from the organs of the heart. (Ovid 1497, sig. g2r)

This rationalist interpretation of the myth may draw on Aristotle’s discussion of flute playing in his Politics, where he explains that ‘it is not a bad point in the story that the goddess did this out of annoyance because of the ugly distortion of her features; but as a matter of fact it is more likely that it was because education in flute-playing has no effect on the intelligence, whereas we attribute science and art to Athena’ (1341b; Aristotle 1959, 667). Despite the distinction he draws here, Aristotle himself sees the effect of instruments on the body as part of their more general moral and philosophical profile, urging that ‘the study of music must not place a hindrance in the way of subsequent activities, nor vulgarize [more literally ‘make mechanical’] the bodily frame and make it useless for the exercises of the soldier and the citizen’ (1341a; Aristotle 1959, 665).

Athena’s transformation into a bloated gargoyle as she bends over the stream has called for little comment, aside from Didier Anzieu’s hilariously doctrinal judgement that the episode illustrates ‘what might, in contrast to penis-envy, be termed penis-horror in women. Athena, virgin and warrior, is horrified at the sight of her face transformed into a pair of buttocks with a penis hanging down or standing erect in the middle’ (Anzieu 1989, 48). The horror here may be a more general concern with what Greek called amorphia . What Athena sees is her face bloated, distorted, or drawn awry. Flowing water transforms and distorts her features, just as water will later provide an apotheosis of Marsyas’s tortured flesh. (Emmanuel Winternitz points to the cohering force of water in the myth, since it provides the reeds which furnish the material both for the pipe and the vibrating mouthpiece – Winternitz 1979, 161-2). The desire to save one’s face from such convulsions survives as late as Plutarch’s life of Alcibiades, which records that his dislike for the ignobility of the instrument was responsible for the decline in its standing:

[H]e refused to play the flute, holding it to be an ignoble and illiberal thing. The use of the plectrum and the lyre, he argued, wrought no havoc with the bearing and appearance which were becoming to a gentleman; but let a man go on blowing on a flute and even his own kinsmen could scarcely recognize his features. Moreover, the lyre blended its tones with the voice or son of its master; whereas the flute closed and barricaded the mouth, robbing its master both of voice and speech. “Flutes, then” said he, “for the sons of Thebes; they know not how to converse. But we Athenians, as our fathers say, have Athena for foundress and Apollo for patron, one of whom cast the flute away in disgust, and the other flayed the presumptuous flute-player.” (Plutarch 1916, 7-9)

There is another tradition about the invention of the aulos by Athena which brings this danger of losing face into much sharper focus and establishes some intricate connections with the skin. Pindar’s 12th Pythian ode, written in 490 BC to celebrate the victory of Midas of Akragas in a flute contest, records that Athena invented the aulos after assisting Perseus to cut off the head of Medusa and in order to imitate the horrifying cries that issue from the mouth of the Medusa’s sister Euryale. Pindar specifies that she ‘wove [diaplexais’, from diaplekô to plait, or interweave] into music the dismal death-dirge of the Gorgons’ (Pindar 1915, 308-9). Euryale has not suffered her sister’s fate of decapitation, but it is as though her threnody were itself both mimicking and giving voice from out of the headless, faceless condition of Medusa. As Thalia Feldman has shown, there is a close relationship between the face of the Medusa and the fearsome cry which is associated with her. The very name ‘Gorgon’ derives from the Sanskrit root garg, which, according to Feldman, signifies ‘a gurgling, guttural sound, sometimes human, sometimes animal, perhaps closest to the grr of a growling beast’. This word spawns a range of forms in various Indo-European languages, including the words gurgle, giggle, gargoyle and gorge (Feldman 1965, 487). The head of Medusa is traditionally to be found represented with mouth gaping and tongue protruding (with the tongue out, one cannot speak articulately, but only slobber and grunt). The Gorgon’s name is a name for the nameless, a word for a sound that is not a word at all, but roars words down, gagging logos in pitchblack, annihilating noise.

This paradox of sound is matched by the visual paradox of the Medusa. The Medusa is associated not only with a terrifying cry, but with a death-dealing visage. Her face is a kind of black hole in vision, just as her cry is a kind of sonorous wound, a blind, shrieking hole gouged out in, but also of, sound. Freud famously thought that the head of the Medusa signified the female genitals, inducing a petrifying, if also in a certain sense bracing, castration-panic in men (Freud 1998, 273-4); but those less fixated upon penis fixation might find a more encompassing panic at the figuring of a face that has no figura , no form or face. As Françoise Frontini-Ducroux points out, the Medusa is never given any of the privileges attaching to the prosopon, the social face which confers identity and acceptance, for hers is ‘the paradigm of the non-face’ (Frontini-Ducroux 1995, 65).

A face that has been torn away or effaced and a cry that has no form both seem to imply a body without clear lineaments or settled contours. In its swarming, liquid flaccidity, that face is copulative and generative, threatening both to swallow and disperse the gaze. The Medusa’s head is all raging, ragged, flaccid body, and, after decapitation, becomes a vagina through which Pegasus will be born. As Charles Segal has suggested, this is in absolute contrast to the body of Athena. The bodies of Athena and Medusa are opposites, the one metallic and impenetrable, the other bloody, baggy and torn, in death and parturition (which are the same for her, since Pegasus is born from her beheading):

Athena’s body, covered by masculine armor or her decorous peplos, is always hidden and never obtrusive. Everything about Medusa, however, contributes to the corporealization of her being: the hair with its individualized, snaky locks, the protruding teeth and tongue, the bulging eyes, the full, fleshy cheeks, and, of course, the wound, blood, pain, and cry of her final parturition. (Segal 1994, 21)