Mostly Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004), and Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Since returning from Christmas, I have encountered many wonderful objects new to me, including in no particular order: Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; Rodney Ascher, Room 237; David Lynch, Inland Empire; Andrew Bujalski, Computer Chess; George Saunders, Tenth of December; and a binge-watching of Allan Cubitt’s The Fall. I list all these not to impress you—A) it’s actually a kind of short list for a person on break who claims to be interested in art, and B) what’s less impressive than trying to impress people with what you’ve read or seen? I list them because I want to show myself the opportunities I’ve had to write. For some I didn’t write down any notes right after listening/viewing/reading, so that’s what I get. I haven’t been completely comatose on break and have actually been far less depressy-sit-on-the-couch-and-stare-at-something than I usually am when I have a lot of time to myself.  But that’s no excuse.  I’m way less busy than I will be when school starts, and one important point of this project is to write quickly that I might write often, making writing part of my day just like eating dinner or going to the gym (ha, ha).

SO, in an attempt to keep myself on track, I’m going to spread across a couple posts an abbreviated list of what I liked about each of these things, and I’ll write a few paragraphs about mute children. I've been wanting to think about sound theory and literature for a while, partially because I think it's inherently interesting, and partially because I know I need to figure out what's applicable and useful if I want to work on sound and music in onscreen adaptations of literature.  

PSA: Plentiful Spoilers Ahead

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

·         I listened to this on an audiobook on an eight-hour car trip, so the fictional parallel to my current reality was fun/oh boy am I lucky. In addition to the obvious differences, this parallel made me think about how journeys with known destinations differ from those with imagined, purported, or no designated destinations; repeated journeys versus novel ones; solo journeys and accompanied ones; being pursued versus being a free agent; fictional journeys, in which everything can be symbolic, and real journeys, in which we try to create symbols where none exist.

·      The two protagonists don’t have names, and people consistently refuse to offer their own names throughout the novel.

·      The consistent repetition of simple phrases and words of the man (“I’m sorry,” “of course you can”) and the boy (“okay”) were both endearing and evocative. It was as if these very common words belonged only to these two people in their private language with one another.

·      The consistent repetition of events and states for the boy and his father (they were starving, the boy was so scared, they came upon a house, they came upon a traveler, they hid the cart) communicated effectively how they—and McCarthy—built a routine out of chaos and moto perpetuo.  I also can’t recall too many stories that so rely on repetition of events.

·      That good ol’ McCarthy horror and gore and tragedy.

·      I hadn’t thought about an apocalyptic universe much since experiencing the Fallout games a few years ago. It’s good to be reminded once in a while that much of global society is little more than agreement and passivity, which if disrupted plunges us into an entirely different set of circumstances, morality, and histories. Yeah, yeah, Walking Dead, I know.

·      The boy’s muteness after tragedy, his flute, and his goodness (more on those later)

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004)

·      I do love an old crotchety retired police detective who’s good at what he does.

·      Like in The Road:

o   the detective is not named.

o   the novel features a child who has seen adult horrors, in this case, the Holocaust.  

o   two characters are utterly dependent upon one another to the exclusion of the outside world

·      It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes in tone, length of story, timeline (the old man would be the right age to be an old Sherlock), character, and emphasis on reason. And who doesn’t love Sherlock Holmes?  It’s an interesting way to pay tribute to the character, given the recent spewing of remakes.

·      The solution to the bifurcated mysteries would be pretty much impossible for readers to figure out.  The emphasis is thus not on the readers being detectives but on literary, symbolic, and character elements of the work.

·      The boy’s muteness and the parrot as a surrogate voice (more on that later).

·      Unapologetic but weird anthropomorphization in a chapter near the end.  Chabon doesn’t give the bird absurdly human rationality. Rather than trying to give the bird a human-like parrot voice, Chabon gives him a parrot-like human voice.  This trait has implications for the parrot’s relation to the boy.

A theme that is common to some of the objects I listed above is how children express themselves after a trauma.

·      The Road: the boy is living a life of almost constant trauma, but after one particularly gruesome and frightening incident is mute for a while

·      The Final Solution: nine-year-old Jewish refugee Linus Steinman acts mute, “speaking” through his African gray parrot, Bruno.

·      Room 237: OK, not so much in the documentary, but The Shining totally addresses how children deal with trauma

·      The Fall: The killer’s young daughter draws disturbing pictures, perhaps out of intuition of her father’s activities, perhaps after seeing his own grisly picture diary, or perhaps due to an overactive imagination caused by detailed and explicit media coverage

·      Tenth of December: children are commonly featured in the stories, and while “traumatic event” might not be the most accurate description of what happens to them, the similarities and differences between the reactions of children and adults are consistently at play.

In The Final Solution, Linus is mute around other people, but a loquacious parrot named Bruno is constant on his shoulder. We know the boy is capable of speaking, because Linus’s voice, singing softly, is one of the voices the parrot imitates.  A colleague in the musicology program recently pointed out an interesting trend in the BBC’s Sherlock series: Moriarty uses voices of other people to reveal himself before he is seen onscreen, in other words, using the physical voices of others to express himself while remaining hidden. A similar thing is occurring here: Linus uses the voice of Bruno to express himself while remaining hidden in his muteness.

An interesting twist, however, is that, of course a parrot’s imitation of a voice is nothing more; there is no lexical meaning for the parrot when he sings a song or recites a poem. This emptiness makes the imitation all the more eerie and complicates Bruno as a surrogate voice for Linus. Are we to see Bruno and Linus as linked in some spiritual way, as children and their daemons are in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? Does the real nature of the relationship matter less than the symbolism of a displaced voice for a displaced child, or the evocative connection to how real children deal with trauma?

Consider the relationship of McCarthy’s boy to his flute.  After the boy watches the man shoot a cannibal before his young eyes, his father whittles a flute for him. In the mute time after trauma, the flute has some appeal, but later, the boy tells the man that he threw the flute away.

The passage in which the man gives the boy the flute:

“In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”

Light Googling tells me that common interpretations of this flute as a symbol regard it as evidence of how hopeless or hopeful the man feels about their situation, as music-making is entertainment, luxury, and culture, beyond mere survival, akin to telling one another stories at night. Other interpretations invoke the Pied Piper, and still others regard it as a metaphor for all the culture that got thrown away.   I think all of these are interesting and valid.  My own first thought was that the boy was rejecting the vessel of a false voice.  The flute was given to him in a period of muteness, partly in apology, partly in hopes of catharsis.  It is well-known that traumatized children sometimes requires means of communication other than the voice, through pictures, dolls and puppets, writing, or, less commonly but occasionally, especially in art, music.  The flute was a means for the boy to communicate, to get something outside of himself, that didn’t require words or his physical voice.

If the flute can provide this for him, why throw it away? I think it could be because the boy is rejecting the falseness of it. We see throughout the novel many times the boy’s attention to sincerity, integrity, and veracity in a way that most of us lose as adults (see Saunders’s Eva in “The Semplica Girl Diaries” for a brilliant example of this contrast). He asks his father to stop telling him stories because they were fictions about a world that never did, never could, and never would exist. Perhaps he saw the flute as a voice that wasn’t true, telling lies about the possibility of a civilized existence or speaking a wordless and thus imprecise language. Maybe he didn’t know how to use the flute in a way that was sincere, lacking both a knowledge base and the will to create a new base of knowledge.  External objects weren’t the problem: the boy had a miniature truck and other toys that weren’t objectionable to him, but McCarthy never makes him draw or sing. I think the key is that, if the object wasn’t used for making sound and communicating his thoughts in some way, he wouldn’t have thrown it away. If he was going to speak, he was going to do it with his own voice.

Speaking with another’s voice is all over film. Think of Danny in The Shining (a complicated example, I know), the David Lynch ventriloquist aesthetic, HAL in 2001. Similarly, mute characters also pop up everywhere. One only has to think of the tradition of miming to come up with many famous names: Harpo Marx, The Pink Panther, Mr. Bean. But what happens when mute or mostly silent characters are used for tragic or emotional effects rather than comic ones? Muteness in film and literature has been explored, mostly through the postmodern suspicion of language. But what of the actual lack of sound, not just its hermeneutic value? Michel Chion says that an acousmatic voice, a voice heard but not seen, like a voiceover or narrator, is considered by audiences to be powerful, omniscient, and omnivisual. For my purposes, I want to ask the opposite: what happens when the body is revealed but not the voice?Ventriloquism is creepy because it separates a voice from a body, which certainly affects the voice, à la Chion, but it also affects the body.  I believe the effect is also a sense of omniscience; we are constantly feeling as if the character knows something that we do not, and that his/her silence is a choice rather than a necessity.  Just as a narrator hides his body, a character can hide his voice. Such an ability has implications for the importance of sound not just in film but also in literature. When we have a sense that some mind is deliberately choosing to withhold information, it is an unsettling demonstration of power. In the case of these mute children, though not always with the omission of sound more generally, this power and knowledge belongs to the characters.  Linus embraces it, the boy rejects it, but each choice is equally effective.

Despite this power appearing to be rooted in the characters, oh, right, these aren’t real children. Their minds are perhaps modeled on those of real children, but they were created by adults, specifically adult men.  This technique is thus an especially powerful tool for an author because it feeds off the common trope that children know a deep truth that adults have forgotten. (I suppose it depends on which camp you ascribe to: if you’re an auteurist, this technique gives an insidious power to the author by appearing to give power to the character.  If you’re more in the camp that likes to grant artworks their own worlds and autonomy, this choice is an actual choice of the character, and its power is real.)

A child who is silent as a defense against the world leads us to believe that cruelty planted something in that child, and if it would only speak we could glimpse a secret horror seen only by the traumatized. We want these silent children to speak, both out of basic human compassion but also out of morbid curiosity about the horrible.  This makes any form of communication whatsoever poignant, and when it is distorted, as through the beak of a bird who can replicate voices and words but not mean what it says, the displacement makes that communication doubly grotesque. In the case of a sentimental mute, we find ourselves imagining what the real voice attached to that body might sound like, what its timbral and textural qualities are, how it expresses words. 

(Which leads me to another short thought: I listened to both The Road and The Final Solution as audiobooks, and thus my imagination was functioning differently. A narrator supplied a physical voice for Bruno the parrot, dictating an imagined sound for me.) 

I’m enjoying thinking about this because it’s another way to subvert the visual bias in fiction and film. I like the idea that withholding sound is an acknowledgment of its power, rather than demonstrating the power of sound by emphasizing the chain linking a disembodied voice to a physical source.

Coming soon: Rodney Ascher, Room 237 (2013); David Lynch, Inland Empire (2006); Andrew Bujalski, Computer Chess (2013); possibly a few tidbits on The Fall (2013)

False leads and cold cases,

Kate

P.S. In that list there is no standalone music. My life hasn’t been without music lately—I’ve been playing Bach and Schubert keyboard works and listening to a few other things here and there, but it is just not what my brain wants to think about right now.  I worry sometimes that I am too finicky, that I get bored too easily. It’s not a laziness thing, I hope, but rather the effect of the massive amounts of stuff to know and experience. Maybe I don’t have the patience to examine Beethoven from a million angles, not that I don’t think that’s valuable, because doing so prevents me from examining David Lynch from a couple angles, or Hieronymus Bosch, or whoever. I certainly run the risk of being a “Jack of all trades, master of none,” but surely I can find some way to incorporate this desire into my professional life in a productive way. For teaching, certainly, it’s a good thing, as it allows my brain to easily create metaphors and make connections that will stick, as well as imagine creative projects outside my own discipline. But when it comes to my colleagues, when it comes to being an “expert,” in something, how much do I have to know about my general field, or what do I have to be able to do in my general field, to be a useful member of it?  I am so lucky to do what I do, but I know I can’t do it forever if I don’t feel like I am contributing. Law school?