Maybe to blot out the voice : Vocaliser l’horreur dans quelques pièces de Pinter, Churchill et Crimp

• Main Author: Laetitia Pasquet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte" 2013-06-01
• Series: Sillages Critiques
• Subjects: horror; torture; emotion; body; hypotyposis; singing
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/2943

Horror cannot exist but openly displayed. It thus freezes our mental abilities and stops any possibility of objectifying, through language, the unbearable pains it displays. Being the medium of rational language, the voice becomes powerless in the face of a dumbfounding horror show. At the same time, the voice is also part and parcel of the perpetrator’s, as can be testified by the part it plays in the interrogation and torture process. Through plays like One for the Road, Far Away or Fewer Emergencies, contemporary English drama sets a paradoxical mission to the voice: it both shows how extreme pain is caused and bears witness to sheer horror in which humanity is disfigured and language powerless. What emerges from this paradox is an ethics of voicing that has to overcome the failure of the logos in order to restore the victims’ voices and invent vocal and verbal strategies to be able to deal with extreme horror, thus restoring the sense of humanity shattered by horror.