Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Scott M. Sanders

Abstract

In this book, Scott Sanders shows that the material, embodied voice (vocal folds, fibers, tissue, etc.) played an important role in eighteenth-century theories of human sound and its emotional qualities. At first glance, this goal seems modest, but Sanders’ book is also a study of how the voice and its mechanisms informed core Enlightenment debates on sensibility, sentience, identity, Car tesianism, vitalism, and more. At the crux of Sanders’ study is the tripartite notion of the “sentimental voice,” the “vitalist voice,” and the “uncanny voice”—all three of which show in different ways that eighteenth-century authors “represented the voice as both a physiological organ and a sound” (180). Sentimental voices (chapters 1 and 2) were windows into a person’s character or, as Sanders writes in an analysis of Rousseau’s novels and polemics, “organs through which it was possible to modify and improve a person’s mental and emotional well-being” (169). Vitalist voices, which were also linked to the body of the speaker or singer, developed “out of a physiological model” where organs, connective tissue, and other material sources interact with each other to produce sound (107). Sanders describes vitalist voices (mostly in chapters 3 and 4) in Diderot’s scientific trans lations, novels, and philosophical dialogues. Sanders situates Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau at the heart of eighteenth-century physiological debates. Sanders shows that understanding the “diaphragmatic” voice—an internal organ in a constellation of physical systems and intellectual faculties—is key to comprehend ing Enlightenment models of mind-body interaction. Lastly, the uncanny voice, discussed in chapter five, differs from the sentimental and the vitalist voices in that it “does not serve as a guarantor of the speaker’s physiological temperament.” Instead, uncanniness separates voice from the “physiological truth” of the speaker or singer (139). Sanders’ discussion of the uncanny voice is contextualized by a clever reading of Jacques Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux—a supernatural novel and attack against philosophe positions on sensibility, rationality, and identifica tion. Sanders tackles challenging primary source materials, including eighteenthcentury scientific discoveries about which, perhaps, most students of the period’s literature and music know little. A less elegant writer would lose readers in discussions about vocal fold anatomy or the differences between “iatromechanical and vitalist approaches to sentience” (90). But Sanders’ prose is jargon-free, light, and fluid. Like the encyclopédistes in his study, Sanders uses literature, music, and art to describe difficult physiological and epistemological concepts to a more general readership. Voices from Beyond is a breathtakingly thorough but readable account of voice in eighteenth-century French literature and thought. More than that, it proves that adopting new perspectives and approaches, notably voice studies, can revive seminal French literary texts as well as more obscure examples of the Enlightenment and its critique.