What does it mean to speak of the posthumous voice, of a posthumous singing? Not simply that the song is sung from the perspective of someone already dead – killed, perhaps, as on the song on which Nick Cave duetted with Kylie Minogue. Posthumousness would not have anything to do with the supposed narrative position of the singer, or with the ordinary conception of the narrator. Nor is it concerned with a singer’s recordings released in the wake of his or her death – as with the recent compilation of live tracks and demos from Karen Dalton, for example. Rather, the experience I want to indicate bears upon a quality of the voice itself. And it is of Jandek that I am thinking in exploring the idea of the posthumous voice.
Jandek is ostensibly the name of a group that formed (under a different name) in 1978, but most Jandek recordings – and there are nearly 60 albums in print – are the work of one individual alone; it seems very clear that he is the same person who runs Corwood Industries, the label upon which all Jandek recordings are released, from Houston, Texas. Sterling Richard Smith, born in 1943, who also registers Jandek songs for copyright with the Library of Congress, is present on all Jandek albums, as a vocalist (though sometimes other people sing) and as an instrumental player – on guitar, piano, harmonica, fretless bass. The run of albums that most interests me are the solo recordings Jandek’s put out since the turn of the millennium, starting with I Threw You Away, and taking us all the way up to The Ruins of Adventure, released last year.
Listen to these albums and it is clear (this is obvious) it is not a tonal music. Nor is it (and this may be jarring) a music in tune. The instrumental work draws on a whole range of sonorities – by turns intense, combative, resolute, distracted, subdued, but always physical – through the plucking of strings and the stopping of frets (thought Jandek’s is not a conventional fretting) – with considerable dynamic range. The guitar does not simply take its cue from the voice, following it, subordinating itself to it, since the vocalising itself echoes and resonates with the guitar work, both in call and response. But it is the voice, nevertheless, that seems to lead the songs (and they remain very much that – songs), even as, as with the instrumental work, the emphasis is on the materiality of the sound – its texture, its grain – where pitch and rhythm are no longer the primary focus.
Hovering uncertainly between speaking and singing, the voice remains unmelodic, with wayward, part-improvised lyrics which are usually clearly audible despite slurred, irregular phrasing. The singing, so difficult to bear for many listeners, never settles into a particular pitch, remaining agonisedly in motion; Jandek presents us with a voice in extremity, and an endless quarrying of pain and related states, in which infinite gradations of suffering are allowed to differentiate themselves. The music of the albums with which I am concerned here remain in the singer-songwriter tradition, even as song prolong themselves into half-hour soundscapes.
We may want to hear these albums autobiographically – as the audio journals of a man depressed, in extremity. The legitimacy of such a hearing is undeniable, being evidenced in an unambiguously autobiographical turn in lyrics in recent live performances. But a confession, sung or written, need not tell us much about the conditions of what permits song or writing: the materiality of a voice (of playing), what it can do (and what it can’t). Perhaps we might even say, as has been noted by so many musicians, that the faculty of music making, the facility of inspiration remains somewhat prior to them, at the origin, the Ursprung of the work of art, as Heidegger might say.
This means a biographical hearing of Jandek recordings would need to do more than follow their apparently confessional turn. There is the fact that they are sung, and, sung, accompanied; of course, with singing, more than other deployments of the voice, it is never a question of merely reporting a sentiment, but of performing it; which is why writers – philosophers in particular – have envied and aspired to the condition of music. Thus the preface to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, written many years after its publication: ‘this book should have sung, not spoken’ – as though it were possible to discover a heightened form of expression, as when, later in his oeuvre, Nietzsche allows Zarathustra to move from speech to song and even to dance.
In the case of Jandek, however, there is something unusual about the attenuation to which the voice (the music) is subject. There is a sense of an artist exploring an expressive potential, certainly, but if this is a virtuosity, it is one mired or floored. Nietzsche holds out for a music that would let joy and mourning coincide, for loss and fullness to be present all at once in that site of dissonance in which pain and contradiction expose themselves in their full rawness, but Jandek’s music is lost in the sludge like Beckett’s characters in How It Is – in a space with barely three dimensions, and which, even as it does not prevent movement, constrains it, confining it to a single plane.
The voice, here, exhibits a virtuosity of a peculiarly limited kind, just as if a painter had decided to work solely in tones of very dark grey, or of black or black, or in the blues that has turned black to remember the title of one Jandek song. But this is a peculiar virtuosity: that of a twitching or spasming – of a creature by the roadside that is not quite dead. As though it were the sludge itself that sang, that had formed itself into a voice and sang of its own condition. Is this what I hear in the wavering of the voice and the instrumental work as it refuses to settle into a single pitch? Is it despair that seems to sing of itself?
There is, I think, a drama to the music – a dramaturgy that depends upon the slippage between the ability to perform, to sing, to play, and an inability – an inability to be able, that is to do anything at all. Some would discover this inability in Jandek’s unconventional use of the guitar and the other instruments he plays (or cannot play – or will not play according to the rules; or plays – according to other rules). There is also his vocalising – by turns wailing, despondent, conquered, frightened, defiant, tutelary as it remains non- or a-melodic, improperly phrased.
But I find this inability somewhere else: in Jandek’s music in its attenuation, its remaining of the brink of extinction, in the ‘and more again’ as it gathers itself up, in the one more gasp of an attempt for breath – each time, in its relentlessness and its wearing away, in its pauses and re-achievements, it is the capacity to sing, to play, that are placed at issue, and that become the drama, such as it is, of the performance.
In a sense, despair (to let the many dark states that are Jandek’s concern settle on one word) becomes a line that can be followed; it permits of something like an avenue of freedom – of freedom, the ability to move in despair, not despite it. Despair is animated and given life. At the same time, despair, the inability to do anything, the inability to be able, cuts across that line, breaking it as crevasses break across a moving glacier. The song remains, it has a certain momentum, but it is cracked – the line that can be followed, lived, is jagged and broken. The ability to be, to sing, to play, has to be regained, but when it is so, it is lost again almost at once. And finds itself again. And is lost again …
It is a remaking that happens as struggle, as creation in extremity that has, as its stakes, the possibility of its own endeavour. There is a fatal dependency of the performer upon the impossibility of what he sets out to accomplish – upon an unfreedom or incapacity as it is brought into contact at each point to the music. Let me concentrate this idea into an oxymoron that is my way of expressing the limits of those accounts of Jandek as the work of an incompetent instrumentalist: the success of the music depends in some sense upon its failure – of the extremity that maintains, in tension its conditions of possibility and impossibility.
What do I mean by this? There is a wonderful passage in Kafka’s journals where he speaks of the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that, even in the midst of despair, permits the writer to write of this despair, ringing changes upon it. What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. This does not alter my basic situation, or offer therapy or cure, but allows me nevertheless to take distance from my suffering, without, however, simply objectifying it, or placing it to one side.
The drama of Jandek’s music is given in a freeing up of fate, a kind of mercy – not as it lifts itself from despair altogether, but as it momentarily allows despair to sing of itself. Mercy lies at the root of the surprise of the address, of being able to address. This carries the music; it bears it – there has been a retreat of suffering in suffering sufficient to sing of it – but suffering is there nonetheless. This does not imply a detachedness or an objectification of pain; there is still a bearing of suffering, a way in which suffering is enacted. I am tempted to put it emphatically, without knowing what this formulation might mean: at issue is not simply a performance of suffering, but of suffering as performance.
We are thrown into existence, says Heidegger; the fact of human existence is aways pre-given such that we are obliged to find ourselves in a particular situation, understanding (in Heidegger’s sense) and taking a stand upon what exists in our vicinity. We do not throw ourselves into existence, we are thrown; and we cannot get back behind or thrownness. This is why the adolescent’s wail, ‘I didn’t ask to be born’ is not ridiculous. Not only that, but we are obligated to do something about our condition; we exist in time, and the future opens before us. Our existence is a project [Entwurf]; we remain in the throw of thrownness [Geworfenheit]. The project is what means we are thrown into the future; we have to do something about our condition, even if it is only to accept it. To chose to do nothing is itself a choice (a refusal to choose to choose). But are we always capable of making such a choice? Can a merciful surplus of strength lift us from that despair in which incapacity voids our ability to choose, to live, to act, from the start?
Writing in a prisoner of war camp, the young Levinas suggests thrownness should be understood as a kind of abandonment or dereliction; that it has the sense of a desertion such that our relationship to the fact of our thrownness returns to overwhelm us, disrupting the opening of the project, of that projection that throws us into the future. For Heidegger, famously, it is by bringing ourselves into the right kind of relationship to our death that we might retrieve a sense of the particularity of our own existence, bracketing out the pressures made on us by others. Death, in Heidegger’s cumbersome phrase, spells the possibility of the impossibility of continuing to exist at all. Where death is, I am not, says Epicetus; but I can nevertheless bring myself into relation with the fact of my mortality such that I can seize upon my life-project as what it is.
Authentic existence, for Heidegger, is lived out of a sense of the urgency and finitude of that project; thrown into the world, I must now make sense of it not as an intellectual task, but by the very way that I live. For Levinas, however, death is not simply an event at the end of one life. It vouchsafes itself in any degree of suffering; it casts its shadow over all pain. It may seem that Levinas is thinking of something very different to the fact that we might bring ourselves into relationship with the fact we will one day die. It may seem that he is providing something like a phenomenology of suffering, drawing impressionistically on a metaphorical sense of death, whereas Heidegger is providing us with a phenomenology of mortality, with an account of what it means for us each to be mortal. I think Levinas would respond, in a manner I cannot explore fully here, that what he is really doing is showing us how death has always been thought as a metaphor, and especially so by Heidegger, and that suffering, likewise, has been metaphorised and sublimated in that tradition of which Heidegger is a part.
A tradition which passes through philosophical reflection on tragedy. In Greek tragedy, so the story goes, the tragic hero is thrown against necessity; he is abandoned to what he cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom breaks against necessity; the hero is dashed to pieces, but for a moment, he brought himself into a splendid freedom. He laments, but to do so means he still had the strength to lament; he has found a refuge sufficient to grant him the power to protest. He is possessed of a will and of a power to resist.
I would like to say – and I cannot substantiate this here, – that authenticity, for Heidegger, has a tragic dimension. The authentic person has confronted the fact that he or she will die; this knowledge, ineluctable as it is, nevertheless permits a seizing hold of life, a carpe diem. For Levinas, by contrast, no such stance is possible;the sufferer is overwhelmed by necessity, coming up against a limit, against which he or she will run up inexhaustibly. This, says Levinas, is the ‘tragedy of tragedy’.
But what does he mean? Hamlet, says Levinas is exemplary. Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.
‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elsinor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantoms of resoluteness, phantoms of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal
‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elinsor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantom of resoluteness, phantom of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal family must be drawn into hell’s circle if the country is to be purged. And so they are. Then Fortinbras comes; hell recedes; the world retrieves itself in Elsinore.
In his famous soliloquy, according to Levinas, Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.
‘To be or not to be’: who speaks? what speaks? Perhaps Levinas would say Hamlet gives voice to an irretrievable dereliction and abandonment. I think it is because Levinas thinks of necessity as the very relationship to being that he can invoke what he calls the ‘tragedy of tragedy’. Hamlet cannot assume his thrownness; freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.
For T. S. Eliot, the figure of Hamlet is fascinating for us moderns because his behaviour is without ‘objective correlate’. For Levinas, such a correlate (although it is not, strictly speaking, a term of a relation) is given in existence itself, in the ‘irremovability of a past that cannot be erased’. Being itself is as though cursed; necessity makes its claim upon us such that we cannot escape into the future. Pain recalls us to our finitude only as it gives the limit at the end of our life unto a kind of infinity or limitlessness. A limit that becomes limitless – but that, by turns, that becomes a limit once again, narrowing itself down such that life, finite life, becomes possible.
Pain is inexorable, but a kind of freedom opens within pain sufficient to live, to prosper, perhaps, to begin and realise plans. Pain retreats in pain – existence is permitted to leap forward; the project opens, and thrownness gives unto the throwing of life into the future. Pain is inexorable. Yet Hamlet vacillates. To be or not to be. There open spaces of possibility; even the possibility of impossibility, the enabling, authenticating relation to death can open. But this opening (to be) is provisional, and it wavers in physical pain with its opposite – not to be is not to experience the possible as the possible. The impossibility of possibility – with Levinas’s reversal of Heidegger’s phrase, there is marked the erosion of the project because of the return of the past. Life becomes fatal, fate-bound and is mired in necessity.
Casually, much too quickly, I would like to say that Levinas’s remarks bear witness to the close of a whole philosophy of tragedy (of the role of the exemplarity of tragedy in several strains of post-Kantian philosophical thought). And this not because we are overwhelmed by necessity, but because we cannot hold out the chance of that harmony of necessity and freedom that would allow us to clear a space in which joy and mourning, loss and fullness might struggle against the other before us in a beautiful dissonance. No longer a space, a site, but a line – a more uncertain and precarious oscillation, a neither/nor to invert Kierkegaard’s title, in which the possibility of impossibility reverses itself into the impossibility of possibility, and vice versa.
The drama of Jandek’s music is given in terms of this oscillation, this neither-nor. What does it mean to characterise the voice in Jandek’s recordings as posthumous? The songs are sung as if the singer were already dead, as if death had already reached him – as if nothing were possible, not even singing. They are sung from suffering, out of it, and of a suffering deep enough to erode, to wear away, the very ability to be able. They are sung out of an unfreedom, of an experience of fate, of necessity, that simultaneously spells the impossibility of being able to sing. And yet, by the same turn, they are sung and therefore borne by the voice of a living body, of someone alive to sing; the singer is someone who had strength enough to sing, who depends upon an ability to be, a capacity that, as freedom, opens song to him as a possibility.
This is what even allows Jandek to sing of the impossible; the impossible is possible; incapacity – the inability to sing – binds itself to a living voice. But what makes this voice posthumous, as opposed to being merely resolute, stalwart, or tragic, is that it touches, in so doing, upon the impossibility of possibility. The posthumous voice is to be thought of as the slippage from the possibility of impossibility to the impossibility of possibility and vice versa, an alternation that is dramatised in the recordings of Jandek as they explore the infinite gradations of despair.
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