In a text titled The Erzhälertranslated into French by The storyteller, the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) advances an astonishing thesis about experience and wisdom. Based on the work of the Russian storyteller Nikolaï Leskov (1831-1895), Benjamin puts forward the following hypothesis: “The art of storytelling is being lost. He is lost, he says, because “the faculty of exchanging experiences”, of transmitting wisdom by voice is less and less communicable.
According to this thinker, what harms the art of storytelling and the oral tradition, it is mainly the “progress of information”. Condemned to describe the most immediate reality, information turns away from the marvellous, from “remarkable stories”. Written in Germany, at the beginning of the Second World War, when the use of the voice, amplified by microphones, became an incredible instrument capable of galvanizing a mass of individuals, this essay by Benjamin also says that the story, ” artisanal form of communication”, must find a new breath within modernity.
Written in 1935, a year before The storytellerthe famous essay The work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility recalls the importance of avant-garde movements in their desire to resist the mercantile system of artistic production. Benjamin then mentions Dadaism and his desire to undermine the harmless reception of a work of art by producing, among other things, poems that have become “verbal detritus”. By taking an interest in shouting, noise, sound poetry, certain artists of this movement like Kurt Schwitters will explore the materiality of the voice and circumvent phonocentrism. This deconstruction of the voice will then resonate like a sort of ritual punctuated by consonants and vowels.
If it is necessary to draw from Quebec literature for examples of this linguistic provocation, it is to the poems of Claude Gauvreau (1925-1971) that one must think. Several of his poetic texts break entirely with the universe of emotions, resounding rather like provocation. Listening to them, we are far from the oral tradition associated, according to Benjamin, with the world of peasants and sailors. However, this quest for pure poetry also manifests the need to break away from informative discourse in order to approach what is involved in orality as the origin of human communication.
In Speak in America. Orality, colonialism, territory (Mémoire d’encrier, 2019), essayist and professor at the University of Ottawa Dalie Giroux recalls how vernacular languages, far removed from scholarly culture, participate in an “underground cartography”. This is because the oral French of America, that of the land, has always rubbed shoulders with other subordinate languages, such as Creole and indigenous languages. It is about Jack Kerouac, Franco-American poet author ofOn the Road (Viking Press, 1957), whose childhood experience of the language is “mixed with English and archaic expressions”, but also of the filmmaker and poet Pierre Perrault, several of whose documentaries give life to “regional speech », to those who harmonize with ways of life and who inhabit the territory. This is what the director of For the continuation of the world (ONF, 1963) when he captures, through the lens of the camera, snippets of living words embodied by men and women who perpetuate skills threatened by “imperial writing”.
The dossier of this issue wishes to report on recent artistic practices where the voice — spoken, declaimed, sung — is at the heart of the aesthetic experience. It highlights several works where the poetics of voices are transmitted from display devices inscribed in a course of current art. While the use of the voice is omnipresent in telecommunications, often reduced to everyday chatter, this dossier highlights, from various ethnocultural perspectives, the importance of vocality in its artistic dimension. Associated with oral tradition, testimony or musical exploration, it wishes to recall the diversity of singular voices, carriers of the identity and sensitivity of the speaker.
Implemented within the framework of artistic representations, these voices make it possible to make heard the multiple ways of incarnating the world, to perpetuate them under the sign of cultural diversity and ways of living differently. Among other things, they make it possible to recognize the existence of minority cultures that are often marginalized, if not reduced to silence. Moreover, without wanting to contradict the pessimism of the philosopher Benjamin in terms of culture, especially in the era of globalized capitalism, orality, when it is highlighted in an artistic context, still makes possible the communication of experiences and of knowledge fostering the future of plurality of voices.
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