ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on versions of Voyage that consist of sound alone, and therefore of voice alone. It examines how the differences between the actors' vocal abilities and qualities and their performative choices give voice to four different Celinian narrators. The chapter examines the rationale behind the project of actors reading Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and the challenges arising out of the transposition of an aural reading into an oral reading of the text. It shows that Michel Simon, Pierre Brasseur, Podalydes, and Fabrice Luchini deliver the text in different ways, bringing to voice four different Celinian narrators. The chapter explores how the preliminary distinctions between the actors' voices and vocal styles shape the performances of Bardamu's textual voice, whose unique 'timbre' heard by the reader is created out of the orchestration of plurality. It analyzes a CD recording of Luchini's Voyage and explores how Luchini constructs the Celinian narrative voice in performance in the Zumthorian sense.