ABSTRACT
Nothing is stranger, or more familiar, than the idea of a voice. In GeorgeEliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a character called Mrs Meyrick observes that ‘[a] mother hears something like a lisp in her children’s talk to the very last’ (423). In Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605), the blinded Gloucester recognizes Lear from his voice: ‘The trick of that voice I do well remember; / Is’t not the King?’ (4.5.106-7). In both of these examples we have what appear to be confirmations of the persistence of identity, expressed in the singular or peculiar nature (the ‘trick’) of a person’s voice. But in each of these exchanges we are also presented with a kind of strangeness as well: in the context of Eliot’s novel, for example, we may reflect on the irony of the fact that what the mother recognizes in her children, what it is in their voice that confirms the persistence of their identity, is something that cannot be heard, a lisp perceived only by the mother. Moreover, there is something strange in the idea that an adult’s speech should be, in a dream-like or hallucinatory fashion, haunted by the past in this way. In the example from Shakespeare, on the other hand, it is difficult for us not to be aware of the terrible precariousness of recognition and, by implication, of identity: Gloucester may believe that he recognizes, and may indeed recognize, the trick of the king’s voice, but we are all too aware of the fact that he can never again see the king, never confirm the king’s identity by sight. And ironically, Gloucester is only reunited with Lear thanks to help from his son Edgar, whose voice (disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam) Gloucester fails to recognize.
