ABSTRACT
The central conceit of Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song”, concerns a tall tower representing the pantheon of popular song in which reside all the greatest singers, alive or dead, in order of rank from top to bottom. Cohen locates himself there, but somewhere near the bottom, from where he calls to Hank Williams, a hundred floors further up, with a query concerning the extent of loneliness. Interestingly, Williams’s cough, from a Lacanian orientation, could be said to occupy both of J. Lacan’s definitions of the symptom from the perspective of the listener. One coughs, just as one is born, erupting from an aperture in the body, against one’s will. Williams’s cough that is all that is left of him even as it endlessly prevents him appearing is the perfect cough that, precisely, has no meaning, yet persists infinitely in its suffering and its sorrow as song.
