ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that voice traverses, four modes of organizing speech: antithesis, repetition, allegory, and epigraph. Nymph and fawn define one pair of antitheses; each of them is related through further antitheses to the troopers. The wound is the center, the place of meeting, the place of echo and voice. The voice that heard the counterfeit echo in Sylvio now echoes itself. For the voice establishes its singularity and purity, its inviolateness, by being violated. The voice that knows Sylvio's echo does not know its own, does not know what it tells in its idyllic recounting. Attempting to make the idyll immune against the incursions of repetition, the voice of Sylvio, it affirms the difference only by repeating. Endless inscription, endless reading: such is the prospect of engraving that wears away, and offers what remains, all that remains. The statue is the image of the discursive space in which reading and writing are constituted as the text is worn away.
