Barthes, Roland. "The Grain of the Voice."
Barthes’s “grain” is the body in the voice as it sings in its mother tongue. The “grain” is not merely timbre, but that element of the singing voice in the production of language that seems “directly the cantor’s body” (505)—the sound of vocal production generating in the muscles, the membranes, the tongue, the glottis, the corporeality of the singer. Perhaps even more importantly for Barthes, a music lover and opera enthusiast, the “grain” provides a way of discussing and interpreting music without falling prey to that “poorest of linguistic categories” (504): the adjective. For music (and, one could argue, sound more generally) seems condemned to “adjectival criticism”—this music is this or that—and Barthes’s essay attempts to model an alternative. He analyzes two singers—one of whom he likes very much (Charles Panzera) and one of whom he likes very little (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau)—in terms of his concept of the “grain.” He borrows from Julia Kristeva to elucidate his analysis, riffing on her concepts of the phenotext and genotext to theorize a “pheno-song” and a “geno-song.” Fischer-Dieskau is a master of the pheno-song, the elements of performance “in the service of communication”—the rules of genre, the style of interpretation, diction, pauses, etc. Yet he cannot compare with Panzera in the quality of his “geno-song,” the space of generation, where “significations germinate from within language and in its very materiality” (506)—in other words, the grain of the voice.
Barthes’s theorization of the voice’s “grain” remains a salient concept for scholars who, like Barthes, find themselves stuck trying to articulate that corporeal quality of speech “beyond (or before) the meaning of the words” (505). He inherits from Derrida a rejection of the voice’s tie to consciousness and interiority: “the voice is not personal…it expresses nothing of the cantor, of his soul” (505). Yet Barthes still embraces (even reveres) the uniquely corporeal aspects of language as voiced. Scholars like myself must remember that Barthes discusses the voice as producing languages, not language. By that I mean: which language a singer sings matters to Barthes—the grain is, after all, the “materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (506, emphasis mine). Barthes loves Panzera because of his rigorous regulation of “the prosody of the enunciation and the phonic economy of the French language” (506). Additionally, we must remember that this essay is not about speaking, but singing. Barthes presents his concept as an intervention in music criticism and, hence, the term cannot be transplanted to literary criticism without some thought. I think, for example, that too many scholars misinterpret Barthes’s “grain” as a word for the voice without language. Or they interpret “the grain” as all of the extra-linguistic qualities of the voice, the voice as high, low, reedy, nasally, etc. (adjectives, adjectives). But no: the grain is the body in the voice as it produces language, more specifically language sung in one’s mother tongue.
