Elena Passarello, Let Me Clear My Throat.
Sarabande Books, 2012. Paperback, 240 pp, $15.95.
“You don’t get to have a voice,” an eminent poet once shouted at me and my aspirant-poet peers. One’s voice, he meant, ought not to spring from yourself but from some deep universal energy for which you are merely the vessel, having made yourself available by assuming the pose of Poet. The better the voice, then, the less you can claim it as your own. Elena Passarello has recently written a book of essays on the other kind of voice—the kind that pours forth from your lips when you will the making of sound. And we might, in the presence of this collection, ask whether we get to have that kind of voice. Is it ours? And where does it come from?
“Vocal cords,” you say, but Passarello begs to differ with your reductive and biologically bankrupt definition of her voicehood. A voice rises from muscle and marrow. The bones you broke and the ones you spared. Height, weight, the slope of the shoulders, the size of the neck. A castrato sings like a castrato not only because his gonadotropin-starved vocal cords are smaller, but because the same hormone affects the curve of his rib cage, the plasticity of his joints. And then there are babies. A baby must scream “without teeth, without neck muscles, without the ability to ground the vibrations in planted legs and feet.” Voices are embodied, and bodies change.
Elena Passarello’s body is thirty-three years old, 140 pounds, tall, with a once-broken metatarsal, and has spent much of its existence hunched over a laptop in such a way that affects her neck and shoulders. Post-exhale, her rib cage measures 31.5 inches. All of these endowments, she claims, affect the resonance of her voice. In 2011 Passarello unleashed a scream so sublime it won her first prize in New Orleans’ annual Stella Screaming Contest—an honor never before bestowed upon a woman. Her delicate account of that indelicate scream, of its origins in both her physical form and the deep well of pain she experiences in watching her mother’s decline, is the best essay in this uneven collection.
As with the scream essay, terrific essays on Judy Garland and various castrati are close studies of individual lives through the odd, surprisingly bloodied lens of larynx. Garland’s first concert was in the womb: “sound vibrating the length of her mother’s spine, down through her pelvic arch, and into that snug listening room of liquid and muscle.” With age her voice breaks, “weight and sinew” having “tipped it backward, dissolving the helium pitch of childhood.” Crowds weep during a Carnegie Hall performance Variety calls “the greatest evening in the history of show business.” And after her suicide a pathologist “separates the muscles that connect larynx to trachea, like popping beans from a pod, until he holds her voice box in his hands.” He places it “next to her on the table, so that it hovers outside of her body like a droopy balloon.” No image in this book better illustrates the holistic nature of the human voice—that droopy balloon, so pointlessly animal when cleaved from the body that gives it the power to sing.
It is impossible not to like this narrator, not just because of that victorious scream but also because she goes to GWAR concerts, interviews inanimate objects, and chooses for her book cover a picture of herself unleashing that prize-winning scream, nipples quite erect through a tank top, as if to say that they, too, are part of the many-sourced mystery that makes the perfect scream. This narrator is game, and that comes across in the formal play at work in her first collection. An essay on Frank Sinatra is structured around some naïve “tips for singing.” An essay on a classic canned scream is structured around stage directions. And between longer pieces Passarello drops some anonymous voice-related monologues, smartly left stranded in white space, random radio transmissions of no obvious origin.
Several of the more traditional essays don’t come off, especially when Passarello wanders from the viscera of the embodied voice. She will alight upon a delicate curiosity and pound some unmerited meaning out of it, drawing inferences where none offer themselves, and adopting the editorial “we” so that the reader, too, is drawn into the muddle. There are no shining insights be to drawn from a comparison between sportscaster Myron Cope’s Pittsburgh accent and the author’s suppressed southern annunciation. That some people from NASA launched various phonograph records into space does not justifiably lead us to the conclusion that “we have more faith in popular singing than in anything else on the planet.” And one might hope for more lyrical prose from a book that is, after all, about sound.
At the same time, this woman is a connoisseur of the scream, and screams are not poetry. All is forgiven when Passarello collaborates with ventriloquist Theresa Foley to interview Foley’s dummy. The narrator in this essay is a corporation selling Hector-the-dummy an independent voice: “What follows is our storied method,” Passarello writes, “guaranteed to match ventriloquist dummies with just-right independent voices for that they can live more fulfilling lives ‘off the knee.’” Hector’s introduction to his new voice, which comes packaged with Hector’s answers to a pleasingly random questionnaire, ends with a warning. Hector will not, in fact, find independence when he can will sound without the aid of a ventriloquist. “A man’s voice is the ultimate puppeteer,” warns the pamphlet. “If we have learned anything from our decades of vocal study, it is that when you abide such a complicated organ, you are more likely to fall prey to it than you are to master it.” In other words: You don’t get to have a voice, Hector. It has you.
