- Dialogues of the Deaf: The Failure of Consolation in Les Liaisons dangereuses
Auditory Voyeurs
Jacques the fatalist, lying with wounded knee on a poor peasant’s bed, overhears his host and hostess in amorous embrace, then in testy disagreement over the charity she has shown him in spite of their poverty. All the more reason, protests the wife, not to produce a new child—and she is sure to become pregnant because “cela n’a jamais manqué quand l’oreille me démange après, et j’y sens une démangeaison comme jamais . . .” (Jacques le fataliste, 26). “Ton oreille ne sait ce qu’elle dit,” says he—but in spite of his objection the metaphor lending speech to the ear eroticizes it, as she fully realizes: “Ne me touche pas! Laisse là mon oreille!” If, as the editors gravely note, the erotic connotations of the ear are a constant of libertine fictions, I think we have here one of the most inventive and beguiling versions of the sexual ear. The language itself conveys, by its rhythms and its strategies, the action it purports to hide in words that go on “behind” the paper, just as Jacques lies on the other side of a wall of paper. For we can easily read in the text how the couple take their pleasure three times, in Jacques’s hearing. The first has already happened during “une assez courte pause” (25), before the dispute. 1 The second (after a short moralizing [End Page 671] digression whose purpose is to tease the reader) doubles Jacques’s cries of pain: “je m’écriai: Ah! le genou! . . . Et le mari s’écria: Ah! ma femme! . . . Et la femme s’écria: Ah! mon homme!” (27)—in all, rather noisier than the first (all ellipses are in the text). The third occurs when the woman protests that her ear is worse than ever because “cet homme qui est là” will have heard them: “Ah! L’oreille! Ah! L’oreille!” she cries, and her husband replies, again irrationally linking speech to the ear: “L’oreille, l’oreille, cela est bien aisé à dire. . . .” Here the writing pretends still to hide what is happening:
Je ne vous dirai point ce qui se passait entre eux, mais la femme après avoir répété l’oreille, l’oreille plusieurs fois de suite à voix basse et précipitée, finit par balbutier à syllabes interrompues l’or . . . eil . . . le, et à la suite de cette or . . . eil . . . le, je ne sais quoi qui joint au silence qui succéda, me fit imaginer que son mal d’oreille s’était appaisé d’une ou d’autre façon; il n’importe, cela me fit plaisir, et à elle donc?
(27– 28)
We receive this mediated communication via Jacques’s praeteritio (“je ne vous dirai point,” “je ne sais quoi”) and feigned indifference (“d’une ou d’autre façon; il n’importe”): we would not be in a position to overhear this couple making love without Jacques’s voluntary or involuntary listening. With his help, we become auditory voyeurs, 2 just as the husband and wife are (as Diderot’s rhetoric takes pains to suggest) auditory exhibitionists, whose pleasure is augmented because somebody is listening. 3 In this article, I am looking at a text in which the reader is placed, like Jacques, in the position of the auditory voyeur and gets pleasure and meaning from an indirect listening.
Listening and hearing are not identical, but complementary. Yet these two activities are often confused and hence the verbs misused—they are loosely taken as synonymous, and they are sometimes spoken interchangeably with no serious loss to understanding. It will be crucial to keep in mind that to listen is not always to hear, and that hearing does not necessarily imply listening. It would further be a mistake to assume that hearing is a passive activity, and that only listening is active; on the contrary, a subject who hears may define himself as active, [End Page 672] precisely because he hears, and the presumably active subject who listens may be doing so distractedly, not willfully. In sum, to listen is not necessarily to...