Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Scott M. Sanders (review)

Reviewed by: Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Scott M. Sanders Ellen Welch Scott M. Sanders, Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022). Pp. 236; 9 b/w illus. , 3 musical ex. 85. 00 cloth, 35. 00 paper. The idea of voice resounds throughout many eighteenth-century debates and discourses, marking the boundary between life and lifeless matter, blurring the line between music and language, communicating the authentic self, and representing participation in a political community. In philosophical writing about music, language, sociability, and subjectivity, voice frequently appears as a disembodied concept or as a metaphor to evoke the expression of mind and heart. Scott Sanders's End Page 404 interesting new book challenges us to appreciate another dimension of the eighteenth-century voice: its materiality, its dependence on the physical body. Putting literary writers and philosophers into dialogue with the physicians and anatomists who detailed the biology of vocal production, Sanders offers an important new perspective on this omnipresent concept. The book identifies three distinct conceptions of the voice across the eighteenth century. The first two chapters investigate the "sentimental voice, " or voice understood as a regulating vector for feeling. Rousseau, whose fixation on voice has been widely studied elsewhere, serves as a common thread through these chapters that also highlight the contributions of lesser known writers. Chapter 1 begins with an overview of the anatomical research on human and animal vocal organs published by Denis Dodart, Antoine Ferrein, and François Hérissant from the 1700s to the 1750s. Against this backdrop, Sanders reconsiders better known discussions of vocal physiology by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Charles Pinot Duclos, and indeed Rousseau. In this context, Rousseau appears as something of an outlier. Against the current of biological explanations for the emergence of language and song, Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues and Dictionnaire de musique instead describe "physiological modifications to the voice as a product of social, linguistic, and natural pressures" such as climate (northern versus southern) and gender. Sanders shows that Rousseau understood voice as a "point of convergence" between biological structure and external and internal environments (27). Although Rousseau's conception of voice challenged the contemporary consensus among physicians and philosophers, it prevailed among novelists who treated voice as the fulcrum between characters' inner selves and the external world. Building on Diderot's appreciation for the lively audibility of characters' voices in Richardson's Clarissa, chapter 2 investigates the "multimodal" representations of voice in fiction through description, punctuation (such as ellipses), and typographical experimentation (53). Careful evocations of voice, Sanders contends, not only convey characters' emotional states but also demonstrate how they endeavor to regulate them. Passages depicting song prove especially rich reflections on voice and emotion. When Clarissa sings, for example, she seeks to "soothe her irritated and dysregulated nerves, " creating a "sonic regime" in which she exerts control over what she hears and therefore over her emotional response (63–64). Sanders locates a similar scene of "vocal therapy" in the little-known short story "Anecdote sicilienne" by François-Marie-Thomas Baculard d'Arnaud (73). The story's protagonist Lorenzo performs strophic romances in a pastoral setting and, hearing the echo of his own song, cures himself of intense passions through their externalization. Although Rousseau's theory of voice seems to influence other novelists' depictions of song, his own Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse presents a rather different account of music's therapeutic function, emphasizing its power to unlock individual and collective memory and its ability to console by connecting the listener to a community of like-feeling souls. As in chapter 1, Rousseau emerges here as a catalyst for new conceptions of voice who nonetheless remains eccentric to the prevailing discourse. The next two chapters offer a more focused examination of a "vitalist turn" in discussions of voice in Diderot's works (90). As compared to the authors featured in the first chapters, Diderot posits a more "direct link between the voice and human physiology" (86). Especially in his translations of Robert James's medical dictionary (1747) and Shaftesbury's. . .