Come Here Aeneas, I Want You1

Ika Willis

Bell conjured up Thomas A. Watson with a commanding utterance...:

‘Watson, come here! I want you!’... Come forth, manifest yourself, Wat-

son, cut the lines that separate us but whose wound enables me to

command your arrival, your destination and destiny... Whether issuing

from the political or the private sector, the desiring command inches

you towards annihilation. It emerges from what is not present-at-hand:

thus, ‘I want you’ phantomizes you. I want that which I do not possess, I

do not have you, I lack you, I miss you: Come here, Watson, I want you.

Or this may echo the more original call of a male god, a god that is not

full, since he is full of resentment, jealousy, suspicion and so on. He calls

out, he desires, he lacks, he calls for the complement or the supplement

or, as Benjamin says, for that which will come along to enrich him. The

god is at the controls but without knowing what he controls until the

Other - still lacking - answers his call. Where the call as such suggests a

commanding force, the caller, masked by the power apparatus, may in

fact be weak, suffering, panicked, putting through a call for help. We

suppose that the phonetic inscription has been rendered faithfully. Yet...

the unavailability of a primary script frees a language into the air

1 A version of this essay was originally presented as a paper at the conference ‘warp:woof: aurality/musicality/ textuality’ at the University ofLeeds in July 2003. It represents part of my doctoral research, which was undertaken thanks to a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, towhom I am grateful. I am also grateful to Adrian Rifkin and John Mowitt for their challenging questions and generous comments at warp:woof, as well as to my Bristol colleagues Duncan Kennedy, Miriam Leonard, Charles Martindale and Angela Piccini, for thoughtful and erudite feedback on a draft of this paper. Any clumsiness or errors remaining in the thinking, translation, or writing are of course mine.

whose meaning, beyond the fact that it constitutes a demand, remains

on shaky, if any, ground.2

1. THE POET’S VOICE, THE READER’S EAR

What is called ‘culture’ in our universities merely proceeds from the mouth to

the ear. 3

‘The epoch of logocentrism is a moment of the global

effacement of the signifier’, writes Derrida in Of

Grammatology.4 Logocentrism fantasizes writing as a

transcription of, or as a transparent vehicle for,

speech; similarly, it fantasizes speech as a transparent

vehicle for the communication of signifieds between a

speaker and a listener who are present to each other. In

other words, logocentrism’s ‘effacement of the signifier’

means that writing is thought as a medium for the

communication of signifieds across space and through

time, merely extending the range of speech, which in turn

is thought as a transparent medium of presence-to-

presence communication across space and through time.5

2 Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln andLondon: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p.128. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Future of our Educational Institutions’, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol 3, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. J M Kennedy (Edinburgh and London: T N Foulis, 1910). Kittler discusses this passage in Discourse Networks, p.18.4 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp.285-6.5 In ‘Signature – Event – Context’, Derrida argues that ‘the properly philosophical’ (ie logocentric) ‘interpretation of writing’ is that it ‘extends the field and powers of a locutionary or gestural communication… presupposing a kind of homogenous space of communication.. a homogenous element across which the unity and integrity of meaning is not affected in

This fantasy is enabled by the invention of phonetic

writing. It is this technological moment which enables

logocentrism’s effacement of the signifier, that is, of

technologies of inscription: it aims at suppressing

consideration of historically and technologically

specific organizations of the relationship between

speech, writing, and presence in space and time, as well

as of the labour of writing, speaking, reading and

listening.

Desire for the recovery of the ‘poet’s voice’

structures one mode of response to Latin literary texts

from the ancient period to the modern day:6 one recent

scholar uses the counterintuitive phrase ‘the reader’s

ear’ to name the organ of reception of Latin poetry. Yet

this is not simply a logocentric symptom: compare the

warning/promise at the opening of Avital Ronell’s The

Telephone Book (‘Your mission, should you choose to accept

it, is to learn how to read with your ears. In addition

to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to

tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to

the inflated reserves of random indeterminateness’7). An

appeal to the ‘reader’s ear’, as Ronell’s reference to

‘noise frequencies’ demonstrates, does not necessarily

posit the existence of a transparent medium of

an essential way’. (Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature – Event – Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982], pp.307-330, p.311.)6 See Ingres’ ‘Vergil Reading the Aeneid To Augustus’ (to which I was alerted by Adrian Rifkin) for a particularly rich example of a fantasy about the somatic power of Vergil’s voice as a transmitter of poetry. 7 Ronell, The Telephone Book, p.xv. This quote is from the beginning of the book’s prefatory section, entitled ‘A User’s Manual’.

communication which speech inaugurates and writing

extends. In the context of Latin literature, such an

appeal reminds us that the question of the role of the

voice in the transmission of information through time is

posed particularly sharply in the reading of Latin texts.

It is generally agreed that Latin poetry was, in

practice, usually vocally distributed and aurally

received:8 more importantly, however, the transmission and

survival of a text was figured by the Romans as taking

place not so much in a specifically inscriptive as in a

specifically vocal medium. For example, the epitaph of

Ennius, one of the earliest epic poets to write in Latin,

ends with the couplet:

Let no-one deck me with tears or make me a

funeral with weeping. Why? I fly, living,

through the mouths of men (per ora virum).

This vocal medium9 – the ora virum (‘mouths of men’),

through which Ennius continues to transmit in the absence

of his living body – is structured by a specific,

technologically conditioned, distribution of writing and

8 Raymond J Starr writes that ‘Roman literature... might more accurately be described as "aural" than as "oral"... The experience of the poem was also the experience of the reader’s voice’, in ‘Reading Aloud: Lectores and Roman Reading’, Classical Journal 86 (1991), pp.337-43, p.338. For a recent and canonical contribution to the debate over the vocal vs silent reading in antiquity, see A K Gavrilov, ‘Reading Techniques in Classical Antiquity’, Classical Quarterly 47:1 (1997), pp.56-73.9 It seems to be both a technological and a spiritual medium, since no differentiation is drawn between Ennius’ own survival after death and the transmission of his poetry.

speech across the body and across the space/time of

communication.

Writing, for the Romans, was operated and mediated

by the voice, as data on a phonograph record are not

directly apprehended by the senses but must be operated -

‘read’ - by a player and through a ‘speaker’. Slavery was

the primary technology by which this vocal operation of

written texts was carried out in ancient Rome. Varro

famously defined the slave as an instrumentum vocale (a

technological apparatus possessed of voice),10 and for

some slaves, their primary labour was precisely to be

vocale - to mediate between the written and the spoken

word. Raymond Starr’s essay ‘Reading Aloud: Lectores and

Roman Reading’ deals with this phenomenon. The historical

evidence he collects is patchy, since the scale of

dependence on slave reading was so massive and so deep in

the culture that it was rendered barely visible as a

phenomenon;11 however, a precise taxonomy and a complex

division of labour may be glimpsed in scattered

references.12 In the labour practices of Roman writing and

reading, speech could figure as little more than a

slavish or technological implementation of writing as

program, with voice and body separated in the production

of a spoken-word performance just as they had been 10 Varro, De Re Rustica 1.17.1; the passage contrasts the slave to the instrumentum mutum, or inanimate tool, and to the instrumentum semivocale or labouring animal.11 Compare Ronell on the telephone, which ‘is inserted too deeply within the oeuvre to be laid on the surface-lines’ (Telephone Book, p.199).12 Starr collects these scattered literary and epigraphic references to the taxonomy and division of the labour of reading in ‘Reading Aloud’, pp.339-40.

separated in the labour of creation of a text. In a

letter to a friend, the first-century CE Roman writer

Pliny the Younger discusses whether he should read his

own poetry at a forthcoming recitation, or whether he

should employ a trained slave lector (literally ‘reader’,

but we might translate ‘speaker’, for the technological

connotations) to ensure better sound reproduction. He

writes (in a letter which would, no doubt, have been

dictated to a slave scribe and read to its recipient by a

slave secretary):

I myself don’t know what I should do in the

meantime while he is reading; to sit still and

mute as if I were just a spectator, or, as some

people do, to follow what he reads out with a

murmur, with my eyes and with my hand. But I

think I dance no less badly than I read!13

Pliny ponders the question as if it concerned technology:

he is aiming to ensure the best possible acoustic

reproduction of the written text, as if the voice, far

from figuring self-presence and interiority as it does in

the logocentric tradition, were instead a non-

interpretative, non-spontaneous, automatic implementation

of a program. Pliny did not have access to phonographic

or telephonic technology which could reproduce his own

13 Ipse nescio, quid illo legente interim faciam, sedeam defixus et mutus et similis otioso an, ut quidam, quae pronuntiabit, murmure oculis manu prosequar. Sed puto me non minus male saltare quam legere. Pliny, Epistulae 9.34. This and all following translations from Latin are my own unless otherwise noted.

voice in the absence of his body; practices of slave

reading, however, already stage the dissociation of an

utterance from the body which uttered it. In the

situation described in Pliny’s letter, the organs through

which the text is written/read are distributed across two

bodies: Pliny’s, possessed of eyes and hand, and the

slave speaker’s, possessed of the vocal apparatus. The

speaker – prosthetic body of the writer – ventriloquizes

the words produced by the writer, and the writer’s body

follows, dancing to the beat of the speaker’s voice.

The relation of voice to presence in Pliny’s scene

of writing is denaturalized: the body – the citizen,

slave-owning, male authorial body, surely the paradigm of

the untroubled sovereignty of the rational subject – is

prosthetic, phantomized and technicized from the very

beginning. The organization of the writing/speaking body,

the distribution of organs and prostheses across writing

and speaking bodies, reflects the culturally and

technologically specific conditions of speakability, the

articulation of a discourse network.

I am borrowing the term ‘discourse networks’ from

the English title of Friedrich Kittler’s book, entitled

in German Aufschreibesysteme1800/1900 (‘Notation Systems

1800/1900’).14 In it, Kittler analyzes the relations

between speech and writing which make up a

historically/culturally specific, and technologically

14 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) (second edition).

conditioned, notation system or discourse network. He

argues that the notation system or discourse network of

1800, which privileged phonetic writing (conceived as the

‘score’ for a ‘mouth-instrument’), was radically

disrupted by the invention of telephony and phonography.

He writes:

The ability to record sense data

technologically shifted the entire discourse

network... For the first time in history,

writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial

storage of data.15

This technological innovation (‘for the first time in

history’) displaces phonetic writing from its privileged

place as the only figure through which communication across

space and through time is understood; moreover, the

technologies of telephonography mean that the voice of

someone who is physically or temporally far away from the

listener – who may even be dead – can still be received

by a reader’s ear. The telephone and the phonograph have

broken the identity of speech and presence (or at least,

in Barbara Engh’s terms, of ‘voice and embodied

consciousness’16) which logocentrism posits. This makes it

possible to rethink, under new figures of the techne, the

15 Kittler, Discourse Networks, pp.229-30.16 Barbara Engh, 'After "His Master's Voice"', New Formations 38 (Summer 1999),pp.54-63, p.54: ‘The phonograph dissociated the voice and embodied consciousness, which formerly had been thought to be so coterminous as to virtually define each other’.

ways in which speech and presence are mediated and

related to one another in the logocentric scene(s) of

writing and telecommunication. In other words, it is, I

think, the shift in ‘discourse network’ inaugurated by

the invention of voice reproduction technologies which

has enabled the twentieth-century critique of

logocentrism. This moment of shift, therefore, breaks

with the technological conditions that had underpinned

logocentrism and reveals that telephonography (the techne

of writing which enables the voice to cross spatial

distances) is the effaced condition of possibility of

logocentrism.

This break with logocentrism’s privileging of

phonetic writing is therefore both a historically and

technologically specific moment and a reorganization,

under the figure of telephonography, of the ways in which

it is possible to conceive of history, speech and

writing. The discourse network materially inaugurated by

the invention of electric speech technologies does not

only close off a period of history from a past and

future, according to technological markers; rather, this

new configuration of the archive reorganizes

past/present/future texts according to a new logic of

retrieval and communication.

In the remainder of this paper, I will be reading

Vergil’s Aeneid in terms of its insistence on the necessity

of vocal transmission for the possibility of coherent

historical narrative and communication. In so doing, I

aim to show how a reading which attends to the

specificity of a text’s construction of a

telephonographic apparatus can resist the logocentric

‘effacement of the signifier’.

2. RUMOUR AND THE SCROLL OF THE FATES

Any writing that is open, is fundamentally open to rumour.17

Vergil’s first-century BCE epic, the Aeneid, relies on a

very specific telephonographic organization as the

condition of possibility not only for its own famously

vocal transmission (arms and the man I sing, Vergil announces

at the opening of the poem) but also for the coherence of

the historical world in which it is set – and hence,

since the Aeneid tells the story of Rome’s and therefore

Vergil’s history, for the coherence of the historical

position of the poem’s writer and reader.

The Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, a refugee from

the Trojan War. In the course of his journey from Troy

with some of the other survivors, Aeneas receives a

series of messages from the gods through various media:

ghosts, dreams, direct conversation with deities in

disguise, a descent to the Underworld. These messages

inform him that his duty is to carry out the program of

the Fates by founding a city in Italy which will later

become Rome, and give him the information he needs in

17 Ronell, The Telephone Book, p.185.

order to behave in accordance with the injunctions of

destiny at specific points in the narrative. The poem’s

readers know from Roman history/mythology and from the

poem’s opening summary of itself,18 as well as from a long

passage of prophecy (A.1.261-296, which will be discussed

below), that Aeneas will succeed in his task. The

narrative of the poem, therefore, does not proceed

through suspense, or the revelation of an unknown-in-

advance series of events. Rather, it is structured around

the junction-disjunction between the program of Fate and

the actual unfolding of events; and this junction-

disjunction operates (as it must) via a series of

telecommunicative acts, through which the characters are

informed about the pre-inscribed content of the scroll of

Fate, and how this corresponds to the situation unfolding

in the world of the epic.

The relationship between the predetermined course of

destiny and the unfolding course of events in the Aeneid

relies on a very specific apparatus of communication

between Fate and the world of events, and hence on a

specific organization of speech and writing. As we will

see, in order for the decrees of Fate to be carried out,

a relationship of supplementarity between writing and

voice must be in place.

18 Vergil summarizes the content of the epic at the very beginning: ‘I sing arms and the man, who, an exile by fate, first from the shores of Troy reached Italy and the Lavinian shores – he was much-tossed-about on land andon sea by the force of the gods, on account of the memorializing anger of hostile Juno; much too he suffered in war, before he founded a city and brought the gods into Latium – from whence came the Latin race and the Albanfathers and the walls of high Rome (Aeneid [hereafter A] 1.1-7).

In the first book of the poem, when Venus comes to

him with her fears that Aeneas will not reach his fated

destination, Jupiter responds with a prophecy which

summarizes Roman history from the victory of Aeneas over

the native Italian people to the deification of Julius

Caesar, such that we see that what Jupiter describes as

fatorum arcana (the secrets of the Fates, Fata’s closed

archive, the closure of history-as-fated19) are identical

with the series of events identified as having been major

causal nodes in the narrative of history leading to the

political situation in Vergil’s present. Rome’s imperial

history thus operates in the fictional-historical time of

the epic as the decrees of Fate, such that Aeneas must,

in a strange, tautological/out-of-joint temporality,

labour to bring about the conditions which will enable

the writing of the poem in which he appears. In this

temporality, Fate appears as the program for history

which history, defined as the record of fated events, by

definition cannot but carry out.

Yet this equation of Fate and history is only made

possible by an effacement of the specific telephonography

through which Fate and history correspond. For in the

narrative of the Aeneid as it unfolds, Fate and history

are inscribed in different locations, different media;

destiny therefore needs an intermediary, an instrument,

in order to implement its program in history. Aeneas is

the instrument through which destiny operates.

19 Arcana derives from arceo, whose basic meaning is to shut up, to enclose (Lewis & Short definition I).

The question then becomes one concerning

teletechnology.20 How is the transition from one medium to

another – from program to implementation, from Fate to

history – performed? How is the program read: that is, how

are the relationships between reading, writing, speaking

and listening organized in order to enable the

unification of fated script and historical event?

Briefly put, in order for Destiny to operate

correctly, reading must be a faithful transmission of

what is written. It must convey the content of Fate’s

script from the place in which it is inscribed or

deposited into the world of historical events; but it

must do so perfectly transparently and noiselessly. The

act of reading must not in itself affect either the read

text or the world in which the text is read. This self-

effacing reading depends, as we will see, on the elision

into a single function of (1) the spontaneous production

of speech and (2) the function of the voice as ‘speaker’

of programmed text.

In his speech to Venus in Aeneid 1,

predicting/reporting the history of Rome, Jupiter’s

language suggests that his embodied practice is

20 This formulation echoes, of course, the title of the essay by Heidegger inwhich he connects sending, technology, history and destiny: ‘The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way of… revealing… “To start upon a way” means “to send” in our ordinary language. We shall call the sending that gathers, that first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining. It is from this destining that the essence of all history is determined’. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farell Krell, trans. Albert Hofstadter (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.311-41,p.329.

physically identical to that employed by first-century

Roman readers reading from a scroll:

For I will speak at more length, since this

anxiety bites you, and rolling it out I will

move the secrets of the Fates (arcana Fatorum),

A.1.261-2.

In the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in

the light (or the shadow) of the Aeneid,21 Jupiter again

reassures Venus about the future of the Roman state by

telling her what is written in the script of the Fates,

and must therefore come to pass in the historical world.

Ovid’s version goes into more detail than Vergil’s about

the archive of the Fates and about the scene of reading,

illuminating both the way that reading works in Vergil’s

version and the omissions Vergil has had to make in order

to represent this mode of reading as unproblematic.

Ovid’s Jupiter says:

Are you trying to shift insuperable fate on

your own, daughter? You are allowed to enter

21 It would be interesting to follow up in detail the relationship between the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses in terms of their different inscription of Fate. Here I will just say briefly that the Metamorphoses (the first major epic to be written in Latin after the Aeneid) covers some of the same mythological/historical material as Vergil’s poem, but inscribes it into both poetry and history in a very different way. This, I think, draws attention to the disjunction between the stability of Jupiter’s speech and the context of metamorphosis and flux, in such a way as to illuminate the potential for a similar disjunction between the Aeneid’s apparatus of Fate and the narrative of Roman history, precisely at the point where Vergil’s poem works so hard to unify the two.

the very building of the three sisters: you

will see there the archives of the world

(tabularia rerum) in the form of a huge

construction of brass and solid iron. They fear

neither the breaking of the sky nor the wrath

of the thunderbolt nor any ruin, and they are

safe forever. You will find cut into them in

eternal adamant the fata of your descendents: I

myself read them and noted them in my mind and

I will relate them (legi ipse animoque notavi/ et

referam), lest even now you should be unaware of

what is coming. (Metamorphoses. 15.807-15)

Ovid’s account places some emphasis on the sequential

temporality of reading, and on memory as an intermediary

between script and vocal performance (‘I read them… noted

them… and will relate them’). Vergil’s Jupiter says ‘I

will speak... and I will move the fatorum arcana’, as if

the two were synonymous, eliding the discontinuity

between the spontaneous production of speech – which

gives the speech the legitimacy of the correctly

organized citizen voice – and the vocal translation of

text-as-data, which gives the speech the ‘truth-value’

and fixed reliability of writing. Ovid’s Jupiter, by

contrast, reads, memorizes, and recites, in that order,

making visible the discontinuity and the operation of

mutual supplementation which underlies Vergil’s Jupiter’s

reading.

Fata as written archive - the ineffaceable tabularia

rerum - is necessary so that the truth value of Fata as

spoken can be evaluated through comparison with the prior

written text, which stands as the measure of truth,

safeguarding its content against accidents of the voice

such as lapses of memory, mishearing,

(mis)interpretation, contamination by noise frequencies,

etc. Without Fata as spoken, however, the written decrees

cannot be accessed or implemented. The text must be

spoken, in order to be sheltered from the vulnerabilities

of the material of inscription (as listed apotropaically

by Ovid’s Jupiter in the speech cited above). It must

also be spoken in order to be located properly in space

and time, thus safeguarding the content of the

inscription from the aspect of writing that logocentrism

most fears: its iterability, the ‘force of breaking with

its context, that is, the set of presences which organize

the moment of its inscription’ which is ‘the very

structure of the written’.22 For the content of a prophecy

may always be delivered in such a way as to mislead its

hearer about the correspondence between, say, characters

referred to in the prophecy and their counterparts in the

hearer’s world: the operation of prophecy in Oedipus

Tyrannos relies on Oedipus’ misidentification of ‘father’

with the man who raised him, rather than with his

biological father, Laius. Unlike Oedipus, Aeneas is

Fate’s conscious collaborator, and it is therefore

22 Derrida, ‘Signature – Event – Context’, p.317.

crucial for the Aeneid that the content of the Fates’

script should be delivered to him in a way that does not

allow for such misinterpretations.

In order for history to correspond to Fate, then,

the vocal system of correspondence – the voice that reads

the Fata – must have a double function. It must both

guarantee presence in space and time (locating a

prophecy’s referents in their proper spatial/temporal

context), and operate the text without interpretation,

being perfectly superimposable on the written text as

guaranteed truth-value.

This organization of Fate’s vocal apparatus is

defined in the Aeneid via its perfect inversion: the

monstrous figure of Fama (Rumour). Fama appears in the

fourth book, precisely at the point where Aeneas has

wandered from his destined path, remaining in Carthage

with its queen, Dido, with whom he has fallen in love,

rather than sailing onwards to Italy.

Fama transmits information via the ora virum (mouths

of men), familiar from Ennius’ epitaph as the vocal

apparatus through which literature is transmitted, but

she is the negative pole of this apparatus. She is

introduced as a malum (evil):23

Fama, than whom there is not any other faster

evil (malum); she thrives on mobility and

acquires strength by moving... a horrible

23 She could be described as malum d’archive, perhaps.

monster (monstrum horrendum) and vast; as many as

there are feathers on her body, that is the

number of wakeful eyes beneath them -

marvellous to tell - that is the number of

tongues and mouths (ora) that sound, the number

of alert ears... She is as tenacious of lies

and fictions as much as she is a messenger of

the truth... At that time, rejoicing, she was

filling the peoples with manifold rumours, and

singing truth and fiction equally (pariter facta

atque infecta canebat)... Everywhere, this foul

goddess was disseminating these things

in/through the mouths of men (virum ora). A.4.174-

95.

It must be stressed, however, that although Fama is

valued negatively as against Fata, this is not because she

represents the ‘lie’ pole of a straightforward truth/lie

dichotomy. In fact, all the information which we know

Fama transmits in Aeneid 4 is, as it happens, true. Some

of the acts of information transmission carried out by

Fama in Aeneid 4 work against Aeneas’ implementation of the

Fata (for instance, when Fama tells Dido that Aeneas is

planning to leave Carthage):24 but this is not always the

case. It is even because Fama transmits information that

Jupiter becomes aware that Aeneas has erred from his

destiny in the first place, and is able to correct him (I

24 A.4.298-9: ‘that same unholy Fama brought her [the news] that the fleet wasarming and a journey being prepared’.

go into more detail about this below). Fama does not lie,

and her actions are ultimately beneficial to the workings

of Fate. What makes her a malum, then, seems to be that:

(1) Her relation to truth is undetermined (she sings

truth and untruth equally) – perhaps because she has no

writing hands, so her existence in the medium of the ora

virum has no written counterpart against which her

relation to truth could be determined;

(2) her relation to time is improper (she goes too

fast);

(3) she has an equal number of eyes, mouths,

tongues, and ears and they are not distributed across

different possessors according to those possessors’

function in the apparatus: her bodily organization, that

is, does not conform to the authorized distribution of

the vocal apparatus across the male citizen body and its

slave prostheses.

Fama, that is, transmits information via other

channels than those authorized by the archive of the

Fates and Jupiter’s reading. ‘The unavailability of a

primary script’ in her transmission network ‘frees a

language into the air whose meaning… remains on shaky, if

any, ground’. She has no authority to guarantee the

source, the verity or the timeliness of the information

she transmits: she accelerates our distance, not from the

truth, but from any criterion by which we could

differentiate truth and fiction, facta atque infecta.

The events of Aeneid 4 are operated by and on a

telephonographic apparatus distributed between the poles

of Fama and Fata. Fama is conjured in the poem by Dido’s

‘marriage’ to Aeneas and her abandonment of Fama’s

homonym, fama (‘little-f fama’:25 fame, reputation).

That day first was the cause of her death and of

evils (malorum); for she was moved neither by

appearance nor by reputation (fama), and Dido did

not now contemplate a secret love: she called

(vocat) it marriage, and covered up26 her sin with

this name. Immediately Fama went through the great

cities of Libya: Fama, than whom there is not any

other faster evil (malum)… (A.4.169-72)

It seems to be Dido’s speaking (vocat) of the word marriage

which immediately summons up Fama. Dido and Aeneas both

are and are not married in Aeneid 4; it may be precisely

this which means that Dido’s speech act must summon up a

transmission network capable of singing pariter facta atque

infecta, equally things done and things not done,27 since

Dido’s marriage has been equally performed and not

performed. The undecidability of this performative jams 25 The difference between fama and Fama is, of course, inaudible: it would also have been invisible, at least throughout the early period of the Aeneid’s manuscript transmission, when the text would all have been inscribed in capitals. 26 The verb here – praetexit – may come either from praetego (to cover up) or praetexo (to weave along the edge of). The precise relationship between ‘marriage’ and ‘sin’ is hence ambiguously figured. 27 Latin vocal performance elides juxtaposed vowels: the word breaks in ‘facta atque infecta’ are inaudible to the reader’s ear, as the syllables run together into something like ‘factatquinfecta’.

the machinery of Fata which, as we have seen, requires

the perfect marriage of primary script and vocal

performance for successful transmission: Dido’s use of

the term coniugium stands in an undecidable relation to

the reality of her and Aeneas’ status. The Fata network

cannot deal with undecidables: it would have to decide

whether the marriage was factum or infectum, and in fact it

does precisely this later in the poem. When Aeneas has

been recalled to his fate by Mercury (in a passage which

will also be discussed in a moment), he denies that he

ever married Dido, referring to specific legal and ritual

formulae which were not fulfilled as well as to his lack

of intention: ‘I never held out the wedding torches or

entered into that legal relation (foedera)’ (A.4.338-9).28

Dido and Aeneas are married29 by Juno, the goddess of

marriage. The narration avoids any unambiguous

pronouncement which might determine their married-or-

unmarried status: instead, various statements, apparently

standing in various relationships to reality, are made by

various characters at different times. Juno’s desire to

marry Dido and Aeneas stems from her desire ‘to turn the

kingdom of Italy away to the shores of Libya’ (106), that

is, to divert Aeneas from his destination and relocate

the destined Roman Empire in space, if not in time. She

28 For a reading of Dido’s undecidable marriage as telephonic in a different context, see my chapter ‘Feminine endings: Dido's telephonic body and the originary function of the hymen’ in Martin McQuillan and Ika Willis (eds), Origins of Deconstruction (Manchester: Clinamen Press, forthcoming). 29 The strikethrough indicates the undecidability of their married/ unmarriedstatus.

attempts to make a pact with Venus to bring this about.

Venus appears to go along with her, but says:

I am at the mercy of the Fates, if Jupiter would

want there to be one city for the Tyrians and those

who have come from Troy… You are his wife. It is

right (fas) for you to test his resolve with

prayers. (A.4.110-3)

‘That will be my task’, Juno replies (A.4.115), but she

defers it, insisting that the marriage of Dido to Aeneas

must be performed before her negotiation with Jupiter and

the Fates.30 This temporal gap, opening the possibility

that the scrolls of the Fates might be rewritten or

reread in such a way as to make them correspond to

unfolding historical events, opens a gap between the

primary script of Fate and the performance of history, in

which desire might be played out. It is in this gap that

Dido and Aeneas marry, and that Fama goes to work.

If Juno ever did intend to speak to Jupiter and

plead for the translation of Aeneas’ destined empire to

Libyan shores, she was overtaken by Fama. The narrative

of the Aeneid proceeds swiftly at this point, following

the news of Aeneas’ detour from his destination as it is

transmitted via a series of relays from Dido’s mouth to

Jupiter’s ears. Immediately after the encounter in the

30 A.4.115-6: mecum erit iste labor. nunc qua ratione quod instat/ confieri possit, … docebo. ‘That labour will be [future tense] mine. Now, how what is pressing [present tense] can be accomplished, I will tell you.’

cave, Dido speaks the magic word coniugium out loud,

conjuring up the transmission system appropriate for this

marriage which hovers, awaiting the decision of Fate,

between ‘done’ and ‘not done’, ‘true’ and ‘fictional’;

then, after the lengthy description already quoted, we

follow Fama to the realm of King Iarbas: ‘Everywhere,

this foul goddess was disseminating these things

in/through the mouths of men; straightaway she turned her

route to King Iarbas’ (A.4.195-6).

Iarbas immediately goes into a temple to pray to

Jupiter, saying:

Do we shudder for no reason, father, when you hurl

your thunderbolts? Are those fires in the clouds

blind which terrify our spirits and mix with

meaningless murmurs?... This woman… has rejected

marriage to us and received Aeneas into her kingdom

as lord. (A.4.208-14)

The news of Dido’s relationship with Aeneas is so at odds

with a universe in which events are synchronized with

their fated or godly course that Iarbas wonders whether

thunderbolts are just meaningless noise (inania murmura).

‘Noise frequencies’ are interfering with the transmission

of Fate.

This is the point at which Jupiter has to set up a

telephonic connection to Aeneas in order to call Aeneas

back, away from his detour, to his destiny, to his proper

trajectory. He summons Aeneas to close the gap between

fate and history, to do away with the need for the

telephonic mediation by which Jupiter’s summons is

transmitted: come here, Aeneas, he says, echoing the first

words ever transmitted on the telephone, I want you.

The highly mediated call (the poem lingers over the

scenes of sending and reception, as well as Mercury’s

arming-scene and journey) stages the disjunction between

the medium of the gods/Fate and that of the world of

events. It is through this disjunction that Jupiter is

able to command Aeneas’ arrival, his destination and

destiny, but it is also because of this disjunction that

he wants, lacks, calls out for, Aeneas in the first place:

before being inscribed into history, in order to be so

inscribed, Fate must detour through Aeneas. This detour

is performed on the level of the narrative, which does

not follow Aeneas or Dido at this point, but rather

follows the route of information as it is transmitted,

moving us from Aeneas and Dido in the cave back to Aeneas

again via the relay of information through Dido to Fama

to Iarbas to Jupiter to Mercury.

Jupiter sends Mercury to Aeneas, to command him to

resume his journey to Italy. Jupiter emphasizes delay in

his messages, converting Juno’s attempted spatial

translocation of Aeneas’ destiny (from Italy to Carthage)

into a mere temporal lag; delay is built into the

relationship between the programme of Fate and its

implementation in history, but (as noted above), in order

for Fate to operate correctly, Aeneas must locate it

correctly, carrying its commands out in the proper place

and time. This is what Jupiter exhorts Mercury to exhort

Aeneas to do.

Mercury appears to Aeneas on two occasions: both

times, it is emphasized that his function is to correct

the pace of Aeneas’ journey, ending the ‘delay’ in

Carthage. This is how Jupiter instructs Mercury to make

his first appearance to Aeneas:

‘Address the leader of the Trojans who is now

waiting around in Tyrian Carthage and does not

bear in mind the cities given by the Fates...

If none of the glory of such great things

kindles in him, if he does not labour to win

fame on his own account, does he, as a father,

begrudge Ascanius [his son] the citadels of

Rome? What is he constructing, or in hope of

what does he delay (moratur) among a hostile

people, and not bear in mind the Lavinian [ie

Italian] fields and his Ausonian [ie Italian]

posterity? He must sail.’ (A.4.224-6, 235-7)

When Mercury reaches Aeneas, he speaks to him partly in

Jupiter’s words, but with some significant alterations:

‘Are you now putting the foundations of high

Carthage in place, uxorious man, and building a

beautiful city? … The ruler of the gods himself

sent me down to you from clear Olympus… he himself

ordered me to bring these commands through the

swift winds: What are you constructing, or in hope

of what do you waste your time in idleness in the

lands of Libya? If none of the glory of such great

things moves you, bear in mind Ascanius as he grows

and the hopes of your heir Iulus, to whom the

kingdom of Italy and the Roman land is owed.’

(A.4.265-76)

Mercury, mediating between the temporally-disjunct voice

of the Jupiter/Fate and the actual situation of address

in the encounter with Aeneas, omits Jupiter’s ‘hostile

people’ (Jupiter is speaking here from a point in Aeneas’

future: the Carthaginians are not hostile to the Trojans,

but they will be hostile to Rome) and ‘Lavinian fields’ (a

reference to the city of Lavinium, founded in honour of

and named after the Italian princess Lavinia, whom Aeneas

is fated to marry when he comes into his kingdom).

Jupiter is at the controls, but he does not know exactly

what he controls until his commands are answered: it is

up to Mercury to translate the commands of Jupiter,

issued from a point outside time, into the terms to which

Aeneas, in the here-and-now of the poem’s narrative, will

be able to respond.

So Mercury, translating ‘Lavinian fields’ into

‘Italy’, effaces the heteroerotic dimensions of Aeneas’

choice, and the telephonic encounter reroutes Aeneas’

desire: as soon as Mercury stops speaking, Aeneas ‘is on

fire to go away, to flee, and to leave this sweet land’

(A.4.281). Yet this desiring command phantomizes Aeneas:

he is himself not present, but only the medium through

which the future passes. His function is to translate the

commands of Destiny into the future political power which

will be, not his, but Ascanius’ property: the land of

Rome, as physical surface on which the commands of Fate

will be inscribed, is owed to Ascanius. Aeneas serves as

part of the transmission network of Fate, supplementing

the locative lack in Jupiter and the scroll of the Fates

as he translates the primary script of Fate into the

future of Rome. Yet Fate can only close the gap opened by

Fama by being diverted through Fama’s telephony. Aeneas

is finally prompted to make the decisive step and leave

Carthage by a second appearance from Mercury. This

encounter differs from the first in several ways, most

notably in the absence of the precise attention to the

sequence of sending, transmission and reception which

characterized the first Mercury-borne message. This time,

we are given no indication that Jupiter has commanded

Mercury’s appearance, either in the narrative or in

Mercury’s speech; the god appears to Aeneas in a dream;

and, moreover, he appears, not as himself, but as an

image of himself:

To [Aeneas] in his sleep the form of the god,

returning with the same countenance, showed

itself, and again seemed to warn him. It was

similar to Mercury in every way, in voice and

complexion and fairness of hair and the

shapely, youthful limbs. (A.4.556-9)

Mercury’s appearance here seems to conform precisely to

the telephonography of Fate, as traced above: he is

locating the decrees of Fate in time and space, so as to

enable a perfect correspondence between what is written

in the arcana Fatorum and what happens in the unfolding

narrative of history. However, the unavailability of a

primary script in this scene of telephonic transmission

means that Mercury’s message remains on shaky, if any,

ground: his appearance – similar to Mercury in every way

– introduces the possibility that something exactly like a god

might not be a god: even Mercury’s vocal ‘signature’ may

be forged. This scene thus ruins the criteria by which

‘Mercury’ could be distinguished from ‘not-Mercury’, and

thus to have more in common with the apparatus of Fama,

which sings pariter facta atque infecta: Mercury’s speech does

not conform to the conditions of faithful transmission

which, as I have argued, are necessary for the proper

workings of Fate and of the vocal medium on which the

Aeneid proclaims that it is transmitted. Thus it disrupts,

in particular, the isomorphism that the Aeneid seeks to set

up between the script of Fate and the history of Rome as

it is transmitted by Vergil’s ‘I sing’: noise frequencies

intervene, not only in the three-way connection between

Jupiter-Mercury-Aeneas, but also between the poet’s voice

and the reader’s ear.

3. CONCLUSION: TELEPHONOGRAPHIC HISTORY

The centrality of vocal/aural transmission to the Aeneid’s

organization of reading, narrative, Fate and history

turns out, then, to depend on a complicated organization

of telephonography.31 Further, this apparatus is put in

place specifically to manage the complex temporal relation

between writing and speech, destiny and history. The

correspondence between the structure of Aeneid 4 and the

speech act by which Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A.

Watson inaugurated telephony, which this paper has put

through, thus aims to perform the out-of-joint

temporality of telephony.32 The inaugural summons of (the)

Bell, which structures the call-and-response of telephony

around lack (‘I want you’) and the desire for presence

(‘come here’), does not constitute a clean cut dividing

the pre-phonographic past from the phonographic present

and future. Rather, the dislocation and re-citability of

31 It might now be timely to re-cite at slightly more length the moment in Of Grammatology with which I began this paper: ‘The epoch of logocentrism is a moment of the global effacement of the signifier: one then believes one is protecting and exalting speech; one is only fascinated with a figure of the techne’. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp.285-632 See, again, Avital Ronell: ‘A structure that is not equivalent to its technical history, the telephone… indicates more than a mere technological object. In our first listening… the telephone in fact will emerge as a synecdoche of technology’. (The Telephone Book, p.13.)

the voice, materialized in a new mode by the invention of

‘electric speech’ technologies, reveal the originarily

out-of-joint temporality of sending-and-receiving which

logocentrism seeks to manage through the techne of a

complex apparatus of mediation between speech and

writing. Through the possibility of electric speech, the

reader’s ear can be attuned to reception histories

carried on different frequencies from Fate’s.

Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk) is Lecturer in Reception at BristolUniversity. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on

teletechnology and Latin literature. She also writes on fanfiction. Currentlyshe is working on a book about civil war and archive fever in Latin epic, and a

website on fan theory/theory fandom.