ソルジェニーツィン『煉獄のなかで』における声 : 言語秩序と「身体」をめぐって

From the period of perestroika, there has been an argument in the criticism of Soviet culture that the Stalinist culture suppressed the representation of the body, which is irreducible to the canonical language. In this body/language opposition, the body is seen as deviation, excess or something antagonistic to the social and language order. But it is not appropriate to think that the body can be represented outside of and autonomous from language because, taking this assumption and regarding the body as something that needs release from the yoke of the language order, we only repeat the same scheme of such sayings that the body must be suppressed by language. The body should, therefore, be seen as that formed in the practice of language. In this light, dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's text appears to tell how the body is formed in the language activity and treated by the language order. His text does not take the body/language opposition for granted, but probes the mechanism which this opposition stands on. Solzhenitsyn's novel, The First Circle, describes the process of the formation of the body far more clearly and elaborately than in any other of his writings. The central motif of the novel is voice-hearing, which inevitably raises the question of the relation of language and body. That is because, on one hand, voice carries linguistic messages, but on the other, it is a part of the human body. Voice separates from the body and goes through various media (recorder, telephone, radio etc.), but in this process it does not seem to lose the trace of the body in the form of its materiality, such as frequency and amplitude. This duality of voice plays a decisive role in The First Circle. In the beginning of the story, Innokentii Volodin, a young diplomat, calls the embassy of the United States in Moscow and reveals that a Soviet agent will receive information about the manufacturing of an atomic bomb. His conversation is tapped and recorded, and the Ministry of State Security (MGB) commits the tape to a special prison-institute commonly called a sharashka, where confined scientists and engineers are working for the benefit of the government. Gleb Nerzhin, a mathematician, and Lev Rubin, a linguist, are ordered to analyze the tape and identify the criminal among five suspects. The novel depicts in detail the process of voice analysis, which is to be examined concretely in this paper. Previous studies on Solzhenitsyn's novels have not read these technology motifs in their literal meaning. If attention is paid to descriptions of technology, they tend to concentrate on metaphorical and ideological interpretations of them (the telephone network stands for the bureaucratic system of the socialist state, for instance) and ignore the material and practical aspect of them. Solzhenitsyn himself lived in a sharashka for three years, and the model of Nerzhin is the author. He compared the sharashka to "the first circle" (borrowed from Dante's The Divine Comedy), which is the most privileged place among the concentration camps. There, prisoners were exempted from hard labor and even enjoyed freedom of speech, unthinkable in the outside society. Their work was directly connected with the benefit of the state, and significant contribution sometimes freed them. Many technical experts imprisoned in the sharashka, however, belonged to the generations before the Revolution, and a part of them were anti-Stalinist sympathizers. What sustained this inclination was their assurance of the autonomy of "techno-elite," but in fact their life depended on the technological innovation which they devised for the regime. In other words, the channels of their voices are strictly controlled, but at the same time their technology regulates the conditions on how voices are transmitted. Located in this ambiguous position of sharashka, the prisoners in The First Circle are confronted with difficult ethical questions to decide one after another. The depiction of the analysis of Volodin's voice is based on a true story Solzhenitsyn experienced in the sharashka and that Rubin's model Lev Kopelev wrote a detailed memoir about. By the time they take up Volodin's case, the prisoners have been engaged in the development of a scrambler phone that can protect Stalin's telephone conversation from being tapped by encoding and decoding human voices. The decoded voice must be identifiable with the speaker as well as being clearly heard. Looking back to the duality of voice mentioned above, clarity of voice (what one is saying) is related to its linguistic aspect, while identification (who is speaking) to its materiality or body. The latter is considered more complicated than the former, and what is necessary for the analysis of Volodin's voice is the latter (who is the criminal). To develop this special apparatus, Nerzhin (Solzhenitsyn) and Rubin (Kopelev) used a device called "visible speech," the prototype of today's sound spectrograph. It gives vo ...