The Energy of the Hindered Scream
… the exceptional status of his voice: the phantom of the opera is first of all a being of voice, in the novel he is regularly addressed as “the man’s voice,” as if the “normal” relationship of voice and its bearer (its source) were inverted: instead of the voice appertaining to the body as one of its properties, it is the body itself which, in its distortion, materializes an “impossible,” originally bodiless and as such all-powerful (all present) voice baptized by Michel Chion as “la voix acousmatique”. The first association here is, of course, again Munch’s Scream: in it, the energy of the hindered scream—which cannot burst out and release itself in sound—finds an outlet (one is almost tempted to say: “is acted out”) in the anamorphotic distortion of the body, in its “unnatural” serpentine windings, and of the coast and water beyond the bridge—as if these spiral lines are here to materialize sound vibrations, in a kind of effect of conversion of the hindered sound into a distortion of matter.
~Slavoj Žižek
Enjoy Your Symptom! ~ NY : Routledge, 2008 / pg 133
