This article accompanies Joe Moran’s piece ‘The Death of an Irishman: A Speculative Biography’ in History Workshop Journal Volume 98 (Fall 2024) (open access).
The first death that really affected me was Obi-Wan Kenobi’s in Star Wars, which came out when I was seven. It wasn’t just that Obi-Wan, played by Alec Guinness, was the first ‘goodie’ I had seen die in a film. It was that, at the merest touch from Darth Vader’s red lightsaber, his body just vaporized, leaving only his monk’s cowled robe on the floor. This was not the kind of death I was used to from cowboy films, where those shot from behind would throw back their shoulders and jerk up their heads, and those shot from the front would clasp their stomachs and totter forwards, perhaps with time for a valedictory ‘you got me’ before breathing their last. Obi-Wan’s death had none of this cartoonish, crowd-pleasing choreography. He was alive, then he wasn’t. He was something, then he was nothing.
Well, not quite. He did return towards the end of the film as a disembodied voice. Luke Skywalker hears Obi-Wan urging him on as he flies his X-wing fighter through the Death Star trench. Use the Force, Luke. Let go. That bit of the film is what sticks in my head now – perhaps because it speaks of the power of someone’s voice to linger in the mind and retain their essence after they are gone.
In my article for History Workshop Journal, ‘The Death of an Irishman’, I try to trace the life and death of my grandfather, who died five years before I was born. As I was writing it, a phrase from Bobbie Ann Mason’s short story, ‘Shiloh’, kept coming to me: ‘They are leaving out the insides of history.’ I have long been interested in the insides of history: the knotty, recalcitrant details of a life that don’t often make it into archives. And of all the many details about my grandfather to which I will never have access, the one that seems to matter most is that I don’t know what he sounded like.
I can guess, of course. I imagine he sounded rather like the Irish men from the next generation I heard talking outside mass when I was growing up Catholic in a small Peak District town in the 1970s and 1980s. When I read the pub scenes in Ulysses,and Flann O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns from the Irish Times, I realised that Dubliner speech has a performative cadence and rhythm that my grandfather’s speech probably had as well. Still, everyone’s voice is unique. Aristotle defined a voice as ‘the sound produced by a creature possessing a soul’. A voice is the living person it belongs to; it is made of their exhaled breath, air from the lungs moving up through the vocal cords, palate, tongue, lips and teeth. Each voice is rendered inimitable by the special shape of the cavities in that echo chamber, the human body, and the unique mood and personality of the speaker.
My grandfather loved to sing, and was a fan of Frank Sinatra (both traits I have inherited). Sinatra, who was known as ‘the Voice’, actually has a far from perfect voice, especially as he got older and lost a lot of wind power. Its magic lies not in its tone or timbre (it’s a bit gravelly at the bottom end and reedy at the top) but in Sinatra’s phrasing and breath control. It feels as if he is confiding in the listener, unravelling the sense of the song as he goes along. His voice, precisely because of its imperfections, sounds like no other singer’s.
We know all this because Sinatra’s voice survives in countless recordings. My grandfather’s voice, by contrast, was like almost every other human voice in history: it died on the air. In his book This is the Voice, John Colapinto suggests that the evanescentnature of the human voice may have had an evolutionary advantage for our species. A voice can travel great distances, as a warning to others, but it leaves no trace – unlike footprints, smell or other clues useful to a predator in pursuit.
A voice stops when its owner stops breathing. Of course it does. But how absurd that this is so; how preposterous to think that something so alive, so utterly itself, so inseparably linked to a single consciousness, will never be heard again. When my father died, I couldn’t bring myself to delete the last message he had left on my landline, but I couldn’t face hearing it either, so I didn’t play back or delete any messages, and the answerphone quickly became full. Around the same time, I more or less stopped using my landline in favour of my mobile, so I avoided the question of when or whether to delete the message. For all I know his voice is still on there, six years later.
Guglielmo Marconi, the radio pioneer, thought that all sound lived for ever, even after it decayed into a form that the human ear could no longer hear. In the opening paragraphs of his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner recounts the story that, in the last years of his life, and ailing after a series of heart attacks, Marconi dreamed of inventing a device that would allow him to hear Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount.
I am no scientist, but as far as I can tell Marconi was half-right. Sound waves do decay into infrasound, decreasing in frequency and losing volume but travelling more rapidly the further they go. Whales use infrasound to communicate across distances of hundreds of miles. Sound waves are energy, and energy can’t be destroyed, only changed from one form into another. So I suppose that every sound wave ever made has some kind of eternal afterlife, oscillating perhaps once every ten thousand years instead of many times per second as it did when first heard. A comforting thought: nothing dies completely. Every life leaves an indelible mark on the universe.
But this does not mean that a lost voice is recoverable in any way that would make sense to another person. We are no closer to inventing a machine that could retrieve the unrecorded voices of the past. I will never hear my grandfather’s voice. Nor will I ever know what he looked like on every day of his life apart from the day of his wedding (the only photograph I have of him), or how he walked, or carried himself, or moved his arms to emphasize speech, or just generally took up his allotted cubic centimetres of space in the world. I ended up writing a much longer article than I had planned, assembling as much particularized information about him as I could find and then layering on contextualizing detail. And all the time I knew that, however many words I wrote, I was leaving out the insides of history.
