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According to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this first coming into subjectivity, into a preamble to subjectivity, occurs in the early life of the infant (for this activity, Lacan indicates the arbitrary age between the sixth and the eighteenth month).4 For the infant's first meeting with its subject, Lacan proffers a "symbolic" object, a mirror in which the infant first catches sight of its full body image and realizes its selfhood in relation to the other. Catherine's maternal presence continues to live beyond the death of her body, and the voice-over accompanying the final images of the movie reveals the undying voice of motherhood manifesting itself through the character of Sabine, Catherine's daughter.9 The voice-over tells us that Jules feels relieved from the nauseating vertigo that Catherine created in his life; it also tells us about his faith in a better future thanks to Sabine: Ils 'Catherine et Jim' ne laissaient rien d'eux.

In the very beginning of Jules and Jim, while the screen is still black, a woman's voice is heard. No musical background, no other artificial sounds accompany this voice so crisp and clear that it sounds like an earnest statement purposely isolated to underscore the intensity of a vocal feminine presence from the start. "Tu m'as dit: je t'aime. Je t'ai dit: attends. J'allais dire: prends-moi. Tu m'as dit: va-t-en." ("You said to me: I love you. I said to you: wait. I was going to say: take me. You said to me: go away.") The voice is deep and sensual-two qualities defining the voice of Jeanne Moreau, the woman behind the voice and the actress in Jules and Jim. It mixes childish and mature tones in the same breath; it speaks of love, frustration, and separation. The present study represents first an uncovering of the filmic status of this voice chanting in the dark, and second a questioning of the effects of the voice on the spectator expecting visual, not aural, pleasure. Whose unexpected voice do we hear coming from the darkness of the screen?

Plot provides us with an immediate answer to this question. This voice is the disembodied voice of Catherine, the main female character in Truffaut's 1962 movie Jules and Jim, in which two young men, Jules and Jim, fall victim to their dream of idealism represented by the sublime statue of a woman whom they come across by accident during a slide show. ' The beautiful statue on the slide triggers their desire to search for the actual woman incarnating the statue (Catherine). When they meet Catherine, they know that she is their "statufied" desire come true. However, Catherine's complex nature leaves her out of psychological reach, and despite her coming into Jules's and Jim's human world, she remains an unattainable object of desire throughout the film. Similarly, her disembodied voice remains an unattainable manifestation of her, as if it were speaking from inside a dream, displaced from the ideal body it represents while enunciating metonymically its feminine desire, adrift between love and rejection: "I love you . . . wait . . . take me . . . go away." As an impossible representation of desire, Catherine raises the question of feminine figuration in Jules and Jim, a question prompted by the mysterious female voice opening the movie.

The voice in the dark prefacing the visual experience that is about to begin dramatizes the distinction between the vocal and the specular, a distinction thoroughly investigated by Kaja Silverman in her acclaimed 1988 book The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. My first task here is to summarize Silverman's argument on the female voice and particularly on the maternal voice2 in order to understand the dichotomous nature of movies like Jules and Jim, in which the division between the vocal and the visual is made clear from the start. It is in light of Silverman's theoretical observations on the different roles of the maternal voice in cinema that we shall uncover the performing presence of the maternal figure invested in the voice prefacing Truffaut's movie Jules and Jim.

For the purpose of defining as accurately as possible the female subject represented in cinema, Silverman uses Guy Rosolato's phrase "the acoustic mirror,"3 which indicates the double function of the voice for any subject that simultaneously receives and produces sounds, internalizing the voice of identification while also externalizing it as an object of projection. seen/heard through the "acoustic mirror," the voice "violates the bodily limits upon which classic subjectivity depends" (Silverman 80). The bodily limits evoked by Silverman are determined by modes of identification built on the specular order alone. In psychoanalysis, the primacy of the specular over any other modes of perception coincides with the critical oedipal moment when the infant identifies its own body, for the first time separated from the mother's body. According to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this first coming into subjectivity, into a preamble to subjectivity, occurs in the early life of the infant (for this activity, Lacan indicates the arbitrary age between the sixth and the eighteenth month).4 For the infant's first meeting with its subject, Lacan proffers a "symbolic" object, a mirror in which the infant first catches sight of its full body image and realizes its selfhood in relation to the other. Lacan's mirror is less an actual mirror than a metaphor for the mother's body, where "mental" separation of bodies first takes place. Past the mirror stage, the child continues to enhance the contours of its own identity, thus becoming capable of operating individually and concurrently into a language "restoring its function as subject" (Lacan, Ecrits 2). The child acquires its individual image in relation to the bodies it sees evolving around it. These "other" bodies act as mirrors that send back images of differences and similarities to the subject who, subsequently, assumes its identity and the limitations of its own body first in language and then in social situations mediated by cultural practices morally and sexually restricted by the Oedipus complex. Rosolato's concept of the "acoustic mirror" adapts the optical relation that the subject has with the mirror in psychoanalytical theory as if the mirror were reflecting sounds rather than images. The subject constitutes its self as it first differentiates sounds through the "acoustic mirror." Rosolato claims that the process of identification starts from birth and that the child, bom with reduced visual powers, first distinguishes sounds5-especially the mother's voice-and incorporates them as if they were its own sounds. Rosolato associates the mechanism of emission and reception of the voice with "the images of entry and departure relative to the body" (Silverman 80). In Rosolato's theory, the voice of the mother creates the vocal subject in similar ways that the imago in Lacan's theory of the mirror stage creates the specular subject. Rosolato gives the speaking mother the status of a vocal mirror in which the child recognizes the mother's voice as its own voice. Thus, according to Rosolato, subjectivity is not solely dependent on the image of the mother; but rather, her voice has already set into place the structures of individuation. In the "acoustic mirror" the mother is first perceived as a speaking subject before being perceived as a subject of speech. She is a speaking voice before being an image/body spoken about; as the "acoustic mirror" she becomes the subject's voice providing a vocal model of identification.

Silverman examines the two paradoxical functions of the "acoustic mirror" that she reads as a sonorous envelope that initially provides pleasure and later must be rejected. In the early life of the infant, the voice of the mother is perceived as a swaddling envelope of sounds protecting it. Once the infant becomes an individual subject caught into the cultural structures in place, the mother's voice represents maternal "abjection," in which the subject "hears all the repudiated elements of its infantile babble" (Silverman 81) that it must reject. The central problem raised by Silverman questions the constant shifting of the subject's position vis-à-vis the "acoustic mirror." Is the infant inside or outside the sonorous envelope created by the maternal voice? Is the mother inside or outside her own vocal envelope? Is the mother's voice a voice of pleasure or a voice of fear? Silverman provides us with an array of critical answers for such complex questions.

She first invokes Michel Chion's theory of the "uterine night," a sort of nightmare within which the child is trapped by the maternal voice.6 In the uterine night, the mother is outside producing the sounds that form the confining walls of a dark prison. Chion's views on the traumatic implications of the maternal voice on the formation of the cinematic subject lie in sharp contrast to Rosolato's theory on the cinematic voice perceived as a "protective blanket," an oral surrounding of pleasure. Rosolato indicates that child and mother live in an undifferentiated state of vocal plenitude. According to him, they are both situated inside the circle of sounds created by the mother's voice.

In light of the different critical approaches to voice in cinema provided by Chion and Rosolato, we are able to shed some light on the odd beginning of Jules and Jim, a beginning in which there are no images to be seen, just a female voice to be heard. This voice seems to cradle the spectator in the dark as it naively narrates/sings a simple, repetitious riddle: "Tu m'as dit: je t'aime. Je t'ai dit: attends. J'allais dire: prends-moi. Tu m'as dit: va-t-en." In resembling the simplicity of a nursery rhyme, this riddle bestows maternal qualities upon the voice. Silverman's question about the position of the mother and the child in relation to the sonorous envelope created by the voice is fully dramatized in this preface of Jutes and Jim. In a single instant, Silverman's distinctive critical positions on the role of voice as maternal pleasure or maternal fear conflate. We shall try to restore both positions and to see how they determine the double presence of pleasure and fear within the same vocalic representation of the mother.

On the one hand, the voice in the dark in the beginning of Jules and Jim dramatizes Chion's "uterine night," and, as such, it speaks from outside the vocal darkness it creates. Catherine's riddle lures its listeners into the darkness of her femininity, and the dark frames accompanying the voice serve as a metaphor for her "threatening" dark womb. The spectators, sitting in the dark movie theater and riveting their eyes to the screen they expect to produce images, are thrown into total confusion by the dark frames that pull them into the "void" in which they become the infant-subject trapped by the maternal voice. In the first few seconds of Jules and Jim, the spectators experience a moment of anxiety as they are forced to become listeners against their own will and desire to see. In place of the expected visual pleasure-an anticipated pleasure for which they have paid their dues by buying a ticket-the spectators find themselves trapped in the interiority of the vocal "darkness."

On the other hand, Rosolato's theory of first auditive bliss suggests a different scenario for the spectators thrown into total darkness; the spectators lose all visual sense of subjectivity and return to the undivided world of pre-symbolic plentitude and bliss where the only "other" object is the maternal voice enveloping the subject in its blanket of pleasure. In Rosolato's terms, the spectators listening to the maternal voice at the beginning of Jules and Jim introject the voice and make it their own voice. As through an acoustic mirror, phonic utterances detach themselves from their original maternal voice to fill the subject with a sonorous and rhythmical identity.

This moment of vocal identification with Catherine's voice precedes the visual bonding between the spectators and the images of the film. Whether nightmare (in Chion's thesis) or bliss (in Rosolato's thesis), the maternal voice prefacing Truffaut's Jules and Jim reenacts a primal scene of subjectivity, a vocal fantasy for blinded spectators.

What happens to Catherine's voice once the visual mechanism of the movies is under way? Her maternal voice, which once protected and cradled the child/spectator with the simplicity of its rhythms and sounds, becomes the voice of a woman expressing sexual desire. Even as the voice in the dark sings its mysterious riddle, Catherine's sexuality can already be differentiated in terms of what she says as opposed to how she says it. In other words, her sexuality depends on the meaning of the words rather than on the musicality supporting the words. Indeed, the female voice that asserts "I love you; wait; take me; go away" utters words of sexual significance depicting in simplistic terms a scene of frustrated love. In this scene, an unidentified lover declares his love ("Je t'aime") to a woman who does not feel ready to respond immediately to such passion. She asks her lover to wait ("attends"). When she feels that the moment has come for them to consummate their passion she offers her body to her lover ("prends-moi"), but the latter tired of waiting casts her off ("va-t-en"). The sexual connotation of these four verbal injunctions leaves behind the maternal resonances of Catherine's rhythmical voice. Understood for what it says, the voice in the dark becomes the voice of sexual desire, a seductive voice speaking a lover's discourse.

The first auditive instant provided by the riddling voice at the beginning of Jules and Jim mixes the cradling sounds of motherhood with the riddling language of sexuality. The mother behind the voice in the dark is also a sexual being seducing the blinded audience into its feminine darkness.

We begin to wonder if the feminine voice singing in the dark belongs to a loving mother or to a seductive temptress. Much of the ambiguous nature of the feminine figure is based on the conflict we have just traced between voice and language, sounds and words, rhythms and meanings; and these conflictual terms delineate in turn a conflictual feminine figure, maternal in essence, but divided in nature between platonic love and sexual love. In La Jeune née, Hélène Cixous views Voice with a capital "V" as the legacy of motherhood resisting symbolic codification. The voice of the mother is a powerful stream of sounds that cannot be cut off by the symbolic order, the paternal order of language.7 According to Cixous, the maternal voice stands outside the "law" just as Catherine's voice prefacing Jules and Jim stands outside the actual limits of the film, before the credits and the first images of the film. Cixous's views on the way in which the "Symbolic" interrupts the respiratory function of the voice lends itself to the odd beginning of Jules and Jim when the female voice in the dark is interrupted by the written credits and the images appearing on the screen, two symbolic occurrences marking the official beginning of the movie. The voice itself survives beyond this interruption, it impregnates the visual order, and resonates throughout the course of the movie.

Beyond its vocal introduction, the film itself provides some answers to the ambiguous nature of the feminine figure. The nature of the female voice prefacing Jules and Jim owes much of its ambiguity to the fact that it does not accompany a body or an image. The disembodied maternal voice Silverman evokes in The Acoustic Mirror is always a voice-over, a voice separated from its original body but initiating a relation of signification with the images appearing on the screen as it speaks. The voice in the dark in Jules and Jim is a voice(-)over nothing, a voice for voice's sake. As the movie progresses, the voice becomes associated with the visual image of Catherine. However, even when the voice has claimed Catherine's body as its originator, the dichotomy between music and language, between maternal rhythms and sexual signifiers, does not dissolve into the visual order of the movie.

Catherine's singing voice sounds again during the movie when she performs in front of her three lovers a song titled "Le Tourbillon de la vie," "The Swirl of Life." Catherine's song is written by Albert, one of her three lovers; the voice is hers, the lyrics are his. We may view the singing as an emanation from her maternal self and the language of the song as an emanation from the masculine/paternal Other embodied in the three male figures who delineate Catherine's love life. Indeed, either directly or indirectly, the three men listening to her have established a relationship of paternity with her. Jules is the real father of their little girl, Sabine; Jim is the short-lived would-be father of Catherine's miscarried child; and Albert is the "adoptive" father ready to marry Catherine and, in his own words, become Sabine's stepfather. Thus, the division between maternal voice and paternal language manifests itself more clearly as Catherine sings "Le Tourbillon de la vie." The song has a simple and repetitious melody, it has "a catchy tune" eliciting a desire to hum along. The pleasure of singing along is somehow reminiscent of the aural pleasure in early infancy during which the infant incorporates the mother's voice as if it were its own. The melody of the song creates "the acoustic mirror" in which sounds are reflected upon the subject able to receive and produce the song at the same time. The lyrics, however, retell a familiar love scenario in which a man meets a woman, a singer whose voice coaxed him to love her: "Elle chantait avec une voix qui, sitôt, m'enjôla" ("She sang with a voice that immediately beguiled me"; translation mine). He loses her to the swirl of time, but, later in his life, finds her again in a café where she sings with her "voix fatale"-her "fatal voice." He gets_drunk while listening to her wheedling voice-"Je me suis saoulé en l'écoutant"-and finally wakes up in her arms under her passionate embrace. The fantasy leading the powerless male into the arms of the femme fatale is initiated by the bewitching voice of the woman-singer. She is a siren enchanting him with her voice of pleasure. However, in the myth of the sirens, pleasure rapidly recedes, and the sailors are eventually destroyed by the ensnaring song of the nymphs. Their seductive song represents the destruction of male subjectivity. "Le Tourbillon de la vie" has the intoxicating quality of the siren's song, for it describes a chaotic love story for which the woman is responsible. Such chaos also marks the composition of the song. Indeed, the long ending of the song repeats ad nauseam the two lovers' separating and meeting over and over again, thus creating a vertiginous and dizzying effect justifying the title of the song: "The Swirl of Life."

The narrator in the song, the "I" speaking the dizzying words of his love affair, is male. There is a complete identification between Albert, the writer of the song, and the male narrator in his song. Albert projects in his song the powerful and seductive effect of Catherine's voice on all men listening to her. In fact, Catherine's voice enacts the vocal seduction already signified by the lyrics of the song. She is the female voice singing a male song for a male audience. She represents the voice, and Albert (also

Jules and Jim) represents the language confused by the power of her voice. The separation of voice and language retroactively bestows meaning upon the first "vocal scene" of the movie. The female voice singing in the dark becomes separated from the content of the riddle. As a melodic voice it falls under the maternal category, and as a spoken language it delineates the sexual content imposed on its maternal musicality by the fathers of Catherine's born and unborn children. The analysis of Catherine's performance of "Le Tourbillon de la vie" dissipates the ambiguity behind the voice opening the movie, because in the final analysis, it casts each component of the act of singing to its particular role: to the mother the voice, and to the father the language.

Thus, the maternal voice emerges from our analysis of Jules and Jim as a feminine detail separated from the corpus of images and language constituting the elements of representation most accounted for in film criticism. Situated outside images and language, the maternal voice belongs to a psychoanalytical category outside the Imaginary and the Symbolic, a category Lacan calls the "Real." Lacan defines the "Real" as the missed encounter between subject and language, which translates into a terrifying unknown territory standing beyond all representations.8 The fear generated by Lacan's "Real" may account for Chion's negative views in his theory of the "uterine night." The inside of the womb belongs to the biological reality of maternal interiority, and therefore it is not accessible to the subject of language. Outside its metaphoric representation, the maternal womb cannot successfully be conceived of by the subject. It is the maternal body that the subject must reject in order to function linguistically and culturally. A voice capable of recreating the uterine conditions of the pre-linguistic environment surrounding the infant would also re-create the horror standing beyond all possible representations of the mother's body. The voice that brings the subject closer to the maternal womb also destroys the subject of language. Lacan's "Real" stands outside representation like Truffaut's maternal voice stands outside the actual film limits, in the unsettling darkness preceding the film. In Jules and Jim, the initial voice catches the spectator unprepared to receive its logic of blindness and pure sound.

The spectator may well confront the initial voice with fear as he is reminded of Chion's "uterine night," the paradigm for the threatening female interiority that the male subject must reject in order to function in his cultural environment. However, he also may let himself be wrapped up inside the pleasurable sonorous envelope of the female voice suggested by Rosolato, thus giving full power to his fantasy of being led back to a lost state of union with the mother. Jules and Jim are Truffaut's creation of male subjectivity fighting the maternal force deployed by Catherine's voice and finding refuge in the visual pleasure provided by filmic representations of her body. As a way to negate the power of the voice singing in the dark, Jules and Jim set up a serious search for the body belonging to the feminine voice heard at the beginning of the movie. As their search progresses, the unidentified woman's voice becomes a figure embodied by Catherine. However, throughout the movie, Catherine will always remain the feminine and maternal force that can never be captured; she will escape the logic of Jules and Jim's world, and at very best, she will give Jules and Jim the frustrated love life prescribed by the lyrics of her opening riddle.

As the movie ends at Catherine's and Jim's funeral, Jules feels almost relieved by her tragic disappearance. He is not afraid to lose Catherine anymore because, as the voice-over declares, "c'était fait" ("it was done"). Her body had been cremated, her image had finally disappeared, she had returned to her initial condition, of a presence without a representation, of a voice in the dark. Catherine's maternal presence continues to live beyond the death of her body, and the voice-over accompanying the final images of the movie reveals the undying voice of motherhood manifesting itself through the character of Sabine, Catherine's daughter.9 The voice-over tells us that Jules feels relieved from the nauseating vertigo that Catherine created in his life; it also tells us about his faith in a better future thanks to Sabine: "Ils 'Catherine et Jim' ne laissaient rien d'eux. Lui, Jules, avait sa fille. Catherine avait-elle aimé la lutte pour la lutte? Non, mais elle en avait étourdi Jules jusqu'à la nausée" ("They 'Catherine and Jim' left nothing of each other. Jules had his daughter. Did Catherine like struggling for straggling's sake? No, but Jules was disoriented and sickened through her struggle"; translation mine). Jules believes that the nausea that ripped through his disquieted self while Catherine was alive is finally over when Catherine dies; however, he is literally blinded by the voice (-over) reminding him of Sabine's presence. Sabine, the undeniable daughter of Catherine, continues to represent the presence of Catherine's maternal power. In the melancholy darkness filling Jules's mind after Catherine's death, the incorporated voice of motherhood invested in the final voice-over offers to Jules the undying figure of female oral/aural presence represented by Sabine echoing Catherine's voice of motherhood. Sabine offers a filmic version to Cixous's unbreakable chain of maternal sounds. Beyond representation and beyond life itself echoes the ever-lilting voice of the mother.