Once upon a time there was a girl who nattered; a girl who helped her boss conduct affairs by relentlessly chatterboxing to his wife while he was on the extra-marital job. And - because, of course, we are talking about the Greek gods - the wife took revenge with a curse, and Echo, as the girl was called, found she could speak only the last words anyone spoke to her. Echo went on to fall in love with a beautiful boy who didn't love anyone, who rejected women till they put a curse on him. And so one day he saw his reflection in a pool and, as Ovid puts it in Ted Hughes's translation, mistook 'That picture of himself on the miniscus /For the stranger who could make him happy."
Whereupon he died of love for himself and was transformed not only into a flower but into an ism, an indispensable psychoanalytical term.
Echo, who faded away until she was nothing but a voice, never quite made it to ism . Echo is a natural phenomenon, but not a complex or a syndrome.While she might make a brief appearance in a feminist cautionary tale about girls too eager to agree with men, her story has never been given the creative rewriting enjoyed by other myths. However her life is read, Echo is the backing group to Narcissus' agonised solo rather than half a double act.
And yet the myth yokes Echo and Narcissus, insisting that a double act is what they are. This is not necessary to their individual love stories. ... The logic of their joint presence springs, I would argue, not from the psychological states they separately embody but from the split symbolised by their respective fates, the split between the aural and the visual modes of communication. ...
It might also learn to re-value Echo. For she is not simply a yes-girl but goes out to grab the words that she needs. 'Come to me', 'Touch me', she says - phrases she has to quarry out of a situation she has not chosen, which she then forces to express her own reality. As her body fades, words themselves become her body, constantly changing and constantly resisting the scenarios imposed by Narcissus's words in order to articulate her desires, desires which diametrically opposed to his. She chases him to catch more words, shifting her ground constantly, like an illicit radio station determined to go on broadcasting. ...
Echo's very existence, then, is subversive; even before her words register with the hearer, before they are established as bearers of meaning, they are voice, they say, I'm here, I'm alive. While an image has infinite potential to become a lifeless object on which meaning can be imposed, voice cannot exist without breath , without a living body to control the vibrations which the breath sets up in the vocal folds to make sounds. Voice signifies an independent, choice-making presence, not one that can be definitively constructed by a gaze. A voice is not a site, you cannot inscribe anything upon it: as Catherine Fitzmaurice points out in her article 'Breathing is Meaning', voice is an action.
~ Frances Gray
Like Echo, you are here - you are alive. Whether either male or female, please feel free to "reflect" and "voice" your experiences concerning NPD on the Disscussion Board. Perhaps the allegory of Echo might also represent what happens to a person when they lose their "voice" - their choice - let's not lose our own power to speak up, even if the words have previously been reflected off a cold, shiny mirror.
Artwork & photography lent by kind permission of
Susie Green. Many thanks.
