Different Spheres

Published 11 June 2009

Different Spheres

- The World of Text; The World of Sound

by Luigi Marchini

I am writing this in response to Chris Hobday's column ‘A Necessary Evil?’ Like Chris I am an advocate of the written word over the spoken one. For me, poetry should be read in one’s head, savoured and digested over a period of time.

The amount of time will obviously vary from individual to individual, but surely it will be appreciated more than the few minutes given to it in a performance? When I listen to poetry my first instinct is always - ‘didn’t they read that well (or not)?’ It is the performer I am most paying attention to rather than the poem itself. I am not doing the work justice - how can I in a minute or two?

Of course our ancestors communicated, told stories in sounds and grunts long before they learned to draw pictures or write symbols. And I do enjoy the musicality of sounds; I can listen to Carroll’s Jabberwocky or Les Murray’s Bat's Ultrasound happily enough. I revel in the texture of their vibrations, and am drawn in by their acoustics.

However, when I am confronted by the two poems on the page, they are not the same. True; I admire the construction of the 'nonsense' words but I am left cold. To me these poems exist in a different sphere when on paper, a sphere I do not want to inhabit, providing evidence perhaps that some poems should be heard and not read. I cannot read Chaucer either - for me he simply has to be listened to.

But these examples are the exceptions to the rule: most poems demand to be read. An example of this is Paul Muldoon's Quoof. I heard it first and was left unmoved other than the unusual title word. It was only when I managed to get hold of the text that I realised what a great and powerful poem it is. And I discovered that the word ‘quoof’ actually has significance to Muldoon:

'How often have I carried our family word
for the hot water bottle
to a strange bed.'

The reliance on sounds outlined earlier brings to mind Julia Kristeva's study of the semiotic and its focus on rhythms and tones. The semiotic is governed by the maternal influence at the pre-Oedipal stage and is characterised by words not by their meaning or what they represent but for their rhythm, intonation, and musicality.

There are obvious parallels with Lacan’s mirror stage and Freud’s Oedipal theory. But to counter-balance the semiotic, and to prevent narrative being solely reliant on babble and child-like sounds, Kristeva introduces the symbolic. Here language is the linear, syntactic and representational discourse of socially constituted reality acquired during the abatement of the Oedipus complex¹.

Along lines parallel to those laid down by Mikhail Bakhtin, Kristeva sees a thetic, unitary consciousness expressing the logics of law and (symbolic) order, and an alternative world where there occurs a sporadic irruption of (semiotic) avant-garde writerliness which subverts the syntagmatic, meaningful plane of language via abrupt dislocations of syntax and literal meaning. In other words perhaps, semiotic = chaos and symbolic = order.

I find Kristeva’s studies go some way to explaining why some people prefer to listen to poetry rather than read it; it’s just that I am not one of them. As mentioned elsewhere, though, reading one’s own work out loud to an audience has to be done if the as yet unpublished poet wants to get his work ‘out there’. How else is a reader (or potential reader) going to know about you?

Because I do ‘perform’ my work, does not mean I enjoy it - far from it in fact, as I am no performer, no actor in a Shakespearian or Jacobean play. Performing my own work is definitely an evil - necessary or not.

¹. There are several texts where Kristeva provides a Lacanian insight to Bakhtin’s distinction between the monologic and polyphonic by delineating the symbolic and the semiotic, most notably, Desire in Language: a Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980)

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