Robert Michael Brain

Brain hoes his row in this article, presenting a cogent and focused thesis on how the late nineteenth-century linguistique was conceived as an explicit answer to German philology, vaulting French science ahead of its rival after the Franco-Prussian War by rejecting Schlegelian Volkgeister and the primacy of the written text for a focus on instrumental data from spoken language, garnered by the new phonetics labs, and an emergent return to the understanding of the arbitrariness of the sign, reaching back to the eighteenth century as well as forward, and setting the stage for Saussure. There is perhaps too much focus on the ins and outs of each of the historical machines, which even in the specialist context has to be a niche interest. In Lenoir and Ulrich, Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication.… (plus d'informations)

A wonderfully written and neatly modular piece of intellectual history, tracing the effect of, or better said, inspiration derived from the beginning of experimental phonetics by the fin-de-siecle Symbolist vers-libristes, which becomes an established legacy to be grappled with by their successors, the Futurists and the Dada movement, and eventually to be subsumed by the “hegemonic ocular politics of modernism.”

Brain’s secret prehistory begins with the work of experimental phoneticians like the Abbé de Rousselot—a straw up your nose attached to a needle which quavers differently when you make different sounds, a human-seismograph type of thing (Rousselot being singled out here for his acknowledged influence on the poets in question, not because plenty of other people weren’t doing the same kind of work). This is instrumental in the burgeoning understanding of a distinction between the old limited poetical sense of the term “prosody” (i.e., systematized poetic meter—regularized feet and caesurae; in French, predominantly, the classic seventeenth-century alexandrine line and Classical models more generally) and a new sense of “rhythm” born of the old but lightyears away from it in spirit—as alluded to by Mallarmé and manifestoized by more anarchistic contemporaries such as Gustave Kahn and Jean Moréas: “temporal distribution of elements of language, especially spoken language, such as timbre (in recurrences such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme), duration, pitch or intonation, and intensity or volume.”

In this context, vers libre—the formulation of Kahn, later a mentor to Marinetti—attains an increasingly clear vector-relation between the vers liberé of Baudelaire/Verlaine/Rimbaud, greats who still seem in the context of the work under discussion sort of like kleiner pishers and the “words-in-freedom” or parole in libertà of Marinetti. As part of the greater impressionism of the time, the dallyings of B/V/R with loosened metre and rhyme are developed under the explicit aegis of speech-not-writing, the body, and physiology (not only phonetics but “pure talk” folk genres and declamation, each of these of course influencing the other) into psychophysiological schemata developed on the basis of shoddy evidence like Sarah Bernhardt reading from the Big Book of French Lit and the recordings analyzed as series of graphic curves. Shoddy but still fascinating.

But you can guess where this goes, right? Vers libre is simultaneously festschrifted and assaulted by Marinetti—the work of Kahn and poets like Charles Henry is called out for patternizing on the features above, with assonance coming in for a particular whipping, and for more generally being a systematics when what we want is POWER! KABOOM! SPORTS CARS! PLOP! MUSSOLINI! WHIZZZZZZ! NO BEETHOVEN! KIDS MAKING MACHINE GUN SOUNDS! MAMMA MIA! An automated process, the human as receiver-transmitter, you know the tired drill (as if The Well-Tempered Clavier isn’t just Philip Glass, Marinetti, you prick and a half). And the Dadaists, god bless ‘em, fulfill their role as Futurism’s good twin by turning the process’s face toward joy; here is Hugo Ball:

With the sentence having given way to the word, the circle around Marinetti began resolutely with parole in libertà. They took the word out of the sentence frame (the world image) that had been thoughtlessly and automatically assigned to it, nourished the emaciated big-city vocables with light and air, and gave them back their warmth, emotion, and their original untroubled freedom. We others went a step further. We tried to give the isolated vocables the fullness of an oath, the glow of a star. And curiously enough, the magically inspired vocables conceived and gave birth to a new sentence that was not limited and confined by any conventional meaning.

“All words have been invented by others,” says Ball; “I would like to add my own nonsense.” Individuality and that which is one’s own—between abstracted phonetic point and Sarah Bernhardt’s idiolectal snowflake of a counterpoint, between alexandrine Scylla and automatic Charybdis—is, you will have seen, a vexed issue here. But Ball makes good on his threat in his Verse ohne Worte, glarhganarfgngna skizzzbbrtbrtarzrtzrzz, and thus raises the beautiful spectre of a poetics of those words we mutter to ourselves with all their individuality, one that turns them away not from Futurism or automata or fascism, precisely, but away from something dark and wounded that aligns with all those things. My grandmother and all her sisters muttered to themselves, and now my father is starting, and I haven’t done it yet but I could speak the complete IPA or play nonsense and mimickry games with my niece all day long, and I’d like to think that those vocalizations are a unique expression of our selfness, whether it be merely neurophysiological quirks and quarks or the glow of an acoustic human star. (It’s not too late for me to go the boyband route, right?)

Ironically, the covering term “rhythm” whereby much of this is understood is nowadays exactly the sense of the term “prosody” as it would be understood by anyone by a poetry critic—the best plainspeeching of it might be “shape,” if not for the visual associations, and Brain closes with a quick discussion of the triumph of the optical over the aural as high modernist aristocrats like Ezra Pound fit them into the predictable proto-fascist hierarchies. It’s always really important not to let those guys get away from their reductions, or to let dadafuturism pretend to immaculate steam birth from Ubu Roi’s head, and this article lays out some of the connections with prior poetry and poetics, thoroughly; with contemporary language science, credibly; and all of it eruditely. Appeared in Grey Room.… (plus d'informations)