E-Book Overview
In Beyond Words, Steven Connor seeks to understand spoken human language outside words, a realm that encompasses the sounds we make that bring depth, meaning, and confusion to communication. Plunging into the connotations and uses associated with particular groups of vocal utterances the guttural, the dental, the fricative, and the sibilant he reveals the beliefs, the myths, and the responses that surround the growls, stutters, ums, ers, and ahs of everyday language. Beyond Words goes outside of linguistics and phonetics to focus on the popular conceptions of what language is, rather than what it actually is or how it works. From the moans and sobs of human grief to playful linguistic nonsense, Connor probes the fringes and limits of human language and our definition of voice” and meaning to challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to communicate and where we find meaning in language. By engaging with vocal sounds and tics usually trivialized or ignored, Beyond Words presents a startling and fascinating new way to engage with language itself.
E-Book Content
beyond words Beyond Word s Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations Steven Connor reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2014 Copyright © Steven Connor 2014 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 258 4 Contents one Ahem 7 two St . . . st . . . st 17 three Hiss 33 four Hic 53 five Mmmm 72 six Grrr 106 seven Pprrpffrrppffff 128 eight Tittle-tattle 144 nine Zzzz 162 epilogue Blottybus in Blottis 194 references 209 further reading 231 acknowledgements 234 index 235 one Ahem Aristotle’s Cough ‘I see a voice’ says Bottom, absurdly, peering as Pyramus through a crack in an imaginary wall at the speaking lips of his lover, Thisbe, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (v.i.190). Absurd as they are, his words can help us grasp the similarity between hearing a voice and seeing a face. For seeing and hearing may both be understood, not as a passive registration of visual or auditory stimulus, but as an active and interrogative scanning of the visual and auditory fields, in search of particular kinds of form. Present somebody with a complex or unintelligible arrangement of dots or stripes, and they are likely to begin by trying to resolve it into a face. Presented with a similarly confused set of sounds, human beings seem equivalently impelled to wonder at the outset if there is a voice to be made out in them. The face and the voice are the two most important forms that stand out from William James’s ‘great blooming, buzzing confusion’ of sense impressions.1 We may say that, for this reason, face and voice come to represent the emergence or figuring out ( figura = face) of form itself. In this sense, voice may be imagined as the antonym of noise, and noise as the matrix or ground of voice. Noise is anonymous, mechanical and meaningless; voice is personal, animate and expressive. Noise is accident, voice is intent. Noise has no importance, voice is full of portent. Though we can train ourselves to listen away from voices, or can under certain circumstances start to hear them as ‘mere’ noise, the effort this requires indicates the very strong predisposition that we have to pick out voices from noise, and to identify foreground auditory phenomena as voice. It makes obvious sense 7 beyond words