Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 102

GRIPLA100
217). This example – chosen at random – is an instance of the unexcep-
tionable metonymy by which ‘voice’ stands for die priviligierte Instanz
der Authentifizierung eines pyschologisch gedachten Subjekts (‘the privileged
manifestation of the authenticity of a psychologically conceived subject’)
(Kolesch 2006, 48). The prominence of the figure of the ‘skald’s voice’ in
discussions of the lausavísur thus bears witness to the continued indebted-
ness of even the most methodologically sophisticated skaldic scholarship to
Romantic ideas of subjectivity and inspiration (Esterhammer 2004). What
happens when we take the idea of hearing the skald’s voice more literally,
or better, more materially – as an auditory phenomenon; as a performed
text – is the concern of the remainder of this article.
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The saga episodes at the centre of the following discussion are, like the
little story about Hetta, uncanonical. They involve uncannny perform-
ances by supernatural performers – giants, revenants, animals – and have
been passed over in most studies of skaldic verse in the Íslendingasögur in
favour of verses more amenable to thematic, psychological or biographi-
cal interpretation; verses where what matters is what it means, not how
it sounds. Rather than sharing a theme, the saga episodes discussed here
stage a common formal tension, between the sonorous evocation of the
presence of a speaking voice and the narrative deferral or problematisation
of the body to which that voice belongs. One could perhaps assume that
the acousmatic voice is merely a decorative motif used to enhance the aura
of the uncanny which surrounds these episodes, but I would suggest that
it in fact stages the issue of the voice as medium in the only way possible
in Íslendingasaga narrative, eschewing as this genre does extradiegetic nar-
ratorial commentary, where such themes are commonly addressed in other
contemporary literatures. In the second part of my discussion, I support
this contention with reference to two other text genres whose conventions
allowed mediation to be discussed more explicitly: the grammatical tradi-
tion, with its theories of vox; and the narratives associated with the being
known as Míms hǫfuð, where medial moment becomes mythic narrative.
What all these texts have in common, I will argue, is their engagement
with the problematic of the medium.