Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 206
Milli mála 13/2021 205
vowelless words are “lame” and “mamed.” Fricative “sighes” make
poor “signes,” his “liquids” are snubbed like the liquid substance of
his tears, and his “mutes” would require painting (with a possible
allusion to Simonides’ “painting is mute poetry” aphorism)—a dif-
ferent art form altogether—to supplement the absence of sound.
In the end, he dismisses them all in favour of “one vowell” he
associates with the Petrarchan interjection “Ah.” But as we have
seen with other sonnets, the theory of lyric Barnes develops col-
lapses under its own weight. The obvious paradox is that Barnes
posits sound—the emotionally charged interjection “Ah”—as the
perfect expression of his sorrow and ultimate solution to his erotic
and poetic troubles precisely when the imagery of writing and visu-
ality (“characters … image … paint … letters”) takes over the
poem. Yet the rift Barnes discloses between his theory and practice
is further exacerbated by the material form which his acoustic activ-
ity is experienced by the reader—print. More so than writing,
Bruce Smith argues, print in early modern culture “stands at the
farthest remove from the speaking body.”83 Print, however, not
only mutes speech; it breaks down acoustic segments into individ-
ual, highly technologized, elements. In Barnes’s sonnet, the pleni-
tude of the groan “Ah” is reduced to a disjunctive combination of
the mechanically processed letters, “A. with H.” In place of a per-
suasively vocal manifestation of “sorrowe,” we are left with “the
indigestible materiality of the medium.”84 More so than writing,
print technology depends on the white spaces between letters on
the page that inscribe spatial and temporal difference. Barnes’s
“Ah” is then not only silent, but non-identical with itself. And if
the blank space between its letters is the final actualization of the
sonnet itself, the readers are left with emptiness flooding the space
of the page, with the sonnet self-effacing before our eyes in order to
fulfil its ambition. The perfect-sounding word is the empty space
between two letters of the printer’s movable type.
* * *
83 B. Smith, Acoustic World, 125.
84 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 175.
DANILA SOKOLOV