Some chapters in FW are dominated, all or in the greater part, by a single voice (I.7), by voices in dialogue or formal response (I.6), by multiple voices taking turns (III.3), or by a mixture (I.1). The Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter (I.8) is an interesting combination. It is perhaps the most consistent chapter in the book in terms of voicing. It is a dialogue between two washerwomen on the banks of a river. At the same time, it is meant to be a river itself speaking, perhaps every river, since the chapter is famously filled with hundreds of names of rivers from all over the world. (The river that flows outside of my office at the university is on p.198, l.4-5: "her bulls they were ruhring, surfed with spree").
There are other voices too ("Other voices inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?") in this text. It is something I've been aware of, but I noticed it consciously for the first time today, as I thought about what it meant for---as JJ said about this chapter---its prose to reflect the sound of a river, especially towards the chapter's end, where the river, growing ever wider, and flowing ever faster, puts an ever greater distance between the two women, who have to shout to be heard by each other.
But first, the cadence of the river, of its flowing water. Such a thing seems easy to recognize, for example in the way that dactyls take the place of iambs or alternate with spondees: "Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you..." "We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find." Just like the names of rivers add a shimmer to the words of the chapter, which are icons of the human convention of language, this flowing and modulating rhythm [I'm proud to report I spelled that word correct at the first go for maybe the first time in my life] is an icon of a natural sound. Or is at least meant to be.
We don't just hear the two women, or the sound of a river (two ways of voicing the text that are not mutually exclusive but are co-extensive). In yesterday's post, I wrote about how JJ listened to the Seine, apparently to verify whether he approximated the cadence of river flow in the cadence of the prose of I.8. I think JJ was listening not just for the water, but for the river and everything in it: ducks, boats, people walking along the embankments singing arm in arm. The sounds coming from of a river flowing through the midst of a city at night. As I.8 comes to an end, we hear: the womens' laundry being quickly folded and flipped ("Flip!"); the sound of a distant church bell ("Pingpong!"); birds ("Allalivial! Allaluvial!"); and the women, not only speaking in their flowing cadence, but hollering at each other across the stream ("Ho!" "Night!"). The women complain that the sound of bats (their wings flapping in the air as they dart and fly awkwardly in a way that is instantly recognizable as not the way that birds fly and dive) and the river itself is growing louder. They say the waters are "chittering" and "liffeying" and "hitherandthithering." The sentences are cut off ("Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of") and interrupting each other, spliced together on the page ("Night now! Tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone."). It is not so much the sound of a river flowing that JJ is capturing, but its soundscape dramatized.
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As some of my posts here have shown, I am always interested in trying to account for the voices of a text. In this way, the poetics and paratext of I.8 resembles the ancient literature I study, where speakers in the text are not always differentiated from each other and from narrators. Some texts which are dramatic monologues of a single speaker (like Isaiah 40ff., in the Hebrew Bible) still include other voices, in quotations or paraphrases or recapitulations. Finding these, reading the text outloud, comparing different potential realizations, makes the text real to me, and reminds me that it is at the same time inaccessible. It seems to be no coincidence that, as I continue to work out my own voice in my writing, and struggle doing so, I find satisfaction and respite in finding the voice of another. Because I can bring my voice to bear on it, without committing myself to saying something of myself and from myself. By giving a voice, however temporary and provisional, to a text, especially a difficult one, I can speak without saying anything, and have the experience of seeking and the temporary satisfaction that comes with finding something that I know is not the final thing to find, only a worthy yet temporary substitution for the own voice that I know, once found and spoken, will bring some kind of peace, but which seems to require everything.
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