The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics by Giorgio Agamben

Author:Giorgio Agamben [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-03-25T05:52:00+00:00

Let us pause to consider these inarticulate and yet "writable" voices, these brekekeks and koi, which are so similar to Pascoli's onomatopoeias. What happens to the confused animal voice such that it becomes engrammatos and comprehended by letters? In entering into grammata in being written, the animal voice is separated from nature, which is inarticulate and cannot be written; it shows itself in letters as a pure intention to signify whose signification is unknown (it is in this respect similar to glossolalia and Augustine's vocabulum emortuum). The only criterion that makes it possible to distinguish it from the articulated voice is, in fact, that "we do not know what it means." The gramma, the letter, which itself does not signify, is therefore the cipher of an intention to signify that will be accomplished in articulated language. Brekekeks, koi, and other imitations of animal voices capture the voice of nature at the point at which it emerges from the infinite sea of mere sound without yet having become signifying discourse.

It is in light of these considerations that we must regard Pascoli's onomatopoeias. It is not a matter of mere natural sounds that simply interrupt articulated discourse; in Pascoli's poetry, as in every human language, there is no-and there could never be-presence of the animal voice. There is, rather, only a trace of the animal voice's absence, of its "death," which renders itself grammatical in a pure intention to signify. Like Caprona's "schilletta" (in Canti di Castelvecchio), these sounds belong to no living being; they are a bell hanging on the neck of a "shadow," a dead animal that now continues to sound between the hands of a "little boy" who "does not speak." The voice, as in the poem by this name in Canti, is noted only "at the point in which it dies," as an intention to signify ("to say many things and still more") which as such cannot say and signify anything other than the "breath" of a proper name ("Zvani"). From this perspective, the dead voice is certainly equiv alent to the swallows' dead language in "Addio"-a language that is not pregrammatical, however, but rather purely and absolutely grammatical in the most rigorous and originary sense of the word: phone engrammatos, vox litterata.

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