Eduard Sievers coulda been a contender

 

Eduard Sievers coulda been a contender.

Sievers was a German philologist of the early twentieth century. In a series of papers he made a plea for what he called a philology of the ear. A beautiful phrase, that floats there in a gray zone, waiting for a meaning. Sievers, though, thought it had a meaning.
Sievers was active at the same time the imagists in American and England, and the symbolists and futurists in Russia were trying to deliver a massive shock to the poetry of their cultures – a poetry that seemed to have been permanently passed by by prose. There were various paths to the new poetry (for, of course, the new person), and one of those was by looking back and trying to grasp that moment in the past where poetry had gone wrong. For Sievers, similarly, philology was born of the era of silent reading, and thus had forgotten the moment when reading was vital – i.e. part of the living stream. That was the long era of reading out loud.

Sievers thought that sound of the written flowed underground, under the strata of silent reading. And, being a Wilhelmine German professor, naturally turned to the newest tools in the lab – the lab in this case being Wilhelm Wundt, with his instruments to observe and measure sensation. “All spoken human talk possessescircumstantially a certain rhythmic melodic character.” 

This was the principle from which he departed in his most famous book of essays, Rhythmic-Melodic studies.

The question that he pursued, given this point of departure, is whether one can find norms. And the way to do that, he decided, was to find a norm. And to find a norm, what better method than to have different people read the same passage in a book, say, and discover if the sound generally tended towards some notable melody?

There’s a wonderful essay about Sievers by Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus: The Promise of a Philology of theEar: Eduard Sievers and Sound Analysis. It is the story of a false promise – Sievers was increasingly driven to bend sound data he developed to his thesis. And at some point he took the esoteric route, like many of his contemporaries – Klages, for instance, with graphology:

“In the end, he even introduced visual signals, inspired by the spiritualists’ pendulums: metal shapes to which the speaker was to react sensorimotorically in order to find the correct voice and melodization while reading aloud.”

Such madness springs from the search for a norm!
Sievers, then, failed to have that much influence on linguistics or sound studies. But his influence was elsewhere: on Russian poetry. In 1918, in the dawn of the revolution – and the dark preface to the years of starvation – the Institute of the Living Word was founded in Leningrad, by Bely, Blok and Boris Eikenbaum, under the inspiration of Sievers philology of the ear. The Institute had a phonograph recorder named Sergei Bernshtein, and though, like all the best things, it was shut down by the Stalinists (in 1930), Bernshtein’s recording of the poets, including Mandelstam, was preserved. So we know some of their voices!
The age of sound recording, which is around 150 years old, is the golden age of voice ghosts. Our videos, our telephones, are voice activated recorders, preserve for us the voices of the dead – something you realize more as you move into the age where people around you die. In my family, we have pictures of my Mom, but no recording of her voice – a huge loss to us, I think.
From Sievers notion that sound runs under our print culture, the Russian formalists, like Eikenbaum, began to attend to the aural engineering of poetry. Interestingly, Sievers thought that this sound engineering was not only there, but provided us with criteria we could disengage: “This subjective interpretation of written signs by the reader can be either “correct” or “false”, according to whether it matches with the melody imagined by the writer or not.” As someone who has written quite a bit – a graphomaniac of the purest type – I can attest that hearing someone read what I have written does have a melodic component. And I can also attest to the fact that the curious academic custom of reading papers is, often, an exercise in tone-deafness, in as much as the melodic substructure of the text is completely neglected. This isn’t to suggest that mandarin prose is tone-deaf – on the contrary, Henry James’ late style, as all Jamesians know, is much more oral than his earlier style, since he dictated it. Rather, it is to point to the way that papers edited for the eye often sound eyeballed rather than tongued when they come out at the podium.
This year, I will work on licking my sentences into place.