Between language and sound: space and the aural subject in Quim Monzó's "Uf, va dir ell"

• Autores: Tania Gentic
• Localización: Catalan Review: international journal of Catalan culture, ISSN 0213-5949, Vol. 27, 2013, págs. 137-155
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article argues that in Uf, va dir ell (1978), Quim Monzó complicates the idea of a nationalist politics rooted in language by shifting the reader's attention from voice, textuality, and orality to the role of aurality in producing subjectivity. Constructing a series of listening subjects who move through urban soundscapes, the collection construes sound as a felt, corporeal experience that is communicated textually via onomatopoeia, prosodic rhythm, and the representation of a globalized soundscape. As the article shows, this globalized aural construction of space, language, and subjectivity challenges nationalist attempts to link language directly to Catalan national identity. Nevertheless, by addressing the work to an audience who must "hear" the soundscape as they read, the collection ultimately reinserts sound into a politically-engaged aural imaginary defined by the Catalan community. The reader as listener, then, occupies a dual position, both corporeally hearing language as sound and understanding the political significance of this gesture within a larger national debate. Monzó's texts thus demonstrate the impossibility of thinking subjectivity solely in terms of a national identity defined by language, while also reaffirming precisely how sound acquires its own form of politicized referentiality in any space of community in which it is heard