3 - Voice and Vocalisation Sonatorrek and Eddic Poetry

Summary

GIVEN THAT EMOTIONS IN TEXT are discursive constructions and only activated through the reader's engagement with the narrative content, this fictive emotional interiority must be conveyed through language. In fact, the anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz consider emotions to be fundamentally a ‘discursive practice’, which should therefore be approached through language:

We should view emotional discourse as a form of social action that creates effects in the world, effects that are read in a culturally informed way by the audience for emotion talk. Emotions can be said to be created in, rather than shaped by, speech in the sense that it is postulated as an entity in language where its meaning to social actors is also elaborated.

Lutz in fact considers the concept of ‘emotion’ itself to be a cultural construct. She assumes that the concept of emotion is intimately related to the notion of a self, particularly to the Western preoccupation with and conception of the self. She therefore rejects the idea that we can determine or fully understand the emotional life of distant cultures given that the social circumstances that shaped the perception and experience of emotional life are always fundamentally different and hence inaccessible.

Yet we would be unable to relate to emotional depiction in texts if there were not a certain degree of commonality in emotional behaviour that allows the reader to decipher emotional reactions and behaviour in texts. The stance taken in this volume assumes that emotions are to a great extent culturally and historically contingent, but that there is nevertheless a modicum of biological predetermination that dictates basic emotional responses. While the articulation of emotions, and their representations and function, will thus differ – and in fact those differences are decisive in formulating and shaping emotive scripts and literary identities – the emotive potential of a text can only be realised if these scripts remain meaningful. This emotive signifying potential is admittedly always actualised through a particular reader (or audience) within a particular cultural and historical context with a particular knowledge of the context of the text with which he or she is engaging.