The reading I will be responding to is “Noises of the Avant Garde” by Douglas Kahn. One of the things I found really interesting about this reading, and specifically in the way it described the interests and processes of the Italian Futurists is how they were really interested in sound in a vacuum; that is to say almost fully divorced from the original context or source of the sound and the potential ramifications of them. I think this is most physically expressed in the Futurists’ continued interest in onomatopoeia as an almost abstract written record of these sounds. The quotes in the text of war being described by them as simply: “horse action flic flag zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] croooc-craaac [slowly] cries of officers slamming about like brass plates here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up there all around.” If the descriptors of horses and soldiers and battalions were not present in this quote, I feel I would have a hard time deciphering exactly what made those noises. And to be honest, even knowing that this is describing soldiers dying in battle, it still feels extremely divorced from that very real context; especially when these Futurists were devising these ideas in the 1910s.
I think this is both an act of freedom and devaluation on their part. I think there will always be a sense of almost child-like wonder and fascination with the idea of war and the sounds are a big part of that. I’m reminded of the original James Thurber short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” where the mild-mannered everyman of the 1930s wishes to escape into the fantastical scenarios of his imagination, most of them brought on by similar uses of onomatopoeia. For example, "’Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!’ The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window.”
There’s an inherent excitement in using onomatopoeia in this way that I think both Thurber and the Futurists are tapping into. But I also think the latter went a step further by using this as a way to devalue war and soldiers into these abstract concepts and purposely stay obtuse. They all seemed to see war as this universal cleansing of the human spirit, and I only think this is possible with a kind of detached viewpoint of these very real horrors that were about to impact the entire world just a few years later.