Her er et utdrag, som nok er vasnkelig å forstå løsrevet, men som knytter seg nært opp til det jeg har skrevet om musikk og metafor tidligere, og til innlegget om Barthes her på bloggen:
It is probably not incidental that the definition of “the grain of the voice” gets increasingly enigmatic in Barthes’ text. In an insightful article, Peter Dayan has pointed to the consistently metaphorical language Barthes employs in his essays on music. Especially the aspects of music which he really appreciates, like “the grain of the voice”, elude unequivocal description in Barthes’ texts. “Scientific” definitions would reduce and betray the experience of ineffability which is one of Barthes’ central concerns. In Dayan’s view, this explains why Barthes chooses a language which describes the musical phenomenon indirectly, a language which appears as fictive and metaphorical, even hallucinatory:
[How] can we speak of a grained voice without betraying it? For to speak of it as a nameable object would be to reduce it precisely to that which it is not: a scientifically or positively analysable thing. The only discourse that can speak of a grained voice without betraying it is, therefore, that kind of discourse which is improper to its object, in that it must be perceived as fictional, as figurative, as naming something other than what it is about: the language of metaphor or […] hallucination.
This perspective reveals interesting parallels between the musical aesthetics of Barthes and the Jena Romantics. The ineffable quality of music is central to its greatness, and this quality can only be described metaphorically. But if E.T.A. Hoffmann uses “the infinite” and “the spirit realm” as metaphors of musical transcendence out of physical materiality, one could argue that Barthes uses “grain” and “geno-song” as metaphors of a kind of musical transcendence into the physical materiality, deeper into the texture of the voice and the presence of the music.
