Overhearing the hail: a poetics of weather for Patrick Cullinan

Abstract

Language is primarily an oral and aural event. This is true of our quotidian experience, overwhelmingly true in history, and totally true for the illiterate majority today and in history. Only the literate fraction come into contact with language as a visual experience, and yet – or because of that – it has been the habit of literary criticism to persist in analytical metaphors that are visual rather than aural. We speak of ‘point of view’, or ‘focalization’, and of ‘the gaze’. In the post-colonial context, we should be particularly attentive to the privilege of vision in our metaphors. Insofar as this article is preoccupied with the nature of ‘overhearing’ and its peculiar affinity to the act of poetry, it sets itself up in opposition to acts of ‘overseeing’ which determine the outcomes of others, and which participate in hierarchies of command and control over the labour and resources of others. ‘Oversight’ is colonial, its agents are overseers. By contrast, to overhear is receptive, active-passive, fugitive, potentially subversive. It is the kind of reading undertaken by those who do not have a voice in the parliament of power. This article takes the humdrum glory of the weather as its occasion, arbitrarily at first, but argues through representations of the human interest in this ubiquity that poetry represents a kind of ‘underwriting’, attuned to overhearing, and both refusing and resisting the errors of oversight in the project of overseeing that is, not least, the ambition of criticism, among other genres of writing.