Fred Moten: Sonnet, Soliloquy, Insovereignty: Lessons from Hank Cinq
Fred Moten: Sonnet, Soliloquy, Insovereignty: Lessons from Hank Cinq
THE LIONEL TRILLING SEMINAR
Under the influence of Ellington and Shakespeare we are all in danger of becoming hyper-sibilant fools. Sovereignty, soliloquy, sonnet (sonata), (in)sovereignty, sound, sequence (sequins), syncopation and self(lessness) are all over our minds because of Henry V or, as his friends call him, Hank Cinq. In addition to lisps becoming more naked and emphatic with every hissing breath, certain obsessions of, which these words bear, become more apparent as well. The obsessions are physical and sociological problems, which will fall under the rubric of chance and incalculability and we’ll need some guidance (from W. E. B. Du Bois and Stephen Booth) to be able to discern how indeterminacy and unruliness are the heart of the matter of the sonnet and their non-binary sister, the soliloquy. We might begin to consider the force of the solo in the soliloquy but if we do it’s because that force is the sound of the unalone and the non-aligned. The single-line’s striational transgression of the line is itself striated, an involuntary muscular shredding of the sonnet that might be said to operate as a kind of anticipatory anti-coloniality in the sonnet, a resistance to constraint and control, Hank’s revelation and undoing of himself, which it is ours to deepen, extend, and swing.
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