The Acoustic Text
Sound and Music in Literature
Literary Music
Composing with Invisible Ink: Hidden Music in Anthony Burgess’s “A Pair of Gloves”
Karla Cotteau
As both a writer and a composer, Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) filled his fiction with music. While overt musical references can be found in his works like A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, “1899 and the Devil’s Mode,” and “Murder to Music,” among others, in other texts, the music is sometimes hidden. In this paper, I will examine the short story “A Pair of Gloves” (1967), in which there is no actual mention of music in the words of the text itself. However, upon analysis, the short story reveals a hidden structure in sonata form. The narrator, an unnamed women, is the only person who speaks in the story, and everything she says is to nag at her husband Harry. However, thanks to the underlying sonata form, the wife’s nagging has been transformed into a sort of literary music. Playing on the idea of the ear worm, the music becomes torturous driving Harry, who is given no voice in the story himself, to silence his wife for good by strangling her while wearing his new pair of gloves. Through this story, Burgess raises questions within the reader about music and meaning, repetition and torture, and the transformation of something artless into art through the use of structure. Finally, I will argue that the brevity of the story is key to its success as the repetitive nagging affects the reader by wearing on our patience and encouraging an uncomfortable empathy with Harry, who is now guilty of uxoricide.
Experiencing polyphony in contemporary literary fiction
Marie Jadot
Focusing on the experience of the reader, who, as Delazari (2021: xx) points out, has often been “bracketed” in traditional approaches to musico-literary intermediality, this paper discusses the methodological relevance of cognitive approaches to literature within word and music studies through an in-depth case study of “Exposition”, from Rebecca Makkai’s short story collection Music for Wartime (2015). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that leans on insights gained from reader-oriented approaches to musicalization informed by cognitive studies, as developed by Delazari (2019, 2021), and perspectives from cognitive-linguistic text analysis, this paper will examine the polyphonic dimension of the text, which, as will be argued, contributes to the subversive power of this one-sided dialogue short story about music censorship. The analysis of the effects engendered by the different means through which censorship occurs at several levels in the text will show how various voices are conjured up in the reader’s mind and highlight the reader’s essential role in lending the text its musical dimension.
The Acoustics of Identity and Resistance in Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self
Alexandra Reznik
In 1879, prolific writer, composer, and singer Pauline Hopkins wrote and produced the musical play Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad. Over two decades later, Hopkins wrote the novel Of One Blood first published serially in the Colored American Magazine in 1902. Peculiar Sam opens on a southern plantation with a group of fellow men inviting each other to sing and dance, in dialect. The soprano Virginia, characterized as “the plantation nightingale” speaks and sings in standard English. Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood opens in early-twentieth century Boston at a university where doctors Reuel Briggs and Aubrey Livingston attend a performance of the Fisk University Singers. Dianthe Lusk, the celebrated soprano, sings “Go Down Moses” for a predominantly white audience. While Peculiar Sam clearly signals Blackness through the acoustics of music and dialect, Hopkins complicates these signals in her novel. Specifically, all of these white-passing characters speak and sing in standard English, the truth of their all being siblings, and of Black ancestry is given voice by their grandmother, in dialect. African-American authors, most obviously through Charles Chesnutt’s short story “The Goophered Grapevine,” use dialect to maintain control of who understands, veiling stories from unwelcome onlookers, specifically, in this context, white audiences.
This paper will focus on both of these texts to argue that the nineteenth-century popular American songs and African-American spirituals in Hopkins’ play and novel, to use Barthes’ words, “subsume” audiences based on their identities; for a white audience, the songs are familiar and comfortable, providing signifiers akin to popular minstrel performances, while for a Black audience, Hopkins emphasizes the importance of music as a way to both honor Black history and assert Black subjectivity in resistance to racist minstrel performances.
“unheard footfalls only sound”: The Infinite Reverberation of Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman’s neither
Kimberly Han
The ten lines to Samuel Beckett’s neither, written in 1976, are an exploration of a space of ‘neither’ in which an unidentified speaker vacillates between “to and fro” (Beckett 557). The text, gifted to American composer Morton Feldman, was later used as the source material for Feldman’s 1977 opera of the same title.
This paper brings both Beckett’s text and Feldman’s operatic rendition into dialogue with each other, and notes that despite the copious research dedicated to both works — apart or together — the space of ‘neither’ continues to be thought of as an exclusionary space due to the language of negation tied to the word ‘neither’. Essentially, the question of what the space of ‘neither’ could be remains unanswered and forgotten in favour of what I believe to be a simpler approach: what the space of ‘neither’ is not. This latter approach, unfortunately, looks away from the significant, though cryptic hint that Beckett has provided — “unheard footfalls only sound” (557). In response and building upon this hint as a reference to sound and the physical sense of hearing, I propose that Beckett’s text has already offered the approach of inclusivity — in imagining the space of ‘neither’ as filled with “unheard” sound.
Drawing from the biological instincts of animals who use echolocation to navigate spaces, this paper thus attempts to feel out the space of ‘neither’ through a process of “unhearing” sound. Grounded in interdisciplinary methodologies of literary criticism, sound studies, and cognitive approaches, this paper utilises the acoustic environment of a reverberation chamber as a model to understand how sounds are “unheard” in the space of ‘neither’. As sounds unfold, reverberate, and bounce infinitely off the walls of this space, I consider not only the physical sounds made in Feldman’s operatic rendition, but the imagined movement and reverberation of sound within and beyond the space denoted by Beckett’s text as well. To this end, I argue that the space of ‘neither’, as experienced through the process of “unhearing”, is ultimately an inclusive space of becoming that incorporates and resonates with our own lived rhythms and experiences.