The Acoustic Text
Sound and Music in Literature
Sound and the Body
Making ‘soundsense and sensesound’ of Joycean Word-matter: Towards an Ontology of Listening
Rishiraj Pal
If there is a sense implicit in experience which the author must then try hard to make explicit, and hope the competent readers to eventually arrive at a sound sense with a zero possibility of error—no short of truth itself—reading will have turned into mathematical formulation, and listening into natural science. The brain cannot read human language; it can only make sense of the patterns of light waves and sonic frequencies. The problem with listening as a faculty remains in its assumption that it must entail understanding. Finnegans Wake (1939), read aloud, must be listened to, both with attention and intention, in order to experience or feel, beyond scholarly exegesis, what Joyce was painstakingly inventing. The sonic frequencies of the Wakean sounds demand that the readers must be ‘in tune’ with it listening with all her being—for any kind of sense to take effect, thus leaving us with two options: the readers listening to themselves reading aloud, often stuttering or halting baffled by the neologisms they encounter, or they being immersed in a process of listening, of eavesdropping, to the varying wavelengths of word-matter. In later Joyce, soundsense therefore becomes a human condition: ‘nothing exists except upon an assumed foundation of absence.’ Joyce’s poor eyesight during his later years is perhaps compensated by his programmatic sharpening of his other senses, especially the aural, thus making this discussion toward an ontology of listening more relevant: the murmurs of gossiping washerwomen giving way to the babble of Liffey, the riverine feminine principle of the Wakean lifeworld: “babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddy-gaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.” The paper examines this problematic relation between Joycean word-matter and sound ontology marked by embodied ‘plurabilities’, primarily in Finnegans Wake.
The Political Mapping of Sound and Life in Wallace Stevens’ poems “The Idea of Order at Key West” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar”
Ian Tan
This paper explores the political-aesthetic impact of sound in Wallace Stevens’ poems “The Idea of Order at Key West” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar”, poems written in intense dialogic engagement with the social uncertainties Stevens witnessed in the 1930s. Stevens’ poetic output of the decade has long been categorised as “apolitical”, a stance reified by contemporary and current criticism which has struggled to discern a political vision conveyed through poetic language that steps away from agonistic confrontation or conservative pessimism made fashionable by poets like W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. However, I want to argue that Stevens’ employment of sound effectively intervenes at the juncture between the poetic and the political to the extent that it suggests a sphericity of “being-with” that envisions an alternative happening of community. Using the theoretical possibilities suggested by Peter Sloterdijk’s geographical imaginary, I read the poems as aestheticizing the conditions of community undergirding a political practice of pragmatic “togetherness”. To this effect, sound opens up a phenomenological attention towards the language of the other, while enunciating a politics that foregrounds belonging-to alongside belonging-with. This analysis of sound will ultimately allow us to highlight the poet’s lifelong interest in the relationship between the poetic imagination and the conditions of life that poetry remains inseparable from. I extend this, via Giorgio Agamben’s examination of language and corporeality in The Uses of Bodies, to consider a “political” Stevens who reads poetic sound as inculcating the reader into an unalienated “form-of-life” which stages effective modes of resistance against biopolitical domination.
Call Backs: A History of Modern Drama in Three Telephones
Kevin Riordan
The telephone made its theatrical debut in the 1870s and was quickly taken up as a novelty act on the vaudeville and burlesque circuits. Soon it became a familiar device for dramatic writing too. Playwrights deployed the telephone to interrupt or impel the action as well as to extend the fictive world beyond the visible stage. When an actor takes a phone call, the interpolated silences become the script for the spectator’s own imaginative completions; that listener is made to hear the unheard and to see the unseen. This ordinary prop, in live performance, has extraordinary effects. Like Chekhov’s proverbial gun, it can transform the event with its sound and, less expectedly, its ringing too is a matter of life and death.
In Jean Cocteau’s 1929 La Voix humaine, the most famous telephone play, The Woman describes the telephone line as her lifeline, until it becomes an asp or a noose, “I have your voice around my neck.” Some forty years later, the onstage phone in Tom Stoppard’s Real Inspector Hound receives calls from beyond the theater. Its ringing transforms at least one spectator into an actor, and then it sentences him to death. Finally, in Sarah Ruhl’s 2008 Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the mobile technology promises extended reception, but the only real pay-off for Ruhl is that your own phone may disrupt your own funeral. This paper scores these telephone calls across a century of modern drama in order to register their evolving, but always uncanny disturbances to some of theater’s fundamental conventions.
Contemporary performances customarily begin with announcements for the audience to turn off their phones, a necessary (but often futile) gesture to control the telephone’s destabilizing and violent role in the theater.