The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies 1399502301, 9781399502306

Table of contents :
List of Figures
Introduction
Part I: Literature, Listening, Sounding
1. The Sound a Sentence Makes: On Poetry, Judgement, and Hearing
2. The Limits of Listening: Riotous Women, Imperial Structures, and Sonic Archives
3. PIANO/Forte: Writing Audible Space, Jane Austen, Dorothy Richardson, and Others
4. Oralities, Literacies, and the Xenophobic Fallacy
Part II: Literature, Music, Performance
5. Notes to Literature: Scores as Musical Reproduction in the Literary Text
6. Sound Agonistes : Music and the Economy of Sacrifice in Sound Studies
7. Shakespeare’s Vibrant Theatres
8. ‘Imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds’: Rap, Patter, and Hyper Diction in Musical Theatre
Part III: Literature, Voice, Acousmatics
9. ‘Let it resound’: ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as Sonic Witness
10. Sound Media, Race, and Voice
11. The Acousmatics of Prison Writing
12. Aural Anxiety and Rurality in Women’s Second World War Writing
Part IV: Literature, Media, Coded Sound
13. Sound Technology and US Fiction in the Postwar Era: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Listening
14. Coded Sound: Reading in the Age of Networked Media
15. Media Affordances of Literary Audio: Interrelations of Format and Form
16. OH-EE-OH-EE-OH-EE-AW-EE-AW!: Sound Descriptors in the Books of Tarzan as Facilitators of Presence
Part V: Literature, War, Industry
17. An Auditory History of Early Modernity: Listening to Enlightenment and Industry in Britain, 1700–1900
18. ‘This is/not was’: The Violence of Circulation and the Sonics of Submerged Language
19. Shriek and Hum: Industrial Noise and Productivity
20. A Critical Poetics of Warfare
21. The Great War: Sonic Fragments in Literature and Sound Studies
Part VI: Literature, Sonic Epistemology, Language
22. Sonic Epistemologies
23. The Cultural Poetics of a Buoyancy Sound from Amazonian Ecuador
24. Havoc Ornithologies
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Published The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Edited by Maggie Humm The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English Edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English Edited by David Johnson and Prem Poddar A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires Edited by Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke and Lars Jensen The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rowlinson The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts Edited by S. E. Gontarski The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts Edited by Stephen Prickett The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory Edited by Stuart Sim The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities Edited by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers

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The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts Edited by Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern

The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck

The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature Edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva

The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas

The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies Edited by Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Suzanne Hobson and Andrew D Radford

The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts Edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts Edited by Josephine M. Guy The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic Rebecca Duncan The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

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The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies

Edited by Helen Groth and Julian Murphet

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Helen Groth and Julian Murphet 2024 © the chapters their several authors 2024 Cover image: The Scream of the Leaders © Rachael Clegg Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0230 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0231 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0232 0 (epub) The right of Helen Groth and Julian Murphet 2024 to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures

viii

Introduction1 Helen Groth and Julian Murphet Part I: Literature, Listening, Sounding   1. The Sound a Sentence Makes: On Poetry, Judgement, and Hearing Astrid Lorange

19

  2. The Limits of Listening: Riotous Women, Imperial Structures, and Sonic Archives Helen Groth

32

  3. PIANO/Forte: Writing Audible Space, Jane Austen, Dorothy Richardson, and Others David Toop

45

  4. Oralities, Literacies, and the Xenophobic Fallacy Richard Cullen Rath

59

Part II: Literature, Music, Performance   5. Notes to Literature: Scores as Musical Reproduction in the Literary Text Tamlyn Avery

81

 6. Sound Agonistes: Music and the Economy of Sacrifice in Sound Studies Miranda Stanyon

99

  7. Shakespeare’s Vibrant Theatres Bruce R. Smith   8. ‘Imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds’: Rap, Patter, and Hyper Diction in Musical Theatre Tamsen O. Wolff

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115

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vi contents Part III: Literature, Voice, Acousmatics   9. ‘Let it resound’: ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as Sonic Witness Noelle Morrissette

145

10. Sound Media, Race, and Voice Sam Halliday

154

11. The Acousmatics of Prison Writing Julian Murphet

167

12. Aural Anxiety and Rurality in Women’s Second World War Writing Imogen Free

182

Part IV: Literature, Media, Coded Sound 13. Sound Technology and US Fiction in the Postwar Era: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Listening K. C. Harrison

201

14. Coded Sound: Reading in the Age of Networked Media Justin St. Clair

216

15. Media Affordances of Literary Audio: Interrelations of Format and Form Jason Camlot

228

16. OH-EE-OH-EE-OH-EE-AW-EE-AW!: Sound Descriptors in the Books of Tarzan as Facilitators of Presence Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard

250

Part V: Literature, War, Industry 17. An Auditory History of Early Modernity: Listening to Enlightenment and Industry in Britain, 1700–1900 Peter Denney

267

18. ‘This is/not was’: The Violence of Circulation and the Sonics of Submerged Language Andrew Brooks

284

19. Shriek and Hum: Industrial Noise and Productivity David Ellison

302

20. A Critical Poetics of Warfare Mark Byron

316

21. The Great War: Sonic Fragments in Literature and Sound Studies Michael Bull

336

Part VI: Literature, Sonic Epistemology, Language 22. Sonic Epistemologies Holger Schulze

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contents

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23. The Cultural Poetics of a Buoyancy Sound from Amazonian Ecuador Janis Nuckolls

366

24. Havoc Ornithologies Jody Berland

382

Notes on Contributors 406 Index411

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Figures

Figure 5.1 Page from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Oxford University Press. 84 Figure 5.2 Excerpt from Harriet Monroe, ‘Rhythms of English Verse, II’, in Poetry.87 Figure 5.3 Page from Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV. New Directions. 88 Figure 5.4 Excerpt from Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920). 91 Figure 5.5 Johnson’s ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Upon Hearing His “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”’. 92 Figure 7.1 Thomas Morley, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, in The first booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (London: William Barley, 1600), sigs B3v–B4. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC 124 Figure 15.1 MsC 14, Gerry Gilbert fonds in the Contemporary Literature CollecDon, Benne@ Library. Photos by Deanna Fong. 241 Figure 20.1 Front cover of Zang Tumb Tumb (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1914). Public domain. 323 Figure 20.2 ‘Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto’ (After the Marne, Joffre visited the front in an automobile), in tavola parolibere (free-word table) (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1915). Public domain.  324

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Introduction Helen Groth and Julian Murphet

I

t is probably no surprise that in a recently published volume entitled Keywords in Sound, neither writing nor literature scores an entry of its own.1 The field-defining collections and readers that make ‘sound studies’ visible as a disciplinary formation tend to treat writing as a minor territory within its domain.2 Yet, this material often makes abundant use of many of the most significant literary resources for transcribing sound. Indeed, we will want to say by the end of this Introduction that sound studies is literary through and through – but not before admitting a disciplinary deficit that demands attention here. For it is obvious that other disciplines have enjoyed a disproportionate sway over the field in its historical crystallisation. Even leaving aside acoustical engineering as the most important parent discipline, the relative importance of musicology, architecture, media history and theory, urban studies, sociology, history, design, and so on, in the categorical articulation of sound studies inside the humanities tells an important story about institutional priorities and rates of internal development. Although it is now a few decades old and sports a large and expanding bibliography, including several dedicated journals, sound studies is defined by a spread of cognate disciplinary enterprises for which sound – the mechanical propagation of acoustic waves through a material medium – can be said to have a more direct bearing on the core elements of research (physics, built space, resonance, signal processing, social organisation, and so forth) than it has tended to in literary studies. Recent research in various national literatures has made a strong claim for a more central role in the direction of sound studies, relative to these other disciplines.3 Starting with Garrett Stewart’s important 1990 volume Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext – which reminded us of how profoundly written text is related to the patterning and articulation of vocal sounds – there has been an accelerating expansion of the corpus of serious work dedicated to unearthing literature’s fundamental engagements with acoustics and listening, theoretically and historically. Anna Snaith’s recent collection Sound and Literature brings together many of the leading voices in this interdisciplinary space and builds on the major achievements of R. Murray Schafer (The Soundscape), Jonathan Sterne (Audible Past), John M. Picker (Victorian Soundscapes), Sam Halliday (Sonic Modernity), Julie Beth Napolin (The Fact of Resonance), Matthew Rubery (Audiobooks), and Patricia Pye (Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London), in their efforts to fashion a usable methodology with which to examine literary texts for meaningful sonic information.4 More recent work has considered the deep sensitivity of lyric form to sonic textures of speech,5 the acoustic dimension of literary tone,6 the sonic colour line as manifest in literary texts,7 and the untold history of the talking book.8 Snaith’s crucial collection Sound and Literature marks a decisive move forward in this direction.9 Our own previous collection, Sounding Modernism,

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attempted to map some of the implications of this research for modernist studies.10 Work will continue to appear that challenges the disciplinary boundaries keeping sound studies separate from literary history and analysis; but the question remains as to what these boundaries take for granted. As R. Murray Schafer once dramatically put the central problem, ‘all visual projections of sounds are arbitrary and fictitious’, and that includes paradigmatically the glyphs and ideograms with which literate cultures have presumed to encode the spoken languages of humankind.11 The entire history of Western metaphysics is vexed by this arbitrary and fictitious suturing of the ‘great divide’ between orality and literacy,12 by signs that supplement spoken discourse only to expose it to the ‘dangerous’ vicissitudes of dissemination, anonymity, and the posthumous trace.13 ‘Literature’ is a concept in which these ancient tensions and contradictions, between sound and silence, presence and absence, speech and text, are dialectically compounded and mutually ramified. For that very reason, it seems to us that literature is an inescapable lens through which to view the study of sound itself, since literature is the institutional home of sound’s coming to be thought, its first awkward transcription into symbolic forms – entirely arbitrary and wildly different from language to language – that defied its ephemerality with the fiat of written signs and offered it up to analysis and evaluation millennia before the invention of technologies capable of recording its actual wavelengths. As a storage medium, writing has never shied away from its relationship with the sounds it can only represent by ‘misrecording’ them. Let us take one of the simplest and most beautiful invocations of the literary contract in the history of any language, the ‘Introduction’ to William Blake’s 1794 volume, Songs of Innocence: Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again.’ So I piped: he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’ So I sung the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanished from my sight; And I plucked a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.14

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introduction

3

Blake’s fable traces the origins of literature in song and the origins of song in music; and it propounds a benign fiction of each medium’s happy dependency on the others. The child in the cloud, a divine muse vouchsafing the vision, first hears the spontaneous rural music of an undisciplined shepherd, piping ‘songs of pleasant glee’, which he then asks to be directed at a specific subject – a lamb. When music turns to subject matter, to specified theme and motive, it heightens its ability to move the auditor: the angel weeps where before he simply laughed. But this still seems too limited; the child next asks for the pipe to be put aside and for the voice to be enjoined in song. Preserving its melody, its pitch, rhythm, volume, and spatial location, but transposing the tune into lyric measures, the shepherd now deepens the sonic engagement with his theme. He sings ‘the same again’, but with the radical difference that language makes to sound. Conceptual, connotational, poetic, tonal, and sprung with the difference-engines of address and diction, language fleshes out melody with all the articulations of voice. Again, but at a higher level, the angel weeps. The final step is the most consequential and flushed with the injunction of radical egalitarianism: ‘sit thee down and write / In a book, that all may read’. We note immediately the necessary change: the songs will no longer be issued where they were conceived and sung, they will be mediated by the primitive technology (a rural pen and basic ink, along with implied paper) that makes transcription possible. The songs will no longer be directly presided over by the angel, who vanishes the moment the pen is plucked; neither will they sound spontaneously in the meadows. But they will vastly extend their reach; ‘Every child may joy to hear’ them, because the preceding stages are implicit, sublated in the last, still vouchsafed by the divine goodwill that smiles over their production. When we recall that this parable is illustrated by an accompanying, illuminated engraving of shepherd, flock, pipe, and floating child, we can fully take the measure of Blake’s lesson: paper is a multimedia, and literature is always already sounded by the ritual, musical, and lyrical processes where its origins lie coiled. Blake’s lyric insists on the historicity of literature and of humanly organised sound, and the historicity of their overdetermined intertwining. It also corrects our tendency to construe writing and reading as necessarily silent. Throughout antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, as Paul Saenger has demonstrated, writing and reading were far from silent activities, and it was only under the habitus of specific monastic communities that a silence of the text became normative in scholarly circles.15 As Blake reminds us, the nursery is the one place where that cone of silence has never dropped, and legion are the stories of the ways in which literature has bloomed again and again into voice: Shakespeare’s theatre, Dickens’s public readings, radio’s literary broadcasts, the recorded book, poetry slams, and so forth. Lyric poetry alone, one of literature’s immemorial pillars, seems indissociable from the larynx, tongue, teeth, and lungs of the poet who writes it, and its rhetoric as well as its decorous formal architectures are ineluctably embedded in the sonic textures of voice.16 And as Garrett Stewart has bravely shown, even the most print-based and ‘post-oral’ of all literary forms – the sprawling Victorian or modernist novel – is secretly animated by ‘transegmental’ drifts and phonemic stutterings at the level of the phonic signifier in ways that baffle any merely ‘linguistic’ reading.17 The silence of literature has in some senses been grossly exaggerated, and the phonetic alphabets of many Western languages are a constant reminder of how literature is a study of sound at the most radical level, decomposing spoken words into units of sound in order that they can be rebuilt into enormous edifices of song, like Homer’s Iliad, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (texts notoriously composed by blind men, and at home in the auditory realm).

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And yet, it is just as false to imagine the problem solved by issuing these salutary correctives. For literature is silent on the whole, and has staged a marked if necessary retreat from the pastoral dances and rituals that presided over the ‘birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music’.18 Silent reading is an accelerator making possible greater and more intensive literary engagement, and it reaches speeds where even the internal ear, that imaginary hallucinator of sounds evoked by the text, simply fails to be engaged. The institutions of literature have long been predicated on these unavoidable facts, which weaken the links between written signs and sounds. Justin St. Clair writes that ‘the relationship between literature and sound is fundamentally dislocatory: the “there” of textuality is necessarily at a remove from whatever soundscape a specific passage records [. . .] Literature, in other words, is inherently acousmatic.’19 Blake’s ‘sit thee down and write’ implies an alienating passage of sound through the symbolic, and the symbolic has no sensory field; it is a purely intellectual, structural domain, where arbitrary signifiers are related to each other out of formal difference alone. The symbolic arises from structural linguistic differentiation and sets its semantic possibilities dancing in the abstract realm of sense, but nothing of the sensory remains in this sublime palace of meanings. Indeed, the very phonemes out of which an alphabetical written language is composed are nothing but symbolic registrations of the ideas of sounds, a fully intellectualised abstraction of something the speaker feels to be embedded in and specific to the individual word being spoken – even if it is not. For the deeper lesson of literacy is that even spoken discourse, in all its apparent harmony with things and its charismatic immediacy, is beholden to the same symbolic processes that writing makes explicit: difference, deferral, arbitrariness, dislocation, supplementarity. The spoken word is not what it says it is, and writing clinches this unspoken truth of all language: none of it is what it declares itself to be. It is a symbolic tool-kit, a medium, and like all media, it facilitates certain ratios between signal and noise, sense and nonsense, according to the precision of its use. Writing arose between three and four millennia ago, eventually to become the exclusive storage medium of all literate cultures. It peaked in power after the invention of the printing press (the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’) and established an insuperable monopoly over the entirety of social and cultural information until near the end of the nineteenth century, when new media, mechanical and electronic, began to emerge. This monopoly obviously includes any information about sound as such: its varieties, its physics, its pitches, timbres, dynamics, and tones. When we consider musical notation as an aspect of print’s data monopoly, then written music too – scores with their staves, notes, time signatures, and directions about tempo and volume – is literary through and through, and the history of Western musical evolution is unthinkable without the impact of writing on its many internal developments. But it is clearly with written discourse that the relationship between text and sound comes most dynamically into definition, not just in the fact of phonetic script, but more generally in an ever evolving lexicon about sonic phenomena. Of course, because writing is a human medium designed to serve human ends, there has historically been no question but that the sonic phenomena subject to written analysis were confined to the bandwidth of human auditory perception: sound frequencies between approximately 20 and 20,000 hertz. But within this relatively narrow range, literary specialisation and

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introduction

5

adaptation proved extraordinarily versatile in developing vocabularies of audition that progressively unearthed more and more sonic data, refining and sophisticating the human understanding of sound. The adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and nouns associated with sound in any of the major language groups are prodigiously various and highly specific, second only to visual language in their range and depth of detailed verbal analysis. In addition to these official lexicons of sound, the phonetic languages have proven immensely adaptive to sonic phenomena through their mimetic capacity for onomatopoeia, though even here the law of arbitrary sign creation prevails (the number of different ways of registering the calling of a cat or the crowing of a cock is infamous). When literature turns its attention to the world of sound, then, it has immense resources to draw upon, even if there is always a necessary symbolic sundering of sound from sense. Perhaps the most sensitive ear ever to record sound in written language was Henry David Thoreau’s, and his prose resonates with a suggestive soundtrack like no other: When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then – that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and – bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.20 The most irresistible conclusion to be drawn from this superlative recreation in language of a screech owl’s hooting is that literature cannot leave sound alone, but must draw it up into itself, metaphorising and personifying it, infusing it with other sensations and affects, relating it to other writers’ works, filling it in with signification and sense. This is the distinctive difference made by literature’s storage monopoly over auditory experience relative to later media: it does not treat sounds in isolation from other phenomena but situates them in a larger context of embodied perception and reflection and commits itself to a general phenomenology and psychology of experience. There can be no thoroughgoing objectivism or ‘scientism’ of auditory description, because, given over as it is to the symbolic, language must expose sound to sense, even as it ineluctably does the reverse by virtue of its phonologic operations. Alexander Pope’s famous advice to poets about ensuring that these two orders are made imaginarily adequate to one another is not simply a classicist prejudice; it

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virtually corresponds to the condition of all efforts to render sounds inside a symbolic medium: True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. ’Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence, The Sound must seem an Echo to the Sense. Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore, The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar. When Ajax strives, some Rock’s vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain, Flies o’er th’unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.21 Literary ‘voice’, an indispensable category of all serious composition, is situated at this aesthetic juncture between sound and sense. Voice is an ethical infusion of living character into impersonal textuality that draws the better part of its persuasive power from the acoustic illusions of an embodied speaker that the writing is at pains to conjure via various literary techniques. Stephen Benson has observed that ‘to think in any way of literary narrative as requiring, or involving, or as predicated upon voice, phantasmically or otherwise, involves the imagination of sound, of the sound of a voice’. Elspeth Jajdelska has convincingly shown how the ‘birth of the narrator’ in Western literary forms was historically tied to the establishment of roles for the implied reader and writer in seventeenth-century European fiction, roles that relate intimately to this formal category of voice.22 And this does not even scratch the surface of the many ways in which script written to be performed – play texts, speeches, orations, and any other written prompt for speech or song – imbues itself with cues and keys aligning it with sound and sound with sense. That construction we call ‘Shakespeare’ is in fact mostly cobbled together out of actors’ recollections of their performances at the Globe and Blackfriars, and it is impossible to divorce this consecrated textuality from its qualities as sounded, spoken, projected, and played in the Elizabethan theatre, without grossly distorting its meanings.23 In all of this immensely various and polyphonic archive of written sound, of course, the general law of all media applies: in order to make these signals clearly (signals underscored by rules of pronunciation and phonetic spelling in Western languages, and therefore by official dictionaries and an extended educational apparatus), there is also an inevitable amount of ‘noise’ (unwanted fluctuations of medial materiality interfering with the signal) that goes along with them. Literary ‘noise’ includes misprints and errata, mispaginations, faint ink, acidic paper, tears, and other accidentals of the printing process which frustrate literary automatisms and return the reader to a confrontation with the arbitrariness of the symbolic. It has not yet sufficiently been theorised in relation to literature and sound, but the noise of the literary mode of production should give pause to any straightforward account of acoustic signs. It was that artificial, semiotic dimension of literary soundscapes that became excruciatingly apparent after the invention of the phonograph and other mechanical record-

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ing technologies at the turn of the twentieth century. Just as the camera had directly imprinted the shadow of the visible real on a sensitive photographic plate, the phonograph too had the frequency curves of actual sounds inscribed upon it by a needle in wavelike configurations. Not symbolic approximations or significations, then, but isomorphic recordings or reproductions of sound were made possible for the first time by this technology; at a stroke the literary monopoly over sonic transcription looked weak and its symbolic apparatus sieve-like. ‘The dream of a real visible or audible world arising from words had come to an end’, writes Friedrich Kittler. ‘The historical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriting separated optical, acoustic, and written data flows, thereby rendering them autonomous.’24 For the first time, sound appeared as what it really was: the real itself. Freed from the arbitrary gridwork of the symbolic, sound could be heard to ‘form the waste or residue that neither the mirror of the imaginary nor the grid of the symbolic can catch: the physiological accidents and stochastic disorder of bodies’.25 Noise, Milton’s chaotic ‘universal hubbub wild / Of stunning sounds and voices all confused’,26 no longer had to rely on mere description for evidence of its immense kingdom on earth – it could be reproduced on its own terms in ways that made language redundant. From that moment onwards, the preponderant mediation of sound has shifted from wax and shellac grooves to electromagnetic signals on tape and via radio to digitised strings of computational data; domains in which the literary sign looks decidedly archaic and extremely ‘lowres’. When it is recalled how effortlessly literary signals can be repackaged and disseminated as media software (talking books, recordings of live performances, radio broadcasts, MP3 files, and so forth), it seems futile to imagine that literature could simply stand its ground against the new media behemoth. What options did the literary mode of production explore in response to this massive data breach and loss of cultural legitimacy? First of all, as David Trotter, Debra Rae Cohen, and many others have expertly shown, the new sound media could themselves be reappropriated as ‘content’ within the mutated literary space of so-called modernism.27 Nor would this appropriation be merely static, since all such media absorption is ineluctably enmeshed in a complex competition for attention within an increasingly crowded media ecology. Fredric Jameson has postulated the aesthetic law that whenever one medium appears inside another it is always to set off the ontological primacy, the superior power and prestige of the host medium; and that one of the most consequential effects of literature’s becoming just one medium among others is that it, too, could participate in this Darwinian struggle for survival.28 So, when literature represents a new sound medium transmitting a recorded or broadcast signal, it will want to do so with the full arsenal of its ethical and associative symbolic machinery, and supplement its relatively deficient reproductions of sound with a rich and supple rhetoric of valuation, and an evocative phenomenology, that compensate the reader for the silence of the literary soundtrack. ‘Literary texts can act as sonic archives,’ recounts Anna Snaith, ‘representing and preserving not just historical soundscapes but what Sam Halliday calls the “para-sonic”: the physical, political, cultural frameworks or situations in which sounds are produced and received.’29 This is why everybody’s favourite literary phonograph, the typist’s in Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, is so immensely provocative: it takes the para-sonic seriously and elevates an otherwise trivial acoustic episode into a world-historical symbolic event in which a recorded sound is emblematic of a vast civilisational collapse.

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Second, literature can experiment with its own means of production to simulate or take as points of departure some of the new features of sound’s reproducibility. The Futurist practice of playing with fonts and sizes, the general avant-garde principle of treating paper as a multimedia, incorporating musical staves and notations as epigraphs, the genre of artist’s books and the use of illustration more generally, the printing of mathematical and scientific formulae in works of fiction, even something as basic as the use of Arabic numbers in a poem (something we believe Ezra Pound to have pioneered in his early Cantos) – all attest to a will to bend the literary text outwards, to open it up to new kinds of sonic texture and acoustical energy specific to the modern soundscapes of the changing media ecology. Without abandoning its fundamental symbolic modus operandi, literature could learn to become more directly ‘reproductive’ in relation to the signals and noises all around it. There are thus distinctly ‘noisy’ modern texts, like Louis Zukofsky’s epic ‘A’, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, that defy standard approaches to the symbolic inscription of sound by virtue of their flagrant efforts to become sound-worlds unto themselves, internally diverse but consistent sonic environments unlike any others. Third, literature can adapt itself to be wired (or wireless) for sound. The history of recorded authorial readings, broadcast readings, and literary texts specifically written for radio (for instance) is long and surprisingly rich, and many are the literary artists who have sat before a microphone and mediated their writing for auditory dissemination across the new networks of reproducible sound.30 Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Döblin, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, Lorine Niedecker, and W. H. Auden are only a few who subjected their literary labours to the technical specifications of broadcast radio; and legendary adaptations like that of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, or the BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial adaptations by major actors and directors of everything from The Aeniad to I, Claudius, have cemented the century-old relationship between literature and mediated sound. The market in audiobooks is today valued at over US$5 billion and expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 26.4 per cent from 2022 to 2030, when it will reach $35 billion per annum. Ease of access across multiple platforms and sites of audition makes this manner of consuming literature increasingly attractive, and writing is being ritually embedded into the daily commute or walk in ways unimaginable to previous generations of readers. When this phenomenon is added to the strong contemporary revival of live literary events like poetry slams and open mikes, alongside the more industry-inflected author readings at literary festivals and bookshop Q&As, the image becomes clear of at least a partial return to literature’s oral roots, a systematic detour of the written word through auditory channels, forums, and storage/playback devices that defamiliarise ‘literature’ in provocative and productive ways. The emergence of sound studies as a disciplinary sub-formation happened at an oblique angle to this contested history of literature’s adjustment to a century of mediated sounds. On the one hand, it seemed to understand the ineluctable relationship of sonic phenomena to verbal signs and the literary record (a scan of Schafer’s The Soundscape is a confrontation with an extensive literary archive); but on the other, it made a determined effort to take the real of sound seriously, and not to lapse back into simple symbolic registrations of acoustics. Situating its analyses and explorations at sites generally unavailable to literary method, sound studies has revelled in the noisy everyday cultures of late modernity as well as the more distant rural and peripheral

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soundscapes where recorded sounds feature less prominently; it has delved deeply into sound design, the acoustic properties of materials, buildings as conductors, sonic digitisation, the public problems and economies of noise, the racialisation of sound across colour lines and contested urban territories, sound’s politicisation more generally, its agency in an antagonistic social field and in warzones, and its complex constitution of social memory and ritual space, among many other important topics.31 The ubiquity of sound waves, within and beyond the range of human hearing, is a subject with vast implications for science and technology, for the humanities, for social science, and for the health sciences. So, it is no wonder that literature should have taken a back seat relative to other powerful vectors in the establishment of a disciplinary formation strung across the intersection of these many faculties and competing concerns. For all that, however, there is no question that – doubtless due to the uniquely evanescent and trace-less nature of most audio phenomena – writing about sound has tended to be, well, writerly. The pre-mechanical, pre-electronic tradition of writing sound in printed signs has never truly been abandoned, least of all in sound studies, where the very best thinkers in the field have raised their literary art to a very high level indeed, tracking elusive, imponderable sounds and committing them to symbolic inscriptions that take their energy from the linguistic, grammatical, syntactic, and tropological dynamics built into the very medium of written language. It is an art of the sentence, writing about sound, and of the flow of sentences one to the next in periods and paragraphs that seek to capture the significance of acoustical events in ways that mere recording never could. We can put it this way: machines and technological media learned how to reproduce and store sound waves as signals and in code; but the fundamental relationship of heard sounds to the lived, embodied, social, cultural, historically changing matrices of human existence is finally irreducible to these signals and codes. Without writing about sound, without its literary inscription, it lies inert as sonic information, capable of making direct and affective impact on human sensoria during playback, but lacking the complex weave of phenomenological interrelatedness with other kinds of information that literature takes as its raison d’être. In the work of David Toop, Douglas Kahn, Steven Connor, Salomé Voegelin, Brandon LaBelle, Michel Chion, and others, writing about sound is an art form, and a literary art form at that. It requires extraordinary control over the technical means of literary production, a precise attention to the shifts in tone, voice, and diction that make palpable to readers the kinds of association the sounds at issue will need to generate in them – as affect, as percept, and as concept. Here is David Toop listening to a CD on headphones in a public library in Whitechapel, East London, with the recorded voice of Janet Cardiff in his ears, telling him where to go: I am leaving myself behind. My radar, the detection system that alerts me to safety and location, seems to be switched to low intensity readings because I am in three places at once: inside Cardiff’s urgent narrative which unfolds like an old-fashioned crime novel; in step with her voice of guidance, which safely walks me over dangerous roads, along narrow pavements and secret alleys; then in my own sense of the here and now, thinking about her work and the ideas it stimulates, observing the strange juxtapositions of Dickensian London and the upsurge of services aimed at the financial sector, what lain Sinclair calls the ‘money lake’. To be directed and informed by this voice is a noirish feeling and parental at the same time. I respond

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helen groth and julian murphet as a parent, having guided my child across roads enough times; simultaneously as a child, my small hand in my mother’s hand. Then as a child again, I think about the noir voice, a voice-over, maybe Veronica Lake or Barbara Stanwyck, drawing me into darkness. Confused. I follow like a lamb.32

There is no doubt that writing about sound, at its very best, is writing raised to a new intensity of awareness, attention, and resonance, as it follows paths the merely visual tends to preclude, into the winding corridors of memory and association, prior writing and multi-temporality, palimpsestic spaces and lucid apperception, where the sentence form can luxuriate in a freedom and reflexivity that advances the art of writing. There are sensory ecologies calling out for maps that can only be written in signs, in paragraphs that take wing from the phenomenological into the philosophical, by way of the biographical and the political. Sounds have histories, and histories cannot be recorded without the rhetoric of temporality that literature has made its own. The very anachronism of writing in a media ecology dominated by digital code and computation is its secret advantage to a study of sounds – because sounds are always embedded in the spaces, the communities, and the temporal trajectories we create for our kind, speaking to each other all the while, singing, infusing our existence with rhythm, harmony, and vocal timbres that reach deep into our animal prehistory even as they carry us into the polyphonic future. Without writing, without literature, sound is simply data, and data does not a culture make. This Companion is offered in the hope, not of lighting up a subdisciplinary hinterland between literary and sound studies, but of illuminating the literary qualities of sound-writing itself and the sonic properties of all writing. Each part of this Companion builds on the claim that literature is an inescapable lens through which to view the study of sound itself. Part I, ‘Literature, Listening, Sounding’, clusters four chapters that rethink literary modes of listening. Astrid Lorange reads Divya Victor’s ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’ as an implicit poetic rendering of the ambient methods of ‘acoustic jurisprudence’ departing from the transcription of voice that drives the interpretive juridical protocols of ‘forensic listening’. Victor’s poetic capture of the ‘ambient and contextual sounds of the courtroom’, Lorange argues, gestures towards alternative frameworks for justice. Like Lorange, Helen Groth’s chapter considers selective audition and the limits of listening. Groth turns to the Australian Waayni writer Alexis Wright’s magisterial novel Carpentaria to rethink the limits of listening in conjunction with creative and theoretical responses to riotous activity. Wright transforms the ‘house of fiction’ into a resonant space that demands a different form of listening from her readers: an active attention to voices, sounds, and noises that jar and disturb the peace of literary histories that have failed to hear the voices of first nations peoples. Sustaining this focus on listening, David Toop asks: ‘Who is the listener? What is the listener? The listener is still, quiet, ambiguous, blank, full or empty, desirous or indifferent, perhaps nothing? Or, the listener is everything.’ Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s account of the attitudinal shifts that characterise intimate listening, Toop considers how novelists, such as Austen and Richardson, create ‘worlds of auditory containment’ that rarely slip outside themselves. In the final chapter in this part, Richard C. Rath considers how soundways beyond speech – as in the ways people interpret and express their attitudes and beliefs about sound – offer a richer context in which to situate specific oralities. Highlighting what he terms the

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‘xenophobic fallacy’ that ‘often frames sonic difference as the absence of reason’, Rath considers the ways indigenous soundways structure speaking and listening in dialogue with recent work by Peg Rawes and others that centres the concept of hungry listening to dismantle the racialised narrative methods that have long shaped oral history. Part II of the Companion shifts focus to the conjunction between literature, music and performance. Tamlyn Avery explores this interaction in her analysis of scores as musical reproduction in modernist texts by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Extrapolating from these readings, Avery argues that the textual and visual materiality of musical reproduction – not just the mimetic representation of its sounds – was far more crucial to modernism’s soundscape than has previously been recognised. Miranda Stanyon shares Avery’s interest in music’s uneasy place in both literary and sound studies: a discomfort that she reads as symptomatic of the prevailing sacrificing of music as a foundational gesture of contemporary sound studies, and one that has significantly shaped ‘literary scholars’ engagements with music. Stanyon then offers an illuminating antecedent of this exclusion from literary history in Milton’s Samson Agonistes: a poem that intertwines sacrifice and sound and, in the process, asks the reader to hope and listen for an ‘affective, communal, and spiritual-political concord that mirrors the workings’ of both audible sound and literary language. Bruce R. Smith’s chapter turns to what he suggestively calls the ‘full panoply of sounds present in performances of Shakespeare’s plays’. Taking inspiration from the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies, Smith attends to the physical properties of sound, the beingness of sound, understood as ‘acoustic vibrations of all kinds: not just phonemes but noise, shouts, sound effects, instrumental sounds, and sounds made by spectator/listeners’. The final chapter in this part shares Smith’s focus on the complex sonics of performance. Tamsen O. Wolff analyses a set of vocal practices that recur across the canon of musical theatre which she calls ‘hyper diction’ – defined as the ‘rapid, cadenced, highly enunciated rhyming speech’. Taking the heightened and underscored text of Hamilton (2015) and The Mikado (1885) as her principal case studies, Wolff explores the relative intelligibility of this mode of vocalisation at the level of both narrative and performance. A focus on voice unites the chapters that form Part III of this Companion, beginning with Noelle Morrissette’s reconsideration of the ‘Black National Anthem’ – ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, as an act of sonic witnessing. Taking inspiration from James Weldon Johnson’s idea of his hymn as ‘a breathing line of poetry that could not be contained on the page or in a single individual’, Morrissette reads ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as animated by the ‘physical experience of sound’ of collective vocal performance and constitutive of an embodied lyricism. This lyrical mode, she argues, would be fully realised in Johnson’s later sermonic poems where ‘modern lyric finds its spiritual expression not in religion per se, but in the embodied, breathing lines of poetry shared between its performers’. Sam Halliday diverges from the liveness and immediacy of vocal performance to examine the mediation of racialised voices. His chapter traces the epistemological limitations of the acousmatic across a range of early twentieth-century fiction by African Americans that meditate on both ‘Black’ and other racial voices. Central to Halliday’s analysis is a consideration of musicological forms ‘wherein Blackness is adduced by white writers as a component of Black music’: a racialised mediation that Halliday considers in conjunction with associated texts in which ‘race is putatively heard’. Julian Murphet’s chapter takes a more optimistic view

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of the epistemological capacities of the acousmatic in the context of the uncomfortable place prisons occupy in the history of the science of sound. Turning to the long tradition of prison writing, Murphet’s chapter explores the fact that for centuries writers, who have also been prisoners, have transformed the acousmatic properties of prison sound into ‘testimonials of terror, torture, resilience, and resistance, as well as rare utopian promises’. Writers have left a detailed record of the dramatic changes in the relationship between the experiences of imprisonment and sound over time, Murphet claims, one that deserves more critical attention than it has yet received. In the final chapter in this section, Imogen Free is also concerned with the acoustic registrations of violent experience. Free explores how the wartime stories of Rosamund Lehmann and Jean Rhys move beyond the soundscape of the London Blitz transporting their readers into rural settings that offer little refuge from the anxiety-inducing noise of war. Through a series of close readings of both Lehmann and Rhys, Free traces the figure of the echo as a subtle registration of an alternative soundscape of women’s civilian experience of the Second World War. Media and technology are the sonic coordinates of Part IV of this Companion. K. C. Harrison offers a comparative ‘resonant reading’ of the work of three pairs of authors across three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, who engage with sound technologies at the moment that they are also exploring ethical questions in relation to racial identity. Drawing on recent work by Jennifer Lynn Stoever and, more particularly Jessica Teague, Harrison’s interest lies in bringing calls for an ethics of listening back to the page. This approach shapes her analysis of the racialised aesthetics of three white authors – Carson McCullers, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon – alongside the formal innovation and ‘canny concern for the power relationships governing the production and dissemination of Black artists’ work’ in the writing of Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed. Justin St. Clair is also concerned with the literary mediation of sound, teasing out the complex aurality of texts that compel readers to ‘acknowledge the disjuncture between the printed text and its inevitably sounded transduction’. The digital age, St. Clair argues, is the most mediated in human history, proliferating forms and content for novelists to remediate. This avid mediation has only intensified ‘the sounded gulf between the written and the read’, St. Clair contends, a shift marked by contemporary fiction’s enlisting of ‘extratextual strategies for processing the media aurality’. St. Clair then reads Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) as ‘a case study in coded sound’, elaborating on the novel’s complex mediality and engendering of networked strategies of reading that ‘allow readers to process sound that resonates beyond the graphical limits of the page’. Jason Camlot considers the ‘media affordances of literary audio’ in his chapter’s consideration of the significance of a range of audio media technologies for the form literary sound recordings have taken over the past century. Through a series of closely observed case studies, Camlot explores how these various sound media have shaped our relationship to literary performance, events, community, and the concept of ‘the literary’ itself. In so doing, Camlot also offers new concepts and categories for analysing not only sonically mediated works, but also the increasingly complex ontological poetics that has arisen from our attempt to understand ‘the nature of a historical literary sound recording for use in our digitally mediated present’. In the final chapter in this cluster, Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard turns to the sonic mediation of presence in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books. Acknowledging the overt white

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supremacism and imperialism of these popular literary works, Grimshaw-Aagaard draws attention to the sound descriptors that orchestrated the immersive reading experience Burroughs created for readers. Aagaard argues that Burroughs’s mediation of a geographically unmoored jungle through ‘fear constructed through sound’ is ‘akin to the application of sound design to horror films and survival-horror computer games, where sound is used to complement the dark recesses and limited visual horizons’ of these imaginary worlds. Part V turns to literature’s historical registration of the sounds of war and industry, drawing together a series of case studies that range from eighteenth-century fiction to contemporary writing. Peter Denney examines fictional registrations of social shifts in the value of sound in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moving from eighteenth-century coffee houses and pleasure gardens to nineteenth-century factories and streets, Denney elaborates on how the narration of the varying acoustics of these key sites created a space for writers to explore, negotiate, and flout conventions in the process of fashioning new sonic identities and the auditory environments they inhabited. Andrew Brooks’s movement between past and present is guided by the poetic remediation of the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert, a 1783 English court document (the only remaining archival record of a massacre that took place on board a British slave ship transporting human cargo from the African West Coast to Jamaica in 1781) in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Brooks’s chapter asks the question, ‘What is the sound of a story that cannot be told but must be told?’ – a question that draws attention to the presence of sound in written documents that we presume are silent and issues an invitation to open our ears to forms of speculative listening, to the songs sung, languages spoken, and screams of anguish that expose the limits of the archive as a mechanism of both preservation and destruction. Brooks argues that poetry’s specific attunement to transformations of time and space makes it uniquely suited to explore the space between record and speculation, language and sound, word and silence. David Ellison takes the title of his chapter ‘Shriek and Hum’ from the American anti-noise campaigner Julia Barnett Rice, who argued that the hum of industry had transformed into an ear-piercing and harm-inducing shriek in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Ellison traces the alignment of shriek with the selectively injurious character of industry, as opposed to the less familiar emergence of hum as a capacitating ground for ‘higher’ feeling and thought. Moving through a series of written encounters, both literary and non-literary, Ellison contends that the critical and persistent distinction between industrial and machine noise – shriek and hum – was first modelled in writing about automata. Mark Byron’s chapter moves the focus of this section from the sounds of industry to those of war in his consideration of the critical poetics of warfare. Byron’s approach to how poetry represents war ‘within its form’ is formal and driven by the underlying question of whether there is an ‘identifiable poetics of warfare’. Byron responds to this question by examining a range of poems, spanning from classical antiquity to the present day, that prosodically materialise the sounds of war. Michael Bull’s analysis of the sonic fragments of the First World War is more specific in its attention to a single event and the epistemological challenges the multimedial record of the war poses for the scholar of sound. Bull defines sonic warfare capaciously as ‘any sound that is filtered through, understood, experienced as a consequence of war’ to open up a wide-ranging analysis of ‘the myriad of sounds and experiences of war’ through a metonymic analysis of two material artefacts: the shell and the bullet. Moving from the striated markings on a

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shell case to the trajectory of the bullet, Bull interleaves historical and literary records to model a sonically sensitised reading of the war that draws on the cognate critical repertoires of both literary and sound studies. The ultimate part draws the Companion to a close with three chapters that approach sonic epistemology from the cognate disciplinary domains of musicology, linguistics, literary, and animal studies. Holger Schulze considers two forms of sound knowledge – ‘corporeal tacit and explicitly formalised’ – in a chapter that ranges across multiple forms of creative ‘sonic’ activation. Schulze examines how contemporary sonic epistemologies build on earlier and tacit forms of knowledge to define and formalise practices of activation and listening that open up otherwise obscure or inaccessible experiences. His chapter culminates in a series of experimental works that draw on earlier engagements with sonic epistemology, such as Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening – a work which Schultz describes as ‘an inextricable amalgamation of performance and meditation, instrumental practice and listening training, musical score, performance description, and multisensory poetry’. Janis Nuckolls approaches the concept of sound knowledge from an anthropological linguist’s perspective in a chapter that considers the cultural poetics of a buoyancy sound from Amazonian Ecuador. Nuckolls’s chapter analyses the various cultural and contextual semantics of the Pastaza Kichwa ideophone polang: an imitative word with various meanings communicated by unusual sound qualities – including extremely variable pitch, loudness, segmental lengthening, and unusual stress patterns – that ‘allows for poetic indeterminacy and principled creativity’ that resonate with Pastaza Kichwa ways of life. Jody Berland concludes the Companion with an extended consideration of modern literature’s interpretation of birdsong. Whilst conceding that literary writing has done so in ways that typically reaffirm the existing divide between human and bird, Berland moves beyond conventional critiques of anthropocentrism in a chapter that asks whether it is anthropocentric to hear the utterances of bird as music, rather than a biologically determined behaviour, a question that inspires a series of close readings of literary portrayals of birdsong that consider the possibility of ‘a more hospitable recognition of the communicative and aesthetic capacities of non-human species’ and the need for human cultures to be more attuned to them.

Notes   1. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds, Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).   2. Anna Snaith’s recent collection is the notable exception here: Sound and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Michael Bull and Les Back, eds, The Auditory Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2020); Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012); and Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sterne’s collection is relatively generous towards literary practices but makes no separate case for literature as a medium of sound.   3. Special mention should be given to the international reach of Michael Alan, ‘Translating Whispers: Recitation, Realism, Religion’, SubStance 50, no. 1 (2021): 10–26; Aleksandra Kremer, The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); Alexandra Magearu, ‘Subaltern Aurality: Listening to Algerian Women’s Voices in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian

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Cavalcade’, Women’s Studies 50, no. 4 (2021): 295–316; Radomil Novák, ‘Sound in Literary Texts’, Neophilologus 104, no. 2 (2019): 151–63; A. Sean Pue, ‘Acoustic Traces of Poetry in South Asia’, South Asian Review (South Asian Literary Association) 40, no. 3 (2019): 221–36; Lucía Martínez Valdivia, ‘Audiation: Listening to Writing’, Modern Philology 119, no. 4 (2022): 555–79.   4. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Julie Beth Napolin, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); Matthew Rubery, Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (London: Routledge, 2011); and Patricia Pye, Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880–1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).   5. Zoë Skoulding, Poetry and Listening: The Noise of Lyric (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).   6. Judith Roof, Tone: Writing and the Sound of Feeling (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).   7. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016).  8. Matthew Rubery, The Untold History of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).  9. Snaith, Sound and Literature. 10. Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 11. Schafer, Soundscape, 127. 12. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York: Methuen, 1982). See also the chapter in this volume by Richard C. Rath. 13. Derrida’s work on Plato, Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss, de Saussure, and other phonocentric sceptics of the written sign remains important to any responsible work on literary sound studies. See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 14. William Blake, Songs of Innocence (New York: Dover, 1971), 4, 34. 15. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Toronto: Vintage, 1998), especially the chapter ‘The Silent Reader’. 16. See in particular Skoulding, Poetry and Listening; and Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), especially 173–85. 17. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin, 1993). 19. Justin St. Clair, ‘Literature and Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 353–61 (355). 20. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 195. 21. Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (c. 1709), ll. 362–73, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), 155; original italics. 22. Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 9; Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (Toronto:

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Toronto University Press, 2007). See also Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel, eds, Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 23. See Bruce R. Smith’s chapter in this volume. 24. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 14. 25. Ibid., 15–16. 26. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ll. 951–2, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 354. 27. See David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 169–217. 28. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI, 1992), 62, 84, 140–3. 29. Snaith, Sound and Literature, 5–6, quoting Halliday, Sonic Modernity, 12. 30. See Debra Rae Cohen, Jane Lewty, and Michael Coyle, Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013). 31. See Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010); Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, eds, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. Andrea McCartney and Henry Torgue (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006); Georgina Born, ed., Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, eds, Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Seán Street, Sound Poetics: Interaction and Personal Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2017); Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, eds, Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, rev. edn (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, eds, Digital Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 32. David Toop, ‘Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory’ (c. 2004), in Sound, ed. Caleb Kelly (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), 207.

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Part I: Literature, Listening, Sounding

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1 The Sound a Sentence Makes: On Poetry, Judgement, and Hearing Astrid Lorange

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hat sound does a sentence make? In the classroom, I invoke the sound of a sentence to try to teach students to tune their ear to their own writing. ‘An ear will snag’, I say, ‘on a sentence that is agrammatical, that loses its subject. Read each sentence aloud one by one and if the ear snags, work on it until it sounds right.’ To sound right, I suppose I mean, is to sound complete. In this sense, the sound of a sentence is the sound of a promise being fulfilled: the sound of grammar adhering to its own rules. But this is only half the lesson. In that same classroom, we discuss what it means to tune the ear to the sound of a broken rule, a sound that contains within it a different kind of promise. And so, the question remains the same, but the answer requires a reorientation of thought. What sound does a sentence make? In her 2021 collection Curb, Divya Victor writes a recent history of racialisation in the US post 9/11 – specifically, the operations of white supremacy in marking Brown people as the target of anti-Muslim violence as well as recruiting them as vectors of anti-Blackness.1 Curb works both with and against official documents – migration papers, legal proceedings, news reports – in order to consider the different inscriptive gestures that underwrite the broader processes of racialisation and racist violence. In one poem, ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’, a preface describes the fatal assault of Divyendu Sinha in New Jersey in 2010 while he was out walking with his wife Alka and their two sons. In a second contextual paragraph, Victor sets up the poem to come: Three years after the death of her husband Divyendu Sinha, Alka Sinha appeared at a Courthouse in New Brunswick to offer testimony in response to the Court’s sentencing of the men who were responsible for his death. She began her testimony by playing a recording of Divyendu’s voice-mail greeting. She closed it by walking away from the podium. His recorded voice & her living voice were buried together in a soundscape of this courtroom. The duration of her entire testimony, documented in these ten sequences, was eight minutes.2

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Before the ‘ten sequences’ comes a single page with an excerpt of the court transcript in which Alka Sinha asks for permission to play the voice-mail greeting. And then, the poem itself, one sequence per page. The first reads in its entirety: f

The hollow, wind-blown plunge of dry bamboo /or a pair of pencils shifting in a circular tube

f

The breathy fret of ten or fewer sheets of heavy duty cardstock or one sheet of vinyl being moved a short distance in a vertical, swift act /or camera shutter

f

A distant click of a camera shutter /or the snap of thin plastic (from left of witness)

f

The soft lift of plastic, followed by a sharp click of plastic, followed by deeper thud of plastic against wood or wood-like material (such as Formica)

f

A series of stuttering shutter snaps in quick succession / or a rash of plastic scraping plastic3

The poem continues, with each sequence comprising a series of discrete sounds – each preceded by an ‘f’, a symbol that denotes frequency, that is, the measure of an event’s repetition over time. Each sentence across the ten sequences corresponds to a moment of the testimony, or rather, a moment captured in a recording of the testimony that is played back to Victor’s listening ear. The sentences register the noise of the courtroom that accompanied – even conditioned – the eight minutes of testimony that the poem focuses on and yet redacts: sounds of furniture, stationery, recording equipment, bodies. The sequences differ in length, with some comprising two sentences and others up to six. Despite the use of silence – the silence of Sinha’s redacted testimony as well as the silence registered by negative spaces on and across the pages – the poem invites a mode of reading acutely attuned to each sound that renders the poem a resolutely cacophonous text. This tension between presence and absence, between recognisable sounds (‘The wispy slide of two or three fingers over a page’4) and speculative accounts of unrecognisable sounds (‘Something slippery but light being gathered up (like sheets of ice) very close to witness’5), moves a reader between the documentary traces generated by the sentence hearing and the more imaginative space in which the operation of law finds its legitimacy and naturalises its violence. A play of presence and absence names the affective tonality of grief, as well: across the sounds scored by Victor we hear the voice of the dead (‘The hum enveloping the flesh of a human voice recording’6), as well as sounds which connect the noise of the courtroom to the sounds of home, of intimacy, of mourning: ‘The tap of something metallic but light being placed down (like a demitasse spoon)’;7 ‘The short rattle of wooden beads of garland of dried flowers (behind witness).’8 These sounds, at once orienting and disorienting, build an archive that derives from the courtroom and its capture in an audio file, and yet is in excess of the time and space of the courtroom: the archive maps the relations between the

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sentence hearing as a specific moment in time and space and the countless moments that mark life, death, and the law. The ‘f’ that precedes each line, and that is mirrored by the title of the poem, marks each sound as its own discrete phenomenon; it also links them through the suggestion of repetition, and through the subsequent association between repetition and perception that is called frequency. But what, precisely, is being repeated? And what is being perceived? My guiding question – what sound does a sentence make? – invites inversion in the case of this poem. Here, each sound makes a sentence. Strikingly, Victor does not reproduce the testimony’s content. We do not read – hear – the voice-mail greeting, nor the language of Alka Sinha’s grief.9 We do not know what Sinha says about her husband, or the men who killed him, or the criminal justice system in which the narratives of testimony and judgment are performed. Instead, we read – hear – the acoustic environment in which she stood and spoke; the echoic space of the court; the warm hum of human bodies; the particular tones of wood, paper, pen, tape recorder; the shrillness of plastic. For the duration of the poem, we are instructed to tune in to the background of this (absent) speech event, to approach what James Parker calls ‘acoustic jurisprudence’, that is, ‘an orientation towards law and the practice of judgment attuned to questions of sound and listening’.10 In order to attempt such an experiment in acoustic jurisprudence, we might first of all consider the role that sound and listening play in the legal event known as the sentencing hearing, and how Victor’s poem provides a critical reading of the sentence as a legal tool that transforms a verdict into punishment. In what follows, I argue that Victor’s poem offers a critique of ‘forensic listening’ resonant with Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s formulation of that concept, as well as an engagement with Parker’s notion of ‘acoustic jurisprudence’. I conclude by positioning Victor’s poem at the intersection of a conversation between sound studies and literary studies on the question of how to critically engage with the law from the outside, so to speak. To imagine law from the outside is to imagine a world in which the law is otherwise: perhaps to imagine an abolitionist horizon, as I will suggest in the final movement of this chapter. This world, imagined otherwise, returns us to the classroom scene I opened with, and to the sound of a broken rule. What is the sound beyond a sentence? In New Jersey, as in other US jurisdictions, a sentencing hearing follows a verdict. The hearing provides an opportunity for the prosecution, defence, and victim/victim’s family (in that order) to speak directly to the judge to appeal for an increased/decreased sentence. As a rule, these hearings allow for more emotional/affective forms of testimony: the idea is to persuade the judge towards a harsher or softer punishment by speaking to, for example, the goodness of character or the impact of a crime on victims and their families. But there is a limit to the terms of persuasion, or rather, a code that delimits persuasion. In a case in California, a victim impact statement which included a montage of photographs accompanied by the ‘stirring’ music of Celine Dion was questioned for its ‘prejudicial’ capacity to move the judge.11 In this case, the affective capacity of music was a point of contention despite the fact that the sentencing hearing allows for – even depends on – affective forms of testimony. The impact that Dion’s ballad could have on the judge was deemed too great – beyond the reasonable means by which a judge might be persuaded. As James Parker argues, the complicated relationship between sound and judgment is inadequately studied, such that the role of sound, speech, and music in the criminal justice system can be at once overlooked and overdetermined.12 In the

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Californian case, the question of whether ‘stirring’ music might move a judge too much can be understood in relation to the act of sentencing itself. To sentence means to translate a crime into its appropriate punishment; sentencing is, as Jordy Rosenberg writes, ‘that precision-weapon on violent equivalence’.13 If a judge might be moved towards a harsher sentence by a stirring song, thereby perverting an otherwise putatively normative process of converting a verdict into a sentence, then the question of what sound a sentence makes might be answered in an unexpected way: a sentence might bear the uninvited trace of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’. The vexed question of what precisely is – or ought to be – heard in the courtroom raises itself in legal debates. In defence of victim impact statements, a widespread yet nonetheless controversial fixture of criminal proceedings across the US, Paul G. Cassell makes the argument that they cannot be said to unfairly impact judge’s sentencing decisions. If an impact statement affects a judge’s decision, he claims, insofar as it adds necessary context to the crime under consideration, such an impact on the final sentence is merely in accordance with the severity of the crime.14 Moreover, he argues, the inclusion of victim impact statements (including the inclusion of statements from a victim’s family, as is the case in Alka Sinha’s testimony under discussion here) works to educate the defendant on the effects of their crime, provide necessary therapeutic benefits to the victim/victim’s family, and ‘create the perception of fairness at sentencing, by ensuring that all relevant parties – the State, the defendant, and the victim – are heard’.15 On this last point we might dwell for a moment: the statements ought to be included, argues Cassell, for their part in creating the ‘perception of fairness’, here understood in terms of an equal opportunity for all parties to speak and to be heard speaking. We might ask what the difference is between the ‘perception of fairness’ and justice, or between the capacities to speak and be heard speaking that the state, the defendant, and the victim have when they enter the courtroom. The same reason that Cassell believes in victim impact statements – that they contribute to the project of justice by allowing for the full human impact of crime to be communicated to the judge for the purpose of sentencing – is cited by their critics, who argue that intense emotions risk troubling the objectivity required of a judge in the process of sentencing. In other words, for both, ‘emotion’ is an unpredictable but unexamined factor in the pursuit of justice, where justice is understood as the allocation of appropriate punishment. The role that sound and music play in modulating emotion beyond an appropriate level is gestured towards but, as Parker argues, never fully confronted in legal discourse. For this reason, the problem of Celine Dion remains a problem of the law as such. In what follows, and as I read Victor alongside Parker’s call for an acoustic jurisprudence, I ask what an alternative idea of justice might look and sound like, and how we can think of the poem as a social object in which one is instructed towards novel reading and media practices that come to bear on documents of everyday life. The book Curb is accompanied by a website on which invited artists’ work is published.16 This work responds to, or corresponds with, the poems collected in the physical book. One artist, Carolyn Chen, includes a short audio piece (a minute or so of ambient ‘dead air’ captured on a sound recording) titled ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’ with a link to the original poem’s source material.17 The link directs a reader to YouTube, where an eight-minute video of the courtroom on sentencing day shows Alka Sinha delivering her victim impact statement while the judge, guards, lawyers, and witnesses listen (or not) in a small courtroom.18 The video is captured from the perspective

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of a witness, positioned behind Sinha, and was published on YouTube by Mast Radio, a New York-based community station dedicated to South Asian news, culture, and politics. Partly because of the positioning of the person filming (directly behind Sinha’s speaking body) and partly because of the recording device (we might assume a smartphone, held sideways to capture in landscape, moving with the body that holds it), the background noise competes with the sound of the speaking witness. The shuffles, coughs, clicks, and bangs of bodies and objects appear louder and more defined than the muffled voice of Sinha, whose already soft speech is further obscured by her own body blocking the camera’s microphone. To witness this video, and its unbalanced audio track, alongside the poem is to gain a different perspective on the ‘background’ that occupies Victor: it is, in fact, the foreground. In ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’, Victor considers the affective weight, not of a voice-mail greeting capturing the ghostly voice of a murdered man, nor the sound of his wife’s grief in speech, but of the environment in which the hearing of such testimony took place, the background noise against which witnessing occurred. This shift of emphasis from foreground to background, from the content of speech to the extraneous noise against which speech is discerned – echoed, as I note above, in the recording itself – in turn shifts a reader’s attention away from evidence presented and towards the conditions in which the judge hears. It draws a reader’s attention to the hearing subjects in the courtroom in addition to the judge, who, as Robert Cover writes in ‘Violence and the Word’, include ‘police, jailers or other enforcers’ whose affirmation of the sentence after it is imposed (for example, by restraining a prisoner, or releasing her from restraint) is a necessary aspect of the sentence’s legitimacy.19 In Victor’s poem, we apprehend the bodies of the different people whose combined effort constitutes sentencing as a legal process. A judge hears testimony whose affective weight guides the conferral of punishment, assists in the translation of one form of violence into another; a judge is heard by state actors who enforce the hearing by formalising its judgment through their own practice of hearing. What is the effect of this shift in attention, this instruction away from the testimony and towards a testimonial acoustics? On the one hand, this shift refuses the terms of translation between violence and violence that the act of sentencing facilitates. There can be no equivalence, the poem suggests, between the violence that murdered Divyendu Sinha and the violence the state imposes as a form of punishment on the men who murdered him. The refusal of this equivalence is mirrored in the poem in the refusal to reproduce Sinha’s testimony as well as details of the sentences imposed, in the refusal to make a comparison between these two speech acts and the logic of interpretation that binds them, the collective listening that affirms them. The poem, in other words, does not ask its reader to perform their own judgment – to impose their own sentences in response to Alka Sinha’s testimony. The reader is asked to withhold such judgment and to consider instead the poetics of sentencing, that is, the material relations that formalise the state’s capacity for violence, and the processes through which various speech acts and interpretative protocols become naturalised in and as ‘justice’. The shift can also be read as a study of the courtroom as the site in which law becomes material: it is, in other words, a shift in genre. Against a romantic representation of judgment, the poem is a reminder of that which conditions judgment and which comprises the vast majority of the court’s proceedings: waiting, adjourning, stalling, clarifying; boredom, alienation, disruption.20

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Let us return here to the title of the poem, ‘Frequency (Alka’s Testimony)’ and to the symbol ‘f’ that opens each sentence in each sequence. Frequency refers to the number of times per second a sound wave repeats itself: frequency is what makes a sound perceptible or not, and within the perceptible range of sound, changes in frequency are registered as pitch. Frequency is therefore not only about the rate of an occurrence – repetition – but also about how repetition correlates to intensity, variability, and legibility. We can read ‘frequency’ in its broader sense as evoking, in this poem, the utter singularity and specificity of the death of a man alongside the broader phenomenon of racialised violence in the wake of 9/11. The lives and deaths of the men murdered in acts of such violence who are remembered at the beginning of Curb – ‘This book was made to witness the following irreducible facts: these men once lived; they are loved; the United States of America is responsible for the force of feeling and action that ended their lives’ – are related by a logic whose repetition signifies the violence of racialisation and the culpability of the racial state. Each moment indexed in the poem captures a minor sound amplified first by the amateur video recording from which Victor transcribes it and then by the critical shift that the poem inaugurates in which the background becomes the foreground. Each sound, which in the act of legal interpretation would be rendered outside the range of what is audible or perceptible, contributes to the actual conditions in which the law acquires, as Abu Hamdan says, ‘its performative might’. But a reader might also see – hear – in each ‘f’ the symbol ‘forte’, which in music notation denotes loudness (or, as the Italian suggests, strong playing). Or does it? As David Fallows writes, when the symbol first appeared in the sixteenth century it was a way of returning a musician to the normal volume after a period of softer playing. By the eighteenth century, the symbol indicated loud playing against a new category of normal, and by the twentieth, it was one in a series of standard relative values of loudness.21 In other words, forte is loud, but not as loud as one can go – and it is louder than ‘normal’ but is also always implicated in the measure of normal. If for ‘frequency’, there is an accepted range of audible sounds, and for forte there is an ill-defined yet implied notion of loudness qua normal, then between the two readings of ‘f’ we might think of the poem as emphasising each of these sounds as its own significant sonic event as well as an instruction to broaden the range of listening beyond the legal terms defined by hearing and towards an attunement to what is ambiguous, excessive, disruptive, extraneous, perhaps even imagined. In this poem, which takes place in the margins of a sentence hearing, there is, paradoxically, no record of the sentence that dominates the legal act in question. But there are a series of discrete sentences, each an index of a single sound that inhabited the space of the courtroom that day. And so, the sound of these sentences might be read in two ways: each sentence describes a sound captured by video recording equipment; each sentence transforms audio into poetry, sound into language. The poem’s alternative translation of the hearing is in excess of the evidential imperative that produces an official court transcript: the transcript is the official document through which the law’s processes become realised, the medium through which the judgment is captured in the event of its being-heard. This poem, on the other hand, takes as its source an unofficial capture of the courtroom, a document which, in its own kind of witnessing, provides an alternative account to an official transcript in the form of an extra-legal record of the sentence hearing. The poem, therefore, is a twice-removed document.

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan traces a history of the recorded voice as an object of study for the law. This history, as Abu Hamdan tells it, begins in 1984 with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in Britain, which ordered for audio equipment to be installed in police interview rooms. This Act, reproduced in similar terms elsewhere across the world and ostensibly designed to mitigate against police misconduct (forced confessions, for example), initiated a new era of ‘forensic listening’ in the criminal justice system: ‘[PACE] exponentially increased the use of speaker profiling, voice identification, and voice prints in order to, among other things, determine regional and ethnic identity as well as to facilitate so-called voice line-ups.’22 The advent of this mode of forensic listening, he explains, emerged as part of an ‘epistemic and technological shift which gave rise to new forms of testimony based on the analysis of objects rather than witness accounts’. However, he clarifies, ‘[i]n the case of forensic listening there is no clean shift from witness account to expert analysis of objects because the witness account and the object under analysis become the same thing. The voice is at once the means of testimony and the object of forensic analysis.’23 From the 1980s on, the recorded voice became an increasingly important object of criminal investigation and legal interpretation; at the same time, the recorded voice as an object for analysis indexes the speaking body, whose presence in the courtroom before a judge serves as another critical scene of listening. The ‘bodily excess of the voice’ such as ‘pitch, accent, glottal stops, intonations, inflections, and impediments’ – ‘non-verbal affects’, as Abu Hamdan calls them – ‘[does] not escape the ears of the judge and of those listening to a trial in the space of the courtroom’.24 In other words, the emergence of forensic listening practices especially attuned to the recorded voice as a technological object can be understood in relation to a ‘regime of listening’ already present in law. In this regime of listening, testimony is heard both as speech and as a speaking body liable to betray its own speech content. Listening to a witness, therefore, requires listening for and against affect, for moments in which speech is undone by non-speech. As Abu Hamdan points out, the regime of listening within which technologically mediated forms of forensic listening prevail today posits a theory of voice at odds with phenomenological approaches dominant in sound studies for around half a century; he cites Don Ihde’s influential Listening and Voice, from 1976, as a landmark in the field, for which sound is an irreducibly multiple phenomenon which cannot be fully or finally known.25 And yet, of course, in practice, the voice remains elusive for law as it does for sound studies, precisely because the voice is social. A judge is not impervious to a Celine Dion song, and a witness does not speak only before a judge but in a courtroom that functions in the broader institution of the justice system. Forensic listening cannot provide a theory for the affective weight of the pop ballad; it cannot account for the social relations that co-produce the actors in the courtroom and that condition not just what is permissible as speech but the speaking and listening subjects of law. This contradiction – an emphasis on voice (Abu Hamdan says that ‘the law itself operates as a speech-space in which those within its range of audibility are subject to its authority’26) and an inability to hear the social context in which the voice speaks and is heard – puts Abu Hamdan’s inquiry in touch with James Parker’s work, which investigates this inability to apprehend sound in the operation of law. For Parker, acoustic jurisprudence brings attention to sound and listening (and, as he explains, specifically to the term ‘hearing’ that is carried in the word acoustic from its Greek root and that is central to the operation of law), as well as to the practice

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of judgment. ‘Sound’, he writes, ‘is a condition of the administration of justice, an inalienable part of the legal world.’27 His book stages an encounter between sound studies and legal theory to address this lack, taking a specific case (the trial of Simon Bikindi, the Rwandan musician) as its primary focus. Parker’s aim is to show what acoustic jurisprudence looks like in practice – when we move from the general category of ‘law’ to the specific instance of law’s inscription. For Parker, acoustic jurisprudence ought to be understood as an attempt to hold law accountable to the task it sets itself: that is, the task of good judgment. Jurisprudence, he writes, ‘is a practice, a craft, and a virtue: a way of attending to and taking responsibility for the full range of techniques by which legal institutions make the world amenable to judgment’.28 Acoustic jurisprudence, therefore, tunes this attention to the role that sound and listening play in shaping such techniques and in affecting the capacity for judgment. As such, for Parker, the aim is to work within law, to consider how judgment may be done better. While this aim differentiates Parker’s project from my own, I am interested in considering Victor’s poem as an engagement with acoustic jurisprudence – an experiment in scoring the courtroom as a site of intensive sonic practices and in scoring the sentence hearing as a legal performance in which the ambient sound of the room carries the trace of what becomes judgment. Consider ‘Sequence 4’. We begin with a sentence that describes a sound relative to Sinha’s talking body: ‘The click of a ballpoint or gel pen (in front of witness).’ The sentences continue, documenting the chorus of minor bureaucratic gestures that are not only audible but amplified in the recording. Some are straightforward descriptions, such as the one above. Others are more complex, giving explicit and intimate detail: ‘The finite pat of placing a flat, narrow, light, small object on to a desk or table’; ‘The bone-snap or knuckle-crack quick & blunt / sound of a thick stack of papers folded at the midriff.’ The final sentence offers two alternative sources of the same sound: ‘The scrape of a taping knife against a wall / or a page turning back & forth & back again like the sound of a double take.’29 Here, the sound of a page suddenly flipping – the sound of a double take – is intrusive enough to resemble the sound of a blade scoring a wall. If the rest of the sentences in this sequence register the more mundane gestures that comprise law’s operations – the sounds of pen and paper; sounds of listening and being distracted – the last sentence carries a slightly different weight. Here, it is suggested, we hear an instant in which what is being heard is cross-referenced with what is expected to be heard, or where what is being heard contradicts what has previously been heard. By scoring the sound in this way, Victor makes it ambiguous (the sound could be this or that) as well as emphatic (the sound of a double take is dramatic, like a blade on a wall). In this final sentence in the sequence, Victor reminds us that every act of hearing contains the possibility of mishearing. But it is not just the shift from ballpoint pen to the more enigmatic double take that interests me. It is also the syntax itself, and how each sentence describes not just a sound contained in the recording of this hearing but rather a kind of sound, a sound that instructs the reader to identify and to identify with. ‘The click of a ballpoint or gel pen’ is not – or not only – a description of a single pen under examination by the poet. It is a genre of sound, a sound one knows by having heard it before. The listening that Victor undertakes, and that her poem transforms into a score for its reader, is a listening that appeals to the social field through which sound travels and becomes legible through recognition. This kind of listening works against the presumptions that

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underscore forensic listening, that is, that the ‘true identity of the sonic object under investigation’ can be apprehended.30 Instead, it highlights the conditions in which listening takes place: the broad and collective archive of sounds from which our practices of listening emerge and to which specific instances of listening refer, transforming the archive in turn. Victor’s syntax invites a reader to imagine each sound – to conjure it, perhaps via memory, as an index of their own body’s gesture: ‘The bone-snap or knuckle-crack quick & blunt / sound of a thick stack of papers folded at the midriff’ – and to build, via layering, a sense of the courtroom’s sonic environment and therefore a sense of what shaped, and was shaped by, the sentence hearing as an act of judgment. Victor’s poem suggests an acoustic jurisprudential approach to understanding this act of judgment in terms that exceed the legal case. But it does so by refusing to reproduce the content of the hearing and registering instead its context. On this point, we might say that Victor departs from acoustic jurisprudence as an orientation to law, since her attention is not focused on judgment, good or bad. Her focus is the many minor gestures – note-taking, double-taking, cross-referencing, paper shuffling; thinking, listening, not listening, daydreaming, fantasising; waiting, standing, sitting, leaning – as well as the many different materials, instruments, tools, and apparatuses – pens, paper, air conditioners, video cameras, audio recorders, tables, chairs – that comprise the courtroom as a site in which judgment takes place. That is, her focus is on the social, material, and technical relations that inhere in and as the law, that mediate the giving and hearing of testimony. The background noise, as the recording itself testifies, is not extraneous, nor separable from the evidence that becomes the official document of a legal process. Robert Cover describes the legal interpretation in its normative operation as follows: ‘The context of a judicial utterance is institutional behavior in which others, occupying preexisting roles, can be expected to act, to implement, or otherwise to respond in a specified way to the judge’s interpretation.’31 In other words, judgment depends on a sentence being heard by those who gather in the courtroom; the judge cannot act without others. All the working, witnessing, testifying bodies, whose actions make the courtroom not just a place of law but also a worksite, as well as a place where one might express grief and anger or might find themselves suddenly in custody or out of it, participate, willingly or not, in this institutional behaviour. The poem offers a way of reading the act of hearing that provides evidence against this normative function of law. It does so by describing to its reader the minor, easily unheard sound of law’s institutionality which, while integral to the normative function of judgment, nonetheless becomes abstracted in the process and redacted in the court transcript. The sound of the social is not the extraneous noise against which the sound of evidence is heard and evaluated but conditions what comes to be heard and evaluated as evidence. To listen to this sound – to listen to that which becomes the site of abstraction – is to listen to the process through which the law presumes its own legitimacy and therefore its own naturalness. It is to hear the sound of a sentence present itself as justice. On this point – the concept of justice – I will conclude my argument. My claim is that the poem, in instructing readers away from one mode of listening and towards another, asks a reader to consider precisely what constitutes justice. The sentence hearing becomes, in Victor’s poem, a site for a speculative kind of hearing: ‘The short rattle of wooden beads or garland of dried flowers (behind witness)’; ‘The tap of something metallic but light being placed down (like a demitasse spoon).’ They are at once

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kind of sounds – the sound we know to be small, firm objects rubbing against each other; the sound we know as metal on wood – and imagined sounds – beads, flowers, spoons. They imply hands, fingers, mouths, the rising and falling of breathing bodies; and, therefore, they also imply anxiety, grief, anticipation, rage. These sounds, each emphatically distinguished, appear in lieu of testimony. As a result, a reader cannot know the terms on which the judgment in question occurs. They cannot hear Sinha’s impact statement, nor the evidence provided by the men who awaited sentences that day. They cannot hear the judge in the act of interpretation; they cannot hear the courtroom workers ratifying judgment. They cannot hear the people gathered to bear witness, recording the scene for a local radio station. They do not know what happened after Sinha spoke, nor how her words impacted the judge. They do not know what happened when the judge spoke to hand down the sentence: not how Alka Sinha reacted, nor the young men. But they might consider the courtroom, available to them as a sequence of sounds, and the institution of law that each sound indexes. They might think about what it means for one act of violence to be translated into another, for the law to manage that translation wholly. They might wonder about a world, not yet our own, in which violence is met differently. They might think about the forms of speaking and listening that would accompany such a world, and the forms of testimony that would come to document it. They might ask about poetry, and about the role of the poem in bridging the world we have and the world that is yet to come. They might finally return to this poem – Victor’s poem – and wonder what it has to say about justice, if not about the criminal justice system. By refusing to reproduce Alka Sinha’s testimony, Victor does not deny Sinha’s desire for a particular outcome. And by refusing to reproduce the outcome of the hearing, Victor does not erase nor protect the men who faced a judge that day. These people – real people – are implied by the poem, which acknowledges the event it documents without restaging it in narrative form. Through this double play of refusal and recognition, the poem opens a space for a conversation it gestures towards without naming. We might call this a conversation about transformative justice, a political framework that seeks to find ways to respond to violence without a different kind of violence including the forms of state-managed violence that comprise the criminal justice system and the prison–industrial complex. As Cover describes it: ‘Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.’32 In its normative function, the law oversees ‘the social organisation of legal violence’ in response to transgressive behaviour.33 In this sense, the question of violence is not merely inseparable from but foundational to legal interpretation and the process of judgment. Transformative justice seeks to abolish the systems and structures that would organise society in this way: it seeks to build a world where there is the possibility of collective healing in the wake of a violent crime.34 ‘Poetry doesn’t talk about the world,’ writes Sean Bonney in a discussion of Amiri Baraka, ‘nor does it create meaning, but rather aims at meanings not yet articulated, meanings not catered to in the currently available aesthetic and social networks.’35 Or, as Joshua Clover puts it, ‘The real situation is the basis of poetic truth.’36 In other words, and to paraphrase Clover: there is no poetry external to the material conditions under which it is written; poetry’s attunement to time and space, its capacity for formalisation, allows for the relations inherent to the material conditions of its own writtenness to be apprehended; this formalisation of material relations might be

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another way of describing poetry’s aim at meanings not yet articulated. My insistence that poetry names a mode of reading as much as a mode of writing or a particular literary form/genre foregrounds the poem as a dynamic site where we can study the everchanging conditions in which we live and die, where we can negotiate a vocabulary for those forces that distribute life and death. Can Victor’s poem offer an entry point to study the conditions in which the death-dealing operations of the state function? Can it offer a place from which we as readers might ask what meanings await in the pursuit of transformative justice? This chapter has attempted to argue ‘yes’ to these questions, even if the poem under examination extends such invitations only indirectly. But in returning, with each sentence, to the scene of judgment, and in refusing the objectification of the courtroom’s sonicity to evidence or the noise that distracts from it, Victor directs her readers to a confrontation with the sentence hearing as a site of violence. What sound does a sentence make? Here in the poem, the answer is none. And so perhaps we must end with a different question: what sound does a poem allow us to hear? For the poem we are reading here, we might get even more specific: what is the sound of the poem if it makes the judge’s sentence inaudible? What do we hear in place of the sentence? We hear what is not there, that is, the sound of a different form that justice might take – something that Fred Moten calls the ‘extra-grammatical’ or the ‘extra-legal’.37 Only that is not quite right, either. Because there is something there: there is a litany of sounds, each amplified by the poem’s use of symbols borrowed from sound and music. There are the sounds of the courtroom, the sounds that score the law. These sounds are made by the social, material, technical, and ritual conditions through which legal interpretation emerges and becomes legitimised, even naturalised. In the absence of the sentence itself, we are instructed to consider, in our reading, the complex apparatus that maintains and affirms state-managed violence. To be attuned to this apparatus – to hear its constituent sounds, to imagine the room in which such sounds move between bodies, falling inside and outside of the official record depending on whether they are considered evidence or the noise that prohibits it – is to be reminded that everything could be configured differently. Between each sound sequenced is a beat in which we can hear the sounds not yet legible, the sounds of the meanings not yet articulated.38

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.  7.   8.   9.

Divya Victor, Curb (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021). Ibid., 116. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 124. In the artists’ book version of Curb, a special edition of twenty copies by Victor, designed/ printed by Aaron Cohick, and published by the Press at Colorado College in 2019, the voice-mail greeting was reproduced as text at the end of the poem (the text occupies the last page on its own). The reproduction of the greeting in this limited edition, and its omission in the Nightboat version of the book, was a conscious decision on Victor’s part. Divya Victor, email to author, 12 April 2022.

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10. James E. K. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. 11. Colin Miller, ‘California Supreme Court Accepts Enya, Rejects Celine Dion for Background Music in Victim Impact Statements’, Evidence Prof Blog, 11 December 2007, https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2007/12/a-jury-convicte.html. 12. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence, 29–30. 13. Jordy Rosenberg, ‘Trans/War Boy/Gender: The Primitive Accumulation of T’, Salvage, 21 December 2015, https://salvage.zone/trans-war-boy-gender/. 14. Paul G. Cassell, ‘In Defense of Victim Impact Statements’, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 6, no. 2 (2009): 611–48. 15. Ibid., 612. 16. ‘About this Site: Curb(ed)’, Curb(ed), 2021, https://divyavictorcurb.org/About-Curbed. 17. ‘Carolyn Chen’, Curb(ed), 2021, https://divyavictorcurb.org/Carolyn-Chen. 18. Mast Radio, ‘Alka Sinha Speaks on Loss of Her Husband, Sentencing Day, 10/18/2013’, YouTube, 8:09, 19 October 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nOioczgp1I. 19. Robert Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601–29. 20. Thank you to Dr Diana Shahinyan for her comments on a draft of this chapter, in which she suggested ‘genre’ as a way to understand this shift from foreground to background. Dr Diana Shahinyan, email to author, 14 April 2022. 21. David Fallows, ‘Forte’, Grove Music Online (2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/978156159 2630.article.10014 (accessed 5 April 2022). 22. Abu Hamdan, ‘Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the SpeakingSubject’, Cesura//Acceso, no. 1 (2014): 200–24 (202). 23. Ibid., 203. 24. Ibid., 205. 25. Ibid., 211. 26. Ibid., 212. 27. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence, 33. 28. Ibid., 39. 29. Victor, Curb, 121. 30. Abu Hamdan, ‘Aural Contract’, 216. 31. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, 1611. 32. Ibid., 1601. 33. Ibid., 1628. 34. Mingus Mia, ‘Transformative Justice: A Brief Description’, TransformHarm.org, https:// transformharm.org/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/. 35. Sean Bonney, ‘Notes on Militant Poetics 2.9/3’, Blackout, 15 June 2018, https://my-blackout. com/2018/06/15/sean-bonney-notes-on-militant-poetics/. 36. Joshua Clover, ‘“An Archive of Confessions”: A Conversation with Joshua Clover, Curated by Kristina Marie Darling’, Tupelo Quarterly, 14 June 2017, https://www.tupeloquarterly. com/editors-feature/an-archive-of-confessions-a-conversation-with-joshua-clover-curatedby-kristina-marie-darling/. 37. Fred Moten, ‘Jurisgenerative Grammar (for Alto)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: University of Oxford Press, 2016), 128–43 (131). 38. I am indebted here to Andrew Brooks. See ‘Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons’, Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (2020): 25–45.

Select Bibliography Abu Hamdan, Lawrence, ‘Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the Speaking-Subject’, Cesura//Acceso, no. 1 (2014): 200–24.

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Bonney, Sean, ‘Notes on Militant Poetics 2.9/3’, Blackout, 15 June 2018, https://my-blackout. com/2018/06/15/sean-bonney-notes-on-militant-poetics/. Clover, Joshua, ‘“An Archive of Confessions”: A Conversation with Joshua Clover, Curated by Kristina Marie Darling’, Tupelo Quarterly, 14 June 2017, https://www.tupeloquarterly. com/editors-feature/an-archive-of-confessions-a-conversation-with-joshua-clover-curatedby-kristina-marie-darling/. Fallows, David, ‘Forte’, Grove Music Online (2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630. article.10014 (accessed 5 April 2022). Moten, Fred, ‘Jurisgenerative Grammar (for Alto)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: University of Oxford Press, 2016), 128–43. Parker, James E. K., Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Victor, Divya, Curb (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021).

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2 The Limits of Listening: Riotous Women, Imperial Structures, and Sonic Archives Helen Groth

W

hat does it mean to listen to a novel? To eavesdrop, to summon voices out of the silence of words on a page; to retrieve exiled or excluded voices and sounds neutralised by the omniscient description of a familiar narrator; to surrender to a world-building voice that renders selected characters and sounds more audible than others? We listen as we read voices, sounding out the words in our minds or with our tongue, throat, breath.1 Or we listen as a talking book sounds out words, registering the rhythm and tonality of another’s voice.2 Listening to an audiobook might happen in either immersive, distracted, or casually interested modes. Speeding up or slowing down, the reader moves in and out of focus, depending on what else is happening in the social space of reading – domestic tasks, the incidental noise of a fellow commuter, a child’s cry – to name just a few of a legion of potential everyday distractions.3 The histories of reading and listening, as Matthew Rubery and Christopher Cannon note, are intertwined and enduring, extending from the ‘oldest known English poem – Caedmon’s hymn – composed and sung by an illiterate goatherd’, then captured in ‘a different and related aurality in the alphabet in which the poem was eventually recorded’, to the recent promotion of audiobooks claiming that ‘listening is the new reading’.4 Julie Beth Napolin concludes her recent study of resonance with a series of reflections on potential methodological trajectories for literary sound studies. She suggests that new work in this field should focus on the space where ‘form-seeking sound [. . .] clings to memory’: ‘Pursuing sounds that cannot, as graphemes on a page, be empirically heard yet still register ways of hearing.’5 Applying this resonant method to Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner, Napolin elaborates on how ‘listening becomes sensible [. . .] as the effect of colonial displacement’.6 Faulkner’s summoning of histories of dispossession of first nations peoples, slavery, and the ravages of American imperialism in Absalom, Absalom! calls out to be read ‘for resonance’, to quote Napolin: ‘Words vanish but later strike what Faulkner calls “the resonant strings of remembering”.’7 The voices, noises, shouts, and cries of what Faulkner names ‘the soundless Nothing’ disrupt the narrative and are sounded again and again through remembering and returning to a beginning that is never simple: a beginning that is part of a sonic sequence begun long before the modernist novel took form.8 So defined, resonance is a deeply political and inter-relational critical practice, dependant on forms of listening that register the inaudible and audible dimensions of literary sound. This approach to literature’s selective displacements and memory lapses, as well as its technological enhancements and dependencies, places a particular kind of acoustic pressure on the

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Anglo-American novel’s historically global epistemological claims and world-building ambitions. Conceived along these lines, literary sound studies methods articulate with a decolonising project that continues to rethink and listen differently to historical literary forms.9 The decolonising impetus driving this understanding of literary listening, however, must extend beyond the prevailing transatlantic focus of this field. Australian Waayni writer Alexis Wright’s magisterial novel Carpentaria listens closely to the noise of white settler violence, limning a fictional world that channels the resonance of the ancient song lines traced by traditional owners of a country never ceded.10 In an early essay Wright locates listening at the centre of her creative practice in an account of her grandmother’s influence on her imaginative life: She was our memory. She was what not forgetting was all about. It was through her that I learnt to imagine. Imagine what had been stolen from us. I also learnt from the images she gave us of our country. The other thing she had encouraged me to do was listen. I also learnt to be silent through all of the times we walked around the bush together. Also, to be silent when other people spoke and told stories at night.11 Wright’s evocation of scenes of childhood listening transition into an account of her preliminary reading for Carpentaria, summoning a chorus of voices that converge in her mind as she begins to shape the contours of her novel. Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Eduardo Galeano, Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Frantz Fanon are just some of the voices Wright conjures. These affiliations between ‘people who had been colonised, people who had suffered at the hands of other people’, constitute a sonic archive for Wright that resonates with the ancient library of Country on which her grandmother drew. Listening and reading, voices and print, intertwine and reverberate, as Wright reflects on the process of writing in the face of the global climate crisis: a process that refuses formal ‘straitjackets’ and ‘limits’. Instead, her fiction models the critical and collective inhabiting of narrative structures required to amplify the resonance of first nations voices.12 Reflecting on the limits imposed by the philosopher who ‘neutralises’ listening as a form of understanding (the philosopher who always hears but cannot listen), Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of the ‘keen indecision that grates, rings out, or shouts between “listening” and “understanding”’.13 This sonic irritation in the space between listening and understanding can be thought of as both a limit and a space or site that only increases in volume and density – an unassimilable zone that resists the neutralising force of a certain mode of philosophical understanding. Diverging slightly from Nancy’s acoustic epistemology, to speak of literary sound is to address both literature’s world-building capacities and the intrinsic porosity of those worlds. Listening as a mode of critical attention accordingly emphasises the aesthetic abstraction of the sonorous in forms of writing that are, in turn, preoccupied with the in-between spaces of sonic connectivity.14 Taking this concept of listening as a point of departure, the first and second parts of this chapter place recent approaches to literary listening in dialogue with contemporary claims for listening as the foundation for a communicative ethics in social justice contexts – exemplified in this instance by theoretical and creative responses to the gendered and racialised rhetoric generated by the 2011 London Riots. The third part of the chapter turns to Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria: a novel which radically reconfigures the often-violent intimate histories of domestic spaces by placing sustained pressure on the epistemological limits of listening.

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Listening in the world Carpentaria builds is a contingent and implicated process, but also an inherently comparative and resonant one. Wright’s work asks her readers to listen to what they have not been trained to hear: a challenge that exposes and moves beyond the assumed limits of literary listening.

Literary Listening and Sonic Connectivity Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s recent study of the ‘sonic color line’ examines how a ‘limited range of listening practices’ have privileged white listening as ‘the standard of citizenship and personhood’.15 Stoever’s ‘sonic aesthetics’ analyses modes of listening that racially encode spaces, voices, bodies, and soundscapes, such as the noisy chaos of the inner-city as opposed to the quiet order of leafy, well-manicured suburban streets.16 She traces two cognate analytical trajectories: one attends to the way Black writers and musicians have ‘radically challenged the mobilisation of sound by white power structures’, and the second argues for the centrality of the ‘trope of the listener’ in the Black literary tradition through close readings of listening scenes: a critical process that consciously diverges from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential claim that ‘black literature’s “ur-trope” is the “talking book”’.17 This shift from talking to listening exposes the acoustic dimensions of literary writing, its segregating structures, as well as its connective impulses. In Wayward Lives Saidiya Hartman confronts the segregating audition of the sounds of the American slum as she moves readers through the streets and domestic interiors of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward in the year 1900, pointing out what they could hear if they chose to listen: What you can hear if you listen: The guttural tones of Yiddish making English into a foreign tongue. The round open-mouthed sounds of North Carolina and Virginia bleeding into the hard-edged language of the city and transformed by the rhythm and cadence of northern streets. The eruption of laughter, the volley of curses, the shouts that make tenement walls vibrate and jar the floor.18 Hartman’s prose defies generic categories. It is aesthetically and methodologically ‘wayward’ in its resistance to the limits of archival forms and conceived of in resonant acoustic terms. Hartman describes her writing thus: ‘I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.’19 This pressing at archival limits draws on literary techniques, as Hartman makes clear: ‘I employ a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text.’20 Returning to the sounds of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, Hartman’s use of the conditional statement – ‘What you can hear if you listen’ – opens up a space that reverberates with sounds that have been historically misheard as an ugly cacophony with no story to tell: an opening that reveals the habituated mechanisms that structure listening as an intentional act of understanding, as well as a ‘close’ mode of narrative signification that illuminates the non-aural aspects of auditory experience.21 There is a sonic beauty in the hectic blurring of vocal rhythms, cadences, accents, that Girl #’s wanderings through

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alleyways and tenement rooms allows us to listen to if we choose, whilst making it clear that these sounds exist whether we listen or not. Like all the wayward women whose histories Hartman recreates, Girl # is an intentional agent, a maker of forms, a writer of her own life; and we, in turn, are both listeners and readers, following the acoustic traces and the multiple histories resounding within the written text in an ongoing process of confronting our own auditory limits and failures. Jack Halberstam’s evocation of wildness as a mode of critical practice in his preface to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons resonates with Hartman’s wayward acts of listening: ‘Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not simply the leftover space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated wildness.’ This fugitive zone is precarious, vulnerable, and of the present. It defies risk and futurity: a riotous movement (a term Hartman uses also) that Harney evokes in his account of the London Riots of 2011 as a patterning of voicing and listening where it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘the request, the demand and the call’; instead one is enacted in the other: ‘I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You’re already in something.’22 Immersed in the present noise of rioting, the norms of propriety and accord fall away, calls and responses reciprocally form and reform in wild abandon, never complete, open and vulnerable, creatively resisting structures that seek to incorporate and rationalise. Listening in this mode of collective being or thinking together critically reveals arbitrary structures and coercive desires, as Moten elaborates in relation to the improvisatory cacophony of jazz: ‘we hear something in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.’23 Cacophony is revelatory in these instances for Moten, exposing the structures (including literary ones) that we normatively inhabit, structures that both limit and enable listening. Leah Bassel writes very differently of an applied politics of listening in the context of the London Riots of 2011 and with an eye to infrastructural necessities. Initially turning to Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler to source the critical vocabulary for her conception of a disruptive politics of listening with the potential to resist norms of intelligibility, Bassel elaborates techniques for listening to the stories of the young Black rioters that are local, specific, and explicitly anti-aesthetic in practice (if not in theoretical derivation): ‘rather than exploring a grand theory of listening, I explore the micropolitics of listening as a social and political process, that can create a responsibility to change roles of speakers and listeners and thereby disrupt power and privilege’. Listening disrupts ‘easy essentialisms’ and ‘Manichean’ dualisms, according to Bassel, by eschewing aesthetic modes of ‘interpretation without legislation’.24 And yet, narratives and literary forms of interpretation remain central to Bassel’s political understanding of listening as a ‘vital, creative practice’ for amplifying and diversifying the relative audibility of voices.25

Riotous Girls and the London Riots The shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham triggered what became known as the 2011 London Riots.26 In the wake of the riots, the failure of legal processes to hear the voices of the Duggan family, and the media’s discriminatory coverage, revealed the often-violent consequences of extracting order from chaos. One of the

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striking features of the media coverage was ‘the hypervisibility of women’ – of riotous girls and troubled mothers in particular.27 Two of the many responses to the London Riots exemplify this gendered structural inequality in ways that resonate with Alexis Wright’s critical interrogation of the institutionalised failure of white ears to hear the stories of disruptive Black women in Carpentaria. The first is American journalist Raven Rakia’s call for the riots to be understood through the historical lens of colonial inequality. The second is the South African novelist Gillian Slovo’s verbatim play The Riots, performed in London in November 2011.28 Situating the London Riots in a global context, Rakia dismantles the labelling of the 2011 London uprisings as a ‘consumer riot’ by yoking images of young Black looters breaking and taking property (televisions and the like) to the historical breaking and taking of the Atlantic slave trade and the continuing colonial gaze that insists on reading Black rioting as a symptom of the ‘political backwardness of black communities’. Rakia then moves to another Black community, summoning images of the occupation of Newark by the National Guard during the 1967 riots, of snipers hidden on rooftops to shoot and kill Black people running in the streets below or ‘coming out of their homes’. Both these riots took place where people lived, close to home, in familiar streets and neighbourhoods. They also share a common resistance to economic policies that enforce mobility and precarity: a perpetual state of ‘contingency, risk, flexibility and adaptability’, to invoke Harney and Moten once more.29 Murmuring and rumbling, these riots are heard as a disruptive idiom, of speech ‘breaking from propriety, on the run from ownership’, but they are also distinct social spaces that entertain possibilities of alternative forms of habitation and inhabiting.30 Gillian Slovo’s verbatim play The Riots: From Spoken Evidence (2011), which also informed her later novel Ten Days (2016), thematises and performs the limits of listening as an intentionally reparative process of creative assemblage.31 Nicholas Kent, the artistic director of London’s Tricycle Theatre, commissioned Slovo to create a play in August 2011 with the aim of trying ‘to make sense of the looting and mayhem by talking to as many people as possible’.32 The Riots accordingly gathers testimonies, interviews, letters, and other evidence into an intentionally dissonant chorus of conflicting accounts of activists, victims, police, politicians, and a small number of rioters. Amidst the largely male chorus of The Riots, an eighteen-year-old girl called Chelsea Ives speaks through a letter written to Slovo from her cell in Holloway Prison: Hi my name is Chelsea Ives and I have recently just turned 18. I’m the girl that got shopped by her mum due to the riots. I read your article in the prison newspaper so I thought I’d share my views on the things that involved me for your theatre and because the whole country knows who I am. I think it’s terrible what the news have said about me, they made it look like I’m a disruptive low-life teenager from a council estate. The public seem to automatically place me in an unnamed catorgory for thick, low-lifed individuals which is not me at all. I havn’t even had a chance to speak for myself. It just feels like I shouldn’t even have legal advice, because it seems the Judge has already made up his mind about my sentence due to the help and support of the media. The public just need to know I’m only accountable for my actions and not everyone else’s and I’m sorry.33

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Ives’s repentant assertion of her difference from the criminalising categories into which she has been forced turns on the claim that she is from a good home; an insistence echoed by one of her mother’s public revelations that she had reported her daughter to the police: Chelsea just got caught up in the moment, as many did. She is accountable for her actions. It was fun at the time for them but I can’t imagine it was much fun for the victims or normal people watching. People label everyone involved as from broken homes, council estates, no future, nothing. That’s not her. We are not on benefits, we have a dinner table we sit round. She is not from a broken home. We work. Everything was done fairly. It could have been a lot, lot worse and she has to deal with it the best she can.34 This mother–daughter exchange captures the moment after the radical joy and wildness that Harney and Moten describe. The ‘fun’ must be repented, the riotous Black girl shamed and punished in a social system that remains unchanged by the riots. Both Adrienne and Chelsea Ives perform this brutal structural necessity, whilst calling attention to the inherent category errors and stereotypes that manufacture the false coherence of an emergency narrative requiring quick solutions and repentant scapegoats. Chelsea Ives’s refusal of her characterisation as an anonymous ‘low-life’ simultaneously echoes and unsettles her mother’s aspirational location of her around the family dinner table in a home and with a future secured by hard work. Chelsea’s letter to Slovo calls attention to the nominative force of a legal system that fails to listen to a different version of her story, one that is also negated by the future her mother envisages: a story that potentially recognises the difficulty of performing what Judith Butler describes as the ‘fantasy of the individual capable of undertaking entrepreneurial self-making under conditions of accelerating precarity’.35 Promoted as a ‘theatrical inquiry’, Slovo’s play attempts ‘to recover and make visible Tottenham’s complex “geographies of grievances”’.36 In this social space, Chelsea Ives’s testimony draws attention to the particular vilification directed at young women in the wake of the riots: a facet of the riots that Rachel Clements highlights in her reading of Slovo’s play alongside a sequence in Fahim Alam’s documentary Riots Reframed (2013). Alam’s film includes Paul Gilroy interpreting the ‘footage of a police assault against a young woman’ as an instance of ‘a known script’ in ‘which violence against a woman’s body proves to be the tipping point for collective disorder’.37 Gilroy further elaborates on this ‘known script’ in an article published the same year that addresses the haunting of the events of 2011 by the rumoured targeting of Black women during the riots of 1981 and 1986: precedents that led the Duggan family to select women to front the initial family-led protest outside the Tottenham police station where the explosive footage of a policeman striking a young Black woman was filmed.38 The other precedent that Gilroy identifies is the pathological construction of Black families, especially female-headed households, as part of a broader sociological accounting for the earlier riots. Gilroy contrasts this gendered focus on ‘bad mothers’ in the 1980s with the pervasive emphasis on individuation and privatisation that characterised media coverage of the 2011 riots which framed ‘the disorders as a brisk sequence of criminal events and transgressions that could be intelligible only when seen on the scale of personal conduct’: ‘Society had been abolished long ago. It was

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no surprise that black communities, already riven into the two great neoliberal tribes of winners and losers were internally divided.’39 And yet, Adrienne Ives’s defence of her home and daughter suggests that the stereotypical construction of Black domestic life Gilroy sees as largely a feature of an earlier sociological response to the riots still haunts her version of the neoliberal typologies he names. As Rachel Clements argues, an explicitly colonial context for the riots emerges from Alam’s decision to listen seriously to his fellow rioters and not the police: a creative choice that amplifies the voices that Slovo acknowledges she had difficulty capturing, despite the intentionally polyphonous narrative she constructs. To quote Clements on the cumulative effect of Keir Elam’s tactical listening: Pointing to the military and colonial roots of looting as word and idea, multiple interviewees argue that the state apparatus of police, army and politicians continues to teach the cliché that ‘might is right’ while simultaneously enacting and loudly performing their own self-righteousness.40 Slovo, by contrast, risked reinforcing the narrowly defined ‘Us and Them’ binary that she had intended to dismantle by telling the story of the riots from ‘both’ sides: a creative decision that she and numerous critics ascribed to her preference for the novel form. To quote Esther Adley’s review of the play in The Guardian, ‘Slovo, who more frequently writes novels, is a skilled plotter’ and yet, Adley concludes, the voices of the rioters she had hoped to amplify are largely absent from the plot she constructs.41 In Slovo’s plot, Chelsea Ives’s letter is enlisted (along with other imprisoned rioters) to reiterate her un-naming by a system that normalises her gendered racialised stereotyping as a criminally riotous Black girl.

Wayward Women and Listening in the House of Fiction In the opening chapters of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Angel Day, the defiantly wayward wife of one of the central protagonists, Norm Phantom, starts a ‘riot’ in the dump on the outskirts of the small racially segregated town of Desperance where the novel is set. Clasping a discarded statue of the Virgin Mary, ‘Angel Day, a queen herself’, claims traditional ownership of the land in a voice that sends shock waves across the town dump, stirring up memories of ‘tribal battles from the ancient past’ and summoning the voices of the old people who knew where the lines in the dirt were drawn: Living in harmony in fringe camps was a policy designed by the invader’s governments, and implemented, wherever shacks like Angel Day’s swampside residences first began to be called a community. The old people wrote about the history of these wars on rock.42 War, not riot, is the name given by the old people and their descendants to the violence that ensues: It is hard to determine how sides were forged, but when the fighting began, the blood of family ties flew out of the veins of the people, and ran on the ground just like normal blood, when face and limbs are cut like ribbons with broken glass, or when the body has been gouged with a piece of iron, or struck on the head over and

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over with a lump of wood. Angel Day did not fight because she was still hugging onto her statue and encouraging the human explosion to take hold. It was like sinking an anchor: ‘What about the traditional owner?’ She was still screaming about her esteemed rights.43 The morning after the war, Angel and her husband Norm awaken to the palpable silence left behind by their departed neighbours, who have moved under cover of night through the streets of Desperance to the other side of the town: People were complaining to each other about the weight of their ragtag belongings, while children zigzagged all over the street with their laughter and cries being heard everywhere. What did it matter to hush all the little children since that many dogs in tow, stirred up by the scraping sticks, joined in the racket by running up and down the fences of white people’s homes barking their heads off or leaping up and throwing themselves against the tin walls while trying to get over the fences, and equally with the town dogs inside doing the same, trying to get out? None of this racket worried their owners. Nor did the straggle-taggle give one iota to the peace and quiet of the town. Whatever! Nevermind! As if the town with all of its laws and by-laws for inhabitation did not exist. It was as if they could not care less whether the town folk, woken up with all the noise, switched on every single light in their houses in the middle of the night, and stood silently in the front yards, gobsmacked, comprehending they were in the middle of a riot.44 To be ‘in the middle of a riot’ in this carefully constructed scene, is to be guided through the white folk’s silent registration of the illusory hold the town’s ‘laws and by-laws’ have over the traditional owners of the unceded stolen land they unlawfully inhabit.45 Wright’s subjunctive formulations deftly overturn the structures of propriety and accord on which white property rights rest, whilst rendering absurd conventional understandings of rioting as criminality. The bemused omniscient narrative voice remarks on the townsfolk mis-hearing a war as a riot, whilst also registering their uneasy listening to the irreverent riotousness of the Pricklebush mob as they move from one side of the town to another – laughing, crying, scraping sticks, children running joyfully down quiet manicured streets – all wildly indifferent to ‘the peace and quiet of the town’.46 Angel Day’s open rebellion is vociferous, and defiant. Repainting the statue ‘in the colour of her own likeness’, her ‘Aboriginal Mary’ becomes the irreverent centrepiece of her domestic life. Initially looming over the marital bed that her husband Norm soon relinquishes, then assuming pride of place in the home where she bears the two sons that will eventually be murdered in police custody, this ‘brightly coloured statue of an Aboriginal woman who lived by the sea’ confronts all who enter the structures Angel Day builds with the constitutive creative force of their author and architect.47 These homes are Angel’s ‘story place’, the sovereign spaces over which she defiantly and notoriously presides – to enlist Wright’s characterisation of the construction of the overarching shape of Carpentaria: The idea of the novel was to build a story place where the spiritual, real and imagined worlds exist side by side. The overall aim of the novel was to create a memory of what is believed, experienced and imagined in the contemporary world of Indigenous people in the Gulf of Carpentaria.48

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Wright builds her ‘story place’ through resonance and connection to country, each chapter amplifying a different voice and soundscape: a deliberate acoustic sequencing that avails itself of the novel’s formal capaciousness, whilst swapping out one of the genre’s foundational architectural metaphors – Henry James’s ‘house of fiction’ – for the idea of creating a ‘place of fiction’. Wright’s shift from house to place is a vital one that signals an accompanying move from seeing to listening. James theorised the formal architecture of his novels thus: The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find.49 At each window of this vast multi-faceted edifice stands ‘a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the persona making use of it an impression distinct from every other’.50 James’s formal ambition for the novel is polemically vast and excessive, to quote Anna Kornbluh’s spatial elucidation of this passage: ‘The planar distortions and dimensional disjunctions of the house of fiction exceed what already exists, spatializing openings to the inexistent.’51 Wright’s theory of fiction is equally or more formally ambitious and architectural in its challenging of the solidity of the cultural foundations and capacious reach of the European novel that James imperiously assumes. In a recent essay on first nations and refugee writing, Wright attends to the narrative structures that have rendered inaudible the ‘million’ possible stories that could be or should have been told: a cultural legacy that James’s vision of the novel’s infinite capacities simultaneously fails to register and constitutively models at a formative moment in the genre’s theoretical history. Developing on Rebecca Solnit’s metaphor of ghost libraries from her essay on ‘A Short History of Silence’, Wright expands on the potentially infinite number of voices that have been silenced, of windows and doors that remain closed in the history of storytelling: ‘What are we to do with the ghost libraries that belong to the voicelessness of the greater force of humanity, including the increasing number of people who are losing their homes and livelihood because of global warming?’52 Security of place is crucially linked to the survival of story; forced mobility, censorship, and precarity destabilise and suppress the possibility of piercing through the edifice of audibility, as Wright argues in the same piece: If the stories that live in all of us were accused of being too reckless for the nation, too dangerous for the country’s ears with assimilatory ideals, or of threatening a narrow view of the world, what would we do? I hope that we would cultivate our memory by continually whispering stories in our mind as Aboriginal people continually do, and that we would be brave, just as our people took great risks to keep the spiritual law stories strong in secret gatherings held in the middle of the night outside missions and reserves where they had been institutionalised under state laws, and were punished for practicing Aboriginal law.53

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To return to Julie Beth Napolin’s model of resonance with which this chapter began, Wright’s image of multiple whispering voices engages with the idea of speaking in forms that cling to memory: forms that demand constitutive forms of listening that cannot be limited to ‘graphemes on a page’.54 Hartman’s acoustic method of pressing at the limits of the archive also aligns with Wright’s theory of listening as an opening onto different worlds and histories that cannot simply be ‘assimilated’ by the neutralising syntax of inherited structures of understanding and worlding. Listening in this sense of creative practice requires attending to the stories that cannot be readily ‘empirically heard’, an acoustic registration to which the novel is uniquely suited. Stories find form in Carpentaria through a vital and continuing connection to place mediated by one of the novel’s foundational world-building devices: a wildly expansive mode of free-indirect narration designed to open the reader’s ears to stories whispered or wilfully misheard. Home as both place and a medium for the sounds of ‘experienced and imagined’ voices is given literal form in Carpentaria in the Phantom house, which is moulded around a ‘long curving corridor’ resembling the ‘shape of a cochlea inside an ear’: Inside this ear the sound grew louder as it travelled, jumping the puddles of water seeping under the tin, just as Norm said it would, in the unfolding years of the house he had designed to have its own built-in alarm system.55 Curving and vibrating, this house is a resonant perpetually protean assemblage that forms and reforms around the various characters that move through its spaces and temporarily inhabit its rooms: its walls absorbing and mediating the sounds of ‘a particular, active, voiced land’, to quote Jane Gleeson-White, that counters the extractive dis-placing violence of colonialism.56 Viewed through this lens, the Phantom home can be read as a metonym for the novel’s formal acoustic ambition. Wright may enlist the familiar devices of the European novel – a complex character system that accommodates the multiple perspectives of a family and its adversaries – but this inherited techne is redistributed and reconfigured by the inherited song lines and narrative cosmology of the Waanyi country that transfigures and transforms the process of reading Carpentaria into a critical encounter with the imperial structures that continue to shape and limit how we listen to literary texts. This is not a rehash of familiar canon formation debates in the context of thinking through new approaches to literary sound studies. What Wright’s work offers instead is a complex ambitious interrogation of listening that compels us to think of alternative futures through the medium of fiction. To listen in literary form for Wright is to calibrate the audible and inaudible dimensions of place as part of a critical process that vigilantly attends to the inherited structures of registering and filtering sound that we necessarily and inevitably inhabit.

Notes  1. Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).  2. Matthew Rubery, The Untold History of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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 3. This point references Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne’s work and recent essay, ‘Aural Speed-Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks’, PMLA 135, no. 2 (2020): 401–11. Leah Price’s work on casual reading practices underlies this point as well. See Leah Price, What We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading (New York: Basic Books, 2019).  4. Christopher Cannon and Matthew Rubery, ‘Introduction to “Aurality and Literacy”’, PMLA 135, no. 2 (2020): 350–6 (350).   5. Julie Beth Napolin, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 212.   6. Ibid., 5.   7. Ibid., 213.   8. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, [1936] 2005), 8.   9. Anna Kornbluh’s recent work on the novel informs this interpretation of the novel as a social space. There is, however, a crucial point of difference that locates this chapter in the domain of the interpretive humanities rather than aligned with the political formalism Kornbluh so eloquently defends. To speak of literary sound is already to think about overlapping worlds and social spaces and question the integrity of those worlds. See Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 12. 10. Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006). 11. Alexis Wright, ‘Politics of Writing’, Southerly 62, no. 2 (2002): 10–20 (11). 12. Alexis Wright, ‘A Self-Governing Literature. Who Owns the Map of the World?’, Meanjin (2020): 92–101 (100–1). 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 2. 14. This analysis is indebted to Wai Chee Dimock, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71. 15. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5. 16. Ibid., 17. 17. Ibid.; Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxii. 18. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 7. 19. Ibid., xv. 20. Ibid., xiv. 21. This reading is indebted to Igor Reyner’s perceptive analysis of Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of listening as an intentional act in ‘Fictional Narratives of Listening: Crossovers between Literature and Sound Studies’, Interference Journal 6 (2018): 129–42. 22. Jack Halberstam, ‘“The Wild Beyond” with and for the Undercommons’, preface to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 7. 23. Moten, cited by Halberstam, ‘“Wild Beyond”’, 7. 24. Leah Bassel, The Politics of Listening (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3–7. 25. Ibid., 44. 26. As the ensuing analysis of the riots has shown, the riots quickly moved beyond the specific violence of Duggan’s death. See Clive Bloom, Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the Capital (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Krishnan Kumar, The Idea of Englishness: English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); and David Lammy, Out of the Ashes: Britain after the Riots (London: Guardian Books, 2012).

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27. Kim Allen and Yvette Taylor, ‘Placing Parenting, Locating Unrest: Failed Femininities, Troubled Mothers and Riotous Subjects’, Studies in the Maternal 4, no. 2 (2012): 1–25 (5). 28. Raven Rakia, ‘Black Riot. The Difference between Riots and Protests Has More to Do with Who and Where than What’, The New Inquiry, 14 November 2013, https://thenewinquiry. com/black-riot/. 29. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 76. 30. Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131. 31. Gillian Slovo’s The Riots was commissioned and directed by Nicholas Kent, the artistic director of Tricycle Theatre, London. 32. Quoted in Terry Stoller, Tales of the Tricycle Theatre (London: Methuen, 2013), 42. 33. Chelsea Ives, quoted in Gillian Slovo, The Riots (London: Methuen Drama, 2021), 50. Spelling as in the original. 34. Quoted from Simon Freeman and Benedict Moore-Bridger, ‘I’ve Been Unfairly Made a Scapegoat for the Violence Says Jailed Olympics Girl’, Evening Standard, 10 April 2012. 35. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 16. 36. Rachel Clements, ‘The Riots: Expanding Sensible Evidence’, in Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, ed. Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 153–70 (157). 37. Ibid., 162. 38. Paul Gilroy, ‘1981 and 2011: From Social Democratic to Neoliberal Rioting’, South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 3 (2013): 550–8 (551). 39. Ibid. 40. Clements, ‘Riots’, 166. 41. Esther Addley, ‘Burn Britain Burn: Gillian Slovo’s The Riots’, The Guardian, 23 November 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/nov/22/gillian-slovo-the-riots-play. 42. Wright, Carpentaria, 26. 43. Ibid., 27. 44. Ibid., 32. 45. Honni Van Rijswijk provides a lucid analysis of Carpentaria, the British juridical fiction of terra nullius, and the Mabo judgment in ‘Stories of the Nation’s Continuing Past: Responsibility for Historical Injuries in Australian Law and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria’, UNSW Law Journal 35, no. 2 (2012): 598–624. Jane Gleeson-White also writes extensively on Native Title and Country as it pertains to Wright’s Carpentaria in her unpublished thesis, ‘Nature in the Twenty-First Century’ (University of New South Wales, 2016), and, more recently, in ‘Valuing Country. Let Me Count Three Ways’, Griffith Review, special issue ‘Writing the Country’, 63 (2019): 171–91. 46. Wright, Carpentaria, 32. 47. Ibid., 38. 48. Alexis Wright, ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, HEAT 13 (2007): 7. 49. Henry James, ‘Preface to The Portrait of a Lady’, in Henry James: Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1:1075. 50. Ibid. 51. Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 35. 52. Alexis Wright, ‘Telling the Untold Stories. On Censorship’, Overland (2019): 16–21 (20). This essay is excerpted from Alexis Wright’s 2018 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture, which was delivered at the State Library of Victoria. 53. Wright, ‘Telling the Untold Stories’, 18. 54. Napolin, Fact of Resonance, 212. 55. Wright, Carpentaria, 114. 56. Gleeson-White, ‘Nature in the Twenty-First Century’, 227.

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Select Bibliography Bassel, Leah, The Politics of Listening (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Butler, Judith, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Cannon, Christopher and Matthew Rubery, ‘Introduction to “Aurality and Literacy”’, PMLA 135, no. 2 (2020): 350–6. Dimock, Wai Chee, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71. Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). Mills, Mara and Jonathan Sterne, ‘Aural Speed-Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks’, PMLA 135, no. 2 (2020): 401–11. Moten, Fred, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Napolin, Julie Beth, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Rubery, Matthew, The Untold History of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Stewart, Garrett, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). Wright, Alexis, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006). ———, ‘Politics of Writing’, Southerly 62, no. 2 (2002): 10–20. ———, ‘A Self-Governing Literature. Who Owns the Map of the World?’, Meanjin (2020): 92–101.

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3 PIANO/Forte: Writing Audible Space, Jane Austen, Dorothy Richardson, and Others David Toop

W

ho is the listener? What is the listener? The listener is still, quiet, ambiguous, blank, full or empty, desirous or indifferent, perhaps nothing? Or, the listener is everything. First, a pleasant scene, extracted from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (published in 1814): A young woman, pretty, lively, with a harp as elegant as herself, and both placed near a window, cut down to the ground, and opening on a little lawn, surrounded by shrubs in the rich foliage of summer, was enough to catch any man’s heart. The season, the scene, the air, were all favourable to tenderness and sentiment. Mrs Grant and her tambour frame were not without their use; it was all in harmony, and as everything will turn into account when love is once set going, even the sandwich tray, and Dr Grant doing the honours of it, were worth looking at.1

Pivotal in this passage is the musical term ‘harmony’, which serves to reconcile otherwise disparate phenomena within a romantic frame both sexual and picturesque. The harp is significant as auditory pheromone, object of displaced desire, if only by implication. Both harp and young woman are placed judiciously, objects in relation. Daily, Edmund attends the Parsonage, where this scene is set, ‘to be indulged with his favourite instrument; one morning secured an invitation for the next, for the lady could not be unwilling to have a listener, and everything was soon in a fair train’. The lady is Mary Crawford, later destined to reject Edmund on the grounds that she will never dance with a member of his chosen profession, a clergyman: ‘They had talked, and they had been silent; he had reasoned, she had ridiculed – and they had parted at last with mutual vexation.’2 But this is far into the future. During the season when a harp forms the centrepiece of a seductive scene, its music is, at best, ambient in relation to the proximity of a window affording the best possible outlook, a small lawn encircled by suitable shrubs, with sandwiches at hand. An impression of stasis is illusory; subtle movements and soundings – the virtue of liveliness – animate what might otherwise resemble the kind of tableaux vivants described in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, in which paintings are

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silently enacted by living bodies wearing suitable costume (after solemn music has established an atmosphere of expectancy): The figures corresponded so well to their originals, the colours were so happily chosen, the lighting so artistic, you thought you had been transported to another world, the only disturbing factor being a sort of anxiety produced by the presence of real figures instead of painted ones.3 Both, however, are united (in harmony, perhaps) in contrivance, a theatre of idleness masking the anxiety of real bodies undergoing unseen tensions that become apparent within the broader narrative. The entirety of the Mansfield Park scene might be described, following Manuel Delanda’s lead, as an assemblage. Working from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s initial use of the term agencement, Delanda identifies a misdirection in the English translation, a tendency to imply a product rather than a process.4 As quoted (in Assemblage Theory), Deleuze and Guattari’s simplest definition is as follows: What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.5 The harp is, in fact, silent, at least in Jane Austen’s account, a description complicated by Austen’s famous use of free indirect style. If the harp is silent, or simply not described in auditory terms, its music insufficiently relevant to the assemblage, then we might also ask who is describing this scene with such a familiar air of complacency tinged with mockery. Pious Edmund, it should be noted, regarded the harp as his favourite instrument; moreover was attracted to the harpist, but nothing is said about enthusiasm or lack of it for the music of the harp. Can this be presupposed? In Jane Austen, perhaps not. For Austen, player of the pianoforte herself, music could be a source of joy, a conduit to personal and collective liberation, momentary or otherwise. Equally, music can have a ghostly presence in her novels, at times an inconvenience whose true purpose is to display female accomplishment to the marriage market or to be applied to room acoustics as a social lubricant, a decoration. Consider Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, happy to play and made happy by playing, and by contrast, the Miss Musgroves, for whom instruments exist as elements of silent assemblage, a true furniture music, artfully or perhaps artlessly disordered: To the Great House accordingly they went, to sit the full half hour in the old-fashioned square parlour, with a small carpet and shining floor, to which the present daughters of the house were gradually giving the proper air of confusion by a grand pianoforte and a harp, flower-stands and little tables placed in every direction.6 The portraits on the wall look down upon the scene in dismay. Accordingly, the young women obliged to perform music, or who resist doing so, or do so only reluctantly,

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or enthusiastically but badly, can be understood to harbour deep ambivalence to the existence of music within such constraining, disempowering society. Music was to some degree a mask, as in Mansfield Park: ‘The evening passed with external smoothness, though almost every mind was ruffled, and the music which Sir Thomas called for from his daughters helped to conceal the lack of real harmony.’7 Music, then as now, was also work. As Lucy Worsley writes in Jane Austen at Home: The idea that women of the gentry didn’t ‘work’ is long since debunked: they either performed ‘work’ that society deemed virtuous, like playing the piano or reading improving books, or else they discreetly carried out – and this was the case in the Austen family – much of the actual labour needed to keep the food on the table and the clothes clean.8 At the outer edges of functionality, music has no inner existence for them, or is withdrawn from them, except in its potentiality for temporary physical release through dancing. Then the body can become enfolded with music; otherwise, the body belongs to another. From its position close to an early eighteenth-century window cut down to the ground (a French window, perhaps?), the harp looks ahead more than a hundred years, anticipating the elusive irony of Erik Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement (1917), particularly the extremes of its ritualistic style in which music is reduced to the functionality of chairs, the decorative nature of interior furnishings such as wall coverings. Satie’s amusement was to compose a dampening mask for the inconvenience of cutlery clatter. Think of the inadvertent scraping of a knife on a porcelain plate, how close it comes to the timbral resistances typical within much contemporary music. If the harp is at rest, just another instrument within the assemblage (an assemblage containing many assemblages), there is implicit noise from Dr Grant, masticating the sandwiches, and audible productivity from Mrs Grant’s tambour. Although Mrs Grant is not audibly drumming, the circular frame on which she performs her embroidery has a convoluted history which allies it to frame drums, particularly those large circular drums inscribed with cosmic images associated with northern shamanism, and to the kanjira, the daf, the tar, the tambourine. Tambour beading or embroidery arrived in Europe in the early eighteenth century. Its origins are thought to lie in Ari (hook) work from India, exported to the Persian Gulf across the Middle East to France and England. Hence, A Turkish Woman, a 1773 painting by English-resident Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman, shows an exotically dressed woman of European features intently embroidering fabric stretched on a large circular frame. The effect closely resembles the popular Orientalist theme of Asian women playing tambourine, exemplified by Jean-Étienne Liotard’s Turkish Woman With a Tambourine, 1738. The connection between music and embroidery extends beyond the circular frame, the tambour. ‘The technique [of tambour beading]’, writes Grace Victoria Bentley, ‘is so named for the tautness of the fabric when it is stretched in the frame, which is necessary for the hook to pass through the fabric cleanly without catching the weave. The stitch should also produce a satisfying thrum noise when the tension is correct.’9 Imagine Jane Austen then as a twenty-first-century artist, sound designer, sound artist, or composer, assembling minimalist elements of an installation designed to

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articulate those studied conditions of the romantic picturesque within which work of varying degrees of seriousness may take place. Yet in the context of Austen’s writing, the descriptive aspect of this passage is unusual. As is frequently noted about her writing, she devoted little attention to describing objects, spaces, or appearances in detail. For John Wiltshire, in The Hidden Jane Austen, this absence of visual description is counterbalanced by a finely drawn aural dimension. ‘Jane Austen’s is not a highly visual world’, he writes, ‘but it is, by way of compensation, an intensely and intricately aural one.’10 This spatiality is frequently achieved through what he calls the ‘recurrent tactic or motif’ of a protagonist overhearing the talk of others. The ethically perilous act of overhearing implies both an overlapping of auditory spheres in which intent is diverted and an excess of hearing. Eavesdroppers will often overhear what they are reluctant to know. ‘It is through overhearing,’ writes Wiltshire, ‘since it invokes simultaneous proximity and relative distance, that intimate spatiality is brought into play and the determining physical conditions of the genteel social life that is her subject are implied.’11

A Black Word The nothing of conversation has its gradations, I hope, as well as the never. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park12 Dorothy Richardson described great novelists as enclosed in a world of people: ‘Human drama, in a resounding box. Or under a silent sky.’13 For Austen sceptics, words spoken in Pride and Prejudice – ‘Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a turn about the room. – I assure you it is very refreshing after sitting so long in one attitude’14 – epitomise the triviality of this genteel social life, entrapped in its architectural boxes. What purpose could there be in walking around a room other than the obsession with walking for health so evident in Austen’s novels? Air, fresh or otherwise, and walking, are avoided only by the hypochondriac valetudinarian – ‘without activity of mind or body’ – Mr Woodhouse in Emma. In an overhearing, overheated world of eavesdroppers both deliberate and hapless, a world of little privacy, a world in which a man and a woman were carefully observed for fear of wayward intimacies, to walk was to circulate the sense of a conversation, body occupied, eyes free to avoid the discomfort of unmitigated ocular interrogation. Words are caught in isolation here, an innocuous thought floats adrift there, the totality distributed among other guests piece by incoherent piece. ‘“Your gallantry is really unanswerable”’, says Emma to Frank Churchill, only recently perceived by her as ‘silent and stupid’, saying nothing worth hearing. ‘“But” (lowering her voice) “nobody speaks except ourselves, and it is rather too much to be talking nonsense for the entertainment of seven silent people.”’15 ‘From a psychoacoustic perspective’, writes Peter Sloterdijk, the shift to intimate listening is always connected to a change of attitude from a one-dimensional alarm- and distance-oriented listening to a polymorphously moved floating listening. This change reverses the general tendency to move from a magical, proto-musical listening to one revolving around alarm and concern – or,

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to put it in more enlightened terms: from uncritical participation to critical awareness. Perhaps history itself is a titanic battle for the human ear in which nearby voices struggle with distant ones for privileged access to emotional movedness.16 In microcosm, this might be a description of an underlying ferocity, the ebb and flow of struggle, characterising Austen’s ‘genteel’ social worlds. They are worlds of auditory containment, rarely slipping outside themselves. In this sense they illustrate Sloterdijk’s conception of intimacy and sociality as spheres and bubbles with origins in the enclosed foetal ear, a ‘regime of sonospheric common spirits’.17 ‘It is the constitutive listening community’, he writes, ‘that encloses humans in the immaterial rings of mutual accessibility. The ear is the organ that connects the intimate and the public.’18 The impression given by Austen through her technique of free indirect style is that a character within the novels is always speaking or listening. In their suggestion of the novel unfolding itself in the absence of an author’s controlling hand – an anticipation of both stream-of-consciousness and the ‘passive writing’ of spiritualists – they might be considered as antecedents to writers such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf, George V. Higgins, and Henry Green, all of them experimenting with dialogue, either spoken aloud or ‘silent’ voices in the head, as the predominant framework of narrative. The limitation of this method is chilly inflexibility, a sphere tightly enclosed to the point of claustrophobia. In his introduction to a Henry Green collection, Sebastian Faulks notes the risks: As real feeling eddies beneath the surface of brilliantly simulated emotion, Green begins to see what dialogue, unmediated by a narrator, can achieve; his interest in this technique was to take him in one of his later novels, Nothing, into a rather austere place, where fewer readers wanted to follow.19 Either in remorse for the relentless back-and-forth volubility of his own characters, or to taunt the reader, Green ends a section of Nothing with a momentary pause: ‘They hardly spoke again that day, a kind of blissful silence lay between them.’20

‘A faltering voice . . .’ But for the author whose concern is listening to a broader spectrum of auditory space, not restricted to sounding/responding of the human voice and its directed specificities, deep intimacies become imaginable through microaudial relationality. To read of acts of listening is an intensification of reading as an act of listening: words on fire in the mind, even in silence. ‘One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room, ‘though no one sits there.’21 Silence is an awaiting absence, fragile and beckoning, becoming filled yet never full. Piano becomes forte. John Wiltshire identifies a similar subtlety of close listening to sound in space, and its consequences for internal reflection, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Both enjoy their debate, but they are talking quietly so as not to disturb Wentworth’s writing at the desk, till they hear a noise from his ‘perfectly quiet division of the room.’ (‘Division’ suggests both contiguity and separation: he is equally present

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david toop in the same space, and cut off.) It is at the precise moment when Anne speaks ‘with a faltering voice’ that Wentworth drops his pen. Anne is ‘startled at finding him nearer than she had supposed; and half inclined to suspect that the pen had only fallen, because he had been occupied by them, striving to catch sounds, which yet she did not think he could have caught.’22

‘Alas, the piano’ Robert Walser’s ‘little novel’, as he called it, And now he was playing, alas, the piano, was written in 1925. The first line of this prose miniature, less than three pages – ‘And now he was playing, alas, the piano, making it sound like a deep and intimate promise, which isn’t at all the way to start a novel’23 – suggests profound conflict between the act of writing and the voice of a piano. Silence is one thing, deep with longing, loss, the unspeakable, but introduce a piano, and the reciprocal saturation of what we call feeling into the vibrational phenomenon we call resonance becomes a miasmic fog through which a writer peers only hopefully, struggling to keep pen or pencil in sight. The pianoforte occupies a similar position of stress in Jane Austen’s novels. Describing the role of accomplishments required of a young woman in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Europe (Japan, also, he might have noted), Arthur Loesser lists the pianoforte, to a lesser degree the harp and guitar, as respectable female accomplishments to be set alongside framing pictures in shellwork, embroidery and needlework, embellishing cabinets with a tracery of seaweed, filigree and varnish work, making wax flowers, and cutting out paper ornaments. These occupations indicated the status of a wealthy man, whose vigorous occupations contrasted with the enforced idleness of his wife and daughters. The epitome of this is Lady Bertram, in Mansfield Park: ‘She was a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, of little use and no beauty [. . .]’.24 For both Loesser and the men who expected such activities to fill time, the so-called minor arts were frivolous, an occupation of time designed to waste hours and days in order to defend empty time against more dangerous pursuits (music was anomalous in this schema, a major art if played by men, rendered minor if made by women). ‘It is questionable’, Loesser writes, in Men, Women, and Pianos, ‘how much these feminine activities were enjoyed, intrinsically, by the families in which they operated; yet they were in great demand.’25 The question remains open: why in such demand if they were so pointless? All of this seems to accept, on Loesser’s part, the proposition that the work of men carries far more significance than the work of women. From this point of view, quiet and idleness might be understood as counterparts in the pursuit of pointless accomplishments, but in Austen’s world, they are more likely to represent an impossible dream. As Lucy Worsley writes, ‘No wonder, despite the powerful myth that genteel females had plenty of leisure time, that Jane thought it a “luxurious sensation” to “sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room.”’26 The room is a recurrent motif, mapped by air both empty and full: voices and pianoforte, the vigorous movement of dance, conversational polyphony, the high spirits of whist contrasted with the sobriety of a nearby table where silence prevails, an occasional scrape of violin bow on string, the nearly imperceptible sounds of a needle through fabric, pages turned by a reader, pen scratching at paper, all in pursuit of passing time.

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It is certainly true that pleasure is mixed with a certain degree of pain when the young women of Austen’s novels are prevailed upon to play the pianoforte but perhaps this should be understood as an example of Austen’s satirical wit, directed at the burden of obligation rather than the object itself. ‘I am going to open the instrument, Eliza, and you know what follows’, says Miss Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, speaking as if she were John Cage addressing David Tudor during a rehearsal of 4′ 33″.27 A hint of threat is evident in this opening of the instrument’s lid; instrument of torture, perhaps? Elizabeth reluctantly takes to the pianoforte, performs pleasantly but only adequately, then gives way to her sister Mary. Whoever is occupying the roving eyes and ears of Austen’s observer at this moment, their judgement is harsh: Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display [. . .] Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.28 The critique is devastating, spiteful enough to be a candidate for Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, yet its concise dissection of personality as a hindrance to musical excellence seems strikingly modern. Mary’s enthusiasm for musicking, if not music itself, is undermined by a lack of self-awareness, leading to some unattractive, presumably visible mannerisms, yet she is occupied contentedly in the performance of music, centred within a listening sphere. So she finds a place that might otherwise not exist for her. Writing of the piano as an emblem of social status among the nineteenth-century middle classes, Mary Burgan describes it as a lifeline: ‘Without a piano, women with pretensions to gentility are deprived of the exercise of their special training, of any leading role in family recreation, and of one of their few legitimate channels for self-expression.’29 This accords with a pragmatism underlying the supposedly romantic trajectory of Austen’s novels, in which music may be a pleasure to be stolen but its true purpose is apparitional, resonating and delineating spaces in which actions can progress, a shadow that should never overshadow the imperatives of life. As Emma says to Miss Fairfax, in Emma, ‘I could not excuse a man’s having more music than love – more ear than eye – a more acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings.’30

Distant Sounds Sounds of visible near things streaked and scored with broken light as they moved, led off into untraced distant sounds [. . .] chiming together. Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb31 ‘Places and sounds weigh on people’, writes Alain Corbin in A History of Silence. ‘Behaviour and choices feel its subtle influence. These impressions have marked so many authors that they have constantly returned to them, and evocations of space have become an expression of their inner state.’32 Silence, like noise, is a hopelessly problematic term, so overcome with meaning and misunderstanding as to be meaningless.

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Yet from out of silences – of thought, quiet existence, spaces, contemplation, unvoiced anger, loneliness, poverty, wordlessness, unspoken love, private ecstasies and the close listening that forages out into worldliness, its teeming liveliness – Dorothy Richardson conducted her lifelong experiment with the ineffable, the unspeakable, how to hear it, to think it, and the question, how to speak of it? As Annika J. Lindskog wrote in her study ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Poetics of Silence’: It may seem ironic that a novel verbose enough to cover over two thousand pages should have silence as one of its central themes. Yet Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimage constantly reverberates around different aspects of silence. Not only is silence represented on the page – in the form of ellipses, gaps, and blank spaces – but it is also a constant presence in the protagonist Miriam Henderson’s explorations of her existential condition.33 Pointed Roofs, the first part of Pilgrimage, was described by a reader at Duckworth as ‘feminine impressionism’, a judgement that was either faint praise or an insightful example of the publisher looking for a selling point. Written between 1912 and 1957 with ten of them published by Duckworth, the sequence of linked novels begins with Richardson’s central character, Miriam, teaching in a German school for girls. The events of Pilgrimage mirror the course of Richardson’s own life. To some degree they can be considered autobiographical, though this raises a constant, perhaps redundant question of how closely the fiction corresponded to actual events, characters, and feelings, and how much memories are transformed over time, given the time lag of twenty or more years between experiences and writing. What is certainly true is that Richardson, on her own initiative, left the family home in Barnes, London, in 1891, aged seventeen, to teach at a finishing school in Hanover. Her father aspired to become a gentleman, invested badly, and plunged the family into poverty. With the added complication of her mother suffering headaches and depression (she committed suicide in 1895 while on holiday with Dorothy in Hastings), Richardson felt the need to help in some way but also wanted to escape a suffocating home life. According to her biographer, John Rosenberg, she acted well and had a good ear for nuances of speech and sound, ‘making her an excellent mimic, as there was “not on earth a speech sound” she could not imitate. She played the piano well, and she thought of becoming a musician or an actress.’34 Family troubles ended those ambitions, though it is clear that virtuosic listening would become a key element of her writing style. Her involvement with the Quaker faith, the Society of Friends, was also a guiding principle of what might be called her listening practice. Quaker emphasis on silence was a way of allowing, as she wrote, ‘our “real self” – our larger and deeper being, to which so many names have been given – to flow up and flood the whole field of the surface intelligence’.35

A Patch of Dull Crimson On intermittent days in the German school, Miriam has access to a piano where she can develop her technical ability. These private sessions are intensely emotional, sometimes to the point of ecstasy or tears:

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Then when the mood came, she played [. . .] and listened. She soon discovered she could not always ‘play’ – even the things she knew perfectly – and she began to understand the fury that had seized her when her mother and a woman here and there had taken for granted one should ‘play when asked,’ and coldly treated her refusal as showing a lack of courtesy.36 Despite, or because of, its significance as an early twentieth-century modernist text, Pilgrimage continues to dwell on the troubled relationship between women and pianos, as if in continuation of Jane Austen. The piano still looms, monstrous furniture music, and yet for Miriam, sound is an active force, sufficiently powerful to sweep away the contrivances of music reduced to social artifice or forced entertainment. The ear of the body is active in foraging for sound fragments, its resonation of space, with music vibrant within the widest spectrum of hearing. During a concert at the German school, Miriam is sensitive to subtleties of performance psychology, a patch of dull crimson she observes on the pallid cheek of a performer, the slight shame she feels in hearing heavy fortissimos from the hands of a self-conscious English woman, then an Australian singer, whose expressive bravura, not a note in tune, shocks Miriam ‘out of all shyness’ and into another world: ‘The longer sustained notes presently reminded her of something she had heard. In the interval between the verses, while the sounds echoed in her mind, she remembered the cry, hand to mouth, of a London coal-man.’37 After the concert she goes to bed content, wrapped in music, its capacity to take her beyond herself, into new spaces, unknown states, and deep memories, conceived as a transfiguration: ‘The theme of Clara’s solo recurred again and again; and every time it brought something of the wonderful light – the sense of going forward and forward through space. She fell asleep somewhere outside the world.’38 Years later, Miriam, always on the edge of destitution, listens to the two young women with whom she shares lodgings, her silent irritation expressed in vivid thought streams: ‘Thin hard fingers of women chattering and tweaking. They go up sideways, witches on broomsticks, and chatter angrily in the distance. They cannot stop the sound of the silent crimson blossoming roses.’39 They attempt to reason with her, why not earn half a guinea for occasional public performances playing piano accompaniment for the séances of Madame Devine? ‘Where is the harm, child,’ one entreats, ‘in your sitting up at a piano, even behind a curtain; in a large room in Gower Street [. . .] playing, with the soft pedal either down or up, the kind of music you play so beautifully?’40 Is it that spiritualist séances are wrong? Nothing that happens on the other side of the curtain should concern her, she is advised, yet her refusal seems based on morality, can it be right to earn money so easily? ‘I had made up my mind’, says Miriam. ‘I wanted them to see me tempted and refusing for conscience sake.’41 The reader who thinks back to Miriam’s anger, 850 pages earlier, will understand her conflict, a reaction against musical performance as duty, leading her to a sense of personal integrity: ‘Of course you can only “play when you can,” said she to herself, “like a bird singing.”’42 Conventions of the novel – identifying characters or who is speaking, creating a coherent map, linking one scene to another, establishing a timeline, moving towards resolution – are largely ignored in Pilgrimage. To read this sprawling examination of the self is to be perpetually disorientated. To enter is to join a flow, to become sensorily attuned to Richardson’s acute perceptions, her intensities and minutiae, her clouded recollections. ‘The sound of the pen shattered the silence like sudden speech’,

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she writes in Deadlock, as if echoing the dropped pen in Persuasion. ‘She listened entranced. The little strange sound was the living voice of the brooding presence.’43 This microaudial drama, as much as any greater turbulence, seems to be the point of Pilgrimage. The most intimate acts of listening connect us with the web of connections that structure a life. She recalled spaces in which she had lived through the distinctive texture of their sounds, or questioned how long these auditory memories would linger. How fugitive they are, vibrations growing more distant, less distinct, like smoke seeping into air until mixed out of existence. Miriam’s frequent use of auditory space to invoke quiet rooms in which she could think and write are pre- and post-echoes of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay of 1928, A Room of One’s Own. Poignant as it may seem, to have the use of a simple room like this, despite oppressive heat in summer and fireless cold in winter, was for Miriam (or Richardson) the apex of life as an impoverished but independent woman. What such a refuge promised was ‘[f]reedom for thought, when it made its sudden visits, to expand unhampered by the awful suggestions coming from the [. . .] surroundings.’44 Woolf herself refers to the potential of micro-sound as a warning signal, the intimate acoustic sphere of a house allowing, in the case of Jane Austen, a degree of privacy for her art: ‘At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in.’45 In a small room with Miss Holland, their privacy protected only by a curtain dividing the space, a window rattles. Miss Holland cannot abide rattling windows. Miriam’s response is non-committal, addressing only the tone. ‘In the actual communication there was a fresh source of division. She loved rattling windows; loved, loved them.’46 Miriam hears outer sounds acutely; Miss Holland is oblivious. Cats squeal, curses and blows rise up from the street, thick distorted voices, children’s voices ‘shrilling up, driven by fear’, but even at their worst, she thought, they were ‘life, fierce and coarse, driving off sleep; but real, exciting’. More intolerable than these courtyard noises were the sounds she heard close to, the intimate sounds from Miss Holland, invisible but audible behind the curtain. Miriam imagined these sounds collecting in the room, waiting for her to come home. Then in the morning, awake with the splutter of a match: ‘To hear, with senses sharpened by sleep, the leisurely preparations,’ Richardson writes in The Trap, ‘the slow careful sipping, the weary sighing, muttered prayers, the slow removal of the many unlovely garments, the prolonged swishing and dripping of the dismal sponge. All heralding and leading at last to the dreadful numb rattle of vulcanite in the basin.’47 This is vindictive listening provoked by an excess of unwonted intimacy. ‘Yet the worst to bear was the discovery of the hatred these innocent sounds could inspire’, she writes. ‘Still there unchanged, pure helpless hatred, rising up as it had risen in childhood, against forced association with unalterable personal habits.’48 ‘And the doors with their different voices in shutting or being slammed-to by the wind’, she writes in Dawn’s Left Hand: Would she remember Flaxman door-sounds after she had left? Glancing at the door which ended the long strip of her half of the room she tried in vain to remember its sound. Yet, when she first settled in, it must have impressed itself and played its intimate part in the symphony of sounds belonging to her life with Selina.49

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For Annika J. Lindskog, silence in Pilgrimage is a strength, a means of self-discovery that acts as enabler, communicator, and revelation of truth: ‘Yet, silence in Richardson’s text also often represents the unknowable: those aspects of existence that move beyond language and that even when grasped and briefly held by Miriam seem to remain hidden from the reader.’50

A Dutch Concert For Richardson, listening, stillness, making sound, constructed auditory spaces whose architecture was infinitely fluid, opening to infinity, closing to the smallest extent in which a body can be matter in the material world. Recuperating from a breakdown in 1908, she lived for a time with a Quaker family in a farm at Windmill Hill, Sussex, a period recorded in Dimple Hill, the eleventh volume of the Pilgrimage series. Here, in the deep country stillness, away from the roar of the sea, she was able to place sounds, move within them, examine them as if masses or entities: Yet sounding, even while, as one paused to look, the stillness seemed complete. Offering if, free from an urgent errand, one should step out into it, small near and distant sounds, clear, measuring the height of the sky, making denser the enclosed stillness of this many-roomed, strangely deserted house.51 ‘Hearing is a model of understanding’, Michel Serres wrote in Genesis: It is still active and deep when our gaze has gone hazy or gone to sleep. It is continuous while the other senses are intermittent [. . .] I begin to fathom the sound and the fury, of the world and of history: the noise.52 This ubiquity of hearing, through which understanding emerges, resolves itself into the satisfactory conclusions of Jane Austen. For Dorothy Richardson, writing during the early years of the social, political, and artistic convulsions we now call modernism, the nearest outcome to a satisfactory conclusion was some degree of self-understanding (appropriate to the century of psychoanalysis). Richardson is often described as a pioneer of stream-of-consciousness literature. She found the term asinine, despised it. Passages of seemingly disconnected imagery are abundant throughout Pilgrimage, though not consistently so. They arise at those moments when she struggles to articulate sense impressions, feelings, experiences, through the medium of words. In this respect she was right to despise the term. Her writing was not an exercise in automatism or glossolalia, more a deep engagement with phenomena. Living in a boarding house, she revelled in the cacophony of fellow occupants: Eighteen Americans. I used to go down to meals just to be in the midst of the noise. You never heard anything like it in your life. If you listened without trying to distinguish anything it was marvellous, in the bright sunshine at breakfast. It sent you up and up, into the sky, the morning stars singing together.53

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The effect reminded her of a so-called Dutch concert, in which a group of people try to sing different songs simultaneously. ‘It’s always spoilt’, she complained: People begin it prepared not to hear the whole effect [. . .] some laugh because they are prepared only to laugh, and the unmusical people put their fingers to their ears, because they can never hear sound, never anything but a tune.54 Jane Austen, an author she admired, also brought innovative stylistic experiment to the problem of how to set down an authentic account of aural fragmentation or the overloaded complexity of what Serres (and William Faulkner before him) calls ‘the sound and the fury’. In Emma, Austen described a strawberry-picking expedition. As the party leads off, the talking begins: Mornings definitely the best time – never tired – every sort good – hautboy infinitely superior – no comparison – the others hardly eatable – hautboys very scarce – Chili prefered – white wood finest flavour of all – price of strawberries in London – abundance about Bristol – Maple Grove [. . .] – glaring sun – tired to death – could bear it no longer – must go and sit in the shade.55 This broken speech, so evocative of group conversation in movement, is both authentic to the experience and experimental (for its time, 1815) in its effect upon the page. For Richardson, there were precursors with which she would have been familiar. One was the ‘concentration’ method of Sigmund Freud, through which the patient would be asked to concentrate on a specific symptom, then urged to recall memories which might unlock its cause. Freud would press his hand to the patient’s head, assuring her that the memories would come. But then Frl. Elisabeth intervened. ‘Freud was still given to urging, pressing, and questioning, which he felt to be hard but necessary work’, Ernest Jones wrote in his biography of Freud. ‘On one historic occasion, however, the patient, Frl. Elisabeth, reproved him for interrupting her flow of thought by his questions. He took the hint, and thus made another step towards free association.’56 Though it lies outside the scope of this essay, the spiritualist practice of passive writing can also be considered of relevance to the development of impressionistic techniques in literature. ‘Passive, or automatic, writing’, writes Alex Owen in The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, ‘involved simply holding a pen over a blank sheet of paper, clearing the mind of unpleasant thoughts, and allowing the spirits to guide the hand.’57 Both Austen and Richardson were highly attuned to time, transience, contingency, and relationality. They wrote of money and property, of course, but these were essential to survival in a world hostile to their gender and status. The essential subject, or at least its beginning, was the silence out of which listening forages for sound. ‘You always think people’s minds are blank when they are silent’, says Miriam during an argument in Revolving Lights: It’s just the other way around. Only, of course, there are many kinds of silence. But the test of absolutely everything in life is the quality of the in-between silences. It’s only in silence that you can judge of your relationship to a person.58 FORTE becomes piano.

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Notes   1. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Richmond: Alma Classics, [1814] 2016), 51.   2. Ibid., 215.  3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1809] 1971), 191.   4. Manuel Delanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1.  5. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 69.   6. Jane Austen, Persuasion (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1817] 2000), 30.  7. Austen, Mansfield Park, 147.   8. Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018), 3.   9. Grace Victoria Bentley, The History and Development of Tambour Embroidery, blog of The Costume Society, https://costumesociety.org.uk/blog/post/the-history-and-development-oftambour-embroidery (accessed 5 March 2022). 10. John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 125. 11. Ibid. 12. Austen, Mansfield Park, 72, from a conversation in which never is described as a ‘black word’. 13. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Dimple Hill (1938)’, in Pilgrimage 4 (London: Virago, 2002), 416. 14. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1813] 2007), 50. 15. Jane Austen, Emma (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1815] 2000), 298. 16. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres 1 (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2011), 479–80. 17. Ibid., 493. 18. Ibid., 520. 19. Sebastian Faulks, ‘Introduction’, in Henry Green, Loving, Living, Party Going (London: Vintage, 2005), 7–14 (11). 20. Henry Green, Nothing (London: Vintage, 2008), 45. 21. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin, [1922] 1992), 31. 22. Wiltshire, Hidden Jane Austen, 162. 23. Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 39. 24. Austen, Mansfield Park, 16. 25. Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover, 1990), 268. 26. Worsley, Jane Austen at Home, 120. 27. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 22. 28. Ibid. 29. Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Victorian Studies 30, no. 1 (1986): 51–76 (51). 30. Austen, Emma, 160–1. 31. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Honeycomb (1917)’, in Pilgrimage I (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 416. 32. Alain Corbin, A History of Silence (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 17. 33. Annika J. Lindskog, ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Poetics of Silence’, Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, no. 5 (2012): 7–34 (7). 34. John Rosenberg, Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot (London: Duckworth, 1973), 11. 35. Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Quakers Past and Present (1914)’, quoted in Lindskog, ‘Dorothy Richardson’, 10. 36. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Pointed Roofs (1915)’, in Pilgrimage I, 58. 37. Ibid., 47.

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Ibid., 50. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Interim (1919)’, in Pilgrimage 2 (London: Virago, 2002), 419. Ibid., 418. Ibid., 419. Richardson, ‘Pointed Roofs’, 58. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Deadlock (1921)’, in Pilgrimage 3 (London: Virago, 2002), 133. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Dawn’s Left Hand (1931)’, in Pilgrimage 4, 196. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2000), 68. Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Trap (1925)’, in Pilgrimage 3, 430. Ibid., 500–1. Ibid., 501. Richardson, ‘Deadlock’, 194. Lindskog, ‘Dorothy Richardson’, 34. Richardson, ‘Dimple Hill’, 438. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 7. 53. Richardson, ‘Deadlock’, 123. 54. Ibid. 55. Austen, Emma, 289–90. 56. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1961) 158. 57. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989), 79. 58. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Revolving Lights (1923)’, in Pilgrimage 3, 389.

Select Bibliography Austen, Jane, Emma (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, [1815] 2007). Green, Henry, Nothing (London: Vintage, 2008). Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989). Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage (London: Virago, 2002). Serres, Michel, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Sloterdijk, Peter, Bubbles: Spheres 1 (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2011). Wiltshire, John, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Woolf, Virginia, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin, [1922] 1992).

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4 Oralities, Literacies, and the Xenophobic Fallacy Richard Cullen Rath

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n Eurocentric work undertaken mostly by white scholars, oral cultures have served largely as a foil for the visual and the literate. In what I will call the classic theory of orality, the oral mindset exists in an ahistorical state of nature resulting from the supposed ephemerality of sound and the consequent unreliability of oral histories. This ephemerality is overstated, based on an understanding of oral culture as individualistic and limiting the understanding of sound to speech. In fact, oral cultures tend to remember things communally rather than individually, and their many errorchecking strategies and productive redundancies make orality as practised rather than as hypothesised much more robust than its classic theorists admit. As well, acoustic spaces were designed to sound in particular ways that are as telling of a culture’s history as any other document.1 Ephemerality, however, is a prerequisite for the classic theories of oral culture because it erases any meaningful histories and requires approaching the subject of oral culture through deduction instead. In the complementary theories of literacy and orality, printed or written knowledge caused a shift in the ratio of the senses away from hearing and towards more visual ways of perception. Literate modes of thought, shaped by the reduction of speech to its silent visual representation on the page, emerged as the figure to the ground of oral culture.2 A key turning point in theories of modernity is the advent of mass print culture, where literacy affected even those not able to read through its saturation of the culture. Even the illiterate were versed if not knowledgeable in the print-based – and thus more visual – ways of perceiving central to navigating the Western world from roughly the eighteenth century onwards. Writing from a non-BIPOC frame,3 my book How Early America Sounded stands as an explicit critique and response to the limits of what I am calling ‘classic orality’ by setting it within a perceptual-historical frame rather than in a theoretical one. Broadening the scope from the oral to the aural to consider soundways beyond speech can help reveal a richer context in which to situate specific oralities as well as opening up new documentation possibilities. By soundways, I mean the paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques – in short, the ways – that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and beliefs about sound. I am not so much concerned with the underlying beliefs, historically inaccessible as they often are, or the concrete expressions themselves so much as the ways between them.4

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In the book, I treat both white and BIPOC peoples through the same set of methodologies. In one notable case, I found that seventeenth-century New England Puritans, perhaps the most literate population on earth at the time, had a thriving oral culture throughout the seventeenth century, belying a central tenet of those who argue for a literate mind as possessing a different cognitive set from oral cultures.5 Classic theorists of orality deduced its qualities from the presumed properties of sound – its ephemerality, its presence, its local nature. Onto these they projected ways of thinking – concrete not abstract, interpersonal and subjective rather than detached objective reason, present-oriented rather than having history. In the leading classic theory of orality, Walter Ong corrected the seeming cultural chauvinism of such a list by adopting a stance of cultural relativism (while skipping the inconvenient necessity of differentiating cultures), arguing that thinking primarily through the ears in an oral culture was different from rather than inferior to thinking more visually in a print-based one. Nonetheless, this created a homogenous category of people – oral, ear-based, and pre-literate or illiterate – out of a vast but ever-receding swathe of the world that did not experience the perceptual, cultural, and historical shift in the ratio of the senses from ear to eye that believers in the classic theories attributed to the rise of print and literacy. Designating a culture as innately ‘oral’ or sound-based has its own long history. It is an example of what I am calling here the ‘xenophobic fallacy’, in which an author’s home culture has a specific history, while the rest of the known world is lumped together as an undifferentiated other sharing a set of common characteristics. Despite Ong’s halfway cultural relativism, authors writing from this space hold two sets of beliefs about the sonic other: first, the latter is inferior and developmentally prior, and second, this homogenous other sounds different from and incomprehensible to – or at least in need of explication to – the home culture. In making these two assumptions, the xenophobic fallacy often frames sonic difference as the absence of reason. For example, Ong limits oral culture to being capable of concrete thought, but not the abstraction made possible in literate culture by offloading things that have to be remembered in oral culture to the printed page.6 Even though Ong sought to counter the belief in orality’s inferiority to more visual literate modes of thought, that belief inevitably creeps back in over time because of a process that linguists call ‘taboo, euphemism, and pejoration (TEP)’7 that is central to understanding the xenophobic fallacy. While Ong’s culturally relativist definitions kept the taboo topics of racism and colonialism at bay for a moment, eventually they crept back in to the meaning. Then, the new term, orality, has through its usage become a euphemism for colonialism and racism again because the taboo topic remained unaddressed. At that point, classic orality underwent a process of pejoration, still under way, as it fell from favour as a way to describe its subject communities – who are nearly always BIPOC and stand in some relation to some form of colonialism. Another example would be highway signs locating roadside places equipped for the acts of urination and defecation. The euphemism ‘facilities’ might hide the taboo topic at first, but because urination and defecation still happen there, the term ‘facilities’ becomes offensive to some and has to be replaced by a new term, say ‘rest stop’, where the euphemism starts out well but again becomes increasingly associated with the taboo that takes place there to again need replacing in an endless cycle of taboo, euphemism, and pejoration. In the xenophobic fallacy, the taboo we have been skirting is that this

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cultural chauvinism concerning the perception and production of speech sounds might actually be a form of racism, usually effected against historically colonised peoples. Discussing Western culture as racist has of course happened voluminously for many years, but nearly always causes defensiveness and even aggression in some quarters. Indeed, when I have brought in the taboo subject of racism underlying the long history of literacy’s other in presenting this work at a talk, several audience members denounced me as a ‘self-hating white man’ and accused me of rewriting history to emphasise only the bad. While the xenophobic fallacy is not inherently racist, it can and has enabled racism to be ported back into the belief systems discussed below, and bringing the fallacy into the range of hearing, or, if you prefer, into the light, disables that process. This essay airs out the TEP cycle to consider an encouraging trend in newer work that corrects the xenophobic fallacy at its source by approaching BIPOC oral cultures (note the plural) in their cultural and historical specificities rather than as one homogenous lump. The approach works just as well on non-BIPOC communities and belies the notion that literate cultures have no oralities of their own. The airing out needs to be explicit to prevent it from finding its way back in. Long-term theoretical advances in race studies and gender and sexuality studies combined with powerful social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and the consciousness-raising around missing and murdered Indigenous women and around LGBTQ+ rights have cut through these taboos, opening up new discursive terrain to intervene in the millennia-old xenophobic fallacy that feeds the TEP cycle even as reactionary forces such as the anti-critical race theory movement in the United States threaten this progress. The rising generation of BIPOC scholars, along with some older writers, have taken the idea of oral cultures out of the hands of mostly white theorists. Many BIPOC authors write about orality as insiders, a very different valence from classic orality studies. This newer work reveals rich, variable, historically situated phenomena where previously Eurocentric scholars had derived homogenous universals. To give just a few examples to get the reader started (there are new ones nearly daily), Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has made it a point to write first in Gikuyu, his native language. He developed a theory of orature to account for the differences in his storytelling from Western styles and what happens to the differences en route from spoken Gikuyu to print and then to English. More recently, he has expanded orature into the digital age in his discussion of cyberture, meaning the engagement of orality with digital networked media. Roger Abrahams, in tune with other Black folklorists, has long mined the specificities of African American oralities. Black and white sociolinguists have also marked the histories of creolised languages, as have Pacific linguists.8 Classic orality’s cousin, oral history, has suffered related problems even while avoiding some of the former’s methodological flaws. Oral histories, being voice-based, are intrinsically a function of sound and hearing. In seeking some sort of objectivity to claim equal footing with paper archives, oral historians controlled as much of the interview process as possible to keep things consistent. Most transcriptions and recordings were in a question and answer format that shaped the results in important ways and took place with individuals in isolation rather than embedded in a community context.9 Newer work by insiders to the communities they study has scrapped much of the semi-scientific trappings in favour of emic (roughly, ‘insider’) approaches.10

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Nonetheless, oral history – with its emphasis on particularity and listening – holds promise as a corrective to the universalism and ahistoricism of classic orality, especially when undertaken by community members rather than outsiders. Nēpia Mahuika (Ngāti Porou), critiquing the field from a Māori perspective, calls for an end to the split between the category of oral history, which tends to shy away from Indigenous histories, and the category of oral tradition, into which most Indigenous cultures get placed. Oral history must also make some accommodations, such as privileging voices from within the community as being authors rather than data (in most versions of oral history, interviews are data that the author ‘collects’ rather than being authorial voices from within the community), and a focus on listening in a community context instead of relying primarily on interviews with individuals. Two projects from the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Hawai’i illustrate Indigenous approaches to oral histories. First, the Mānoa North Shore Field School led by Kānaka Maoli11 anthropologist Ty Tengan situates oral histories from within communities as much as from outside. He and his students conduct oral interviews with kūpuna (elders, ancestors, starting point) in a community setting, with one of the goals being to give back the knowledge of what they learn to the community they learn from, in the process strengthening university–community ties and giving students a sense of what the university aspires to, a Hawaiian place of learning. Second, also in line with the university’s aspirations, the Center for Oral History, directed by Daviana Pomokau McGregor, takes a leading role in the community in finding and sharing na mo’olelo (stories, histories, with the implication of their being spoken, from the root mo’o ʻōlelo, ‘succession of talk’). In North American Indigenous studies, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson (Dakota) wrote an oral history in both Dakota and English, doing the important work of documenting the sounds of her community’s endangered language, accompanied by a series of glosses to partially explain the material in context to non-Dakota readers. Besides providing a way in for outsiders to at least a partial understanding of Dakota processes – including the sounds of its language – the book serves as a media-shifted archive of a specific Dakota community’s history and culture through the sounds of their voices. Melissa K. Nelson (Anishinaabe/Cree/Métis (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)) lays out part of the oral histories of Anishinaabe and other Indigenous women who have otherthan-human relations (including but not limited to sexual relations) with elements of their environments from sticks to bears to the wind to the stars. These stories come to her as sound and listening in its cultural context that is at its best still mostly irreducible to print and transcription. She argues that ‘published oral literature is contradictory, at best. These “postcolonial literatures” have been spoken, performed, recorded, translated, transcribed, published, interpreted, forgotten, reinterpreted, remembered, dismembered, misinterpreted, and re-written many times in different contexts and times. They are fragments of orality’, which she ‘re-presents’ as ‘messy storyscapes’ she understands in the medium of sound first rather than neatly packaged as oral traditions. This is a nice inversion of the usual claim that orality is fragmentary and unreliable rather than print.12 Dylan Robinson, a xwélmexw writer of Stó:lō descent, explains the connection between sound studies and oral history, musical practice, and legal discourse as a function of what he calls ‘hungry listening’ and the settler practice of ‘inclusionary’ collaboration with Indigenous people. ‘Hungry’ is drawn from the Halq’eméylem (the

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xwélmexw language) word for ‘settlers’ and is drawn from their first direct contact with Stó:lō people (smallpox had preceded them), when they appeared as physically starving and hungry for gold, too. Thus, ‘hungry’ means ‘a settler’s starving orientation’. Purposely discordant, the second word is drawn from the Halq’eméylem word roughly translated as listening, but indicating the Stó:lō people’s soundways, markedly different from Western ones, as he demonstrates throughout the book. ‘Listening’ is uncomfortably and purposively juxtaposed with ‘hungry’ to indicate that the ‘positionality of listening’ does not reduce settler logics to ‘white’, since the author asserts that his stance is a hybrid of both the ‘hungry’ and the ‘listening’ side of the equation.13 More than an epistemic metaphor, Indigenous soundways structure speaking and listening not from outside the Western gaze but from inside what Peg Rawes calls the ‘sonic envelope’ of hungry listening. The trouble with much oral history is that while the voice may be that of the interviewees, the sonic grammar or envelope of their speech remains within the traditional methodology of oral history. Although mostly concerned with the relations between Indigenous and classical Western musics, Robinson’s discussion of what he calls ‘inclusionary’ sonic collaboration is applicable to the shift that Mahuika says is necessary to bring classic orality and classic oral histories together into a methodology that BIPOC scholars can use to document their own soundways instead of being studied by outsiders. In contrast, Robinson’s idea of inclusionary collaboration is when classical composers working with Indigenous collaborators strive to include an Indigenous voice or voices but continue to structure their compositions in a Western musical grammar. Instead, Mahuika advocates having insiders structure orality’s sounds, and the ways they shape Indigenous oral histories forms the ‘sonic envelope’ of the hybrid orality/oral history.14 Bringing hungry listening outside the realm of Indigenous North America, the WPA Slave Narratives – which are often cited as first-person sources – are actually transcriptions made by anthropologists, folklorists, and other fieldworkers which then went through further editing, mostly by white scholars far upstream from the actual sounds. Were the depictions of Black English the actual sounds of the speakers? Or merely the fulfilment of the fieldworkers’ and their supervisors’ expectations? Lori Ann Garner approaches the question through a comparison of interviews collected by African American fieldworkers – as was the case for most of Florida – with those collected by white workers. The Florida interviews reveal fewer ‘dees and dems’ while holding truer to the grammatical patterns of Black vernaculars. The transcriptions in these cases were no different from a written representation of a white southerner saying ‘floor’ with the / R/ left unsounded in speech, then writing the ‘r’ when spelling it. Black interviewers heard the white-expected ‘dees’ and ‘dems’ as ‘these’ and ‘them’. Some scholars consider the ex-slave narratives to be all but useless for discovering much about the sounds of the dialects the formerly enslaved interviewees spoke regardless of their other historical value, but Garner shows the value of an insider approach even on these sonically unreliable written sources.15 The classic theory of orality seems irredeemable on its own. Why revisit a discarded theory, then? For three reasons: first, the underlying problem that begat it – the xenophobic fallacy – is alive and well. Second, these underlying principles can be traced through Western high culture at least as far back as the founding era of the Greek citystates. And third, the whiteness of sound studies has rightfully come under fire during the past few years.16 The rest of this essay is in three parts. First is a section on the

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development of orality as a concept. The second part explains how the xenophobic fallacy came to poison what was meant as a corrective to the idea of culturally relativistic ‘primitive’ societies. The third part traces the sonic history of the xenophobic fallacy from its origins in ancient Greece through to the present.

Orality and Consciousness Julian Jaynes’s 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind provides an ideal place to begin despite not being the usual first suspect in a discussion of orality. Jaynes was a cognitive scientist, not a literary theorist, anthropologist, or historian, and he developed his theory after the introduction of the main theories of orality discussed below. He did so largely in isolation, neither citing nor being cited by the others. But in setting out his case, he makes clear the stakes and the theoretical moves that often stay below the surface in the other accounts. Jaynes proposed that ancient humans were not conscious in the way that we are today.17 Consciousness as we experience it now, he claimed, is a function of the left side of the brain, the rational, logical, speech-producing side, as opposed to the intuitive, creative, speech-comprehending right side. Even today, everyday judgement, learning, and performing of tasks proceeds for the most part with little intervention of the conscious mind, but we are – well – unconscious of the parts outside, so consciousness has played a misleadingly great role in thinking about all these issues. Nonetheless, consciousness does play an important part in what makes us human today, and it was a cultural-historical development, according to Jaynes, not an evolutionary one. He asserted that the Greeks of the second millennium bce drew much more on the right side of the brain, which they experienced as voices giving them instructions to execute. The voices would be classified as auditory hallucinations today because they were not rooted in the self. Jaynes thought that the ancient Greeks and others had no conscious self to which to attach the voices. They were bicameral, meaning that they drew on both sides of their brain in dealing with the things that today we resort to the left hemisphere for, which in the theories of 1970s cognitive science controlled language, self, and consciousness. He found evidence for the older way of being in the Iliad, a tale told for hundreds if not thousands of years before being written down sometime in the eighth century bce. The epic recounts the events of the Trojan War. In the poem, warriors and kings hear and follow the instructions of different gods. Jaynes argued that the lexicon of consciousness is curiously absent, along with intent and volition. When faced with a difficult situation, the gods tell X to do something and it is done, much like the subject and verb of a sentence determine the fate of the object. Nothing resembling our process of deliberation or agency, both hallmarks of modern consciousness, appears to take place, giving the Iliad an odd and slightly surreal or unbelievable feel to presentday readers. In contrast, the Odyssey, according to Jaynes, documents the breakdown of the bicameral mind resulting in the dominance of the left hemisphere we know today as consciousness emerging. The epic tells the story of Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War, a travail of ten years during which he faces a disrupted and unfamiliar world in which the gods became absent characters to think about and contend with rather than immanent voices to blindly obey. The Bronze Age in Europe was tumultuous,

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and old ways of navigating the world failed to work any longer. People became unmoored from their habitual social mores and were cast adrift. The quest for a new way of being in the world runs as a theme throughout the story as an echo of the historic task of creating consciousness that the Greeks accomplished as the first millennium bce proceeded, in Jaynes’s theory. For Jaynes, Odysseus’ journey is an allegory for the process of coming to consciousness, with the left brain colonising the voices of the gods/right brain and then internalising them as a part of the emerging self. Consciousness, he argued, is a linguistic metaphor, like a map, built up from representations of the world which, unlike in the Iliad, he finds throughout the Odyssey. He thought that we can still find the remains of the older way of thinking in untouched primitive societies (which, amusingly, we could not know of without ‘touching’ them) and the struggles of schizophrenics. Critics found the idea of unconscious humans difficult to grasp, but precisely this incredibility helps us. The move Jaynes made from a prior condition (without feature X of modernity) to a more familiar subsequent condition (with X) is a hallmark of classic orality theories. Jaynes has many detractors, and the fate of the theory, which is not the point here, remains open.18 Historians of the senses, and particularly of hearing, might be able to provide a way of salvaging the explanatory possibilities of the voices of the gods while jettisoning the tendentious developmental model of consciousness implicit in Jaynes. The Greeks of the Iliad may have had a different ratio of the senses, privileging hearing things in the mind’s ear in much the same way we now privilege seeing things in the mind’s eye. Rather than (visual) lines of thought, the Greeks may have conceived their worlds – quite consciously – as more of a 360 degree field of surrounding sounds. This is a difference in sensory modality, not consciousness. Much as we imagine visible things outside ourselves, they heard imaginary sounds as coming from outside themselves.19 Once we attend to sense ratios, placing the visual at the apex of consciousness becomes merely one historical possibility among several. Different modes of consciousness still need explaining, perhaps even more so, but the explanations can be made by stretching out and exercising our modes of consciousness rather than theorising, as Jaynes did, their absence. Once we return from the tangled briers of consciousness, the territory looks more familiar. Since the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry in the 1930s and his student Albert Lord’s 1960 The Singer of Tales, scholars have considered the formulation and transmission of ancient Greek poetry through the lens of orality.20 Parry and Lord argued that Homer, or some aggregate of writers that we have come to assemble under his name, recorded oral strategies of construction and performance as part and parcel of the tales. Anyone who has ever had a song stuck in their head knows the power of these sonic strategies in aiding memory. In societies where writing was not widespread, these methods were all the more important as one of the main conduits for everyday people to learn and engage with socially significant information. The oral strategies of singers and storytellers acted as recipes, formulas which made possible what seem to modern people to be great feats of memory. Close examination of the Homeric epics reveals the use of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and melody. In effect, the ancient Greek singer of tales would spontaneously create the actual words he sang by taking a theme and repeating short metrical expository rhymes to a stock remembered melody. The actual phrases came, like the melodies, from a common

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memorised pool. Themes would be repetitively varied and expanded upon to tell the story. In this view, the epics of Homer are just one particular telling which through the power of writing has come to be canonical. The epics had most likely been in circulation for centuries before being transcribed. The version that has come down to us is only a single instance, so Parry and Lord could not rely upon the texts alone to make their case for their orality. They undertook extensive fieldwork in Bosnia, interviewing the people they thought were the ‘purest’ progenitors of the ancient songs. What they uncovered was a system of formulaic improvisation that recreated the stories anew each time while retaining the gist. The result was that the same story could be told again and again, varied in the details and adjusted for the context of the telling. The notion of purity that Lord and Parry attributed to the Bosnian singers is ahistorical, relying on a structuralist model of branching and corruption from an apocryphal pristine original. Scholars from the late nineteenth century through the post-structuralists criticised this family tree genealogical approach to language and culture. They argue instead for a wave model (nineteenth century) or a rhizomatic one (post-structuralist) that, much like real families, intermix and intersperse constantly from multiple origins.21 The family tree model is, however, what buys them a link between the orality of the Homeric epics and that of twentieth-century Bosnian folk singers. During the same time period that Lord was refining and extending Parry’s ideas, Eric Havelock argued for a broader evidential base for ancient Greek orality in his 1963 Preface to Plato.22 He makes the case that education before the advent of literacy was the province of the poets, who used the methods outlined by Parry and Lord to teach. According to Havelock, learning through oral poetry led to something akin to a different consciousness, not altogether distant from Jaynes’s ideas that followed later. Havelock turns to Plato, who thought that poetic learning seduced students with its rhythms and repetitions and led to a herd mentality: people followed the poets because they sounded good. For Plato, poetic teaching was dangerous demagoguery that needed to be expelled from both education and government, replaced by logic and rational thought.23 Socrates, in a discussion with Phaedrus that Plato reconstructed, ripped into the practice of writing, which Plato preferred to poetry. Socrates told Plato the story of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth’s invention of writing. Theuth showed writing to another god, Ammon, and recommended giving it to the people. ‘“This invention, O [divine] king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”’ Ammon, presumably reflecting Socrates’ position on the matter, responded: this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. Writing, commented Socrates, was only useful for reminding the reader of something already known. He told Phaedrus that it could defend itself no better than a painting could because it is fixed in place.24

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The visual nature (‘like a painting’) of writing, in other words, stopped the workings of experience, time, and relationships intrinsic to sounded speech and froze them in place unnaturally in a way that sounded language did not, and indeed could not. Socrates concluded that the written word was the illegitimate offspring – and the spoken word the legitimate heir – of language and wisdom. A learned speaker would know when to speak and when to remain silent, and could defend ideas and make whatever point needed to be made in the best way to suit the context. For Socrates, and presumably the ancient Greek poets, the sound form of words was truly the sound form, but we must not lose the irony of his thoughts coming to us only through the writings of Plato.

Orality and Literacy What happens if we generalise from Parry’s, Lord’s, and Havelock’s ideas? The result, which achieved currency in the 1960s and beyond, is the classic theory of orality introduced above. Orality provides the necessary precedent that makes hypotheses about literacy work. The literacy hypothesis deduces cognitive characteristics of orality disguised as historical observations. It reflects a hypothetical modern/pre-modern split that has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition for centuries and has repeatedly come under fire for its racist assumptions only to return cloaked in a new terminology. In 1962, Marshall McLuhan argued that Europeans and, later, European Americans increasingly came to a hypervisual way of thinking, first as a result of writing technologies and later as a result of print. In effect, he took the findings of Parry and Lord and projected them onto literacy by paying attention to how writing and print affected what McLuhan had earlier labelled the ‘sense ratios’ of sound to vision. By dint of us taking in much of the world serially through our eyes using a small set of infinitely repeatable and reusable characters (as I presume you are doing now), McLuhan derived Western science, industry, arts, philosophy, and politics as predictable if not inevitable outcomes of literacy.25 In 1963 anthropologist Jack Goody and literary critic Ian Watt took the first foray into generalising from literacy to a teleological pre-literate set of ‘oral’ cognitive capacities. They drew on scholarly precedents strikingly similar to McLuhan’s, though without reference to the latter’s recently published Gutenberg Galaxy. They combined a discussion of orality and literacy among the Greeks with two things: first, a discussion of how forms of media could have the ability to restructure consciousness, and second, the results of Goody’s fieldwork with the supposedly oral culture of the Vai people of Northern Ghana. Goody would later expand that fieldwork into two influential and highly contested books.26 Goody’s critics pointed to other fieldwork with the Vai people that uncovered all the cognitive strategies which Goody argued they lacked, from list-making to abstract thought, concluding that while there were differences in the ways oral and literate people went about tasks, they do not entail any cognitive restructuring.27 A few years after Goody and Watt’s article, literary critic Walter Ong, a student of McLuhan’s, undertook the challenge of generalising the findings of Lord to all cultures where an absence of literacy prevailed and extending the range of the theory by deducing features of the oral mind from the properties of sound itself and then imagining it as a foil for some quality ascribed to literate minds: oral cultures are additive in the sense of accreting meaning through addition, as opposed to the neatly nested

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subordination of written thought epitomised by the writers’ outline. Ong’s conception of orality is aggregative rather than analytic, so stock phrases – he uses ‘the brave soldier’ and ‘the beautiful princess’ – rather than single words. He contrasts it with the analytic qualities of literate culture. Ong’s orality uses redundancy as reinforcement, and it is conservative rather than innovative, placing a value on keeping things the same because of having no written records, only an individual’s (not a community’s) memory to rely on. And so the list goes on to make a total of nine derivations of orality from the qualities of cognition, sound, and hearing. In a scathing critique, Jonathan Sterne called Ong’s comparison of so-called oral cultures to so-called visual ones ‘the audiovisual litany’. Sterne uses the phrase to underscore Ong’s theological background as a Catholic priest doing something akin to creating a liturgy to believe in, as opposed to Ong’s stated goal of deducing cognitively equivalent categories.28 Sterne’s essay has become somewhat of a stock response to any mention of classic orality, but its reification obscures another problem than crypto-Catholicism, namely the way the xenophobic fallacy creates a homogenous category of oral culture by failing to differentiate any cultures beyond his own with everything else transmogrified into a category rather than a vast pool of diversity, difference, and cultural and historical specificity.

The Xenophobic Fallacy The cultural chauvinism of classic orality has a long history and a much broader scope than this or that medium combined with the xenophobic fallacy. It stretches back at least to the Greeks and got honed by a fetish for science and a Cold War love of developmental, evolutionary models that served to directly compete with Marxism’s own developmental model.29 Tracing that genealogy is important to understanding oral culture as a historical category. Our ultimate goal here is not to dismiss the historical West or the global North, but to reveal the xenophobic fallacy that allows racism’s and colonialism’s ancestors to keep returning as the result of the xenophobic fallacy. Only once we address the fallacy can we pursue historically grounded understandings of oralities. Western scholarship has long marked its others: first as ‘barbarian’, then ‘savage’, then ‘primitive’, then ‘oral’ and its cousin, ‘developing’. Each of these terms started out as a neutral label for outsiders, but because of a categorical error built into the definition – the xenophobic fallacy – each gradually folded all sorts of prejudices into its successor until it too had to be replaced. We find this binary of insider/outsider at least back to the Athenian notion of ‘barbarian’. It first occurs in the Iliad. There, the Athenian Greek word barbarophonos meant ‘rough voiced’. It referred at first to the language of the Carians, who allied with the Trojans against the Athenians in the Trojan War. It meant approximately ‘the people whose speech sounded like “bar bar bar”’ to the Athenians. The geographer Strabo (64/63 bce–c. 24 ce) argued that the usage ‘was at first uttered onomatopoeically in reference to people who enunciated [Greek] words only with difficulty and talked harshly and raucously’.30 The earliest reference to barbarians that I have found comes from the same period that Jaynes and Havelock mark as a transformative period in the Greek thought. During this time, the meaning of ‘barbarian’ broadened to become a reference to any non-Greek. As we defined the xenophobic fallacy, there were two categories, ‘Greeks’ and ‘Everyone Else’.31

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Plato, writing in the historical voice of the Stranger of Elea, a follower of Parmenides (who was active early in the fifth century bce), pointed out the error in the Greek usage of ‘barbarian’ that is at the heart of the xenophobic fallacy: It was very much as if, in undertaking to divide the human race into two parts, one should make the division as most people in this country do; they separate the Hellenic race from all the rest as one and to all the other races, which are countless in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the single name ‘barbarian’; then, because of this single name, they think it is a single species.32 In much the same way, the classic theories of orality take literacy, and by implication, the Western intellectual tradition, as one exceptional category with a civilisation and a history, and everyone else is elided into orality. Aristotle wrote that Greek male citizens, by dint of their reasoned speaking (logos), became the only political animal. Hearing made logos possible, ‘for rational discourse is a cause of instruction in virtue of its being audible’. Other animals, as well as some people, had ‘mere voice’ as one translation puts it, or ‘bare voice’, a phrase that has gained considerable theoretical currency. The word for bare voice, phoné, should look familiar from our rough-voiced (barbarophonos) Carians of the Iliad. Logos sat at the conjuncture of voice and language, translatable as both speech and reason. According to Aristotle, free Greek male citizens alone possessed the faculty of logos. In contrast, phoné was the sound without real language or reason. Some dependent people, like women, slaves, or barbarians, were able to apprehend logos, but they did not possess it. Theirs was bare voice, more a sonic expression of feeling than reasoned articulation, but with comprehension enough, conveniently for the citizen men, to take instructions. Similarly, calling people barbarians placed them outside of logos and denied them the capacity for reasoned speech, locating barbarians in the xenophobic ‘everyone else’ category.33 As the Romans rose and conquered Greece and much more, ‘barbarian’ changed its scope again, coming to mean anyone not Greek or Roman. This definition, meant to take in all that was uncivilised, also began to falter when it became obvious that many of the barbarians within the Roman Empire were as ‘civilised’ as the Greeks and Romans. The rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome further complicated matters, and the terms ‘heathen’ and ‘infidel’ came into widespread usage to distinguish Christians from the ‘everyone else’ category.34 Another word, silvātĭcus – meaning ‘of or belonging to the woods’, with the connotation of wildness evolving into it – began to take hold to solve the insider/outsider problem. The barbarians of previous generations became ‘people of the forest’. The forest was an uncultivated place, and culture, cultivation, and civilisation were all caught up in one another. Silva, the root of the word, implied ‘a crowd, mass, abundance’. As the idea spread throughout the Christian world, it shifted in spelling and meaning, so that by the fourteenth century, Middle English had the word ‘savage’. When referring to land, it meant uncultivated, to animals, not domesticated, and to people, uncivilised. Savage people were fearless and violent, perhaps reckless, frenzied, or even mad, and most of all, not Christian, thus again reinserting the xenophobic fallacy into Christianity’s understanding of anyone outside the realm.35

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As in barbarism, sound played a central role in determining who was civil and who was savage, falling out along the xenophobic category of ‘us’ and ‘everyone else’ in much the same way as the Greeks distinguished logos and phoné. Seventeenth-century New England Puritans understood themselves to have landed in a ‘howling wilderness’.36 What was a wilderness that it howled? With twentieth-century notions of wilderness as a place devoid of people, the reader may first think of wolves, wind, and storms, but the Puritan notion was different. In part because they had not yet displaced them – the dispossession being a central and necessary component of creating today’s artificial wilderness spaces and their imagined soundscapes – the Puritan wilderness was teeming with human life. In short, what howled in the Puritan wilderness were those they considered savage, the Indigenous peoples whose land they were invading. A note on wilderness opens up the meaning of howling wilderness and connects it to the ideas of savagery and sound once it is associated with the howling part of the stock phrase. The wilderness was a savage place outside of belonging, where one was no longer properly possessed by Puritan Christianity and its God. The distinctions of social class and good and evil on which Puritan society depended for order fell away in the wilderness. It was a place where will – possibly the root of the word – replaced this order. It belonged to wild savages, who, not under the sway of the Puritan God, were by definition evil and of the devil. Far from realising the violence of their own incursions, English settlers across Eastern North America understood themselves as besieged by the wild and savage forces enveloping them. Like weeds on the edge of a cultured field, the wild was forever invading them rather than vice versa. To be clear, this self and other perception allowed settlers to justify their own violence: the wilderness served as a great screen (pardon the anachronistic metaphor) onto which they could project their own violence and give themselves a terrible and violencereinforcing fright by attributing it to the Indigenous peoples whose land they were on. The wilderness howled for New England Puritans and other English settlers in many ways. Native Americans, construed as ‘hellish fiends’, howled in the poet Michael Wigglesworth’s imagination. Serving as a Narragansett captive during Metacom’s War, Puritan Mary Rowlandson spoke of the Narragansetts as ‘a company of hell-hounds’ she described primarily through their non-linguistic (to her) sounds of ‘roaring, singing and dancing, and yelling’ that evoked ‘the howlings and Torments of the pitt beneath’. Travelling Narragansett parties met each other on the trails with ‘an outrageous roaring and hooping’. When her master’s child died away, mourners came not to grieve with the mother, but to ‘howl with her’. Not to make xenophobia a purely white phenomenon, Recollect Missionary Chrestien Le Clerq reported that Micmac people of eastern Canada thought the French sounded like ducks and geese to them since they all talked over one another, unlike the Micmac emphasis on listening and turn-taking. Savages were the opposite of civil during the age of exploration and the Enlightenment. Even the noble savages of Montesquieu and Rousseau were no more than the negative definitions of the worst of civilisation. The point is not that savages were valued as good or bad, but that because of the xenophobic fallacy, they served as a foil for the civil rather than carrying any meaning of their own. This should be familiar since it is the same figure/ground dynamic that inserts the xenophobic fallacy into the classic theories of orality and literacy. Actual explorers tended to speak of Native Americans in more specific terms. John Smith, for example, referred to the Powhatan Indians as ‘savages’ but would go beyond generalisations to provide specific observations about

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particular peoples (along with massive fabulations in other places, lest we mislabel him as a reliable source). Nonetheless, explorers and their contemporary pundits both called Native Americans ‘savages’ far more than they used ‘Indian’ or the Indigenous names. Although actual experience with Indigenous peoples complicated the picture, exploration, Christianity, an insatiable drive for wealth, and a superiority complex all went together in sounding the Indigenous people of the Americas and elsewhere as savage, leaving opportunities for colonialism and exploitation rife as well as righteous. Critics of this reading of the term ‘savage’ have argued that it is anachronistic to impute the negative values (the taboos of the TEP cycle) since it just meant ‘people of the forest’, but this misses the slow tidal shifts in TEP processes.37 ‘Savage’ may have begun as a somewhat neutral way of referring to forest people, but it picked up its negative connotations from the failure to examine the xenophobic fallacy, pushing ‘savage’ from euphemism to pejorative over time. In the Virginia colony, a tenuous proposition for its first few decades, our unreliable reliable narrator John Smith described Powhatan ceremonies as ‘howling devotions’ made by ‘devils’. William Strachey, another early Virginia leader, only heard ‘shouting, howling and stamping their feet’ in a similar ceremony he witnessed. Our ubiquitous ‘hello’, a linguistic artefact of telephony, meant a loud greeting in the wilderness rather than the polite answer to a point-topoint audio signal. In a sort of folk etymological assemblage, seventeenth-century English usage remixed hello with howling and hollering, and perhaps hailing, as when Smith was about to be captured by the Powhatan war leader Opechancanough and he heard a ‘halloing of Indians’. Back in New England, where second- and third-generation Puritan missionaries experimented with turning Indigenous converts into subservient second-class worshipers, minister John Eliot collaborated on a Massachusetts-language Bible translation with the English- and Massachusetts-speaking Sassamon. Eliot reduced his vital collaborator to ‘Printer John’ on the title page in a move both civilising – by dint of the Christian name – and silencing – by dint of the reduction of Massachusetts speech to print and having Sassamon occupy that role as ‘printer John’. Eliot’s phonetic scheme for pronouncing the language relied on a similar reduction, this time of the sounds of Massachusetts to Latin orthography. This even though the Massachusetts language had a number of phonemes that simply do not exist in the European languages Eliot knew. This sort of micro-colonial practice of subsuming the sounds of one language into the Procrustean bed of another, and then lopping off all the sounds which did not fit, recalls Robinson’s idea of inclusionary collaboration, where Western music incorporates rather than converses with the Indigenous music of collaborators. Racism steeped in cultural chauvinism sat at the root of TEP as barbarism developed into savagery. It took a darker and more visual turn in the nineteenth century, as the xenophobic fallacy got folded into biological racism and some of the worst of European and US colonial endeavours. Although there is not much of a sonic element (perhaps future research can find it), a quick review is necessary to set up the return of the ear with the introduction of classic orality as the corrective. Here, the historically conscious self was the ‘Caucasian’ race and the semi-homogenous others were the ‘Negroid’ and ‘Mongoloid’ races. One set of theories made a hard distinction between the capacities of the races, like Aristotle’s differentiation of logos and phoné, while a second took a developmental approach, arguing that the non-white races were simply at an earlier stage of development than the ‘Caucasian’ race.38 This latter

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version provides a handy moral justification for colonisation and proselytism, and its heirs persist in developmental models today. In the twentieth century, two new strands of anthropology, pioneered in the United States by Franz Boas and his students, and in Europe by the structuralist movement, adopted a stance – at first partially and with much hedging – of the newly minted idea of cultural relativism, meaning that cultures were all different but equally valuable, and they needed to be studied in their specifics through research in the field. As part of this set of innovations, the term ‘savage’ was retired because of its by-then-obvious racism. Here we seem to have a hint of the cultural if not historical specificity recent BIPOC scholarship has established as necessary to understand orality, although the approach was still decidedly etic, or outsider-led. In place of ‘savage’, the anthropologists used the more-neutral-at-first notion of ‘primitive’ to evacuate the racism from the older term. Both European and US anthropologists understood history as faintly audible and receding into silence in so-called primitive societies, so they sought to record elders first and capture hints of what their critics have called the golden past. These faint echoes of the past were offset by a deep dive – in the structuralist case, quite literally – into the idea of deep structure. What the structuralists found was a sort of universal ‘primitive mind’ which manifested in countless and varied presentday expressions. Thus, anthropologists ported the xenophobic fallacy back in, covered over by a patina of cultural relativism.39 The rise of fieldwork-based anthropology incorporated the new sound recording technologies of the early twentieth century to capture the voices of the newly minted others, ‘primitive’ people. These early recordings were utterly decontextualised. The machines required a set if not yet a studio to make successful recordings. A speaker would have to converse with the attached recording horn (later the microphone) in an artificially quiet isolated setting.40 This may have been part of the origins of oral history’s tendency to pull interviewees out of their community context and record them alone. Once racism had been imported into the idea of the primitive by way of the xenophobic fallacy, it required a new euphemism, which brings us back to Ong’s notion of orality. Ong thought of his formulation as emancipating orality from the cultural baggage that had attached itself to ‘primitive’ in the same way that ‘primitive’ had distanced itself from ‘savage’. Changing the name to orality but leaving the xenophobic fallacy intact means that the taboos of racism and colonialism will yet again find their way into whatever the new euphemism is unless the taboos of the TEP process are directly and uncomfortably confronted, as happened in the cases of classic orality, savagery, and barbarism before.

Conclusion In fact, there are no such ‘oral’ people as McLuhan, Ong, and Goody posit. This does not mean there is no such thing as orality. What it means is that there are as many oralities as there are peoples. As discussed at the beginning, oralities must be carefully situated in their historical and cultural contexts. And the xenophobic fallacy must be recognised as an uncomfortably still-present practice that keeps reimporting racism and colonialism into the new terms through the TEP process. The xenophobic process

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makes this happen through its tendency towards reducing heterogeneous cultures into a single homogenous other. This has led to some confusion, as many white scholars still think of oral culture as a unified thing with a universal set of qualities. Thus, white theorists can speak of the orality while at the same time scholars from within cultures that have substantial and specific histories use the same term, and the two are able to speak past each other with neither realising they are speaking and meaning different things. Simply criticising oral culture without addressing the xenophobic fallacy can quickly lead to conflict and misunderstanding. Nor are oralities and literacies (for they also are plural) mutually exclusive. Oralities are alive and well, not only in BIPOC cultures and communities, but in the white Western world. Standard English pronunciation still pulls a great weight in the United States as does Received Pronunciation in Great Britain. The sounds of these dialects become the unmarked case, considered as just ‘English’ rather than an orality combined with global power relations. In another example, a situated orality is emerging in a distinctive form in gaming. Players speak to each other over an audio channel as part of gameplay since their hands and eyes are too busy to type or read. The speech patterns are informal but reflect white, straight, male, and cis-gendered as a tenuous norm with strong emotional responses evoked if, for example, a woman or a nonnative speaker out themselves through their voices. These spaces are still working out their protocols but racism, sexism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia are all rampant and on the surface. As they become suppressed into taboos, we can expect the TEP process to start its cycle. It will be interesting to listen for whether the xenophobic fallacy creeps in to this new configuration of orality when the world is increasingly globally connected as it is in the gaming universe. Orality remains alive and well despite the onslaught of print and literacy, and, being part of the human condition, it is not limited to this culture but not that one (with the possible exception of the deaf community). The purpose of this critical essay is to historically situate the myriad oralities in place and time to jettison the xenophobic fallacy, not to besmirch the Western intellectual tradition but to take part in the hard work of continuing to decolonise the academy.41 Once that process is engaged, it becomes clear that classic orality as it is conceived in the Western intellectual tradition is a flawed concept and that Europeans and their American descendants have their own thriving oral cultures too. The classic theories of orality asserted that the need for deduction rather than evidence derives from the ephemerality of sound and speech. Historical work on sound studies belies this, as does the newer scholarship on orality by BIPOC authors working from within cultures rather than seeking to penetrate them. Without overtly addressing the xenophobic fallacy, the taboo items – in our discussion, mostly racism, colonialism, and their ancestors – will creep back in. Centring the work of BIPOC authors goes a long way towards correcting it, but to take hold and grow, white scholars and their kin will need to confront and reject the racism that the xenophobic fallacy continually and unconsciously reintroduces through the TEP process. This goes well beyond rejecting particular terms such as orality or civilisation to attend to the underlying pattern of lazily constructing an all-encompassing other as a coherent category. The belief in a singular literacy and a singular orality is hubris: exceptionalism that needs to be checked and replaced with myriad oral and literate cultures set in their own contexts and histories.

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Notes   1. Richard Cullen Rath, ‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): 417–31.   2. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).   3. The term ‘BIPOC’, which seems to have been coined on Twitter in 2013 but has come into prevalence more recently, since about 2019, stands for ‘Black, Indigenous, and People of Colo[u]r’. See Sandra E. Garcia, ‘Where Did BIPOC Come From?’, New York Times, 17 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html. The term is meant as a unifying umbrella for anti-racist, self-determination, and decolonising work that is set on its own terms rather than in reference to the oppression that the term is deployed to oppose. In contrast to ‘non-white’, BIPOC distinguishes the component groups rather than defining them by a lack or absence. If one writes about a particular group, South Asians, African Americans (although there is some criticism that this term should be replaced by ‘Black people’), or Diné (Navaho), then the more specific term is used instead. There is a mistaken belief that the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ grammatically subordinates People of Colour to the experiences of Black and Indigenous people. This holds within some anti-racist work as well as among advocates of more traditional terminology. For a starting point, see the Wikipedia entry for BIPOC within the definition of ‘People of Colour’ at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color#BIPOC_2. In a coordinate clause, which BIPOC is, all the components are equal. To make the claim of inequality hold any sway, the phrase would need to be ‘Black and Indigenous, and (then) People of Colour’. Time will tell whether usage overcomes grammar in privileging the experiences of Black and Indigenous people over other People of Colour. Germane to this essay, BIPOC is a set of umbrella terms comprising an umbrella term. Except when using it as a unifying term in decolonial, antiracist, and self-determination solidarity work, the most specific term that a people call themselves is preferred to the umbrella term: e.g., it is preferable to write ‘Dakota’ when speaking of Dakota people rather than ‘Sioux’ (imposed name), or Native American, or even the currently preferred umbrella term, ‘Indigenous’. This somewhat future-proofs one’s terminology, as specific names age much more gracefully than umbrella terms.   4. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2.   5. Ibid., 3.   6. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York: Methuen, 1982), 48–56.   7. John Algeo and Carmen A. Butcher, The Origins and Development of the English Language (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2013), 235.  8. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London; Portsmouth: J. Currey; Heinemann, 1986) (orature); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) (cyberture); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992). The best entry point for pidgin and creole studies is the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).  9. For an introduction to oral history ‘classic’ methodology that emphasises the aural throughout, see Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader, 3rd edn, Routledge Readers in History (London; New York: Routledge, 2016). 10. For an introduction to the ideas of ‘emic’ used here and ‘etic’, used below, see Dell Hymes, ‘Emics, Etics, and Openness: An Ecumenical Approach’, in Emics and Etics: The Insider– Outsider Debate, ed. Thomas M. Headland, Kenneth Lee Pike, and Marvin Harris (Newbury Park: Sage, 1990), 120–6, along with the other essays in that volume.

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11. Cynthia Kanoelani Kenui, ‘Na Kānaka Maoli: The Indigenous People of Hawai‘i’, in Diversity in Human Interactions: The Tapestry of America, ed. John D. Robinson and Larry C. James (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–110. 12. Nēpia Mahuika, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Oxford Oral History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/ oso/9780190681685.001.0001; North Shore Field School, https://northshorefieldschool.org/ (accessed 26 June 2022); ‘Center for Oral History, Ethnic Studies (ES), UH Mānoa, Hawai’i’, Ethnic Studies (ES), UH Mānoa, Hawai’i, https://ethnicstudies.manoa.hawaii.edu/centerfor-oral-history (accessed 27 June 2022); Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives, trans. Wahpetunwin Carolyn Schommer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Melissa K. Nelson, ‘Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 229–60 (40), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373162. 13. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 14. Ibid.; Peg Rawes, ‘Sonic Envelopes’, Senses and Society 3, no. 1 (2008): 61–76. 15. Lori Ann Garner, ‘Representations of Speech in the WPA Slave Narratives of Florida and the Writings of Zora Neale Hurston’, Western Folklore 59, no. 3/4 (2000): 215–31; Toniesha Taylor, ‘Saving Sound, Sounding Black, Voicing America: John Lomax and the Creation of the “American Voice”’, Sounding Out!, 8 June 2015, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/06/08/ john-lomax-and-the-creation-of-the-american-voice/; Sterling A. Brown, ‘On Dialect Usage’, in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 37–9. The rest of this book remains an excellent starting point for using the WPA Narratives well. 16. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, ‘Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies’, Sounding Out! (blog), 6 August 2018, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-the-colorof-sound-studies/; Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Marie Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1 339967. 17. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 18. The quickest way to catch up on critical responses to Jaynes is ‘Book Reviews’, Julian Jaynes Society (blog), https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/book-reviews/ (accessed 22 June 2022). 19. Edmund Carpenter introduces the idea of acoustic space in an ethnocentric reading of Inuit sensory ways in Eskimo Realities (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 33–5 and ‘Eskimo Space Concepts’, Explorations 5 (June 1955): 131–45. The most explicit, still ethnocentric, but also still useful for opening up the idea of acoustic space is Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, in Explorations in Communication: An Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 65–70, https://archive.org/details/explorationsinco00carp. On the accuracy of Inuit maps, see Robert A. Rundstrom, ‘A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy’, Geographical Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 155–68. 20. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 21. For the origins of the family tree model and the wave theory critique, see William Labov, ‘Transmission and Diffusion’, Language 83 (2007): 344–87; Winfred P. Lehmann, ‘August Schleicher’, in A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics,

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Indiana University Studies in the History and Theory of Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 87–96; and Guus Meijer and Pieter Muysken, ‘On the Beginnings of Pidgin and Creole Studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling’, in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, ed. Albert Valdman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 21–45. The ideas are also still being played out in post-structuralist theory drawing the idea of genealogy in Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100; and the rhizomatic model of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London; New York: Continuum, 2004). 22. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 1982). 23. Plato, ‘Republic’, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (London: William Heinemann, 1969), vols 5–6, books 2, 3, 10, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts. edu (hereafter PDL). 24. Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 9:274–76, PDL. 25. McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy. 26. The initial theory is laid out in the groundbreaking and influential article by Jack Goody and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (1963): 304–45; Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 27. The relevant literature is ably and concisely covered by Daniel Chandler, ‘Biases of the Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism’ (c. 1994), http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel//Documents/litoral/litoral1.html (accessed 20 July 2023). For rejection of Goody, see Carol Fleischer Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in Orality and Literacy, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 47–65 as well as the rest of the essays in that volume; and Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 28. The initial work is Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, The Terry Lectures A Clarion Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970); summarised in Ong, Orality and Literacy, 36–56. For ‘the litany’, see Jonathan Sterne, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of Communication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25; and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14–18. 29. Giovanni E. Reyes, ‘Four Main Theories of Development: Modernization, Dependency, World-Systems, and Globalization’, Nómadas: Critical Journal of Social and Juridical Sciences 4, no. 2 (2001): 109–24. 30. For barbarophonos, βαρβαροφώνων, see Homer, The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), book 2, l. 867; Walter Leaf, ‘Commentary on the Iliad’, in The Iliad, ed. Walter Leaf (London: Macmillan, 1900), commentary to book 2, l. 867; Thomas D. Seymour, ‘Commentary on Homer’s Iliad, Books I–III’, in Homer’s Iliad: Books I.–III. (Boston: Ginn, 1891), commentary to book 2, l. 867; Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. βαρβα^ρό-φωνος; Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. βαρβαρόφωνος φωνή; Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges, s.v. βαρβαρό – φωνος; Strabo, trans. A. T. Murray, book 14, chapter 2, section 28 (all the above from PDL); and OED Online, https://www.oed.com, s.v. barbarous. 31. This can be tracked through its 335 occurrences in PDL. 32. Plato, ‘The Statesman’, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 12:262, PDL; emphasis added.

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33. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London; Cambridge, MA: W. Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1944), 1253a–55, quote from 1260a, PDL; Aristotle, ‘De Sensu’, in The Parva Naturalia, trans. John I. Beare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 437.a.12 (on hearing and reason). For the theoretical and political implications of bare voice, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7–8. 34. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1975), 3–14, 43–57. 35. ‘Savāğe’, in Electronic Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/; Charlton Lewis, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary; Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Co., 1890), s.v. silva (all of the above from PDL); OED Online, s.v. sylvan n. and adj., savage adj. and n.1. 36. Unless otherwise noted, this and the following three paragraphs are distilled from Rath, How Early America Sounded, 145–52. All primary source references can be found there in the notes on pp. 213–15. 37. For a negatively valued analysis of the civil/savage binary, see Jennings, Invasion of America. For the observation that actual explorers were more specific and particular than armchair pundits, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). For an excellent summary of recent arguments about savage and civil that overestimates the neutrality of the term ‘savage’ in seventeenthcentury North America, see Thomas G. M. Peace, ‘Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage in the Writing of Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith’, French Colonial History 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–20. 38. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Walter D. Mignolo picks up on this idea in an American context in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). On biological racism, see George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: H. Fertig, 1978). Although it spends little time on orality per se, the best starting point for understanding the connections between sound and racism in the nineteenth-century United States remains Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 39. Regna Darnell, The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in North America, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021). 40. Sterne covers the artificiality of early ethnographic recording in Audible Past, 311–24. 41. While some of the newer works have been discussed, the classics Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999) remain touchstones and excellent starting points for this work.

Select Bibliography Carpenter, Edmund and Marshall McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, in Explorations in Communication, an Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 65–70, https://archive.org/details/explorationsinco00carp. Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya, ‘Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies’, Sounding Out! (blog), 6 August 2018, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-thecolor-of-sound-studies/.

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Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Mahuika, Nēpia, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, Oxford Oral History Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/ oso/9780190681685.001.0001. Nelson, Melissa K., ‘Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 229–60, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373162. Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York: Methuen, 1982). Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler, Perseus Digital Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 9:227–79, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Rath, Richard Cullen, ‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): 417–31. Steingo, Gavin and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Sterne, Jonathan, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of Communication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25. Thompson, Marie, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967.

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Part II: Literature, Music, Performance

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5 Notes to Literature: Scores as Musical Reproduction in the Literary Text Tamlyn Avery

Music, Modernism, and the Material Text Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. [. . .] Whether you are [. . .] like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee [. . .] such a noise is cheap at two shillings.1

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nder the guise of the Schlegel siblings’ attendance at a symphonic concert in London, chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) offers a masterclass in musical listening. Although scholars have foregrounded Helen Schlegel’s late Romantic literary ‘reading’ of Beethoven’s Fifth as indicative of modernism’s anti-traditionalist reconfiguration of music’s archaic social forms,2 Tibby’s actions here touch on deeper crises of meaning regarding modernism’s internalisation of sound. Tibby’s historical formalism diverges from his sisters’ listening habits; he practises what in music theory is called structural listening by retaining a critical distance to the musical object, approaching meaning through a historically informed intellectual analysis of structure and form, blocking out all sensual responses to musical sound. Tibby’s structural listening inadvertently comes closest to reflecting how modernism perceived music within the commotion of modernity. If musical scores are reproductions that illuminate ‘the differing implications of the ideals of sound, notation and rendition respectively’,3 this is what Tibby hears as he mutes the ‘noise’ of a musical text that has been reduced to memorable ‘tunes’ valued at two shillings (which is all Mrs Munt, his English aunt, hears). He seeks a ‘true reproduction’ of Beethoven’s Fifth by embracing the ‘ideal of silent music-making’: the sole means of transcending ‘the utter destruction of the sensual phenomenon of music through mass reproduction’, according to Theodor Adorno.4 To liberate the commodified artwork and the listener from their alienation, listening must turn inwards and the music fall silent. As a symbolic figure in modernist literature and the contemporary philosophy of sound, the reproduced musical score activated a mode of structural listening whereby the information the artwork communicates is approached critically and logically, rather than sensually and affectively. For Adorno, solving the riddle ‘What is the relationship between musical notation and writing?’ was essential to resolving the theoretical question

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mark overhanging the status of music and literature within a modernising print culture.5 That question reoriented music’s status as predominantly a sounding, non-signifying art that literature jealously aspired to emulate. Although for millennia, Western music and literature had been intrinsically linked under the Hellenic interart of oral mousike, the development of writing systems in both arts is said to have gradually severed that bond.6 The modernisation of those writing systems, including the development of more sophisticated reproductive capabilities for inscribing, printing, and disseminating texts, led to subsequent formal innovations that only widened that imaginary chasm.7 From the 1860s, interart hybridity was further revolutionised by the expansion of the grand opera and Richard Wagner’s totalising vision of the artwork of the future, reconfiguring literary innovation’s association with the sounding arts. By 1873 Walter Pater could claim that ‘all art constantly aspires to the condition of music’, apprehending the moderns’ aspiration to achieve ‘the perfect identification of matter and form’ that instrumental music alone ostensibly produced.8 Pater’s axiom exemplifies how ‘instrumental music’ tended to mystify aesthetics that used ‘semantically oriented theories developed to describe meaning in the representational arts’.9 Concerned that unlike other artforms, poetry had no ‘undefiled language’ distinct from its functional usage, Stéphane Mallarmé also considered musical notation a pure ‘means of mystery’, as he and other French symbolists devised a concept of verse-music that might ‘depict, not the thing, but the effect it produces’.10 Classical music, broadly defined, was thus seen to stand ‘for what cannot be put into words’, by mimetically ‘transmitting meanings directly to the listener, and transcending language by communicating through form’.11 Modernism’s tendency to privilege musical composition as a metaphor for disrupting writing and reading practices was symptomatic of a recent crisis of cultural aesthetics catalysed by the evolving soundscape of modern noise. Music was now to be read, and literature listened to. Internal to this transition towards a materialist view of music was a need to rethink the properties of sound, driven by the understanding that art internalises the forces of production. Noise mediates the political, and thus maps onto subversive social categories which music and literature attempt, with limited success, to contain. Noise is feminized; it is nationalized; it is racialized; it is heard as a symptom of colonial disruption, changing urban demographics, technological intrusion into the home. The process of ordering noise musically, then, takes on the project of hierarchizing it.12 As part of that musical project, concepts of ‘dissonance and rhythm circulated as ways for modernist art to enhance the interactive exchange between a text and the subversive or abject cultural presence of noise’.13 Composition was another influential concept to that end: as a symbol of abstract sounds that exist, on one level, only in the mind itself, the musical score offered literature additional metaphoric possibilities for regulating the artwork’s internalisation of noise. One intriguing response to the crises of representation incited by industrial modernity’s noisy soundscapes was to infuse literary typescripts with the visible, material, and textual reproduction of music: the score. Reproductions of musical scores regularly appeared in modernist literature;14 less frequently than verbal ekphrasis or mimesis, yet pervasively enough to indicate a coherent textual strategy that coalesced with modernism’s objective to make it new by reimagining, remediating, and relating

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various traditions, techniques, and technologies. The reproduction of actual scores in places where they are generically novels – in poems, or novels – shifted the emphasis from music as sheer sensuality to more perplexing questions of how texts communicate sound in similar and distinctive ways to literature, certainly after it had deserted what Forster called the ‘tape-worm’ of narrative. A. J. Carruthers advises that musical notation in literature addresses ‘sound’ as much ‘as silence, or the withdrawal of sound from silence’, signalling moments of crises of representation.15 For it is ‘when musical ekphrasis fails, when poetic descriptions of musical sound fail to produce or adequately grasp their sonic object, that staves begin to crop up’ to provide ‘analogous substitute[s] for musical metaphors and allegory on the one hand, and the purer description of sound on the other’.16 Mark Byron likewise finds that literary scoring exposes ‘complex relations between artworks and between artistic media’ whilst unsettling ‘the status of the literary text and its intersection with the musical score’.17 Because the score’s representational system also features mimetic limitations – its semiotics represent but can never reproduce the live sounds of the Real – its appearance in the literary text forms a concentrated image of the historical pressures, anxieties of form, and crises of representation that interartistic innovation could not resolve. In what follows, I consider how Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees, and Georgia Douglas Johnson incorporated reproductions of scores to rewrite the social history of forms in which they worked. For these authors, to address the question of whether literary scores as ‘notional experiments are really meant to be sounded, or (also) sighted’18 was to rethink music’s position in modernism as a source of abstract, immaterial, or pure sound. Given how other technologies within modern communication systems including the telegraph, phonograph, and typewriter have shaped our understanding of modernism and sound,19 I argue that the textual materiality and optics of musical reproduction, and not only the mimetic or ekphrastic representation of its sounds, have been more crucial in shaping modernism’s soundscape than previously recognised in either literary or sound studies.

The Musica Practica of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Increasingly, the modernist artwork recognised how the musical score and the literary text may both depict an imagined ‘sequence of sounds ordered in time’; however, musical and literary sign systems organise such sequences ‘according to different criteria’.20 Even at its most surrealistic, symbolistic, or nonsensical, literature remains dependent on denotation. It thus ‘determines sets of semantic correspondents that are utterly foreign to the musical score’, which operates ‘a code for ordering sounds in time according to certain of their physical characteristics’, without a clear ‘codified semantic function’, Eric Prieto explains.21 Because ‘there can be no literal contact between music and literature short of the actual superimposition of the two’, as in vocal music, ‘the only relationship that can obtain between music and literature is a metaphorical one’.22 Literary scores were used to formulate the ‘modern’ phenomenology of novel reading and musical listening within a modernising discourse network through another order of superimposition, by destabilising habitual reading practices and ontologies. Although before the twentieth century, the interplay of notes and letters in literature already illustrated the aesthetic repercussions of a modernising print culture,23

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it was only after 1900 that literary scores formed a coherent collective responsive to the mounting pressures of mechanical reproduction upon artistic production. The modernist literary score insisted that music exists not only as the notes musicians play, or the sound-making that spectators consume, but as a third ‘inaudible’ category of music that we ‘grasp’, not by observing a ‘performance or hearing, but’ through a method of ‘reading’ Roland Barthes called ‘musica practica’.24 Although unlike Tibby Schlegel or Adorno, we need not ‘sit with a Beethoven score and get from it an inner recital’, in ‘reading’ music, we are no longer ‘receiving’ or ‘feeling’ music but ‘writing anew’ that ‘inaudible music’, now ‘rediscovered, modified according to the movement of the historical dialectic’, manoeuvring the reader into ‘the position of an operator, who knows how to displace, assemble, combine’, and ‘structure’ meaning.25 A clear example of literary modernism’s facilitation of such musica practica is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Although it is written in prose constructed of paragraphs, sentences, words, letters, and punctuation – not composed in staves, clefs, time signatures, notes, or symbols and letters belonging to music’s language conventions – Joyce described that novel as ‘pure music’ because it demanded comparable deconstruction to musical scores.26 Adorno noted how the ‘new art’ movement Joyce represented could be distinguished by its non-discursive prose, which instigated ‘the transformation of communicative’ language of everyday reporting ‘into mimetic language’.27 Similarly, Jacques Derrida chose the French word portées – referring to both reaches and musical scores, words united only in homophony but which under closer inspection cast the other’s meaning in new light – to describe what ‘Finnegans Wake represents with respect to all the culture, all the history and all the languages it condenses’, which is that even under ‘the ruse of the invented word’ language always retains ‘the greatest possible

Figure 5.1  Page from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Oxford University Press.

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memory’.28 Joyce’s prose reaches for the ‘pure music’ a score represents, as it disassembles the functional denotation of syntax used for interpersonal communication, to simulate the immediacy of the mind’s processing and how the psyche constructs reality through language and association. Yet, if Finnegans Wake is a novel and not ‘pure music’, what of that one curious instance, following a series of sound-images and onomatopoeias, when words settle into the configuration of musical staves and notes (Figure 5.1)? This song – Joyce’s original composition – appears in chapter 2 of book 1, as the apotheosis of the many flagrant rumours that have been circulating throughout Dublin until this point regarding the moral misconduct of the protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker; rumours that are here given musical expression by Hosty.29 The score intersects with the analytical procedures demanded by the novel’s dense tapestry of musical mimesis, allusions, and ideograms; one reason why Joyce has been a key figure in theorising how when ‘twentieth-century novelists’ adopted musical influences, they viewed musical inference ‘as a source of models for rethinking the plot-based forms that have traditionally governed the novel’.30 This includes the semiotic interplay of notes and letters suggested by the protagonist’s initials, HCE, a musical cryptogram akin to J. S. Bach’s signature motif BACH (in German musicology referring to the notes B♭–A–C– B♮).31 ‘The Ballad of Persee O’Reilly’, along with the score of the ballad ‘Little Harry Hughes’ and the medieval neume of ‘Gloria’ in the ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ sections respectively in Ulysses, are just three examples of over 3,000 song references throughout Joyce’s oeuvre,32 suggesting his preoccupation with hybrid verse-music forms that interfuse notes and letters. In bringing musical semiotics into the cryptic fabric of the novel’s linguistic sign system, Finnegans Wake’s literary score forms a concentrated image of the novel’s methodology of combined structural listening and musica practica: of historical formalism and textual deconstruction. Although Joyce’s score does not presume musical literacy, its appearance clearly disrupts how the narrative encasing it is to be read, disentangling the ‘differing implications of the ideals of sound, notation, and rendition’.33 In parsing the score’s intricate ‘codology’, Zack Bowen and Alan Roughley observe the difficulties in imagining the ballad’s full harmonic progression and thus the song’s mood. Given only the melodic line is supplied, the score obstructs adaptation and performance.34 The lyric’s transhistorical periodisation mirrors the possible harmonic structure underpinning the melody, which passes through modern musical keys and early modern modes. Beginning in A major, the song modulates halfway through the fourth bar (‘and curled up’) into the tonic A harmonic minor key, as suggested by the otherwise redundant G♯ marking in that bar, which the key signature already includes. The final five bars modulate again into what appears to be the Aeolian scale, a minor mode without any sharps also beginning on A, first popularised in sixteenth-century street music. Although the melody ends on the tonic, it is unclear whether the song ends in the minor or returns to the original major key, provoking tonal ambivalence and historical indeterminacy. The melody does not reflect the essence of any particular musical period, paralleling how the Miltonic dialectic interspersed with ‘modern’ neologisms and syntagms produces an etymologically unplaceable language peculiarly outside of history. The da capo sign in the final bar indicates that the reader should return immediately to the anacrusis with which the piece began, and repeat the melody, this time mapping the additional strophes supplied beneath the score onto the

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same melody. The simple melody lends itself easily to mnemonic conservation for its possible reproduction as performance. Nevertheless, the harmonic indeterminacy, the incompatibility of the melodic notes and the lyric’s rhythms as the strophe progresses, and the absence of any tempo marking (although the jaunty rhythms and 6/8 time signature imply liveliness) all indicate that the literary score on various levels resists performability.35 As Finnegans Wake’s language aspires or reaches towards the effects of musical scoring, in Derrida’s sense, the text draws awareness to how musical and literary language construct and convey history, memory, and myth in the mind. Of Ulysses, Josh Torabi argues that Joyce ‘[entwines] the mythic and contemporary, to convey music in language, and present the inner psychological and out-urban reality in all its minutiae, in an encyclopedic attempt to faithfully evoke the universal form of the mundanity of everyday life’.36 The anti-Semitic ballad ‘Little Harry Hughes’ that Stephen sings in response to Bloom’s rendition of ‘Hatikvah’, sung with ‘defective mnemotechnic’, suggests how ‘Joyce introduces musical notation to detract from the meaning of the lyrics and therefore cement the well-established view that “Ithaca,” for all its rigorous scientific discourse, leads the reader astray as we focus on the wrong details.’37 This assessment clearly applies to Finnegans Wake’s literary score, too. Joyce looked to the novel, rather than Wagnerian drama, as the ideal form through which to ‘[reject] romantic historicist notions of myth’,38 as he widened the possibilities of that form by adopting musical properties including scoring whilst refusing the idealisation of ‘pure music’. Joyce’s literary scores demand more active conceptual processing of their hybrid sign system on the interpreter’s part, whilst ultimately provoking indirection, misreading, and an unclosed framework of meaning. Joyce, it seems, looked to musical composition as a model of how ‘to organize noise’ and ‘its homologous social elements’,39 and disorganise them, by recognising that musical scores, like literary texts, mediate history as distorted, fragmented images of an unrecoverable past.

Pound’s Notes Containing History Due to sound’s ephemerality, musical texts require extra-musical elements to signify abstract sonic phenomena, including some use of lettering and words, leaving it dependent over time on analogous critical hermeneutics to literary interpretation, and raising issues of reproduction.40 Because musical texts are densely mediated, how one ought to interpret the information they contain is not always clear, leaving the passive ear and mind open to ideological interference. Structural listening formed one hermeneutics of difficulty that could potentially expose ‘all the relations, all aspects of context, contrast, and construction that lie hidden beneath the surface of the perceptible sound’.41 Because the ‘difficulty of accounting for music in language [made] music appealing to the modernist writer, not just because difficulty itself was perceived as a virtue, but also because music seemed to enable more active modes of interpretation’,42 this explains why musical composition also became an important model for the poet and composer Ezra Pound, who in 1917 decreed that poets ‘who will not study music are defective’.43 Pound’s statement reflected a growing musicological consensus on poetry’s relationship to the compositional principles of musical reproduction. As Figure 5.2 illustrates, his co-editor Harriet Monroe pre-empted Pound’s sentiments in promoting a classification system for scanning ‘poetic rhythm on the basis of musical notation’,44

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Figure 5.2  Excerpt from Harriet Monroe, ‘Rhythms of English Verse, II’, in Poetry. advising that poets probe ‘the elements and laws of that verse-music which must be an instinct with them’, rather than adhere to the iambs, anapests, and trochees that had hitherto constrained English verse.45 Like Monroe, Pound sought a systematic poetics derived from musical composition, later defining music as ‘a composition of frequencies, microphonic and macrophonic’ that are governed by the temporal laws of what he called absolute rhythm and Great Bass.46 Pound’s intervention into the metaphysical properties of soundmaking emphasised the materiality of textual composition as the regulation of sound frequencies in music and poetry.47 Because poetry shared music’s temporal attributes, it should be understood as ‘a composition of words set to music’, not reduced to some ‘metaphysical’ definition, as in vers libre. Pound noted how poetry ‘“dries out” when it leaves music, or at least an imagined music, too far behind it’, meaning it should ‘be read as music and not as oratory’, not ‘that the words should’ congeal into ‘a sort of onomatopoeic paste’.48 Amending vers libre’s idealised conception of verse-music, Pound sought a materialist poetics to examine the technical operations that connect the internal ideation of the ‘thing’ to the external ‘effect’, as those operations convey an artwork’s passage to conception. This contextualises why The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV–LXXXIV) visually disconcert the typographical conventionalisms of words and notes to rethink their semiotic functions. Pound’s theoretic intervention applied most clearly in Canto LXXV. It is composed of seven lines of poetry, followed by a reproduction of a musical score (Figure 5.3): a two-page photocopy of his associate Gerhart Münch’s violin study of the French medieval composer Clément Janequin’s polyphonic choral work ‘Le Chant

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des Oiseaux’, an adaptation which Münch based on Francesco de Milano’s arrangement for solo lute (c. 1475). Like Joyce, Pound reproduces a musical work that is deeply mediated, and thus demands more active inspection of its provenance, composition, and reproduction, whilst rebelling against literature’s two-dimensional surfaces without ever transcending them. Münch composed the piece for violinist Olga Rudge to perform as part of a concert series Pound co-organised, held in Rapallo in 1933.49 Some of these programmes juxtaposed avant-garde music with early modern and medieval counterparts, whilst others focused on a historic composer’s entire oeuvre, to reveal a composer’s or period’s concealed essence.50 This programming derived out of similar concerns over mimesis and musical reproduction expressed by Adorno – known to Münch, if not to Pound. Writing of Guido’s revolutionary ‘merging’ of letters and notation within the neumic stave, Adorno argued that the most precise score retains, as an image, an element of neumic ambiguity, and even the most precise specification retains an element of that significative rigidity which threatens to kill the very thing it has resolved to save. [. . .] [E]ven pictorial fidelity has an element of rigid lettering, and the most precise specification an element of ambiguity.51 The wider the historical passage between texts and interpreters, the more ambiguous its meaning becomes. ‘Pure signification is unattainable through writing’, meaning that the ‘history of musical notation is an attempt to reach a synthesis between unambiguity and immediacy’.52 If the Rapallo concerts were intended to close the chasm between the modern audience and the original source lost to history’s abyss, such is the effect of Canto LXXV’s literary score.

Figure 5.3  Page from Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV. New Directions.

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Proximately positioned as an extension of the stanza, Münch’s arrangement ‘challenges idealist notions of the musical work and discloses a complex composition and transmission history’, following ‘the provenance of the score, from Janequin and perhaps from Arnaut Daniel’ and the troubadour poets to a time before ‘the era of pure music upon which idealist accounts of music derive their force’, Mark Byron observes.53 For Münch as for Pound, Janequin served as an indexical marker of the history of musical reproduction, having been one of the first ‘composers to have his work printed and distributed on a large scale, connecting this work to the ideas of reproduction [. . .] in how he undertakes to represent the natural world in his scores’, including birdsong: a key motif of The Pisan Cantos.54 The cry ‘Out of Phlegethon!’ establishes a mythic framework for the canto that forces deeper reflection on the transmission of history and its relationship to modernity. The lines preceding the musical score are not ekphrastic; rather, the score indicates the tapestry of historical mediation alluded to in the stanza, which contains series of dynamic, war-torn images in which Münch emerges ‘forth out of Phlegethon’, the fiery river leading into Hell, carrying ‘in [his] satchel’ his sources of influence: works by the Baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude, the anthropologist Ludwig Klages, and Hans Sachs’s Ständebuch (1568), a versified almanac of sixteenth-century trades with illustrative engravings by Jost Amman.55 The final line of the stanza points to the ‘many’ versions of the ‘birds’ that underwrite the score: Janequin’s, Milano’s, and Münch’s. These birds are also Rudge’s, whose phrase Pound quotes in the canto’s last line, as she reassured Münch that he had preserved the ‘essence’ of Janequin’s song of the birds, which through careful use of instrumentation and timbre, including the use of double-stopping, was able to convey the lute’s polyphonic sound ‘not of one bird but of many’.56 Canto LXXV’s score is not a standalone fragment. As a reproduction of one of the Rapallo scores, the canto trains the reader to read what follows through the same historical methodology, given the programme was conceived in tandem with the poet’s evolving conception of the ideogrammatic method in poetry.57 By conjoining ‘the musical score and the poetic text in Canto LXXV’, Pound sought not to provoke ‘rivalry between the arts’, so much as to present ‘an eloquent request to the reader to value the identity and provenance of aesthetic production’, Byron also insists.58 Such logic further applies to Canto LXXIX, which alludes to Guido d’Arezzo: ‘that bastard’ who brings about ‘the change in writing the song book’,59 whose treatise Micrologus (c. 1025) guided the development of the four-line stave: an early solmisation system for writing down melodic chants, which removed the requirement of memorisation. The premodern and modern coalesce in a flurry of fragmented images, including references to a Bechstein electric piano and Beethoven, and repeated references to Guido, to whom Pound twice returns as the mythic source of modern music’s textual origins. Although whether Guido invented the stave or merely propagated it remains a point of contention in early music history,60 the subsequent merging of the neume and the letter-notation system catalysed more complex developments in Western music, including polyphony,61 a model of multivocality upon which many modernists drew. Expanding Canto LXXV’s theme of musical reproduction as an unstable bridge traversing modernity and antiquity, the score’s dialectical opposite appears as the lettered ‘notation’ of birdsong in Canto LXXXII, whereby Pound composes his own ‘music, though his is not a music strictly of sound, but rather of [. . .] a writing which is not imitative or even descriptive of sound, but, instead, one which requires the

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“real” birds of the camp to be transformed into the image of written music’.62 Pound’s remarkable arrangement of letter-notes strung across three lines, f

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orchestrates a horizontal vision of pitch that depicts what it is to ‘write the birds in the treble scale’, without lining the stave.63 These birds are sitting on wires that run through the US prison camp in Pisa in which Pound was interned whilst awaiting his trial and probable execution; these are wires of imprisonment, and of communication. Pound envisions them as notes, and then transcribes what he sees. The letters do not signify sound ‘in itself’ but sound as already codified, already written, to which nature conforms. In notes or letters, The Pisan Cantos’ visions of literary scoring distort the idealist perception of music as non-signifying expression. Petitioning the reader’s active reflection on the historical mediation internal to the text’s aesthetic production, the literary score irradiates the concealed history reproduction occludes from the modern reader.

Mirrlees’s and Johnson’s Wild Notes and Organised Sounds Though the literary scores of canonical figures including Pound and Joyce have drawn localised critical attention, this textual strategy also pertained to other historically marginalised figures within discussions of literary modernism and music. British poet Hope Mirrlees’s critically neglected long poem Paris: A Poem, typeset by Virginia Woolf for its publication with Hogarth Press in 1920, also contains a literary score. It captures what Mirrlees metaphorised in her 1926 essay ‘Listening to the Past’ as the ‘kaleidoscope of sounds’ that, visually intertwined through constantly rearranging symmetrical patterns, evoke the simultaneity of the past, present, and future layers of history.64 Paris seizes the political warp and weft of the French capital during one ordinary, yet world-historical day, set against the ambient hum of the Peace Conference proceedings of 1919. Nodding to the surrealist typography peppered with musical notes pioneered by Parisian poet Guillaume Apollinaire,65 Paris widens the horizons of the long-poems’ printed typography by including musical scoring (Figure 5.4),66 adding to the poem’s visually interwoven, palimpsestic layers of history and cultural topography. Sound-images of streets haunted by those killed in past wars are accompanied by a musical quote from ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’: Almirena’s mournful recitative in George Frideric Handel’s Italian opera Rinaldo. The reproduction ends on the note that should be lyrically connected to the word ‘liberty’ in Giacomo Rossi’s accompanying libretto, which reads: Lascia ch’io pianga la cruda sorte, / E che sospiri la libertà. Let me weep for my cruel fate, / And let me sigh for my liberty. Handel’s autographed score is not the version Mirrlees quotes.67 As Carruthers notes, subtle distortions to the face of Handel’s original melodic text underscore that music’s nature as a ‘recyclable object (a common phenomenon)’ that ‘persist[s] in cultural

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Figure 5.4  Excerpt from Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920).

memory’ and is ‘rich with historical signification’ in the poem’s context.68 Mirrlees adds the diminuendo into barely audible pianississimo (very, very soft), mirrored in the onomatopoeic sibilance of the typographically elongated word ‘H u s s s h’, the implied sound of which also fades into metaphoric inaudibility. Drawn in silence, letters and words that are estranged from their expected functions meaningfully amplify the inaudible vibrations of postwar social memory that verse alone seemingly cannot fully access or formulate. As a conduit of social memory, Mirrlees’s literary score resonates with similar innovations in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922), a quintessential collection of the New Negro Renaissance (c. 1919–40). Like Joyce and Pound, Johnson was already both a published composer and poet prior to adopting musical scores into her literary work, and a graduate of the Oberlin Music Conservatory of Ohio.69 Two poems in Bronze, the poet’s second poetry collection, contain literary scores: the first, an elegy commemorating the sacrifices of Black American soldiers, entitled ‘Taps’; the second entitled ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Upon Hearing His “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”’, which saw reproduction in Alain Locke’s influential anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1927). In his introduction to Bronze, W. E. B. Du Bois commended Johnson’s gift for capturing ‘a word – a phrase – a period that tells a life history or even paints the history of a generation’, detectable in the final line of the poem ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor’, which sings the boundless ‘sorrow of a dark child wandering the world, “Seeking the breast of an unknown face!”’70 This gift for encapsulating social memory is concentrated in the sound-image of the poem’s literary score (Figure 5.5).71

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Figure 5.5  Johnson’s ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Upon Hearing His “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”’. As Paul Allen Anderson observes, ‘musical performances (and literary evocations of them) provided especially haunting and portable sites for the staging of social memory’ in 1920s African American cultural production.72 In the author’s note to Bronze, Johnson writes how to compose those poems is to ‘sit on the earth and sing – sing out, and of, my sorrow’.73 Song forms the structural metaphor that ties the collection’s thematically assorted sections together. It metaphorises the poet’s artistic processing of complex, difficult emotions: lamentation, terror, and rage intertwined with love, jubilation, camaraderie, and hope, contradictory sentiments that Bronze insists were central to Black women’s collective experiences of Jim Crow, as the forces of cultural modernisation chafed against the lingering residues of a harrowing past. Johnson’s score is neither a complete nor a strictly faithful reproduction of Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s melodic theme. ‘Motherless Child’ was one folk song that Coleridge-Taylor, dubbed the ‘Black Mahler’ by the white American musicians he conducted,74 had classicised and compilated in his 1905 piano opus, ‘24 Negro Melodies’ (Op. 59, No. 22). Johnson would likely have been familiar with the original score, which contained a foreword by Booker T. Washington, along with summaries detailing the melodies’ provenance. First, Coleridge-Taylor scores the music in E minor, whilst Johnson’s fragment is written in A minor, an apparently incidental transposition. More notable is the alteration visible in the final two bars, in which Johnson has added an evaded cadence. Rather than conclude this musical phrase on the tonic note of the key (in this case, the note A), as in the original melody, Johnson peculiarly ends the melodic phrase on the supertonic note, B (the second note of the eight-note scale). This creates harmonic tension; the ear wants the cadence to resolve

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into a note in the tonic chord, that is, A [I or VIII], C [III], or E [V], creating a lack of resolution. The literary score’s evaded cadence thus serves as a launchpad for rendering an imagined conversation between mother and child, a common poetic trope in African American poetry circa 1922,75 including in Johnson’s first collection, The Heart of a Woman (1918). In ‘To Samuel Coleridge Taylor’, however, Johnson reimagines that maternal conversation from the perspective of an individual bereft of parental love, who is held ‘captive’ by that absence; ‘captive’ here is suggestive of coterminous physical but also metaphysical enslavement, namely the bondage of intergenerational trauma.76 Written in unbroken iambic tetrameter, the poem’s pedestrian form contrasts the disorganising terrors of the racial sublime its content conveys. Although it was her associate Angelina Weld Grimké whose poetry the author Sterling Brown likened to nineteenth-century lyricist Emily Dickinson,77 Johnson harnesses that poet’s renowned ability to focus on minute material objects in one instance, and in the next, open the poem’s field of vision to the cosmic and sublime. Johnson’s descriptions of the ‘toy’ and the ‘frail little captive’, suddenly shift into sweeping images of those ‘drowsy empires’, ‘brooding planets’, ‘empty space’, and the fear of the ‘unknown’ maternal that overwhelm the speaker.78 The literary score appears at the moment the poet faces a crisis of representation: how to convey irrepresentable intractable barriers, injustices, and those ‘creeping’ empires that were the progenitors of slavery and colonialism in the lyric form. When we speak of the spirituals’ reproduction, we are implicitly recognising a conceptual and categorical distinction between orally transmitted folk songs and composed art songs; between ‘wild notes’ and ‘organized sound’.79 Johnson’s poem evokes a similar relationship between notes and letters to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which famously paired fragments of notated African American spiritual melodies with stanzas from canonical poetry to that end. Du Bois drew upon Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), the first text to conceive how the ‘sorrow songs’ sung by Africans enslaved on American plantations were allegorical forms of sociopolitical communication: the white overseers heard slaves divesting their sorrows, which they permitted as the songs set the rhythmic pace of their labour in the fields; in the melodies and lyrics, the Black slaves heard encoded messages of dissent, rebellion, and political solidarity. In the context of discourses of ‘racial uplift’ following Reconstruction, those sorrow songs became popularised by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whose international successes in the post-Reconstruction era inspired heightened interest in collecting, notating, and arranging spirituals to transform them into reproducible texts, and thus, reified commodities. Simultaneously premodern and modern, spirituals occupied a tenuous position between a culture of orality and one of literacy, both linguistically and musically. White composers used classical notation and phonographic recording technologies to capture and transcribe profitable melodies. Many Black intellectuals saw notation as a necessary process of cultural modernisation through their transformation from folk songs into art songs; Alain Locke, for one, determined that the ‘Negro spiritual’ was to undergo, ‘without breaking its own boundaries, intricate and original development in directions already the line of advance in modernistic music’.80 A score is said to be always ‘incomplete in representing the composer’s intentions’, due to ‘certain intangibles that cannot be expressed by our method of writing music’, which preclude ‘vital elements’ of sound-making that are ‘incapable of being fixed

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by the marks and symbols of notation’.81 If that is the case, Johnson’s fragmented, tonally irresolute literary score meaningfully accentuates such ambiguity to unsettle how the spiritual is to be read. Musical reproductions preserved otherwise ephemeral sounds, as the basis of an historically durable cultural tradition; but that reproduction was dependent on a visual system that could not fully capture what those wild notes communicated as live sounds and sites of social memory, which is where Johnson’s poetic intervention came into force. Johnson was one of the many women poets of the New Negro Renaissance that subsequent generations of critics dismissed as too ‘conventional and sentimental, and out of step with the militant, rebellious race consciousness of the period’,82 yet her literary scoring speaks to the poet’s unsung innovativeness and political acuteness. Although grounded in similar theoretic and aesthetic concerns as modernists such as Mirrlees, Joyce, and Pound, her poetics gave pictorial shape and form to what Paul Gilroy has recently theorised as ‘black Atlantic sound’, which resounds the ‘self-making and sociality’ at the centre of the Black Atlantic as they are ‘organized’ through oral ‘sound: music and song’.83 Spirituals, as social forms, require the poet to rethink the status of those songs as recyclable, popularised sound objects, the spiritual aura of which has waned through their mass reproduction within the American music industry’s racial capitalism. As the literary score deviates from the harmonic structure of the original melody, Johnson amplifies these concerns by insisting upon the reader’s active inspection of the cultural provenance of the poem and musical text. Underwriting modernism’s evolving relationship to ‘musical works’ was the notion that they ‘essentially exist only as mediated through writing, because interpretation does not have the direct sound to go on, only its notated form’, and musical hermeneutics ‘has no rules for the decipherment of texts that is located in the actual phenomena, only in the reflection upon the nature of musical texts’.84 For such reasons, musical composition and the materiality of the score gave many modernists occasion to break with idealised conceptions of absolute music, and review the historical and social contingencies of noise, at a historical juncture in which the sounds of the present and past, old and new alike, were mediated through machines, including telephones, telegraphs, gramophones, lithographs, typewriters, and a range of other sound apparatuses and information processors. As literary works integrated musical notation and scoring into literature’s visual typography, they insisted upon a hybrid signification system that was responsive to modern technologies of textual reproduction, and the new literary metaphors of musical listening and reading those technologies inspired. In doing so, they disrupted habitual practices of reading and listening, to recover the artwork from its alienated status as a commodity. Because the literary score became available as the crises of form modernity’s noises incited drew the modernists towards new interartistic possibilities, it also offers vital insights into the relationship between literature and music in sound studies.

Notes   1. E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, [1910] 2000), 26–7.  2. Nathan Waddell, Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 50–1.   3. Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, A Draft and Two Schemata, ed. Heni Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 179.

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  4. Ibid., 2–3.  5. Ibid., 8.   6. Eric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 11.  7. In Western music, these innovations included the adoption of the stave and the rise of polyphony over the medieval to early modern periods, along with the transition into the octave system; the widening of large-scale genres, such as the choral mass during the Baroque period, and the invention and enlargement of the symphony and opera during the Classical and Romantic periods; and the ubiquity of chromaticism from the Late Romantic period, which after Richard Wagner arguably led to the breakdown of Western tonality.   8. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1873] 1980), 106.  9. Prieto, Listening In, 27. 10. Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in L. J. Austin, ‘Mallarmé on Music and Letters’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester 42, no. 1 (1959): 19–39 (24, 31). 11. Gemma Moss, ‘Classical Music and Literature’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 92–113 (92). 12. Joshua Epstein, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 3–4. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. Notable examples not examined here include Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s collaboration on ‘L.Z. Masque’ in ‘A’ (1978), and Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953). 15. A. J. Carruthers, Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961–2011 (Cham: Springer, 2017), v. 16. Ibid., xxvi. 17. Mark Byron, ‘A Defining Moment in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Musical Scores and Literary Texts’, in Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Myer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 157–82 (157). 18. Carruthers, Stave Sightings, v. 19. See Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 20. Prieto, Listening In, 25. 21. Ibid., 26. 22. Ibid., 17. 23. The first novel to feature an entire musical score, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1747), bore witness to how musical mass reproduction was reshaping everyday life across new settings, as through emergent technologies and forms, music became a prominent aspect of ‘eighteenth-century culture and daily life’ and the basis of modern subjectivity. Clarissa’s costly ‘engraved score’, a folding illustration that opened into a booklet, required extensive technical planning, leading subsequent publishers to abandon this ‘three-dimensional novelty’. See Janine Barchas, ‘The Engraved Score in Clarissa: An Intersection of Music, Narrative, and Graphic Design’, Eighteenth-Century Life 20, no. 2 (1996): 1–3. 24. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 153. 25. Ibid. 26. James Joyce, quoted in Jack Weaver, Joyce’s Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in His Writing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 4. 27. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 112.

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28. Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, trans. Geoff Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 145–59 (148–9). 29. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Faber and Faber, [1937] 1975), 44. 30. Prieto, Listening In, 59. 31. Anthony Burgess was among the first to observe this musical pun; but HCE’s conceptual connection to Bach, who influenced Joyce’s literary polyphony, has since been observed by numerous scholars. See Alan Shockley, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 117–36. 32. Michelle Witen, James Joyce and Absolute Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2. 33. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 179. 34. Zack Bowen and Alan Roughley, ‘Parsing Persee: The Codology of Hosty’s Song’, in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (New York: Routledge, 2014), 295–306 (300). 35. Ibid., 302. 36. Josh Torabi, Music and Myth in Modern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021), 152. 37. Ibid., 146–7. 38. Ibid., 152. 39. Epstein, Sublime Noise, 4. 40. This accounts for why programme (narrative) music and ‘musical ekphrasis’ proliferated over the 1880s. See Siglind Bruhn, ‘A Concert of Paintings: “Musical Ekphrasis” in the Twentieth Century’, Poetics Today 22, no. 3 (2001): 551–605. 41. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 1. 42. Epstein, Sublime Noise, 11. 43. Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977), 42. 44. Harriet Monroe, ‘Rhythms of English Verse, II’, Poetry (December 1913): 110. 45. Ibid., 110–11. 46. Ezra Pound, quoted in Margaret Fisher, ‘Music’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 298–312 (308). 47. Josh Epstein, ‘“Scoured and Cleansed”: Ezra Pound and Musical Composition’, in The New Ezra Pound Studies, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 57–71 (66). 48. Pound, Complete Criticism, 42. 49. Roxana Preda, ‘Of Birds, Composers, and Poets: Ezra Pound’s Memoir of Gerhart Münch in Canto 75’, Paideuma 42 (2015): 141–70 (141). 50. Ibid., 142–3. 51. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 178. 52. Ibid. 53. Byron, ‘Defining Moment’, 177. 54. Richard Parker, ‘Canto 75 vs. “A”–24’, Golden Handcuffs Review 1, no. 14 (2011): 270–85 (273). 55. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 450. 56. Byron, ‘Defining Moment’, 165. 57. Preda, ‘Of Birds’, 143. 58. Byron, ‘Defining Moment’, 177. 59. Pound, Cantos, 487, 486. 60. John Haines, ‘The Origins of the Musical Staff’, The Musical Quarterly 91, no. 3–4 (2008): 327–78 (327). 61. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 177.

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62. Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117–18. 63. Pound, Cantos, 525. 64. Hope Mirrlees, Collected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), 88. 65. Carruthers, Stave Sightings, xxiii. 66. Mirrlees, Collected Poems, 14. 67. The opera premiered in London in 1711; but by 1920 no major performance had been staged since 1731. It was typically performed either as a concert aria or a hymn. 68. Carruthers, Stave Sightings, xxiii. 69. Maureen Honey, ‘Georgia Douglas Johnson’, in Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, 2nd edn, ed. Maureen Honey (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 158–9 (158). 70. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Foreword’, in Georgia Douglas Johnson, Bronze: A Book of Verse (Boston: B. J. Brimmer, 1922), 7. 71. Johnson, Bronze, 95. 72. Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 4. 73. Johnson, Bronze, 3. 74. Charles Elford, Black Mahler: The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story (London: Grosvenor House, 2008), 257. 75. In 1922, two rising Black male poets published poems in The Crisis on this theme: Langston Hughes with ‘Mother to Son’, and Jean Toomer with ‘Song of the Son’. 76. Johnson, Bronze, 95. 77. Honey, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii. 78. Johnson, Bronze, 95. 79. Paul Gilroy, ‘“Lost in Music”: Wild Notes and Organised Sound’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 170–89 (171). 80. Alain Locke, quoted in Anderson, Deep River, 4. 81. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 8. 82. Honey, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii. 83. Gilroy, ‘“Lost in Music”’, 171. 84. Adorno, Towards a Theory, 179.

Select Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997). ———, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, A Draft and Two Schemata, ed. Heni Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Anderson, Paul Allen, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). Bruhn, Siglind, ‘A Concert of Paintings: “Musical Ekphrasis” in the Twentieth Century’, Poetics Today 22, no. 3 (2001): 551–605. Bucknell, Brad, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Byron, Mark, ‘A Defining Moment in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Musical Scores and Literary Texts’, in Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Myer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 157–82. Carruthers, A. J., Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961–2011 (Cham: Springer, 2017).

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Epstein, Joshua, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Goble, Mark, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Moss, Gemma, ‘Classical Music and Literature’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 92–113. Prieto, Eric, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). Torabi, Josh, Music and Myth in Modern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021). Waddell, Nathan, Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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6 Sound Agonistes: Music and the Economy of Sacrifice in Sound Studies Miranda Stanyon

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t first sight, music and sound go hand in hand. Yet in its formative years, sound studies sometimes marginalised music in asserting its new identity. Interest in sound resonated with histories of the senses and the sociology of the everyday, and with disciplines like media and cultural studies, which often turned away from the ‘traditional’ arts – and sometimes, by extension, music more broadly imagined – as elite, conservative, specialised, unworldly, and Eurocentric. Despite the rich history of entanglements between literature and music, and despite notable exceptions in the scholarship, sacrificing music might be seen as one of sound studies’ founding gestures, a gesture with significant implications for literary scholars’ future engagements with music. This chapter considers the positioning of music in programmatic work on sound studies, investigating the problems and discomfort raised by music, before exploring a comparison between the treatment of music and the fraught economy of sacrifice, where something is given up in the hope of gaining something more valuable – here a new and better field. I then suggest that illuminating antecedents to this sacrifice lie in literary history, with rhetorical exclusions and reinclusions of music from the domain of the verbal arts – especially poetry – and ambivalent representations of musical genres and practices. I offer a case study of sound and music in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a poem which showily struggles with sacrifice, sound, and specious harmony. If sacrifices are made in the hope of gaining something better, then in Milton’s tragedy, ironically, the reader is asked to hope and listen for a larger kind of harmony: an affective, communal, and spiritual-political concord that mirrors the workings of audible music – and literary language – as humanly ordered sound.

Locating Music in Sound Studies ‘Music is an idea, not just a form, and like any other idea, music is a problem’, notes Matt Sakakeeny.1 We might add that music is a big idea, and correspondingly a big problem, sometimes even an elephant in the room. It could hardly be called a constitutive outside for sound studies, part of a ‘set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system’: plenty of work in sound studies includes music, or is conducted by people whose vocation is musical.2 And yet neither does music sit comfortably within the ‘system’. This stands in tension with sound studies’ habitual characterisation as inclusionary, expansive, always emergent, or ‘conjunctural’ – the child of pluralist, relativist, and levelling movements in the academy that saw the foundation of media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies.3

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Some key texts and stock-taking moments suggest the varied ways that music, and what are sometimes called ‘music studies’ (musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and so on), are placed and dis-placed in the field. In their important reader, Michael Bull and Les Back presented a post-Romantic view of music as an ineffable art that constantly revealed the inadequacy of words and challenged scholars (echoing Beckett) to fail again, and fail better in attempting to interpret it.4 Musicologists were acknowledged to have developed tools for doing just this, but readers were simultaneously warned that musicology could ‘strangle the life in music’.5 The volume’s thirty authors included two working in music departments (musicologist Susan McClary and anthropologist of music Steven Feld).6 The section ‘Living and Thinking with Music’, while not the only to discuss music, tellingly centred on twentieth- and twenty-first-century ‘popular’ musics, with ‘classical’ music addressed in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brief reflection on his embodied experiences as a cellist.7 This shaping of the territory and division of labour is instructive: this strain of sound studies embraces (modern and popular) musics but often sidelines ‘traditional’, older repertoires and disciplines. The point is ramified in Bull’s monumental anthology Sound Studies (2013).8 According to its framing material, If Sound Studies incorporates the sonic turn in Media Studies and coheres around Cultural Studies, it also extends into Urban Studies, Aesthetics, History, Architecture, and Anthropology. It looks at the wide array of sonic experiences in society to include sound, music, and silence. In so doing it goes beyond the traditional disciplines of Ethnomusicology, History of Music, and the Sociology of Music.9 Sound studies thus has its home in postwar, postmodern disciplines; it attends to music as part of an apparently all-embracing attention to the ‘everyday’, ‘present-day’, ‘modern experience’, and thereby transcends not only (tacitly) older forms and genres but also the ‘traditional disciplines’ devoted to music.10 This gesture of transcendence is not isolated, nor surprising in the consolidation of a new(ish) field, even a declaredly protean one. Marginalising music (and music studies) can be implied to be a matter of progress, disciplinary expertise, or democratisation, with music studies’ methods being ‘deliberately elitist, credentialised [. . .] available to aficionados but not the masses’.11 Or it can be framed as more strategic, with sound ultimately complementing music. Thus ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann wrote that ‘ethnomusicology and musicology [. . .] might lay superior claim to sound [. . .] as their very birthright’ – casting them as entitled older-sibling disciplines – but explained that his collection offered few essays on music because, ‘even’ in such traditional fields, ‘new thinking’ was chiming with his volume’s search for an ‘ethnographic ear’.12 Not difference but slightly awkward similarity thus marked the sidelining of music [studies]. A similar equivocation marks Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes’s forceful remapping of sound in and through the global South. Music presents challenges in surveying existing literature and articulating desiderata for their project. The editors present an ‘imaginary reader’ of extant work, with the small-print disclaimer: ‘we have placed the voluminous literature on “music” off to one side but do include a few musicological sources that explicate broader sound-related topics’.13 This is partly because the abundant research on sound and the South, although muted in mainstream sound studies, ‘quickly overwhelm[s]’ ‘one’s bibliography’, raising ‘the

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question of what should constitute sound studies’. Certainly not all ‘sound-related topics (e.g., music, language)’ should ‘“count as” sound studies’, although then again ‘any remotely comprehensive study of sound’ should take account of ‘the voluminous scholarship on music in India and Africa’. Fortunately, ‘histories of sound and music are relatively distinct’, and ‘[t]here is little to gain from employing the term “sound studies” for any and all literature that is even vaguely associated with sound’, or from ‘claims to the effect that musicology (or ethnomusicology) has “been doing sound studies all along”’.14 Still, not all work on music falls beyond the pale, and the editors hail the music-oriented Audible Empire as, alongside their own collection, ‘carv[ing] out a crucial space in twenty-first century thinking about sound’.15 Scholars occasionally admit to being, if not quite ‘suspicious’, then ‘impatient’ with music.16 Others, of course, are much more irenic. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld described sound studies broadly as ‘an emerging interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise, and silence’, and identified musicology as a ‘long-standing scholarly tradition’ that aided the ‘reception’ of sound studies in the humanities.17 They noted the recent inclusion of ‘some sound studies’ within music studies, and observed new branches of musicology that had ‘fully digested cultural studies approaches’.18 Bijsterveld and Pinch’s own pioneering work bringing music into science and technology studies doubtless influenced their perspectives. But if the demands of musical and musicological expertise are often cited as barriers to music’s integration with sound studies, then expertise certainly does not guarantee a warm reception for music in sound studies. Writers with backgrounds in composition, musicology, or ethnomusicology are arguably among the least likely to give music a hall pass. This is noteworthy insofar as a history could be construed in which music’s disciplines existed in a world apart, secluded from the postwar academy: sound studies was pioneered by ‘outsiders’. Yet the prehistory of sound studies coincided with some acute soul-searching and self-critique within music which, of course, continues in the present. Some earlier texts influential for sound studies praised or arguably romanticised music, or regarded elite written repertoires as sources for broader social histories of sound.19 But others were more aligned with the twentieth century’s ‘opening of [Western] music to [what had been] the non-musical’: extended dissonance, microtones, noise and distortion, extreme volumes including (near) silence, ambient sound, durational works, aleatory compositions, use of found objects, field recordings, new and non-musical instruments, and non-singing voices.20 Theorist-composers such as ‘Luigi Russolo, with his art of noise, Edgar Varèse, with his liberation of sound, and John Cage, letting sounds be themselves’ epitomised what Erlmann, following Edward Said, calls a ‘new inclusiveness’ in modern music (or, quoting Said more fully, what might be called a ‘desperate attempt at a new inclusiveness’ in modernism, triggered by the faltering of the ‘imperial enterprise’).21 The gestures are not only inclusive: if ‘music’ in this vein increasingly opened itself to the previously nonmusical, it often turned away from what used to count as music. In the midst of such musical experimentation, theorists as different as Douglas Kahn, Michel Chion, or Friedrich Kittler challenged distinctions between music, sound, and noise, and even our ability to listen to noise without subsuming it under the rubrics and codes of music.22 In Kahn’s case, the exploding of ‘music’ extended to critique of art music’s inclusivity and noisiness. His Noise, Water, Meat questioned

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what twentieth-century music’s ‘openness to the world of sound’ both left out and covered up. On one hand, sounds that ‘signified’ became ‘the noise of noise’ for the avantgarde, with a ‘banishment’ of imitative or signifying sounds that ironically preserved music’s high modern status as the premiere non-mimetic art.23 On the other hand, the inclusive treatment of noise by the avant-garde could act as window-dressing for an ossified and unresponsive Western institution – a fig leaf for an ivory tower: Despite the concentration of the bulk of Western art music activity on the music of past centuries, played on vintage classes of instruments couched within equally vintage rites, the actions of venturesome contemporary avant-garde composers grappling with changing conditions of aurality have given rise to an impression that Western art music as a whole has the capacity to respond to the world in which people presently live.24 Rather than helping to explode music’s borders and humble its pretensions, then, progressive figures helped ‘Western art music [. . .] maintain its integrity and expand its resources’.25 Even oppositional and form-bending composers may fail to purge music, with its ‘vintage rites’, from noise. Studies like Kahn’s gave sonic specificity and depth to a wider fascination within the humanities and social sciences with noise as a figure of disruption and primal non-semiotic data and energy. Not creation ex nihilo, but creation from and of noise, marks this cultural moment. ‘[N]o logos without noise’, as historian and philosopher of science Michel Serres wrote in Genesis.26 And no music, according to the political economist Jacques Attali, except as ‘a channelizer of violence, a creator of differences, a sublimation of noise, an attribute of power’.27 Attali’s take on music as a ‘ritualization’ of noise and ‘simulacrum of ritual murder’ – that is, a sacrifice – is interesting not least because it points towards what I would like to suggest is one of the economies connecting music with sound studies.28 ‘Music’ – be that Western art music, or ideals of harmony and organisation, or music as an area of expertise, or music tout court, if such a thing existed – is given up here for the sake of something greater: sound [studies]. Given the range and complexity of the rhetoric surrounding music, and the brilliant treatment of music within any number of projects in or in dialogue with sound studies, it may seem extravagant to talk about music’s sacrifice. My suggestion is not that music is in any simple fashion excluded from sound studies. After all, sacrificial gestures are always representative, and often figural or substitutive in nature: human sacrifice does not mean that all humans are sacrificed, and some of the best-known human sacrifices are commuted and transmuted into the offering of a goat, ram, lamb, deer, or piece of bread. My suggestion is that we might usefully gloss music’s treatment in parts of the field not only in a negative sense, as navigating a ‘problem’, but also in a constructive sense, as a sacrifice that serves the founding of a new, larger, better field. Elements from the complex theory of sacrifice clarify this suggestion.29 Unlike capitalist exchanges, sacrifices are often non-symmetrical and non-contractual: offerings made in order to gain something more valuable than what one has, although often without a guarantee that the gods will grant their side of the transaction (and successfully launching something as nebulous as a ‘field’ is not something done by fiat or contract). Sacrifices are characteristically costly, giving up something valuable or – as with music in its relationship to sound – something difficult to extricate from the whole (think of

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the guiltless scapegoat that must be set apart from the community before being loaded with communal sins). There is correspondingly a complex valuation of the thing sacrificed: while it may be maltreated and disdained, as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss argued, sacrifice can also sacralise its victim – something we might see in equivocal celebrations of music in the field – and reincorporate it through consumption.30 There are high-minded self-sacrificers, perhaps not unlike the occasionally contrite music specialists within sounds studies; and there are rhetorics which focus on the transformation of the sacrificer and outwardly deny the logic of sacrifice, something that resonates with the field’s gestures towards inclusiveness and repudiation of disciplinary territorialisation. As the Psalmist puts it, his God has ‘no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.’31 Or, in an example relevant to my later discussion as the only New Testament reference to Samson, Hebrews scorns the high priest’s sacrifice of animal blood in the Temple, and burning of flesh outside the city, for Christ’s superior blood-sacrifice and his followers’ continual ‘sacrifice of praise’ and charitable sharing.32 Crucially, sacrifices are foundational acts and boundary markers. They figure prominently in narratives of cultural transition, from past to present or savagery to culture, whether in myths of progress (where barbaric sacrificial practices end), myths of fall (violent sacrifice brings about a state of corruption), or mixtures of the two. Even when sacrifice is relegated to the past, it often features in contemporary warnings against recidivism or diagnoses of ‘modern’ structures as hidden transformations of sacrifice. In other words, culturally and analytically, sacrifices seem hard to give up. As Derek Hughes and others observe, sacrifice has been an overwrought theme in literature and music drama, and one sometimes given a central place in the very constitution of these arts. But literature also has its internal moments of sacrifice as it defines and redefines itself – moments of excluding, sidelining, and scapegoating music.33 A key moment in English writing came after the Renaissance, and intensified during the Commonwealth. Renaissance poetic theory had often elaborated the trope of the ‘music of poetry’ and magnified the kinship between the ordering of sound in music and the verbal arts.34 Composers and music theorists, meanwhile, had drawn on rhetoric and grammar to classify the effects of musical figures and to structure musical phrases that mimicked the sequential logic and discursivity of speech. Reacting against this alignment of music and language, writers in the English Commonwealth and their heirs through the eighteenth century developed rhetorics and poetics of sublime difficulty, bold austerity, rough plain-speaking, and martial discord. They objected to monarchy’s fictions of concord between a harmonious cosmos and harmonious (monarchical) state – fictions like those developed in the court masque tradition – to the courtier’s sycophantic sprezzatura; the muting of political disagreement down to a mere ‘mutter’; and the restriction of eloquence to what one writer called ‘the hearing of one voice’.35 ‘[O]nly by confronting discord and difficulty’, they reasoned, could ‘a stronger kind of poetry [. . .] emerge’.36 The most prominent figure in this context is John Milton, who in Paradise Lost famously cast off the ‘troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ as ‘of no true musical delight’.37 Even during the so-called Augustan age with its preference for rhyming couplets and smooth sounds, later Whig writers such as John Dennis argued against imagining poetry through music. Dennis took aim at the commonplace that poetry’s ‘numbers’ and rhymes meant poetry ‘must be Musical’, arguing that ‘Passion’

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was ‘still more necessary to it than Harmony’: ‘therefore Poetry is Poetry, because it is more passionate and sensual than Prose’.38 Despite this appeal to the sensual and passionate nature of poetry, against music’s formal harmonies, Dennis elsewhere invoked music’s own associations with sensuality and passion in order to castigate music and indicate the proper domain of theatre. Dennis singled out opera in the process of defending the morality of the English stage against reformers’ denunciations. Opera’s listeners wallowed in the ‘mere sensual Pleasure’ ‘that effeminate Musick gives’, music which ‘unmann’d’ both ‘he who gives [pleasure] or he who receives [it] in a supreme Degree’.39 Both singer and listener, Dennis argued, were morally undone by music, at least music of the wrong kind. We would not look to Dennis for a coherent philosophy of sound, but we should find instructive precisely his flexible treatment of music, which he repeatedly excludes to mark out the proper terrain of English poetry, epic, and drama. Not unlike avant-garde Western musicians in the twentieth century, Dennis hopes to expand the boundaries of his art, but expands the remit of literature to exclude music.

‘Ever best found in the close’? A Sweet Little Sound in Milton’s Samson Milton’s Samson Agonistes casts particular light on the literary rhetoric of excluding and repudiating music, in this case in contrast not with noise or sound but with quietness. In doing so, Samson both invokes and problematises sacrifice’s economical prospect of giving up to gain more. Separating music from literature is difficult in general, if we accept that there are low and porous barriers between these auditive (or potentially, or subliminally, auditive) arts – and this despite the fact that writing has become core to literature’s definition as a lettered medium. But in Samson the separation proves exceptionally difficult because, in the text’s equivocal or multivocal conclusion, one kind of harmony – specious and easy – is given up for the prospect of another, greater harmony, be that music ‘sounded’ or silent. The son of a musician and inheritor of a century and more of reforming suspicion of music and performance, Milton positioned song within a teeming ‘world of intermedia circulation’, and worried at music’s power to model perfect harmony and praise, yet also to seduce, distract, corrupt, and to threaten writing and writerly authority.40 This is nowhere clearer than in his Samson Agonistes (1671), a closet drama which ‘never was intended’ for the stage, and which turns on the fate of a figure – the Old Testament warrior-hero Samson – whose blinding by the Philistines makes him pitiably dependent on sound, as he is on his captors and visiting friends and kin, and as Milton was after the onset of his own blindness.41 Captivity and blinding are also enabled by sound: in the backstory of the poem, Samson ignored God’s injunction to keep silent about the source of his enormous strength (his uncut hair), submitted to his Philistine wife Dalila’s nagging, broke the ‘seal of silence’, and became a ‘blab’ (49, 495). The poem’s genre, plot, and source thus turn on sound and silence. The text’s vocabulary and imagery are also densely auditory, juxtaposing the senses of sight and sound, and refracting the sonic into a spectrum of noises, music, speech, cries, and silences. We meet Samson as he ‘Retir[es] from the popular noise’ of a Philistine feast (16), although unable to escape implicitly noisy ‘thoughts [. . .] like

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a deadly swarm / Of hornets’ (19–20). Samson is visited by a sententious chorus of Israelites who intermittently doubt their own purpose, fearing that in the ‘sound’ of counsel ‘Little prevails, or rather seems a tune, / Harsh, and of dissonant mood’ to ‘the afflicted’ (660–2). With Dalila, who visits to tempt Samson back to a life of ease, sounds become more cognitively dissonant, more slippery, and animal-sensual. Her words ‘seem into tears dissolved, / Wetting the borders of her silken veil’ (729–30). Dalila is like a ‘hyaena’ (748), an animal that according to Pliny copied speech, calling shepherds by name so that they left their homes and were torn apart. Only the deaf ‘adder’s wisdom’ now protects Samson against her ‘warbling charms’ (936, 934), we hear in a convention-laden passage connecting the powers of song, wine, magic, and women’s verbal guile and sex appeal. In captivity, Samson fears himself ‘sung and proverbed for a fool / In every street’ (203–4), conjuring up popular dissemination of news in broadside ballads, and igniting a slow-burning preoccupation with true report, honour and commemoration against ‘double-mouthed fame’, rumour as ‘noise’ and ‘loud report’ (1088, 1090), and boasting as quasi-musical ‘descant’ (1228). This preoccupation culminates in the poem’s final exchanges and the image of virtue as a phoenix – one not resurrected after her ‘holocaust’ (literally a burnt sacrifice), but immortalised by ‘fame’ (1697–707). Among the complex resonances of this holocaust is its reminder of burnt offerings made by Samson’s parents before his birth and Samson’s setting apart as an offering to God, sanctified by privations that promised greater strength and redemptive potential for Israel (Judges 13, SA 23–39); the strongly sonic trope of fame thus intersects with an underlying, if ambiguous, sacrificial context. Having failed to keep his obligations, Samson rebukes himself for being ‘vanquished with a peal of words’ (recalling the forceful, repetitive, potentially popish pealing of church bells (235)), Dalila’s ‘Tongue-batteries’ (404). Divine strength is not audible in this way, conforming instead to a biblical paradox of divine silent speech, and hinting at a contrast between fleshly and spiritual senses. Thus Samson’s past martial ‘deeds’ were ‘mute, [yet] spoke loud the doer’, although ‘Israel’s governors’ ‘persisted deaf’ to their possible deliverance from tyranny (242, 248). The chorus then remembers how the ungrateful Ephraimites were distinguished from fellow Israelites (and marked for slaughter) by ‘want of well pronouncing shibboleth’ (289), summoning up the use of fine-grained aural differences as markers of spiritual rectitude/turpitude – and recalling a deadly ‘acoustemology’ practised by their forefathers. The poem’s central event and interpretative problem is also its aural climax: a ‘hideous noise’ attending Samson’s destruction of the Dagonite ‘theatre’ where he has been forced to perform feats of strength, killing the ‘flower’ of the Philistine ruling classes and himself (1509, 1605, 1654). The feast that, always offstage, sets the scene for the poem is ‘proclaim[ed]’ with ‘pomp, and sacrifice, and praises loud’ (435–6), accompanied by ‘trumpets’, ‘pipes / And timbrels’ (1598, 1616–17). Celebrating the defeat of Samson, the feast not only scandalises the strict Nazarite, but epitomises his shame at bringing ‘obloquy [on God], and ope[ning] the mouths / Of idolists’ (451–3). In the theatre’s destruction, sacrifices made by idolists to Dagon are replaced by a tacit or possible sacrifice (for the term is never used of Israelite worship) by Samson to God; ritual ‘pomp’, shouting, music, and praise are replaced by anti-spectacular destruction, horrid noise, and, in their aftermath, quiet.42 Noise is a correlate of Samson’s sacrificelike violence, and one of the things it silences is the celebratory music of the feast.

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High in intensity, the sounds of destruction are low-fidelity: we hear them obliquely through others’ reactions and reports. First, Samson’s father Manoa breaks off his speech to ask, ‘What noise or shout was that? It tore the sky.’ The chorus supposes they are hearing ‘the people shouting to behold’ Samson (1472–3). A messenger later confirms this, reporting that At sight of him the people with a shout Rifted the air clamouring their god [. . .] (1620–1) Also confirmed here is Manoa’s representation of sound as physical force, tearing or dividing the air; of sound weaponised, as it was in Dalila’s mellifluous attacks on Samson’s ‘fortress of silence’.43 The poem elaborates on the material constitution of sound after Manoa’s second aposiopesis, and the chorus’s response: Manoa: [. . .] – O what noise! Mercy of heaven what hideous noise was that! [. . .] Chorus: Noise call you it or universal groan As if the whole inhabitation perished, Blood, death, and deathful deeds are in that noise, Ruin, destruction at the utmost point. Manoa: Of ruin indeed methought I heard the noise. (1508–15) Sounds are granted an embodied, more-than-semiotic ability to carry violence in them, to be destructive noises of ruin. This is significant partly in suggesting the gravity of the danger represented by noise and music in Samson, and partly in indicating the power of a tragedy addressed only to the ears – whether spiritual or fleshly – to strike the reader and effect a purgative catharsis of sound through sound.44 The intense but nebulous sonic atmosphere leaves the Israelites in suspense: what is the nature of the destruction? A messenger resolves their initial uncertainty, but his testimony raises questions about Samson’s motivation that modern critics have often concluded are irresolvable, and precisely because interpreters must rely on an oral report about a silent, pregnant pause: when Samson ‘stood’ ‘with head a while inclined / And eyes fast fixed [. . .] as one who prayed, / Or some great matter in his mind revolved’ (1636–8), was he finding his authentic vocation – a more-or-less literal ‘calling’ from God – in self-destruction and slaughter, or not? The poem uses inaudibility (Samson’s potential ‘calling’) and sonic mediation (ear-witnessing and second-hand report) to raise questions of spiritual discernment in a postlapsarian world, and to school its readership in practices that are modelled on but also exceed embodied listening in a noisy polis.45 The poem’s evocation of resistance to tyranny and idolatry, and suggestion of precarious victories (aesthetic, interpretive, and political) – temporary composure achieved through privation, difficulty, violence, and confusion – all this means its soundscape resonates not only with reformed suspicion of music but also with Milton’s republican sublime. For Milton, David Norbrook observes, Longinus’ sublime is ‘consistently opposed to easy, specious harmony. Language that is too neatly patterned leads to premature closure, so that’, in the words of Longinus as translated by Milton’s follower Hall, ‘foreseeing their periods’ listeners figuratively ‘join with them in the close, and as in a consort anticipate the conclusion’.46 The musical, formulaic, and in that sense ritualistic anticipation Hall/Longinus derides in certain poetry reminds us of the premium republican writers could place on diversity of voices, and the lurking

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parallels between aural concord, monologic forms, and tyrannous monarchy. It also reminds us that ‘close’ applies equally to verse, grammar (the close of ‘periods’), and music (cadence of phrase). Narratives and lives, too, close, and in the following I want to examine the ending of Milton’s tragedy and its treatment of song. Samson Agonistes famously draws to its close with Manoa celebrating his son’s end and advising his fellow Israelites that ‘Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail / Or knock the breast’, ‘nothing but’ ‘what may quiet us in a death so noble’ (1721–4). Preferring quiet of mind to the sounds of cries, blows, or vocal complaint, Manoa bears witness to the purging of turbulent passions that Aristotelian tragedy should produce through its homeopathic logic of remedying like with like – ‘sour against sour’, suffering against suffering, noise against noise.47 Manoa goes on to imagine the ‘silent obsequy’ that will mark Samson’s funeral and an overwhelmingly visual memorial to be arranged: a ‘monument’ ‘With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled / In copious legend, or sweet lyric song’ (1732–4, 1736–7). This is the poem’s only positive reference to song, yet it is apparently an inaudible one, inscribed (enrolled) on a sepulchre.48 Manoa foresees that the monument will form a centrepiece for national solemnities and recreations: youths will ‘resort’ there and ‘inflame their breasts’ to ‘valour’; maidens will visit ‘on feastful days [. . .] with flowers, only bewailing’ Samson’s marriage (1738–42). This feast pointedly opposes the noisy feasting and musical recreations introduced early in the poem, alongside another imagined celebration in the poem’s centre: dismissed by Samson, Dalila defiantly predicted that ‘double-mouthed’ Fame would make her ‘among the famousest / Of women’ for the Philistines, ‘sung at solemn festivals’, ‘my tomb’ ‘visited’ with ‘annual flowers’ (971, 982–3, 986–7). Samson’s future tomb with its externalised, textualised ‘acts’ further responds to Samson’s early self-description as a ‘moving grave’ (‘My self, my sepulchre’, 102), shut up from light and action. Samson’s monument, then, seems to invoke not performable song but the visible genre(s) of lyric poetry. Manoa might seem to forestall practical musicmaking, setting poetic ‘song’ as a simple counterpart to prose ‘legend’, the brevity implied by song contrasting the ‘copious’ tale. And yet the stifling of sound/song and the disciplining of passion it accompanies in the poem’s catharsis is not so complete as this suggests. For one thing, legend has its own murky aural connotations. By 1671 a legend could name unauthenticated, superstitious tales. This sense itself derived from a genre of book (the legend) either containing passages to be read aloud in church or focusing on lives of saints. The legend qua liturgical book had been banned under Edward VI, and the legend as saint’s life was, of course, odious to Puritans like Milton. Suspect sound then insinuates itself into Manoa’s quiet plans and casts tiny doubts on the soundness of his production of a single, authorised account of Samson’s life.49 Nor would it be surprising if sound were recuperated in the poem’s moment of repose. Sound and hearing are not merely repudiated or sacrificed in the poem in favour of longed-for light and sight: hearing is also necessarily the play’s key way of knowing, its source of (always questionable) enlightenment. Sound parallels light as well as opposing it. Thus Samson complains in a lyrical lament: The Sun to me is dark And silent as the Moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. (86–9)

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The simile structurally makes the power of sound (and feminine moon) echo that of sight (and masculine sun), but semantically aligns silence with darkness, desertion, and enclosure. Returning to Samson’s monument, we find Manoa’s last speech followed by a stanza from the chorus which itself takes the form of a sweet lyric, one uttered aloud within the poem’s world, if not sung: All is best, though we oft doubt, What the unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns And all that band them to resist His uncontrollable intent, His servants he with new acquist Of true experience from this great event With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind all passion spent. (1745–58) Samson thus ends with a somewhat irregular but recognisable sonnet.50 Most of its lines are briefer than the pentameters of Milton’s standalone sonnets, and his favoured Petrarchan pattern (ABBAABBA CDECDE) is varied (ABABCDCD EFEFEF) while retaining the Italianate shape of an octave plus sestet. We find, too, a subtle but startling semantic ‘turn’ over the enjambment that accompanies the transition from octave to sestet: ‘whence Gaza mourns / And all that band them to resist’. Not only the Philistines, but all who ‘band’ together against God should mourn in light of Samson’s fate – not only geographically beyond Gaza, but potentially in the historical present beyond the poem’s end. On this reading, the classicising chorus in its conclusion turns to face the audience, not unlike the player entrusted with an epilogue in a modern Restoration play, and addresses them as fellow ‘servants’ of God who will depart edified and with ‘peace and consolation’ – or, if they ‘resist’ the poem, as part of a ‘band’ of Philistines who should ready themselves for ruin. The lyric’s shorter lines are matched by relatively muted rhyme sounds, especially in the sestet: it uses narrow vowels and closing consonants (ist, ent) that we might contrast with the open vowel endings that singers love in contemporaneous Italian repertoires. This is hardly an exuberant song of praise, nor the ‘trumpet’-blast Wordsworth heard in Milton’s freestanding sonnets, but rather, as the form’s Italian name suggests, a very ‘little sound’ – the kind of still, quiet voice that might come after the tempest and embody the possibility of balance and concord after sacrifice and purgation.51 Comparison with Italian models is seeded in Samson’s introduction, which justified Milton’s inclusion of a chorus as ‘still in use among the Italians’ (and in this context one might think of the chorus’s role in musical as well as spoken dramas, given Milton’s engagement with music in Italy).52 Milton went on to explain that,

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unlike his Greek models, he did not use repeated stanzas, since these were ‘framed only for the music, then used with the chorus that sung; not essential to the poem, and therefore not material’. Yet Milton’s chorus does indulge in irregular rhymes and metrical variations, what Milton terms ‘apolelymenon’ (freed measures) or allæostrophic (irregular) ‘stanzas or pauses’.53 The other characters speak largely in blank verse, the non-rhyming metre chosen for Paradise Lost on the grounds that it broke free from the ‘modern bondage of rhyming’: easy musicality was there sacrificed for the greater cause of liberty. The chorus’s propensity to lapse into verse can be taken as an index of the Israelites’ waywardness and error, with their supreme moment of lyricism at the play’s end making for deep irony and cognitive dissonance.54 Still, the recognisability, sustained length, and closure of the sonnet separate it formally from the chorus’s other spells of rhyming. Alongside its position after the play’s noisy crisis, this allows a different reading of the evocation of song, one that chimes with the chorus’s assertion that ‘all is [. . .] best found in the close’. As Manoa perceived ruin in the hideous noise from offstage, Samson may hint that proofs of divinely ordained resolution are found not only at the narrative’s end, but in the cadences of an appropriately bounded, freely used, quiet lyric song. The term ‘close’ is significant in the poem, related to the semantics of bondage, but with its own miniature patterning: it appears in the first speech, as Samson describes how the bank where he sits with ‘choice of sun or shade’ offers respite from the prison where he ‘scarce freely draw[s] / The air imprisoned also, close and damp’ (7–8). The adjectival ‘close’ (with the aural difference from the noun of a final s/z) thus appears in proximity to ‘air’, another potentially ‘Songish’ term (as John Dryden would call the airs of his music drama Albion and Albanius (1685)).55 The only other appearance of close is with the false resolution Samson prays for before his inklings of a ‘remarkable’ last ‘act’ and reconciliation with God’s purposes: ‘speedy death, / The close of all my miseries’ (650–1). Appropriately, the actual close of Samson’s life is marked not only by his release from subjection through an outlet of violence but by a release and purgation of ‘air’. On this reading, then, music begins as part of a spectrum of destructive sounds marking a noisy lapsed world; but song also emerges as an embodiment of moments or ‘pauses’ of psychological ‘peace’ and ethical-spiritual concord offered by ‘highest wisdom’ and wrought by tragedy. Harmonious ‘stanzas’ might be cadences without being absolutely final cadences – appropriately, since the close of the poem is also forwardlooking: Manoa has called on his kin to seize the ‘occasion’ to collect Samson’s body while the Philistines are in confusion, and to ‘Find courage to lay hold on’ the potential ‘freedom’ that is Samson’s legacy (1714–15). In Milton’s words, tragedy possessed ‘power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight’.56 The musico-poetic vocabulary of ‘measure’ and attuning suggests the importance of well-tempered sounds to this schema. As Norbrook puts it, ‘it is not harmony in itself that [Milton’s] Longinus rejects but its premature, specious approximation; the sublime is indeed harmonious and unified, but only just’.57 Audible harmony and song are not necessary signals of this free concord, but arguably become ethically permissible, part of Milton’s realm of ‘things indifferent’ or adiaphorous – to be discerningly chosen or omitted, just as Milton is free to deploy or avoid rhyme as a tool throughout the poem.58

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Conclusion Sacrificing music has a long history in literature and the humanities. Insofar as sound studies has part of its root-system in cultural studies, and cultural studies one taproot in a literary discipline whose narrow canonical textbase and medium-specific focus it rejected, the ritual sacrifice of music in literature belongs to the dim prehistory of sound studies. Another tendency of this chapter, less direct, is to suggest the limits of categorising music as a ‘subset of sounds’.59 While calls to read music and literature conjuncturally are welcome, we might hesitate over integrating music into sound studies by subsuming music into audible sound. Attention to the everyday and presentday encourages (positive) characterisations of music as vibrating, live, and in the air. Yet just as the inaudible slide of a sound technician’s controls or the noisy clank of a roadie’s harness belong to musicking as a cultural activity, so too unsounded or only potentially sounded texts, structures and concepts, literary representations and verbal patternings, help make up music as a cultural domain. As Kahn argued, ‘None of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence, and the traditionally auditive arts grow to sound quite different when included in an array of auditive practices.’60 Music and literature bear particularly strong witness to Kahn’s observation. In interpreting music, literature, and sound with and against one another, students of sound may well struggle to avoid the odd sacrificial gesture. And this is not all bad. After all, there are no fields that exclude nothing. Even a provisional field is an enclosure with lines that leave some things out, some of the time, and marginalise others. Sacrifice illuminates the strategic, partial, complex, and recuperative nature of music’s marginalisation. But perhaps, if we need to make continued sacrifices in this context, we should at least sometimes remember a further strand of anthropological arguments about sacrifice: sacrifice is not always or only about giving up. It involves towards its close, or sometimes instead of violence, a practice of commensality, that is, eating together or ritual feasting with the gods.61 Despite all the attendant risks of poisoning, cross-contamination, trickery, mess, bad table manners, and bad sharing, when it comes to relationships between the arts and disciplines, we might do well more often to practise sacrifice as commensality.

Notes My thanks to Ruby Lowe, Matthew Champion, and all my students in ‘Listening Across the Channel: Sound and Modern Literature’ at King’s College London.   1. Matt Sakakeeny, ‘Music’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 112–24 (113).   2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 39; in relation to musicology, see Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 2 (2010): 205–43 (221–3).  3. See, for example, Jonathan Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–17 (3, 5); Sakakeeny, ‘Music’, 113; and Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, ‘Introduction: Remapping Sound Studies in the Global South’, in Remapping Sound Studies, ed. Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 1–36 (7, 12).   4. Michael Bull and Les Back, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 1–18 (12).

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 5. Ibid.   6. Defining authors whose primary disciplinary ‘home’ is in ‘music’ risks seeming to create the kind of disciplinary boundaries under investigation, and certainly a number of other contributors were practising music-makers and composers, and/or worked in organisations and institutions where ‘music’ might not be a structuring principle.   7. Richard Sennett, ‘Resistance’, in Auditory Culture, 481–4.   8. Michael Bull, ed., Sound Studies (London: Routledge, 2013).   9. Publisher’s book description at https://www.routledge.com/Sound-Studies/Bull/p/ book/9780415597333 (accessed 24 August 2023). 10. Ibid. 11. Mark M. Smith, ‘Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts’, in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), ix–xxii (x). In disciplinary terms, Smith, xi, brackets off ethnomusicology as ‘lack[ing]’ the ‘historical dimension’ relevant to his readers. 12. Veit Erlmann, ‘But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses’, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 1–20 (2). 13. Steingo and Sykes, ‘Introduction’, 11, 27n18. 14. Ibid., 6. 15. Ibid. See Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, eds, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 16. Mark M. Smith, Mitchell Snay, and Bruce R. Smith, ‘Coda. Talking Sound History’, in Hearing History, 365–404 (398). 17. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, ‘Introduction to “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music”’, Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 635–48 (636); Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, ‘New Keys to the World of Sound’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–36 (8). Compare Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’; Anna Snaith, ed., Sound and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 18. Pinch and Bijsterveld, ‘New Keys’, 9. 19. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 158–64; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977), 103–19; Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 20. Steven Connor, ‘Strings in the Earth and Air’ (2006), 11, http://stevenconnor.com/seeingtosound .html (accessed 24 August 2023). 21. Erlmann, ‘But What of the Ethnographic Ear?’, 15; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 189. The characterisation of Russolo, Varèse, and Cage is Douglas Kahn’s, ‘Ether Ore’, in Hearing Cultures, 107–30 (108). 22. See especially Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 55–80; and Friedrich A. Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 23. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 17. 24. Ibid., 101. 25. Ibid. 26. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 7. 27. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 23. 28. Ibid., 24.

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29. Germane studies include Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Julia Meszaros and Johannes Zachhuber, eds, Sacrifice and Modern Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 30. First proposed in Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur la nature et la function du sacrifice’, L’Année sociologique 2 (1899): 29–138. 31. Ps. 51:16–17. 32. Heb. 11:32 (on Samson), 12:1, 13:10–16. 33. For further discussion, see Miranda Stanyon, Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 34. Compare Robert Stagg, ‘Against “the Music of Poetry”’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 183–8. 35. Quotations from John Hall’s translation of Pseudo-Longinus, Peri hypsous (1652), in David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138. 36. Norbrook, Writing, 67. 37. John Milton, ‘The Verse’, in Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler (London: Longman, 2006), 55. 38. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (London, 1701), 23–4. 39. John Dennis, An Essay upon Publick Spirit (London, 1711), 19. 40. Scott Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 186–7. Trudell, 151–3, offers a recent view of the extensive literature on Milton and music. See also David Ainsworth, Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit (New York: Routledge, 2020). It is rarer to integrate consideration of sound, music, and musically coded aspects of versification in Samson Agonistes (hereafter SA), the approach adopted here. 41. John Milton, ‘Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Called Tragedy’, in Samson Agonistes, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997), 357. 42. Milton’s association of the term ‘sacrifice’ with idolatry may reflect early Protestant arguments that Christianity was not sacrificial, and Catholic Reform’s renewed emphasis on sacrifice. See Johannes Zachhuber and Julia Meszaros, ‘Introduction’, in Sacrifice, 1–11 (1–2). SA’s equivocation about Samson’s last act chimes with what Gregory Chaplin argues is Milton’s heterodox downplaying of the Crucifixion and emphasis on the perfect obedience which precedes and enables Christ’s sacrifice, an ethical choice imitable by other humans. This ethical framework draws on Cicero, as do Milton’s musical images of cosmic and interpersonal concord, Chaplin shows. Gregory Chaplin, ‘Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement’, PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 354–69. Discussions of SA and sacrifice include Anthony Low, ‘Tragic Pattern in Samson Agonistes’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11, no. 2 (1969): 915–30; and Brendan Quigley, ‘The Distant Hero of Samson Agonistes’, ELH 72, no. 3 (2005): 529–51 (548). 43. Early modern understandings of sound as a purgative and/or destructive physical force were widespread. See Marissa Greenberg, ‘Noise, the Great Fire, and Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, in Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 108–38. 44. See Greenberg, ‘Noise’, on cathartic purging and sound, although Greenberg suggests no acoustic catharsis occurs. By contrast, Ainsworth sees a more abstract musical catharsis available to readers, reflecting harmonia mundi and Samson’s restored ‘harmony’ with God, but less related to sonic sensation or poetic sound. Ainsworth, Milton, Music

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and Literary Interpretation, 120–40, especially 122–3. Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Samson Agonistes and Milton’s Sensible Ethics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 649–66 (656), suggests the relevance to SA of seventeenth-century theories that ‘sensation happens when the sense is converted into the nature of the sensible thing, that is, through an alteration’ of the subject. 45. Compare Greenberg, ‘Noise’. 46. Norbrook, Writing, 137–8, quoting Hall, Peri hypsous, 79. 47. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 355. 48. Compare Trudell, Unwritten Poetry, 193–4. On the slippery category of lyric and its relation to song, see Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 49. The prevalence of unreliable speakers in the poem is discussed widely. See Joan S. Bennett, ‘Reading Samson Agonistes’, in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 219–35. 50. On the sonnet, see, for example, Michael Cohen, ‘Rhyme in Samson Agonistes’, Milton Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1974): 4–6 (5); and Linda Gregerson, ‘Milton and the Tragedy of Nations’, PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 672–87 (682–4). Greenberg’s and Trudell’s interpretations of SA in the wake of sound studies curiously do not comment on such manipulations of poetic sound/song. 51. William Wordsworth, ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’, l. 13, in Poems of William Wordsworth, Volume 3: Collected Reading Texts from The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009), 605–6 (606). 52. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 356. See, for example, Edward Phillips, ‘The Life of John Milton’, in Letters of State, written by Mr. John Milton [. . .] (London, 1694), i–xliv; and John Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities (London, 1968), 129–205, which speculated on Monteverdi’s and others’ impact on SA. 53. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 357. Carey’s edition gives ‘stanzas of pauses’, while seventeenthcentury editions give ‘or’: pause is here synonymous with stanza (from stare, to stand); the phrase emphasises Milton’s separation of his verse from the choreographic movements of Greek choruses in a strophe and antistrophe (turn and counter-turn). 54. For one view of the final lyric’s prosody as condemning the chorus, see Janel Mueller, ‘Just Measures? Versification in Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies 33 (1996): 47–82. For interpretation of the sonnet as a questionable but not merely ironic moment of catharsis and community, see Gregerson, ‘Milton and the Tragedy’, 680–4. Gregerson notes in passing rhyme’s ‘musical’ coding and apparent contradiction between SA and Paradise Lost, suggesting, like Cohen, SA’s highly ‘flexible’ deployment of rhyme. On contemporary debate about choruses and rhyme, see Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘Milton’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Samson Agonistes’, in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 97–120. 55. Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 15:4. 56. Milton, ‘Of [. . .] Tragedy’, 355. 57. Norbrook, Writing, 138. 58. On adiaphora, see, for example, Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 365–9. 59. Sakakeeny, ‘Music’, 122. 60. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 2. 61. Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice, 10–11. See further Maurice Bloch, ‘Commensality and Poisoning’, Social Research 66, no. 1 (1999): 133–49; and Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 24–45.

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Select Bibliography Ainsworth, David, Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit (New York: Routledge, 2020). Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Bull, Michael and Les Back, eds, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003). Chaplin, Gregory, ‘Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement’, PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 354–69. Erlmann, Veit, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Greenberg, Marissa, Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Hughes, Derek, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Milton, John, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997). Norbrook, David, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Novak, David and Matt Sakakeeny, eds, Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Steingo, Gavin and Jim Sykes, eds, Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Sterne, Jonathan, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012). Trudell, Scott, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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7 Shakespeare’s Vibrant Theatres Bruce R. Smith

T

hat’s vibrant as in vibrating.1 The physical media of theatrical performance are frequencies of energy. They exist in two forms: (1) electromagnetic light rays at 400–700 nanometres and (2) mechanical sound waves at 20–20,000 hertz. Whatever the performance – live or digital, medieval or contemporary – these two forms of vibrating energy communicate what spectator/listeners see, hear, perceive, and feel. One of these two kinds of vibrations – sound waves – is the subject of this chapter, with particular attention to the original acoustic environments and original performance practices in the theatre buildings for which Shakespeare contrived his designs in sound. The notations of those designs are usually referred to as ‘scripts’, but that term privileges words. To call the sound designs ‘scores’ comes closer to recognising the variety of sounds encoded and implied in Shakespeare’s designs, and I am adopting that term here. In performances of Shakespeare’s plays, now as well as then, a certain subset of sound waves coalesce to produce the phonemes of English speech. But the ambition of this chapter is broader: to study acoustic vibrations of all kinds: not just phonemes but noise, shouts, sound effects, instrumental sounds, and sounds made by spectator/ listeners. In turning attention to the full panoply of sounds present in performances of Shakespeare’s plays I am following the example of Steve Goodman, who has been credited with initiating a so-called ontological turn in sound studies. Instead of describing the cultural meanings of sound, theorists like Goodman attend to the being-ness of sound, its physical properties, its assaultive force on hearers’ bodies, and its politics.2 Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2010) makes Goodman’s case. Goodman regards audible sound to be only one manifestation of vibration: If we subtract human perception, everything moves. Anything static is so only at the level of perceptibility. At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating. Equally, objecthood, that which gives an entity duration in time, makes it endure, is an event irrelevant of human perception. All that is required is that an entity be felt as an object by another entity. All entities are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities. This is a realism, albeit a weird, agitated, and nervous one.3 As Goodman frames it, sound is first and foremost a physical force; its symbolic potentialities are second-level effects. Ontology begets epistemology. Holger Schulze’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how knowing-through-sound produces a distinctive kind of

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knowledge. To consider theatrical sound in these ontological and epistemological terms is to decentre intentional speech acts. Instead, sites of performance become acoustic force fields, full of all kinds of sounds, rife with conflict. In these force fields of contained energy, speech is only one force and, in certain moments at least, not the dominant force. Tamsen O. Wolff’s chapter in this volume investigates just such a realignment of sounds. Reading Shakespeare’s scores as vibrations might seem perverse. After all, Shakespeare was famed in his own time – and remains famed today – as a wordsmith. To listen for the non-linguistic sounds in which Shakespeare’s language is embedded, I am arguing here, is better to understand the potencies and potentialities of his words and their effect on listeners who apprehend semantic vibrations within a matrix of other sonic vibrations. I proceed in four phases: (1) noise as the matrix of sound in performances of Shakespeare’s plays, (2) extra-linguistic and para-linguistic sounds, (3) speech as an unstable category, and (4) vibration as the interface between text/ performance and actors/audience. The result, I hope, will exemplify the affordances of sound studies for Shakespeare studies.

Noise When neighbours in the London parish of St Ann Blackfriars successfully petitioned the Bishop of London to prevent Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from opening the indoor Blackfriars Theatre in 1596, they listed as one of their reasons ‘the same Playhouse is so neere the Church that the noyse of the Drummes and Trumpetts will greatly disturbe and hinder both the Ministers and the Parishioners in tyme of devine service and Sermones’.4 So focused have Shakespeare scholars been on the words spoken within the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres that they have shut their ears to the multiple kinds of sounds that were part of performances in those places – especially noise. Josua Poole in his how-to-be-a-better-writer book The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie (1657) provides under the heading ‘theater’ a suggestive list of adjectives: ‘Publick, spacious, thronged, crowded, open, populous, peopled, crammed, well-fill’d, mirthfull, joyous, noisefull, clamarous, applausive, pompous, gorgeous.’5 In addition to the drums and trumpets specified in the St Ann’s petition, early modern theatres were full of other non-verbal noise: alarums from backstage in battle scenes, cannon fire from the roof, fireworks accompanying entrances of devils and demons, shouts, boos, applause, and catcalls from the audience.6 In terms of volume, such sounds outdecibelled speech. A curious thing about the St Ann parishioners’ complaint is their fear of trumpets and drums. These loud sounds were prominent features of performances in the vast outdoor theatres north of the city walls of London and across the Thames on the South Bank. When the Blackfriars Theatre was finally allowed to open – with so-called rehearsals of plays by child actors from St Paul’s School – the repertory did not favour loud sounds. When the King’s Men finally did take over the space in 1609, performances there featured consort music as the plays began, not drums and trumpets.7 Several plays acted by the King’s Men at both the Globe and the Blackfriars exist in two versions. The version for the Blackfriars tones down the trumpets and replaces them with quieter cornets.8

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In both the Globe and the Blackfriars one major source of noise was the audience. Poole characterises all theatres, outdoor and indoor, as ‘noisefull, clamarous, applausive’. Contemporary testimony attests that Shakespeare’s audiences were far from being the quiet, attentive listeners that have been the rule in ‘legitimate’ theatres since the late nineteenth century.9 Sound studies has generally considered noise as distracting and undesirable.10 If we attend carefully to cues for sound written into Shakespeare’s scores and the strategies the scores present for controlling boisterous audiences, the role of noise becomes a dynamic part of the original performances. Greg Hainge in Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise gives noise its ontological due.11 ‘Noise’ for Hainge is not the random frequencies that sound studies has regarded as meaningless and distracting but the matrix out of which all human-created meaning emerges. Hainge’s schema can be understood as a figure/ground relationship. Perception is a matter of where one turns one’s attention: to figure or to ground. What would happen if we trained our ears to listen for the auditory ‘ground’ of Shakespeare’s plays, turning non-verbal sounds into the ‘figure’?

Extra-Linguistic Sounds and Para-Linguistic Sounds By extra-linguistic sounds I mean sounds that exist in vibrating frequencies somewhere between noise and speech. By para-linguistic sounds I mean sounds that modulate and enhance the phonemes of speech, as for example songs, in which the semantic sense of words is enhanced via pitch, melodic cadence, and rhythm. Extralinguistic sounds, whether explicitly cued or indirectly implied in Shakespeare’s scores, are the hardest for modern ears to hear. So intent are we on decoding speech – the ‘figure’ in Shakespeare’s work – that we tune out the ‘ground’ from which speech emerges: noise. The figure/ground relationship is particularly apparent in how plays at the Globe and other outdoor theatres customarily began. Out of the noise of the assembling audience first emerged trumpet blasts to signal to the assembled audience and to potential customers outside that the play was about to begin. The segue from the trumpet signals to semantic sounds, often consisted in a Chorus outside the fiction or an authoritative male character within the fiction asserting aural command over the theatre building and silencing noise. The volume and timbre of the trumpets could often be heard in the male actors’ declamatory voice. A signal example – signal in every sense of the word – is the Prologue’s opening lines in the 1623 Folio text of Henry V: O for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of inventïon: A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.12 The piercing sound of the trumpet is continued in the bright /o/ of the Prologue’s first phoneme. In the acoustic progression of vowel sounds from /aː/ in the front of the mouth to /ʊ/ in the back of the mouth, the middle position is occupied by /o/. With lips protruding like a trumpet’s bell, /o/ is the loudest of the English vowels.13 In its first two lines the Prologue to Henry V runs the gamut of primary English vowels, aligning the timbre of the speaking voice with a trumpet’s brass in the visualisation of ‘a muse of fire’.

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One of Shakespeare’s distinctive ways of dealing with audience noise is to begin, not with a loud voice, but with a conversation in progress: Antonio conversing with Salerio and Solano in The Merchant of Venice, Orlando voicing his woes to Old Adam in As You Like It, Iago setting up Roderigo in Othello, Kent and Gloucester exchanging court gossip in King Lear, and Philo commenting to Demetrius about Antony’s ‘dotage’ over Cleopatra moments before the two title characters enter in Antony and Cleopatra. In these instances comparatively soft speech commands the audience’s attention, and noise likely diminishes by degrees. Other plays, from Shakespeare’s later career, are scored to begin with loud extralinguistic sounds: a shouting mob in Coriolanus, ‘a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ in The Tempest. The fact that these sounds are extra-spatial as well as extralinguistic foregrounds their visceral vibratory quality. These sounds were executed ‘within’, that is, from inside the ‘tiring house’ at the behind-the-rear façade of the playing platform. Not being able to see the source of a sound has been demonstrated to create a sense of disorientation.14 Designating songs and instrumental music in Shakespeare’s scores as paralinguistic is likely to seem as outrageous to musicians and musicologists as regarding immortal words as momentary semantic sounds is to Shakespeare scholars. The prefix para- sets up music as ‘beside’ or ‘next to’ semantic sounds. The music in songs takes the phonemes, rhythm, pitch, and cadences of words and shapes them acoustically, blurring the distinction between music and words. In performance, music and words are both species of sound within the genus of regulated vibration. If extralinguistic sounds from ‘within’ functioned behind the words, paralinguistic sounds functioned beside, above, or below the words, depending on where the musicians were placed. Sometimes the places from which instrumental sounds emanate are specified in the score. An ominous sound seeming to come from the under the stage in 4.3 of Antony and Cleopatra is heard by the soldiers onstage: Music of the hautboys as under the stage SECOND SOLDIER Peace, what noise? FIRST SOLDIER List, list! SECOND SOLDIER Hark! FIRST SOLDIER Music i’th’ air. THIRD SOLDIER Under the earth. FOURTH SOLDIER It signs well, does it not? THIRD SOLDIER No. FIRST SOLDIER Peace, I say! What should this mean? SECOND SOLDIER ’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, Now leaves him (4.3.11–16) On other occasions instrumental sounds are heard as coming from above, as being ‘in the air’. By his very name the spirit Ariel, who conjures the musical sounds in The Tempest and sings the play’s songs, is associated with air. In the Blackfriars Theatre, for which The Tempest was likely designed, the instrumentists were placed in a musicians’ gallery above the façade at the back of the playing space. Some witnesses describe the space as being curtained, in which case paralinguistic music would have vibrated in the

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air from an unseen source, producing a disorienting effect not dissimilar to the effect of extralinguistic sounds produced from within the tiring house. An example of this disorienting effect is the ‘Solemn and strange music’ that is cued to sound when Prospero produces an apparitional banquet to Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio in The Tempest 3.3. The paralinguistic function of the music – its ‘along-side-ness’ – is indicated in Gonzalo’s naming of the sound: ‘Marvellous sweet music!’ The word ‘strange’ reverberates throughout The Tempest. The instrumental music in 3.3 adds overtones to earlier instances of the word ‘strange’ and continues to echo in the audience’s ears every time the word ‘strange’ is enunciated later in the play. Heard but not seen: in cinema that arrangement is called ‘extradiegetic sound’ in contrast to ‘diegetic sound’ in which the source of the sound is visible within the image.15 Cues for drums and trumpets in battle scenes suggest that such sounds were usually extradiegetic. As such, they could function alongside words, as is usually the case in film, but they could also drown out words, temporarily reversing the usual figure/ground relationship. The placement of musicians at the Globe Theatre remains more controversial than at the Blackfriars. In the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where electronic amplification is not used, positioning the musicians on the open gallery above the stage results in a muted sound as compared with placing the musicians in an upper spectators’ gallery just to the right or the left of the platform.16 In my 1999 book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England – published two years before the reconstructed Globe in London officially opened and three years before the replica of the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton, Virginia, was completed – I attempted acoustic analysis of both spaces, using surviving dimensions of the original structures, their construction materials, and principles of modern acoustic engineering. Speech was my reference point in both cases, and I distinguished the reverberant lateral sound of the Globe with the quieter, rounder resonance of the Blackfriars. To revisit these calculations with instrumental music in mind confirms the general differences between the two acoustic environments but points up some specific differences when the sound is not words but music. The Globe, open to the sky and circumscribed with horizontal vibrating surfaces, fosters brighter, more locatable instrumental sounds. Musicians, whether placed on the balcony above the platform or in a gallery to the side or even on the platform itself, are visually and acoustically present beside the actors. The musicians are physically more distant from the actors in the reconstructed Blackfriars Theatre, resulting in a warmer and more diffuse sound that embraces actors, musicians, and the audience alike. The musicians figure as an independent sound source. The affinities of music with other forms of sound is apparent in early modern English in the word ‘noise’, which could refer not only to extralinguistic sounds but to a pleasant or melodious sound as well as to the company of musicians who made those sounds.17 ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord’: the King James Bible’s translation of the first verse of Psalm 100 celebrates this once-current idea of noise.

Speech If we make noise and non-linguistic sounds the ground and speech the figure, we end up blurring the boundaries of speech itself. In Shakespeare’s sound scores, speech comes in a variety of forms that incorporate to varying degrees extralinguistic and

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paralinguistic sounds as well as noise. ‘Speech genres’ is Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for utterance routines tailored to specific intents and situations.18 All of the speech genres in Shakespeare’s scores – orations, soliloquies, asides, dialogue, clowning patter – involve varying degrees of extralinguistic and paralinguistic elements, sometimes even noise. Semantic sense is never the only motive for a character’s speaking. In orations the tropes of classical rhetoric figure as paralinguistic sound effects. To limit attention only to Hamlet, Claudius’s nervous oration in the first court scene (1.2) is full of paralinguistic sounds. The scene is scored to begin with a flourish of trumpets. Claudius, like the Prologue to Henry V, uses his voice as a trumpet to cover up the one thing he wants to conceal, the crime of murdering his brother and marrying the brother’s wife. He uses the sounds of words and the piling up of fine-sounding phrases before mentioning, almost parenthetically, what he wants not to say: Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we, as ’twere, with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife (Ham 1.2.8–14) Another flourish of trumpets ends the scene. Noise comes later, when offstage noises of trumpets, cannons, and drums are cued and are heard by Hamlet and Horatio. ‘What does this mean, my lord?’ Horatio asks Hamlet. It is Claudius draining cups of wine with his courtiers: ‘The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out / The triumph of his pledge’ (Ham 1.4.5, 10–11). Hamlet’s first aside in the court scene is another speech genre involving paralinguistic sounds: a quip directed at the audience that is as much about contemptuous /k/ sounds as about Claudius’s incest: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65). Hamlet’s famous soliloquies – the first is ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.129–30) – function primarily as expressions of emotion, in this case communicated through /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds. Dialogue, exchanges of speech between two or more characters, is the staple speech genre in Shakespeare’s plays. Characters exchange not only semantic information but nuanced emotions, facilitated by sympathetic or antagonistic paralinguistic sounds. Hamlet’s exchanges with the Ghost in 1.5 are a concise example. ‘Speak’, pleads Hamlet; ‘swear’, demands the Ghost. The disjunction with the Ghost between body and no voice in 1.1 and voice with no body (later in 1.5) makes this a case in extremis. Clowning patter is a speech genre concerned with such disjunctions, in this case disjunctions between sense and nonsense. Shakespeare’s clowns and fools are great riddle-tellers and punsters. They revel in the arbitrariness of sounds and signifiers. They are fond, too, of ‘breaking out’ into song. Take the first grave digger in Hamlet: HAMLET Whose grave’s this, sirrah? FIRST CLOWN Mine, sir. [Sings] O, a pit of clay for to be made— HAMLET I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in’t. FIRST CLOWN You lie out on’t, sir, and therefore ’tis not yours. For my

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part, I do not lie in’t, yet it is mine. HAMLET Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t and say it is thine. ’Tis for the dead, not for the quick; therefore thou liest. FIRST CLOWN ’Tis a quick lie, sir: ’twill away again from me to you. (Ham 1.5.118–29) Boundaries between speech and other kinds of sound – extralinguistic and paralinguistic sounds as well as noise – are not static. Vibrations of extralinguistic sounds carry over into speech, and paralinguistic vibrations become extensions of speech. Alarums from ‘within’ during battle scenes, shouts onstage and off, and sound effects like thunder affect speeches that occur during and after those sounds. The ‘tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ at the start of The Tempest drowns out the speeches it provokes, resulting in semantic chaos among the voices. In no production of the play that I have witnessed could the actors’ voices be heard above the noise. Rather, phrases emerged momentarily out of the noise and then receded: MASTER Boatswain! BOATSWAIN Here, Master. What cheer? MASTER Good, speak to th’ mariners. Fall to’t yarely, or we run our-selves aground. Bestir, bestir! Exit Enter Mariners BOATSWAIN Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Yare, yare! Take in the top-sail! Tend to th’ Master’s whistle! – Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough (Tem 1.1.1–7) When the noblemen onboard enter, the Boatswain mocks their attempts to speak amid the storm: ‘Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin; silence! Trouble us not’ (Tem 1.1.16–18). Only when Prospero enters in the next scene does speech assume final dominance over extralinguistic noise. A similar segue of noise into speech occurs in the first scene of Coriolanus. ‘Enter a company of mutinous citizens, with staves, clubs, and other weapons’: the opening stage direction in Coriolanus implies shouts and cries that compete with speech: FIRST CITIZEN Before we proceed any further, hear me speak! ALL CITIZENS Speak, speak! (Cor 1.1.1–2) This is one of the very few times in Shakespeare when a crowd of people are cued to speak on top of each other. Offstage shouts are heard again later in the scene. It takes the dominant male voice of the statesman Menenius Agrippa, who enters the scene at line 40, before shouting settles into speaking. The extralinguistic sounds of the first scene of Coriolanus do not end when the shouting stops: they reverberate through the entire play, always threatening to erupt, as they do in the play’s many battle scenes and in the last scene when conspirators murder Coriolanus in the presence of his archenemy Aufidius: CONSPIRATORS Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him! Draw both the conspirators, and kill Martius, who falls. Aufidius stands on him

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LORDS Hold, hold, hold, hold! AUFIDIUS My noble masters, hear me speak (Cor 5.6.300–1) Aufidius has had a change of heart and laments the death of his enemy. The last sounds in the play are paralinguistic: ‘Beat thou the drum’, Aufidius commands, ‘that it speak mournfully’ (Cor 5.6.149–50). The final stage direction is for ‘a dead march’ to accompany the removal of Coriolanus’s body offstage. The drums continue the vibrations of Aufidius’s voice. Paralinguistically, the drums speak for Aufidius, in his place. And they vibrate the affect of his speech out into the theatre and into the ears of the audience, creating a vibrant aural field. Upon close inspection, the boundary between linguistic sounds and other types of sounds turns out to be less rigid than linguistic science would have it be. Early modern brass instruments were regarded as particularly apt for paralinguistic use because they were played with tongue and lips. The sounds produced by musicians using these instruments were, in multiple senses of the word, articulate sounds. In early modern trumpets there were no valves to change pitches; everything was done with the player’s lips and tongue. Military signals in particular required precise arrangements of the tongue. As Cesare Bendinelli explains in Tutta l’arte della Trombetta (The entire art of trumpet) (1614), a student of the trumpet should learn to lead with his chin (mangeggiar il barbozzo) [together] with the notes of each register – this is called ‘accenting’ the trumpet and gives it elegance. When [the pupil] has succeeded in this, and knows how to play all the notes (voci) well, he then can learn how to sing and play with the tongue.19 Tonguing technique is particularly important in military signals, which Bendinelli understands as words. Particular tongue positions are specified in Bendinelli’s notations: ‘The principal military signals have syllables (parole) placed under them, in order that the player may know in which way to tongue (far la pronontia) into the trumpet and to differentiate one signal (cossa) from another.’20 Shakespeare’s history plays are full of trumpet cues that signal what is happening in a battle. In most instances, the battle is taking place offstage and is heard by the audience via alarums rather than seen. Two or three characters may move the battle onstage for a private encounter, as happens when Macduff rallies his troops in the passage from 5.6 to 5.7: MACDUFF Make all our trumpets speak, give them all breath, Those clamorous harbingers of blood, and death. Exeunt. Alarums continued Enter Macbeth MACBETH They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, But bear-like I must fight the course (Mac 5.6.9–10, 5.7.1–2) In effect Macbeth is responding to the trumpets’ speech. The audience hears in those trumpet sounds an extension of Macduff’s voice. It is not only trumpets that speak for characters in Macbeth but drums. From the beginning of the play Macbeth is associated with the distinctive sound of his drum.

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A cue for ‘Drum within’ interrupts the witches’ chanting in 1.3. ‘A drum, a drum! / Macbeth doth come’, chants one of the three witches at 1.3.25–6. There are repeated stage directions for ‘Drum and colours’ before each of the entries of the opposing forces in the concluding sequence of battle scenes. These stage directions bring directly onto the stage sounds that are usually heard from within. In each case, a drum speaks first, then the men. It is Malcolm’s drum that heralds his victorious entry in the last scene. In sonic terms, the whole battle sequence has been a matter of battling drums as much as battling speeches. Drums may lack articulation, but the rhythm with which they are struck can certainly cue differences in speech rhythms and even in pitch and volume if more than one drum sound together.21 The close connection between drumming and speech is quite explicit in the role of Parolles, the braggart soldier in All’s Well That Ends Well. His name literally means ‘words’ – of which he speaks plenty – but he is also enamoured of his drum. In the jokes played on him a direct connection is made between drumming and verbal bombast. For Parolles his drum is a metonym for manliness, valour, and war, and the recovery of his lost drum becomes his obsession, much to his fellow soldiers’ amusement. ‘A pox on’t, let it go. ’Tis but a drum’, says Lord G. ‘But a drum?’, Parolles exclaims. ‘Is’t but a drum? A drum so lost!’ (AWW 3.6.35–6). When the lords trick him by covering his eyes with a hood and pretending to be his captors, Parolles – ever the man with ready words – slanders the nobleman he has served, Count Roussillon, as an imposter, a man of all sound and no action: ‘Faith, sir, he’s led the drum before the English tragedians’ (AWW 4.3.218). When English acting companies went touring on the Continent, they used this way of drumming up business.22 Earlier in the play Parolles has been ridiculed as ‘That jackanapes / With scarves’ (AWW 3.5.18–19). Scarves were worn and waved by morris dancers, whose movements were coordinated with drum beats and piping. Songs, in which words are set to music, are an especially interesting form of paralinguistic sound-making. The idea of ‘setting’ words ‘to’ music23 – or in Shakespeare’s time ‘in’ music – is fundamentally placing words next to (para-) music. We frequently speak of songs as a merging of music and words, but the relationship between these two entities can shift. In the case of chant, words predominate; in highly ornamented songs, words can become secondary. Coming from multiple musical traditions, the songs in Shakespeare’s plays can veer in either direction. Shakespeare’s comedies, especially As You Like It and Twelfth Night, contain multiple cues for speech turning into song in the form of snatches of popular ballads, rounds, dance songs, and art songs.24 If audiences recognised popular tunes, they may well have joined in, and the few words noted in the text may not have marked the end of the song in a given performance. In As You Like It the best-known song today is Thomas Morley’s artful setting of ‘It Was a Lover and His Lass’ from near the end of the play. Which came first – the song’s use in As You Like It (c. 1600) or the song’s inclusion in Morley’s The first booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (1600) – remains controversial, but Morley’s setting of the words to (or in) music for voice and lute demonstrates how exquisitely the music shapes the phonemes, rhythm, pitch, and cadences of the words. As originally printed in Morley’s book, the song provides a score for all the sounds – linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic – that are involved in its performance. On the left in Figure 7.1 the top stave cues words, pitches, and rhythm, a singer’s voice, while the lower stave gives finger positions and rhythmic

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Figure 7.1  Thomas Morley, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, in The first booke of ayres. Or Little short songs, to sing and play to the lute, with the base viole (London: William Barley, 1600), sigs B3v–B4. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. cues for an accompanying lutentist. On the facing page another stave provides pitch and rhythmic notations for a bass-viol player, who provides a so-called ground bass for all the figures sounded by the singer and the lutenist. The rising rhythm of ‘It was a lov-er and his lass’, coupled with the rising pitches of ‘was’ and ‘lov-’, the quick descent from there, and the tripping rhythm after the pitch climax of ‘lov-’ are all paralinguistic embellishments to the semantic sense of the words. Early modern taste in all things artistic ran to ornamentation.25 The lutenist might provide further ornamentation in improvisations on the bare notations of finger positions. Also prominent in Morley’s setting are the extralinguistic sounds of ‘hey-nonnynonny-no’ and ‘Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding’, nonsense syllables that are repeated again and again, becoming the song’s main event. (The text of the song in the First Folio provides only one iteration of these syllables.) As the court fool Touchstone quips at the end of the song, ‘though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the note was very untunable’ (AYL 5.3.37–8). ‘Matter’ here refers to semantic sense. The two pages who have performed the song for Touchstone and his country wife Audrey take exception to Touchstone’s courtly dismal of their music: ‘We kept time, we lost not our time’ (5.3.39). But Touchstone hears it all as nonsense: ‘I count it but time lost to hear such a foolish song’ (5.3.40).

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Vibrancy Let us return to the petition made by neighbours of the Blackfriars Theatre. They opposed the opening of the theatre for two reasons, both having to do with vibrations. First, ‘by reason of the great resort and gathering togeather of all manner of vagrant and lewde persons’ and, second, because ‘the same Playhouse is so neere the Church that the noyse of the Drummes and Trumpetts will greatly disturbe and hinder both the Ministers and the Parishioners in tyme of devine service and Sermones’.26 St Ann was a relatively quiet, well-to-do parish made up of closes and narrow lanes, vestiges of the Blackfriars monastery that had occupied the site.27 The prospect of noisy throngs of ‘vagrant and lewd persons’ was not only a political threat but an acoustic threat. A proximity search of the database Early English Books Online reveals how often ‘loud’ appeared in the same context as ‘lewd’ even when people were not present, as in the formulaic phrase ‘a lewd and loud lie’. When trumpets and drums were added to the lewd and loud noises of audiences, the result was a challenge to the primacy of words and speech, especially in the ears of Puritan-leaning members of the parish. The contrasts between church-space and theatre-space were sharp: Church acoustic Theatre acoustic Quiet Noisy Single dominant male voice Many competing voices Group voices under total control Group voices not under control Linguistic sounds Extra- and para-linguistic as well as linguistic sounds In services at St Ann’s Church, The Book of Common Prayer precisely dictated the sounds to be made, all of them under control of the priest: direct addresses of priest to parishioners, readings from the Old and the New Testaments by the priest, group singing of psalms in Sternhold and Hopkins’s four-square word-for-word settings, a sermon delivered by the priest, group prayers led by the priest and spoken by the priest alone. All very orderly, as directed by ‘The Order for Morning Prayer’, ‘The Order for Holy Communion’, and so forth. By contrast, a theatre was a noisy and potentially unruly space, full of competing sounds. Superficially, Shakespeare’s plays might seem to be just as orderly as Church of England services. First one character speaks, then another, taking turns.28 Instances like the mob scene in Coriolanus, in which ‘All Citizens’ are cued to speak at once, are rare. The underlying dynamics of turn-taking remain, however, competitive. Semiotic analysts like Keir Elam and Alessandro Serpieri regard plays in performance as dialectics in which a speech by one character alters the ethos that all the other characters are creating together. Elam explains, ‘As a speaker, the character (a) posits possible worlds and reveals propositional attitudes; (b) enters into dialectic relations with his interlocutors; (c) manifests himself as a particular rhetorical force, with his own idiolect or style.’29 In acoustic terms, characters onstage compete for ‘air time’ with each other – and with the audience. Early modern audiences – more rambunctious than modern audiences – competed for air time with the actors. There is abundant testimony of

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audiences jeering and shouting down actors as well as exclaiming their approval. There was always the possibility that an early modern stage-player could ‘lose the audience’, as actors would say today. If Shakespeare’s prologues and opening speeches function as attempts to control audience noise, his epilogues enact a giving up of aural control to the audience. The Epilogue to The Tempest, scored to be spoken by Prospero – who has used his voice to attempt to stage-manage the proceedings from start to finish – betrays an anxiousness about what will come next: extralinguistic noise. Prospero’s return to his dukedom in Milan will not happen unless the audience responds to his words with claps and deepbreathed shouts: Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell, But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please (Tem Ep 5–13) Parting gestures like Prospero’s Epilogue would seem to return the vibrations of the play – linguistic, extralinguistic, and paralinguistic – back into the noise out of which the performance emerged in the beginning. But the vibrations of the performed sounds begin at once to re-verberate in the listeners’ memories, to be recalled later as snatches of speeches, as musical tunes, as impressive sound effects. Vibration, in Goodman’s conception, is a force that connects all material entities, animate (as with actors and audiences) or inanimate (as with trumpets, drums, and lutes and the timber and plaster of theatre buildings). In sonic transactions these always-present vibrations of molecules are made viscerally apparent. Vibrations start as physical sound waves, but they can be converted into different manifestations via the energy-transfer of ‘transduction’. In transduction, one form of energy is transduced, or ‘carried across’, into another. In theatrical performance, sound waves produced by vibrating vocal chords, by instruments blown, struck, and plucked, and by reflected sound waves in the theatre building are converted into other forms of energy in listeners’ bodies. Early modern physiology understood these transductions as happening in five phases: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Sound waves striking listeners’ ears become spirit-infused humours circulating in listeners’ bodies, to become affects in the listeners’ hearts, cognitions in listeners’ fore-brains, and finally aural memories stored at the back of the brain.

In this five-part scheme, resonance (‘re-sounding’) is more than a metaphor. To attend only to cognitions, to words, is to miss the full vibrancy of Shakespeare’s theatres.

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Notes   1. Versions of this chapter were given as talks at the London Renaissance Seminar in autumn 2021 and at a Sound Studies Workshop at Newcastle University in spring 2022 under auspices of the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful to the people who encouraged my project and made suggestions, many of which are incorporated in this chapter.   2. Brian Kane, ‘Sound Studies without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn’, Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 2–21.   3. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 81–4.   4. ‘Neighbors’ Petition of November 1596 against a Playhouse in Blackfriars’, UK National Archives, manuscript SP 12/260 folio 176, digital image in ‘Shakespeare Documented’ database, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/ document/neighbors-petition-november-1596-against-playhouse-blackfriars, including a summary with quotations by Alan Nelson, from which my quotations are taken.   5. Josua Poole, The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie containing a collection of all rhyming monosyllables, the choicest epithets, and phrases: with some general forms upon all occasions, subjects, and theams (London: Thomas Johnson, 1657), sig. O5v.   6. The physical noisiness of early modern theatres is described by Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The psychological and political implications of noise are explored in Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).   7. David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 111–40.   8. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 139–208. See also Sarah Dustagheer, ‘Acoustic and Visual Practices Indoors’, in Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 137–51.  9. Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 275–82. 10. See the succinct survey, with full bibliography, by David Novak, ‘Noise’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 125–38. 11. Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 12. William Shakespeare, Henry V, Pro 1–4, in The New Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowatt, Terri Borous, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Further quotations from Shakespeare are taken from this edition and are cited in the text. 13. Comparisons among the qualities of vowel sounds and their placement is the starting point of my book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3–6. 14. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 73–84. 15. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 32–58. 16. Philip Pickett, first director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, personal communication 1998. 17. OED Online, ‘noise, n.’†3. and †3.b, OED Online, https://www.oed.com. These meanings of ‘noise’ became obsolete in the eighteenth century. 18. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

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19. Cesare Bendinelli, Tutta l’arte della Trombetta, trans. Edward H. Tarr (Vuarmarens: The Brass Press, 2011), 10. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Speculation about connections between drums and words is made by Charles Subor, ‘Drumming, Language, and Poetry – Finding Relationships’, Percussive Notes (1 April 1992): 63–6. 22. Pavel Drábek and M. A. Katritzky, ‘Shakespearean Players in Early Modern Europe’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1527–33. See also Jerzy Limon, Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). There is also evidence that the London companies used drums for similar advertising purposes when they travelled outside London. 23. OED, ‘set, v.1’, VI.73.a. 24. Ross W. Duffin, The Shakespeare Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004) provides a complete catalogue; songs in the comedies are analysed by Kathryn Roberts Parker, ‘Music and Festival Culture in Shakespeare’s Comedy’ (PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2020). 25. Russ McDonald, ‘Ornament’, in Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 388–96. 26. ‘Neighbors’ Petition of November 1596 against a Playhouse in Blackfriars’. 27. Maps and diagrams of the Blackfriars neighbourhood are reproduced in the University of Victoria’s ‘Map of London’ database, https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLAC6.htm. 28. Oliver Morgan, Turn-Taking in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 29. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2005), 119. The dynamics of the dialectic are explored in songs specific to the comedies. See Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetry in Action: Between Thought and Passion’, Actes des congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare 24 (2007): 165–82.

Select Bibliography Goodman, Steve, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Hainge, Greg, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Novak, David, ‘Noise’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 125–38. Smith, Bruce R., The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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8 ‘Imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds’: Rap, Patter, and Hyper Diction in Musical Theatre Tamsen O. Wolff

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arly on in the musical Hamilton (2015), the character of George Washington identifies himself in his opening song with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (1880): ‘Now I’m the model of a modern major general. / The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / Lining up, to put me on a pedestal.’1 This might be a throwaway line; after all, the musical, which tells the story of the United States’ founders with a multicultural cast and a hip hop score, is rife with allusions to its many influences and predecessors, especially in the annals of musical theatre and rap. Composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda notes in passing in the margin of the libretto: My first part in high school was as The Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance. It was going to sneak in one way or another. I also think my rhyme for general is better than theirs, ‘mineral.’ All props to Gilbert & Sullivan, kings of light patter.2

Yet, while patter and rap are not the only musical forms in Gilbert and Sullivan’s and Miranda’s works (the former are operettas, the latter also rely on R&B, jazz, pop, and other forms), they remain the signature expression of each. And Miranda’s glancing mention touches on a larger and more complicated relationship between the two. Initially it seems a curious pairing: how does the patter originally associated in musical theatre with Gilbert and Sullivan, traditionally marked as white and British, elitist, nonsensical, and ‘performed’, circulate or become supplanted in Miranda’s Hamilton by rap, which is traditionally marked as Black and American, ‘street’ or vernacular, and ‘real’?3 It does so because, despite an apparent divergence of content and connotations, the actual vocal practice of rap and patter is remarkably similar. Musical theatre imparts specific narratives in and through the kinds of sounds that characters make, which means the basic components of material, physical vocal production in musicals matter. While nearly all dramatic texts are written to be performed and thus heard, musicals are made up of multiple kinds of scripted sound, including musical notes for instruments and voice, lyrics, and speech. Of the many sonic elements in theatrical texts and in production – from the punctuation, composition, and delivery of actors’ lines, to sounds called for in the script, to sound design created for individual productions, to the aural architecture of theatre spaces, to ambient noise

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in performance – the embodied phenomenon of voice, as Adrian Curtin observes, has ‘traditionally been under-examined and under-theorised’.4 Making the constitutive parts and practices of the voice central to musical theatre analysis also shifts a frequent critical approach to musicals, which emphasises distinguishing and assessing the relationship between musical numbers (song and dance) and spoken dialogue. In musical theatre studies there is even a sometimes apologetic, surprisingly persistent effort to justify why characters break into song, or, in some cases, there is an explicit refusal to address this jump, which itself can wind up feeling like another kind of defensive posture.5 In taking the voice as the starting point, it is possible to reorient the long-standing binary of music versus text. Rather than reiterating the division of singing versus speaking – what we might think of as the blunt difference between bodies of water and land mass on a geographical map – I am interested in the many funky iterations, overlaps, and practices of voiced sound; the features, in other words, of a three-dimensional, topographical, vocal sonic map of musical theatre. Rap and patter come together under the umbrella of a vocal practice I am calling hyper diction. The three interlocking components of hyper diction are: the spoken word, set to music; the speed of the music; and the stressed syllables of the spoken words set to that music. In musical theatre, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s fourteen operettas arguably mark the beginning of hyper diction and Miranda’s Hamilton offers the most recent iteration, but hyper diction surfaces repeatedly across the canon of musical theatre, including in the practice of mid-twentieth-century Golden Age musicals, like The Music Man and My Fair Lady. Because of its often intense tongue-twisting speed, hyper diction is a form of vocalisation that raises questions about what is intelligible and to whom. On the level of production, it pushes the limits of what performers can articulate and what audiences can understand. On a narrative level, because it is an exhilaratingly ingenious vocal trick, hyper diction encourages storylines about inventive, playful virtuosity and sleights of hand. Hyper diction begins with the quickly spoken word, or patter. Patter is usually defined as fast, glib talk, often prepared and practised speech that nonetheless appears to be somewhat spontaneous (partly by virtue of its speed and apparent ease). The word ‘patter’ originates in the fourteenth century, meaning to repeat the Paternoster (the ‘our Father’ prayer) in a rapid, mechanical, indistinct fashion. By the eighteenth century, ‘patter’ had come to mean superficial, insincere, or devious speech.6 It has long been integral to a number of occupations that involve some kind of performance, persuasion, or deceit, from magicians and auctioneers to talk show hosts, street hawkers, and comedians. In the theatre proper, spoken patter – often to introduce songs and acts or between verses of songs – has a history in popular entertainment and in opera that dates back at least to the 1830s. Its purpose in these contexts has run the gamut from being informational to being a line of entertaining continuity, to covering transitions between acts, to being a way to distract the audience, to enhancing a show. Often patter is used to fill auditory space, when for example a bingo caller or a dance caller interpolates patter, usually in the form of metrical lines, in between calling instructions to the players or dancers. Recognised as one of the foundational sources for rapping, radio DJ spoken patter also performs many similar functions: it fills or enlivens otherwise empty air time between songs on an audible medium, creating continuous energy and movement through speech and sound, offering information about songs just played or about to be played, and sometimes providing a narrative. Unlike

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the more or less spontaneous speech of early theatre or radio patter, hyper diction in the form of rap and patter in musicals is entirely scripted, even though it is often designed to suggest improvisation. Hyper diction thus also exists as a performance text that readers can sound out, although this is markedly different from hearing it in performance, where the specific requirements of the practice are on display. Spoken patter by itself can sound musical, but hyper diction – rapid, cadenced, highly enunciated rhyming speech – must be set to music. Whereas music genres or forms (for example, jazz or symphonies) are frequently defined in terms of instrumentation and structure, often on the level of bars and movements, hyper diction is defined first and foremost by the relationship between words and time.7 It requires a large number of words to be articulated at high speed to fit the music, which must in turn have a fast, steady beat. Patter songs emerged when the spoken word was set to quickpaced music, and speed and syllabic stress came into play. According to Laura Kasson Fiss, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were almost immediately inseparable from the definition of the patter song provided by the official Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians: the very first definition in 1880 read, ‘a kind of song the humour of which consists in getting the greatest number of words to fit the smallest number of notes’, and by 1907 Gilbert and Sullivan were included and credited in the definition as the original practitioners of the form.8 There are two main kinds of patter songs: the narrative, which tells a story, and the list, which identifies a category and itemises its parts.9 In Gilbert and Sullivan, an example of the former is Sir Joseph’s song ‘When I Was a Lad’ from HMS Pinafore, while Ko-Ko’s song ‘As Someday It May Happen’ from The Mikado, more popularly and aptly known as ‘I’ve Got a Little List’, represents the latter. Rap composition, however, according to Imani Perry, tends to take one or more of four forms: narrative, exhortation or proclamation, description, and battle.10 Listing – especially of objects and sometimes of insults – is also a regular feature of these four forms of rap. Both rap and patter can be broken down into the essential categories of content (what the artist is rapping/pattering about); flow (the rhythms and rhymes the artist is using); and delivery (how the artist uses his or her voice to perform or ‘spit’ the flow; this includes vocal techniques, including breath control, enunciation, and style).11 Like all forms of written poetry, patter and rap as hyper diction combine sonic and poetic devices: rhyme techniques and strategies, including assonance (repetition of a vowel sound), bending words, alliteration, consonance (repetition of a consonant sound), and compound rhymes. As Justin St. Clair points out, in literature ‘[m]uch word play [. . .] depends upon phonological sounding’ and ‘poetry in particular – has inherited the aural legacy of patterned, acoustic mnemonics’.12 Patter and rap also emphasise creative cleverness, the strikingly memorable in lyrics and beats, punchy breaks and playful rhymes. For both, speed of delivery in performance is critical. Soon after the Broadway opening of Hamilton, an essay appeared on the statistical, number-crunching website FiveThirtyEight that expanded on Miranda’s reference to Gilbert and Sullivan by claiming, ‘Hamilton Is the Very Model of a Modern Fast-Paced Musical’.13 In it, the author calculates the relative speed of a range of musicals in words per minute, and concludes that Hamilton takes first place for words per minute (144), with Pirates of Penzance (the one Gilbert and Sullivan operetta under consideration) clocking in at 58 words per minute.14 Certainly, by virtue of being a largely rapped-through musical,

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Hamilton set the record for the fastest pace of any Broadway show. The study does not isolate instances of syllables per minute, however, which is a better metric of hyper diction. The speed or syllables per minute of a classic patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan, for example, might easily match the fastest rap song in Hamilton. For individual songs, the most words per second award goes to Stephen Sondheim’s patter song from Company (1970), ‘(Not) Getting Married Today’ in which Amy, a bride on her wedding day, reaches new heights of velocity at 6.2 words per second.15 This is also the most sustained patter and thus the hardest from the singer’s perspective to perform because there are no built-in rests. In contrast, Lafayette’s song ‘Guns and Ships’ from Hamilton clocks in at 6.3 words per second, but the actor has multiple chances to catch his breath because there are scripted opportunities for his cast-mates to cheer him on that punctuate the breakneck pace of the rap. This is true as well of Angelica Schuyler’s rap in Hamilton, ‘Satisfied’, which is fast, but supported throughout by choral interruptions that give the actress occasions to breathe. Even when rests occur they are hidden behind other sound so the propulsive rhythm of the words never seems to slow down. This kind of speed happens when as many words as possible are crammed into the fewest possible musical notes, which requires syllabic text setting. Lyrics are broken down into syllables, or individual units of sound, with each syllable getting its own note. Hyper diction uses stressed syllables often said at the same time as each of four beats in a bar (unless there is a rest). Since the lyrics must stay in time with the beat, the stress can fall on different syllables from those that would be stressed ordinarily in speech, which can sometimes be a source of humour or unpredictability. Stressed syllabic text setting also provides opportunities for apparently off-the-cuff (but nonetheless scripted) invention. In the Major-General’s song in Pirates of Penzance, for example, it is a standard piece of theatre business for the actor playing the MajorGeneral to ‘search’ for a way to conclude a stanza’s phrase with a rhyming word. Thus, ‘About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot of news – [pause for actor’s bit of ‘searching’ for a rhyme that will stretch over the four syllables of ‘a lot of news’, before his triumphant concluding line:] / With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse!’16 The final line is then taken up in the rousing refrain, which consists only of that last rhyming line’s being repeated four times at top speed by the chorus. This patter song, like most patter songs, is a combination of extraordinary speed in syllabic articulation and moments of dramaturgically justified, brief rest – useful to the taxed performer and listener – that still emphasises the rush and spontaneity of the form. Hyper diction, in other words, is both a technical skill and a performance that draws purposeful attention to that skill. In many musicals the practice works as the audible equivalent of waving something shiny to distract attention with a specific desired outcome. This function is especially prevalent in classic mid-century American musicals that fall chronologically midway between operetta and rap. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (1957), for example, offers a prototypical example in the song ‘Ya Got Trouble’, which is an explicit, transparent diversionary tactic, a sneaky salesman’s effort to create a need where there is none, in this case to identify a community scapegoat (pool halls!) in order to point to a solution that requires a purchase and community investment (boys’ band instruments!). The singer, the con artist and male lead, Harold Hill, is casting about for a problem for the town of River City, Iowa that will demand the answer he wants to

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provide. The song’s powers of apparently extemporaneous invention and its alacrity, as well as the way in which it details a rapid list-like and narrative descent into degradation, place it squarely in the hyper diction tradition. Speaking words swiftly here can only end with ‘Trouble! We’ve surely got trouble right here in River City, with a capital T that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool.’17 The song offers a series of displacements in a downward slide, using a three-step process of repetition (‘Trouble [. . .] trouble’), rhyme (‘T that rhymes with P’), and replacement (‘and that stands for Pool’). Of course what Hill says is ridiculous, and the offstage audience knows it; part of the pleasure in the song is the degree of Hill’s fluency coupled with the ludicrousness of his fabrication. Not coincidentally, the song describes the danger of words particularly. As Hill uses words duplicitously, he directs his listeners to the sinister threat of other words, in this case the slang that these parents’ kids will inevitably parrot if they spend time in the dreaded pool hall. Dwelling on the word ‘woooords’, he asks ominously, ‘Are certain words creeping in, like “swell?”’, which causes the chorus to chant in alarmed response, ‘Trouble trouble Trouble trouble.’18 The actual words that are causing trouble – Hill’s – go unnoticed because he redirects his suggestible listeners. In the cycle of repetition, rhyme, and replacement, Hill uses auctioneer language (I’ve got twenty, twenty do I hear twenty-five – a practice of repetition and building on the repetition), the pitch of travelling salesmen, and the language of preachers who suggest to a congregation that they are going to hell in a (fast-moving) hand basket.19 Critically, the speed of expression (driven by a rapid, steady beat) as well as the rhyme and replace pattern is cover for the illogical claims, which keep accumulating and escalating. Yet at the same time that hyper diction can be a narrative cover-up, it is also always a form of performance exposure because it is hard to fake the skill that is required to rap or patter well. From a performance perspective, hyper diction is an example of ingeniousness, not disingenuousness. As a test of a performer’s vocal powers, hyper diction embraces a paradox of unintelligibility – the words are accelerated until they threaten to degenerate into incomprehensible noise – and heightened intelligibility, since the practice requires consummate breath control and enunciation. The performance of teetering on the verge of losing control – as well as the ideal audience response to that performance – is repeatedly written into musicals that rely on hyper diction. Early on in Hamilton, for instance, in Hamilton’s initial encounter with his new friends – John Laurens, Hercules Mulligan, Aaron Burr, and the Marquis de Lafayette – he lets his emotions and words get away from him when he raps with increasing speed and volume, ‘A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists / Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is!’ Suddenly remembering that he is in a public tavern, he dials it back: ‘Oh, am I talkin’ too loud? / Sometimes I get overexcited, shoot off at the mouth. / I never had a group of friends before. / I promise that I’ll make y’all proud.’20 But the rhyming concluding response from his new friends celebrates this borderline out-of-control energy: ‘Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd!’21 Musicals often have aural lessons like this built into the written text: numbers that explain explicitly either how sound works or how it could work, simultaneously suggesting to an audience what and how to think about voiced sound and how to respond to what they are hearing. Sonic pedagogical strategies that are included in musicals’ scripts are frequently straightforward and practical, as with the unambiguously named The Sound of Music (1959), in which Maria, as the

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new governess to the seven Von Trapp children, wins them over with song, but also breaks down the basics of music for them and teaches them to sing with the number ‘Do-Re-Mi’. This is a tutorial, not just for the children but for the audience, so we can appreciate what Maria is doing musically as well as how vocalising can create unexpected connections between people. This kind of sonic guidance may be in the musical’s book, as is the case in the first interaction between Hamilton, Laurens, Mulligan, Burr, and Lafayette, but it can also be present in vocal performance. One immediate lesson in Hamilton is that homosocial bonds are formed in, around, and through the practice of hyper diction. The verbal hat trick of repetition, rhyme, and replacement in The Music Man also shows up in Hamilton to reinforce this message, but with a different context. Harold Hill’s linguistic evocation of auctioneers, salesmen, and preachers gives way in Hamilton to the vocal context of battling or battle rhyming, which emerged as a dominant form of rap in the 1980s. Battling, an established part of hip hop lyrics, is made up of bragging and boasting, or braggadocio, combined with insults against rival rap artists. The goal of battling is to outdo other rap artists, whether this is done by facing off in person in performance or in song lyrics across the airwaves. To battle well, rap artists usually have to be highly familiar with the style of their opponents. As will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas puts it: [If you know the history of different MCs] you know how to approach a person if a person wants to battle you. If a person battles you and they’re coming with [a certain style], it’s like, OK, I know where this [guy] is getting that shit from, he’s got a little 2Pac in him. I’m gonna fuck this [guy] up, with some 2Pac, and I’ma add 2 Pac and mix 2Pac with Chuck D, and I hit them – boom – and I hit them from every single angle.22 So, for example, when Lin-Manuel Miranda grants ‘all props’ to Gilbert and Sullivan while also noting ‘my rhyme for general is better than theirs’, his combined gesture of acknowledgement and one-upmanship is in total keeping with a (mild) hip hop braggadocio. In Hamilton, the heated Cabinet debates between Jefferson and Hamilton offer the clearest convergence of the offstage form and practice of rap battling, not only in the verbal sparring and jockeying but in the heckling from other characters and calls for audience participation. But another example arrives early in Hamilton, in the sixth song of the show’s forty-six musical numbers, ‘Farmer Refuted’, in which a gentleman who identifies himself as the (real-life) loyalist Samuel Seabury stands on a box and cries, ‘Hear ye, hear ye!’ before reading his anti-Revolution ‘Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress’.23 Although he is not British, Seabury’s loyalist alignment is immediately clear in his prim demeanour, his pretentiously genteel diction, and the classical harpsichord that accompanies his speech. Hercules Mulligan is the first to interject after Seabury’s initial two lines – ‘Oh my god. Tear this dude apart’ – an invitation Hamilton jumps at, attempting at first to engage with Seabury, rather than simply ride roughshod over him – ‘Honestly, look at me, please don’t read!’ – before abandoning that effort.24 He then raps alongside Seabury’s rote speech, chiming in on some of Seabury’s words and mirroring some of Seabury’s language and sounds but using different words to change the meaning (so Seabury’s ‘They have not your interests at heart’ becomes

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Hamilton’s ‘The have-nots are gonna win this’25). In this way, Hamilton steals the argument from Seabury and rewrites it in the moment. Thrown off his game by Hamilton’s steady interruptive stream of (scripted) spur-of-the-moment mimicry and reversal, Seabury’s speech becomes confused and breaks down even as he tries to stick to his text. When Hamilton proclaims, ‘If you repeat yourself again I’m going to scream’, he is not objecting to repetition, which is a heavy weapon in the hip hop arsenal, and one he uses regularly.26 What he is rejecting is outdated soapbox delivery and Seabury’s reading from and clinging to a pre-written script, all of which is antithetical to a rap battle. Hamilton runs circles around Seabury verbally (as well as literally circling him on his box in the Broadway production’s choreography) and effectively takes him down. Miranda notes: I began with the harpsichord progression and wrote this melody and lyrics rather quickly. None of this is in Seabury’s writings [. . .] The fun (and laborious part) of this tune was having Hamilton dismantle Seabury using the same vowels and cadences and talking over him. Heed becomes he’d. Rabble/unravel. Heart/hard to listen to you, etc.27 Seabury makes one change in key, a single failed effort to dodge the relentlessness of Hamilton’s verbal assault, but principally an opportunity for Miranda to have Hamilton mock Seabury with a musical meta-joke: ‘Don’t modulate the key and then not debate with me.’28 Seabury’s initial claim is that this ‘[Constitutional] congress does not speak for me’, but that is precisely what Hamilton does, with repetition, rhyme, and replacement reinforcing his dominance and entertaining his fellow rabble-rousers.29 As Hamilton demonstrates, hyper diction often provides the soundscape for men’s relationships with one another. Here the ‘acoustic field of study’, to draw on R. Murray Schafer’s original definition of soundscape, is not only the predominantly male characters’ text and the male actors’ voices but what their kinds and manner of vocalisation might invoke or suggest.30 Women’s roles in Hamilton are constrained, as Stacy Wolf points out, by occupying the age-old trio of wife/madonna (Eliza Schuyler Hamilton), muse (Angelica Schuyler), and whore (Maria Reynolds).31 Purely dramaturgically, the male relationships are the critical ones: the camaraderie of the first act between Burr, Hamilton, Lafayette, Laurens, and Mulligan becomes the rivalries between Burr, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison in the second act, reinforcing through the double casting of two of these actors the challenging, devoted, and nuanced relationships that exist between men. At the heart of the male revolutionary cohort is the relationship between Burr and Hamilton, the love/hate ‘bromance’ of the show, which plays out sonically.32 To draw attention to Hamilton’s hyper diction, Miranda sets the account and action of his hero’s percussive verbosity – his ‘throwing verbal rocks’ and talking for six straight hours at the Constitutional Convention33 – against Burr’s reticent smoothness (represented and deeply informed by the mellifluous voice of Leslie Odom, Jr. who originated the role). The text setting characteristic of hyper diction requires words with many consonants. Although Burr also raps, most of his lyrics call for elongated vowels and melisma (the carrying of one syllable over more than one, or even over many notes). His defining song, ‘Wait for It’, is particularly notable for its extended vowels, especially the long wail of the ‘AAA’ that occurs in multiple words, including ‘wait’, ‘takes’, ‘breaks’, ‘stakes’, ‘late’, and ‘discriminate’. Throughout, Miranda demonstrates the tension between Burr and Hamilton by weighting the different kind and

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number of sounds that are assigned to the two characters. This occurs on the particle lyrical level of the use of vowels (Burr) versus consonants (Hamilton) and the use of melisma (Burr) versus rap (Hamilton). The difference is also built into assumptions about the actors’ timbre (the sound of the voice), like the one I provide here (‘the mellifluous voice’ for Burr). Most tellingly, this difference is repeatedly reinforced even when it is not borne out by the script, as, for example, when Burr even while rapping announces his rejection of rap: ‘You spit, I’ma sit / We’ll see where we land.’34 Hamilton’s revolutionary brotherhood also bands together in opposition to the British, and to be anti-British here is to embrace stereotypes (reflected in stereotypical sounds) of the British. From a sonic standpoint, the British and British-allied characters never pose a threat in this account of the American Revolution; their language and affect is pompous, effete, rigid, and ridiculous, and their music is out of date (from a contemporary audience’s perspective by centuries in the case of Seabury, and by decades for King George, whose sound is Beatles-adjacent). These characters directly evoke Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical comedy characters. More, as Raymond Knapp argues, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas presented Americans with a full slate of useful – and durable – musical images of Englishness. To this end, it hardly mattered that these images were originally intended as parodies [. . .] [One of these] helped establish and reinforce a familiar trope on the American stage: that Englishness, in a male, is indistinguishable from homosexuality.35 Notably, given that Hamilton aims to overthrow stereotypical or entrenched representations of the Founding Fathers, the character of King George embodies this trope. Perhaps especially as voiced by Jonathan Groff in the original Broadway production, King George is played for comedy as an over-the-top, shrill, mincing gay male stereotype. In contrast, the group of American friends is avowedly, even noisily heterosexual, despite Miranda’s note in the marginalia of the script that ‘it is possible that Hamilton and Laurens were lovers at some point – Hamilton’s letters to Laurens are every bit as flirtatious as his letters to the opposite sex, if not more so’.36 The single indication of this possibility is silence: the brief revelation of Laurens’s death at the end of the first act marks the only occasion that leaves Hamilton speechless.37 For the rest of the show, hyper diction sounds out the province primarily of straight men, both acknowledging and disavowing the connection to English patter and its associations with queerness. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady (1956), based on Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), uses hyper diction to reveal the limits and possibilities of both speech and sound. My Fair Lady, a dramatisation of vocalisation as the means to social advancement, is the apotheosis of musical theatre’s didacticism. Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, accepts a bet from a new friend, Colonel Pickering, that if he gives speech lessons to Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, she will be able to pass successfully as a member of the upper class. A wide range of vocal sound is both the subject and the medium in My Fair Lady. All of Professor Higgins’s musical numbers are hyper diction, which was a decision by Lerner and Loewe because they felt Shaw’s character was too emotionless to sing, but also because Rex Harrison, the original Higgins, was famously a non-singer. In an interview with the BBC in 1967, Harrison described the experience in terms of the creative control that hyper diction offers a performer:

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I was using the melody, but not singing it. I mean, I could use notes, and sometimes when I was doing the play I used to use quite a lot of the notes. Sometimes I would use hardly any of the notes. But I was able to sort of jiggle it about.38 Lerner, the lyricist, observed that the words for Higgins’s songs were ‘set exactly the way one speaks it’, while Loewe, the composer, explained it this way: ‘instead of writing a baritone solo, the music had to be written in such a way that a non-singer could sing it; in other words no sustained notes’.39 Again, as Loewe’s comment suggests, hyper diction highlights the difference between vowels (commonly sustained notes) and consonants. When individual syllables land on individual notes to create speaksinging, there is very little to no melisma. Even when the sound tilts in the direction of singing rather than speaking, the sound is usually not sustained. It is a truism of speech that the literal meaning of words is delivered (or confirmed) by consonants, while emotional meaning is carried on vowels; the corollary in singing is that words are delivered by consonants while music happens on vowels. The high ratio of consonants to vowels in hyper diction might suggest that hyper diction reflects literal meaning and speech more than emotion and music. That is Henry Higgins’s stated position as a professor of ‘the science of speech’, but his practice of hyper diction contradicts it. In the parodic humour and lists that mark his hyper diction, the character of Higgins has clear links to Gilbert and Sullivan, as he does in his position of authority and in the multiple ways he can be read as at least a ‘heterosexually challenged’ Englishman40 (including in his bond with Pickering, who moves in to Higgins’s house after the first scene; the ways in which they behave like the parents of Eliza; the lack of conventional romantic duets between Eliza and Higgins; his misogyny; and his number ‘A Hymn to Him’). On several occasions Higgins delivers Gilbert-like comic hyper diction diatribes that reveal his idealised and wrong-headed perception of himself. He is not, as he asserts in ‘An Ordinary Man’, ‘an average man of no eccentric whim’, ‘a very gentle’ and ‘quiet living man’.41 All his actions belie these claims, but most important, the frantic jumps in tempo and the violent accents of the number contradict his words, which demonstrate not sense but extreme emotion and volatility. Here and at several other points, Higgins skates close to the edge of losing control vocally. When he accelerates to the brink near this number’s conclusion, he turns on, at increasing volume, sped-up recordings of women’s voices that he has in his study. This results in cacophony, a great incomprehensible jabbering chorus. His aim is to make it sound like women (and their voices) are the problem, but he introduces the vocal chaos, his hyper diction number degenerates into a racket, and he requires the noise to make his point. Despite the narrative goal of ‘correct’ intelligible speech for Eliza, throughout the musical extra-verbal vocal sounds erupt in place of words or when words are no longer able to convey meaning. In My Fair Lady, the importance of the sounds is acoustic as well as semantic; the noises Eliza makes, for example, are just as important as the words she makes. In the opening scene, in which we meet Eliza selling flowers at Covent Garden in the rain, she makes distinctive, visceral sounds that exist between speech and noise. Among these is the disbelieving, dismissive, expressive ‘Gaaarn!’ a phonetic distortion of the slangy ‘Go on!’ Another is Eliza’s signature yowl of unimpeded vowels: ‘AAoooww!’42 This regular high-pitched wail of outrage, without any consonants to provide linguistic sense, might be the most expressive sound in the show. Higgins, who initially likens

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Eliza’s ‘disgusting and depressing’ noises to ‘a bilious pigeon’, proceeds in her elocution and diction lessons to break down ‘every syllable she utters’, so that we hear many isolated garbled sounds from Eliza, from individual vowels to words obscured by a mouth full of marbles.43 Higgins finally draws a correctly pronounced ‘ai’ diphthong from her after he manages to speak calmly about the ‘extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds’ in the English language, something she knows more about than he does.44 Eliza has mastered ‘proper’ speech before the end of the first act; the second act exists for Higgins to bring together his sound, emotion, and words. Hyper diction always draws attention to the sound of the words as well as their content, since the words make sound as they tumble by. The acceleration as well as the variation in rhythms and rhyme means that the words can register as percussion or noise. This potential unintelligibility serves a number of purposes. For example, rap’s popular reputation for unintelligibility is at least partly strategic, as Imani Perry explains: One of the communication elements that resists white supremacy and co-optation has been the self-conscious incomprehensibility of hip-hop lyricism [. . .] Difficulty is a strategy in hip hop, both in terms of words, which are fast and hard to understand if you are not privy to the hip hop community, and of demands for an authentic personal connection to hip hop and its geography, the hood. Difficulty is a cultural and political strategy, as well as an ideological one.45 In musical theatre, various forms of hyper diction test an audience’s listening skills differently. Comprehension matters more with narrative, for instance, since an audience is meant to follow a story – one that sometimes includes important plot points especially in Gilbert and Sullivan – while lists are befuddling because their components are unpredictable and often nonsensical. As Perry points out, the question of intelligibility also rests on listeners’ foreknowledge or cultural familiarity with the form. In the case of Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter, the original audiences at the Savoy were provided with the operettas’ lyrics to read while attending performances. They could also then take the lyrics home, learn, repeat, and circulate them; an early version of the cast album. Gilbert and Sullivan’s audiences – even those who could not read, who were likely to be in the minority within the theatre – were aficionados who recited the works by heart. This audience experience of being co-present at a performance, reading along or not with the text, as well as individually reading (and sounding) or reciting the text helped create a culture of close listeners. If anything, today’s Gilbert and Sullivan audience tends to be even more deeply, sometimes even obsessively familiar with the work.46 The phenomenal popularity of the almost entirely sung and rapped-through Hamilton similarly owes something to the fact that the double CD includes all the lyrics, or nearly all the text for Hamilton. The CD, with its album booklet of lyrics, is readily available – unlike tickets to the show – so that audience members lucky enough to see a production of Hamilton overwhelmingly already know (and frequently sing along with) the musical’s numbers with the performers. Musical theatre encourages and relies on an audience’s enthusiasm to learn songs that they have read and heard, or will hear performed, and to form communities based on that effort. If hyper diction poses a particularly challenging test of comprehension, listeners come together to meet that test.

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A musical theatre audience could regard hyper diction as a trick because it is not singing in the way they might expect to find singing in a musical and it can be hard to follow. But it is a trick for them and not on them, because hyper diction – breakneck, rhythmical, poetic, musical – is an exhilarating, joyful skill to hear in action. When we grasp the meaning of the words, we have accomplished something remarkable alongside the performer, who is working at the peak of his or her vocal game; when we do not, we are still collectively engaged in a uniquely challenging and thrilling experience of finding meaning in the sounds.

Notes  1. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton the Revolution: Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America (New York: Grand Central, 2016), 61. The Gilbert and Sullivan line is: ‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General / I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral.’  2. Ibid.   3. On Gilbert and Sullivan, see Laura Kasson Fiss, ‘“This particularly rapid unintelligible patter”: Patter Songs and the Word–Music Relationship’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. David Eden and Meinhard Saremba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 98–108; and Raymond Knapp, ‘“How great thy charm, thy sway how excellent!” Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy in the American Musical’, in Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, 201–15. On the literary, aesthetic, and artistic work of hip hop and rap, and the problems with the traditional identifying markers of the form, see, for example, Daniel Levin Becker, What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (New York: City Lights, 2022); Alan Light, ed., The Vibe History of Hip Hop (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999); Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and John Yasin, ‘Rap in the African American Music Tradition: Cultural Assertion and Continuity’, in Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture, ed. Arthur K. Spears (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).   4. Adrian Curtin, ‘Attending to Theatre Sound Studies and Complicité’s The Encounter’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 351–71 (355).  5. See, for example, Scott McMillin: ‘My argument is that the principles of disjunction between book and number, and between one number and another, that organised the revue and operetta formats still inform the musical, and there is no point in being ashamed if it.’ Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 13.  6. ‘Patter’, OED Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl.  7. Fiss, Patter Songs, 98.   8. Ibid., 104.   9. Ibid., 106. 10. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 77. 11. Paul Edwards, How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009). 12. Justin St. Clair, ‘Literature and Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 353–61 (353–4). 13. Leah Libresco, ‘Hamilton Is the Very Model of a Modern Fast-Paced Musical’, FiveThirtyEight, 5 October 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hamilton-is-the-very-modelof-a-modern-fast-paced-musical.

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14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ian Bradley, ed., The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 219. 17. Meredith Willson, The Music Man (New York: Van Rees Press, 1958), 36. 18. Ibid., 37. 19. In his analysis of The Music Man, Raymond Knapp notes the connection to patter, adding even further possible sources for Hill: ‘Hill, in “Ya Got Trouble,” takes over and redefines within one persona a number of American stereotypes, including most obviously both the traveling salesman with his huckstering patter, and his close cousin the religious demagogue . . . but also evoking the temperance sermonizer (“I say, first it’s a little medicinal wine from a teaspoon; Then beer from a bottle”), the stumping politician up on his soapbox (“Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock, and the Golden Rule”), and even, perhaps, the fast-talking auctioneer (“Ya got ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, pockets in a table!”). Linking all of these is the special fascination Americans have long had for rapid verbal patter evident from their earlier fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan and their later love-hate relationship to rap.’ Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 147. 20. Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, 27. 21. Ibid. 22. will.i.am, quoted in Edwards, How to Rap, 29. A person who raps is often referred to by the prefix MC, or refers to him- or herself this way (from the title, Master of Ceremony, also spelled emcee); he or she can also be referred to interchangeably as a rapper, lyricist, or hip hop artist. 23. Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, 49. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994), 7. 31. On gender representation in Hamilton, see Stacy Wolf, ‘Hamilton’, The Feminist Spectator, 24 February 2016, http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2016/02/24/hamilton; and James McMaster, ‘Why Hamilton Is Not the Revolution You Think It Is’, HowlRound, 23 February 2016. 32. Hilton Als, ‘Boys in the Band: A Musical about the Founding Fathers’, The New Yorker, 9 March 2015. 33. Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, 138. 34. Ibid., 25. 35. Knapp, ‘Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy’, 210–11. 36. Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton, 131. Consider, for example, when Hamilton’s friends drunkenly rib him before and after his wedding in true unimaginative straight male measure: ‘Raise a glass to freedom! Hey! Something you will never see again. No matter what she tells you.’ Ibid., 136. 37. This scene is also the only part of Hamilton unrepresented on the cast album (Miranda and McCarter’s reasoning: ‘It’s more of a scene than a song’, ibid., 131). 38. Rex Harrison, Post-Recording Conversation. With Goddard Lierberson. My Fair Lady (Original Broadway Cast Recording). Columbia Records, Sony Music Entertainment, 1956, 1967, 2002.

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39. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Playback. With Goddard Lieberson. My Fair Lady (Original Broadway Cast Recording). Columbia Records, Sony Music Entertainment, 1956, 1967, 2002. 40. Knapp, ‘Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy’, 212. In the London 2001 revival at the Royal National Theatre, with Jonathan Pryce as Higgins, Nicholas Le Prevost played Pickering as gay. 41. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (New York: Gardners Books, 1969). 42. Ibid., 14, 15. 43. Ibid., 16. 44. Ibid., 31. 45. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 50. 46. Currently there are more than 200 websites for Gilbert and Sullivan fans, and in 2009 there were over 2,000 professional and amateur groups devoted to their work in the UK alone. Ian Bradley, ‘Amateur Tenors and Choruses in Public: The Amateur Scene’, in Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, 177–89.

Select Bibliography Barthes, Roland, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 179–89. Brooks, Daphne, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021). Cavarero, Adriana, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Eden, David and Meinhard Saremba, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Fox, Aaron A., Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Hampton, Marion and Barbara Acker, eds, The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice (New York: Applause Books, 2000). Knapp, Raymond, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). ———, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). McMillin, Scott, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Rodenburg, Patsy, The Right to Speak (New York: Methuen Drama, 2015). Symonds, Dominic and Millie Taylor, eds, Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Part III: Literature, Voice, Acousmatics

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9 ‘Let it resound’: ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as Sonic Witness Noelle Morrissette

L

‘

ift Every Voice and Sing’, written in 1900 and first performed in 1901, marked a new century of African American life post-Emancipation, trailing from the failure of Reconstruction and entering a new century that was characterised by the historian Rayford Logan as the ‘nadir’ of Black experience in the first decade of the twentieth century.1 The song was authored as a modern-day hymn of African American experience birthed from this nadir with a nod to the past, an acknowledgement of the difficult present, and lifted hopes for the future of Black liberation and equality in the American nation. The hymn represents modernity itself, following from the musical forms of the spirituals originating in enslavement and the blues in Reconstruction America. It became known as the ‘Negro National Anthem’ and later, the ‘Black National Anthem’, by which name it is known today. The reputation of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ has outlasted James Weldon Johnson, its lyricist, and his brother John Rosamond Johnson, its composer. It was birthed in 1900 for the occasion of a 12 February celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. James W. Johnson, then principal of Stanton School, Jacksonville’s grade school for African Americans, was originally slated to give an address at the event, but he instead was driven by a lyrical inspiration. As his form shifted from oratory to lyric, the occasion’s subject also shifted: from Lincoln the Great Emancipator to the descendants of the emancipated. This shift in emphasis marks the beginning of Johnson’s artistic effort to collaborate, affirm, and offer a multiplicity of voices and settings in which his compositions could be performed. Johnson describes its collaborative composition with his brother: ‘we planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises [celebrating Lincoln]. We planned, better still, to have it sung by schoolchildren – a chorus of five hundred voices.’2 Johnson reflected that having composed the first stanza, ‘the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me’: he found himself overcome with emotion – tears, ecstasy, and serene joy. Rosamond (as his brother was called) set it to music. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ began modestly, on the Johnson family home’s front porch in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew to national and later international prominence through its vocalisation by the voices of 500 Jacksonville children emanating outwards. It is a process affirming the vocalisation of African American experience, and articulating an aesthetic James Weldon Johnson, then James William Johnson, was only just developing: ‘the idea of a breathing line of poetry that could not be contained on the page or in a single individual, but which required the performative aspect of multiple voices to physically complete and vocalise the thought contained within’.3

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This breathing line of poetry directed Johnson’s composition of it. Describing the song’s genesis in his autobiography Along This Way, Johnson emphasised what became his customary practice in the musical trio Cole and Johnson Brothers (1901–6): ‘walking it out’. This rhythmic form was a version of the call and response practices of Black church congregations in responding to preachers during sermons, called ‘lining-out’: such a practice welcomed congregants familiar with the lessons of the Bible if not its text, and represented a long tradition of acknowledging the wisdom of the spirituals, songs which originated in a captive people who honoured the biblical wisdom even without the opportunity to read it.4 This physical experience of sound as Black creation, with Johnson using the rhythm of his body to inspire and fill the lines of his lyric, would come to full expression in his sermonic poems, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), where modern lyric finds its spiritual expression not in religion per se, but in the embodied, breathing lines of poetry shared between its performers, who are the collective authors of its context and meaning. Johnson recalls: I got my first line: – Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a startling line; but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came to me the lines: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond. In composing the other two stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting, I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself, going through all the agony and ecstasy of creating. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza: God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on our way, Thou who hast by Thy might Let us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray; Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee [. . .] I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment – that sense of serene joy – which makes artistic creation the most complete of all human experiences. When I had put the last stanza down on paper I at once recognized the Kiplingesque touch in the two longer lines quoted above; but I knew that in the stanza the American Negro was, historically and spiritually, immanent; and I decided to let it stand as it was written.5 The song was sung at the February 1900 celebration to great effect; the Johnson brothers then moved away from Jacksonville to pursue successful careers in New York’s

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musical theatre scene. ‘The song passed out of our minds’, Johnson reflected in his 1933 autobiography, Along This Way, But the schoolchildren kept singing the song; some of them went off to other schools and kept singing it; some of them became schoolteachers and taught it to their pupils. Within twenty years the song was being sung in schools and churches and on special occasions throughout the South and in some other parts of the country. Later, in 1920, it was adopted by the NAACP, and is now quite generally used throughout the country as the ‘Negro National Hymn.’6 Johnson believed that the song’s widest circulation came through copies pasted in the backs of hymnals and songbooks used in Sunday schools, YMCAs, and similar institutions.7 There is a second part to the lyric’s completion through the body: not just its author, but the hundreds of children and students who ‘kept singing’ the song. It was also ‘fervently sung’ by some white people,8 confirming its physical transference through the bodies of its listeners and performers, thereby confirming their alteration through the interracial transfer of song – the ‘every voice’ of the song’s title. The voices ‘lift’ and ‘carry’ Black culture to a central place in the national discourse, asserting the ‘immanence’ of Black people to the nation. Johnson’s compositions become shifting frameworks, inviting new voices and contexts to enliven the song’s meaning through its performances and the multiple experiences informing them. This movement is central to Johnson’s developing aesthetic: none of his major works is a discrete, unmoving whole. Instead, we find Johnson constantly resituating his works, sharing them as incomplete compositions to be taken up and taken in by others in the changing landscape of the sonic environment.9 Such movement incorporates the biography of a people seeking a homeland and opens the narrative as a continued quest of African Americans within the American nation. In the Cole and Johnson Brothers trio, James Johnson advanced the appropriation of well-known tunes that belonged to no one for their compositions. He was proud of the appropriative measures that such borrowing facilitated, for not only were the spirituals and work songs given new voice by the trio’s compositions, they were sung enthusiastically by Black people and white people in a broader acknowledgement of their popular appeal. The trio as a whole had different ideas about the future of music and Black culture in the US. Bob Cole was convinced that Latin American and Caribbean culture would strongly inflect and fuse with Black culture in the US, that ragtime and habanera rhythms would merge. Rosamond saw great opportunity in operatic interpolations that elevated Black culture as a whole, and he inserted operas from Giuseppe Verdi and others into ragtime, much as Antonín Dvořák, Frederick Delius, and other (European) classical composers inserted spirituals into their symphonies. These differences were productive ones that helped direct Johnson’s developing views of multilingual, simultaneous voices in Black culture that influenced his major compositions. The start was in ‘Lift’. The year after its composition, Johnson was nearly lynched in his hometown by National Guardsmen, confirming the aspect of the American modern soundscape that was chaos and brutality.10 The precursor of Johnson’s modern hymn was the spirituals of the ancestors, for which he had deep reverence. In his preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals

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(1925), Johnson emphasises their spontaneity, variety, and the interchange of their meanings, underscoring them as practices of cultural transmission and modes of expression, constantly moving, breathing, and transforming.11 He acknowledged the fluid, improvisatory meaning of Black cultural expression found in the spirituals and their modern descendant, ragtime. Expressive forms such as these, as well as regional vernacular, cannot be set to the page, Johnson asserted; for example, ‘Not even in the dialect of any particular section is a given word always pronounced the same. It may vary in the next breath in the mouth of the same speaker. How a word is pronounced is governed by the preceding and following sounds’, he wrote.12 The spirituals similarly elude fixity of musical notation, in an intentional act meant to affirm an expressivity of life that lives past the page. Johnson’s preface elaborates on this complexity of expression: There are the curious turns and twists and quavers and the intentional striking of certain notes just a shade off the key, with which the Negro loves to embellish his songs. These tendencies constitute a handicap that has baffled many of the recorders of this music. I doubt that it is possible with our present system of notation to make a fixed transcription of these peculiarities that would be absolutely true; for in their very nature they are not susceptible to fixation. Many of the transcriptions that have been made are far from the true manner and spirit of singing the Spirituals.13 Johnson’s emphasis on ‘singing the Spirituals’ – vocalising their spirit – versus transcribing them privileges the practice that affirms their meaning and their fugitive sounds. Melodic lines have been traced by previous notations of the spirituals, Johnson acknowledges, but these transcribers have missed a key aspect of the spirituals: their harmony, which distinguishes them from most other folk songs with which they were compared. This harmony reveals the tonal slide, the rhythmic play, the fluid context of these songs – in short, it conveys their spirit or feeling through the act of transmission, or what Johnson calls ‘swing’. The spirituals’ proper transmission hinges on their performance in this spirit, which Johnson contrasts with ‘playing the notes too correctly’ or ‘not play[ing] what is not written down’.14 Any performer, Black or white, may ‘flounder [. . .] either in the “art” or the “exhibition” pit’.15 Johnson’s emphasis on performance dissolves the gap that transcription of the spirituals preserves: Salomé Voegelin finds that ‘critical discourse does badly in dealing with sound as it assumes and insists on the gap between that which it describes and its description – it is the very opposite of sound, which is always the heard, immersive and present’.16 Johnson assures the reader of The Book of American Negro Spirituals that in this study, the only development has been in harmonizations, and these harmonizations have been kept true in character [. . .] [T]he songs [. . .] have not been cut up or ‘opera-ated’ upon. The arrangers have endeavoured above all else to retain their primitive ‘swing.’17 He makes clear that the dedication of the book is reserved for those ‘through whose efforts these songs have been collected, preserved, and given to the world’ not through notation but through enactment. Like the children in Jacksonville who sang the Johnson

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brothers’ ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ into national culture, Black composers, musicians, and singers carried the spirituals beyond themselves, singing, in the words of Johnson’s poem about the makers of the spirituals, ‘O Black and Unknown Bards’, ‘far better than they knew’.18 Johnson’s poem, which begins with ruminative questions, opens his preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, highlighting the status of the unnamed Black creators of the spirituals. Johnson used this idea of the centrality of fluid performance of the spirituals to model the meanings he hoped to enact in his writing: from The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to God’s Trombones.19 Resisting fixation allowed Johnson to advance his works through time, troubling the very notions of an exclusive American tradition of belonging through culture and history. If we understand R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape as one in which ‘the general acoustic environment of a society can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it’,20 we must listen for, and attune ourselves to, the way in which this environment produces multiple forms of sound and experience. In his preface to The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals, Johnson emphasised that the spirituals were ‘still in the making’.21 In other words, the spirituals remain a dynamic, elusive form of expression for African Americans. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ demonstrates as a modern-day hymn that the spirituals are not fixed in time, place, or notation. Like Black culture itself, these songs are constantly moving, making and remaking themselves. Assessing Johnson’s prefaces as markers of his developing ideas about Black expressive culture and its transference, we find that his very framing of the spirituals and ‘American Negro Poetry’ helps develop his ideas about the form his writing would take.22 Text and sound become mobile, elusive markers of Black culture and the unfulfilled quest for equal citizenship, and these markers in Johnson’s work are carried into the new century of modernity and modernism. In many of his subsequent works, Johnson characterises linguistic and musical variety through sound, using it to describe and advance past aural experiences of the modern world. His innovative incorporation of spirituals and hymns, classical and romantic scores for piano and opera, abolitionist oratory and Broadway era songs from New York’s Tenderloin district, and ragtime is used to show their imperative and continuous alterations, through performance and their continued expression. When Johnson’s narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man writes of ragtime music that it ‘was music that demanded physical response, patting of the feet, drumming of the fingers, or nodding of the head in time with the beat’, he points to a form of interracialism that does not demand the ‘loss’ of racial claims in its transference. The sounds of ragtime and more broadly expressive culture demand physical interaction. As Steven Feld observes, ‘listening habits and histories figure in the shaping of poetic, vocal, and instrumental practices’.23 ‘Listen to it’, Feld implores. ‘Hear how knowing [. . .] [the environment] animates multiple forms of instrumental and vocal expression.’ Hear in these expressions opportunities for experimentation with the practice. Hear in these expressive acts ‘the embodiment of knowing the world through sound’.24 Many of the physical interactions of the latter twentieth century are public expressions of attitudes shaped by racialised experiences. Wattstax, Los Angeles, 1972: in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, no one rises to the rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. When vocalist Kim Weston shifts to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, survivors of

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the 1965 Watts uprising raise their fists in a Black power salute. Washington DC, 2007: Reverend Lowery closes his eyes and offers verses from the song as part of his inaugural benediction of President Barack Obama. San Diego, 2016: NFL San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick takes a knee to protest police brutality. NYC, 27 May 2020: Anthony McGill, principal clarinettist for the New York Philharmonic, takes two knees, playing ‘America the Beautiful’ in a minor key, and places his hands behind his back, as in a police arrest. The sonic witness of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is all about us, and while it often centres on Black suffering, it is all of us, as we face injustice, police brutality, and an incomplete democracy.25 In the broader world of this song, which extends past Johnson’s death in 1938, multiple nations, the World Wars, African decolonisation, the revolutionary 1960s, and these more contemporary moments meet the physical demand of the music to acknowledge the breathing movement of Black culture as an uncontained, dynamic, evolving witness to the world of human agents. Knowledge alone, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, is not enough to advance equality. It must be knowledge and action. ‘Nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being part creator of this song’, Johnson wrote, adding: I am always thrilled deeply when I hear it sung by Negro children. I am lifted up on their voices, and I am also carried back and enabled to live through again the exquisite emotions I felt at the birth of the song. My brother and I, in talking, have often marvelled at the results that have followed what we considered an incidental effort [. . .] we wrote better than we knew.26 Johnson’s ‘O Black and Unknown Bards’, a poem that paid homage to the unnamed creators of the spirituals, echoed this sentiment: ‘you sang far better than you knew’. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ acknowledges the past of enslavement and suffering to make way for a resilient hope, one that sustains and directs us on the path towards liberty. While not yet fulfilled – not in 1900, not in 2023 – the song emphasises the truth of faith, homeland, and the quest for a fully realised liberty. ‘Let us march on till victory is won.’ Despite harsh racism, poverty, and oppression, African Americans and any oppressed group will strive for a better day and keep their faith in justice and ‘a new day begun’. The song has emerged at key moments in the national consciousness over the twentieth century to reveal anxieties over Black citizenship and Black voices of critique. Back in 2008 at a state of the city address in Denver, CO, the jazz singer René Marie sang the tune of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ but replaced the lyrics with ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, for which she was nationally chastised. More recently, the Reverend Joseph Lowery invoked the lyrics to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ in his inaugural benediction of Barack Obama: ‘God of our weary years / God of our silent tears, / Thou who has brought us thus far on the way.’ The references to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as the ‘Negro National Anthem’ or ‘Black National Anthem’ indicate cultural pride, but alternatively they have been used to advance judgement of Black citizens as less loyal to the nation. Indeed, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ – the history of its performances, the contexts in which it has been sung and in which it has been received – carries us directly to Colin Kaepernick’s protest voiced through the national anthem. Is there space in American culture for dissenting Black voices? Are Black citizens permitted to love their nation and criticise it?

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Johnson took great pains to refer to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as the ‘Negro National Hymn’, not ‘anthem’. (‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the official US national anthem in 1931.) Ollie Jewel Sims Okala, Johnson’s family nurse and literary executor, recalled that Johnson insisted it was a ‘Hymn’: ‘In his typical calm manner, he never failed to remind me that “a nation can have but one anthem and our anthem is the Star Spangled Banner.”’ But Johnson fully understood the inequality that moved African Americans in particular to embrace ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as an anthem representing their experiences of the nation as a people apart. Anthems became especially crucial in a post-World War I international discourse of nation’s rights.27 The survival of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ for 120 years of expression in various contexts, sung by Black people and white people, children and adults, conveys the continued harshness of racism, and the hopefulness that as a nation, we sing ‘far better than we know’. Johnson presented his ‘hymn’ as a modern spiritual, suggesting that as a nation we must become attuned to the many voices and experiences that attach themselves to the song. It is a simple song, with a partial ascending and descending scale, a bridge of sorts in a major-to-minor key prior to the refrain, and an aspirational progression of optimism, of hope prevailing beyond the minor key to resolution in the major key. It is graspable, easy for anyone to voice. One does not need a musical score to carry the song’s tune, but it also can be made elaborate with multiple instruments, four different vocal ranges, and a variety of arrangements. Many of Rosamond Johnson’s compositions maximise the performative contexts in which the song could be used, from symphonic renditions to mixed quartette, to vocalist-specific keys for noted singers such as Marian Anderson (G flat).28 ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is a story about what everyday people – educators, churchgoers, musicians, college students, civil rights advocates of all backgrounds – did with the song. Craig Werner observes the ‘simultaneous quality of music – its ability to make us aware of the many voices sounding at a single moment’.29 A song requires body, breath, and vocalisation. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is linked to African American political status and the history of protests for equality. The voices of the many are welcomed – from white women at Bryn Mawr to Japanese citizens who sing it in translation to Japanese. All classes, with or without religious affiliation or space to worship, may sing this song. The spirituals’ resistance to notation, and Johnson’s privileging of ‘swing’ through digression, playing with the beat, and swinging from one body to another, demonstrate the imperative need for fugitive expression. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ has come to represent the necessity for fugitive expression in US and international discourse. The Johnson brothers’ work in collecting the spirituals in two volumes, with Rosamond Johnson’s scoring marking innovative efforts to reflect the un-notatable and the living opposite of the ‘“opera-ated” upon’ versions of the spirituals, demonstrates their vision of a world where the ever-present voices of the ancestors as artists and Makers of the nation combine with the modern soundscape of Black life. To write a modern-day spiritual, or hymn, was to acknowledge past bards and the powerful foundation of Black music in the American discourse of freedom. Johnson’s emphasis on the voices of the emancipated meaningfully ‘let it resound far as the rolling sea’ – the powerful body of voices whose hopes, dreams, and political might had yet to be released into the national discourse. Modern-day hymns can be sung by the many. When white people join with Black people in singing, they extend the transference of sound with which Johnson animated his works.

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Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) extends this premise, its originators possessing the ‘wonderful voice’ ‘not of an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice – and with greater amplitude’.30 His project in writing God’s Trombones was to invite a broader culture of listeners into the world of the African American preacher and his congregants. Among Johnson’s literary works, God’s Trombones is particularly cherished. Like ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, it continues to be performed with new inflections of culture and experience. We continue to read God’s Trombones today much as we continue to sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’: for its gift of song and its promise of hope; because it articulates the faith and creative survival of African American lives, and many more lives besides; because of our personal relationship with our nation and the vast universe; because of continued suffering; for the continued quest for liberty and equality. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ and God’s Trombones, the two works of which Johnson was most proud to have created, remind us that we act in the world together, and that when we reflect upon our personal and shared trials, we discover the things that make us human. The cadence and rhythm of the preacher’s delivery found in Johnson’s poetic sermons pays homage to the ‘trombones’ of expressive culture. Lifted voices elevate their speaking subjects and cultural forms, animating a fresh and politicised expression for a new generation of leadership. You sang far better than you knew; the songs That for your listeners’ hungry hearts sufficed Still live – but more than this to you belongs: You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ.31

Notes  1. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial, 1954).   2. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1933), 154.   3. Brent Edwards, ‘The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson’s Prefaces’, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 580–601 (532).   4. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ‘Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s’, in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed. Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 996–1018 (982).  5. Johnson, Along This Way, 154–6.   6. Ibid., 156.  7. Ibid.  8. Ibid.   9. Noelle Morrissette, James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), 134. 10. Ibid., chapter 1. 11. Ibid., 130. 12. James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking Press, 1925), 43.

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13. 14. 15. 16.

Ibid., 30. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), xiv. 17. Johnson, Book of American Negro Spirituals, 50. 18. Ibid., 12. 19. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French, 1912); James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking Press, 1927). 20. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994), 7. 21. James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking Press, 1926), 11–12. 22. See Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 23. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 30th anniversary edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xxvii. 24. Ibid., xxviii. 25. Imani Perry, ‘Afterword’, in May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 218–26. 26. Johnson, Along This Way, 156. 27. Shana L. Redmond, ‘Introduction’, in Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 1–19. 28. JRJ Papers, MSS 21, Box 6, folder 11, Yale University Library Music Archives. 29. Craig Werner, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014), xiv. 30. Johnson, God’s Trombones, 6, 7. 31. James Weldon Johnson, Fifty Years and Other Poems, with an Introduction by Brander Matthews (Boston: Cornhill, 1917), 8.

Select Bibliography Edwards, Brent, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). ———, ‘The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson’s Prefaces’, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 580–601. Morrissette, Noelle, James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013). O’Meally, Robert G., ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Perry, Imani, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Redmond, Shana L., ‘Introduction’, in Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 1–19. Voegelin, Salomé, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010). Werner, Craig, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014).

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10 Sound Media, Race, and Voice Sam Halliday

Introduction

A

mongst the personal papers of Ralph Ellison, now archived in the Library of Congress, is an unattributed typescript of a radio play, possibly written by Ellison himself as part of his work for the Federal Writers Projects in the late 1930s and early 1940s, though possibly never broadcast or performed.1 The play concerns the life and work of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (?1809–76), a real-life African American concert singer, who, having been born a slave in Mississippi, first found freedom and then fame, performing in the concert halls of North America and England.2 According to a character within the play, Greenfield possessed ‘[t]he greatest voice of the age’ (20). This earned her the nickname ‘The Black Swan’, inspired, in part, by the nickname of another famous nineteenth-century concert singer, Jenny Lind (1820–87), ‘The Swedish Nightingale’. In Lind’s case, the nickname refers, of course, to the singer’s bird-like voice, in tandem with her nationality. But in Greenfield’s case, the nickname refers primarily to race. Though most varieties of swans sing, few are esteemed for it, and none at all are songbirds. Meanwhile, the variety known as the Black Swan (Cygnus atratus) is given that name antithetically, to distinguish it from others that, in adulthood, are white. As a descriptor as much as an appellation, then, ‘The Black Swan’ identifies Greenfield as possessed of a ‘black’ voice. Or maybe, it suggests that such a voice resounds or passes through her, as if it were an auditory analogue of black skin.3 A cognate claim is made in the Ellison archive radio play – though in a more historicist or ‘culturalist’ vein, not necessarily conditioned by belief in racial essences. At the beginning of the typescript, the narrator contends, ‘You have heard their voices. You have heard their laments and their protests and the singing in the fields’, with reference to the slaves amidst whom Taylor is raised, and their customary music (1). As Taylor’s mother tells another character a little later, ‘Elizabeth has been singing ever since she was nine months old. She picks up every tune she hears on the plantation’ (5). Both statements recall the famous claim made by Frederick Douglass, in his slave narrative of 1845, that slave songs are perhaps the most important historical document extant of the African American experience of slavery.4 In Douglass’s text, in turn, one finds a kernel of well-known claims according to which music made by slaves is a source for African American music generally, and vocal sound that music’s paradigm or core.5 The radio play does not contest these claims when it has Taylor, or her dramaturgic counterpart, sing herself, at points throughout the script. Her mother presents her as relaying music heard in infancy, and as other characters declare later, her adult voice is ‘uncommonly beautiful’ and her performances ‘superb’ (14, 16). But the play has

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difficulty demonstrating any of these things directly, for the simple reason that the historic voice it turns upon is lost: Taylor died in 1876, just before the first technology for capturing and reproducing sound, the phonograph (1877), became available. No matter how the actor playing Taylor sings, or is instructed to in the radio script she follows, no one involved in the play can know what the real-life singer really sounded like, or reproduce the voice in its own right. But as Ellison and anyone else involved in that play would have been well aware, black music had been hugely invigorated by sound recording in the decades since the phonograph’s invention, in ways that helped both document existing traditions and create substantively new ones. So-called race records representing both these trends were an important commodity from the 1920s, as part of a worldwide economy of music in which African Americans were involved as both consumers and producers.6 The very first record company to be owned by African Americans indeed paid tribute to Taylor as a herald of all this, taking its name from Taylor’s nickname: Black Swan Records, based in Harlem, New York City, traded from 1921 to 1924, and disseminated music in a range of genres, including gospel, blues, and jazz.7 In the Ellison archive radio play, then, Taylor’s voice is a major object of representation, even though it cannot represent itself. What does it mean to represent this voice via radio? The medium has obvious advantages for the portrayal of not just this but any voice, both as an acoustic medium and as an ‘acousmatic’ one, to invoke Pierre Schaeffer’s famous definition of the acousmatic as a condition allocating ‘to the ear alone the entire responsibility for a perception that ordinarily rests on other sensible witnesses’.8 The other ‘witnesses’ Schaeffer has in mind here are the eyes and eyesight, primarily, along with other sensory faculties responsible for pegging sound to a definite source, and pegging that source to a definite location, in non-acousmatic situations. All these agencies are typically absorbed into a sensory ensemble, along with touch, taste, and smell, wherein ear and eye correct and bolster one another (at least in so-called fully abled individuals). And as both Schaeffer and his interlocutor/ commentator Michel Chion emphasise, the acousmatic has become a regular feature of modernity since the late nineteenth century, not least via sound technologies such as the phonograph itself. In Chion’s words, the increasing prevalence of ‘radio, records, telephone, tape recorder’ and the like has made the acousmatic influential in many walks of cultural and economic life (and here we should add sound cinema, the object of Chion’s classic study The Voice in Cinema (1984; English trans. 1999)).9 This makes the sources of many sounds invisible, and many of those sounds appear autonomous. In what follows, I trace the acousmatic and its vicissitudes in relation to a range of early twentieth-century fiction by African Americans, meditating on both ‘black’ and other racial voices. I also look at musicology wherein blackness is adduced by white writers as a component of black music, and that music treated as an index or effect of race itself. In charting the conceptual moves of these and associated texts, I hope to show how technology is put to work, both materially and imaginatively, when race is putatively heard instead of being seen (and, sometimes, seen and heard at the same time). Insofar as all these texts consider hearing as an alternative to sight, they reflect the history of the acousmatic generally. And in this, they also help tease out the limitations of the acousmatic as an epistemological mode – for though there are analytic dividends to be reaped from acousmatic listening, there are liabilities as well. On one hand, as Chion argues, the fact that sight and hearing become detached in acousmatic

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listening may lead listeners to a richer appreciation than they would otherwise enjoy of ‘sound object[s]’ in themselves. But on the other, as Brian Kane points out, the selfsame situation may lead listeners to unconsciously adulterate that object, attributing qualities or causes to it that are not actually implicit in the sounds themselves.10 As Kane puts it, such objects are phenomenologically ‘underdetermined’, and thus beg ‘imaginative supplementation’.11 And where race is concerned, supplements may be metaphysical. It is in part because they recognise the dangers of all this that some of the writers I address believe the ‘black’ voice to be chimerical. Of these writers, George Schuyler expresses this belief most directly; his fellow-novelist contemporaries Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison do so less directly while also entertaining other possibilities. The non-black musicologists Leonard Bernstein and Milton Metfessel are most convinced of the reality of black vocality amongst non-literary writers I consider: in the latter’s case, this conviction leads to both intellectual and material investment in ‘phonophotography’, a technological procedure supposedly capable of making the blackness of ‘black’ voices visible and quantifiable. Male writers predominate throughout the present chapter – a fact that is certainly regrettable, but at least partly necessitated by the way black voices come under the same kinds of analytic and aesthetic pressure as those historically imposed by men upon the vocal sounds of girls and women. Because of this, in turn, my closing discussion of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) incorporates discussion of Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), a text that both assesses these pressures and protests them. As we shall see, James’s novel simultaneously assesses and protests and instances the ‘sonic gaze’ (a term coined by Avital Ronell) – a ‘male’ way of listening to women that is premonitory of ways that certain white people listen to black people.12

Passing and Telephony One way of bringing the sonic gaze into clear relief is by comparing it to the scopic gaze described by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952; English trans. 1967). Here, the latter is said to focus on black skin, in ways that freight black subjects with psychic as well as extra-psychic burdens commensurate with hyper-visibility.13 At first blush, this account fits the history of race and racism in North America well, insofar as blackness is represented there in visual terms. Thus, from the fugitive slave posters of the nineteenth century to cinematic extravaganzas such as The Birth of a Nation (1915; dir. D. W. Griffith), race in the US has often been literally spectacular. But countervailingly, race has also often threatened to become invisible, almost as a function of its importance. As is well known, the legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrem (a child’s legal status follows the mother’s), pivotal in slave codes since the seventeenth century, and premonitory of the notorious ‘one drop’ statutes adopted by certain states in the early twentieth century, decreed that certain persons should be considered ‘black’ even if they appeared not to be.14 Meanwhile, the realities of sexual depredation of female slaves by male masters under slavery, and associated demographic increase, meant that, as Douglass famously pointed out in the same 1845 Narrative cited above, the black population had become more variously and ambiguously ‘black’ well before the end of slavery.15 By the close of the Reconstruction era (1863–77), race was attended by what some historians call a crisis of visibility.16 African American author Charles

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W. Chesnutt is an astute guide to this. His essay ‘What Is a White Man?’ (1889) mordantly delineates the colour line in different Southern states, and shows how one might pass from ‘white’ to ‘black’ as one travels from one state to another.17 Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars (1900) explores the implications of this more fully, partly via a series of plot points uncoupling sound from vision. One of these involves a white man who hears a woman’s voice and is convinced that she is black on the basis of his acousmatic listening (he overhears her passing by his window, while half asleep).18 But this does not prevent him being equally convinced of the same woman’s whiteness later on, and falling in love with her – never dreaming that a ‘black’ voice and ‘white’ skin might coincide in the same person. And so to other novels concerned with ‘passing’, the practice of deliberately assuming a racial identity contrary to that imposed by majoritarian decree. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), famously depicts the rooftop terrace of a racially exclusive northern hotel where incognito black women take tea; Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928) surveys a range of racist institutions, all tending to convince its heroine of the benefits of giving up her given, black identity for white. By the same historic juncture, the post-slavery ‘New Negro’ had become less distinctly Southern (in US terms), and more Northern; not just a denizen of the US, but also of an international diaspora – at least according to Alain Locke’s definitive account in his The New Negro anthology (1925). These developments, in turn, were bound up with the Great Migration, the large-scale demographic shift from South to North within the US, which further opened up the question of what was truly ‘racial’ and what more truly cultural and geographical. According to some migrants, much of what had customarily been seen as ‘blackness’ was really ‘Southern-ness’, and the descendants of slaves much more cognate with the descendants of their masters than hitherto assumed. To travel North might be to cast off insignia of so-called race, including diction, accent, and vocabulary. In this context, the widespread literary practice of using non-standard orthography to represent black dialectic (a practice Chesnutt follows in some of his fiction) came to seem increasingly problematic. Thus James Weldon Johnson, in his Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), notes that most younger writers in the anthology eschew the practice, in favour of techniques more suited to their metropolitan, supra-local outlook.19 In this they may have found an unexpected ally in the telephone. This, at least, would be a plausible inference to draw from the avowed anti-racism of its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), as discussed by Ronell in her The Telephone Book (1989), a study that applauds the telephone for its (potential) colour-blindness.20 George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) picks up this theme, as part of its wideranging satire on essentialist attitudes to race, whether adduced by black people or white people. Here, Schuyler modulates a claim earlier made in ‘The Negro Art Hokum’ (1926), his contrarian assault on Locke and other figures whose celebrations of blackness he considered to be ultimately based on the same metaphysics as the racism they were trying to contest. As one of his novel’s characters contends: There is no such thing as Negro dialect, except in literature and drama. It is a wellknown fact among informed persons that a Negro from a given section speaks the same dialect as his white neighbors. In the South you can’t tell over the telephone you are talking to a white man or a Negro. The same is true in New York when a Northern Negro speaks into the receiver.21

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Dialect exists in literature, but not in any real-world sound or mannerisms that literature purports to represent. Instead, this dialect is purely textual or alphabetic, and all sonic manifestations of it hallucinatory. By revealing this to non-biased listeners, the telephone performs an admirable service, over and above its more familiar and obvious function of facilitating conversation. To be sure, neither Schuyler nor his character deny that real voices have acoustic variations. But they do deny that any of these variations correspond to race. A more complex picture emerges from the telephone’s portrayal near the start of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Here, the telephone is imaginary: not wire and metal, but constructed ad hoc by cupping one’s hands to one’s face and asking one’s interlocutor to play along. That ‘play’ is indeed the order of the day here is a function of the fact that those invoking it are young adults, and that as well as playing at being telephone users, they play at being older ones. Not coincidentally, the two men concerned, Bigger and Gus, also play at being white – a condition they identify with vocal mannerisms, timbre, and commands. And as African Americans, their simulation of these mannerisms and so on represents a form of passing, albeit one that is not trying to fool anyone, but rather to measure out the socio-economic as well as racial gulf that separates them from white countrymen: ‘Let’s play “white,”’ Bigger said, referring to a game of play-acting in which he and his friends imitated the ways and manners of white folks. [. . .] [. . .] Bigger saw Gus cup his left hand to his ear, as though holding a telephone receiver; and cup his right hand to his mouth, as though talking into a transmitter. ‘Hello,’ Gus said. ‘Hello,’ Bigger said, ‘Who’s this?’ ‘This is Mr. J. P. Morgan speaking,’ Gus said. ‘Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,’ Bigger said; his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect. ‘I want you to sell twenty thousand shares of U. S. Steel in the market this morning,’ Gus said. [. . .] ‘Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,’ Bigger said. Both of them made gestures signifying that they were hanging up telephone receivers; then they bent double, laughing. ‘I bet that’s just the way they talk,’ Gus said.22 In contrast to Schuyler’s character, both Gus and Bigger ‘bet’ that whiteness can be heard, and simulated, even in the absence of the acousmatic telephony their play-acting invokes. Moreover, Bigger matches Gus’s ‘white’ voice with a ‘black’ one, represented orthographically via ‘yessuhs’ redolent of the dialect tradition. Thus, their roles expose the gaps between a range of objects: not only ‘white’ sound and ‘black’ sound, but also between black/white sound and black personhood – between black skins and, in Gus’s case, an auditory white mask. But beyond this, Wright suggests that Schuyler is partly right, albeit for the wrong reasons. To reveal what white people really sound like, one needs to bracket how they look – including white people’s skin colour, especially. This may not disable racial prejudice, but might at least unsettle it. Telephony aside, the major locus of attempts to ‘see’ race from the early twentieth century is music. It is to this that we now turn.

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Singing and Phonophotography The history of visualising sound is often traced to Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756–1827), whose experiments involved coating glass or metal plates with sand, passing sound through those plates, and then observing traces made by sound vibrations, in the sand, upon those plates.23 Subsequent research often focused on the voice, and how this might be educed visually for the benefit of those who could not hear.24 Alexander Graham Bell’s research in this tradition led directly (if unexpectedly) to the invention of the telephone, in 1876. Just one year later, Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph eventually led (no less unexpectedly, at least to Edison himself) to an extraordinary burgeoning of recorded music, and a related quickening in music’s modes of social circulation. In song lyrics and adjacent discourses, musicians provided a de facto commentary on all this. And in African American music, this commentary often focused on race. The aforementioned Black Swan Records made a joke out of the way that listeners seeking authentically ‘black’ sounds could rely upon the label, despite the potential for racial masquerade acousmatic sound afforded. ‘The Only Genuine Colored Record[s]’, its labels assured its customers: ‘Others are only passing for colored.’25 This brings us to the increasing influence of black music on music generally, and related interest in black music amongst academic musicologists. Leonard Bernstein’s undergraduate thesis, ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’ (1939), reflects both trends. Here, Bernstein espouses a form of musical nationalism, wherein black music supplies melodic traits, rhythms, and other source material to American composers, much as European folk materials had done for composers from old-world nations previously. Amongst American materials, particular attention is given to the flatted 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes in major scales, said to give a ‘special Negro flavor’ to black singing.26 Not only do these intervals constitute a challenge to conventional methods of notation, they also challenge the distinction between pitch per se and pitch articulation: As a matter of strict record, none of these three alterations of the major scale can be notated absolutely correctly. They are dependent on the Negro timbre; that is, they are almost purely a matter of intonation [. . .]. It is for this reason that when swing [i.e. the sub-genre of jazz] is played on the piano – which, being a mechanically exact instrument, cannot produce quarter-tones and the like – the pianist must resort to such impressionistic approximations as:– [here, Bernstein interpolates a few bars of musical notation.] Obviously, music based on this scale sounds most authentic when sung by a Negro voice, although such instruments as clarinet and trumpet in the hands of a man with ‘feeling’ – usually a Negro – come very close to the vocal execution.27 In ‘Negro’ music, what is also how, as any given melody owes part of its being to the inherent idiosyncrasy of live performance, notwithstanding any actual or possible notation. Insofar as this music ‘sounds most authentic’ when performed by ‘Negroes’, how also corresponds to who, as the supposed racial essences of singers commingle with the substance of the music they perform. Though ‘mechanically exact’ instruments may generate a tolerable facsimile of this music, these can never replicate the full range of its ‘vocal expression’. Vocality is this music’s core, even when other instruments are involved in its performance.

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But the voice itself remains elusive to precise representation, whether by conventional musical notation or otherwise. This creates particular challenges for those seeking to analyse black music systematically. And though Bernstein seems not to have known it, these are challenges Milton Metfessel believes he has surmounted in his Phonophotography in Folk Music (1928). Metfessel was a researcher at the Iowa laboratory for the Psychology of Music and Speech, devoted to what his colleague Carl E. Seashore called ‘the scientific study of the expression of musical emotion’.28 His special interests were blues and spirituals: supposedly privileged expressions of emotion amongst African Americans. Like other ethnomusicologists, Metfessel used the phonograph to gather data.29 But despite the phonograph’s ‘inestimable value’ in this, as Seashore observes, its records can only be interpreted by ear (8). Though the latter claim may sound odd coming from a musicologist, it points towards an optimum scenario wherein music could be seen as well as heard. Were a sufficiently stable and precise method to become available, the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘who’ of music (as I have just called them) could be measured simultaneously. This is what both Metfessel and Seashore think ‘phonophotography’ enables. Via a bespoke apparatus, the new technique combines features from conventional phonography and cinematography, as Metfessel details: The apparatus consists of photographic instruments mounted within a suitcase. In the interior [. . .] there is a large wheel to which a crank is attached from the outside. Motion picture film is wound around the wheel, coming from a film magazine. In its passage from the magazine to the wheel, beams of light are concentrated in it. These lights are reflected from tiny mirrors, which are attached to diaphragms. [. . .] The diaphragms pick up the vibrations of sound [coming either from a phonograph or live performance], and the mirrors translate the vibrations into an up and down flashing of the light. (22) The singing voice initiates a sequence that transduces and displaces it at each successive stage. Sound begets the rise and fall of diaphragms; these, in turn, help mobilise reflected light. At the conclusion of this sequence, the voice acquires permanent, substantial form. Metfessel’s wider mission is accomplished: ‘Phonophotography lifts folk music out of the subjective and intangible into an objective, measurable physical reality’ (178). Can the ‘Negro-ness’ of ‘Negro’ singers be measured in the same way? Flatted intervals aside, Metfessel identifies several things differentiating black voices from others, starting with rhythm – a term that he aligns with ‘primitive’, as happens so often in discussions of black music of this period (98). Second, he claims that ‘Negroes’ mingle song with speech, making songs’ internal rhythms more complex (44). Finally, he states that when black singers become emotionally aroused, ‘the entire organism is stirred up’, leading them to clap their hands and shake their heads (175). When performers are emotionally transported, their music becomes trans-vocal. This leads us to a wider point. If black music is visual as well as auditory, it is not enough to hear the voice, or even see its transcript, Chladni-style: one also needs to see the singer’s body.30 And in that case, one must consider not only formal and aesthetic pressures on that body but historic and sociopolitical ones as well. Here, we may again consider Bigger in Native Son (notwithstanding the fact that we have seen him speak,

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not sing). When he plays ‘white’, he does not just make pseudo-acousmatic sounds; he also makes exaggerated facial expressions (‘his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect’), burlesquing obsequy. Behind these expressions stands a whole tradition of minstrelsy and related performance genres encoding blackness as a set of gestural and physiognomic tropes. And behind these, in turn, stands a wider edifice of customs, laws, and institutions, all constructed with the effect if not express intent of telling black people how they should act – in every sense. In a commentary on Native Son, Ralph Ellison claims that though supposedly ‘physical’ expressions of black culture, including rhythmic speech, appear self-grounded, they are in fact consequent upon and repercussive of that edifice of customs, laws, and institutions just referred to – displacements of the latter, à la phonophotography. Though often seen as an avatar of ‘primitive simplicity’, the hypersensitive response of the ‘Negro’ to their environment means that they should instead be acknowledged as ‘complex’.31 In Invisible Man (1952), Ellison extends this line of thought, dramatising the interplay of acousmatic and non-acousmatic sounds, and highlighting the political capital that may be used – or abused – by those who would control the ‘black’ voice. The novel’s examination of that voice will occupy us shortly, and bring the present chapter to its conclusion.

Invisibility The rigour of Invisible Man’s interrogation of these issues has slowly become evident over the last few decades. In 2004 David Copenhafer could claim, with justice, that ‘we have yet to comprehend the novel, yet to understand what it has to say, in particular, regarding the interaction of the acoustic, the visual, and the racial’.32 Since then, though, several critics have taken up the challenge of understanding just this. In Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Alexander Weheliye proposes that the narrator’s subjectivity is best understood as a correlative of sound technologies with which he is associated, and the ‘invisibility’ these promise (or threaten).33 Nicole Brittingham Furlonge’s 2011 essay on the novel agrees, and adds that the narrator’s relationship with such technologies reflects Ellison’s own critical writings on recorded music.34 In a 2016 essay, Herman Beavers focuses on the speaking voice, and shows how a disruption of the ‘feedback loop’ connecting speech to listening vexes the narrator’s relationships with others.35 And in Sydney Boyd’s ‘The Color of Sound’ (2018), the putative blackness of black voices, as depicted in the novel, is identified with timbre, a musicological category we have seen adduced above – precisely in relation to the ‘Negro’ voice – by Bernstein.36 A key coordinate for all these readings is the novel’s Prologue, which famously dilates upon a phonograph recording of Louis Armstrong singing ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?’ (Fats Waller, Harry Brooks, and Andy Razaf, 1929). Via this recording, the narrator hears his own ‘invisibility’ reflected. But as Copenhafer and others point out, it is not just this that the phonograph reflects; it is also the narrator’s own actual, acoustic voice. And throughout the novel, this voice occasions self-regard and self-critique in roughly equal measure. As a student, the narrator addresses himself to a ‘connoisseur of voice sounds’, as he gives debating-society-type speeches, freighted with ‘more sound than sense’.37 Upon leaving the South, he joins the Great Migration, with this express intent: ‘here in the North I would slough off my southern ways of speech. Indeed I would have one way of speaking in the North and another in the South’ (135). In an ironic commentary on this prospectus, his voice appears, later,

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temporarily, divorced from him, ‘spill[ing]’ words ‘in a mumble over which I had little control’ (211). But later still, en rapport with his own voice, he joins the Brotherhood (a political group) as a public speaker. In this capacity, the narrator gives a speech whose audience regards him like a crowd of Metfessels: ‘They were listening intently, and as though looking not at me, but at the pattern of my voice upon the air’ (366). It is as if Chladni’s aim of visualising sound had taken root in every mind. In his capacity for public speech, the narrator also resembles an otherwise quite different character in Henry James’s The Bostonians, that earlier novel whose relation to Invisible Man I signalled in the introduction to this chapter and which I turn to directly now. In James’s text, Verena Tarrant speaks on behalf of women’s rights, as one of several ‘Bostonians’ making up one side of the novel’s agonistic scheme. On the other side is Basil Ransom, whose misogyny and anti-black white Southern chauvinism complete the novel’s set of geopolitical and cultural antimonies: North versus South; feminism versus male chauvinism; (relatively) pro-black racial liberalism versus white supremacy. Ideological contention between these two sides is compounded by the erotic kind, as Basil battles for Verena’s heart against another Bostonian, Olive Chancellor. In their respective discourses, these rivals dwell obsessively upon Verena’s voice – Olive declaring, ‘A voice, a human voice is what we want’, and Basil swooning, ‘Murder, what a lovely voice!’38 But as that reference to ‘murder’ should lead us to suspect (though it is not in fact an augury of the real thing), Basil’s wishes for Verena are against her own best interests. As he tells her to her face, ‘I don’t listen to your ideas, I listen to your voice’ (326). He disregards her as a subject, even as he craves her as an object. Olive’s view of this is categorical: ‘It was because [Basil] knew that [Verena’s] voice had magic in it’ that ‘from the moment he caught its first note he had determined to destroy it’ (369). Basil is a killer, hunting with a sonic gaze. This brings us to that gaze’s relationship to race. As I have suggested, that gaze’s prototype is a ‘male’ way of listening to women, but cognate, supplementary versions include the way that black people are listened to by certain white people. And in Invisible Man, these white people are represented by the narrator’s colleagues in the Brotherhood. Their leader, Brother Jack, insists, ‘“We’re not interested in his looks but in his voice”’, apparently determining that race should play no part in the organisation’s dealings with the narrator (245). But what he really means is that race should determine all those dealings surreptitiously – veiled by the sonic’s detachment from the scopic, and by his and his colleagues’ ostensible approval of the narrator’s speech. When Jack castigates a colleague for invoking stereotypes of black musicality (‘“all coloured people sing”’), it seems that he sees the narrator as a voice of reason (253; emphasis in original). But it soon transpires that the Brotherhood have no time for what the narrator says, except when this coincides with what they tell him to say. Instead, they care about how he sounds – in one instance, with a pronounced erotic inclination. In that instance, the narrator’s would-be paramour, Emma, tells him, ‘“at times you have tom-toms beating in your voice”’ (333). Reprising Metfessel’s association of the ‘Negro’ voice with, on one hand, rhythm, and on the other, cultural naïvety, she comes on to him using perhaps the most exemplary word of Western racism: ‘“primitive”’ (333; emphasis in original). Parallels between Invisible Man and The Bostonians can only be taken so far. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their divergent vintages and genealogies, differences

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between the two texts are just as important as their similarities. For instance, James’s evocation of the black voice is occasioned not by the public speaker of his text, Verena, but by the man who will not listen to it, Basil. In an extraordinary twist, Basil becomes a proxy ‘slave’, even as he hails from – and speaks for – the plantocracy: ‘his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and vast, something almost African in its rich, basking tone, something that suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton field’ (36). It is the chauvinist, revanchist misogynist who here sounds ‘black’. And in a further twist, the narrator glosses Verena’s speeches with broad, impressionistic paraphrases, as if their actual words were not worth quoting. This is what I meant earlier when I said that the novel instances the ‘sonic gaze’ as well as assessing and protesting it: though it ‘listens’ to women, it pointedly refuses to do so in the way they demand, instead reproducing the patriarchal assumptions and prerogatives against which they protest. In this respect, if not in others, the novel is of Basil’s party, not Verena’s. But the most significant difference between The Bostonians and Invisible Man is a corollary of the distinction between the third-person narrator of one and the first-person narrator/protagonist of the other. In The Bostonians, the narrator stands above the fray, bestowing sympathy and scorn on all the novel’s characters in equal measure (patriarchal bias notwithstanding). But in Invisible Man, the narrator is part of that fray, inextricably bound up with the milieu that he describes. This is the case even, if not especially, when he retreats into the underground lair described in the novel’s Prologue and Epilogue, with only Louis Armstrong’s phonographic voice for company. What does that intone? The answer takes us to the relation between the acousmatic and invisibility, implicit throughout the novel, not least when, at the very end, the narrator refers to his own voice as ‘disembodied’ (468). This is not the first time a voice has been referred to in this way: earlier, a woman’s singing voice acquires the same descriptor, as does a preacher’s when he preaches (99, 107). In all these cases, ‘disembodi[ment]’ denotes a bracketing of vision which brings the voice closer to the listener for purposes of closer scrutiny. But as we have seen throughout this chapter, ‘closer’ does not mean ‘better’, if the ear is subject to racially inflected metaphysical assumptions. Though the narrator of course does not adhere to these, avowedly, he lives in a world where acousmatic voices are routinely ascribed racial meanings, whether or not their bearers like it. What did he do to be so black and blue? He has found that being heard does not compensate him for the trauma of not being seen.

Notes   1. Ralph Ellison, ‘Radio, undated’, Library of Congress, Ralph Ellison Papers, Part I: Family Papers, 1890–1996, Box I: 21. The manuscript cited here has 25 pages. Further parenthetical references in the text.  2. Scholarship on Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield includes Sara Lampert, ‘Black Swan/White Raven: The Racial Politics of Elizabeth Greenfield’s American Concert Career, 1851–1855’, American Nineteenth-Century History 17, no. 1 (2016): 75–102; and Julia J. Chybowski, ‘Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’, Journal of the Society for American Music 15, no. 3 (2021): 305–20.   3. This possibility is the focus of Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s analysis of Taylor (and her public reception) in The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016), chapter 2.

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  4. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), chapter 2.   5. For the first claim, see, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Sorrow Songs’, in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 250–64; for the second, see, for example, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), ‘The Jazz Avant-Garde’ (1961), in Black Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 69–80 (especially 77).   6. See, for example, Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).  7. See, for example, David Suisman, ‘Co-Works in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music’, The Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (2004): 1295–324.  8. Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, trans. Daniel W. Smith, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2006), 76–81 (77).   9. Michel Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, trans. John Dack and Christine North (1983), 11, https://monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound_Objects_Pierre_ Schaeffer_and_Musical_Research.pdf. 10. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8–9. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 184. 13. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, [1952] 1967), chapter 5. 14. See, for example, F. James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1991), 33–4. 15. Douglass, Narrative, chapter 1. 16. See Mark M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Smith dislikes the term ‘crisis’, and insists that visibility did not wane but rather gained support from non-visual senses during the nineteenth century. 17. Charles W. Chesnutt, ‘What is a White Man?’ (1889), reprinted in Interracialism: BlackWhite Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37–41. 18. Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (London: The X Press, [1900] 2012), 68. 19. James Weldon Johnson, ‘Preface’, in The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), vii–xlviii (xxxix). 20. Ronell, Telephone Book, 401–2. 21. George S. Schuyler, Black No More (New York: Macmillan, [1931] 1971), 31. 22. Richard Wright, Native Son, with an Introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York: HarperPerennial, [1940; restored 1991] 1993), 17–19, emphasis in original. 23. See, for example, Tobias Wilke, Sound Writing: Experimental Modernism and the Poetics of Articulation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 32–44. 24. See, for example, Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Language, Deafness and the Senses – A Philosophical History (London: HarperCollins, 1999). 25. Reprinted in Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 14. 26. Leonard Bernstein, ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’ (1939), reprinted as ‘Harvard Bachelor’s Thesis’, in Findings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 37–99 (53).

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27. Ibid.; emphasis in original. 28. Carl E. Seashore, ‘Introduction’ to Milton Metfessel, Phonophotography in Folk Music: American Negro Songs in New Notation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928), 6. Further parenthetical references in the text. 29. Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). 30. Metfessel himself is well aware of this, and includes conventional photographs in his book alongside transcriptions of phonophotography. These photographs show singers’ faces in the act of singing. As Metfessel comments, ‘it is the experience of simultaneously hearing and seeing exactly how the Negro sings which will give a more complete analytic comprehension’ than any possible by sound or vision solely (26–7). 31. Ralph Ellison, ‘Richard Wright’s Blues’ (1945), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. with an Introduction by John F. Callahan; Preface by Saul Bellow (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 128–44 (139). 32. David Copenhafer, ‘Invisible Music (Ellison)’, Qui Parle 14, no. 2 (2004): 177–204 (177). 33. Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 34. Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, ‘“To Hear the Silence of Sound”: Making Sense of Listening in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Interference Journal: Issue 1. An Ear Alone is Not a Being: Embodied Mediations in Audio Culture (2011), http://www.interferencejournal. org/to-hear-the-silence-of-sound/ (accessed 2 July 2022). 35. Herman Beavers, ‘The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invisible Man’, in The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marc C. Connor and Lucas E. Morel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 75–98. 36. Sydney Boyd, ‘The Color of Sound: Hearing Timbre in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 74, no. 3 (2018): 47–64. 37. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1952] 1965), 95, emphasis removed. Further parenthetical references in the text. 38. Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. with an Introduction by Charles R. Anderson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1886] 1986), 81, 348. Further parenthetical references in the text.

Select Bibliography Beavers, Herman, ‘The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invisible Man’, in The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marc C. Connor and Lucas E. Morel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 75–98. Bernstein, Leonard, ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’ (1939), reprinted as ‘Harvard Bachelor’s Thesis’, in Findings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 37–99. Boyd, Sydney, ‘The Color of Sound: Hearing Timbre in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 74, no. 3 (2018): 47–64. Brittingham Furlonge, Nicole, ‘“To Hear the Silence of Sound”: Making Sense of Listening in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’, Interference Journal: Issue 1. An Ear Alone is Not a Being: Embodied Mediations in Audio Culture (2011), http://www.interferencejournal.org/to-hearthe-silence-of-sound/ (accessed 2 July 2022). Brooks, Tim, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Chion, Michel, Guide to Sound Objects, trans. John Dack and Christine North (1983), https:// monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound_Objects_Pierre_Schaeffer_ and_Musical_Research.pdf. Copenhafer, David, ‘Invisible Music (Ellison)’, Qui Parle 14, no. 2 (2004): 177–204.

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James, Henry, The Bostonians, ed. with an Introduction by Charles R. Anderson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1886] 1986). Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Metfessel, Milton, Phonophotography in Folk Music: American Negro Songs in New Notation, with an Introduction by Carl E. Seashore (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928). Ronell, Avital, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Schuyler, George S., Black No More (New York: Macmillan, [1931] 1971). Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). Suisman, David, ‘Co-Works in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music’, The Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (2004): 1295–324. Wright, Richard, Native Son, with an Introduction by Arnold Rampersad (New York: HarperPerennial, [1940; restored 1991] 1993).

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11 The Acousmatics of Prison Writing Julian Murphet

P

risons have an uncomfortable place in the history of the science of sound. Theories of resonance and acoustic surveillance were galvanised by architectural experiments with incarceration. ‘The “ear” of Denys, the tyrant of Syracuse [fourth century bce], famous for its acoustic properties, was a device that allowed him to hear from outside what his prisoners were saying inside. Its configuration was similar to an ear canal.’1 Leibniz’s plans for a prison-like ‘panacousticon’, which he called the ‘palace of marvels’, are telling: These buildings will be constructed in such a way that the master of the house will be able to hear and see everything that is said and done without himself being perceived, by means of mirrors and pipes, which will be a most important thing for the State, and a kind of political confessional.2 And we should not forget the morbid fact that Antoine Ferrein erected his new science of the voice (specifically his discovery of the function of the cordes vocales) on experiments done with the unclaimed cadavers of dead prisoners (and dogs) in mid-eighteenth-century Paris.3 For our purposes, however, the critical fact about prison, from the point of view of the prisoner, is that it is an architectural topos where the faculty of sight – typically so dominant in daily life – is reduced to an absolute minimum even for sighted people, because its domain is so starved of novel sensory inputs, while the auditory senses are heightened to a new intensity of perceptiveness. And, given this inverse ratio between sound and vision, the most peculiar thing about prison sound is that its source is most often invisible – that is to say, in Michel Chion’s influential term, that prison sound is disproportionately acousmatic.4 It is a fact made palpable in the convention of prison-genre cinema which features the ‘disembodied male voice-over’ as a ‘pure distillate of the law’, separated from any body, floating freely as a meta-diegetic promise of ‘justice’.5 But what matters most in this context is the fact that, for centuries, writers who have also been prisoners have seized hold of the acousmatic property of prison sound and turned it into testimonials of terror, torture, resilience, and resistance, as well as rare utopian promises. The relationship between imprisonment and the experience of sound has shifted dramatically over time and space, and writers have left behind a detailed record of these transformations that has not yet adequately been noted, let alone analysed and interpreted. Of medieval prisons with their walls operating as ‘breathing membranes, not hermetic seals’, and their creation of, not ‘a world of men and women, not even a world of beasts, but a chaos, a pandemonium’, we have the written evidence of Boethius, Villon, and others.6 To Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey, Thomas Wyatt, and

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Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey we owe our partial glimpses of the Tudor prison’s typical soundscape, its fragmentary, ‘architecturally haphazard’, anti-panoptical floorplan resulting in extended periods of isolated audiovisual deprivation (punctuated by howls of pain) geared towards extorting the climactic auditory moment of coerced confession or recantation.7 We know many of the ominous acoustic qualities of Victorian prisons thanks to Dickens – sounds dissociated, jarring, violent, and threatening – in Little Dorrit. Verlaine’s poetry, subject to some searching acoulogical readings by Michel Chion, displays remarkable qualities of sonic synaesthesia to compensate for the starving of the eye.8 To Henry David Thoreau, that most astute recorder of sounds, we owe the following realisation of sonic experience in the Concord jail cell where he paid his dues for civil disobedience: It seemed to me that I never had heard the town clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn, – a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.9 Thoreau leads us to suppose that, as per Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insistence that in any new settlement some space must be reserved for a cemetery and some for a prison,10 the town jail is one of the better situations from which to observe the settlement itself: in a condition of growing alienation, privatisation, and separation, the prison perversely brings one’s native place ‘closer’, not via abstract analysis but via the unstoppered ears and grated windows, through which pass the accumulated sounds and conversations of a social formation glimpsed in its moving totality – as if it were the Middle Ages. On the other hand, Harriet Jacobs’s account of her years in an airless attic eluding the clutches of her hated owner assume a much more troubling attentiveness to ‘shudder[ing] at the sound of his footsteps, and trembl[ing] within hearing of his voice’ any time her supersensitive ear detected these sounds.11 Sound in this prison is a daily torment of unpredictable intrusions: Suddenly I heard a voice that chilled my blood. The sound was too familiar to me, it had been too dreadful, for me not to recognize at once my old master. He was in the house, and I at once concluded that he had come to seize me. I looked round in terror. There was no way of escape. The voice receded. I supposed the constable was with him, and they were searching the house.12 In the open-air prison of chattel slavery, every sound made by the slaveowner is a portent of structural violence, an all-too familiar reminder of the pervasive constraints on liberty set by an entire class, its constables, fellow travellers, and scribes in the South. Jacobs’s narrative is punctuated by this acoustic terrorism, invasive and resounding across every threshold and private barrier like the law itself.

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One of the most significant developments in the history of the prison was taking place in the USA during Thoreau’s and Jacobs’s lifetimes, namely the establishment in Auburn, New York, of a new system of incarceration based on solitary confinement and an emphasis on self-improving spiritual discipline. This is one of the few aspects of prison life that has regularly attracted the attention of sound scholars, not only because Michel Foucault treated it at great length in his Discipline and Punish, but because sound itself was a crucial aspect of the Auburn system; specifically its reduction to a theoretical zero. If ‘Bentham considered a prisoner’s ability to make “noise” as the sole weakness of his system: resistance as sonic externalization rather than visual internalization’, then Auburn would perfect the panoptical hypothesis.13 As Brandon LaBelle points out, ‘Auburn instituted its “silent system” in 1821 whereby silence was to be maintained at all times: there was to be absolutely no talking among prisoners.’14 The Board of Inspectors of Auburn penitentiary put it as follows: Let the most obdurate and guilty felons be immured in solitary cells and dungeons; let them have pure air, wholesome food, comfortable clothing, and medical aid when necessary; cut them off from all intercourse with men; let not the voice or face of a friend ever cheer them; let them walk their gloomy abodes, and commune with their corrupt hearts and guilty consciences in silence, and brood over the horrors of their solitude and the enormity of their crimes, without hope of executive pardon.15 Guards would patrol the quiet corridors in stockinged feet, able to discern even the slightest murmur or tapping, and intervene immediately to prevent any intercourse among inmates. The prevailing idea was to turn attention inwards by imposing a monastic severity of sensory deprivation on those deemed guilty by the state. Rates of insanity were unsurprisingly high. One inmate released from an Auburn-style prison in 1905 recorded her initial reactions to being back in a world of spoken interests and uncontrolled sounds. Florence Maybrick’s ‘My Year of Freedom’, published in the New-York Tribune Sunday Magazine, ‘offered a moving account of the difficult process of adjusting from a life in solitary confinement to “the volume and sound and the perpetual movement” of “normal life,” which had left the former prisoner “fairly dazed and stunned” at first’.16 Urban soundscapes, interdicted for years of solitary confinement, strike the returning prisoner as a debilitating pandemonium. The ‘punitive-penitent quietudes imposed on prisoners under the Silent System’ amounted, indeed, to torture.17 Consider Alexander Berkman’s description of his first night in Pennsylvania’s Western Penitentiary, at the end of the nineteenth century: Gradually the clamor ceases, the sounds die out. I hear the creaking of rusty hinges, there is the click of a lock, and all is hushed and dark. The silence grows gloomy, oppressive. It fills me with mysterious awe. It lives. It pulsates with slow, measured breathing, as of some monster. It rises and falls; approaches, recedes. It is Misery asleep. Now it presses heavily against my door. I hear its quickened breathing.18

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Under Auburn conditions, the world becomes an ear, as the eye progressively loses its functions. We note how the propinquity between prison and social life, so precious to Thoreau, has been negated by the Silent System. Acoustic reports of life outside only deepen the alienations of obligatory silence: Life is so remote, so appallingly far away – it has abandoned me in this desert of silence. The distant puffing of fire engines, the shrieking of river sirens, accentuate my loneliness. Yet it feels so near, this monster Life, huge, palpitating with vitality, intent upon its wonted course. (66) Inside the penitentiary, Berkman repeatedly remarks the uncanny experience of sinking into a well of enforced silence: ‘The clatter and noises have ceased; the steps have died away. All is still in the dark hall. Only occasional shadows flit by, silent, ghostlike’; ‘Within the House of Death is felt the chilling breath, and all is quiet and silent in the iron cages’ (76, 139). On rare occasions, some stray sound breaks through the blanket of noiselessness only to exacerbate the agony of it: Through the bars, I gaze upon the Ohio. The full moon hangs above the river, bathing the waters in mellow light. The strains of a sweet lullaby wander through the woods, and the banks are merry with laughter. A girlish cadence rings like a silvery bell, and voices call in the distance. Life is joyous and near, terribly, tantalizingly near, – but all is silent and dead around me. For days the feminine voice keeps ringing in my ears. It sounded so youthful and buoyant, so fondly alluring. A beautiful girl, no doubt. What joy to feast my eyes on her! I have not beheld a woman for many months: I long to hear the soft accents, feel the tender touch. My mind persistently reverts to the voice on the river, the sweet strains in the woods; and fancy wreathes sad-toned fugues upon the merry carol, paints vision and image [. . .] (158) Here Thoreau’s social ear is turned around on itself; the outer sign becomes an inner torment. Prison’s sexual segregation saturates the girl’s voice with a turbid and hallucinatory desire converting sound to picture, tone to touch, cadence to fugue. But it is in the ‘maddening quiet and darkness’ of the dungeon, the solitary cells, ‘bereft of all consciousness of time’, that the mind truly wavers on the brink, ‘yearning for the sound of a human voice’: Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the underground, the world of man receding, leaving no trace behind. [. . .] Eagerly I strain my ear – only the ceaseless, fearful gnawing [of the rats]. I clutch the bars in desperation – a hollow echo mocks the clanking iron. My hands tear violently at the door – ‘Ho, there! Any one here?’ All is silent. (167–8) The damage done by this deprivation of any soulful sound is radical, and leaves behind a trail of human wreckage – ghosts of the sonic dead. ‘Like ghastly nightmares, the shadows pass before me. There is “Silent Nick,” restlessly pacing his cage, never ceasing, his lips sealed in brutish muteness. For three years he has not left the cell, nor uttered a word’ (210–11). And just as it was for Maybrick, so it is for Berkman upon

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release from fourteen years of this silent treatment: ‘I feel dazed. The short ride to Pittsburgh is over before I can collect my thoughts. The din and noise rend my ears; the rushing cars, the clanging bells, bewilder me. I am afraid to cross the street; the flying monsters pursue me on every side. [. . .] The turmoil, the ceaseless movement, disconcerts me’; ‘this seething life, the turmoil and the noises of the city, agonize me’ (390, 397). Unaccustomed to even the whisper of a name, the ear cannot withstand the maelstrom of modernity, and the subject descends into panic, seizure, flight. It is only in the secret system of communication devised by the inmates to tear the pall of silence that Berkman’s narrative discovers some fragile evidence of human sociality in sound. This is the prison ‘telephone’, improvised through the empty pipes that sustain the plumbing of the cell toilets, either in Morse code or, more precious still, in conducted voices. Berkman’s scene of discovery resounds to generic, spy-thriller overtones: Only an occasional knocking, as on metal, disturbs the stillness. I listen intently. Nearer and more audible seem the sounds, hesitating and apparently intentional. I am involuntarily reminded of the methods of communication practiced by Russian politicals, and I strive to detect some meaning in the tapping. It grows clearer as I approach the back wall of the cell, and instantly I am aware of a faint murmur in the privy. Is it fancy, or did I hear my name? ‘Halloa!’ I call into the pipe. The knocking ceases abruptly. I hear a suppressed, hollow voice: ‘That you, Aleck?’ ‘Yes. Who is it?’ ‘Never min’. You must be deaf not to hear me callin’ you all this time. Take that cott’n out o’ your ears.’ ‘I didn’t know you could talk this way.’ ‘You didn’t? Well, you know now. Them’s empty pipes, no standin’ water, see? Fine t’ talk. Oh, dammit to—’ The words are lost in the gurgle of rushing water. Presently the flow subsides, and the knocking is resumed. I bend over the privy. (139) Interrupted only by an occasional flush, this system is a standing ‘party line’ consisting of the same cell numbers on different floors – 6K, 6F, 6H, and so on – and achieves an extraordinary amount of communication when combined with tapping and note-passing across adjacent cells. Auburn’s silent system, ruthlessly enforced, is internally compromised by a covert ‘hacking’ of the pipes used to convey excrement. Once caught using it, all prisoners on a vertical pipe are hauled off to the dungeon (196); and then, before the end of the nineteenth century (in late 1898), the telephone is ended altogether: ‘No more talking through the waste pipes; the new privies have standing water’ (282). Berkman’s memoirs are extraordinarily attentive to the physics and psychology of prison acoustics, and give moving evidence of the resourcefulness of inmates in exploiting its infrastructure. As one of the first genuinely intellectual inmates of the Auburn system, Berkman took his opportunity to map it from within, only to find that it had virtually nothing to do with visible dimensions or textures. Prison time is aural first and foremost, especially when the rule is silence. And, in its punitive sonic regime,

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the new American prison seemed specifically designed neither to rehabilitate nor to exploit incarcerated labour, but to suck from it the resilience and fortitude of its innate sociality. It is at this point that Berkman’s testimony joins the historic record: The silent system is a disciplinary silence designed to bear down on the body as the final mark of the law and to force the criminal into a state of deep solitude while quite often leading to insanity: the debates and ultimate design of the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia in the 1820s pointed at Auburn’s initial project of solitary confinement without labor (which results in absolutely no interaction) as an ultimate failure. This initial design of the Auburn prison was finally retracted in favor of solitary confinement with labor after prisoners underwent extreme psychological distress caused by the absolute separation and silence in which they were confined.19 Berkman’s Memoirs show how this supposedly more humane regime was just as destructive as its predecessor, specifically in its haunting figure of ‘Silent Nick’, who has internalised the discipline of Western Penitentiary as a permanent sealing of the lips and closing of the mind. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world and reflecting on a six-week spell in the Alexanderplatz police interrogation cells, Rosa Luxemburg was able to reclaim the affirmative, utopian dimension of Thoreau’s ‘involuntary auditor’ in her typically ecstatic mode of prison writing. The following anecdote stands out for the stunning richness of its auditory imagination: After 10 p.m. the diabolic concert of the city trains would grow somewhat softer, and soon after that the following little episode from the life of the streets would become audible. First you could hear dimly a hoarse male voice, which had something demanding and admonishing about it, then in reply, a young girl singing, probably around eight years old; she sang a children’s ditty while hopping and jumping and at the same time letting go with silvery peals of laughter which had a bell-like purity of tone. The man’s voice must have been that of a tired, badtempered janitor, who was calling his little daughter home to go to sleep. But the little rascal didn’t want to obey, let the deep gruff voice of her father go in one ear and out the other, kept flitting around in the streets like a butterfly, and countered the oncoming strictures and threats with a merry children’s rhyme. One could vividly picture the short skirt flapping and the thin legs flying in dance steps. In the hoppity-hop rhythm of a children’s song, in the rippling laughter, there was so much carefree and triumphant joy of life that the whole dark and musty building of the central police headquarters was enveloped as though by a silver cloak of mist and in my foul-smelling prison cell the air was suddenly scented with the perfume of dark-red roses falling through the air. This is the last of three exquisite sound-scenes inscribed in the same letter, emphasising the penumbral darkness of the cell in order to fall back on strong aural sensations which begin infernally (the ‘hellish’ cacophony or ‘diabolic concert’ of the streetcars) and then modulate into the repeated late-night scene she is at pains to recreate. In the person of this nameless young girl, in her nightly defiance of her jailor-father, Luxemburg has found a fitting figure for her political solidarities with the oppressed and incarcerated. Their sounds are antiphonic and counterbalancing in timbre and

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pitch: below, a thoroughbass male voice, ‘hoarse’, ‘tired, bad-tempered’, ‘deep gruff’, full of ‘something demanding and admonishing’; and trilling above it, the sprightly piccolo of ‘a young girl singing [. . .] a merry children’s rhyme’ and ‘letting go with silvery peals of laughter’, liquid ‘rippling laughter’ with ‘a bell-like purity of tone’. In this measured counterpoint Luxemburg detects the ‘hoppity-hop’ rhythm of the girl’s feet, ‘hopping and jumping’, ‘flitting around in the streets like a butterfly’; and this intuited percussion allows for a sudden transposition from the aural to the visual: ‘One could vividly picture the short skirt flapping and the thin legs flying in dance steps.’ Prison obliged Luxemburg ‘to see and hear from a distance those things that for me mean life and happiness’, and in that distance was the opportunity to ‘use [her] eyes and ears, and thus to create an inner equilibrium and rise above everything petty and annoying’.21 Her many sound-scenes written during her four-year incarceration are extraordinary attempts to flesh out her solidarities with the street, abolishing prison walls through the acute sensitivity of her auditory organ, and to identify with her beloved birds who sang and ‘rose above’ the grim bars of her cage. In Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965), written about her incarceration of that duration in South Africa’s apartheid state, the auditory is once again loaded with ethnographic information. The better part of her confinement taking place in a working central police station, her critical acoustic nerve is trained on the violent machinery of law: My ears knocked with the noise of a police station in operation. The cell was abandoned in isolation, yet suspended in a cacophony of noise. I lay in the midst of clamour but could see nothing. Accelerators raced, exhaust pipes roared, car doors banged, there were clipped shouted commands of authority. And the silence only of prisoners in intimidated subservience. It was Friday night, police-raid night. Pickup vans and kwela-kwelas [‘get-in-heres’], policemen in uniform, detectives in plain clothes were combing locations and hostels, backyards and shebeens to clean the city of ‘crime,’ and the doors of Marshall Square stood wide open to receive the haul of the dragnet.22 The deluge of auditory phenomena, overwhelming the narrow range of visual experience by an order of magnitude, is broken down by the analytic intelligence into its component tracks; cacophony resolves into an audio-image of Power sweeping the demographic litter of the streets into detention. It is the ‘suspension’ of the ‘I’/ eye that permits the image to appear, too complex and multi-faceted to allow of any single form or aspect. ‘I could dispense with my eyes. Ears were more useful in isolation.’23 Prison, depriving the subject of visual stimuli, trains the cortex to parse the incessant clamour for signs of systemic significance; and equips the ear with political radar, capable of new ranges of journalistic perception. Over and against which, human beings are perceptible principally through the void they make in audible space. ‘And the silence only of prisoners in intimidated subservience.’ Sound is, however, the medium in which the artificial separation between ‘criminals’ and ‘politicals’ (those detained without charge on suspicion of communist conspiracy) is transcended, and, suggestively at least, where the abolition of apartheid itself is rehearsed: The Ninety-Dayers were locked away from this mainstream of police station life, but the sounds and some of the sights washed us nevertheless. Washed and were welcome in a series of endless days when time was determined only by the scratches

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on the wall and the visits of Security Branch interrogators. The politicals were in separate cells, segregated from the other prisoners, but sounds filtered through the thick walls, especially at night.24 Community may be negated by the state’s enforcement of segregation, and its prison apparatus of division and distinction (white people apart from Black people, politicals from criminals, men from women), but ‘sounds filter through’ the walls to create, if not the actuality, then at least the promissory note of a community to come. Back in the USA, the Silent System having by this point fallen into disuse, the emergent norm was one of overwhelming noise, which imprisoned writers consistently noted as an infringement on their privacy and sanity. In George Jackson’s prison letters, for instance, we detect a return to a much older paradigm of the maddening hubbub, conducted through the resonant metals of modern incarceration: It destroys the logical processes of the mind, a man’s thoughts become completely disorganized. The noise, madness streaming from every throat, frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls, the steel trays, the iron beds bolted to the wall, the hollow sounds from a cast-iron sink or toilet.25 The inmate either uses such noise as a mode of resistance to thought – ‘they make these loud noises so they won’t hear what their mind is trying to tell them’ – or he creates a noise-buffering bubble of critical attentiveness: ‘I don’t let the noise bother me even in the evenings when it rises to maddening intensity, because I try to understand my surroundings.’26 But the pandemonium seems to serve, at least passively, as a mode of low-level torture, accentuated by the omnipresent, sharp acoustic reflection of metallic clanging and harsh human braying off bare brick walls. Angela Davis notes the same soundscape in her Autobiography: When the iron door was opened, sounds peculiar to jails and prisons poured into my ears – the screams, the metallic clanging, officers’ keys clinking. [. . .] As the women slid their heavy iron gates closed, loud metallic crashing noises thundered from all four corridors of the seventh floor. I could hear the same sounds at a distance echoing from throughout the jail.27 The institutional, regimented nature of these ferocious, clashing sounds – repeated daily, identical, synchronised, definitive – reinforces the segregation of prison life from the outer world and further degrades the psychological fibres of the inmates. As Davis remarks, ‘sometimes the women would ask to be moved to the “mental” cellblock [reserved for women with psychological problems] because they couldn’t tolerate the noise in the main population’.28 Meanwhile, in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze in Belfast, the radical Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands, MP, gives moving written testimony to the power of the human voice in a situation of rigorous spatial separation in a high-security prison wing. If prison in occupied territories exists largely to frustrate the intercourse and throttle the morale of the colonised, the politics of sound inevitably assumes the function of extramural political action. Few have transcribed this substitution as fully as Sands:

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The singing continued. It broke the monotony and the tension-filled air and for a few minutes helped to take your mind off your surroundings and situation. [. . .] Then one of the lads began to sing Ashtown Road. The wing went deadly silent and I sat, slightly shivering, listening to every note and word of the beautiful rendering as the singer sang on in his very sad voice. I felt my morale rising and once again I was glad I was resisting. Better suffering while resisting than being tortured without fighting back at all. The singer finished and the lads nearly tore the place down. The Master of Ceremonies called on the same singer to sing the last song and away he went again with The Wind that Shakes the Barley.29 Himself a noted songwriter during his four terrible years of imprisonment at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Sands attests to the power of the human voice not only to traverse and resonate across carceral steel and concrete, to steal under doors and through bars, but to resituate the imagination and replenish the courage and resilience of a collective resistance tending towards individual deaths. Gaelic classes, for instance, are held ‘at the cell door listening to your mate, the teacher, shouting the lesson for the day at the top of his voice from the other end of the wing when the screws happened to be away for their dinner or tea’ (31). The wing-wide system of shouts, taps, songs, and lectures among prisoners harnesses the conductive properties of modern prison architecture (which otherwise work to torture the auditory nerves) to promote solidarity between the isolated, and boost morale amongst the men separated from their struggle. Sands also records the awful, heightened significance of sound and silence, both for the veteran of the cells (‘The sound of screaming men tears at my heart and attacks my mind and I wish to God it were I again, for the pitiful cries of my comrades being tortured are harder to bear than the physical hurt that besets my brutalised body’, 202) and the new inmate, in these simple ballad lines: From wall to door he walked the floor Listening for a sound. Each sudden creak or sneaky squeak Sent him swishing round, His bulging eyes so terrorised Near fell upon the ground. That eight foot space ’twas freedom’s grace. To exercise the bones, With every step the body wept In awful moans and groans, And sounded like the gnawny grind Of some one rubbing stones. (144) In prison, it is precisely the unpredictable swings between extremities of noise and of silence, babel and vacuum, that supercharges the sonic dimension with political and allegorical significance: ‘A sinister silence reigned: not so much as a sigh from the wind stirred, not one bird sang, but there was nothing in Belsen to sing about either, I thought, going through the gate to hell’; ‘I can hear heavy booming noises echoing all around me like thunder. Somehow it reminds me of heavy doors closing’ (62, 178).

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Carceral sound, or its absence, is always already political and carries the phenomenological spores of the darkest episodes of twentieth-century history into the chambers of the ear. But, as it was for Luxemburg and Thoreau, so prison is for Sands also a space in which the auditory becomes utopian, to the extent it is visited by species-outsiders, particularly birds: Many a day in the eternal hours, I stand watching the birds and listening to the lark, trying to discover its whereabouts in that stagnant blue ocean above me that represents the outside world, and I long for the liberty of the lark. I suppose, to many, a few birds, the sound of a lark, a blue sky, or full moon, are there, but stay unnoticed most of the time. But, to me, they mean existence, peacefulness, comfort, entertainment and something to view, to help forget the tortures, brutalities, indignities and evils that surround and attack my everyday life. (161) As his body slowly wastes away, starving to death under a self-imposed regime of nil by mouth, it is the sounds of avian life that increasingly occupy Sands’s pen, turned towards the songs of the curlew and the lark as disembodied carriers of everything he is leaving behind, everything he has given his life to redeem: The birds were singing today. One of the boys threw bread out of the window. At least somebody’s eating! I was lonely for a while this evening, listening to the crows caw as they returned home. Should I hear the beautiful lark, she would rent my heart. Now, as I write, the odd curlew mournfully calls as they fly over. I like the birds. Well, I must leave off, for if I write more about the birds my tears will fall and my thoughts return to the days of my youth. They were the days, and gone forever now. But I enjoyed them. They are in my heart – good night, now. (242) In prison, with its imposed sensory deprivation and torturous sonic regime, the penetrative qualities of extramural birdsong (or the songs of passing girls) give rise to affective intensities, perfect crystals of memory-sound that are vestiges of lost time and promissory notes of alternative futures. In situation after situation, we have seen how writers take these acousmatic signatures of life beyond the prison walls as omens of altered circumstances. Precisely to the extent that their sources cannot be seen, cannot be allocated a place within the gridwork of the penitentiary, they exceed the carceral cognitive map imposed by the authorities and prise open heterotopic acoustic pockets alive with political energy and phenomenological freedom. It is the task of the writer in these situations to record as verbal friezes these ephemeral visitations of the auditory ‘outside’, and so defy the intentional deprivation with evidentiary proof of its undoing. One of the most interesting test cases for this acousmatic reading of prison literature is the memoirs of Nawal El Saadawi, held for a period of several weeks in Qanatir Women’s Prison at the behest of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Another intellectual detained for her beliefs and writings, Nawal anticipates the same kind of individual segregation as that imposed upon Ruth First, Bobby Sands, and Alexander Berkman; but she is held in a communal cell amongst a large group of other political detainees, just metres away from another large cell holding a motley crew of common prisoners: sex workers, drunks, and petty thieves. Her romantic hopes of writing like Luxemburg while detained in genteel isolation rapidly accede to a sense of acoustic damnation:

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‘I want to be transferred to a solitary cell. I don’t want to stay in this cell any longer.’ But the prison administration rejected my request. I came to understand that in prison, torture occurs not through solitude and silence but in a far more forceful way through uproar and noise. The solitary cell continued to float before me like a dream unlikely to be realised.30 As with George Jackson and Angela Davis, the Egyptian political prisoner must first come to terms with the routine acoustic torture of ‘uproar and noise’: Steel clanging against steel, the sound colliding with the walls and the echo reverberating over the inner walls, as if hundreds of steel doors are being closed and locked. A whistle as sharp as utter silence, and voices resounding like a whistle, like a waft of trapped smoke escaping through a narrow aperture. (27) This regimented cacophony besieges the fortress of even Nawal’s iron discipline and threatens to topple the seat of her reason – the very rationalist secularism for which she is being detained: I raised the handkerchief from my face and stuffed it into my ear. Continuous ringing and sharp screaming, whose source I could not place. Weird voices and a commotion I’d not heard before. From where does all of this come? Do these sounds pass through the four walls, the ceiling, the earth’s depths, to arrive here? Human and non-human voices alike. A sharp scream like that of a newborn child; wailing and moaning akin to the howling of wolves, quarrelling and cursing and a stifled sobbing. Raspy coughing, hands slapping and the sound of kicking. The whinnying murmur of water, what sounded like pleas of supplication, and chanting like the ritual of prayer. Frogs croaking, cats meowing and dogs barking, and over all a sharp whistling, the cockroaches’ calls. (31–2) There are few writers as adept at registering the full pandemonium of a communal jail cell, the true Miltonic limbo of ‘a universal hubbub wild / Of stunning sounds and voices all confused’.31 But something happens during Nawal’s enforced cohabitation with other women prisoners; gradually she learns to embrace their noise and draw from it, so that by the end of the memoir she herself has become an agent of noise conducted concertedly against the infernal regime of sonic torture. By binding ties of solidarity and focusing the din of the incarcerated, Nawal taps into the innate political force of sound itself – here metaphorised as a ‘demon’ latent in women’s bodies: We began knocking at the bars on the door, calling out all together: ‘We will destroy this prison! We will not die without noise!’ The steel door rocked under the heavy blows. The prison vibrated with the sound which had become like the roar of a waterfall. From the inner selves of human beings threatened with death emerged the tyrannical demon – the latent strength long imprisoned, the stored-up energy suppressed since the remote past, since childhood, since birth, or rather from before birth, ever since those human beings were foetuses in their mothers’ wombs. (184) This vital ‘choric’ energy of women prisoners, which Nawal went on to weld into a political organisation – the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association – as a direct response

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to this experience of orchestrated noise in Sadat’s cells, is a prodigious realisation of the carceral politics of sound being turned against the explicit design of the prison institution. The sinister resonance of prison architecture, its bare walls, metallic conductors, concrete flooring, and bars for doors, is consciously engineered to create maximal sonic distress in inmates by bouncing brutal metallic noises off stark reflective surfaces into the always open organs of audition. But for these very reasons, a political manifestation in jail will generally take acoustic shape around the same torturous properties, reflecting them back at the jailors. As Robin James has argued, incarceration in the neoliberal order happens preponderantly to what Lester Spence calls ‘exceptional populations’ – Black and Brown people who are permanently at biopolitical risk from financial and legal harm because they are largely surplus to the requirements of capital at any given moment.32 These ‘exceptional populations are subjected to various techniques – like surveillance, quarantine (e.g., in the prison–industrial complex), debt – that produce the material, social immobility these techniques claim to manage’.33 Immobilised, held in thrall, these populations are also subject to a sonic regime that eats away at their fibres of solidarity and connectedness by reflecting their pain back at them in an amplified form; in prison, everyone can hear you scream, and you will hear everybody’s scream, forever. The writings of political prisoners over the twentieth century teach us, in exquisite detail, about this harrowing instrumentation of sonic torture as a routine element of daily life under conditions of detention and immobility. Yet they also show us that the very conditions that engender psychic harm are the same that enable resistance; Berkman shows us that ‘prisoners subject to acoustic surveillance could just as well spy on the conversations of their guards’;34 and Sands and Nawal teach the even larger lesson that, seized by a counter-current, the very mechanics of sonic torture can be transformed into liberatory conductors of insurgency. As François Bonnet observes: Sound is not a prisoner of the archipelagic structure, then; it is not doomed to be a vector of order and authority for this structure. It can take many paths, many channels, can elaborate many strategies, oblique strategies. And through them, it can reclaim its rights.35 However, there are carceral spaces where writers have not yet penetrated, where the harm done to hearing is so extreme as to vitiate all resistance. Recent work on the ‘acoustemology’ of detention has focused on the extreme use of sonic torture or ‘acoustic violence’ in detainment facilities in the theatre of war with its archipelago of camps and confession cells.36 Suzanne Cusick has shown how the ‘acoustical monopoly’ enjoyed by US Army interrogators over prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, as they bombard their victims with heavy metal music at ear-damaging, bone-rumbling decibel levels, ‘produces the presence of a ubiquitous but invisible power with which there can be no negotiating a mutuality of acoustical agency’.37 In ‘the extremes of acoustical, physical and psychic suffering at the heart of the biopolitical, carceral regime of US military interrogation camps’, writes Georgina Born, ‘the camp oversees domination through sonically enforced individuation: an “ultimate violence that batters prisoners’ bodies, [shattering] [. . .] the capacity to control the acoustical relationality that is the foundation of subjectivity”’.38 As Cusick puts it forebodingly:

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Whatever prison authorities may consciously believe, their practices produce prison populations that amount to a conglomeration of hearing, speaking people who do not hear, vocalise and co-create with each other an acoustical environment characterised by relationships of reciprocity between self and other, individual and collective, private and public. Isolated without ever being alone, palpably in the presence of an invisible presence with the power to reduce them to ‘all ears’ [. . .] or to vibrating objects [. . .], denied both the privacy-based right to silence and the public right to free speech, these prisoners have experienced a preview of one very dark symbolic order [. . .].39 Ramona Nadaff, writing about similar abuses of sound in US Army camps in the Middle East, proposes that in conditions of ‘post-acoustic trauma’ induced by the ‘sonic imperialism’ of extremely loud music, ‘the brain changes and works differently in its incorporation and response to sound’.40 In the ‘“panacousticon” where unjustifiable revenge and retributive justice reign rhythmically, where music as a form of surveillance produces, to revise Foucault’s words, “an anxious awareness of hearing” and of being heard’, prisoners suffer profound sleep deprivation and enter ‘a new type of geographical space and time in which detainees, the waking dead, are immobilized’.41 The Beirut-based artist/activist Lawrence Abu Hamdan creates works that reconstruct the psycho-physical conditions under which prisoners were held at Syria’s Saydnaya prison, principally by drawing on recorded testimonials. The aesthetic reworking of this testimonial evidence is the closest we have to a literary rendition of the ‘panacousticon’, and it takes the difficult form of what Abu Hamdan calls ‘trauma-architecture’ or ‘painprojections’, which the auditor enters in a more or less willing compact with the prisoner’s sonic experience. As he puts it, my task was to design dedicated earwitness interviews to uncover the witnesses’ acoustic memories, to reconstruct the acoustic space of the prison, and through this process to understand what is happening within its walls and build evidence about the conditions under which detainees are being held.42 Like Anna Deavere Smith and Svetlana Alexievich before him, Abu Hamdan is acting as acoustic scribe for those without a voice, whose hearing has been irreparably damaged by a carceral regime that works to erase subjectivity through sonic decimation. In the centuries-long relationship between prison, writing, and sound, this is surely the darkest epoch yet.

Notes   1. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, eds, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. Andrea McCartney and Henry Torgue (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 104.   2. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 7.  3. See Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010), 176.   4. See Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17–30.

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  5. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 163.   6. G. Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5; Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations (New York: Harper, 1950), 205.  7. See Ruth Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Kristen Deiter, The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition (London: Routledge, 2008), 27–53.   8. Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 102–3.   9. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience, 1849’, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. with an Introduction by Jeremy Cramer (London: Penguin, 2012), 73–98 (91). 10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in Collected Novels, ed. Millicent Bell (New York: Library of America, 1983), 115–346 (158). 11. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Childs (Boston, 1861), 86. 12. Ibid., 159. See the discussion in Jason Haslam, Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 70–81. 13. James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow, eds, Sound Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 6. 14. Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2010), 68. 15. Board of Inspectors of Auburn penitentiary, quoted in Orlando F. Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs 1776 to 1845 (Albany: Prison Association of New York, 1922), 81. 16. Anne Schwan, Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in NineteenthCentury England (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 145. 17. Hillel Schwartz, ‘Inner and Outer Sancta: Earplugs and Hospitals’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 273–97 (274). 18. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Stirling: AK Press, 2016), 37. Further parenthetical references in the text. 19. LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 71. 20. Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to Hans Diefenbach, 29 June 1917, in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, trans. George Shriver (London: Verso, 2013), 423–4. 21. Ibid., 426, 431. 22. Ruth First, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African 90-Day Detention Law (London: Virago, 2010), 9. 23. Ibid., 26. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1995), 21. 26. Ibid., 154, 64. 27. Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 33, 49. 28. Ibid., 20. 29. Bobby Sands, Writings from Prison (Blackrock: Mercier Press, 1997), 77. Further parenthetical references in the text. 30. Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, trans Marilyn Booth (London: Zed, 2020), 129. Further parenthetical references in the text. 31. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ll. 951–2, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 354.

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32. See Lester Spence, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 33. Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 44. 34. François J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. Robin McKay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), 215n279. 35. Ibid., 278. 36. J. Martin Daughtry, ‘Thanatosonics: Ontologies of Acoustic Violence’, Social Text 32, no. 2 (2014): 25–51. 37. Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the “Global War on Terror”’, in Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 275–91 (289). 38. Born, Music, Sound and Space, 47–8, quoting Cusick, ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention’, 276. 39. Cusick, ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention’, 290–1. 40. Ramona Naddaff, ‘The Animal Whose Ear It Is’, in Unsound: Undead, ed. Steve Goodman, Toby Heys, and Eleni Ikoniadou (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), n.p. 41. Ibid. 42. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘The Missing 19dB’, in Unsound: Undead, n.p.

Select Bibliography Ahnert, Ruth, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Bonnet, François J., The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. Robin McKay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019). Chion, Michel, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ———, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Cusick, Suzanne G., ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the “Global War on Terror”’, in Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 275–91. Daughtry, J. Martin, ‘Thanatosonics: Ontologies of Acoustic Violence’, Social Text 32, no. 2 (2014): 25–51. Goodman, Steve, Toby Heys, and Eleni Ikonaiadou, eds, Unsound: Undead (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019). James, Robin, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). LaBelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2010). Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Spence, Lester, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Steintrager, James A. and Rey Chow, eds, Sound Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

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12 Aural Anxiety and Rurality in Women’s Second World War Writing Imogen Free

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ar necessitates a practice of aural anxiety; listening, for instance, to the siren that warns of bombing to come, represents a means of anticipatory survival. Consequently, however, this experience also stigmatises the practice of listening, thereby channelling wider wartime anxiety into the realm of the aural. In her work on aural biopolitics and the air-raid siren, Beryl Pong refers to a diary entry written by Vivienne Hall, a British civilian during the Second World War: ‘you just have to listen and hope for the best’, she writes, ‘that’s all we do, we are just one large frightened ear’.1 The Second World War is often characterised as the first ‘total’ war, in which conflict stretched ‘beyond the battlefield to encompass a nation’s every political, economic and cultural domain’.2 In cities that experienced intensive bombardment, such as London and Liverpool, as well as listening for the shrill air-raid siren that anticipated bombing to come, civilians experienced ‘the growling, roaring crackle of the incendiary bomb on a burning building; the high-pitched tinkle of breaking window-glass; the crash of falling bricks [. . .] the hum of aeroplanes [. . .] the zoom of the low-flying dive-bomb “plane”’.3 ‘Total war’ brought the sonic experience of conflict to the home front, albeit in very different forms from the battlefield. This chapter explores the relationship between anxiety and aurality in the wartime short stories of Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. Moving beyond an urban Blitz-scape, the rural settings of these stories nevertheless present an aural anxiety that troubles the soundscape of war. Their writing of an aural anxiety, situated in or expressed by the rural, in turn calls into question wartime constructions of gendered citizenship and the narrative of conflict. I am particularly interested in three elements of such sonic expression. First, I analyse the mingling of natural sounds with those of warfare, exploring a ruralised version of the wartime hyper-aurality discussed in this introduction. This takes the form of an atmospheric rippling, humming, or buzzing, from a ‘natural’ source (such as a river or a swarm of bees) that serves to recall, and resonate with, those of an urban Blitz or even battlefront soundscape. I investigate how this disrupts conceptions of the aesthetics of war, recentralises women’s ‘wartime acoustemology’, but also draws attention to wider issues at the heart of conflict: the ethics of care, nationalism, ideology, and misogyny.4 Second, I investigate the means by which these texts mix wires with waves, the ‘natural’ with the technological, considering how anxieties around acousmatic sound feed into the conflicts of identity and ideology at work in the texts. I do so by analysing these authors’ presentation of a ‘radio imaginary’, which calls into question wartime rhetoric that heightened both the

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significance of rurality and a sense of gendered public identity and duty in the period.5 Third, I consider the sounds of the village community that raise the alarm about the uncomfortable confluence between gendered citizenship and identity in this period, the dangerous ways in which the ideal of ‘wartime womanhood’ and good rural citizenship become somewhat synonymous, in a complex system of socially policed behaviours and duties. For as James Mansell argues, ‘an individual’s resonance with, or resistance to, the sound-space of the nation was [. . .] a marker of insider/outside status’, as ‘wartime situations heighten the politics of belonging and, in turn, amplify its sonic underpinnings’.6 Building on Ella Finer’s work on ‘Feminism and Sound’, which reads the figure of ‘Echo’ as an ‘ancient sound artist’, only ever giving back ‘incomplete reproductions of sound material’, I consider how Lehmann’s and Rhys’s development of an alternative soundscape of conflict might speak back to the common understanding of women’s civilian experience.7 I do so by connecting ‘the richness and complexity of sonic difference’ that Finer identifies, to the gender difference at play in such writing.8 Thus, to elucidate the aural gender politics at work in these texts, I engage with contemporary feminist sound studies by Finer, Tara Rodgers and Anne Carson.9 Furthermore, I turn to these studies in order to foreground the challenge Lehmann’s and Rhys’s work poses by troubling the soundscape of war and undermining the paradoxical construction of ‘wartime womanhood’, an impacted identity that intersects heavily with ideological investments in the rural landscape in this period. In reading their wartime work in light of such studies, I situate this chapter among works by Marion Shaw and Stella Deen which argue for the feminist potential of the interwar rural novel, though instead of celebrating its ability to present alternative systems of living, I examine the oppressive patriarchal systems at work in the ideological, as well as physical, space of the countryside during the war.10

The Sonic Politics of War on the ‘Home Front’ As a ‘total war’, ‘waged by all against all’, the Second World War was a period in which the civilian ‘female population were no longer insulated from the brutality of the battlefield’; aurality was a key medium for registering this experience.11 Pong notes, for instance, that Virginia Woolf’s ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ resounds with an anxious aurality, registering the noise of a warplane as ‘the zoom of a hornet which might at any moment sting you to death’.12 ‘There is a sense’, Pong argues, ‘that one hears both not enough and too much.’13 Or as Anna Snaith discovers in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, there is a distinct sense of an ‘auditory wartime regime of hyper-alert listening’.14 But as these readings imply, listening on the home front is not only bound up with a sense of anxiety due to impending violence. During the Second World War, aurality also became a conflicted territory of national responsibility and citizenship. Both governmental legislation and propaganda encouraged British citizens not to resist the injunctions of sonic warnings such as sirens – what R. Murray Schafer describes as ‘signals’, foreground sounds that ‘must be listened to’ – while at the same time resisting their ‘damaging vibrations’.15 Techniques of aural ‘self-management’, listening carefully but not too intensely, were considered, as Mansell notes, ‘contributions to the national war effort’.16 Wearing earplugs, for instance, ‘became a patriotic act’ because they were

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necessary in order to ensure ‘a restful night’s sleep’, which would in turn ensure a full reserve of energy for war work the following day.17 The injunction to citizens to actively suppress extraneous noise was enforced through legislation such as the 1939 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, in which the government seized control of ‘every aspect of the audible environment, giving bells, whistles, and sirens specific wartime meanings and tightly controlling their use [. . .] [C]reation of noise by anyone other than official war personnel was designated a criminal offence.’18 Good citizens were able to listen well, and would sound accordingly, and bad citizens did not. Thus, wartime listening became, as Pong argues, ‘conditioned by an aural biopolitics’.19 Sonic signs and systems of noise control became a means of managing ‘human bodies and processes under regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and subjectivation’.20 This authority was partly managed by the discourse of the ‘People’s War’ in wartime propaganda, which presented the Second World War as ‘collective suffering and collective heroism’, and encouraged every citizen to contribute to the war effort by maintaining their sense of morale.21 A key aspect of this endeavour required citizens to personally resist the ‘nervous’ impact of noise, with Lord Horder arguing that ‘every effort to suppress needless noise is a contribution to the resistance of the nerve force of the individual, and therefore a contribution towards winning the war’.22 To resist the threat of noise meant reimagining a national soundscape that was free from such anxieties. Indeed, Mansell argues that ‘in contrast to the soundscape of aerial bombardment that often serves to characterise “total war on the home front” more strongly than any other’, it was ‘rural sounds, and the quietness of the countryside’ that ‘came to signify the essence of the national homeland’.23 This ‘rural imaginary’ played a significant role in what Mansell describes as ‘cultural attempts’ to describe the quotidian soundscape of the nation during the war.24 At the root of this relationship is a sense in which, as David Matless contends, ‘the mythic qualities of rural landscape [. . .] have served to symbolize and refract national identity’.25 By the outbreak of war, argues Marion Shaw, the idea ‘that somehow the real England was one of village greens, country churches, haymaking’, an idea which stemmed from interwar loss and anxiety, had become ‘a powerful motivator of patriotism’.26 As a means of ‘affective mobilisation’, the sonic is particularly adept at embodying such ideology.27 Yet, as expressive of a particularly modern imagining of the nation, sonic attempts to call upon the rural often mingle with the contemporary technologies that enable their transmission. An example of such rural-sonic nationhood can be found in the rise in popularity of recorded birdsong from the 1930s onwards, accompanied by the idea that the sound could ‘counter the noise and pressure of modern life’ (part of BBC director John Reith’s ‘founding vision for radio’).28 Birdsong played a crucial role in how Britain defined its soundscape from 1939, for as Michael Guida notes, it was both a ‘distinct sonic expression of the character of the nation and, at the same time, an emblem of peace and tranquillity’.29 As Mansell argues, ‘the nation must be actively imagined’.30 Listening to rural sounds such as birdsong, which were expressive of an idealised peacetime, became a patriotic act because it meant participating in the sonic idea of the nation: aligning yourself with an aural politics that related to practices of citizenship that celebrated the ‘land’. In the 1942 film Listen to Britain, the soundscape of Britain at war mingles ‘the evening hymn of the lark’ with ‘the roar of spitfires’, as the rustle of a radio tuning in fades to voices announcing ‘London calling’ among the rattle of transport; the whirring of industry mixes with church bells and clip-clopping hooves.31 The film counters

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the idea of the soundscape of the nation at war as only being represented by sounds of war-related ‘violence’, for as Heather Wiebe argues, its blurring of ‘natural sounds’ with ‘urban and industrial noise’ represents ‘everyday wartime life’.32 It does so, as Sam Halliday has noted, to present Britain’s civilians living in a ‘more or less normal and (so the film seeks to persuade us) good-humoured way’, participating in an acoustic form of ‘People’s War’ propaganda.33 Yet Listen to Britain also significantly represents Jim Sykes’s expanded definition of the term ‘wartime acoustemology’, described by Pong as ‘a sonic way of knowing and being in the wartime world’, through ‘the more mundane soundscapes with which wartime sounds are intermingled’.34 For Sykes, this refocus demands we turn ‘to the sonic lifeworlds of women and children’, in order to bring ‘to the forefront neglected phenomenologies of war’.35 By broadening the soundscape of war, Listen to Britain also includes sonic experiences that affect women and children more directly. We hear women factory workers singing in unison to the radio while handling parts for munitions, a woman playing a piano in an ambulance station to a group of solemn medical staff, a weary mother clattering to get tea-time together while listening to the children singing nursery rhymes in the playground below. These iconic soundscapes invoke a sense of morale and solidarity through aural affect, and Wiebe suggests that in doing so, these soundscapes form part of a particular campaign of ‘affective mobilisation’. Wiebe notes that the film was ‘made in 1941 just as women were being required to register for war service’, and this is why the ‘film actively works to include them in its account of Britain at war, in ways that perhaps shape its turn to everyday sound’.36 In Listen to Britain, we see the sonic nation being imagined not only through a mixing of the urban and rural, but through the lens of gendered responsibility and citizenship too. In Gender and the Second World War, Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers argue that ‘war is a “clarifying moment” which throws gender into stark relief’ by revealing ‘what in constructions of gender is negotiable and flexible, and what is not’.37 As Listen to Britain attests, women made immense contributions to war work by taking up temporary positions in munitions factories, as Air Raid Wardens, drivers, conductors, and medics. In December 1941, the second National Service Act expanded conscription to make ‘all unmarried women and all childless widows’ between the ages of twenty and thirty ‘liable to call-up’, and this was later further expanded to include married women.38 But as the editors of Behind the Lines argue, wartime propaganda actively ‘stipulated that women’s new roles were “only for the duration” and framed the situation as wives and mothers making heroic sacrifices “for the nation in its time of need”’, but only in this time of need.39 ‘Propaganda’, they note, ‘reminded female defence workers that they were not themselves – that is, not “natural” – but behaving temporarily like men.’40 The paradoxical figure of the wartime woman was thus ‘created by the symbolic and the pragmatic mobilization of women for the war effort’, by what Sonya O. Rose identifies as the ‘contradictory’ expectation that women should remain ‘feminine’, keen mothers and wives, while contributing ‘to the war effort’.41 With recourse to the rural, despite anxieties around the ‘naturalness and social acceptability’ of women replacing men in agricultural labour, ‘land girls’, volunteers for the Women’s Land Army, were celebrated. Their value, however, was premised on two key factors: that they assimilated into rural life, however temporarily; and that their labouring roles were, crucially, temporary.42 Urban women evacuated to the country risked being judged ‘feckless’ if they sought leisure in pubs or cinemas, and were often denigrated for their unwillingness to adapt to rural patterns of living.43

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Despite ‘the myth’ of the ‘People’s War’, the glow of rural citizenship was premised on the social policing of gendered roles.44 Thus, as I will illuminate in my readings, the gendering experience of wartime is constructed by the same patriarchal ideology implicit in the contemporary politics of rurality; the dynamics and aesthetics of the two subjects feed off one another. Sound, being imbued with both particular wartime resonance and the tools of a feminist theoretical framework – the capacity to not only register but to remix and recompose narratives of experience – provides a particularly perspicacious mode of interpreting the complex ideological intersections between ‘wartime womanhood’ and rural citizenship, at a time when the politics of aurality was heightened.

‘When the Waters Came’ In contrast to the imagined serenity called up to soothe the minds of the nation, the English writer Rosamond Lehmann’s collection of short stories The Gipsy’s Baby (1946) presents a rural climate of anxiety, characterised by an obsessive listening to an environment that seems to be not only under threat but also curiously threatening. Kristine Miller writes that these stories ‘describe the setting of [Lehmann’s] own life in wartime: a peaceful, rural England far removed from both the physical and social upheaval of the bombing’.45 Yet throughout these stories Lehmann’s rural environment reverberates with the sounds, however displaced, of war. Lehmann’s resonant prose challenges Miller’s assumption that this collection represents an autobiographical rendering of her life in conflict; the ruralised soundscapes of these stories actively problematise normative depictions of women’s wartime experience and a sense of gendered citizenship or responsibility bound up with the politics of rurality. In ‘When the Waters Came’, we find a familiar soundscape made alien – a soft meadow made uninhabitable by severe frost – natural, of course, yet distinctly unnatural. Listening to an icy ‘bush of dogwood’, the protagonist, a single mother in rural England, describes the sound as a ‘musical ring, hollow, like a ghostly Xylophone’.46 This eerie musicality not only disturbs the measures of imposed wartime quiet but also seems to sound another kind of affective alarm. Lehmann makes clear that this story is set during the cold winter months of 1939–40, during the ‘Phoney War’, a period of tense anticipation in which the expected enemy attacks and bombardment did not take place.47 As the narrator rather ominously notes, ‘nothing very disturbing was likely to happen for the present’, though ‘one thought, of course, of sailors freezing in unimaginable wastes of water [. . .] of soldiers numb in the black-and-white nights’ (WTWC, 93). Although the narrator refers to distant violence, the war never features directly in the story; rather, it is registered through an intense listening to the rural soundscape, mingled with a sense of dreadful anticipation. In this story, the rural soundscape, supposed to induce a sense of calm and national stability, becomes a repository for anxiety, and a means of expressing the repressed experience of violence by women on the home front. When the frozen environment finally thaws in February, it does so ‘not gradually but with violence, overnight’ (WTWC, 95). ‘That night was the end of the world’, Lehmann writes: She heard the branches in the garden snapping and crashing down with a brittle rasp. It seemed as if the inside of the earth with all its roots and foundations had become separated from the outside by an impenetrable bed of iron. (WTWC, 95)

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Listening to the world break up in a freak, but ‘natural’, act of nature, the narrator seems to anticipate the violent upheaval of war. The sound of the thaw unseen, experienced acousmatically, brings her into closer contact with a wider sense of impending doom, to a war which has not yet ‘happened’, registering its trauma in its everyday rural soundscape, as part of what Sykes would call its ‘wartime acoustemology’.48 When the protagonist takes her children out in the morning to inspect the damage from the thaw, the once eerily quiet landscape has come alive with the sounds of water: ‘wherever you looked, living waters spouted, trickled, leaped with intricate overlapping voices into the dance’ (WTWC, 95). R. Murray Schafer describes the sound of water as ‘the sound which above all others gives us the most delight in its myriad transformations’, yet here its animacy is too intense a contrast with the silent snow.49‘Such sound and movement on every hand after so many weeks of silence and paralysis made you feel light-headed, dizzy’, the protagonist explains, ‘as if you, too, must be swept off and dissolved’ (WTWC, 95). As her children begin to play dangerously near the rushing water, the protagonist’s internal dialogue streams but she represses vocality: ‘it can’t be dangerous’, she cautions herself, ‘I mustn’t shout’ (WTWC, 97). Jessica Gildersleeve describes this as a ‘self-silencing’ that indicates a ‘denial or repression of anxiety’, as Lehmann attempts to ‘bury’ the war, which ‘sprawled everywhere inert: like a child too big to be born’ (WTWC, 93).50 Amidst these acts of repression, the story’s real child, the protagonist’s daughter Jane, falls into the freezing water and ‘perfectly silent, her astonished face framed in its scarlet bonnet’, she starts to sink (WTWC, 97). Jane’s silent, bonneted face amongst the turbulent waters recalls the silence of the soldiers freezing in foreign waters, whose distant presence the protagonist tried to drown out earlier on. The loud ‘voices’ of the water, which seem to render both Jane and the soldiers dangerously silent, create a resonance between the local stream and the freezing oceans which animates the protagonist’s suppressed memory and makes her realise the danger of her self-silencing.51 Lehmann draws this connection through the seemingly ceaseless reach of watery sound, transforming this tragic domestic event, so that it echoes with wider anxieties about international conflict. In making a sonic connection between domestic and national tragedy, between the rural and international, Lehmann finds a means of expression in response to the silencing, anxious climate of war. Just as in her 1938 speech for ‘Writers Declare Against Fascism’, Lehmann had invoked an ethics of international care that reached beyond the divisions of geography, class, race, and religion by foregrounding the fate of children, in ‘When the Waters Came’ she draws a sonic resonance between her protagonist’s maternal anxiety and anxiety about war to develop a feminist, anti-fascist stance.52 Although the protagonist of this story ultimately manages to save her daughter from the water, the weight of the event, its clear relation to wider anxieties about the future of democracy, bears upon her. Comparing this text with a story written by Jean Rhys in 1945, we can situate the anxious, polyphonic waters of Lehmann’s story within a wider feminist aesthetics of waves that troubles the very idea of peacetime. As Tara Rodgers demonstrates in her ‘refiguring of waves [. . .] towards a feminist epistemology of sound’, the ‘physical properties of sound waves have been aligned with the connotations of fluidity and excess associated with female bodies throughout Western history and philosophy’.53 Rodgers highlights the roots of sound waves’ descriptors in maritime navigation which then echo in acoustic texts to illustrate the association between sound waves and ‘gendered and

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racialised excess’, something the male, Western subject has attempted, with scientific objectivity in the form of visualisation, ‘to control’.54 My argument here is that, in creating an aural resonance between ‘personally’ traumatic events and a mass traumatic experience of war, Lehmann critiques the sonic stiff upper lip of the ‘People’s War’ presented in the introduction to this chapter, developing resonances that subvert wartime modes of ‘affective mobilisation’. As Rodgers argues, ‘authors of acoustic texts typically defined sound as fluid disturbances of an idealized state of rest’, and here Lehmann disturbs the idealised ‘peace and tranquillity’ of rural soundscapes.55 As we will see in the following reading of Jean Rhys’s ‘The Sound of the River’, sound and water waves take on what Rodgers describes as the ‘properties’ that have been ‘abandoned to the feminine’: that of ‘formlessness and uncontrollability, which threaten the coherence of subject and object as distinct entities’.56 The sound/water waves externalise a seemingly destructive yet seductive will for self-expression that abides neither the conventions of sonic nor gendered wartime behaviour.

‘The Sound of the River’ ‘I didn’t exactly retire to the country when war broke out’, Anglo-Caribbean writer Jean Rhys wrote, ‘in self-mocking mode’ years after its close.57 The war years saw her living precariously in rural England, thinking about what Carole Angier describes as her ‘twin obsessions’: her ‘hatred of England’ and ‘England’s hatred of women’.58 ‘The Sound of the River’ recounts Rhys’s experience of a holiday she took with her husband Leslie after he was demobbed in 1945. They stayed in an isolated cottage ‘to recover and rest’, but one evening Leslie began experiencing chest pains, suffered a heart attack, and died next to her.59 Rhys wrote the troubling story very shortly afterwards, partly to respond to the terrible sentence Leslie’s family levelled at her: that she had failed in her care-giving duties, that despite Leslie having lived through the war, Jean’s despair had exhausted him.60 Unable to respond to these misogynistic accusations verbally, Rhys developed a soundscape of aural anxiety. In ‘The Sound of the River’, fear is indescribable but distinctly audible. What David Toop terms a ‘present absence’, the sound takes on different tones throughout the story; it is an aural haunting, or in Toop’s words, a ‘sinister resonance’.61 Akin to Lehmann’s troubling waters, Rhys’s rural soundscape is expressive of a climate of anxiety, and through it Rhys expresses her anxieties about the ideological nature of England’s landscapes. The soundscape of the story’s ‘country retreat’ should be ideally restorative and recuperative, in accordance with wartime schemes that promoted the healing properties of the countryside, sending inner-city war-workers for a ‘rest’, but there is no rest in this country.62 Instead, Rhys develops eerie connections between the ‘natural’ sound of the river and the technological sounds of wires and waves, which disrupt the ‘peace’ of the countryside. The story begins with a crisis of expression. As a couple ‘rests’ in a rented cottage, the protagonist tries to describe the root of her fear: ‘If I could put it into words it might go’, she explains, ‘but there aren’t any words for this fear. The words haven’t been invented.’63 The fear the protagonist is attempting to describe here is an affective experience that cannot be captured by words. In her discussion of ‘nonverbal responses’ to the Second World War, Gill Plain argues that ‘inarticulate passivity is [. . .] suggestive of problems of identity stemming from the war’s capacity to alienate individuals from language, and in consequence, from themselves’.64 The narrator is

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unable to define her fear, but her acoustic atmosphere does so for her; it manifests as an aural anxiety that pervades the story. It begins when the couple walk by the river, as the husband observes that the river looks ‘curiously metallic’ and ‘not like water at all [. . .] very much alive in an uncanny way’, with ‘streaming hair’ (SR, 227). The river’s streams of flowing metal seem to recall wires: lively, silently communicative, and disconcertingly animate. Along these wires, the river follows them back to their room, but here it is no longer silent but making a ‘row’ (SR, 227). Rhys subverts the expected calming effect of listening to rural sounds on the radio, instead presenting the acousmatic transmission of such sounds as fearful: There’s something here to be frightened of, I tell you. Why can’t you feel it? When you said, let’s be happy, that first day, there was a tap dripping somewhere into a full basin, playing a gay and horrible tune. Didn’t you hear it? (SR, 229) In tracing the noise of the river through to the dripping tap, Rhys associates her hyperacusis (‘decreased sound tolerance’) with fear, as found noise seems to become a kind of eerie music, taking on a meaning that it should not.65 In similar terms, Dr John Ivimey describes being troubled by the pervasive reach of the gramophone, across ‘town or country [. . .] perched on a hill-top, or basking by the sea’, its music disturbing the peaceful boundaries and natural soundscapes of these areas.66 ‘No greater disservice was ever done to music’, he declaims, ‘than by allowing it to be tapped like electricity, gas and water [. . .] soon every bathroom will have its wireless tap.’67 Rhys’s wireless tap haunts the peaceful countryside, signifying the pervasive reach of phonophobia that seems to dissolve physical and psychological boundaries, the bond between listeners and the bond between soundscape and situation. Yet it is the sound’s very incoherence that seduces the protagonist, like Rodgers’s sound waves – ‘figurations of alterity and desire’ – it appeals to their struggle for expression.68 In the morning, she wakes up to ‘the first fine day’ (SR, 229) they have had and recounts to her husband her ‘funny’ dream: I dreamt I was walking in a wood and the trees were groaning and then I dreamt of the wind in telegraph wires, well a bit like that, only very loud. I can still hear it – really I swear I’m not making this up. (SR, 229) The sound of the river has changed from watery streams of wire to an intense atmospheric sound that recalls the roar of white noise, that of an untuned radio, and also the boom of aircraft flying overhead. Rhys muddles the technological with the ‘natural’, the threat of war’s violence with personal trauma, to disturb what Marie Thompson terms ‘the conservative politics of silence’ from which stems the national aural politics of rural peace, throwing into question its use as an ideological tool and condition.69 For once the roar of the river enters the room, multiple voices begin to creep in to the narrator’s head: ‘you’re not my daughter if you’re afraid of the shape of a hill’, they say, ‘or the moon when it is growing old. In fact you’re not my daughter’ (SR, 228). The many metallic voices of the river recall what she does not want to hear: a disavowal of her femininity or role in the patriarchal system of the family. The sound ‘of the river’ then takes on a final meaning, as shortly after recounting it, she realises her husband is unresponsive. This sound was also that of the man lying

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next to her dying. The story cuts to what feels like an interrogation scene between the protagonist and the doctor recording the death, in which he questions how she had not recognised his struggle sooner. Internally, she responds, ‘I was late because I had to stay there listening. I heard it then [. . .] I heard the sound of the river’ (SR, 232). The perceived failure of the protagonist to act as an appropriate care-giver is bound up with her fearful but seductive interaction with this sound. In the place of form, she hears ‘formlessness’, ‘fluidity’, movement, the sound waves call her away.70 She finds means not of expression but of alterity. Written in a contemporary landscape in which ‘fear of noise separated [. . .] those who counted as fully national and those who threatened to destabilise the nation by failing to “hold their nerve”’, the story’s phonophobia signals a nervousness about the ideological underpinnings of wartime aurality.71 In reworking the sound of England from ‘the restful countryside’ into a hyper-alert soundscape of white noise, wires, and metallic inflections, Rhys subverts the calming role of the radio, writing back to the sonic nationalism discussed earlier. For Rhys, such nationalism is but one branch of a wider system of oppressive hegemonies, an inherently patriarchal structure. As the voice of the wiry river told her earlier, ‘you’re not my daughter’.

‘A Dream of Winter’ Lehmann’s feverish story ‘A Dream of Winter’ shares Rhys’s concern about an acousmatic ‘natural’ sound which simultaneously calls up an atmosphere of wartime anxiety and stages a critique of gendered citizenship. In this story, also set during the ‘Phoney War’ period, Lehmann’s protagonist lies in bed and listens to a swarm of bees that may or may not still be alive in the honeycomb she has hired a ‘bee man’ to remove from her house.72 The story’s soundscape should be ideally restorative, but instead it is the scene of intense aural anxiety mingled with inactivity. ‘The silence’, she writes, ‘was so absolute that it reversed itself and became in her ears continuous reverberation. Or was it the bees’, she asks, ‘still driving their soft throbbing dynamo, as mostly they did, day in, day out, all the year round?’ (ADW, 101). The bees whirr away, either in her mind’s ear or in the roof of the house, and their continuous sonorous motion becomes strangely conducive to power – the narrator likens them to a ‘dynamo’, an energy generator. As the days of the protagonist’s illness and bedrest go on, the noise becomes ‘fiercer, louder’, as her keen listening transforms the bees into ‘[a] snarling, struggling, multiple-headed organism [. . .] seeming to strive in vain to explode away from its centre and disperse itself’ (ADW, 101). In her solitary listening, the buried murmur comes to resemble a kind of bombastic army. The bees’ buzzing recalls Woolf’s description of the warplane as a zooming ‘hornet’; by detailing the engine-like whirring of the bees, Lehmann transposes some of the sonic qualities of the (anticipated) Blitz. Lehmann brings the sounds of the war on the home front into the realm of the rurally domestic in order, I argue, both to challenge preconceived notions of women’s experiences of war and to deconstruct the complex workings of gendered citizenship in this period of conflict. Having removed the hive, the ‘bee man’ informs her that there is not likely to be, as she had hoped, any honey to help sustain her family through sugar rations. She hears the bees taunt her verbally:

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Another sentimental illusion. This source of energy whose living voice comforted you at dawn, at dusk, saying: We work for you– vanished! [. . .] What you took for the hum of growth and plenty is nothing, you see, but the buzz of an outworn machine running down. (ADW, 106) The contrasting language of vitalism, industry, and labour positions the ‘resourceful’ wartime mother as a profiteer. Here, the sonic clearly speaks to anxieties around performing certain cultural roles. The empty hive represents the broken system of the country house, and the identification that the story draws between the workman removing the hive and the bees themselves – both are described as disturbing the quiet of its walls, the man with his ‘low drone, bee-like’ voice (ADW, 104) – suggests an anxiety around the class, as well as gender, dynamics of the situation. As the bees taunt her, the war signals the end of ‘ripe gifts unearned out of traditional walls’ (ADW, 106). This disappointment helps the protagonist to process the realisation that care should not exist purely on a familial level; by the end of the story, she acknowledges that for the community of bees, the lack of honey had not been ‘a question of no surplus, but of the bare necessities of life’ (ADW, 107). A member of Penn International, Lehmann is also challenging the idea of the international ‘enemy’ here, listening to what should be the pleasant rural sound of the English bees, they become, in not providing as they should, weaponised as a seemingly alien community. In processing this connection through hyper-aurality, the protagonist interrogates her own ideological perceptions of citizenship and rurality. Furthermore, in the context of wartime expectations of rural gendered citizenship, the mechanical sound of the whirring bees is also disturbing the would-be ‘organic’ nature of women’s honey harvesting and preserving. In 1941, around the time Lehmann wrote this story, the Women’s Institute ‘mounted a fruit-preserving campaign’ supported by the Ministry of Food. As Matless writes, ‘associations of femininity, community and fruitfulness came together’, in a delightfully sticky package.73 In this story, the loss of honey stages a failure of a domestic duty which, in the wider context in which this story was read, is also a failure of wartime gendered citizenship. The aural attention given to what might be the buzz of the bees, or might equally be a sonic phantom or ‘sinister resonance’, stages these anxieties. As Joan W. Scott emphasises, the effect of echo ‘undermines the notion of enduring sameness that often attaches to identity’.74 Lehmann’s haunting bees act as a sonic echo of aerial warfare that disrupts the homogenous narrative of women’s rural experience in the Second World War.

‘I Spy a Stranger’ In Jean Rhys’s ‘I Spy a Stranger’, disrupted wartime cultures of rural sound call gendered responsibility into question, while the rural village exemplifies what Rhys describes as the ‘woman hatred in this country’.75 In a notebook kept at the time, Rhys questioned ‘who said England & hell, the white cliffs of Albion & of hell, or hell like England has white cliffs’, half-repeating and subverting snippets of nationalistic folk narrative.76 Here, and in the following story, Rhys takes up the figure of Echo in the form Ella Finer describes, as an ‘ancient sound artist’, reworking narratives of rurality, nationhood, and propaganda to critique them.77 In the stories read so far, the soundscape of rural

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England was the repository for its ideologies; in ‘I Spy a Stranger’, Rhys homes in on the ‘community’ of its rural villages to analyse the weaponisation of such aesthetics against otherness. The story is set in an oppressively ‘tight-knit’ village community which villainises Laura, a ‘non-conforming’ stranger, who has come to stay with her cousin, Mrs Hudson, during the war.78 The narrative explores ‘the sinister implications of domestic homogeneity’, as the villagers identify her as alien, purportedly due to her having lived in Europe for several years, and abuse her accordingly.79 The village, convinced that she is a ‘crazy old foreigner’, makes ‘a lot of nasty talk’.80 Mrs Hudson cautions Laura that ‘it’s better not to answer them’ (ISS, 235), so she begins collecting newspaper cuttings in a book, in order to find an alternative means of response. Laura annotates these cuttings, criticising definitions of nationhood and identity: ‘I could not stop myself from answering back’, she writes, ‘saying that there was another side to the eternal question of who let down who, and when’ (ISS, 238). While collaging the cuttings, she describes being haunted by ‘words, phrases, whole conversations’ about fascism and nationalism: the world ‘dominated by Nordics, German version – what a catastrophe’, she thinks, but ‘then of course, England and the English’, she sighs (ISS, 238). Disrupted by voices rising from the past, her friend Blanca discussing the English and ‘their extraordinary attitude to women’ (ISS, 238), Laura draws relations between nationalist ideology and misogyny. There is a sense that she is speaking through the many-headed voices the protagonist of ‘The Sound of the River’ feared, repurposing the gender ‘propaganda’ she finds in the newspaper clippings and making her own story. This might present another form of ‘passive response’ to war, a means of harnessing aural anxiety, cutting up the earworms of propaganda, making texts speak and signify differently, indirectly, through verbal collage.81 Embodying Echo, ‘giving back only ever “incomplete reproductions” of sound material’, Rhys undermines the original meaning of this material, as Laura remixes those ‘haunting’ words in order to haunt them back.82 Despite this ‘passive’ outlet, things become increasingly strained, in particular in Laura’s relationship with Mrs Hudson’s husband, Ricky. Ricky pressures Laura to leave the house, but shortly before her departure, other voices of authority intervene. Mrs Hudson describes one night, during the ‘worst raid we’ve had’, when Laura did not come down to shelter but remained ‘smoking and playing the gramophone she’d bought’ (ISS, 242). Laura seems to be attempting to drown out the sound of the bombing, but this is considered irresponsible, poor aural citizenship: ‘is this the moment to fool about with music?’, Mrs Hudson asks (ISS, 242). When an Air Raid Warden begins to bang on the door, Laura starts to yell about ‘the law!’ and the ‘Universal Robots!’ (ISS, 242). This is a moment of abstract but direct response as she protests aural biopolitics through noise-making. We might read Laura’s sonic action as embodying another characteristic of Echo, who in Anne Carson’s reading was ‘described by Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth”’, and who, for Carson, thus embodies a subversive figure, for as she notes, ‘putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day’.83 Thus Echo is cast, Finer argues, ‘as continual vocal disturbance to the dominant social acoustics of history [. . .] which have so often sought to restrain or dominate women who speak out, who are deemed to talk excessively, too much, too loudly out of turn’.84

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The story’s ending exemplifies the warning Finer’s reading provides, as Laura is sent to a rural ‘sanitorium for a rest’ (ISS, 243). In ‘I Spy a Stranger’, the English village is oppressively homogenous, a space threatened by masculine and institutional violence, in which sonic expression is controlled. In her wartime short stories, Rhys presents ‘misogyny and war as intimately connected’, and these dual features are emphasised and channelled into subverted soundscapes of rurality, including that of the suspicious, whispering rural village.85 There is something critical and resistant in Rhys’s development of this soundscape during a period of such politicised sonicity. Rhys’s obsession with meaningless noise, and the phonophobia attributed to ‘white noise’, or unidentifiable sounds, positions her at odds with the ‘sound-space’ of the nation, at a time when sonic cues had strictly policed meanings and were intended to control citizen’s behaviours. But as Rhys makes clear in ‘A Solid House’, this connection between sonic affect and social assimilation and cohesion reaches before and beyond wartime: ‘are you telling me the real secret, how to be exactly like everyone else?’, its protagonist asks. ‘Tell me, for I am sure you know. If it means being deaf, then I’ll be deaf.’86 Both Rhys and Lehmann present subjects with a sense of wartime hyper-aurality that borders upon hyperacusis, and that suggests they fail to resist sonic affect in a way that would align them with a sense of gendered citizenship during the war. The soundscapes the women encounter in their stories reveal a sense of their being out of rhythm, out of sync with the complex wartime womanhood they should adhere to, for they fail to discover the ‘techniques of [aural] self-management [. . .] necessary for the greater good of the nation-at-war’.87 For as the protagonist’s child asks in ‘A Dream of Winter’, ‘if you can’t stand the hum of a wretched little bee, what’ll you do in an air-raid?’ (ADW, 110). I argue that in the attention that their listening calls to issues of citizenship, ideology, and misogyny, these writers develop a politics of aural anxiety that can be elucidated in light of recent criticism in feminist sound studies. Ultimately, what we find in these stories is a radical reconceptualisation of the rural soundscape which is bound to an active refusal or complication of women’s wartime roles. This approach, in turn, challenges the common conception of the soundscape of war as located in ‘discrete conflict zones, or in palpable violence’, and instead allows reflection on ‘the actions and structures supporting such violence’.88 By rewriting the rural soundscape of war into one of aural anxiety, Rhys and Lehmann interrogate the ideological work of gendered citizenship.

Notes   1. Cited by Beryl Pong in ‘“The Zoom of a Hornet”: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenology of the Air-Raid Siren’, in Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences, ed. Edward Allen (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming), originally in Amy Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London 1939–1945’, Journal of British Studies 84, no. 1 (2009): 153–75 (164).   2. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 7.   3. Sir James Purves-Stewart, ‘Noise and Nerves in Wartime’, Quiet: A Magazine Devoted to the Prevention of Avoidable Noise (March 1941): 7–9 (7). Quiet was the resident magazine of the Noise Abatement League (NAL, earlier The Anti-Noise League). Established in 1933, its mission was the ‘to promote the cause of quiet and to prevent interference with the amenities of life by avoidable noise’, Quiet (March 1936): 26. For further information, see

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James G. Mansell, The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 29, 46–56.  4. ‘Wartime acoustemology’ is a term discussed by Jim Sykes in ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening’, Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 1 (2018): 35–60. A full explanation of its relevance here is provided in the following pages.   5. See Timothy Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii for more on the ‘radio imaginary’.  6. Mansell, Age of Noise, 127.   7. Ella Finer, ‘Feminism and Sound’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 315–33 (319, 317).   8. Ibid., 317.  9. Tara Rodgers, ‘Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-Technical Discourse’, in Engaging the World: Thinking after Irigaray, ed. Mary C. Rawlinson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 195–215; Anne Carson, ‘The Gender of Sound’, in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), 119–42. See also Marie Thompson, ‘Gendered Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 108–18. 10. See Marion Shaw, ‘Cold Comfort Times: Women Rural Writers in the Interwar Period’, in The English Countryside between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline?, ed. Paul Brassley, Jeremey Burchardt, and Lynne Thompson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 73–87 (76); and Stella Deen, ‘The Spinster in Eden: Reclaiming Civilisation in Interwar British Rural Fiction’, in Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention, ed. Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 135–49. 11. Susan Gubar, ‘“This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun”: World War II and the Blitz on Women’, in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (London: Yale University Press, 1987), 227–59 (227). I add the specification of ‘civilian’ women to Gubar’s note here in acknowledgement of women’s work during the First World War. 12. Virginia Woolf, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 216–19 (216). 13. Pong, ‘“Zoom of a Hornet”’, 10. 14. Anna Snaith, ‘Introduction’, in Sound and Literature, 1–35 (1). 15. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: The Canadian Publishers, 1977), 10; Mansell, Age of Noise, 128. 16. Mansell, Age of Noise, 128. 17. Ibid., 130. 18. Ibid. 19. Pong, ‘“Zoom of a Hornet”’, 8. 20. Ibid. 21. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 254–6. 22. Lord Horder, ‘To Our Readers’, Quiet (March 1940): 5. 23. Mansell, Age of Noise, 129. 24. Ibid. 25. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 10. 26. Shaw, ‘Cold Comfort Times’, 76. 27. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 11. 28. Michael Guida, ‘Ludwig Koch’s Birdsong on Wartime BBC Radio: Knowledge, Citizenship and Solace’, in Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, and Morag Shiach (London: UCL Press, 2018), 293–310 (302).

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29. Ibid., 305. 30. Mansell, Landscape and Englishness, 128. 31. Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, Listen to Britain (London: Press Books, BFI Special Collections, 1942). 32. Heather Wiebe, ‘Morale as Sonic Force: Listen to Britain and Total War’, Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7, no. 1 (2021): 24–41 (24). 33. Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 157. 34. Sykes, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance’, 35; Pong, ‘“Zoom of a Hornet”’, 3. 35. Sykes, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance’, 35. 36. Wiebe, ‘Morale as Sonic Force’, 25. 37. Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers, ‘Introduction’, in Gender and the Second World War: Lessons of War, ed. Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers (London: Palgrave, 2017), 1–2. 38. National Service Act 1941 (UK). 39. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz, ‘Introduction’, in Behind the Lines, 1–17 (7). 40. Ibid. 41. Peniston-Bird and Vickers, ‘Introduction’, 3; Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 123. 42. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 252. 43. Ibid. 44. For more on the mythologising of the home front during the Second World War, see Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Cape, 1991). 45. Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 65. 46. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘When the Waters Came’, in The Gipsy’s Baby (London: Collins, 1946), 91–9 (94) (hereafter WTWC). Further parenthetical references in the text. 47. Jessica Gildersleeve, ‘Monstrous Child: Rosamond Lehmann’s War Writing’, Philament (2011): 1–11 (7). 48. Sykes, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance’, 35. 49. Schafer, Tuning of the World, 16. 50. Gildersleeve, ‘Monstrous Child’, 9. 51. Schafer, Tuning of the World, 18. 52. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘Speech possibly made for Writers declare against Fascism’, RNL 1/1/5/1, The Papers of Rosamond Nina Lehmann, King’s College Archives, University of Cambridge. 53. Rodgers, ‘Refiguring Waves’, 197. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 199; Guida, ‘Ludwig Koch’s Birdsong’, 305. 56. Rodgers, ‘Refiguring Waves’, 202. 57. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys (London: Penguin, 1992), 411–12. 58. Ibid., 412. 59. Ibid., 427–30. 60. Ibid., 430. 61. David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London: Continuum, 2010), viii. 62. Joan Woollcombe, a member of the NAL and a Red Cross worker, details such a scheme in Quiet (March 1941). 63. Jean Rhys, ‘The Sound of the River’, in The Collected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 2017), 226–32 (226) (hereafter SR). Further parenthetical references in the text.

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64. Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 11–12. 65. David Baguley, ‘Tinnitus and Hyperacusis in Literature, Film, and Music’, in Tinnitus: Clinical and Research Perspectives, ed. David Baguley and Marc Fagelson (San Diego: Plural, 2016), 1–12 (8). 66. Dr John Ivimey, ‘Musician’s Plea for Noise Control’, Quiet (Spring 1937): 13–14 (14). 67. Ibid. 68. Rodgers, ‘Refiguring Waves’, 201. 69. Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 4. 70. Rodgers, ‘Refiguring Waves’, 202, 205. 71. Mansell, Age of Noise, 127. 72. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘A Dream of Winter’, in The Gipsy’s Baby, 99–113 (101) (hereafter ADW). Further parenthetical references in the text. 73. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 246. 74. Joan W. Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’, Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 284–304 (291). 75. Angier quoting from Rhys’s ‘Orange Notebook’, Jean Rhys, 415. 76. Ibid. 77. Finer, ‘Feminism and Sound’, 319. 78. Plain, Women’s Fiction, 24. 79. Ibid. 80. Jean Rhys, ‘I Spy a Stranger’, in The Collected Short Stories, 232–45 (234) (hereafter ISS). Further parenthetical references in the text. 81. Plain, Women’s Fiction, 24. 82. Finer, ‘Feminism and Sound’, 317. 83. Carson, ‘Gender of Sound’, 121. 84. Finer, ‘Feminism and Sound’, 318. 85. Plain, Women’s Fiction, 25. 86. Jean Rhys, ‘A Solid House’, in The Collected Short Stories, 211–25 (221). 87. Mansell, Age of Noise, 129. 88. Wiebe, ‘Morale as Sonic Force’, 24.

Select Bibliography Carson, Anne, ‘The Gender of Sound’, in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), 119–42. Finer, Ella, ‘Feminism and Sound’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 315–33. Guida, Michael, ‘Ludwig Koch’s Birdsong on Wartime BBC Radio: Knowledge, Citizenship and Solace’, in Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Bud, Paul Greenhalgh, Frank James, and Morag Shiach (London: UCL Press, 2018), 293–310. Halliday, Sam, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Mansell, James G., The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017). Pong, Beryl, ‘“The Zoom of a Hornet”: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenology of the Air-Raid Siren’, in Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences, ed. Edward Allen (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming).

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Rodgers, Tara, ‘Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-Technical Discourse’, in Engaging the World: Thinking after Irigaray, ed. Mary C. Rawlinson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 195–215. Snaith, Anna, ‘Introduction’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–35. Sykes, Jim, ‘Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening’, Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 1 (2018): 35–60. Thompson, Marie, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). ———, ‘Gendered Sound’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 108–18. Toop, David, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London: Continuum, 2010). Wiebe, Heather, ‘Morale as Sonic Force: Listen to Britain and Total War’, Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7, no. 1 (2021): 24–41.

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Part IV: Literature, Media, Coded Sound

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13 Sound Technology and US Fiction in the Postwar Era: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Listening K. C. Harrison

Introduction

T

he advent of sound recording in the late nineteenth century brings about a crisis of representation that informs both the style and substance of modernist literature.1 By removing sound from source, voice from physical presence, recording provokes anxiety that ‘permanence outside the subject invites greater mutability, where the primacy and purity of voice are subjected to the machinations and imaginations of culture and politics’.2 This fear and fascination manifest in formal innovations that mimic the stuttering, repetitions, channel-switching, and multiplicity of voices of radio and records.3 While there is no bright line dividing modernist from postmodern authors – and indeed, in her recent monograph Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix, Jessica Teague argues against the conventional pre- and post-1945 division of American literature – authors classified according to the latter categories (postwar and postmodern) are often described as abandoning the search for authenticity in favour of an awareness of the compromised nature of all expression; both language and the circumstances of its dissemination are ‘always already’ imbricated with social and cultural limitations beyond individual control.4 Authors in the twentieth century engage with sound technology in a variety of ways that reflect both the search for authenticity and its abandonment. Black American writers are the vanguard of this critical shift, positioned to critique recording industries’ complex and often exploitative relations of power and voice. There is a rich, multilayered body of literary scholarship showing how authors of colour participate in and prefigure these qualities more often attributed to White male authors from William Burroughs through Thomas Pynchon to David Foster Wallace.5 The condition of decentredness, Philip Brian Harper argues, may be ‘a function of the increasing implication in the “general” culture of what are usually thought of as socially marginal or “minority” experiences’.6 Robert Stepto traces postmodern irony to a long tradition of African American authors’ simultaneous embrace and distrust of literacy.7 Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifying Monkey is notable in this critical conversation, and Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) expands the scope beyond literature to argue that race is present in our understandings of sound more generally: in the ways that inhabitants of the twentieth century vocalise, improvise, create, listen, and exchange. Questions of embodiment and disembodiment that

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intrigue anglophone modernist authors like Beckett, Joyce, and Woolf are inflected in the United States by Black diasporic legacies of bondage and resistance. Shane White and Graham White’s The Sounds of Slavery establishes a sonic archive of this history, grounded in the ethical question posed by Saidiya Hartman: how to represent racial horror without repeating its violence (a question W. E. B. Du Bois grapples with at the turn of the twentieth century).8 Fred Moten identifies the experimentation of Black poetics – which he puts into conversation with Freud, Heidegger, Derrida – with the ‘freedom drive’: formal resistance to objectification, grounded in sound. Jennifer Lynn Stoever invites readers to participate in an ethics of listening, acknowledging how our racial imaginations and actions have been formed through sound, from the antebellum period to today.9 Teague brings Stoever’s call back to the page when she advocates for ‘resonant reading’, making ‘ear training’ a part of the ‘intersubjective space between text and reader’.10 This chapter explores three pairs of authors, spanning 1940 to the 1970s, each a case study in ‘resonant reading’ that shows how writers engage with sound technologies at the same time that they encounter ethical questions related to racial identity. Carson McCullers earnestly, William Burroughs carelessly, and Thomas Pynchon anxiously demonstrate White authors’ concern with influence by and responsibility towards their contemporaries of colour. Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed push the formal boundaries of writing with stylistic innovation and canny concern for the power relationships governing the production and dissemination of Black artists’ work (what Nathaniel Mackey calls ‘musicking’11). I hope to contribute to the emerging (‘never “emerged”’, some complain) narrative of sound studies that locates these questions of racial identity and sound at the centre of twentieth-century US literature.

Carson McCullers: The Radio as Inadvertent Integrator In 1930 there were twelve million radios in American homes; by the end of 1940, that number had reached fifty million, averaging one radio per home.12 This rapid growth is even more remarkable when you consider that commercial radio broadcasting only began in 1920, and managed to grow during the Great Depression even as other sectors of the entertainment industry suffered.13 What did this unprecedented expansion of communications and entertainment bode for the novel? Surely not the ‘death of paper’ that some early radio enthusiasts and detractors alike predicted.14 But while some writers continued to work in relative isolation from the powerful new medium, many took up the challenges and possibilities of radio to suggest new roles for fiction, as well as to defend fiction’s unique capacities. Pamela Caughie has argued that ‘voice divorced from sight’ destabilises race, class, and gender boundaries, even – or perhaps especially – as the radio brings about what Theodor Adorno called ‘corporeal proximity’.15 Citing Michael North, Caughie locates a new awareness of the cultural construction of identity, its mediated nature.16 As often accompanies new media (whether the novel in the eighteenth century or Twitter today), there was both excitement and concern about the democratising effects of radio and records. These technologies could link communities across distance in service of a broad range of ideals, from FDR’s famous ‘fireside chats’ to the broadcast speeches of Hitler and Mussolini. Americans worried about the coercive power of the radio voice to create mass monoculture. At the same time, the radio’s broadcasting

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of Black music heralded a kind of sonic integration that raised new possibilities for empathy and awareness – as well as exploitation.17 Published in 1940, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter shows how even a rural adolescent – far from the urban clamour of streetcars, sirens, claxons, loudspeakers, pneumatic drills, and the other machinery that defines the modern soundscape – may become ‘an acoustically cosmopolitan subject’ through her exposure to the variety of radio programming.18 Its protagonist Mick is a smart, rough-and-tumble tomboy; early in the novel she scrawls on a wall the words ‘EDISON, DICK TRACY, MUSSOLINI – PUSSY – MOTSART’.19 Her graffiti, a statement of the dominant figures of her young imagination, juxtaposes the modern inventor, the comic-strip-turned-radio-show detective, the fascist dictator, the sexual slur, and the classical musician with the irreverence for distinctions between high and low art, political news and entertainment, that characterised popular media and was the particular concern of radio’s critics, who derided it as ‘a disorderly medium that shoved classical music into the same wavelength as news reports and vulgar advertisements’.20 But rather than confirming these fears, the novel valorises the possibilities of radio as an escape from provincial limitations – as indeed McCullers herself would find when leaving her own small town to study at Juilliard at the age of seventeen. The yoking together of disparate references was already a feature of modernist literature (famously in Joyce’s Ulysses published in 1922), and while readers may assume the list reflects Mick’s naïvety, it reveals her miscellaneous radio listening, as well as her earnest hope for understanding and connecting with the wider world. The popular appeal of McCullers’s accessible realist writing has perhaps prevented critics from examining her relationship to technology, but her musical training makes it unsurprising that listening would form the novel’s ethical core. The mute Singer is valorised as the confidant of the novel’s many isolated characters, a receiver capable of seeing commonalities that elude them. Characters’ divergent reactions to Singer’s radio reveal this most sharply: only the protagonist Mick listens attentively; the White middle-class Biff is distracted; the Black physician Copeland switches it off; and the drunk labour organiser Blount fails to notice it. McCullers explores, and at times inadvertently displays, the limits of White characters – and writers – in their attempts to listen across Jim Crow racial lines. While the idealised White mute character Singer listens often to the concerns of the Black doctor Benedict Mady Copeland, he has difficulty comprehending Copeland’s daughter, Portia, who is described as speaking ‘like a low song. She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning.’21 When Mick threatens to idealise the consolations of music for the racially persecuted character Willie – saying, ‘Anyway Willie can still play his harp’ – Portia swiftly undercuts Mick’s optimism with the brutal social reality: ‘With both feets sawed off that about all he can do.’22 These moments of racialised sound – that include White characters hearing without listening – demonstrate Stoever’s thesis of a ‘sonic colour line’.23 McCullers sees in the radio potential for crossing this line, even inadvertently. In her 1953 novel Clock Without Hands radio forms a bond between Jester Clane, a White teenager dissatisfied with his surroundings, and Sherman Pew, a passionate young Black artist. Jester’s White supremacist grandfather plans to give a radio address condemning desegregation, but the radio itself seems to silence his ‘vile words, cuss words unsuitable for the radio’, and instead calls forth the Gettysburg Address, ‘the

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first speech he had memorized in law school’.24 The medium of the radio causes the Judge to ventriloquise, in spite of his racist intentions, an oratorical defence of equality, ‘a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal [. . .]’.25 In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter the radio presents the possibility for transcending local circumstances, but proves insufficient; Clock Without Hands delivers a utopian moment when we hear a message concerning American pluralism transmitted despite its imperfect medium. Throughout her writing, Carson McCullers, who early in life imagined a career as a concert pianist, considers the potential of sonority to link individuals in a broader community of listening. The technology of record players and radio broadcasts may amplify music’s transcendent possibilities, but not without confronting the obstacles that for McCullers inhere in all acts of communication.

Ralph Ellison: The Breaks and the Lower Frequencies Both McCullers and Ellison are interested in the democratising potential of radio to counter racial bigotry. Ellison does so with sophistication informed by his lived experience as a Black man and his more intimate knowledge of sound technology. Like McCullers, Ellison enters writing from music studies – his at Tuskegee Institute – and never abandons an intense interest in both classical and jazz as he sees the success of Invisible Man, published in 1952. His description of the novel’s ‘ironic, down-home voice’ marries the two genres ‘irreverent as a honky-tonk trumpet blasting through a performance, say, of Britten’s War Requiem’.26 As the unnamed protagonist struggles among competing models of oratory – from the folk trickster Trueblood, to the academic Barbee, to the nationalist Ras – with snatches of spirituals, blues, and other music from whistles to operas permeating his experience, Ellison foregrounds the search for personal authenticity against the perils of mechanisation. Far from a simple equation between authenticity and voice, however, Ellison explores the potential of sound technology to mediate the voice in new and surprising ways, and ends up valorising ‘the lower frequencies’ as a conduit for the unrecognised but vital influence of marginalised artists on the mainstream. Ellison’s immersion in blues and jazz styles is well documented in Arnold Rampersad’s definitive biography; less explored is his ‘passion for technology that grew over the years’27 and was apparently undiminished by building audio amplifiers and installing high-fidelity sound systems with his friend David Sarser, a musician and pioneering sound engineer for Philips Electronics.28 At first technology functions as a metaphor for racism, from the electrified rug of the battle royale to the ‘crushing electrical pressures’ at the hospital.29 In both scenes, the feeling of being trapped within an electrified racist machine coincides with the imperative to perform: ‘pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player’s hands’.30 Internalised racism is a ‘soul sickness’ that turns one into a ‘mechanical man’ or a ‘[machine] inside the machine’.31 Louis Armstrong, heard through the radio-phonograph machine in Invisible’s underground den, might seem to epitomise the mechanical man.32 By Ellison’s time, although Armstrong remained hugely popular, his performance style had become controversial for the way that it seemed to some to pander to White audiences’ expectations of minstrel performers’ exaggerated gestures, like Armstrong’s signature eye-rolling.33 Such stereotyped images reappear throughout Invisible Man as a source of anxiety,

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from Mary’s cast-iron ‘red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro’ coin bank to Tod Clifton’s ‘Sambo’ puppets.34 Ellison takes Armstrong’s mechanised phonograph voice and does something much more complex than make it a figure for the ‘mechanical’ race traitor, however. Ellison’s invisible man engages with the voice of Armstrong singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?’ to consider the many gradations that lie between the betrayal and the embodiment of authentic identity.35 As a disembodied, electrified current, the voice transcends the limits of minstrelsy. The lower frequencies of the radio and the vibrations the machine sends through the narrator’s body restore the embodiment and expression that racial invisibility denies: ‘There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body.’36 These underground vibrations elude the threat of pandering that plagues public oratory; the novel validates and connects the medium of writing with ‘a different way of listening’; we readers, along with the protagonist, hone our ability to produce and detect ‘unheard sounds’. This mode of perception involves hearing the ‘silent spaces between the notes’, those ‘nodes, where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead’ that Invisible detects in Armstrong’s song; he wonders whether ‘the only true history of the times’ might lie beneath the surface of music, ‘a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words’.37 While critics Michael Borshuk, Jürgen Grandt, and Timothy Spaulding have focused on the ways that Ellison’s virtuosity deliberately mimics the improvisatory space of the ‘break’ in jazz performance, Ellison adds to this musical break a distinct literary meaning.38 It is true that Ellison shares many techniques with jazz musicians: he works through variations on a theme, appropriates a variety of forms, and introduces moments of chaos or dissonance to create a distinct personal style. Although Ellison was undeniably invested in the democratic potential of music and in new means of sharing sound worldwide, he chose the printed page for his medium, and remained committed throughout his life to the novel’s ethical power – perhaps ironic, considering what critics like Ishmael Reed would see as his tokenisation by the literary establishment. Not only do Ellison’s ‘breaks’ expand the scope of the American novel with his adaptation of jazz idioms and the inspiration of radio, but he also defends the unique province of fiction – the silent space of reading akin to ‘the silent spaces between the notes’. Ellison valorises the ‘lower frequencies’ as a space of subversive expression. As opposed to the high-frequency FM signals ascendant in postwar commercial radio, the lower AM frequencies remained the bandwidth of the smaller independent radio stations and whichever ‘ham’ radio enthusiasts could manage to escape the regulations that began to restrict individual broadcasters as commercial radio gained strength in the 1920s and 30s.39 But the ‘very low’, ‘ultra low’, and ‘super low’ bands on the radio spectrum are used below the surface of the ocean and the earth, for communication in mines and among submarines. It is in this way that the ‘lower frequencies’ indicate the signals of the literal and figurative underground. The subterranean lair of Ellison’s invisible man, as we know, provides a retreat from the demands of publicity, a den of hibernation, but it is also a planning ground for subversive activity, where the protagonist’s above-ground invisibility is undone by the light of a thousand electric bulbs, and he recognises a responsibility to record the unacknowledged histories of the young men of Harlem ‘outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of them’.40 Using the ‘lower frequencies’, Ellison’s protagonist both seizes the potential

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of broadcast to link individuals in a collective consciousness and rejects the means of commercial radio. Like the invisible man above ground, Black voices on the commercial airwaves are subject to the manipulations and distortions of the controlling corporate interests. The ‘lower frequencies’ model a form of communication that eludes the compromising effects of the public domain. In this way Ellison attempts to resolve the tension that we continue to see today, between the democratic potential communications technologies offer and the ways that so-called new media remain entrenched in existing hierarchies of gender, race, nation, and class. The lower frequencies represent Ellison’s vision for a novel that communicates across racial lines, maintaining nuance and resisting co-option as the popular reception of Armstrong’s performance did not.

From LeRoi Jones’s Radio to Burroughs’s ‘Cut-Ups’ The relationship between the Beats and Black Arts demonstrates Michael Magee’s assertion that ‘African American cultural expression [is] the prime mover behind the “experimental attitude” of the American avant-garde.’41 The Black Arts Movement inspires major shifts in American letters: the disjunctive style of the postwar avantgarde, the amplifying voices of non-dominant groups, and the negotiation of media changes.42 Both literary groupings can be oversimplified as romanticising authenticity or essentialism; by exploring the Black Beat writer LeRoi Jones’s evolution into the Black Arts co-founder Amiri Baraka, and in particular his multilayered engagement with sound technology, and finally his influence on the proto-postmodernist William Burroughs, we can better understand the intersection of race, technology, and the arts at this critical period. Baraka’s early treatment of radio in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) builds on Ellison’s radio-phonograph in Invisible Man to consider technology as both a means of and metaphor for interracial encounter. Critics note the deep nostalgia that poems like ‘In Memory of Radio’ and ‘Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today’ show towards Baraka’s childhood radio drama heroes Captain Midnight, Green Lantern, and the Lone Ranger.43 What they miss is how Baraka’s fondness for radio participates in the wrenching conflict he experiences, negotiating his identity in the period of transition from bohemianism to Black Nationalism. Radio, Baraka demonstrates, has caused him to internalise White radio voices. Just as, following his 1959 trip to Cuba, Baraka reconsiders his relationship to White colleagues, collaborators, and influences in the Village, these works show him re-evaluating the interracial communication radio provides. The imaginative boundary-crossing that was effortless to a child, and that he cultivated as an editor and cultural broker in Greenwich Village, becomes problematic. Rather than utterly reject the technological and figurative possibilities of radio, however, Baraka finds in the medium’s static, channel-switching, and confusion of voices a new model for his process of self-inquiry. ‘In Memory of Radio’ and ‘Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today’ appear together in Preface; both lament the poet’s lost innocence, bemoaning ‘all the lovely things I’ve known [. . .] disappeared’ and ‘one’s youth [. . .] taken off / for greener parts’.44 The radio drama heroes form part of the pantheon of White influences and friends that Baraka must expel as part of his attempt to develop a fully Black consciousness (the ‘suicide’ of the book title refers to his former, Beat identity). The poet’s alienation from his onetime companions is felt in lines like ‘Where is my Captain

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Midnight decoder?? / I can’t understand what Superman is saying!’ and amplified to nearly farcical desperation in the subsequent outburst ‘THERE MUST BE A LONE RANGER!!!’ The end of the poem leaves Baraka stripped of the materials of his identification with the White hero – ‘My silver bullets all gone / My black mask trampled in the dust’ – but the final image of ‘Tonto way off in the hills / moaning like Bessie Smith’ suggests the emergence of a once marginalised voice to fill the void.45 Tonto stands in for the poet, mourning his lost White counterpart in the language of the blues. The process of excision enacted in Baraka’s poems presupposes a parasitic power in radio that appears earlier in Ralph Ellison’s work, and later in that of William Burroughs. As early as 1945 Ellison wrote of Black voices on the airwaves entering White listeners’ bodies like ‘an X-ray machine concealed in a radio’.46 While the question that ends his 1952 novel embraces radio’s capacity to cross boundaries – ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ – Ellison’s earlier writing depicts this capacity as a threat, its X-rays ‘shrivel[ing]’ White writers’ ‘vital sperm’.47 Radio is not only a literal and metaphorical means of boundary-crossing; its formal qualities enter the writing. Nathaniel Mackey relates Jones’s poetic practice – the ‘treadmill or a stuttering effect’ of his repetitions – to his description of John Coltrane’s practice of ‘testing’ notes.48 Looking at the intrusions of radio in System, however, provides an additional source for this stuttering effect: radio. Like Invisible Man, The System of Dante’s Hell foregrounds its narrator’s search for personal expression amid the pain and confusion of conflicting models: All the other times I know form crusts under my tongue and hurt my speech. I slur my own name, I cannot remember anyone’s name who I thought beautiful. Only indelicate furtive lust. Even intimacy dulled by some hacking silent blade. The knife of the lie. Lying to one’s self. You are uglier than that. You are more beautiful. You have more sense than to kill yourself this way. You are invisible in my mouth & talk through my head like radios.49 As in Ellison, mechanisation threatens the authentic self, but the protagonist finds a way to use technology to embrace a transformed identity. Even as the radio penetrates the mind and threatens individual consciousness, Jones finds that it models a countertactic in the character of The Shadow. ‘Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?’ he begins ‘In Memory of Radio’, invoking the hero identified by his voice in the dark, who uses the power of suggestion to make himself invisible to villains. Airing from 1930 to 1954, the show capitalised on the medium of radio, associating its hero with the disembodied voice that famously queries, ‘what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ For Jones the Shadow suggests a racial and poetic parallel: ‘shadow’, like ‘shade’, being slang for Black person, the Shadow represents the African American artist’s capacity for social perception. ‘Oh, yes he does / Oh, yes he does’, Baraka repeats at the end of the poem – the Shadow indeed knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, and the context of Preface in which ‘In Memory’ appears suggests that it is a racialised evil. Jones’s relationship to the Shadow helps him to reclaim the radio for activist ends; rather than the voice of a White hero like the Lone Ranger infecting his ears, the Shadow is another invisible man, a model for the power of a voice ‘on the lower frequencies’. The radio dramas that created a sense of double consciousness also inspire strategies of resistance.

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While William Burroughs’s work is less overtly concerned with race, it is indebted to an African American media critique that he encountered through Baraka’s bohemian circle in New York. Burroughs used cuts in his work to interrupt the flow of media indoctrination, to demonstrate the insidiousness of ‘mind control’ through what he called the ‘word virus’. In The Ticket that Exploded (1957–61) Burroughs describes its parasitism in terms that recall Baraka’s anxiety of internalised oppression: ‘the realisation that something as familiar to you as the movement of your intestines the sound of your breathing the beating of your heart is also alien and hostile’.50 For Burroughs the control of the mass media creates a populace of automatons: ‘you are a programmed tape recorder set to record and play back’.51 While Burroughs’s tape projects may seem to emerge from Jack Kerouac’s interest in the medium (in his use of the tape recorder in ‘Imitations of Tape’, the final section of Visions of Cody, written in 1951–2, for example), they in fact owe more to Jones’s suspicious and disjunctive relationship to sound technology.52 The ‘cut-up’ began as a visual, tactile technique for disrupting print media: in 1960 Burroughs and his collaborator, the painter Brion Gysin, ‘sliced through a pile of newspapers’ to create an amusing and intriguing satire: In Hollywood, Rita Haywo in the ground facing another million in their slots, said: When I started this thing I had sideburns and a guy but the authorities didn’t want to mix rock with politics. The crowd stopped the traffic and it fell to Mr. Van R in the line of duty to think that a million men were fitted into the ground in their slots.53 Already in this first example themes of automation (‘in their slots’), gender, culture, and authority are evident. The concerns that emerged in the paper cut-ups soon lent themselves to tape-recording experiments inspired by Gysin’s friendship with pioneering electronic musician and mathematician Ian Sommerville. The newly available inexpensive and mass-produced portable tape recorder becomes a democratised means of counterintelligence, a media for the masses, against the mass media. The earliest cut-up instructions, in 1960, advise, ‘Pick a book any book cut it up’, but soon the manipulation of print media gives way to the cut-up novels’ preoccupation with the audiovisual: turn off the sound track on your television set and substitute an arbitrary sound track prerecorded on your tape recorder street sounds music conversations recordings of other television programs you will find that the arbitrary sound track seems to be appropriate and is in fact determining your interpretation of the film track.54 ‘What we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear’, writes Burroughs.55 Schooling their readers in guerrilla sound-editing techniques, they hope to revise, rewrite, and re-record collective narratives instilled by the mass media: ‘You can cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets with a tape recorder.’56 While artists and authors saw the potential of emerging media to foster new forms and wider audiences, the reality of commercial control of the airwaves usually kept the avant-garde on the pages of the small presses. ‘Where are our revolutionary television/radio stations, roaming about in the backs of trucks?’ Baraka

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asks in a radio address. ‘We are the most developed nation technologically; why don’t we have alternatives to the “Big Five”?’57 Whereas Ellison’s interest in technology led him to experiment with home electronics and to serve on the boards of National Educational Television and the Commission on Public Broadcasting, Jones/Baraka took the more radical stance that ‘learning western technology must not be the end of our understanding of the particular discipline we’re involved in’.58 In order for ‘the whole technology [. . . to] change to reflect the essence of a freed people’, it ‘must begin by being “humanistic”’, Jones writes in the late sixties.59 Ten years earlier in his 1958 PEN International Address, Ellison had spoken of the need for authors to ‘keep pace with that growth [of science and technology], to dominate it, and to humanise it’.60 But in that ten-year interval the meaning of humanism was sharply contested, with the inhumane results of Western liberal tradition coming under fire from women, people of colour, and antiwar activists. While television images of the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests helped to precipitate political change, corporate networks were unreliable allies. The most efficient and reliable means of transmitting revolutionary messages remained print: The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.61 This concern for the way that mass media could ‘ignore and blot out of existence’, in particular, the messages of the counterculture, led Burroughs to dub young Americans of the 1960s the ‘Invisible Generation’. But the invisibility imposed by the increasingly powerful broadcast networks, Burroughs argued, could be manipulated to the generation’s advantage. Secrecy, subterfuge, and sound were tools adapted to the use of a people thus suppressed. The fact that Burroughs becomes the ‘grandfather of postmodernism’ while largely ignoring the influence of or his responsibility towards Black contemporaries is not surprising, but can be corrected. His political aesthetic of noise developed alongside Black contemporaries’ prior understandings of invisibility and sonic revolution.

Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed: ‘the Black Hole Sings the Blues’ Despite his own assertion to readers of Gravity’s Rainbow to ‘Check out Ishmael Reed’, Thomas Pynchon tends to be included in a lineage of White postmodern authors who, like Burroughs, obscure their indebtedness to Black innovation. Pynchon anxiously considers his role as a White writer, and develops a concept of ‘Soniferous Aether’ as a means of communicating Black experiences to largely ignorant White audiences that places his writing in a continuum with Ellison and Baraka, as well as Reed.62 Radio makes the inaudible audible by converting and amplifying electromagnetic frequencies otherwise impossible to detect, providing both a powerful metaphor for the work of the novel and a source of formal innovation. Reed and Pynchon expand this sonic

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potential into interstellar space, seizing on new discoveries such as the black hole to imagine ‘a subcultural (underground, marginal, or liminal) region in which a dominant, white culture’s representations are squeezed to zero volume, producing a new expressive order’, challenging the idea that sound cannot travel through space as a ‘very elaborate scientific lie’.63 Like Ellison’s invisible man, Pynchon’s protagonist pursues an Orphic course ‘into the depths [. . .] beneath the hot tempo’.64 Diving after his lost mouth harp into the Roseland toilet to the strains of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker’s sax, he is pursued by ‘Red’ (Malcolm X) as he excavates the fears and desires underlying his encounters with race. In this gesture Pynchon surely echoes and emulates his modernist forebear’s descent into the ‘blackness of Blackness’ and aspires to Ellison’s – or Parker’s – facility with the art of subterfuge; Slothrop follows his harp down: for the sake of tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be bent from the official frequencies, bends Slothrop hasn’t really the breath to do . . . not yet but someday . . . well at least if (when . . .) he finds the instrument it’ll be well soaked in, a lot easier to play. A hopeful thought to carry with you down the toilet.65 The degree of Pynchon’s pessimism regarding interracial rapprochement, for individuals or society, has been explored by David Witzling in the only full-length study of Pynchon’s relationship with race.66 Does the impending bomb blast – which arrives faster than sound – at the end of the novel render the injunction for the cinema audience to sing ‘Now, everybody – ’ futile or hopeful?67 Witzling argues that Pynchon’s formal exuberance belies the political paralysis and inefficacy of both the White left and Black militancy.68 Paired with Reed’s playful pyrotechnics, however, it is possible to read the annihilation in the novel’s end as the positive prerequisite for change. Mumbo Jumbo’s engagement with the soundscapes of Blackness has been well covered by critics including Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The plot of Reed’s 1973 novel revolves around the rise, theft, and restoration of ‘Jes Grew’, a 1920s song and dance craze that is not just modern fad but a resurgence of ancient rhythms: a fecund, creative, inclusive practice, opposed to the ‘Atonist’ demand for control, hard work, and militarism.69 (The enemies of Jes Grew, the ‘Atonist’ members of the ‘Wallflower Order’ are defined by their tin ear and inability to dance.) Reed traces the spiritual heritage of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker all the way back to the Egyptian goddess Isis; he values an oral, vocal, sonic archive that his writing collects and complements. At the end of Mumbo Jumbo the Book of Thoth, the historical text that has accompanied resurgences of the Jes Grew phenomenon from ancient Egypt to 1920s Harlem, disappears in a pile of ashes. This loss of text – ‘The Work of its Word’ – is framed as a temporary setback.70 Although the 1920s story ends when ‘Jes Grew sensed the ashes of its writings, its litany and just withered up and died’, Black Herman reassures his audience, ‘Better luck next time . . . we will make our own future text.’71 Pynchon takes on the challenge Reed offers to the dominant ‘Atonist’ order and explores the role of listening as the racial responsibility of the White writer and reader. In his first novel V. and in an early story ‘The Secret Integration’, Pynchon’s characters

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attempt to ‘tune in’ to Black perspectives – sometimes literally, through the use of radio equipment. V. centres Kurt Mondaugen, an engineer sent to South-West Africa during the genocide of the Herero people to solve the mystery of the sferics (atmospheric radio disturbances), low-frequency ‘clicks, hooks, risers’, and ‘nose-whistlers’ that interrupt German audio surveillance activities.72 Abandoning his outpost during a rebellion of the Bondelswaartz, the enslaved Africans, he finds his way to a colonial villa; while other Europeans distract themselves at a ‘siege party’, Mondaugen tirelessly monitors the radio signals, until he follows a wounded African bleached white in the blinding sunlight, who sings an incomprehensible Hottentot song.73 Mondaugen resurfaces in Gravity’s Rainbow, having taken up residence among the Africans, ‘haunted by a profound disgust for everything European’.74 The sferics emanate from the lower frequencies as a form of resistance that invites ridicule – masking fear – and invites the attention of a White ‘écouteur’ or ‘Low-Frequency Listener’ who tries but fails.75 For both Pynchon and Reed, the Other Side is a space of metaphysical and racial alterity grasped primarily through sonic experience, whether the ‘lower frequencies’ immanent in Pynchon’s world, or the musical culture through which Reed links African American jazz rhythms with Haitian ritual incantation. Although Pynchon does not explicitly embrace Reed’s ‘HooDoo – or as they say in Haiti and other places, “VooDoo” or “Vodun”’, he is nonetheless interested in ‘the possibility of the real world and the psychic world intersecting’, what Reed calls the principle of ‘LegBa (in the U.S., “LaBas”)’.76 I am not the first critic to note that Slothrop serves as ‘a kind of transmitter’.77 The symbols he draws as he wanders the Continent as ‘Rocketman’ signify crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment, and so certain messages don’t always ‘make sense’ back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane).78 It is this sense of historical simultaneity that Reed cites throughout Mumbo Jumbo, and in interviews, as the key to his work’s power, using ‘the past to prophesy about the future – a process our ancestors called “Necromancy”’.79 Like Eddie Pensiero in Gravity’s Rainbow, Reed is an Agent of History, ‘passing through [. . .] restructuring’ the Harlem Renaissance, Egyptian legend, and contemporary politics. The B/black hole is a sonic crossroads, not yet named as such in Reed’s early work, but confirmed in its significance as the title of Reed’s 2020 poetry collection Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues.80 Reading Pynchon’s ‘Low-Frequency Listener’ in the tradition of Ellison and Reed rightly places him in a trajectory of postwar US fiction that acknowledges the aesthetic innovations of Black writers engaging with aurality and technology, as their White counterparts struggle to understand and acknowledge the legacies of racism. All of the writers covered here defend the unique province of the novel to explore questions of ethics and identity, while drawing on the suggestive power of radio and recording technology to provide a ‘crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side’.81

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Notes   1. Leah Hutchison Toth, ‘Resonant Texts: Sound, Noise, and Technology in Modern Literature’ (PhD dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2016), 11.   2. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 8.   3. Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).   4. Jessica E. Teague, Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).   5. Nathaniel Mackey, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. trace the appearance of qualities such as fragmented narrative, dislocated identity, irony, and the free play of signification in African American literature.   6. Philip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12.   7. Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991).   8. Shane White and Graham J. White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon, 2005); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).   9. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 10. Teague, ‘Introduction’, in Sound Recording Technology, n.p. 11. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 12. US Census 1940. Paul F. Peter, ‘The American Listener in 1940’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 213, no. 1 (1941): 1–8. 13. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170. 14. Rubén Gallo, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 15. Pamela Caughie, ‘Passing as Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 12, no. 3 (2005): 385–406 (403). 16. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18. 17. Caughie is interested in the experience of racial ambiguity that sound technologies enable, versus its consumption by white audiences as explored by Lisa Gitelman in Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 18. Rudolph Arnheim, Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 13–14. 19. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 45. 20. Gallo, Mexican Modernity, 164. 21. McCullers, Heart, 305. 22. Ibid., 309. 23. Stoever, Sonic Color Line. 24. Carson McCullers, Clock Without Hands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 240. 25. Ibid. 26. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), xv.

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27. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 23, 33–4, 252. 28. Ellison, Invisible Man, x. 29. Ibid., 232. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 94, 217. 32. See Millard, America on Record, 96, on Armstrong as ‘the voice of the phonograph’, with the African American technologised voice defining the medium even as audibility continued to be regulated by venues that banned white and Black performers from sharing a stage. 33. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 287. 34. Ellison, Invisible Man, 557. 35. Ellison steadily and staunchly defended him. Indeed, Armstrong may be called the hero of Ellison’s 1964 book of essays, Shadow and Act. O’Meally quotes Ellison’s essay ‘An Extravagance of Laughter’ to make the case for Armstrong’s jazz ‘as a rippling, subversive comic art’ in ‘Checking Our Balances’, in Uptown Conversation, 280–2. 36. Ellison, Invisible Man, 8. 37. Ibid. 38. Michael Borshuk, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006), 105; Jürgen E. Grandt, Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004); A. Timothy Spaulding, ‘Embracing Chaos in Narrative Form’, Callaloo 27, no. 2 (2004): 481–501. 39. Irving Settel, A Pictorial History of Radio (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967). 40. Ellison, Invisible Man, 443–4. 41. Michael Magee, ‘Tribes of New York: Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and the Poetics of the Five Spot’, Contemporary Literature 42, no. 4 (2001): 694–726 (701). Parts of this section of the chapter were previously published as ‘LeRoi Jones’s Radio and the Literary “Break” from Ellison to Burroughs’, African American Review 47, no. 2–3 (2014): 357–74. 42. Daniel Punday, ‘The Black Arts Movement and the Genealogy of Multimedia’, New Literary History 37, no. 4 (2006): 777–94 (779). 43. See Werner Sollors, The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); and Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delaney (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). 44. Amiri Baraka and William Harris, eds, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 12–13. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 200. 47. Ibid. 48. Mackey, Discrepant Engagement, 130–1; LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1971), 66. 49. Amiri Baraka, Three Books by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): The System of Dante’s Hell; The Dead Lecturer; Tales (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 20. 50. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg, eds, Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 209. 51. Ibid., 222. 52. Aldon Lynn Nielsen notes the ‘scant space’ Baraka receives in biographies and critical histories of the Beats for his work as an editor and a colleague, ‘a nexus for America’s first racially-integrated avant-garde’, in Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 118.

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53. Brion Gysin, Back in No Time (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 71, 126. 54. William Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 218. 55. Ibid. 56. Grauerholz and Silverberg, Word Virus, 295. 57. Baraka radio address, ‘Culture Language Media and Meaning’, Noropa University, Boulder, CO, 13 July 2006, AlternativeRadio.org. 58. Amiri Baraka, ‘Technology and Ethos’, in Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971), 155–7 (157). 59. Ibid. 60. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 365. 61. Grauerholz and Silverberg, Word Virus, 296. 62. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 810. 63. Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 12; Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 810 64. Ellison, Invisible Man, 8. 65. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 75. 66. David Witzling, Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2008). 67. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 887. See David Cowart, ‘“Unthinkable Order”: Music in Pynchon’, in Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 63–95. 68. See Witzling, Everybody’s America, 149, on the ‘political pointlessness’ of the novel’s satiric elements. 69. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1972), 160. 70. Ibid., 33. 71. Ibid., 203–4. 72. Thomas Pynchon, V. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1961), 248. 73. Ibid., 304. 74. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 470. 75. Ibid., 298, 761. 76. Bruce Allen Dick and Amritjit Singh, eds, Conversations with Ishmael Reed (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 62. 77. Cowart, ‘“Unthinkable Order”’, 87; Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 727. 78. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 727. 79. Dick and Singh, Conversations, 60–1. 80. Ishmael Reed, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020). Robert Elliot Fox identifies the black hole as ‘a concept [. . .] which has recently exerted a powerful effect on the creative imagination [. . .] of speculative fiction writers’ in ‘Blacking the Zero: Towards a Semiotics of Neo-Hoodoo’, Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 3 (1984): 95–9 (95). Patrick McGee describes ‘the Text of Jes Grew [as] the black hole at the center of Mumbo Jumbo’ in Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 114. 81. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 793, 727.

Select Bibliography Baker, Houston, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Borshuk, Michael, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006). Grandt, Jürgen E., Kinds of Blue: the Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).

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Mackey, Nathaniel, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Millard, Andre, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Murphet, Julian, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). Teague, Jessica E., Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Weheliye, Alexander G., Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). White, Shane and Graham J. White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon, 2005).

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14 Coded Sound: Reading in the Age of Networked Media Justin St. Clair

W

e read, as Garrett Stewart argues, by listening. Silent reading is never truly silent, for the words resound in our mind’s ear, a phonotext composed of sounds that often signify outside the bounds of graphical inscription. The aurality of ‘I scream in a freezer’, for example, compels readers to acknowledge the disjuncture between the printed text and its inevitably sounded transduction. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, the aurality of the literary novel evolved. While nineteenthcentury realism was characterised by what Mikhail Bakhtin termed heteroglossia (that is, ‘multi-voicedness’, or a diversity of languages and speech types), the advent of twentieth-century recording technologies – acoustic, electric, and digital – increasingly rendered the novel heterophonic (that is, multi-sounded, or characterised by a diversity of audio streams). The digital age is the most mediated in human history, and the proliferation of forms and content alike has provided literary novelists with a wealth of new material to remediate. This, in turn, has exacerbated the sounded gulf between the written and the read, challenging readers who must, on occasion, listen in concert, deploying collaborative, extratextual strategies for processing the media aurality encoded within contemporary fiction. As novelist Tom McCarthy recently told the New York Times, ‘literature, as a mode, or as a set of possibilities, only begins once we acknowledge being irreversibly embedded within networks that both precede and exceed us [. . .] once we acknowledge being irremediably mediated’.1 This chapter, then, examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) as a case study in coded sound, investigating how the novel utilises sound technologies and how such mediality suggests and engenders networked strategies of reading, strategies which allow readers to process sound that resonates beyond the graphical limits of the page. 2 Over the past several decades, few novels have been as daringly ambitious as Danielewski’s debut. House of Leaves is a tour de force, a dazzlingly vertiginous pastiche of styles and media forms. The novel’s nested narrators, ever unreliable, hold forth in prose and verse, from footnotes and appendices. There are journal entries, transcripts, and embedded quotations; interviews, letters, and miscellaneous lists; commentaries on commentaries and word games galore. We get inverted text, mirror text, text laid out like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, red-letter embellishment (featuring not Jesus but the Minotaur), faux-links in blue ink, and even a forty-two-page index containing terms that both appear (verbigeration, transubstantiation, rumination, echolocation, immolation) and do not appear (defenestration, premeditation) in the novel. Throughout, House of Leaves exhibits a relentless engagement – both

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structurally and thematically – with the logic and grammar of diverse forms of artistic expression, including everything from audio-imaging and cinematography to architecture and graphic design. ‘As if learning about omnivorous appetite from the computer’, writes Katherine Hayles, ‘House of Leaves, in a frenzy of remediation, attempts to eat all the other media.’3 As a consequence, the novel defies easy summarisation. An existential horror story, of sorts, House of Leaves has, at its unsettling centre, an impossible house, the interior dimensions of which exceed those of its exterior – first by a quarter of an inch and then, after the discovery of a mysterious hallway, immeasurably. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Will Navidson,4 who moves into the house with his wife and children, soon decides to make a documentary. He gathers the requisite equipment, puts together an expedition team, and sets off into the abyss. Carnage ensues. The resulting film is apparently lost (or perhaps does not exist, even within the world of the novel), but readers get an account of its contents nonetheless thanks to Zampanò, a mysterious, blind critic who has somehow screened a copy with the help, it would appear, of his many amanuenses. All of this is framed by the unreliable annotations of Johnny Truant, a troubled tattooist’s assistant who discovers The Navidson Record – not the film, but Zampanò’s eponymous exegesis – in a trunk following the critic’s apparently violent death. Johnny organises the fragments of the partially destroyed manuscript, admitting, on occasion, to a few sly alterations. As he comes increasingly unhinged, Johnny adds his own commentary and digressive adventures (both real and invented) to the novel’s many footnotes. To complicate matters even further, an additional set of footnotes attributed to ‘the Editors’ and encrypted letters from Johnny’s mother, Pelafina, which appear in the index, add competing claims on the novel’s already convoluted narrative hierarchy. The locus of authority is altogether indeterminate: House of Leaves is, in essence, a bit like Pale Fire with at least three additional layers. Ever contested in the novel’s fan-driven digital afterlife – from twenty-year-old discussion boards to recent random subreddits – is the question of who has written whom. While Danielewski’s deft handling of horror tropes has cemented the novel’s status as a cult favourite, much of House of Leaves’ appeal can be linked to its intense and persistent gamification. With a series of nested, unreliable voices, Danielewski destabilises the narrative’s epistemic structure, leaving readers ever unsure of the veracity of the novel’s fictional particulars. Simultaneously, he dangles a series of proverbial carrots, constantly tantalising the audience with the possibility of a solution to the central question of narrative genesis. We encounter puns and typos, malapropisms and Freudian slips, acronyms and elaborate acrostics, omissions, deletions, excisions – everything seems to suggest a clue, a code, a cipher. The more we search for these apparently meaningful puzzles, the more we find; the more we find, the more we solve; the more we solve, the more we search. It is a kind of addictive semiosis, a self-motivating cycle of compulsive textual engagement. Ultimately, the experience of textual navigation is House of Leaves’ defining feature, its governing characteristic. There is no fixed trajectory, and given the competing narrative registers, the experimentation with typographical layout, and the inclusion of countless puzzles, readers rarely – if ever – manage to trace the same track through the book. One of the ways that Danielewski complicates navigation (while simultaneously underscoring the disjuncture between the visuality of print and its aural evocalisation) is by allowing fonts to signify extralinguistically.5 Readers quickly realise that

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the various narrators have each been afforded a separate font: Zampanò’s words are set in Times New Roman, Johnny’s in Courier, the Editors’ in Bookman, and Pelafina’s in Dante.6 While this serves as a visual indicator to help readers track the various voices, it can also, on occasion, dissuade them from toggling among narrators – choosing, for example, to stay with Zampanò’s Times New Roman rather than digressing into Johnny’s Courier (or vice versa). The extensive use of footnotes – and footnoted footnotes, to say nothing of those suggesting that the appendices be consulted – can have a similar effect, as it is often legitimately difficult, after bouncing along the bottom of multiple pages, to wend one’s way back to the appropriate passage. Moreover, portions of the book are laid out in a fashion that suggests no intuitive point of entry, leaving readers without so much as a clue as to which quadrant of the page to prioritise. And then there is the problem of all those damn puzzles: start working your way through one of the novel’s many acrostics and you are likely to lose your bearings entirely. As a result, House of Leaves is routinely categorised as an ergodic novel. Originating with Espen J. Aarseth’s oft-quoted Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), the neologism is a useful way of emphasising the critical interface between form and user in cybertextual constructions. ‘The concept of cybertext’, Aarseth notes, focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim.7 For the reader of a traditional text, Aarseth argues, activity occurs only in the mind (excepting, of course, what he deems ‘trivial’ actions, such as ‘eye movements and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages’8). Cybertexts, however, demand an embodied response. ‘During the cybertextual process’, he writes, ‘the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction.’9 Finding no readily available adjective to describe this process, Aarseth married the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path) to arrive at ergodic. A novel like House of Leaves, then, is ergodic in the sense that ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’.10 Turning the pages will not suffice. Instead, readers create a workpath through the novel: they must rotate the book this way and that to access inverted material; they must hold the book to a looking glass to read mirrored text; they must choose which tangents to pursue, footnotes to follow, puzzles to solve, pathways to take. Thus, ‘a chain of events (a path, a sequence of actions, etc.) has been produced by the nontrivial efforts’ of the reader, and this special type of participatory engagement – what we might call the selective play of the user – creates something distinct from (and in a certain sense more relevant than) narrative action.11 While Aarseth’s paradigm is an interesting and useful way to think about how an audience engages House of Leaves (and, indeed, other works of sounded fiction), it might not, as he seems to suggest, entirely eclipse traditional reader-response theory. Interpretive communities, in particular, are especially pertinent to the navigation of ergodic fiction. In literary studies, the idea of the interpretive community is most closely associated with Stanley Fish, who complains that when the Right is not busy trotting him out as the posterchild for relativism, everyone else is misunderstanding

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his signature dance move. Conservatives have mostly moved on to other strawmen (namely critical race theory), but Fish may have something of a point. ‘An interpretive community’, Fish clarifies, is not a community of people who share a point of view or a set of interests, for example, the community of Star Wars fans. An interpretive community is a community made up of people who by virtue of their education and initiation in practice now have consciousnesses which are in a sense community specific. They walk around the workplace or their arena of practice, and merely by looking out, see that arena or workplace already organized in specific ways that are meaningful, in ways that can be read.12 To put it another way, then, Fish understands his coinage to reflect a self-effacing, ideological construction rather than a self-selecting fandom. As a direct result of membership of which they are likely unaware, Fish contends, readers in an interpretive community manifest a group-specific set of practices and assumptions which they deploy automatically and without reflection. Fish’s clarification is entirely sensible. Nonetheless, the misapplication of the term (that is, the commonplace understanding that, say, a self-selecting group of hardcore punk fans also represents an interpretive community) is not unreasonable. More often than not, I would argue, and particularly in cases in which the fan community is a relatively close-knit subcultural formation, the interest group (joined voluntarily and cognisantly on the basis of shared affinities) is but a subset of a larger, invisible group, one with the kind of ideological interpretive predilections that Fish has identified. In other words, a community of people who share a point of view or a set of interests, to repeat Fish’s language, is quite often composed of those who already belong – unknowingly – to the same interpretive community, and who, seeing the world through similar filters of meaning, gather together under the banner of some specific fandom. For this reason, I make little attempt in this chapter to distinguish between interpretive communities in the sense Fish intends and fandoms engaged in interpretation. There may be a difference, to be sure, but the processes are inextricably interwoven: on the basis of pre-existing ideological lenses, fan groups hash out canonical readings of their chosen texts, the negotiations of which, as a kind of education and initiation in practice, ineluctably colour the community-specific consciousness of group members. Online interpretive communities are central to Danielewski’s art and reception. In fact, Danielewski timed the launch of houseofleaves.com to coincide with the publication of the novel and its companion soundtrack, Haunted (which his pop-singing sister, Poe, simultaneously released on Atlantic Records). The website’s discussion forum (which has since been transferred to markzdanielewski.com) quickly became the central hub for an online community of readers, who, in threads by the thousands and posts by the tens-of-thousands, dissected, hypothesised, and fabricated. The readings produced in the forum – which is still active – run the gamut, from the asinine rantings of trolls and subliterate paranoiacs to the perceptive (and helpful) observations of careful obsessives. Over the past twenty years, the online community has produced an overwhelming amount of material, so much commentary, in fact, that it transcends the exegetical. Instead of merely annotating or explicating, the community has positioned itself as the omphalos of an extensive transmedia experience, rendering the actual

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book but one ‘part of a much larger network of information processing, one that operates across media platforms in real-time and connects many different readers’.13 One of the most notable aspects of the integration of House of Leaves into an information-processing network is the phenomenon of crowdsourced interpretation. The novel, as I note above, is suffused with puzzles and ostensible clues, which, in aggregate, elude the capacity of any first-time reader. Indeed, even repeat visitors, working alone, are typically unable to process all of Danielewski’s inclusions – some are well hidden and inevitably go unnoticed, others require specialised knowledge or a particular skillset. Take, for example, the endpapers of the hardcover edition. The pastedown and flyleaf of the front and rear covers contain hundreds of lines of hexadecimal code, arranged in four-character increments. Here are the first two lines, which represent approximately 1 per cent of the entire sequence: 464F 524D 0000 2A9E 4149 4646 434F 4D4D 0000 0012 0001 0000 2A6F 0008 400B AC44 0000 0000 0000 5353 4E44 0000 2A9E 4149 4646 434F 4D4D 0000 0012 0001 0000 2A6F 0008 400B AC44 0000 0000 0000 5353 4E44 2A77 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0101 0200 0404 0002 0101 0102 0101 0103 06FF 0201 0000 0800 0000 02FE 0202 0001 0000 0000 0001 0101 0200 0404 0002 0101 0102 0101 0103 06FF 0201 0000 0800 000014 Many readers are likely to overlook the endpapers entirely, or, as I first did on purchasing the book, assume the code to be nothing more than a quirky design element. Typeset in miniscule four- or five-point font, the hexadecimal string is easily mistaken for visual decoration. Even if it is immediately recognised as hex code, however, and assumed to have a significance beyond the symbolic, it cannot be read directly by cognoscenti – that is to say, it cannot be sight read in the same way that a francophone might easily parse the novel’s French. Instead, the code must be processed, algorithmically converted into something that human readers might find meaningful. And this, as Aarseth would have it, is decidedly non-trivial work. As a result, readers wishing to pursue this particular path but not accustomed to tinkering with hex code inevitably turn to the novel’s information-processing network: the House of Leaves forum. ‘Has anyone converted [this] from hex and tried to run it?’ asks a representative user, who, a bit late to the party, is immediately ridiculed for his inability to uncover earlier threads on the topic.15 Nonetheless, this is precisely the pattern we find throughout the community: a reader discovers an ostensible clue and crowdsources its interpretation by posting the discovery and soliciting assistance. The question of the hex code puzzle in House of Leaves was first taken up by the Angry Psychos community, subscribers to an email list founded in the mid-1990s by fans of Mark Danielewski’s sister, the pop singer Poe.16 The siblings were asked about the endpaper code during a joint Yahoo! Chat event in November of 2000. Mark acknowledged that people were ‘on the right track’, but refused to provide additional information.17 ‘I can’t just give away secrets’, he demurred.18 His sister, on the other hand, was more direct: ‘Program it and see’, she advised.19 Within a matter of days, Poe fans – apparently lacking access to a flatbed scanner and OCR software20 – had discerned the file type, hand-keyed the entire string, and posted the results to various fan sites and discussion forums. The header, they discovered, revealed the code to be that of an audio file.21 Once the entire sequence of 20,000-odd characters was keyed

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into a hex editor and saved as an .aiff, the resulting file could be played on any computer: it was a two-second audio snippet of Poe’s 1996 near-hit, ‘Angry Johnny’.22 Despite its brevity, the sound file is deeply unsettling. What eventual listeners hear is not lifted directly from Poe’s album Hello (1995), but has been eerily distorted. The singer’s voice is shrouded, emerging through digital static as though phoned in on a bad line from some alternate realm. The effect audibly reinforces the novel’s recurring evocation of existential dread and, simultaneously, is an actualisation of what one of Danielewski’s characters calls ‘Rumpled Technology’, an appeal to authenticity though the aesthetics of wear.23 We get but a word-and-a-half in the resulting sound file: ‘Johnny, angr–’. The long E that should end the second word is curtailed, snuffed out just as soon as it begins. In fact, given the clip’s duration, truncation, and distortion, Danielewski fans unfamiliar with his sister’s music often have no idea what they are hearing. ‘My ears must be failing me, either that or my memory of the book’, offers one contributor to the House of Leaves forum. ‘What exactly is that AIFF saying? I hear something like “sewing ang,” which I know is nowhere near anything.’24 Readers who finally do realise what the clip contains are still left wondering what it portends. As with many of Danielewski’s puzzles, the endpaper hex code is a concatenation of clues. First, readers must discover what the endpapers are (a coded file, not cyber-decoration). Next, they must render the code into a format intelligible to the human sensorium (audible sound waves, not abstract numerals). Thereafter, they must recognise the linguistic content embedded within the audio file (‘Johnny, angry’, not ‘sewing ang’). And, finally, they must determine whether the message itself is, in fact, significant, or whether it is little more than a meaningless dead end, a playfully embedded Easter egg that contributes nothing but second-order decoration to the sprawling novel. In this particular case, I would contend, Danielewski’s coded message is doubly meaningful, providing readers with possible clues as to the narrative’s ostensible inception and to its navigation as well. By imprinting the endpapers with a portion of the novel’s soundtrack, Danielewski has – in a literal sense – framed the print experience of House of Leaves with his sister’s music. This echoes a number of other passages in the novel that also nudge the reader outside the printed volume and into a larger discourse network, while simultaneously suggesting that music may offer an interpretational strategy for contextualising and processing various textual elements. Near the end of the novel proper, for example, we get a pair of staves, which, printed vertically on facing pages, compel anyone interested in reading the music to rotate the book ninety degrees in a counterclockwise direction.25 The stave on the right (or above, after rotation) contains a pickup note and four bars of music. The one on the left (or below, after rotation) is completely blank: no clef, no time signature, no barlines, nothing. Much like the endpaper hex code, this musical notation requires non-trivial work on the part of the reader – admittedly less effort, however, for those proficient in sight-reading music, as they need not employ machine conversion to arrive at the resulting melody. The song is either ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ or ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’, which for most of their respective histories have been sung to essentially the same tune. For most American readers, the former is probably more familiar, a rousing Civil War era song about the cessation of hostilities that effectively glorifies war by celebrating a soldier’s heroic return. In contrast, ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ is a far darker tale of Irish conscription, in which the eponym returns from battle abroad badly disfigured and fit only to beg.

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While readers cannot be entirely certain which song to map atop the novel’s Johnny Truant, the latter is a decidedly better bet.26 In a similar fashion, the blank stave is also an ambiguous, if suggestive, inclusion. Like much of the novel’s other negative space, it offers an actual, demarcated site for writerly activity on the part of the reader – a direct invitation, in this case, to replace textual lacunae with music. Given the position of the empty stave, readers might initially suspect that the next four bars of ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ would be an appropriate transcription. On closer examination, however, careful observers will note that due to the translucency of the paper, not only is the printed content from the previous page visible, but the bleed-through also aligns perfectly with the unmarked stave. On the obverse, Navidson – nearing the end of his final expedition and lost in the deep spaces of his own cavernous house – is ‘derailed by some tune now wedged in his head’.27 Just before his film runs out, he clears his throat and sings, ‘Daisy. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy over the love of you’, before muttering, ‘That’s not right.’28 He is correct: the lyric is not quite right. The line from the popular Victorian tune ‘Daisy Bell’ (aka ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’) is ‘I’m half crazy all for the love of you’, far less ambiguous than Navidson’s prepositional replacement (which might suggest, alternately, that the speaker is either half-crazy because of his love or half-crazy because he has moved on, fallen out – is over his beloved, to put it in the parlance of the present). Film buffs immediately recognise the reference: it recasts the moment near the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when the remaining astronaut, David Bowman, finally begins to deactivate HAL 9000. The malevolent AI asks whether Bowman would like to hear a song, and when he answers in the affirmative, it proceeds to deliver a pre-programmed version of ‘Daisy Bell’, its pitch dropping as modules are disconnected. Winding down, HAL pre-echoes Navidson by slurring ‘all for’, which comes out nearer the situationally appropriate ‘o-ver’. Danielewski’s appropriation of the scene, moreover, is doubly referential as the use of ‘Daisy Bell’ in 2001: A Space Odyssey is itself an allusion to what the Library of Congress calls ‘the earliest known recording of a computer-synthesised voice singing a song’.29 In 1961 computer music pioneer Max Matthews along with vocoder developers John Kelly and Carol Lochbaum programmed an IBM mainframe at Bell Laboratories to sing, in a manner of speaking, a robotic rendition of ‘Daisy Bell’. Given the technology of the day, the result was as ‘flat as a dial tone’, but nonetheless impressive.30 When Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kubrick’s co-writer on the screenplay, witnessed a demonstration soon thereafter, the seed for the famous scene was planted. For Danielewski, then, coded music represents both an interface between media forms and also a mode of toggling between subject positions, be they human/machine, reader/writer, or viewer/listener. As many of the novel’s puzzles directly encourage the audience to engage the text by incorporating paratextual music, readers increasingly find reason to use sensory faculties beyond the visual. The pivotal chapter that contains the unmarked stave, for example, opens with two epigraphs, the first attributed to Poe, the second in Braille. At first blush, the Poe quotation – which concerns navigating the underworld unassisted – appears to have been lifted from the oeuvre of Edgar Allan. It was not. Like the endpaper hex code, the quotation originates with Danielewski’s musical sister, but the attribution gives no such clarification (nor does it indicate that the line has been appropriated from the title track of her debut album).31 The Braille,

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meanwhile, playfully trumpets the unreadability of the text, ‘[e]ven to the keenest eye or most sentient fingertip’.32 Indeed, the inscription is unembossed, so fingertips are of no use. Moreover, as most people proficient in Braille are visually impaired, readers with keen eyes are also unlikely to make much sense of the epigraph as it stands. Fortunately, ‘the Editors’ have provided a footnote that purports to render the Braille in Latin script. And so it does, with one notable exception: where the footnote reads ‘You will never find a mark there’, the Braille in question, properly transcribed, actually declares ‘You will never find Mark there.’33 Ultimately, the two epigraphs that open the novel’s twentieth chapter highlight the limitations of traditional modes of reading (individual, visual) while simultaneously blurring attribution in a fashion designed to redirect interpretive lines of inquiry. In addition to the ambiguity inherent in crediting ‘Poe’ for a line on solitary visitors to the underworld, the Editors’ transcription of the Braille text closes with the unusual attribution ‘ – [Illegible]’.34 Indubitably, it is this particular detail that sends many readers (as it did me) on a mission to decipher the Braille.35 What does the illegible portion contain? Why were the Editors unable to read it? Is the transcription accurate? Etc., etc. It turns out, rather amusingly, that the ‘–[Illegible]’ tag has been transcribed verbatim from the Braille epigraph, right down to the editorial brackets. While this sheds no light whatsoever on the putative source of the quotation (or its fictional copyist, for that matter), it does re-emphasise the novel’s central conundrum regarding narrative transmission. Furthermore, readers goaded into pursuing the illegible, so to speak, eventually land outside the novel, attempting to decode the Braille by consulting paratextual resources or, more commonly, crowdsourcing their questions in the online community.36 In either case, persistent readers who eventually find ‘Mark’ (where they are told they never will) in concert with his sister (warning against solitary endeavours) are encouraged to continue seeking answers in assemblage, that is, in a dual sense, assemblage as both process (the aggregation of disparate data) and form (following Katherine Hayles, ‘a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and remediate one another’37). In the final analysis, the most significant sounded element of House of Leaves is literally illegible. In other words, it is not the visually accessible music enfolded within the book’s covers but rather the recorded component of the novel’s networked assemblage – Poe’s album, Haunted – that allows readers to disambiguate the narrative’s competing voices and decode the novel’s locus of authority. Released simultaneously, the book and the CD were deliberately cross-marketed, the rear cover of the novel even emblazoned with Poe’s logo and a message encouraging readers to listen to the house . . . ‘HAUNTED’ The new CD from Poe on Atlantic Records www.p-o-e.com38 In the months to follow, Danielewski and Poe repeatedly cross-promoted their media assemblage, urging their respective audiences to consider the book and its music in tandem. Disappointed with the album’s lack of radio play, for example, Poe remixed the song, ‘Hey Pretty’, to include snippets of her brother reading from the novel.39 The single immediately gained traction, and Danielewski subsequently appeared alongside his sister to perform the spoken-word selections live – from the opening slot on tour with Depeche

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Mode to an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.40 It was, in other words, a windfall of promotional synergy that literary practitioners rarely encounter. Nevertheless, the relationship between Poe’s CD and Danielewski’s book was – and remains – decidedly more than a marketing ploy, for ‘clues to deciphering some of the novel’s mysteries actually exist outside the oversized book and in its sibling soundtrack’.41 Ultimately, the central question of House of Leaves’ nested narrative structure – whose tale is this? – finds its most significant hint, as Jessica Pressman convincingly argues, in Poe’s music.42 To make a long and rather convoluted story short, Johnny Truant, in the novel proper, stumbles across a band playing ‘The Five and a Half Minute Hallway’ – a song, enterprising readers eventually discover, that occupies the pivotal midpoint of Poe’s CD.43 Those who seek out the CD are rewarded: Poe’s lyrics suggest to careful listeners that Pelafina is, in fact, ‘the author of both Truant and Zampanò’, thereby ‘provid[ing] a key to [. . .] the central enigma in House of Leaves’.44 As a novel, House of Leaves can be comfortably read as occupying a multiplicity of nodes in the history of literary fiction. Most obviously, its heterophonic obsession with competing media forms marks it as the evident progeny of high postmodernism, echoing everything from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Perhaps less apparent to literary historians, however, is the novel’s position as a work of soundtracked fiction, that smaller subset of print works – including Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985) and Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996) – for which recorded, musical complements have been produced. Danielewski, however, accomplished several things that his predecessors never managed to achieve. First and foremost, he succeeded in creating a digital interpretive community, one that has proven persistent and regenerative, continuously existing in some format for more than two decades. While this community was arguably seeded and nourished by a decidedly corporate infrastructure – House of Leaves was published by Pantheon,45 after all, and Poe was signed to Atlantic Records – it thrived largely due to the formal structure of Danielewski’s gamified fiction. By embedding a welter of puzzles, riddles, and tantalising ambiguities into the very fabric of his narrative, Danielewski has inveigled successive generations of readers, most of whom wend their way, eventually, to the Web for assistance. Second, Danielewski outstripped his precursors by rendering both the book’s soundtrack and its digital community an integral part of the interpretive experience. Not only is Poe’s album an essential component of House of Leaves, but the interpretations generated by the novel’s online community also serve as an indispensable resource for those navigating the multimedia assemblage, allowing readers to process and decode sound that resonates beyond the graphical limits of the novel’s pages.

Notes   1. ‘Tom McCarthy Thinks the Wrong Kurt Vonnegut Book is Famous’, New York Times, 20 January 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/books/review/tom-mccarthy-bythe-book-interview.html.   2. Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Justin St. Clair, Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of ‘Books That Sing’ (New York: Routledge, 2022). Used with permission.  3. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’, American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 779–806 (781).

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  4. Both Will Navidson and his Pulitzer are entirely fictional. The prize-winning photograph described in the novel, however, is clearly based on Kevin Carter’s March 1993 photo of a starving Sudanese child with a vulture lurking in the background. Carter committed suicide months after receiving his prize, an unsettling real-life backdrop to the existential horror of the novel.   5. It should be emphasised that Danielewski did not leave typographical and layout choices to a book designer, but insisted on doing it himself. ‘Mark Z. Danielewski drafted the original manuscript for his breakthrough novel House of Leaves (2000) in longhand, then revised it with a word processor’, notes Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. ‘But after he signed a book contract with Pantheon to publish it, he flew (at his own expense) to New York City, set up shop in his publisher’s offices, and taught himself QuarkXPress in order to do the typesetting – he didn’t wish to entrust any of the staff designers with his vision for the typographic effects so central to the book.’ Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203.   6. The names of several of these fonts have obvious overtones that resonate within the world of the novel – an editor is, pardon the dad-joke, a Bookman; Dante conjures the Inferno, fitting for Pelafina; and so on. Many readers, moreover, use the font choices as ‘evidence’ to support theories regarding the source of the narrative. The cover of House of Leaves, for example, appears to be set in Dante (or a variant thereof), leading some to argue that all of this, ultimately, is Pelafina’s tale.   7. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1.   8. Ibid., 2.   9. Ibid., 1. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 94. Aarseth uses a football match to clarify the distinction between narrative and ergodic function. ‘For instance’, he writes, ‘both stories and games of football consist of a succession of events. But even though stories might be told about it, a football match is not in itself a story. The actions within the game are not narrative actions.’ Ibid. 12. Scott Parker, ‘Interview with Stanley Fish’, Philosophy Now 116 (2016), https://philosophynow.org/issues/116/Stanley_Fish. 13. Jessica Pressman, ‘House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel’, Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1 (2006): 107–28 (114). 14. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000). These are the first 312 characters found on the interior pastedown. 15. whtdrkness, 06-14-2002, 08:27 AM, ‘Hexadecimal on inside covers’, https://forums. markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/2329-hexadecimal-oninside-covers. 16. The story of the initial solution of the endpaper hex code appeared on the now-defunct Poe fansite http://www.polishchick.com as ‘House of Leaves Hex Code’. It is archived at https:// web.archive.org/web/20010409232854/http://www.polishchick.com/features/holhex.shtml. 17. Chat capture, quoted in ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Optical character recognition. 21. The opening thirty-two bits, ‘464F 524D’, when converted to ASCII, is a chunk ID that reads ‘FORM’. The next four bytes, ‘0000 2A9E’, is a so-called unsigned long, providing the file length, 10,910 bytes. The subsequent sixty-four bits, ‘4149 4646 434F 4D4D’, reads ‘AIFFCOMM’, indicating that what follows is encoded in Apple’s Audio Interchange File Format.

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22. Poe’s album Hello (1996) peaked at no. 71 on the Billboard album chart; the single ‘Angry Johnny’ hit no. 7 on the ‘Modern Rock Tracks’ chart, its video receiving significant airplay on MTV. 23. On the embrace of the decay inherent in an off-the-shelf, do-it-yourself approach to media reproduction, the fictional commentator Murphy Gruner remarks, ‘These days nothing deserves our faith less than the slick and expensive.’ Danielewski, House of Leaves, 144. 24. chris_adams, 06-09-2001, 10:18 PM, ‘Hexcode Aiff’, https://forums.markzdanielewski. com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/53-hexcode-aiff. 25. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 478–9. 26. The character Johnny Truant is physically disfigured by his traumatic childhood: he is scarred by his mother (boiling oil) and loses half a tooth to his foster father (a beating). 27. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 476. 28. Ibid., 477. 29. ‘Registry Titles with Descriptions and Expanded Essays’, Library of Congress, National Recording Preservation Board, https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/ recording-registry/descriptions-and-essays/. 30. Cary O’Dell, ‘“Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)”: Max Mathews, John L. Kelly, Jr., and Carol Lochbaum (1961)’, in ‘Registry Titles with Descriptions and Expanded Essays’, Library of Congress, National Recording Preservation Board, https://www.loc.gov/static/ programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/DaisyBell.pdf. 31. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 423. The epigraph in question was taken from ‘Hello’, the lead track on Poe’s 1995 album of the same name. 32. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 423. 33. Ibid. The difference between ‘a mark’ and ‘Mark’ in Grade 2 Braille is but the movement of a single dot in a single cell from position 1 to position 3. 34. Ibid. 35. ‘Okay: I tackled the braille, because I wanted to see just how the last part was “illegible” and decided to take a crack at the entire thing while I was at it’, posts one such user in the House of Leaves forum. OriginalIdea, 06-30-2005, 03:37 AM, ‘Epigraphs’, https://forums. markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/3880-epigraphs. 36. The earliest reference to the Mark/a mark slippage I could find was the following post in the House of Leaves forum: Booklad, 10-29-2001, 11:00 PM, ‘Footnote/Braille’, https:// forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/824-footnotebraille. 37. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 263–90 (278). 38. Danielewski, House of Leaves, back cover. As is the case throughout the book, the word ‘house’ appears in blue. The website www.p-o-e.com is no longer active. Later printings direct readers to www.realpoe.com, which is also inactive. Following the release of Haunted, Poe became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of her music. She has kept a relatively low artistic profile in recent years, and to date has not released another album. 39. Jill Pesselnich, ‘The Modern Age’, Billboard, 9 June 2001, 84. 40. The Conan O’Brien appearance is available on YouTube – at least for now. To put it charitably, no part of the cringeworthy performance stands the test of time. 41. Pressman, ‘House of Leaves’, 114. 42. Ibid., 107–28. 43. Timewise, that is. It is the eighth track (of seventeen). Runtime on the first eight tracks is 35:30; on the final nine, 35:28. This is the kind of compulsive nonsense the novel engenders. 44. Pressman, ‘House of Leaves’, 115–16. For a full explanation of the trail of breadcrumbs leading from the novel to its soundtrack and onwards to The Whalestoe Letters (a standalone volume of Pelafina’s letters published a half year after House of Leaves, most, but not all of

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which appear in the novel’s appendices), see Pressman, ‘House of Leaves’. Whalestoe, incidentally, is an anagram for ‘whose tale’, further confirmation, it would seem, of the ‘Pelafina solution’ to the central riddle. Pressman also notes that other aspects of Poe’s soundtrack also support this reading, including the song ‘Spanish Doll’. Ibid., 126. 45. Pantheon is an imprint of Random House, owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.

Select Bibliography Aarseth, Espen J., Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Danielewski, Mark Z., House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000). Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’, American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 779–806. Poe, Haunted (New York: Atlantic Records, 2000). St. Clair, Justin, Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening (New York: Routledge, 2013). ———, Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of ‘Books That Sing’ (New York: Routledge, 2022). Stewart, Garrett, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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15 Media Affordances of Literary Audio: Interrelations of Format and Form Jason Camlot

T

here is an entire world of literary life and activity that has yet to be discovered because it lies engraved on cylinders and discs or has been transduced into patterns of iron oxide on long bands of tape, left to wait silently in cardboard sleeves or boxes. Since the introduction of sound recording technologies in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and especially since the 1950s with the introduction of portable tape recording, writers and artists have documented their performances of literary works, events, and conversations with creative abandon and technical implication. This chapter considers the significance of a selection of audio media technologies and formats (wax cylinder, acetate flat disc, long-playing transcription disc, reel-to-reel tape, audio, cassette tape, digital audio files [i.e. WAV, MP3]) for the historical forms that literary sound recordings have taken over the past century. What impacts might the material substances and formats of recording media, and the physical design and features of historical recording media technologies, have had on the ways sound recording was used to capture and voice the audible features of the literary? How have those media informed our relationship to literary performance, events, activities, and the idea of ‘the literary’ itself? Rehearsing a series of miniature case studies from different periods in the history of literature and sound recording to illustrate the relationship between media affordances and audiotextual forms, this chapter will formulate concepts and categories for analysing sonically mediated literary works. The chapter will close with some speculation on the status of such material historical considerations in the context of the digitisation of literary sound from analogue to digital formats, and on a newly complex, ontological poetics of metadata that arises in our attempt to describe the nature of a historical literary sound recording for use in our digitally mediated present. I use the term ‘audiotext’ to describe the audible literary entity that functions in relation to the affordances of media formats. As I have explained elsewhere, an audiotext ‘is an interpretive concept by which sound is conceptualized as a signal with ideational, aesthetic, social, cultural, and formal qualities of historical significance’.1 My focus in this chapter will mostly be on the formal qualities and affordances of audiotexts as they interact with the affordances of media formats. I will now explain what I mean when I posit this scenario of formal–formatic interaction.

Technology, Media, Format, Generic Form Knowledge of the technology and media formats used to produce and replay an audio record is useful for understanding an audiotext. In most cases today, this will entail

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some understanding of the historical media technology used to produce the early sound recording, as well as an understanding of other media through or to which that original recording has been transferred for either convenience or preservation purposes. It will also demand some appreciation of the differences between the digital media technologies we are most likely using to hear and work with our audiotexts today, and the earlier relevant forms. Why does it matter? Sound recording media in many ways shape and continue to shape what we listen to and how and why we listen. An instrument-centred understanding of sound recording represents one initial approach to revealing the social meanings and cultural imaginary that surrounded the material source of our object of study. Further, knowledge of how the machine worked, and how it worked on the medium it employed for capture, preservation, and playback, is necessary to grasp the practical techniques deployed by performers and users of the technology, and functions as a basis for interpreting the applications, processes, and protocols that informed its use. Beyond an attempt to grasp the historical situation that informed the applications and social and cultural significance of sound recording during a particular historical period, knowledge of the instruments of sound recording and production is also relevant to an understanding of the processes of preservation, migration, and transformation of the sounds we wish to study. All of this said, an artefact-based understanding of the instrument (the phonograph, the gramophone, the microphone and electrical recorder, the tape machine, the digital recorder and digital audio workstation [DAW]) does not necessitate a deterministic approach to unpacking the cultural and social processes that were associated with a particular media technology. Rather, one can imagine a middle ground between technological realism (which stresses the properties of objects in constraining human use of technological artefacts) and constructivism (which views technologies in terms of open discursive practices surrounding the object) by thinking of media and technologies in terms of their affordances, that is, the ‘functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’.2 New media (of different historical moments) are not necessarily epochal in their influence, but exist in concert and negotiation with social and cultural structures that existed before their introduction, and persist (in altered ways, ongoingly) long after their appearance. As Carolyn Marvin has argued, the history of a new medium begins when users and audiences become organised around it. The focus of social and cultural significance related to a new medium, from this perspective, ‘is shifted from the instrument to the drama in which existing groups perpetually negotiate power, authority, representation, and knowledge with whatever resources are available’.3 Those resources may include the capacities of a new medium, the capabilities of older media, and most likely will include an interesting combination of both, resulting in a complex tangle of discursive threads to unravel and weave into an explicative, historical narrative. The very terms ‘technology’ and ‘media’ (and ‘format’ – a term I have privileged in my title) are rich with meaning and the beneficiaries of elaborate critical heritages, most productively over the last twenty-five years, developed in the fields of sociology, and communications and media studies. ‘Rich’ may be perceived by some as a euphemism for ‘slippery’ or ‘imprecise’ but I am less interested in providing a single definition of each term than in presenting the critical potential of these terms as they can be mobilised in particular critical situations towards a diverse range of aims and ends. And so, in line with theorists of the social construction of technology (a theory that has

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earned its own acronymic acronym, SCOT), I am content to approach ‘technology’ as a term with multiple layers that refers to material artefacts (say, the phonograph), activities and processes (phonographic record making and playback), and the manifestations of knowledge about these first two categories in the forms of design and technical applications (phonographic invention and modification).4 Paying attention to media formats helps us understand the historical specificity of a medium and enables us to discuss issues ranging from the material and design features of a medium to protocols and processes of use (and intentional misuse) to different kinds of ideations associated with the medium. As Jonathan Sterne discusses the importance of this critical category, ‘Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology can operate.’5 As with media technologies themselves, media formats are often hidden from view until they become an issue, such as when cars stopped being furnished with tape decks, or more recently, when your 1/8″ headphone jack can no longer fit into your iPhone without a Lightning adapter. Suddenly, a media format you did not think much about becomes an artefact to behold because you can no longer use it without confronting its specifications. Beyond considering the format histories of audiotextual forms, it can be interesting and useful to imagine an analytic schema for approaching questions of relationship between literary forms and audio media formats, by cataloguing some of the most prominent affordances of audio media technologies, and considering them in relation to similarly prominent affordances of literary genres. Such a schema will provide a useful conceptual framework for thinking about the often closely bound workings of audiotextual forms and the material platforms and formats by and through which we experience them. Caroline Levine has adapted the concept of affordances from design theory to the consideration of text-based literary forms by asking such questions as, ‘What is a walled enclosure or a rhyming couplet capable of doing?’ She answers her own question with the observation that ‘each shape or pattern, social or literary, lays claim to a limited range of potentialities’.6 Epigrams are useful for expressing stinging zingers, sonnets for the unfolding of a compressed train of thought and emotion, haiku for communicating intensive, overdetermined images, novels for the extensive exploration of character, intertwined plot, and subtle shifts in narrative perspective. When avant-garde artists explore the boundaries of their chosen generic form – as when Alain Robbe-Grillet experimented with the nouveau roman (the new novel) by avoiding discernible plot, or David Antin with the talk poem when he composed poems by talking for an hour before a live audience and then recorded, transcribed, shaped, and published those talks as poems – they are pushing against the limits of a genre’s expressive affordances. Sometimes the relationship between a generic form and a media format results in a similar kind of limit-point confrontation, as when early recording era record companies adapted novels by Charles Dickens to fourminute wax cylinders.7 Some key affordances of audio media technologies that seem most relevant to literary audiotextual forms, and the formation of modes of literary audition and mediated engagement fall into the following categories: • Recordability (Read/Write): Can the media technology record and play media or does it only play pre-recorded media?

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• Portability: To what extent can the media technology be moved easily and thus be used in a variety of spaces and contexts, for recording and playing? • Storage Capacity: How much time can the media format hold and play back without pause or disruption? As a time-based medium, this affordance of sound recording media technologies has significant implications for the formal length and performance speed of an audiotext. It determines the duration of an audiotext, in ways that books (which can vary in length) do not usually determine the length of a novel or collection of poems (unless a format constraint is wilfully imposed). • Navigability: Can one easily stop, start, rewind, bookmark, and return to points along the audio timeline, either during recording or during playback? How difficult or easy is it to manage the audio during recording, and/or for listening as an audible text? • Signal Clarity: Is the medium noisy (like a scratchy record or a hissy tape), thus obscuring the audiotextual signal, or is the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) such that it indicates a much higher ratio of signal to noise, thus effectively ‘erasing’ the sound of the recording medium itself in favour of the audiotext? • Frequency Spectrum: Does the medium afford a broad or narrow sonic spectrum, thus either expanding the potential for subtlety in timbral range in the delivery of an audiotext or compressing the expressive range of the spoken signal? There are many other media affordances that are relevant to the generic forms that audiotexts may take, depending on the level of specificity one wishes to explore in one’s analysis, and the modes by which a medium was deployed in the production of an audiotext. In all cases, an audiotext is shaped by more than one affordance of the media technology used in production and playback, although the impact and implications of some affordances are usually more prominent than others in considering the formal qualities of an audiotext.

Cylinder and Flat Disc Records The first case study I will present, and the one I will linger on the longest as a technically rich yet simple example of the relationship between formats and forms, is that of a poetry recitation recorded multiple times during the acoustic era of sound recording. One of the most popular genres of literary recording during the first decades of the twentieth century was the ‘dramatic recitation with orchestral accompaniment’, and one of the most popular examples of that genre was Edgar L. Davenport’s performance of a cowboy poem entitled ‘Lasca’, written by the English poet Frank Desprez. In this rhyming, narrative poem, consisting, for the most part, of anapestic couplets of varying beats, a cowboy tells of his love for a wild, passionate, and loyal Indigenous woman named Lasca who rode by his side throughout his cattle-herding adventures, and then died, pressed against him, as they sought refuge from a cattle stampede beneath the corpse of the cowboy’s fallen mustang. The poem first appeared in print in the London Society journal in 1882, and then was collected in Desprez’s Curtain Raisers for Amateurs and Others (1886), before appearing in numerous recitation anthologies throughout the early twentieth century.8 Published iterations of the poem suggest that it was aimed at different audiences over time, ranging from theatre-goers in a comic treatment of the theme in an early ‘curtain raiser’ staged before performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, to middle-class London audiences in

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its earliest printed versions, to American and English recitation circles via its appearances in elocution manuals and recitation books, to Chautauqua audiences in public performance, and to oral storytellers at cowboy poetry gatherings.9 Davenport recorded at least eight versions of the poem for different record companies between 1905 and 1920 (and it was recorded by others, as well).10 These recorded versions ranged in length from a little over two minutes to nearly five minutes and had varying arrangements of musical accompaniment. All of Davenport’s recorded versions omit the opening five lines of the poem as it first appeared in London Society; lines that identified the speaker of the narrative poem as a bored London urbanite reviewer who was fed up with city life and found himself incited to burst into a tale of frontier adventure and freedom. As these omitted lines state: It’s all very well to write reviews, And Carry umbrellas, and keep dry shoes, And say what every one’s saying here, And wear what everyone else must wear; But to-night I’m sick of the whole affair [. . .]11 Removing this opening set-up from the audiotext strips the recitation of one particular context for delivery, and enables Davenport to begin his performance in an energetic canter, if not yet the fully fledged gallop that is reserved for the dramatic climax of the poem which describes the speaker’s race to escape on his speedy mustang, with Lasca clinging behind, from the life-threatening cattle stampede. Before considering some of the particular differences between Davenport’s recorded performances of the same poem, I will take a moment to outline the nature of the recordings we are discussing, and elaborate on this question of the speed of Davenport’s delivery of the different excerpted versions of the poem across his recorded performances. In the case of this set of audiotexts, the storage capacity of the medium plays an important role in the content, inflection, and speed of delivery of the sounded poem. Of the eight Davenport recordings of ‘Lasca’ I am aware of, and the seven I have so far had the opportunity to listen to, six of them differ from each other in content, arrangement, and, to some extent, in the nature of the performance itself. Here are the recordings in question: LASCA 1905 Edison Gold Moulded Record Cylinder 9087 (2:13) LASCA 1906 Victor matrix C-3283 12″ (4:01) LASCA 1908 Victor 12″ 31529 (same as 1906) (4:01) LASCA 1909 Edison Amberol Cylinder 296 (4:45) LASCA 1909 Victor 12″ 35090 C-3283/4 (3:57) LASCA 1910 Columbia 12″ A-5218 (4:27) LASCA 1913 Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 1868 (4:40) LASCA 1920 Edison Diamond Disc 50575-L (4:15) The 1908 Victor recoding seems to be a re-release of the earlier 1906 Victor recording, and I have not been able to listen to the 1909 Victor release, which leaves us with the six recordings in Table 15.1 to consider comparatively in terms of duration, length of text, reading speed, and the integration of musical accompaniment.

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media affordances of literary audio TABLE 15.1 LASCA 1905 Edison Gold Moulded Record Cylinder 9087

LASCA 1906/1908 Victor matrix C-3283/31529

LASCA 1909 Edison Amberol Cylinder 296

LASCA 1910 Columbia 12″ A-5218

LASCA 1913 Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 1868

LASCA 1920 Edison Diamond Disc 50575-L

(2:13)

(4:01)

(4:45)

(4:27)

(4:40)

(4:15)

359 words

631 words

662 words

740 words

663 words

658 words

172 WPM

174 WPM

149 WPM

166 WPM

151 WPM

159 WPM

9 seconds announcement + solo music

22 seconds solo music

18 seconds solo music

16 seconds solo music

16 seconds solo music

6 seconds solo music

51/359 words backed by music = 14%

382/631 words backed by music = 61%

93/662 words backed by music = 14%

93/740 words backed by music = 13%

93/663 words backed by music = 14%

93/658 words backed by music = 14%

Some basic comparative observations about these recordings might begin with facts and speculation about the possible relationship between differential media formats, the treatment of the recitation text, and the nature of the performer’s delivery of that text. Of the 1905 recording we might observe that Edison Gold Moulded Cylinders – developed in 1902 to improve upon earlier pantographic methods of cylinder duplication – played at 160 rpm (revolutions per minute) with 100 TPI (threads per inch), which resulted in the playtime of between 1.5 and 2.5 minutes.12 In the case of this, the earliest of Davenport’s ‘Lasca’ recordings, the total playtime (including an announcement and brief musical outro) is 2:13 (two minutes and thirteen seconds). The text of the poem had to be significantly abridged for this recording due to the media format, and the format also demanded a speedy reading pace, at an average of 172 words per minute (WPM). The Victor 12″ flat disc recording Davenport made just a year later plays for nearly twice as long, and yet the pace of Davenport’s recitation is even more frantic, at an average of 174 WPM, due to Davenport’s decision to increase the length of the excerpt he recorded by 272 words. The 1909 Edison Amberol Cylinder format doubled the TPI capacity on the cylinder from 100 to 200, thus allowing for recordings of over four minutes, in this instance, to a lengthy 4:45. This was pushing the storage capacity of the format to its outer limit. The forty-four seconds gained (as compared with the 1906 Victor 12″), combined with four fewer seconds devoted to orchestral music without speech, allowed Davenport to increase the size of the excerpt even further (by about thirty words) and to slow down his average pace of reading (149 WPM), particularly at the line ‘Lasca was dead!’ where he prolongs the phrase significantly and pauses for a sob. Davenport increased the size of the excerpt from the poem even further (by nearly eighty words) for the Columbia record of the next year, a 12″ flat disc that played for 4:27. In order to accommodate this expansion, he was required to speed up his reading to an average of 166 WPM. The 1913 Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder with the same 200 TPI as the Amberol Cylinder was similarly filled to near capacity at 4:40, and the strategy of excerption and delivery speed are a near match with the 1909 recording, the

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effect in both cases allowing for longer dramatic prolongations at key moments in the text. The Edison Diamond Disc recording of 1920 – sold as a double-sided record that coupled Davenport’s recitation of ‘Lasca’ with a recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’ delivered by Harry E. Humphrey on the reverse side – does not seem to capitalise on storage capacity associated with that format, which, with a unique 150 TPI on a 10″ flat disc, might have been able to store up to five minutes of sound. The result is a text length and reading speed that is somewhere in the middle of the group, albeit with little time left for the orchestra to play on its own at the end of the record. Considering the integration of musical accompaniment, a significant difference is noticeable between the Victor records as compared with the Edison and Columbia recordings. The Victor production implements background music through over 60 per cent of the text that is read, and also has the most music that is played solo without voice of all these recordings. By comparison, length of the excerpt aside, the other recorded versions have musical accompaniment for only 14 per cent of the text that is read, always during the concluding strophe of the poem. Such considerations move us away from the more strictly formal qualities of audiotextual form as they relate to media format rehearsed (perhaps to a point of testing the reader’s patience) above, into considerations of the commercial, organisational, and production contexts that informed the application of media by distinct record companies to the production of specific kinds of spoken recordings. While all of these recordings function as dramatic recitations with musical accompaniment, one important distinction between the Victor recordings and the others is the degree to which illustrative and dramatic elements of the production are stressed, as compared with the speaker’s elocutionary performance as a feature, itself. The 1906/1908 recorded rendition of the poem produced by Victor represents a pronounced example of the correlation of recitation and descriptive orchestral accompaniment for the purpose of illustrative dramatisation.13 The record opens with a Mexican/Spanishsounding melody, complete with castanets that double as the galloping hoofs of the vaquera (cowgirl). Following the introductory section without music, a first light and buoyant melody commences upon the speaker’s description of Lasca as a free-spirited rider of the Rio Grande, and of the playful nature of their relationship. The music stops for a section in which her physical appearance is described, and for the quiet period the speaker and Lasca sat together at night, forgetting to listen for the dangerous sounds of weather and consequent stampede. Following this intimate, dramatic lull in the narrative, the music resumes with a burst of kettle drum rolls, representing the thunderous sound of the impending cattle stampede, and the speaker responds as if to the orchestral sound with the question loudly exclaimed, ‘Was that thunder?’ As if incited by the orchestra into a new level of intensity, the recitation picks up speed, as does the music, which now consists of wood block sounds to imitate the effect of the narrative which tells how the speaker and Lasca ‘rode for their lives’. The hoof clopping persists for the next seven lines, which describe the mustang’s flight from the frantically charging steers. The orchestra and reading voice then soften significantly for a four-line section in which the speaker imagines a possible future in which he dies and must bid adieu to Lasca and life in ‘the open air and the open sky’. Then the galloping hoof sounds resume, this time as if on the prompt of the speaker’s announcement that ‘the cattle were gaining’. The clopping sound persists until the speaker declares in a loud voice, ‘Down came the mustang!’ Following this line the orchestra goes silent until it

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resumes with a slow and solemn arrangement to accompany the speaker’s extensively tremor-filled description of the burial of Lasca and the lasting effect it has had on him. And then the orchestra swells in volume to play a resolving outro for approximately twelve seconds, before the recording ends. This is a rich example of a fully orchestrated and arranged dramatic recitation with musical accompaniment, with a selection of mimetic sounds to reinforce the action that is described, an activating relationship between spoken performance and orchestral sound, and a musical orchestration that is, at points, designed to reinforce not just the action but the emotional message of the speaker’s vocal actions. With the technology in question, the speaker and orchestra would have recorded the entire piece together, allowing the speaker and musicians to coordinate their expressive intentions as the disc was cut. The 1920 Edison recording – and to some extent, all of the previous non-Victor recordings – on the other hand, showcase Davenport’s elocutionary technique rather than a fully fledged dramatic recitation with musical accompaniment.14 Music is heard only in a brief introduction before the recitation begins, and is not explicitly linked to the content of the poem, and thus does not establish relevant mood or setting. The reading then runs for most of the recording without any musical accompaniment at all, with a delivery that accentuates audible vibrato, prolongation of vowels, and rolled Rs explicitly. The only two brief instances when musical accompaniment is brought in behind the recitation occur after Lasca’s death has been declared. The orchestra plays a slow and solemn melody as the speaker describes how he buried Lasca. Here the speaker deploys vibrato and regular pauses to allow the strings to come through between the description of the burial ritual and site: ‘I gouged out a grave a few feet deep, / And the black snake glides and glitters and slides’. The orchestra drops out for four lines as the speaker describes the buzzard floating overhead, ‘stately, like a ship at sea’. And finally, the orchestra resumes its accompaniment for the final four lines of the poem in which the speaker poses an existential question about the impact that his loss of Lasca has had upon his ability to live in the present: ‘And I wonder why I do not care / For things that are like the things that were’. As the poem resolves with these lines, the pace of the recitation slows significantly and the elocutionary actions of voice (prolongation and vibrato, in particular) become more pronounced. This combination of slowed and pronounced delivery combined with use of music for dramatic effect to colour the gravity of the summary speech heard in this last version of Davenport’s recitation had precedent in all of the previous non-Victor recordings, as well. The forms of these ‘Lasca’ audiotexts were thus partially shaped not only by the material media formats, but by decisions made in the production departments of the commercial organisations, the record companies, that made and sold these recordings, and that aimed to define their sonic identity and brand in a marketplace of new listeners.

Electrical Lathe-Cut (Instantaneous Transcription) Disc Davenport’s acoustic era recordings of ‘Lasca’ represent an early mode of the commercial literary recording. The poem was recited in a professional recording studio by a professional recording artist (one who knew how to take advantage of the affordances of acoustic recording technologies, which entailed speaking loudly, if not yelling outright, into a horn, and, in these examples, coordinating speech with an orchestra). The records were marketed and sold for both leisure and pedagogical listening. While

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cylinder phonographs were read/write machines, and thus could be recorded on in the home, these ‘Lasca’ cylinders, like the flat disc records, were meant for consumption and were thus situated within an emerging commercial infrastructure for pre-recorded sounds to be purchased for subsequent use at home, or in educational applications that record companies like Victor and Columbia were beginning to develop in the early teens and 1920s. Spoken recordings represented a small percentage of the commercial market, overall, which consisted primarily of musical recordings of different kinds. The next media format I will consider differs from acoustic era formats in some significant ways. Electrical transcription recording lathes (sometimes known as instantaneous disc recorders) first came into use in the mid-1920s primarily to make high-quality recordings from the radio, or for rebroadcast on the radio, but not for widespread commercial distribution.15 Further, this was an electrical recording technology that resulted in a wider frequency spectrum in its sound capture and so they were quite high-fidelity devices. The records were usually at least 12″ in size (sometimes even larger) and could be cut either at 78 or 33.3 rpm, so could store significantly more sound than acoustic era formats. They were made of aluminium, acetate (with aluminium, glass, or cardboard base), or vinyl. Used primarily for capturing and replaying jingles or broadcasts on the radio, many of these machines were compact and lightweight enough to be installed in a variety of settings or even taken on the road (as Alan Lomax did to make field recordings of folk singers, for example).16 While this particular media iteration of electrical recording technology did not have a widespread commercial impact on the production of spoken records, it represents a fascinating example of new affordances for the production of literary recordings within academic settings, by poets and authors, as opposed to professional elocutionists and recording artists. In 1933 T. S. Eliot performed experiments in the recitation of his poem The Waste Land (among other poems) onto aluminium discs in a do-it-yourself recording lab that was set up by Barnard College English Professor (and linguist) William Cabell Greet. These ‘literary’ recordings, and a few by other writers such as Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Vachel Lindsay, pop up as a small series within a much larger collection of American and English dialect recordings that Greet developed for the purpose of studying and teaching speech, pronunciation, and elocution. While several of the recordings made in Greet’s lab were indeed released for use in teaching by the National Council of Teachers of English, my focus on this media format will be the handson, experimental affordances that it offered writers who were interested in recording themselves reading their own works.17 Electrical disc recording technology worked by electromagnetic transduction through the use of electrical microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and electrical disccutting and playing machines.18 The phases of electrical acoustic and playback technologies move from collecting, storing, and then decoding for playback. The collecting phase transformed the air pressure (sound waves) of an acoustic event into electrical energy with a microphone. During the storage phase, this energy was transmitted to a storage medium, in the present case an aluminium or acetate disc, via the stylus of a lathe that carved that electrical energy as a signal engraving onto the disc’s surface. The playback phase essentially reversed the collection phase, transducing the patterns engraved on the disc back into electrical energy through an amplifier and loudspeakers so it could be heard as a reproduction of the recorded sound event.19

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The microphone is an electromagnetic transducer used to convert acoustic sound waves into ‘analogous’ electrical signals. Depending on the kind of microphone used, metal plates separated by carbon granules (carbon microphone), a diaphragm with embedded wire coil (dynamic microphone), corrugated ribbon (ribbon microphone), or conductive metal disc (condenser microphone) are arranged to move in sympathy with air waves in relation to a magnet-produced magnetic field.20 In the case of electric disc recording, those signals were then sent through an amplifier to boost the fluctuating electrical current (the signal) before they were applied to a magnetically calibrated cutting stylus which would record the vibrations within the parameters of its calibrated magnetic field in a spiral groove onto a disc.21 Significantly increased amplitude (due to the amplification of the electronic signal prior to cutting) and a wider frequency spectrum were just two of the numerous changes that differentiated electrically recorded discs from acoustically recorded discs and cylinders. The wider frequency spectrum captured in the electrical recording process allowed for far greater subtlety in the use of volume and timbre in a speaker’s vocal delivery, these new affordances of the media technology expanding the potential of the performer’s expressive range.22 The technical workings of this electronic recording process would lead to the development of an explosion of technologies and techniques in professional recording, and new kinds of professional recording studios. As Susan Schmidt Horning notes, ‘instantaneous recording gave rise to a recording studio business by making quality recording possible without the need for elaborate and expensive processing facilities’.23 Most interesting and relevant to this particular case study is that the instantaneous disc recorder of the kind used by Greet and the poets he invited to use it at Barnard College was also part of an emerging amateur recording boom that took advantage of the (relative) portability and simplicity of these new electronic recording devices. A key element that made these disc recorders appealing for a wide range of amateur applications was the fact that one could play back and listen to a lathe-cut record immediately after it had been made. As the name of one major manufacturer of these machines – the Presto Recording Corporation – suggests, a key affordance of the device was the instantaneity of movement from the recording to playback phases of the process. This affordance of instantaneous playback had an important impact on T. S. Eliot’s early poetry recordings, which were pursued in a spirit of experimentalism through trial, audition, and retrial. The recordings Eliot made in Greet’s lab followed an iterative process in which he tried multiple takes of a section of the poem before moving on to record the next part. Through the process of recording followed by immediate playback, Eliot was able to hear, analyse, and explore a range of methods for speaking a complexly allusive and notoriously polyvocal modernist poem like The Waste Land out loud. The twenty-four recordings (of approximately five minutes each) Eliot made on twelve twosided instantaneous discs document a process of takes and retakes in experimental literary performance, resulting in three or more recorded takes for each of the five sections of the poem.24 The medium afforded an iterative process of recording and audition that let Eliot pursue the realisation of a unique method of sounding the poem, characterised by timbral and rhythmic rather than semantically intonational vocal actions and, over all, a peculiarly monotonic mode of vocal performance for a poem largely composed of citations from the characters of other works, of ‘different voices’.25 Some of the recorded takes from Eliot’s experiments in transcription disc recording were selected, compiled, mastered, and released commercially by the Library of

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Congress as part of its Twentieth Century Poetry in English recordings series.26 This media migration from singular transcription disc to commercially released vinyl represents a shift in the literary affordances of flat disc records, from an amateur medium of experimentation to a professional medium of consumption. The Library of Congress poetry recordings series would soon be followed by an array of professional labels that specialised in spoken word recordings, including Caedmon Records (1952), Spoken Arts (1956), Yale Series of Recorded Poets (1959), and others. These labels developed a new, high-fidelity sound for spoken poetry through studio recordings that evoked a sense of proximity and intimacy to the poet ‘amplified by their preference for a more “intimate ‘room’ sound” than as opposed to “a ‘hall’ sound”’.27 Beyond the sense of proximity to the speaker’s voice afforded by the powerful preamplifiers and largediaphragm condenser microphones that these record companies used to record poets reading from their works, these mid-century recordings also evoked a special sense of the poet’s voice as sounding both present and disembodied, nearby and ‘numinous’28 at once. This effect was, in part, the result of a newer electronic media technology coming into use for studio recording, that of magnetic tape recording. As Derek Furr notes, when listening to a Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas reading ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, ‘we hear a poem spoken elsewhere, not in the room with us, and yet close at hand’.29 This effect is, in part, the result of the fact that Caedmon sound engineers edited out ‘all extra-linguistic bodily noises that poets might make in the course of a reading’, including coughs, swallows, and audible breaths.30 This particular sound of poetry as disembodied presence was brought to the listener, in part, by the affordance of audio tape to be cut, edited, and spliced back together, leaving unwanted situating sounds on the cutting-room floor, and the numinous literary voice to sound as if from a vacuum in the listener’s ears. Editability was one of many new affordances of magnetic tape recording that would have implications for tape-recorded audiotexts from the 1950s on.

Magnetic Audio Tape: Reel-to-Reel and Cassette Magnetic tape recording applied the same transduction principles as electronic disc recording but removed the step of mechanical disc cutting from the storage process. Rather than convert vibrations into magnetically structured signals so that they could be engraved on a flat disc, this technology sought a different medium to store the electronic signals in some sort of memory bank to be reconverted into sound at will. Such a system uses a length of tape that is coated with magnetic ferric oxide: and this system of storing sound is therefore known as tape-recording.31 I quote this passage from Doug Crawford’s thorough handbook Tape Recording from A to Z (1974) because it captures well the combined sense of arbitrariness (‘some sort of memory bank’) and material specificity (‘length of tape that is coated with magnetic ferric oxide’) that can inform our understanding of sound media technologies. Tape recording enabled new literary uses of sound recording. The storage capacity of tape was far more accommodating and flexible than that of cylinders and discs because the recording and playback duration of a length of tape is easily extended by recording and playing at slower speeds to extend the length of a tape. A tape could run, depending on

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the machine, as slowly as 15/16 ips (inches per second) to 30 ips, although most consumer machines used to record speech ran on the slower end of the spectrum at either 15/16, 1 7/8, or 3 3/4 ips. The storage capacity could be doubled with the turn of a switch, thus allowing for significant extensions in duration when needed. The portability of the tape recorder was also transformative for recording practice. Where a Presto or Rek-O-Kut recording lathe with built-in amplifier for recording and playback might weigh about 70 lb (in a lighter model), a Uher or Wollensak tape machine weighed less than half that, and in some models could be worn like a heavy satchel on the recordist’s shoulder, if necessary. Tape-recording machines were thus comparatively portable and flexible as compared with earlier recording technologies, enabling the documentation of literary events and conversations, both public and private; and this, along with their increasing availability for relatively low cost on the consumer market, extended the reach of capturing literary occurrences, and consequently, our understanding of what comprised a literary event. Further, as I have already mentioned, tape could be edited, cut, spliced together, rearranged, and erased, and was easily reused by erasure or taping over a previous recording, allowing users to transform the audio of a recorded event after the fact, to combine recordings from different times and places (‘mixtapes’), among many other creative possibilities. In short, tape expanded the generic range of literary audio through its ubiquity, portability, and flexible applicability and also functioned as an important medium of literary creation. Beyond the facility of documenting readings and shaping those events on tape through edits in post-production, the portability and flexibility in use of the reel-toreel tape machine led some artists to understand and approach this media technology as an instrument that embodied and enacted the existential situation of the artist, and performed the ontological status of the event. Perhaps due to the visibility of the medium (the machines were called ‘open reel’ tape recorders), they played with tape in ways that drew upon and pushed the affordances of tape as a material enactment of time axis capture and manipulation, of presence and time. So, poet, artist, and tapeexperimenter Roy Kiyooka would take his tape machine to the Cecil Hotel, a gathering place for writers and artists in Vancouver in the 1960s, load up a thirty-minute reel, press record, and then, as he explains in a transcript from one such recording: I’ll let it run though for thirty minutes, and I get the buzzing signal that tells me it’s at the end. I play it back and listen to it a bit, and then I rewind the whole thing and do it again, and again, and again, cancelling out each successive thirty-minute stretch. I can do that at the Cecil because the nature of what occurs as conversation is that thing. It never stops, anyways. It never stops and it is totally impartial as to what is uttered or said.32 The portability and ease in recording and playback of the medium, combined with the medium’s materialisation of time as tape on a spool, as a visible, moving timeline that can be recorded, played, erased, and recorded again, indefinitely, extended the contours surrounding the artful event to all audible happenings in time. In this taperecording scenario, what is left on the tape determines what will become the historical event on record. In this case, the recordist (Kiyooka) controls the temporal event by recording it, listening to it, and then deciding to erase and record over it, either until the iron ferrite particles have been exhausted and the tape is ruined or until he decides

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to keep a take from the last span of time he has recorded, store that recording, and begin again with a new blank tape. In similar exploratory spirit, Kiyooka’s poet colleague Gerry Gilbert (another tape-o-phile) took spliced strands from recordings he made during the 1960s and 70s, and bundled and deposited them in his archive in a variety of small boxes and containers from everyday use that might otherwise (normally) have been discarded (Figure 15.1).33 These little bundled loops of recorded speech, boxed and framed in mass-produced detritus, may be understood as Joseph Cornell-like installations that signify the practical, aesthetic, and sentimental import of tape as a material souvenir of time. While the clips could be spliced back to tape on a longer reel and thus played and heard again – the medium affords such action – Gilbert’s purpose, here, seems to have been similar to that of the early tinfoil phonograph demonstrators, who would cut up and offer pieces of a tinfoil recording for those in attendance to take away as a metonymic souvenir of the playback they had just heard; as what Lisa Gitelman, in reference to that earlier recording context, has described as a mute evocation of experience and event.34 The material qualities of this analogue medium suggested the possibility of fixing speech on a tangible strip of time one could see and hold. The temporal and spatial evocations of the medium were also exploited in practice by poets who integrated tape recordings into their performances. In the 1960s and 70s, American Avant-Garde poet Jackson Mac Low regularly integrated tape recordings into his readings by requesting and setting up multiple tape recorders in the venue,35 and playing recordings from past readings of a work that he would then read along with, thus creating what he called ‘collages of various times and places, as well as the simultaneity in this room’.36 In one documented reading held in Montreal (26 March 1971) he combined recordings from multiple past events. One machine played a performance he had done with sound artist Max Neuhaus at the University of Illinois in 1966. A second machine played a collaboration with Neuhaus, James Tenney, and Jeanne Lee at the Town Hall in New York at a later date in 1966. This second recording also held and played the sound of the Illinois event, as it was played as part of the New York event. The Montreal event included the sounds of these previous recordings along with the voices of Mac Low and audience members he invited to participate in the reading of texts with him.37 The recording of this event might then be used in a future performance, thus transporting the sound of time and place of this moment elsewhere, again. Among other effects, these tape and voice performances created a process of intersubjective collaboration across time and space, experienced by participants and audience (in the words of Michael Nardone) as events of ‘roving contexts and overlapping combinations of the poem’s utterers and utterances’ leading to an ‘accumulative and reproductive noise’ that ‘assembles a multi-layered mesh of sounds’.38 The resultant mesh signified the possibility and creative potential of collaborative simultaneity of past and present. Tape as a media technology and format played an important role in the artist’s conception and realisation of this spatiotemporally complex audiotextual form. Even in more seemingly straightforward readings, where a poet stood at a podium with a microphone and read works from a book or manuscript page, the extensive storage capacity of reel-to-reel tape (due to its flexibility in recording and playback speeds) allowed the live poetry reading to be documented in its full and often sprawling length, capturing not just the poems that were read but everything heard around

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Figure 15.1  MsC 14, Gerry Gilbert fonds in the Contemporary Literature Collection, Bennett Library. Photos by Deanna Fong.

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them. This capacity to capture incidental context – the din of the audience before a reading began, the fumbling with the microphone, the shuffling of chairs, and so on – as well as more deliberate context in the form of introductions and set-up talk from host and poet, allowed tape to frame the live poetry reading as a form of in situ, existential performance. Speech, talking, in addition to the reading of poems out loud, became an important feature of the public poetry reading in the 1960s. Reading represented only a small part of what constituted a poetry reading event, where the featured poet would be expected to engage in extensive impromptu narratives explaining their writing process and providing the personal and literary contexts that helped situate the poems they selected to read. For example, in my analysis of the recordings of the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, staged in Montreal between 1966 and 1975, and featuring over sixty poets in readings that always lasted more than an hour, we can hear that, on average, about 25 per cent of the poet’s time was spent talking as opposed to reading poems.39 In some cases, a reading might consist of as much as 60 per cent talk versus actual reading.40 These expository ramblings sometimes became formulaic after repeated readings and might find their way into print as essays in poetics, sometimes transcribed directly from the poetry reading recordings as they were first spoken.41 While there are a number of reasons that the poetry reading of the 1960s became what Stephen Fredman has called an ‘existential practice – an art of contexts’,42 tape’s capacity to capture the long duration of that existential practice, and the contextual sounds surrounding a literary performance, helped underscore the poet’s sense of the extension of art into life, and of poetry into talk. Tape recording helped reveal the poetic nature of talk and other kinds of ephemeral sounds to poets and sound artists. Explorations of the recording of the sounds of environments and spaces through media by the likes of John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, Irv Teibel, Hildegard Westercamp, and Alvin Lucier, among many others, took advantage of the portability and high fidelity of tape, in many cases of the highly portable cassette tape-recording machines, to extend the sources of composition from traditional instruments to all sounds, and to reflect on the relationship between composition, audio media, and everyday sounds we usually take for granted, or block out altogether. In poetry and poetics, David Antin pursued an analogous exploration of the continuum between live talk, tape-recorded speech, and printed poetry.43 Antin, a self-declared ‘talk poet’, explored ‘talk poetry’ as an artefact that first emerges as unscripted speech delivered in live performance. His live talks were loosely imagined in advance, often in response to a pre-assigned topic or title, but were delivered as impromptu talk, the poem taking shape in the time he took to think it out loud before a live audience. Where impromptu talk is usually considered ephemeral (we do not record and keep everything we say), Antin’s talk poems exist as poetic works due to his use of an audio cassette recorder, the cassette recording being the first step towards his spoken words’ transcription and typographical transformation into a printed work of poetry, a published talk poem. Like many poets who began working, reading, and circulating among poetry communities in the early tape era, Antin first used a reel-to-reel recorder ‘back in the early sixties – mainly to record poetry readings’, his and those of others. In the 1960s he also used reel-to-reel tape to stage some experimental readings, preparing loops of pre-recorded sounds to accompany his performances. As Antin described one such event in New York from ‘around [19]66 or so’:

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It was in relation to a reading organized by Bob Nichols to address the ongoing Vietnam war. I recorded from radio all sorts of talk and music shows, baseball games, interviews – radio junk on the two different channels and Elly [Antin’s partner] would switch back and forth while I read the passages on pain from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. She manipulated the volume also intermittently drowning me out or merely accompanying my recitation on pain.44 Antin’s interest in integrating sounds of radio ‘junk’ and ‘all sorts of talk’ into a performance piece that used a tape reel loop eventually evolved into his creation of talk poems. A talk poem is never a truly stable thing, but an entity that exists across time and media. It exists as a live event in which he creates a poem by talking for about forty-five minutes before an audience, and thus is an ephemeral entity tied to a specific space and time. It exists as an audio recording of that event (a few of which have been released as commercially available recordings45). And it exists as a printed poem that serves as a typographical representation of the previous two manifestations. Antin employs specific techniques of typography in the print versions of his talks in part to represent the immediacy of the original, improvised performance, and yet this scrupulous performance of the immediacy in print has the reciprocal effect of highlighting the impossibility of such a translation across media. While Antin has referred to the book and audio tape versions of his performances as ‘imperfect recordings/ of transactions that occur in real time’,46 and most critical work on Antin has tended to follow suit by focusing on the relationship between the live talk and the printed talk poem, exclusively, it is worth thinking seriously about the significance of cassette tape as the overlooked step in the process and substance of the unstable, tripartite entity that is a talk poem. As Antin began to tour delivering talk poems and then collecting them for publication in books such as Talking (1970), Talking at the Boundaries (1976), Tuning (1984), What It Means to Be Avant-Garde (1993), and i never knew what time it was (2005), audio cassette technology fulfilled his need to use ‘something easy to travel with and with reliable sound’ so he could ‘hear and transcribe’.47 The intermedia genre of the talk poem arose, according to Antin, from a combination of intentional experimentalism and the presence of an audio cassette recorder, of which he was an early user: Back in 1967 I was invited to give a talk at Cooper Union as part of a series on various approaches to critical discourse. The talk I somewhat called ‘The Metaphysics of Expectation – or the Real Meaning of Genre,’ was an experiment in improvising from notes over very wide ranging areas from the diagnosis of disease to shifts in molecular theory in the early 19th century, to discursive relations between the works of two Impressionist painters, to contemporary questions regarding the newest sculpture. I had lots of notes for what I thought I would talk about and I wanted to hear how it turned out. So I took a small Sony cassette recorder. In the end I never looked at my notes and the piece turned out to be the first talk poem, though I had no name for its genre as yet.48 The Antin talk on analogue cassette tape – a medium that had widespread use by consumers (for buying pre-recorded materials, and for recording from other media such as LP records and radio) in the 1970s and 80s, and that then fell to the less versatile (read

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only) medium of the compact disc (CD), but was briefly resuscitated again in the late 1990s due to the popularity of ‘books on tape’ – may sound like many speech events (academic lectures, self-help seminars, stand-up comedy recordings, audio recorded transcripts of psychotherapy) that are not poetry. As his origin story reveals, the talk poem originates in his taping of an off-the-cuff lecture on topics about which he only had disorganised ideas. The talk poem as a genre, and as an intermedial item, raises important, foundational, ontological questions about the generic and aesthetic status of the recorded poem in the twentieth century, and about the difficulty of describing and identifying the nature of the mediated literary audiotext as a stable, discernible entity. The complexity of an audiotext’s status as an entity increases when a signal from an analogue medium (like a cylinder, flat disc record, or tape) is migrated (for the purpose of convenience or long-term preservation) into a digital form.

Audiotextual Metadata: Describing Recorded Literary Events across Media Formats In his writings about the gramophone, Friedrich Kittler has argued that analogue audio media playback (of the kind I have been discussing) quite literally reproduces the same sound vibrations that have been stored on the analogue recording substrate (be it tinfoil, wax, acetate, aluminium, vinyl, mylar, and so on).49 According to this claim, the playback of analogue media represents a form of ‘time axis manipulation’50 wherein prior time can be played and manipulated (sped up, slowed down, stopped, started, interspliced) within a present time axis. In this conception of temporal representation, the image of time captured by analogue media is fluid and continuous. By comparison, digital audio media technologies suggest a different manner of representing sound in time, one that is less fluid but far more transformable than any analogue audio media could ever be. Digital audio represents sound by encoding it into numerical samples in sequence. The discrete samplings taken of an audio signal in this mode of media are microcosmic, usually with many tens of thousands of samples of the signal taken for each second of sound (for instance, CD audio was usually sampled at a rate of 44,100 times per second). With so many samples in such a short space of time, human ears cannot discern the spaces between the samples taken. But from media theorist Wolfgang Ernst’s perspective, the encoding of sound into samples that the conversion of analogue audio to digital data entails represents a radically different way of representing time, and introduces the potential of microtemporalities, tiny, infinitesimal representational slices of historical time, a fact that, in Ernst’s words, ‘produces a new form of temporality in competition to the historical event’.51 Ernst is interested in the relationship between manifestations of time implicit in the historical media that capture cultural events and the conceptions of time manifest in cultural history. One of Ernst’s points on this subject is that contradictions often arise between the arguments about how time works in our own narratives of cultural events and those about how time works in the media that have captured the events we study. I raise these ideas about the difference between analogue and digital media representations of sound to spark interest in reading further on this subject in works such as Ernst’s Digital Memory and the Archive and Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format.52 The one point I wish to make in this brief conclusion to my account of media formats and audiotextual forms concerns the nature of sound as an entity as it exists

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across historical media, and especially as it moves from analogue into digital form. I will address this concern, here, as one of metadata description. Metadata is a structured form of data that provides descriptive information concerning the contents, qualities, contexts, and material or other relevant characteristics of other forms of data (such as a collection of digitised analogue audio recordings). Metadata is often a first point through which a researcher or listener will discover a digital audio file online. In addition to describing the nature of the audiotext and artefact, metadata may also provide important information about the systems and processes of use surrounding the entity, such as ‘data about where the resource is located, how it is displayed online, its ownership, its condition’.53 What are the conditions of the digitised audiotext as an entity? What happens (beyond the remediating process of digitisation itself) to the audiotext of a wax cylinder, transcription disc, or analogue tape recording? An enormous amount is potentially gained by digitisation, both in terms of the long-term preservation of the audio signal (a digital preservation copy may have the potential to last longer than an audiotape that is decaying from sticky shed syndrome, or some other material form of degradation), and for the increased capacity to filter, edit, transform, and circulate that signal as digital data across a wide range of platforms. The digitised audiotext greatly increases the possibility that a sound signal will be separated from its original context of production and use, and thus from its historical situations as they may have pertained to the media formats that once stored it. A long documentary recording of a poetry reading event may be cut into shorter audio files of individual poems – what Charles Bernstein has called ‘singles’, the creation of which he has called for as a requirement for the digital presentation of documentary literary recordings in the ‘PennSound Manifesto’ (2003).54 Certain metadata may accompany that now rather fugitive audio file – the single – but what can that accompanying metadata tell an interested user about that recording’s historical situation, or about the significance of the previous media format by which the signal had once been made available, and that archaic media format’s relationship to the signal’s audiotextual form? What metadata schema exists to help capture the mediated histories of documentary and other kinds of literary recordings that are becoming available through the process of digitisation?55 The relationship between digital audio and other audio formats reveals new and interesting questions about the relative importance of knowing a literary recording’s media history, and how best to represent that history in the technical and descriptive metadata that may accompany a recording that is a digital representation of analogue captured sound. It raises questions about the nature of the sound recording as a discernible entity, and whether the thing we are describing is the material artefact, the audio that artefact holds, or the original event that has been captured and migrated across media. Just as audio tape once inspired poets to push the boundaries of time, space, and poetic form, digital audio inspires new kinds of productive uncertainty around the situations of audiovisual artefacts that document historical performances of the sound, social contexts, and life of literature. Understanding the media-historical parameters that first shaped a literary recording, and maintaining an interest in understanding the implications of the migration of historical audio signals across media, including into digital formats, enriches the formal analysis of literary sound with historicist concerns. Such understanding and interest is necessary for the ongoing development of a literary historical sociology of audiotexts.

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Notes   1. Jason Camlot, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 11.   2. Ian Hutchby, ‘Technologies, Texts and Affordances’, Sociology 35, no. 2 (2001): 441–56 (443–4).   3. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.   4. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, ‘General Introduction’, in The Sociological Construction of Technological Systems: New Direction in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2012), xlii.   5. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 7.   6. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6.   7. See Jason Camlot, ‘Charles Dickens in Three Minutes or Less: Early Phonographic Fiction’, in Phonopoetics, 71–99.  8. Peter Kirkpatrick, ‘Life and Love and “Lasca”’, Sydney Studies in English 36 (2010): 127–49 (128).   9. Ibid., 127–42. 10. Among Davenport’s recordings of ‘Lasca’ are: 1905 – Edison Gold Moulded Record Cylinder 9087; 1906 – Victor matrix C-3283 12″; 1908 – Victor 12″ 31529 (same as 1906); 1909 – Edison Amberol Cylinder 296; 1909 – Victor 12″ 35090 C-3283/4; 1910 – Columbia 12″ A-5218; 1910 – U.S. Everlasting Cylinder 1381; 1911 – Indestructible Phonograph Co. Cylinder 3143; 1913 – Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 1868; 1920 – Edison Diamond Disc 50575-L. Discographical information from: Tim Brooks, ‘One Hit Wonders of the Acoustic Era (and a Few Beyond . . .)’, Antique Phonograph Monthly 9, no. 2 (March 1990): 8–13 (8); Brian Rust, The Complete Entertainment Discography: From Mid-1890s to 1942 (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1973), 208–9; and the Library of Congress online catalogue. 11. Frank Desprez, ‘Lasca’, in London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation 42 (1882): 484–6 (484). 12. ‘Edison Gold-Moulded Cylinders (1902–1912)’, UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-goldmoulded.php. 13. The recording can be heard online at http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/ id/6043/ (accessed 1 June 2022). 14. The recording can be heard online at https://www.loc.gov/item/00694068/ (accessed 1 March 2017). 15. Geoffrey P. Hull, Thomas Hutchinson, and Richard Strasser, eds, The Music Business and Recording Industry, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2011), 327. 16. For a short video presentation and explanation of a transcription disc recorder used by Alan Lomax in the field, held at the Library of Congress, see ‘Did you know Alan Lomax used this old field recorded to record tens of thousands of folk song [sic]’, YouTube, 2 October 2011, https://youtu.be/ACa7NzesY4w. 17. For an extended discussion of T. S. Eliot’s experiments in recording his own spoken interpretation of ‘The Waste Land’ in Greet’s lab, see Jason Camlot, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking’, in Phonopoetics, 137–67. For a detailed account of Greet’s lab, the technologists behind his recordings, and the making of some transcription disc records of William Carlos Williams reading his poetry in 1941, see Chris Mustazza, ‘Provenance Report: William Carlos Williams’s 1942 Reading for the NCTE’, Jacket2, 21 May 2014, https://jacket2.org/article/provenance-report.

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18. Francis Rumsey and Tim McCormick, Sound and Recording, 6th edn (Oxford; Burlington: Focal Press, 2009), 169. 19. Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3–4. 20. Rumsey and McCormick, Sound and Recording, 48–53. 21. J. S. Chitode, Consumer Electronics (Pune: Technical Publications Pune, 2007), 5–7. 22. For a discussion of changes in vocal performance resulting from the introduction of electronic sound recording media, see Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 81–162. 23. Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 61. For discussion of the home use of transcription recorders, and the emergence and affordances of the professional electronic recording studio, see ibid., 57–62, 78–92. 24. For a full account of the number of takes Eliot made for each section (‘I. Burial of the Dead’, ‘II. A Game of Chess’, ‘III. The Fire Sermon’, ‘IV. Death By Water’, and ‘V. What the Thunder Said’), see Camlot, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Recorded Experiments’, 142–3. 25. The original, working title of the poem that would become The Waste Land was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’. For a recent approach to parsing the different voices in this poem using computational methods, see Julian Brooke, Adam Hammond, and Graeme Hirst, ‘Distinguishing Voices in The Waste Land Using Computational Stylistics’, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 12, no. 2 (2015): 1–41, and their website, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices: A Website for Exploring Voices in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’, http://hedothepolice.org/. 26. T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot Reading His Own Poems, 78 rpm mono 12″ records (Washington DC: Library of Congress Recording Laboratory, [1946] 1949). 27. Jacob Smith, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 65. 28. Derek Furr, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 38. 29. Ibid., 41. 30. Sarah Parry, ‘The Inaudibility of “Good” Sound Editing: The Case of Caedmon Records’, Performance Research 7, no. 1 (2002): 24–33 (30), quoted in Furr, Recorded Poetry, 41. 31. Doug Crawford, Tape Recording from A to Z (London: Kaye & Ward, 1974), 3–4. 32. Roy Kiyooka, ‘At the Cecil, 1970’, Roy Kiyooka fonds, Special Collections, Simon Fraser University, digitised audiotape. 33. MsC 14, Gerry Gilbert fonds in the Contemporary Literature Collection, Bennett Library. Photos by Deanna Fong. 34. Lisa Gitelman, ‘Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded Sound’, in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 157–73 (166). 35. Mac Low made extensive demands on venues for equipment and technical support. One audiovisual technician describes the request for equipment received from Mac Low in advance of a performance at his university in this way: ‘he sent a letter . . . saying he needed the following equipment and we looked at it and burst out laughing’. Mark Schofield, Interview with Christine Mitchell, 12 September 2013, 00:14:11, https://montreal. spokenweb.ca/oral-literary-history/mark-schofield-interview-september-12th-2013/. 36. Jackson Mac Low, ‘Jackson Mac Low at SGWU, 1971’, SpokenWeb Montreal, 00:55:27, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/. 37. For an extended discussion of Mac Low’s use of tape media in the creation and performance of his poetry, see Michael Nardone, ‘LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN!: Jackson Mac Low’s Phonopoetics’, Amodern 4 (March 2015), https://amodern.net/article/listen-listenlisten/#rf19-5542.

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38. Ibid. 39. For a literary historical account of the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, see Jason Camlot, ‘The Sound of Canadian Modernisms: The Sir George Williams University Poetry Series, 1966–1974’, Journal of Canadian Studies: Revue d’études canadiennes 46, no. 3 (2012): 28–59. Following the publication of this article I discovered that this series ran through 1975, and so I correct the date range of the series here. That final year of the series was not sound recorded. 40. Jason Camlot, ‘Robert Creeley in Transition 1967/1970: Changing Formats for the Public Poetry Reading’, English Studies in Canada 42, no. 2–3 (2017): 215–45 (223–4). 41. For examples of this migration of impromptu speech from poetry readings into print, see ibid., 222–3. 42. Stephen Fredman, ‘Creeley’s Contextual Practice: Interviews, Conversations, and Collaborations’, in Form, Power and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, ed. Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 181–202 (182). 43. For a discussion of Antin’s use of tape as a medium of poetic creation, see Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, ‘Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean’, Postmodern Culture 3, no. 3 (1993), http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/ issue.593/antin.593. 44. David Antin, email interview with author, 13 May 2005. 45. Two Antin talk recordings released for purchase are The Principle of Fit 2 (Washington DC: The Watershed Foundation, 1980); and the archeology of home (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1987). 46. David Antin, Tuning (New York: New Directions, 1984), 54. 47. David Antin, email interview with author, 13 May 2005. 48. Ibid. 49. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 60. 50. Ibid., 34. 51. Wolfgang Ernst, ‘From Media History to Zeitkritik’, Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 132–46 (142). 52. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Sterne, MP3. 53. Daniel N. Joudrey and Arlene G. Taylor with the assistance of Katherine M. Wisser, The Organization of Information, 4th edn (Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2018), 181–2. 54. Charles Bernstein, ‘PennSound Manifesto’, PennSound (2003), https://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound/manifesto.php. 55. The SpokenWeb research network has introduced a metadata schema designed specifically for the description of collections of literary audio recordings: SpokenWeb Metadata Scheme and Cataloguing Process, https://spokenweb-metadata-scheme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Select Bibliography Camlot, Jason, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). Ernst, Wolfgang, Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Feaster, Patrick, ‘Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording’, Folklore Forum 32 (2001): 57–102. Furr, Derek, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

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Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds, New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Kittler, Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Schmidt Horning, Susan, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Smith, Jacob, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). ———, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Wurtzler, Steve J., Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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16 OH-EE-OH-EE-OH-EE-AW-EE-AW!: Sound Descriptors in the Books of Tarzan as Facilitators of Presence Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Introduction

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t might seem inadvisable in these morally proscriptive days to focus on Tarzan as the example for this chapter. After all, the books, and certainly earlier films and series based upon them, are overtly racist, explicitly white supremacist, supportive of colonialist and imperialist agendas,1 and the author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, had a peculiar fascination for, and belief in, the superiority of, of all things, the British aristocracy. I do, however, have a relevant and highly personal reason for presenting the Tarzan books as an example of how the conditions for presence can be created through sound in literary works. Between 1970 and 1978 I was a child in Kenya where my parents worked as teachers. My family did not have a television and so, regularly each Saturday, I cycled across the boarding school compound to a friend’s house to watch the morning children’s programme of Voice of Kenya.2 My recollection is understandably a little hazy, but I clearly recall enjoying grainy footage of early twentieth-century boxing bouts with such luminaries as Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Max Schmeling interspersed with more forgettable syndicated cartoons. But the highlight of the morning, eagerly anticipated through the preceding week, was that great bull ape, the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan, perfectly personified in the athletic physique of the god-like Johnny Weissmuller. The irony of such films, and their ideological baggage, being broadcast on the national television service of an African country several years after gaining independence from Britain were lost on my seven-year-old mind as the films’ cardboard-cut-out characters, predictable plots, and satisfyingly expected outcomes unfailingly worked their magic on my pre-adolescent imagination (see N. Frank Ukadike, who specifically mentions Tarzan in the context of media and entertainment imported into Africa).3 Such childhood memories led me, later in life, to rediscover Tarzan through the original books. What struck me upon reading them were the sound descriptors used in a very deliberate and precise manner to paint an imaginary heart of darkness for those readers who, like Burroughs, had never experienced Africa. An example from the third of the Tarzan series is this: From the dense jungles upon either side came the weird night cries of the carnivora – the maniacal voice of the hyena, the coughing grunt of the panther, the deep and awful roar of the lion. And with them strange, uncanny notes that the girl could not ascribe to any particular night prowler – more terrible because of their mystery.4

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This excerpt bears all the hallmarks of the Burroughs style when it comes to vividly painting in sound, and such descriptors of sound comprise the immersive technology used to enable the reader’s presence in the world of Tarzan. There is a consistency in the use of such technology that is found throughout the series – the sounds of the African jungle are invariably strange, uncanny (a word that appears frequently in Burroughs’s writing) and, in their mysteriousness, often impossible to ascribe to any specific source. This is a fictional externality of ambiguity, unknowingness, and fear constructed through sound, akin to the application of sound design to horror films and survival-horror computer games, where sound is used to complement the dark recesses and limited visual horizons typical of such imaginary worlds. As Conor Reid notes: ‘When Burroughs refers to the jungle, and it is one of the most frequently used nouns in the entire Tarzan series, he is imagining any tropical, densely forested area and does not draw any further technical or ecological distinctions.’5 Furthermore, this imaginary world is ‘a vertical one’6 with visual horizons as restricted as in the audiovisual horror genre; a world in which the limited visual horizon and the unfettered auditory horizon permit free play to the fearful imagination. There is a wealth of research and writing on the relationship between sound and fear (and related emotions such as anxiety, urgency, suspense, terror, horror). For example: in the design of warning signals and alarms;7 in creating the conditions for presence in virtual reality;8 the audio design of computer games;9 and sound and cinema.10 Even poetry recognises the fearful power of sound such as this excerpt from Wordsworth that is particularly apt in the context of this chapter: ‘That’ roar, the prowling lion’s ‘Here I am,’ How fearful to the desert wide!11 So, it is no surprise that sound is a primary resource, coupled with removing vision, for the creators of horror films and survival-horror computer games, no less so than the frequent use of sound descriptors in the vertical space of the jungle is for Burroughs. My academic research has thus far mainly focused on presence and the perception of sound, and much of my early writing was on the use of sound to create the conditions for presence or immersion in virtual worlds such as computer games. The motivation for this chapter proceeds on the assumption that it is possible to apply what I have learned from the study of sound and presence in computer games to other virtual worlds such as those found in fictional literary works. After all, both operate by stimulating the imagination in order to engage the interactant with a constructed reality – ideally to immerse the player/reader in a world far removed from their mundane reality. In order to test this assumption, I must first present a short theoretical framework dealing with presence and sound’s role in presence, which I then use for a brief analysis of presence-facilitating sound descriptors in the first of the Tarzan novels.

The Framework Presence There are almost as many definitions of presence and forms of presence (for example, subjective/objective presence, self presence, co-presence, social presence, and so on) as there are articles on presence – I direct the interested reader initially to peruse the

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long-running journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments should a history of the terminological and conceptual debates be sought after – but they all relate in some way to Marvin Minsky’s original use of the phrase ‘being there’ (see below). The reader should note that, in contrast to the literature on virtual reality, the computer and video game literature typically uses the term ‘immersion’ as a synonym for presence. As noted below, some writers make a distinction between the two terms. In its early conception, presence, or telepresence, is about robotics and the use of sensors to feed back the robot’s conditions and operations to a remote operator, such that it would be as if the robotic arm were merely a flesh-and-blood extension of the human. As Minsky puts it, the teleoperator would have the ‘sense of “being there”’,12 and so hazardous jobs in nuclear reactors, mining, space exploration, and so forth could easily be accomplished remotely in a safer, and no doubt more comfortable, environment. As computer games gained in popularity through the 1980s and 90s, and developments in computer graphics and processing power enabled the production of firstperson, 3-dimensional game worlds (the first example of the first-person shooter genre being Catacomb 3-D (1991)), the term ‘immersion’ began to gain currency. It was, and still is in many ways, a synonym for presence used in the field of computer games (their production, marketing, and study), but it owes more of a debt to philosophical antecedents than the more rationalistic concept of telepresence (thus, immersion or presence in computer games is an aesthetic experience rather than a perceptual state to be achieved in order to get a job done). It is closely related to concepts such as engagement, engrossment, absorption, and transportation – being immersed in a work of art or a novel, for example – and this allows one to go back a little further in history when attempting to trace the roots of the immersive experience. Thus, the eighteenthcentury philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot could suggest that the artistry and skill displayed in a painting by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince ‘puts you in the scene’, that ‘one is in the painting’, or, as Fried puts it, that the beholder and painting become ‘a closed and self-sufficient system’;13 Diderot feels compelled to take part in and extend the actions depicted in the painting.14 There are clear parallels here to later conceptions of presence in digital worlds with Fried describing Diderot’s state of absorption as requiring an obliteration of the beholder’s presence in front of the painting and the transportation of ‘the beholder’s physical presence to within the painting’.15 Alison McMahan provides three conditions required for immersion in a computer game: the user’s expectations of the game or environment must match the environment’s conventions fairly closely [. . .] the user’s actions must have a non-trivial impact on the environment [. . .] the conventions of the world must be consistent.16 Here, the key concepts are expectation, malleability, and consistency. The game player comes to the game with a set of expectations from experience that the game’s system should satisfy – in a first-person shooter, for example, there is an expectation of free movement in all directions, a variety of weaponry, the sounds of combat, and so on. The game’s environment must be malleable, and, using the same example, the player’s actions should result in destruction and the death of other characters – a bomb brings down a building, a bullet results in blood spatter. Finally, there should be no major

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surprises – the game’s control mappings, for instance, must never change, but, equally, the result of firing a weapon should be consistent in its sound, and the player should never be presented with, say, the sound of a duck quacking rather than the expected explosive bang. There are those (I am one of them) who attempt to differentiate between the concepts of presence and immersion for various reasons, not least of which is the extant confusion and potential for confusion outlined above. But attempts to do so run the risk of succumbing to technological determinism and even more confusion surrounding definitions, understandings, and usage made of terms such as ‘real’, ‘reality’, and ‘realism’. A brief discussion of this is worthwhile, though, because it opens the door to imagination, a faculty that, as I will show, is necessary to the attainment of presence in the worlds of literary fiction. In writing about presence in virtual worlds such as those designed for virtual reality, Mel Slater defines it as ‘the extent to which the unification of simulated sensory data and perceptual processing produces a coherent “place” that you are “in” and in which there may be the potential for you to act’.17 In this, despite a number of questions that might arise – what exactly is simulated about the sensation that is provided? and at precisely what point does presence magically occur? – Slater is generally in agreement with Minsky in that presence is the feeling of being in a place and being able to act within that place. But Slater also acknowledges the existence of the concept of immersion and takes pains to distinguish between that and presence. Accordingly, immersion is an objective measurement of the fidelity of a virtual world’s sensation-delivery mechanism ‘to their equivalent real-world sensory modalities . . . [while] [p]resence is a human reaction to immersion’.18 The technology of a virtual world can therefore be more or less immersive depending on its degree of fidelity to an ideal. In answer to the question of how immersive technology can create the conditions for presence, Slater suggests: ‘One way to induce presence is to increase realism.’19 This last is problematic for several reasons, not least because there is little discussion in the field of virtual reality of what reality and realism are other than similar appeals to that noted above to the fidelity of virtual-world sensory data to real-world equivalents. There is a virtual world and then there is the real world, and the distinction is a given. I might take the view that presence is simply not (currently) possible in virtual worlds, if presence in virtual worlds must be the same feeling, and achieved the same way, as in our everyday existence. I could support this view by the fact that most virtual worlds are purely audiovisual; very rarely is the tactile sensation available and even less so sensations of smell and taste let alone sensations of temperature and mass. Complicating matters further, no matter how present I might be in a computer game world, I still retain a presence in that other world where my dog barking is able to force my attention from the game. Gestalts of sensation compete for my attention, and that attention can be directed, wittingly or unwittingly, from one to the other. This might be equivalent to the notion of sensory immersion in computer games as proposed by Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä:20 the sensation from one unified set of sensations overwhelming those from another set. But this would be a little too reductionist because it ignores the role of imagination and experience, important faculties and facilitators of presence that are too often overlooked in the pursuit of fidelity to ‘equivalent real-world sensory modalities’ as the means to presence.

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To suggest that presence is impossible in virtual worlds, though, would be uncharitable and, in my experience of hours-at-a-time playing first-person shooters in my more youthful days, untrue. What must be at fault, then, are the what and the how of Slater’s explanation. My own view is (a) that presence in one world or another is an on–off switch but that the tipping point is directed by focus on one unified set of stimuli or another – gestalts of sensation; (b) that fidelity to so-called real-world stimuli is neither necessary nor possible; and (c) related to (a), that distinctions between virtual world and real world are mere obfuscations: the origin of a gestalt of sensation is of little importance. I hold that reality is the experience of a perceptually formed environment – in other words, reality is individual and a result of a process of construction. Especially in a fictional world such as a computer game or novel, Slater’s fidelity ‘to their equivalent real-world sensory modalities’ is of little importance, and cleaving too much to such an approach risks straightjacketing the imagination that is required to bring the environment into effect. I deal further with this below. So where amidst all this is the locus of presence? What is the ‘there’ in which we can reach the state of ‘being there’? Clearly the player is never physically in the game, materially transported into the monitor despite being enveloped in sound from speakers or headphones: ‘there’ is not a real place which I can take a tape measure to. It is more akin to what Michel Foucault terms a heterotopia and exemplifies with the metaphor of a mirror. A mirror is a utopia, a nowhere place, but, because it does exist in externality, it is also a heterotopia exerting a ‘counteraction on the position’ the viewer occupies, ‘a virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I see myself there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent’.21 However, this is a concept that is difficult to transfer to computer game worlds or novels – a mirror can be measured and touched, a fictional world cannot – and Foucault originally presented the idea in a 1967 lecture, long before the advent of computer games. My own conception is that gestalts of sensation are transformed, with the aid of experience, into perceptual environments, the experience of which is our current reality regardless of the source of that sensation. This heterotopic environment is populated with other-presences – percepts of those objects and events which are part of my gestalt – and it is in this environment that our self has presence, the feeling of ‘being there’.22

Sound, Imagination, and Presence Today, as I write, there are labourers at my home carrying out work. Let me rephrase that. As I sit at my desk writing, the normal calm and even tenor of my comfortable and tranquil domestic castle is disrupted jarringly by the yells of strange men, the constant, annoying twang of otherwise forgettable Eastern European pop music (all grounding bass removed by a tinny sound system boosted beyond the point of distortion), the all-too-frequent nerve-shattering clang of metal shovel cast into empty wheelbarrow, and, underpinning it all, the dark, satanic mill-like snarl and grind of an earth excavator, incessant in its stone-crunching, monotonous cacophony. In the best of circumstances, I would find such sounds disturbing to say the least, especially as pen is put to paper, but, today, they provide a useful example of how the

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use of sound descriptors can aid a third party (you, the reader) in, however fleetingly and vicariously, experiencing something close to my current reality. The key to this is how the perceptual environment is formed: a combination of sensation, experience, and imagination. There is a neurological foundation to imagination that is well researched under the banners of aural and visual imagery (these two senses being the most thoroughly studied).23 Both forms of imagery are important for a discussion of sound descriptors in literary fiction – the only relevant input sensation when reading is visual, but the printed word is all the immersive technology that is required for our cognition to start fashioning an environment in which to be present. Jesper Svenbro traces the genesis of the written word as immersive technology (not his phrase but the parallel is valid) back to the late sixth century bce, the dawn of the concept of silent reading: ‘the internalization of the voice [. . .] corresponds to [. . .] “letters that speak,” [words] “speak,” they “cry out” or even “sing.” The eye sees the sound. A written page can now become a scene.’24 Thus, we can conjure up particular percepts of image and sound where there are no current sensations in those modalities.25 In the auditory modality, there is a wealth of neurological evidence for this faculty whereby there is activation of the auditory cortices of the brain in the absence of sound waves if a recognisable action is observed.26 For example, an audio-less film of a hammer forcefully striking an anvil produces auditory activity similar to that shown when the audio of the event is present. This requires familiarity with at least the intensity and amplitude envelope and the frequency spectrum to be expected when two hard objects are seen colliding, but the aural imagery is even more precise if the perceiver has experience of the sound of metal striking metal or even of a hammer smashing down onto an anvil. Equally, the analogue to aural imagery, visual imagery, can be triggered by the perception of a sound source and its location in space. The pitter-patter of footsteps in a computer game where there is no source to be seen on the screen allows for the positioning of the source behind my self’s presence in the environment, and so allows me to act within the, in effect, 2-dimensionality of the virtual world as if it were 3-dimensional. In this case, ‘footsteps’ is an audiovisual percept in my environment originating from sound wave sensation and the visual imagery that is triggered in the absence of appropriate light wave sensation. As with aural imagery, this functions regardless of the source of the sensation – activity in my home space, a film, or a computer game. The fashioning of percepts in the environment from aural and visual imagery is a phenomenon that is a constant and typically involuntary process. So much so that we could not be present without it. I sense a sound wave emanating from some direction in relation to where I sit, I fashion the percept ‘car’ and perhaps imagine its direction of travel and speed or even the type of vehicle. The same with aeroplanes overhead, birds in the garden, doors shutting and family moving about in my home, and very quickly these percepts coalesce into other-presences in the environment in which my self is present and at the centre. Being present allows for action in externality – I can walk towards a family member who is other-present in my environment. To return to realism in virtual worlds (as fidelity to ‘real-world sensory modalities’) and reality as the momentary experience of a perceptual environment, imagination’s role is to fill in the gaps left by the shortcomings of the immersive technology of such worlds. Imagination plays this role in shaping the environment even in our everyday lives – hearing footsteps behind me, I can form visual imagery of a person walking

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towards me (complete with footwear, floor surface, speed, weight, and so on) – but it has even more importance where a variety of modalities are missing (such as tactile, gustatory, and olfactory) and where aspects of a fictional world are created for emotional effect. For further details on this, I direct the reader to other writings,27 but, here, a brief example from the world of cinema suffices: anyone who has ever heard a SPAS shotgun fired in real life will know that it is nothing like the sound FX of that same shotgun in the film Terminator 2.28 And yet, the constructed sound FX is far more visceral than the original, and any subsequent attempts in later audiovisual worlds to retain fidelity to the original, to be realistic, sound puny and emotionless by comparison; so much so that the constructed sound FX is now much more verisimilitudinous in a fictional context than an authentic recording would be. As Michel Chion has noted, there are sound conventions in cinema and ‘the impression of realism [these conventions convey becomes] our reference for reality itself’.29 A final note will answer the question as to why we use imagination in the first place. The world that is external to ourselves, externality, is fundamentally ambiguous, and ambiguity begs resolution within our framework of experience about that externality. The sound waves of footsteps, without knowledge of the fundamental aural form of such an event, could have any number of meanings, resulting in any number of percepts in my environment. There is a certain rhythm to footsteps, a certain amplitude envelope and frequency spectrum that can be matched to our experience in order to resolve the inherent ambiguity – any variations merely refine the resolution further in terms of speed, weight, direction, even potential threat or specific person. If the gestalt of sensation we receive from externality is lacking in its details or complement of modalities, imagination is drawn upon even more in order to fashion some form of percept to provide other-presence in our environment. The requirement to resolve ambiguity, the existential need to know whether the sound I hear represents a threat or not, is the trigger to combine the sensory input with experience and imagination and so fashion an environment in which our self can be present.30 As already noted, though, literature uses only visual sensation in the first instance – light reflected off the page in front of me creates dark and light patterns from which my experienced brain is able to form structure. To return to my current situation. The single sentence at the start of this section provides little grist from which to create a vibrant environment replete with other-presences. The sentence is over almost before it has been read, and that, coupled with the lack of descriptive information, gives limited opportunity for the imagination to work on what little is provided before the writing moves on. There is no grit in the oyster from which, over time, to fashion a lustrous pearl that is far more engaging than its predecessor. What follows that sentence, though, does, I trust, slowly provide you, the reader, with enough descriptive language for you to imagine to some extent the environment I am present in and to thus fashion a simulacrum of that environment for your self to be present in.

Tarzan of the Apes In building up to this analysis of presence-facilitating sound descriptors in the Tarzan novels, I have sketched a framework for such analysis drawn from my past research on the relationship between computer game sound and presence in the game’s virtual

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world. There are some difficulties, as noted, in using a framework derived from one field of study within another – novels use only the printed word, for instance, and so do not make use of sound waves as sensory input. One might also question where the possibility is for the reader’s action in the fictional world. Nevertheless, both computer games and novels leverage their resources to engage the player or reader in fictional worlds through a combination of the player’s or reader’s imagination and experience. The main points of the framework are: • The immersive technology of the medium delivers a gestalt of sensation which, the gestalt being apprehended and attended to, provides the basis for the construction of a perceptual environment. • The self is present in the environment, a heterotopia (the fictional world) populated with percepts. • Percepts, the other-presences in our environment, are formed from sensory input moulded by our imagination and experience. • This experience is the knowledge we have gained of externality throughout life and is used to resolve the inherent ambiguity of externality. • The sensory input that ultimately leads to presence need not have fidelity to source – aural and visual imagery fill in enough details to form percepts if the form of the input can be roughly matched to experience – but must match expectation and be consistent enough to provide stability to the environment, the ultimate form of which is malleable as the player’s or reader’s imagination and knowledge allow. To illustrate Burroughs’s use of sound descriptors, and to explain how they are instrumental for the reader’s feeling of presence in the imaginary world of the Tarzan series, I now delve deeper into the first book in the series: Tarzan of the Apes.31 My approach has been to extract sentences with sound descriptors that, in particular, depict the locations and the experiences of the events detailed throughout the book. Thus, I have not made note of descriptors of the tenor of a human voice, for example, concentrating instead on those that characterise the externality of Tarzan’s world for the benefit of the readers. The first point that can be noted is that the use of sound descriptors is markedly different where such locations and experiences are in the jungle compared with those that take place outside of it. With few exceptions, in those chapters that are not set in Tarzan’s familiar world there are no notable sound descriptors of the type I am interested in. These include chapter 1 (the action takes place mainly on a sailing ship), chapter 17 (the departure of another ship stranding a party of Americans on the beach), the first part of chapter 18 (a found letter detailing the historical provenance of a chest of treasure), chapter 25 (Tarzan’s possible genesis is suggested to him by the Frenchman D’Arnot), and the final chapters 27 and 28 (Tarzan seeks out Jane in America). The sound descriptors used here are scarce and mundane, depicting sounds that American readers of the time might be expected to be familiar and comfortable with. Thus: ‘[A] week later, Robert Canler drew up before the farmhouse in his purring six cylinder.’32 Even the sound descriptor itself is redolent of the known, cosy world of the reader, relaxed in a favourite armchair, toes toasting before a fireplace, and a cat curled up in one’s lap as the novel resolves with the hero and other (white) characters snug in the secure, civilised environs of (white) America.

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In chapter 26 (Tarzan is schooled in the ways of Western civilisation), the action takes place at a colonial outpost, and there are sound descriptors aplenty here but, in the main, they relate to an excursion back to the jungle that Tarzan takes and are used to describe the fearful perception of the colonialists at the sounds they hear: ‘“God! What was that?” suddenly cried one of the party, an Englishman, as Tarzan’s savage cry came faintly to their ears.’33 The one notable exception in the chapter is this sentence: Gradually he became accustomed to the strange noises and the odd ways of civilization, so that presently none might know that two short months before, this handsome Frenchman in immaculate white ducks, who laughed and chatted with the gayest of them, had been swinging naked through primaeval forests to pounce upon some unwary victim, which, raw, was to fill his savage belly.34 Here, Burroughs is perhaps drawing attention not only to diverse worlds of sound, each unfamiliar to unaccustomed ears because the sounds are not a mundane part of their civilisation, but also to the view that sound, especially language, separates civilisation from savagery. In this, Burroughs shares something in common with the ancient Greeks and Romans who labelled barbarians those whose language, to cultivated ears at least, was nothing more than a stuttering, stammering sound (namely ‘barbar’). Although not originally a pejorative term, ‘barbarian’ came to be associated with savagery and a lack of civilisation, an association particularly pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon tradition (see Bruce R. Smith for further on this35) of which Burroughs was, in his admiration for the British aristocracy, clearly a worshipper. In all other chapters, sound descriptors are used freely to describe the soundscape of the imagined African jungle, not from the aural perspective of Tarzan but from that of the fictional Western interlopers and for the benefit of (the original) American readers. To list just a few, these include: ‘But now he heard, outside, the sounds of many voices, and long mournful howls, and mighty wailing’;36 ‘No, the white man did not hear. Sheeta was crouching for the spring, and then, shrill and horrible, there rose from the stillness of the jungle the awful cry of the challenging ape, and Sheeta turned, crashing into the underbrush’;37 ‘Clayton came to his feet with a start. His blood ran cold. Never in all his life had so fearful a sound smote upon his ears’;38 ‘Sabor emitted a frightful shriek’;39 ‘“What a frightful sound!” cried Jane, “I shudder at the mere thought of it. Do not tell me that a human throat voiced that hideous and fearsome shriek”’;40 and ‘Every sound she magnified into the stealthy creeping of a sinuous and malignant body.’41 Immersive technology is the objective means by which sensation is delivered to the perceiver, leading, ideally, to the attainment of a feeling of presence. In a novel, the only means of directly conveying sensation to the reader is the written word; the visual modality, then, is the primary tool Burroughs has at his disposal. Where the immersive technology of a computer game, for instance, can deliver photo-realistic imagery and authentic recordings that are indexical (thus, fidelity ‘to their real-world sensory modalities’), descriptive words can only be iconic. As noted previously, though, it would be fallacious to suggest that only indexicality can induce presence; the shotgun in Terminator 2 has little fidelity to source and neither, for that matter, do tin sheets and coconut shells as theatrical stand-ins for thunder and galloping horses. None of this calls a halt to the willing suspension of disbelief. Thus, it is entirely possible that

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words, their direct meaning obfuscated under layers of convention and iconography, can function as immersive technology. The sources which the words as immersive technology describe need only be suggested for the reader’s imagination and knowledge to do the rest. Two of the conditions for immersion (that is, presence) furnished by McMahan are present in the novel. Stock sound descriptors are used time and again in briskly economical fashion – strange, uncanny, terrible, savage, shrill, horrible, awful, fearful, frightful, hideous, fearsome. Stock words and phrases demonstrate consistency and this feeds into the reader’s expectations, creating a rudimentary framework within which to ever more quickly navigate the externality of the novel and transform it to an environment. But expectations are also satisfied in another way for Burroughs’s American readers. In the second decade of the twentieth century, at the tail end of the nineteenth century’s doctrine of manifest destiny as it morphed into American imperialist and colonialist ambitions and feeling immune from the storm clouds gathering over Europe (to use a stock phrase), such readers would have felt confident and secure in their God-given superiority and civilising mission.42 As noted by others (for example, Jeff Berglund and Reid43), the Tarzan novels are a product of their time and reflect the period’s fundamental binarism – ‘the modern and the primitive, civilised and savage, urban and wild’.44 These binarisms are perfectly represented in Tarzan of the Apes not only explicitly in the subject matter and plot but also in the use of sound descriptors. Hence, the stock phrases are icons of the right-hand side of each binarism, all that is unknown, unseen, to be feared and abjected. Referring to several of the Tarzan novels, Reid suggests that the coast is ‘an intermediary space between the African jungle and the wider world, the coast provides intelligibility and transparency to those trapped within an obscure and mysterious landscape’.45 It is where Europeans and Americans confront the boundary between civilisation and savagery. Although Reid overlooks the use of sound descriptors to mark this liminality, such uses are abundant in the novel. In chapter 2, Tarzan’s future parents contemplate their impending marooning on the African shore: Before dark the barkentine lay peacefully at anchor upon the bosom of the still, mirror-like surface of the harbour [. . .] From the dark shadows of the mighty forest came the wild calls of savage beasts – the deep roar of the lion, and, occasionally, the shrill scream of a panther. The woman shrank closer to the man in terrorstricken anticipation of the horrors lying in wait for them in the awful blackness of the nights to come, when they should be alone upon that wild and lonely shore.46 And, during their first night ashore, ‘[s]carcely had they closed their eyes than the terrifying cry of a panther rang out from the jungle behind them.’47 As in the audiovisual horror genre, it is the shift from the visual to the aural modality that triggers the terror in the dark. To answer to the question I posed above – regarding the possibility for action in the fictional world on the part of the reader – this relates to McMahan’s third condition, namely ‘the user’s actions must have a non-trivial impact on the environment’: the environment is malleable in that the basic framework set out by the writer is refined and further shaped by the reader’s imagination and experience. Thus, the possibility

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for presence depends on the quality of the environment which, in turn, depends on the reader’s approach. My academic approach for this study, explicitly seeking out in Tarzan of the Apes relevant sound descriptors, militates against presence in Tarzan’s world. But I initially began by reading the books again for pure escapist pleasure, allowing my imagination, drawn in part from childhood experience, free rein. As a privileged child growing up in Africa, I experienced first-hand and many times the externalities described by Burroughs for his American readers. Although there exist no jungles in Kenya (and other African countries I later lived in) of the type that Burroughs describes, and lions, in any case, are denizens of the savannah, sounds of the creatures he writes about became an intimate and familiar part of my world such that, even today, many years later and living in Denmark, I can easily aurally imagine them. Thus, when I read of the ‘frightful shriek’ that Sabor emits, my cognition cannot help but use that descriptor and my store of experience to furnish an appropriate percept in my environment. Of course, a lioness does not shriek in the way that a child or macaw might more accurately be described as shrieking, but my experience is rummaged through to bring forth the more appropriate, but no less impressive, auditory imagery of a snarling half-roar that I know from direct experience to be voiced by such a creature. Burroughs’s overwhelming, almost incantatory, and consistent use of sound descriptors when conjuring up the African jungle and its creatures for his readers soon populates my environment, such that it rapidly gains the necessary other-presences for my self to attain presence among. As the creator of that environment, I act within and upon the environment by providing ever more details from my experience. Thus, I can picture Sabor, crouched in a defensive posture, a snarl on her face as she is cornered, and so can go even further in fashioning my environment than can many other readers. It is not necessary for Burroughs, in my case at least, to use so many words – just the phrase ‘frightful shriek’. And this brings me to my next point. Throughout this chapter, I have made use of the term ‘percept’. As I have described it, a percept is an other-presence in the environment which results from the use of imagination and experience to resolve the ambiguity of externality.48 But, in the context of this chapter, it is also useful to conceive of the percept as a metonym. Each percept carries with it a lot of baggage, and some of that baggage is highly personal while some is shared across groups of readers. To return to Sabor’s ‘frightful shriek’, the percept that results has a host of associations, some of which might trigger the creation of other percepts, refining and adding detail to the reader’s environment. For me, with my experience, not only are there visual and aural imagery directly related to lions, but there are also other percepts drawn from my childhood such as the pale yellow savannah, the shimmering heat, the smell of the red earth after rain, the aural imagery of the still vividly remembered high-pitched, frightful squeal of a warthog wriggling in toothed jaws. All of this metonymic association enriches my environment and makes it all the easier to be present within it. And this brings me to the naïve American reader for whom Burroughs originally wrote. By naïve, I mean unlikely to have had the experiences I have had and living at a time before audiovisual media was able to import daily the sounds and images of the African jungle into American homes. What are such readers to make of Sabor’s ‘frightful shriek’ having little or no experience of the authentic roar of a lioness? The unknown is an ambiguity that must perforce be resolved by the imagination, an imagination easily triggered and directed by fear. Restricting vision and so bringing

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sound FX to the fore is a favourite trick of film and game producers working in the horror genre. But an organic sound such as a shriek, and the aural imagery accompanying it when sounds or words alone are used, triggers something primaeval within us. In a study of the ‘chilling’ effect of the sound of fingernails scraping across a blackboard, the authors speculate that the acoustic qualities of this uncomfortable sound are similar to the warning calls of macaque monkeys, suggesting a link to our primate ancestors’ responses to predators in the vicinity that remains a vestigial presence in modern humans’ brains.49 As with such sound and the audio design of horror films and survival-horror computer games, the auditory imagery provoked by the writing populates the reader’s environment with the other-presences of dimly glimpsed, shadowy shapes, lurking and threatening in the primaeval murkiness of the ecology of fear. For Burroughs’s original readers, this is only compounded by their imaginations working with the framework of the civilised–savage binarisms of the period where civilisation and savagery respectively are metonyms for everything that is known, homely, familiar, and safe and for everything that is unknown, foreign, exotic, and to be feared. It is in the unknown darkness of a visually restricted jungle that the sound descriptors used so frequently and consistently by Burroughs prove their worth: utilising the imagination through a canny use of uncanny sound descriptors, the reader is, as Diderot might put it, transported to the jungle that forms with the reader ‘a closed and self-sufficient system’, the environment in which they become present.

Notes   1. To a point. Chapter 21 of Tarzan of the Apes has the following: ‘To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueller barbarities practised upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State – a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe.’ Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (Project Gutenberg, 2021), chapter XXI, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/78/78-h/78-h.htm.   2. Since 1989, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.   3. N. Frank Ukadike, ‘Anglophone African Media’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 36 (1991): 74–80.   4. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Beasts of Tarzan (Project Gutenberg, 1993), chapter IX, https:// www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/85/pg85-images.html.   5. Conor Reid, ‘“This Savage World Was an Open Book”: Genre and Landscape in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan Series’, Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 1 (2017): 147–62 (148).   6. Ibid., 149.   7. Judy Edworthy, Sarah Loxley, and Ian Dennis, ‘Improving Auditory Warning Design: Relationship between Warning Sound Parameters and Perceived Urgency’, Human Factors 33, no. 2 (1991): 205–31.   8. Stéphane Bouchard, Julie St-Jacques, Geneviève Robillard, and Patrice Renaud, ‘Anxiety Increases the Feeling of Presence in Virtual Reality’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 17, no. 4 (2008): 376–91.   9. Tom Alexander Garner, Game Sound from Behind the Sofa: An Exploration into the Fear Potential of Sound & Psychophysiological Approaches to Audio-Centric, Adaptive Gameplay (PhD thesis, University of Aalborg, 2013). 10. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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11. William Wordsworth, ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1828), https://www.bartleby.com/145/ ww746.html (accessed 6 September 2022). 12. Marvin Minsky, ‘Telepresence’, Omni (1980): 45–51 (48). 13. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 121, 130, 131–2. 14. Ibid., 121. 15. Ibid., 131–2. 16. Alison McMahan, ‘Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A New Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–86 (68–9). 17. Mel Slater, ‘A Note on Presence Terminology’, Presence Connect 3, no. 3 (2003): 2. 18. Ibid., 1–2. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä, ‘Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion’, presented at Changing Views – Worlds in Play (16–20 June 2005). 21. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, trans. from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–9. 22. For a detailed explanation of this, I refer the reader to Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, ‘The Importance of Sound to the Formation of Presence’, in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). 23. Sometimes referred to as auditory imagery/auralisation and visualisation respectively. 24. Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5. 25. A modality is a sensory-perceptual channel relating to hearing, vision, smell, and so on. 26. For example, Nico Bunzeck, Torsten Wuestenberg, Kai Lutz, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and Lutz Jancke, ‘Scanning Silence: Mental Imagery of Complex Sounds’, NeuroImage 26, no. 4 (2005): 1119–27; David J. M. Kraemer, C. Neil Macrae, Adam E. Green, and William M. Kelley, ‘Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex’, Nature 434, no. 7030 (2005): 158; Julien Voisin, Aurélie Bidet-Caulet, Olivier Bertrand, and Pierre Fonlupt, ‘Listening in Silence Activates Auditory Areas: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study’, The Journal of Neuroscience 26, no. 1 (2006): 273–8; and Andrew J. King, ‘Auditory Neuroscience: Activating the Cortex without Sound’, Current Biology 16, no. 11 (2006): R410–11. 27. For example, Karen Collins and Bill Kapralos, ‘Auditory Reality and Virtuality: Is Space the Final Audio Frontier for Games?’; and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, ‘Video Game Sound Design and the Fetish of Realism’, both in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). 28. James Cameron, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991. See Shotgun Sound Design Deconstructed from Terminator 2 for an explanation of the sound FX, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tiq-oBeEn1M (accessed 28 August 2022). 29. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108. 30. For more on ambiguity and presence, see Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, ‘Ambiguity and Vagueness in Video Game Sound’, in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). 31. Originally serialised in 1912 in the American pulp magazine The All-Story then published in book form in 1914. 32. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 315–16. 33. Ibid., 302.

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34. Ibid., 297. 35. Bruce R. Smith, ‘Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology’, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 21–41. 36. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 109. 37. Ibid., 153. 38. Ibid., 154. 39. Ibid., 166. 40. Ibid., 169. 41. Ibid., 227. 42. Not to absolve Europeans of their share of guilt. 43. Jeff Berglund, ‘Write, Right, White, Rite: Literacy, Imperialism, Race, and Cannibalism in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes’, Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (1999): 53–76; Reid, ‘“Savage World”’. 44. Reid, ‘“Savage World”’, 150. 45. Ibid. 46. Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 23–4. 47. Ibid., 30. 48. One can, of course, use the pure force of imagination and experience to fashion a percept. 49. D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand, ‘Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound’, Perception & Psychophysics 39, no. 2 (1986): 77–80 (80).

Select Bibliography Berglund, Jeff, ‘Write, Right, White, Rite: Literacy, Imperialism, Race, and Cannibalism in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes’, Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (1999): 53–76. Ermi, Laura and Frans Mäyrä, ‘Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion’, presented at Changing Views – Worlds in Play (16–20 June 2005). Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, trans. from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 5 (1984): 46–9. Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mark, ‘The Importance of Sound to the Formation of Presence’, in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, ed. Will Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). Halpern, D. Lynn, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand, ‘Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound’, Perception & Psychophysics 39, no. 2 (1986): 77–80. McMahan, Alison, ‘Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A New Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–86. Minsky, Marvin, ‘Telepresence’, Omni (1980): 45–51. Reid, Conor, ‘“This Savage World Was an Open Book”: Genre and Landscape in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan Series’, Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 1 (2017): 147–62. Slater, Mel, ‘A Note on Presence Terminology’, Presence Connect 3, no. 3 (2003). Smith, Bruce R., ‘Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology’, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 21–42. Svenbro, Jesper, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

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Part V: Literature, War, Industry

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17 An Auditory History of Early Modernity: Listening to Enlightenment and Industry in Britain, 1700–1900 Peter Denney

I

n Britain, the arrival of modernity was frequently associated with sound. A watershed was reached in the nineteenth century, when the noise of industrialisation came to be heard as a defining feature of modern life.1 For some commentators, the unprecedented amplification of sound, generated by the factory, the railway, and other innovations, prompted a celebration of power and progress. Other listeners, however, regarded industrial noise with considerable anxiety as a form of sonic oppression, which silenced human voices and damaged auditory environments. Literature, especially pastoral imagery, shaped the aural meanings attached to these negative experiences of industrialisation.2 In the same period, new acoustic technologies like the stethoscope and gramophone encouraged among the professional classes a culture of close listening, which contributed to a heightened sensitivity to loud, unwanted sound, along with an accompanying attempt to control urban sonic spaces.3 This ultimately led, in 1864, to the British Parliament passing a law to limit street noise by enforcing the removal of itinerant musicians. The problem of street noise, however, had likewise been an issue in the eighteenth century.4 During this earlier period, sound also expressed the pleasures and pains of modern urban life. Well before the noise of industrialisation became associated with a new social and economic order, which transformed work patterns, living conditions, and class relations, the sonic effects of modernity generated substantial debate and examination. Many commentators, for example, emphasised the importance of spaces of regulated sound such as the coffee house and the urban pleasure ground for practising a revamped form of civility suitable to Britain’s emergence as a commercial and imperial power. Contrariwise, some critics condemned these spaces, centred in London, for licensing sensory confusion, whether the noise of political dissension, vulgar unmusicality, or hedonistic luxury.5 From either perspective, however, liberty and refinement were interpreted as acoustic experiences requiring discrimination between desirable and unwanted sound in the performance of enlightened selfhood. Religious movements, such as Methodism, similarly provoked interest in the codes of sonic behaviour, of singing and preaching, needed to ensure effective management of the emotions.6 In all these ways, the vexed attitude to noise in the Victorian era not only resulted from the new kind of amplified, mechanical sound brought about by industrialisation; its origins also lay in the ideal of the bounded self,7 which was both shaped and challenged by the urban auditory environments of the British Enlightenment.

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This chapter examines changing valuations of sound in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on recent case studies in the history of sound, it focuses, in particular, on several spaces and concepts, which were paradigmatic of distinctive phases of modernity, and which also possessed strong acoustic significance. Coffee houses and pleasure gardens in the eighteenth century, and factories and streets in the nineteenth, for instance, are shown to be key sites where shifting distinctions between sound, noise, and quietness were explored, negotiated, and flouted in the formation of modern identities. Specifically, the fashioning of sonic identities appropriate for a modern nation necessitated an emphasis on regulated auditory environments. Such spaces were also important in literature, whether Enlightenment periodical writing or Victorian fiction. While the chapter pays special attention to class, it recognises, too, how class intersected with gender and race in shaping ‘ways of hearing’,8 from polite conversation to music appreciation. In addition, by taking into account a long arc of modernity, it argues that many conflicts over sound, which became a hallmark of Victorian culture, had antecedents in the rather different auditory environments of the Enlightenment world. Unlike the nineteenth-century focus on mechanical noise, commentators in the eighteenth century concentrated on the sonic links between modernity, civility, and sociability. And yet, as we shall see, these earlier ways of understanding sound were repurposed in later debates about industrialisation.

Listening to Enlightenment During his stay in London, in 1727, the Swiss tourist César De Saussure recorded that Englishmen were ‘taciturn by nature, especially when compared to the French’. Even in a tavern, remarked De Saussure, there was ‘so little talk’ that it was possible to ‘hear a fly buzz’ in the ‘long pauses’ that ‘interrupted’ conversation.9 Foreign visitors in the eighteenth century were virtually unanimous in regarding taciturnity as a key characteristic of English people, both men and women.10 Despite locating this behaviour in a tavern rather than a more salubrious venue, however, De Saussure thought such truncated conversation applied mainly to members of polite society. For, throughout his trip, the labouring classes of London were depicted as ‘insolent’, ‘quarrelsome’, fond of swearing, and enamoured of outdoor recreations, in which violence was accompanied by ‘noise’.11 And yet, if a taciturn disposition was a marker of elite status, it also had the potential to jeopardise participation in conversation, a practice vital to the performance of politeness. The ideal of politeness was a distinctively modern form of civility. It emerged in Britain in the early eighteenth century as a means to manage the frictions of an increasingly urban, commercial society. This polite identity was initially promoted in periodicals, which identified in metropolitan life the basis of a new system of morality. Most famously, in the Tatler and the Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele developed a new literary genre, the periodical essay, where a detached, fictional persona provided illustrations of politeness and its violation in accounts of a wide range of everyday topics directed to a broad constituency of readers, from the modestly prosperous to the fabulously wealthy. For the most part, the role of sound in polite society featured only indirectly in these Enlightenment ‘lifestyle magazines’.12 Nevertheless, it was prominent in discussions of music, conversation, and activities involving public assembly. Befitting the irenic tone of the periodicals, the violation of acoustic

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norms, whether raucous festivity or inappropriate laughter, was generally treated as an object of gentle satire rather than bitter invective. In their essays, Addison and Steele attempted to prevent political rancour by uniting the middle class and landed gentry around a shared commitment to sociability and cultural refinement. Acting courteously and tastefully in company was held to be conducive to the political stability necessary for economic growth.13 At this time, London was a centre of international trade with a bustling, booming population, but initially it was not known to be a particularly polite city. The streets were crowded, and grime pervaded even fashionable squares.14 In the 1710s and 20s, the spread of politeness had to compete with a maelstrom of noise, as the metropolis reverberated with, among other sonic phenomena, the clatter of coaches and carts, the clamour of crowds, the din of labourers undertaking manual work, and the loud voices of ballad singers and street vendors. Throughout the day, wrote John Gay, ‘all the Streets with passing Cries resound[ed]’, while the ‘Pavement’ thudded with ‘trampling Feet’.15 In the Spectator, edited by Addison and Steele, an irritated citizen argued for the regulation of street cries partly because such noise evoked disorder and partly because it violated standards of aesthetic decorum. The presence of these largely plebeian sounds in London obviously offended many affluent members of society, but they were tolerated as an unavoidable, if not desirable, aspect of modern urban life. Accordingly, objections to street noise during this period were frequently represented in a tone of wry amusement rather than furious indignation. In addition, no campaign was waged to introduce laws to eliminate the sounds of hawkers and popular musicians.16 Still, the distaste for plebeian noise intensified among wealthy residents of London as they embraced a polite identity, which separated them from their social inferiors. This widening social distance contributed to the growing geographical segregation of the metropolis into rich and poor districts. In consequence, such districts were depicted as possessing different acoustic profiles. At a time of political crisis in 1779, Elizabeth Montagu opined that discontented inhabitants ‘raved’ in the slums of St Giles, while complaints were ‘softly whisper’d’ in the fashionable West End, with its elegant mansions and tidy streets.17 And yet the location of shopping precincts and other key venues meant that elite city-dwellers could not shield themselves from unwelcome aural shocks. Instead, sociability was sought in designated spaces, where protocols or fees aimed to prevent disagreeable sonic behaviour from ruining the pleasures of politeness. In the eighteenth century, anyone with a pretension to gentility had to master the art of polite conversation, striking a correct balance between speaking and listening. Conversation was crucial to civility and its related programme of modernity, for it was held to facilitate a smooth, amiable interaction between strangers in an urban world, where differences could easily lead to misunderstanding or conflict. The main goal of conversation, most people agreed, was to be agreeable in company. For Addison and Steele, a vital feature of polite conversation was informality. In their opinion, as noted in 1711, an ‘unconstrained Carriage, and a certain Openness of Behaviour’ were essential signs of ‘Good Breeding’.18 Importantly, this informal conversation neither licensed nor repressed the emotions; rather, it provided a context in which they could be guided by reason, expressed as refined affections rather than unruly passions. Despite such seeming casualness, a large number of guidebooks were published in the eighteenth century to teach the rules of polite conversation to individuals keen to affirm their

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gentility.19 These rules were countless. Indeed, there were so many of them that people, insecure in their polite status, must have felt anxious whenever they engaged in the practice lest the slightest blunder undercut their claim to gentility. The rules of polite conversation addressed matters such as talking too loudly, too fast, or too much; not pausing to give others an opportunity to speak; interrupting fellow interlocutors; using vulgar language; talking with excessive levity; and whispering to someone in private, while others were discussing a different subject.20 As indicated by these rules, mastery of conversation involved interlocutors being attentive to the sound of their speech quite as much as to its propositional content. It also meant listening intently to both the spoken words of others and the ways in which they were communicated in terms of tone, pace, and volume. Quiet, disciplined listening was thus a key component of refined conversation. As the author of one conduct manual stated, the polite gentleman ‘ought to be more willing to hear, than to speak [. . .] a just moderation herein is best, not to be over-Silent nor Talkative’.21 The same point was made by Addison, who also linked moderation to the management of sound. In fact, the fictional author of his periodical, Mr Spectator, was depicted as a man who enjoyed polite conversation precisely because it was an activity in which a preference for hearing instead of speaking still allowed individuals to be agreeable in company. For Addison, such conversation was best located in regulated sonic spaces like the coffee house, a site of urban sociability removed from the commotion of street life.

Sonic Spaces of Civility Coffee houses proliferated in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, when they came to be emblematic of the distinctive modernity of this unique global city.22 People frequented coffee houses to do more than drink a fashionable beverage. For the cost of a penny per cup, men, predominantly, were able to discuss politics, transact business, talk about books and plays, read newspapers, acquire information, and generally enjoy the pleasures of conversation. The appeal of coffee houses lay in their function as centres of communication and conviviality. They also served as venues for the wide range of clubs that grew in popularity during the same period.23 This connection between clubs and coffee houses contributed to the specialisation of the latter, as groups with divergent interests or occupations met in different locations. As a result, coffee houses were perceived to vary in the sounds of their conversation depending on the class or character of their clientele. In 1759, for example, Oliver Goldsmith noted that ‘passionate’ men could ‘vent’ their ‘rage among the old orators at Slaughter’s’, damning the nation at every chance, while ‘phlegmatic’ individuals could ‘sit in silence at the Hum-Drum Club in Ivy Lane’.24 Unsurprisingly, Addison also mentioned the Hum-Drum Club, praising the ‘peaceable’ character of its members, who allegedly sat and smoked together without speaking.25 Meanwhile, Samuel Johnson similarly condemned the ‘fierce vociferations’ of ‘passionate men’ for obstructing the ‘course of conversation’ and interrupting the ‘quiet’ of anyone within earshot of their ‘clamours’.26 Addison and Steele were concerned that, by facilitating debate, coffee houses had the potential to fuel animosity rather than foster amiability. Moreover, the extent to which individuals succeeded in controlling their passions was registered in the sounds of their conversation. Speakers who were ‘talkative’ or ‘loud’ in ‘mixed

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company’, declared Steele, undermined sociability by displaying a lack of concern for others. They were no different in this sense to the gentleman in one establishment who spent half an hour clearing his throat by ‘coughing and spitting’, before proceeding to sing, hum, and dance in the middle of the open room.27 In response to this kind of impulsive behaviour, Addison and Steele aimed to promote in coffee houses a model of refined conversation in which the passions of interlocutors were restrained by reason. Such coffee houses avoided ‘Mirthful Meetings’. Rather, they were regulated auditory environments, where moderate, orderly speech enabled citizens to remain in ‘quiet Possession of the present Instant’.28 As John Hill asserted in 1753, the ‘mixed conversation of Coffee-houses’ was beneficial only if it was ‘restrained within any bounds of order and regularity’, in part by people listening ‘with attention’.29 Removed from loud, irregular, or sudden sounds, the polite self fashioned in coffee houses was both amiable and unruffled, sensitive to others but unswayed by external circumstances. As spaces of quiet, polite conversation, the coffee houses celebrated by the Spectator included only the elite classes in its idealised account of civility.30 But there were rowdy as well as refined coffee houses frequented by wealthy men, whose meetings might involve libertine pleasures as opposed to rational pursuits. Such hubs of alleged immorality were criticised for their discordant noise. So, too, were the less respectable coffee houses attended by artisans, who, in the opinion of Lewis Theobold in 1717, engaged in an ‘unintelligible’, ‘absurd’ style of conversation characterised by long, loud harangues. If such ‘Declamations’ could not be ‘silenc’d’, declared Theobold, they should ‘at least be restrain’d to a certain Duration’.31 One major problem with these plebeian coffee houses, critics agreed, was that their noise distracted polite citizens from serious pursuits conducive to improvement.32 The coffee house was a masculine environment which mostly excluded women. And while Addison and Steele specifically represented women as valued members of polite society through their participation in conversation, it nevertheless remained a highly gendered activity. In 1710, Steele remarked that women had ‘naturally a Great genius for being talkative’, a trait linked to their supposed limited capacity to bring their emotions under rational control.33 On the other hand, though, women were also praised for their silence. And much emphasis was given to their acquiring the skill of attentive listening as a precondition for joining polite society. In a conduct manual published in 1760, for instance, Charles Allen advised that ‘young ladies should be more apt to hear than to speak’.34 The same rule, as we have seen, was enjoined on men by Addison, among others. But applied to women, it clearly enabled them to be included in polite society in a position of inferiority, as passive rather than active contributors to conversation. At the same time, men, too, were redefined through this valorisation of silence, as a feminisation of elite culture led to the creation of a new masculine identity based on refinement, restraint, and responsiveness to others through disciplined listening. A similarly important site of modernity was the pleasure garden, a commodified landscape in which listening to music and participating in conversation complemented a range of visual entertainments, while providing an escape from the noise of crowded urban streets. The most famous pleasure gardens were Vauxhall and Ranelagh in London. These spaces were eighteenth-century equivalents of theme parks, confected rural wonderlands in which city-dwellers fashioned a polite identity through fashionable consumption disguised as cultural sophistication.35 To facilitate this process,

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they also encompassed highly contrived auditory environments. One experiment, for instance, involved groups of musicians playing in hidden locations to create the illusion of natural features generating ‘musical sounds’.36 A pastoral soundtrack thus complemented the sylvan landscape. In addition, an entry fee attempted to deny access to the labouring classes, reducing the potential for plebeian sounds to disturb the refined sociability of patrons. At Vauxhall, before the gentrifying efforts of Jonathan Tyers in the 1730s, a mixture of social classes had often participated in impromptu, collective music-making. When Tyers improved the gardens, however, music became an organised, controlled, and commercialised activity. Performances were scheduled for set times, and structures were added such as the elevated, circular pavilion or orchestra, which separated musicians from customers, while enhancing amplification through a domed roof. Moreover, a new level of attentiveness was encouraged in auditors, who would stand still and silent to listen to songs by a solo vocalist. This disciplined listening anticipated modern concert etiquette well before it became commonplace in the nineteenth century. After the singing, however, there was a period of instrumental music, and patrons returned to their promenading and talking, no longer taking notice of the performances except as pleasant sounds heard in the background.37 At Ranelagh, music was also regarded as one of the premier entertainments in the gardens. Indeed, a grand indoor setting, the Rotunda, was built in 1742, making it the first dedicated concert venue in Europe.38 Here, promenading and talking were also considered as ‘pleasures’ to be enjoyed during musical performances. And yet, the Rotunda was designed to minimise extraneous sounds through the use of a mat on the floor, which prevented visitors from being disturbed by the footsteps of the assembly. By ensuring that there would be no ‘noise’ made by the ‘heels’ of the ‘company’, asserted a publicist for the gardens, this mat meant that music could be ‘heard in every part of the rotundo’, while ‘conversation’ was ‘not interrupted by a disagreeable clangor’.39 Revealingly, then, in urban pleasure gardens, talking during musical performances was regarded as consistent with politeness, but refined sociability required a degree of concentration, which was regarded as incompatible with non-purposive sounds like those associated with the crowd.

Sound and Social Identity As politeness emphasised regulated speaking and disciplined listening as a means to achieve enlightened selfhood, social distinctions came to be elaborated by differences in sonic behaviour. Whether in coffee houses or pleasure gardens, the elite classes represented their own spaces of assembly as controlled auditory environments conducive to the exercise of reason. The refined, rational sociability of these spaces was demonstrated by comparing them with centres of plebeian leisure, especially alehouses, where convivial sounds were condemned as unneighbourly noise, detrimental to modern civility. As a moralist complained in 1758, the ‘Noise and Quarrels’ of alehouses disturbed and terrified local inhabitants, being even more of a nuisance than the din of a blacksmith’s hammer.40 In the early nineteenth century, many commentators argued that industrialisation exacerbated this alleged problem of noisy sociability among working-class frequenters of alehouses. Critics of industrialisation contended that factory workers sought solace in boozy noise due to their demoralising living conditions,

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including incessant labour, squalid accommodation, and dysfunctional domesticity. In manufacturing towns like Manchester, asserted Peter Gaskell in 1833, ‘low beer houses’ had increased in number, while Saturday night was celebrated with a ‘hubbub of discordant sounds’, as working-class residents found temporary satisfaction in ‘jangling, swearing, drunkenness, noisy vociferation, confusion worse confounded, riot and debauchery’.41 At this time, many members of the middle class in Manchester, as in other industrial towns, were moving at a rapid rate to the suburbs in pursuit of clean air, greenery, and quiet surroundings.42 The result was a city in which social groups became segregated into residential areas with distinct acoustic profiles. For affluent citizens, the flight to the suburbs was in part a reaction against the perceived sonic disorder of the urban core, but in normalising quiet environments, it also heightened intolerance of the sounds of working-class spaces. The role of sound in elaborating class differences in Britain rose in importance in the early nineteenth century as social segregation affected not only living spaces but practices of work, leisure, religion, and much else. In many domains, respectability came to be associated with quietness. Conversely, noise indicated vulgarity. As declared by the protagonist in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Pelham, published in 1828: the distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society, is a calm, imperturbable quiet, which pervades all their actions and habits [. . .] while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it.43 The character, Henry Pelham, was a dandy, a man of heightened sensory appreciation, with a notable interest in gastronomic delicacies and fashionable clothes. His dandyism, however, was also represented in acoustic terms. In the novel, the dandy was depicted as a certain kind of libertine, whose freedom from conventional morality was, on occasion, indicated by an enjoyment of the ‘roar’ of hedonistic aristocratic sociability.44 For the most part, though, Pelham heard noisy activity with disdain, whether the ‘shrill voices’ of plebeian street hawkers or the shouts of affluent devotees of the turf.45 Indeed, at the racetrack, he affirmed his dandyism by remaining silent in the crowd. With its emphasis on quiet comportment, this hyper-refinement constituted an exaggerated version of a form of masculine behaviour typical of gentility in both its aristocratic and middle-class iterations. But for the dandy, quietness was a self-conscious, affected performance more than an informal, naturalised behaviour, as it had been for Addison and Steele. If selfregulation was a precondition of gentility, its display via quiet conduct could signify simulation as much as courtesy. Nevertheless, through quiet conduct, affluent individuals were able to embody the restraint and emotional control which had become hallmarks of status as well respectability. The origins of this standard of behaviour stretched back to the eighteenth century when, in accounts of politeness, noisy expression was denigrated as a failure of self-discipline leading to the inconsiderate treatment of others. ‘Humming a tune to ourselves,’ advised John Trusler in 1775, ‘drumming with our fingers, making a noise with our feet, and such like, are all breaches of good manners, and indications of our contempt for the persons present.’46 Bodily control was as crucial as emotional management to the performance of polite social identity. Unnecessary motion signified and promoted distraction, not least through the generation of sound dismissed as noise.

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Whereas quietness connoted composure and self-possession, noisy activity evoked an inner restlessness, which was inimical to the unhurried, relaxed demeanour a gentleman was required to exhibit even in crowded, public places.

Sound and Popular Religion Beginning around the mid-eighteenth century, a revival of religious enthusiasm in Britain, best exemplified by the rise of Methodism, transformed the auditory environments of many towns and villages, especially in mining and manufacturing regions. Sound was central to Methodist worship. Its style of passionate piety was fostered above all by energetic hymn-singing,47 but fervent preaching and spontaneous vocalisations also enlivened devotion and contributed to the appeal of the movement among adherents, primarily people from plebeian backgrounds. Methodism provided artisans and servants, both men and women, with opportunities to exercise leadership as lay preachers, converting souls and inspiring fellow worshippers through loud, dramatic speech. The founder of the movement, John Wesley, urged his followers to ‘sing lustily, and with good courage’,48 though he formulated rules to regulate as much as stimulate vocal worship. Methodists embraced outdoor meetings attended by large crowds. In such settings, preaching had to be loud and impassioned to be effective. The sounds of singing, preaching, and general movement at outdoor meetings communicated to local inhabitants the vitality of this style of religion, whether perceived as a curiosity or a nuisance.49 Perhaps nothing so violated polite conventions of sonic propriety and bodily comportment as Methodism, especially before its shift to respectability in the early nineteenth century. What followers perceived as the sound of joyful, heartfelt worship, a mode of devotion prompted by the ‘witness of the spirit’, critics heard as the ‘hideous Noise’ of dangerous fanaticism, volatile emotionalism, and gross sensualism.50 Methodist worship posed a threat to polite identity because, in valorising feeling to an excessive degree, it showed how self-abandonment could triumph over self-control, licensing extreme acoustic and affective experience at the expense of rational thought and conduct.51 In addition, critics of Methodism were worried about the contagious nature of religious noise, which threatened to dissolve the self in a manipulable, unstable crowd. The noisy quality of Methodist worship was a source of anxiety for Leigh Hunt, who conducted a vigorous campaign against religious enthusiasm in 1808 in a series of essays in the Examiner, republished one year later as a separate pamphlet. As founding editor of the Examiner, Hunt saw his periodical as continuing the work of Addison and Steele in advancing, or reviving, a conversational model of politeness associated with literary taste, though this was aimed at a more inclusive, heterogeneous readership.52 While there was a tension between Hunt’s aesthetic project and his reformist political agenda, the genial conversational tone of his writing placed his persona above party factionalism and demonstrated his liberality, refinement, and objectivity. As he wrote in the prospectus to the magazine, the ‘steady observation’ of the periodical essayist was enabled by escaping from the ‘noisy’, ‘moving multitude’ in order to better contemplate the modern, urban world.53 For Hunt, popular religious enthusiasm posed a threat to this ideal of disinterestedness, its sonic intensity being inimical to enlightened political activity as well as an affront to polite taste.54 Methodists were

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‘bawlers’, asserted Hunt, and as such, they lacked the ‘refinement’ of the ‘great author of Christianity’, who was the embodiment of ‘meekness’.55 From this perspective, plebeian religious zeal was represented as a perversion of true religion, its noisy quality an index of violence, vulgarity, and irrationality, traits which rendered such worship incompatible with political and aesthetic judgement.

Privacy and Auditory Freedom At the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, a common complaint about the noise of the crowd, whether it was caused by public recreation or enthusiastic worship, was that it disturbed the refined privacy of the elite classes. Privacy had become an established concept, and there was an expectation that certain spaces such as homes or even holiday lodgings should provide a refuge from an increasingly noisy world so that individuals could cultivate the self through reflection or intimate companionship.56 Such an expectation of privacy implied a freedom from the noise of others, a condition which was associated with emotional depth, especially after the Romantic interest in interiority emphasised balancing sociability with solitude.57 Quiet surroundings, conducive to privacy, however, could be difficult to obtain in urban environments in the early nineteenth century due to the porous quality of buildings and the population density of cities and towns in a rapidly industrialising nation. There was no quietness for George Head, for instance, in 1836, when he stayed overnight at Goole, situated halfway between Leeds and Hull, during his tour of manufacturing regions in northern England. Sitting in the parlour of an inn, where he was attempting to read, Head was ‘disturbed by a very disagreeable noise’, as a congregation of Primitive Methodists across the road began ‘singing’.58 Actually, in Head’s opinion, this mode of devotion sounded more like quarrelling, or even an orgy, as he dismissed this expression of religious freedom as an assault on his own personal liberty. Gaining a following among factory workers, coal miners, and rural labourers, Primitive Methodism, which seceded from the Wesleyan Connexion in 1810, was renowned for its noisy culture.59 While Head’s annoyance initially derived from being prevented from reading, his abhorrence of the noise of these ‘Ranters’ extended into a more general critique of the barbarism of their intense, disorderly sonic behaviour. Specifically, their ‘discordant tones’ were heard as evidence of their uncivilised state, for they ‘roared and stamped in chorus, and howled’, he added, in a style comparable to ‘a dance of Hottentots’.60 For their part, Primitive Methodists defended their noisy religious practices on biblical grounds. Auditors whose ‘delicate feelings’ were ‘shocked’ by Primitive Methodism failed to recognise, wrote one believer, that the Bible contained many illustrations of ‘sanctified noise’.61 For Head, by contrast, the noisy culture of popular religious enthusiasm signalled an inability among participants to govern their emotions. Moreover, these emotions were akin to bodily responses, triggered by sound and unrefined by judgement. Head thus concluded that the ‘deep emotions of the heart’ were ‘best expressed in moderate tones, or silence’, whereas ‘unbridled’ passions were ‘incompatible with the decencies of civilization’.62 If silence, or regulated sound, was both a sign and precondition of civilisation, it was also crucial to the enjoyment of privacy by which affluent individuals fashioned an identity combining reason with emotional depth.

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Sonic Meanings of Civilisation By the early nineteenth century, commentators routinely deployed a moral contrast between quietness and noise as a means of mapping class and racial differences on an account of modernity in which ways of hearing and engagements with sound indicated distinctions between barbarism and civilisation. Applications of this system of sonic classification varied widely according to context. Issues of class and race plainly intersected in Head’s demeaning depiction of noisy religious worship as an activity aligning working-class enthusiasts in northern England and Khoikhoi pastoralists in southwestern Africa. Similarly, the attack on street musicians in London linked their plebeian and non-English origins to the ‘sonorous savagery’ of their performances, to quote William Henry Wills in 1850, in a defence of ‘quiet neighbourhoods’ as fundamental to a civilised society.63 And yet, there were also commentators who regarded civilisation as defined by the production and experience of noise. In 1873, one journalist noted that of the four primary soundmarks of modernity, only bell-ringing was pleasing to the mind, with railway whistles, gongs, and celebratory cannons evoking a ‘barbarous’ character despite being an inescapable aspect of metropolitan life.64 Conversely, the geographer William Woodbridge claimed that people in ‘Half-Civilised’ China were ‘orderly’ and ‘quiet’, though this sonic condition reflected a putative absence of ‘energy or enterprise’, as despotism facilitated refinement at the expense of liberty.65 In all these ways, the auditory account of civilisation occasioned considerable debate, not least because the meanings of sound, noise, and quietness were shot through with contradictions and ambiguities. Some writers rejected the emphasis on quiet behaviour on the grounds that both hearing and producing noise constituted a life-affirming, vitalising experience expressive of joy, liberty, and conviviality as relevant to modernity as to any other age. ‘Man is naturally a noisy animal’, asserted one observer in 1821.66 Noise-making, he added, was a basic human propensity rather than an immoral indulgence or public nuisance. This particular journalist recognised that noise, like music, had the power to trigger strong emotions and influence the behaviour of auditors. Nevertheless, the self had to be open to aural shocks, he claimed, if the heart was to be moved to sympathy. Similarly, in the same year, Charles Lamb rushed out of a concert hall midway through an opera recital because the silent attentiveness of the audience stifled his humanity. Once in the ‘noisiest places of the crowded streets’, Lamb came alive again, finding ‘solace’ in the sounds of the metropolis.67 Other writers, however, celebrated the new habit of quiet, attentive appreciation, which was increasingly becoming an expectation of audience behaviour not just in the concert hall but in the theatre, art gallery, museum, and so on. When Charlotte Brontë visited the Great Exhibition in 1851, for example, she not only admired the display of industrial machinery and imperial wealth, but marvelled at the fact that, among the 30,000 people attending on the same day, ‘not one loud noise was to be heard’.68 It was as if, in this instance, the quiet, orderly behaviour of exhibition visitors was as much a part of the celebration of modernity as the spectacle of Britain’s technological ingenuity and global power. When nineteenth-century commentators identified quietness as one of the effects of civilisation, they had in mind any number of developments, chief among them an advance in knowledge, a rise in personal comfort, a reduction in informal violence,

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and the refinement of manners through increased emotional control. Managed emotions entailed regulated auditory environments, along with a suspicion of loud, sudden, or irregular sounds. According to Sharon Turner, in 1832, civilisation was typified by a ‘general love of quiet and orderly life and manners’.69 The problem was that this postulation was in tension with another sense of civilisation as progress, as the energy responsible for Britain’s emergence as a global power, with London and a network of industrial cities facilitating rapid economic growth and imperial expansion. As Richard Vaughan explained in 1843, large, complex cities witnessed ‘constant vibration and movement’, a perpetual occurrence of ‘distracting and exciting’ sensations, which were ‘unfriendly to the prosecution of works demanding the exercise of silent, continuous and profound thought’. Intellectual activity, he concluded, was impossible in ‘crowded places’ in close proximity to the ‘working-day multitude’.70 The paradox, then, was that the educated professional classes were imbued with a fondness for quietness in an increasingly noisy world. This was a dilemma noted in 1878 by the psychologist James Sully, who contended that modern urban life increased the volume, quantity, abruptness, and unevenness of sound, while also imbuing affluent, cultivated individuals with a habit of disciplined listening which rendered them much more sensitive to, and irritated by, such invasive noise.71 The same paradox was at the heart of the campaign against street music initiated by Charles Babbage and supported by Charles Dickens, among other prominent writers. Organ grinders and ballad singers, however, were not the only source of dissonance held to be degrading the metropolis. In 1895, the novelist Ouida complained about the ‘hard, ugly, unpleasant noise’ produced during royal events, describing it as a ‘barbarous practice’, which might bring joy to the ‘savage’, but piled disgrace on a ‘civilised nation’.72 If such royal state events deployed sound to secure an emotional attachment to the monarchy, here a racialised appeal to sonic propriety emphasised that they did so by jeopardising the rational basis of civilisation, as symbolised by quietness.

Listening to Industry The meanings of noise and quietness in relation to civilisation also shaped perceptions of industrialisation. Indeed, for many commentators, industrialisation was regarded as an acoustic affair, which encapsulated the promises as well as the perils of modernity. There were many different ways of hearing factories as dehumanising or aweinspiring, a sign of progress or a threat to morality, wretched or sublime. As a result, factory sounds played a crucial role in evaluating the effects of industrialisation, including on the sonic behaviour of the working class. Industrial towns were hellish environments, wrote Thomas Carlyle, in which the ‘noise’ of ‘Power-mills’ coexisted with the loud, jarring voices of factory workers.73 Other writers like Dickens, however, similarly imagined something ‘demonic’, or even ‘savage’, in the ‘roar’ and ‘hissing’ of factories, but emphasised that such ‘deafening sounds’ prevented workers from speaking or being heard.74 Factory workers agreed. As remembered by William Dodd, a former factory boy, manufacturing labourers could hear ‘nothing but the rumbling noise of the machinery’ or the ‘harsh’ commands of an ‘overlooker’.75 If quietness was an index of civilisation, this was a state imposed on the working class by the uncivilised conditions of their labour.

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Despite claiming that emotional depth required silence, George Head was an ardent admirer of the noise of virtually every aspect of industrialisation, from cotton factories to hydraulic presses, coal staithes to sausage-cutting machines. Such noise was interpreted in positive terms as an instantiation of power, of the ‘stupendous’, ‘mechanical power’76 which underpinned Britain’s rise to global dominance on the back of enhanced manufacturing production and expanded international trade. Intriguingly, Head claimed that the ‘creaking’, ‘groaning’, ‘grating’, ‘rattling’, ‘thundering’ sounds of industrial processes excited the ‘senses’ and riveted the ‘attention’.77 A sublime aesthetic thus mediated his experience. Of an iron foundry in Leeds, for example, he expressed astonishment at its various processes, which cumulatively generated the most ‘terrific’ and ‘stunning’ ‘din’ he had ever heard.78 Confronted by this sonic spectacle, he was lost for words, silent in the midst of noise. For Head, then, the aural appreciation of industry was a sublime experience, in which the veneration of mechanical power involved hearing a noise that overwhelmed auditors. Of course, this highly aesthetic treatment of the sounds of industrialisation required a mode of distant listening available to tourists, but not to workers. In the debate about the factory system, employers and their spokesmen were not always as sanguine as Head about the exhilarating effects of industrial noise. However, like him, many optimistic commentators failed to consider its effects on factory workers. On the whole, the affluent classes were more anxious about controlling or eliminating the social sounds of popular recreation or outdoor music, heard as dissonance, than understanding and minimising the impact of the mechanical sounds of factories.79 Nevertheless, some defenders of factories did address the issue of noise as part of an attempt to refute the notion that industrial labour was injurious to operatives. In 1835 Edward Baines, for instance, recorded that factory workers were completely unfazed by the ‘noise and whirl of machinery’ as they had become ‘habituated to it’, unlike middle-class visitors in whom it occasioned ‘unpleasant and confusing’ sensations.80 A striking variation on this same theme was formulated, in 1847, by the Scottish geologist and journalist Hugh Miller. Of Birmingham, a centre of metalworking specialising in gunmaking as well as ‘toy’ and brass manufacturing, Miller wrote that in ‘no town in the world’ were the ‘mechanical arts more noisy’. The ‘ring’ of hammers, the ‘unending clang of metal’, the ‘unceasing clank of engines’, the hiss and roar of water and steam, among other sounds, meant that people lived in an ‘atmosphere continually vibrating with clamour’.81 Indeed, according to Miller, working-class residents of Birmingham had become so habituated to the noise of industrial labour that they developed a desire for noise to accompany every aspect of their lives, including recreation. By contrast, quietness evoked emptiness and alienation. It was this fondness for all noise, Miller speculated, that created a keen interest in music in Birmingham, which hosted more concerts and performances than any town of comparable size in the empire. And yet, in terms of music at work, industrialisation silenced the voices of manufacturing labourers. Singing had been a vital component of pre-industrial work for most occupational groups before and during the eighteenth century. However, in Victorian factories, many employers established rules to prohibit singing and other forms of musical expression and oral communication on the grounds that these practices decreased productivity and incited disorder.82 Whistling was even banned in some places, along with shouting, loud talking, and singing, to eliminate habits of sociability associated with pre-industrial work. Famously, in 1844, Friedrich Engels

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criticised a mill owner in Manchester for drawing up a list of rules, which included issuing a fine for any ‘operative detected speaking to another, singing or whistling’.83 In addition, factory noise itself made it difficult for workers to speak to each other, while dust and heat were not conducive to talking or singing.84 Such lack of fulfilment at work prompted Peter Gaskell to worry that the ‘Babel-like sounds’ of modern industrial life, with its demoralising factories and crowded streets, had harmful effects on the happiness, morality, and physical health of manufacturing labourers.85 Drawing on an influential Wordsworthian idea, he proposed that factory workers should be provided with an opportunity to experience the ‘sights and sounds of natural objects’ as a means to maintain their health, morality, and mental wellbeing.86 Many other writers, including Dickens, similarly deployed pastoral imagery to condemn or question the effects of industrial noise by contrasting it with a quiet, harmonious rural soundscape. And factory workers themselves were attracted to the opposition, incorporating it into their ballads as well as pamphlets to emphasise the oppressive conditions of their auditory environments. Although based on a fiction, this was not mere escapism but an important resource of resistance. Perhaps no one articulated the contradictory sonic meanings of modernity, as exemplified by industrialisation, as clearly as Alexis de Tocqueville in his evocative account of Manchester. Writing in 1835, de Tocqueville described Manchester as a Hades in which people were continually disturbed, day and night, by a ‘thousand noises’. There were the ‘footsteps of a busy crowd’, the ‘crunching wheels of machinery’, the ‘shriek of steam from boilers’, the ‘regular beat of the looms’, and many other kinds of dissonance. Absent, however, were the ‘gay shouts of people amusing themselves, or music heralding a holiday’. This was a town in which human voices were silenced by an allencompassing, never-ceasing noise. Combined with stench and darkness, such sonic disruptions, concluded de Tocqueville, showed that, in Manchester, humanity had attained ‘its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back into a savage’.87

Notes  1. The focus on industrialisation as the defining sonic event in modernity began with R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, [1977] 1994), 71–82. See also the emphasis on industrialisation in recent general histories of noise such as Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 101–30; Mike Goldsmith, Discord: The Story of Noise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83–110; and David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile, 2013), 213–22.   2. Mark M. Smith, ‘The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 39–57 (41–52).   3. John M. Picker, ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in The Victorian World, ed. Martin Hewitt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 603–18.   4. Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 121–9.   5. Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 223–4; William Tullett, ‘“The Macaroni’s Ambrosial

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Essences”: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 163–80 (167).  6. Phyllis Mack, ‘Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–107.  7. On the ideal of the bounded self in the eighteenth century, see especially Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 159–76; and Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 265–311.   8. On ‘ways of hearing’, see James Mansell, ‘Ways of Hearing: Sound, Culture and History’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 343–52.  9. Madame Van Muyden, ed., A Foreign View of England in 1725–1729: The Letters of Monsieur César De Saussure to His Family (London: Caliban Books, 1995), 101. 10. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175–6. 11. Van Muyden, Foreign View of England, 78, 112, 175. 12. Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in the Tatler and the Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 2. 13. Among many studies, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 59–121; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997), 98–122; and Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 27–30, 76–83. 14. Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Achievement (New York: Doubleday, 2020), 207. 15. John Gay, Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (London, 1716), 14, 34. 16. Cockayne, Hubbub, 122. 17. Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, 3 October 1779, Montagu Collection, Huntington Library, MO 3485. On these segregated areas of London, see Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 6–7; and Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Penguin, 2000), 117–8 18. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 119 (17 July 1711), in The Spectator, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 4 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1945), 1:362. 19. Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 109–11. 20. John Barrell, ‘Awkward Silences’, in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850, ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, and Karen Crawley (London: Routledge, 2020), 28–62 (44–5). 21. Richard Bulstrode, Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1715), 20 22. Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 187. 23. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40–1. 24. Oliver Goldsmith, ‘A Description of Various Clubs’ (1759), in Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3:6. 25. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 9 (10 March 1711), in The Spectator, 1:29. 26. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 11 (24 April 1750), in The Rambler, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 3 of The Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 58. 27. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 148 (20 August 1711), in The Spectator, 1:446. 28. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 49 (26 April 1711), in The Spectator, 1:148–9. See Markman Ellis, ‘The Buzz of Business: Soundscapes of Urbanisation in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Sound, Space and Civility, 83–105 (98–9).

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29. John Hill, The Inspector, 2 vols (London, 1753), 1:15. 30. Ellis, Coffee House, 196. 31. Lewis Theobold, The Censor, 2 vols (London, 1717), 2:215–16. 32. Ellis, ‘Buzz of Business’, 99–100. 33. Richard Steele, The Tatler, no. 157 (11 April 1710), in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:382. 34. Charles Allen, The Polite Lady (London, 1760), 87. 35. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guildford Press, 1998), 122–8. 36. Anon., A Description of Vauxhall Gardens (London, 1762), 44. 37. Rachel Cowgill, ‘Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens’, in The Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 100–26 (118). 38. Berta Joncus, ‘“To Propagate Sound for Sense”: Music for Diversion and Seduction at Ranelagh Gardens’, London Journal 38, no. 1 (2013): 34–66 (35). 39. Anon., A Description of Ranelagh, Rotundo, and Gardens (London, 1762), 18. 40. Caleb Parfect, The Number of Alehouses Shewn to be Extremely Pernicious to the Publick (London, 1758), 11. 41. Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833), 113. 42. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 74–5; Alan Kidd, ‘From Township to Metropolis: Suburbs and the Shaping of the Modern City’, in Manchester: Making the Modern City, ed. Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 304–6. 43. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, or, Adventures of a Gentleman, 3 vols (London, 1828), 1:5. 44. Ibid., 1:180. 45. Ibid., 2:302. 46. John Trusler, Principles of Politeness, and of Knowing the World (London, 1775), 109. 47. David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 68–74. 48. John Wesley, Select Hymns, 3rd edn (Bristol, 1770), 159. 49. Carys Brown, ‘Sound Faith: Religion and the Aural Environment of Towns in Northern England, c.1740–1830’, Cultural and Social History 18, no. 4 (2021): 463–80 (473). 50. Anon., The Enthusiast, or Methodism Display’d (Portsmouth, 1753), 6; see Peter Denney, ‘The Sound of the Spirit: Auditory Enthusiasm and the Attack on Methodism in the Eighteenth Century’, in Sound, Space and Civility, 123–44. 51. See Misty Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 51–69. 52. See Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 246–7. 53. Leigh Hunt, ‘Prospectus’, Examiner 1 (1808): 6. 54. See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 80–1. 55. Leigh Hunt, An Attempt to Shew the Folly and Danger of Methodism (London, 1809), 5. 56. David Vincent, Privacy: A Short History (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 56–9, 77–8. 57. David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 19–20. 58. George Head, A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts of England (London, 1836), 224. 59. Sandy Calder, The Origins of Primitive Methodism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), 121; David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 116. 60. Head, Home Tour, 225.

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61. Thomas Church, Sketches of Primitive Methodism (London, 1847), 80. 62. Head, Home Tour, 225. 63. William Henry Willis, ‘The Monster Promenade Concerts’, Household Words 2, no. 30 (1850): 95; see John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45–52. 64. Anon., ‘Sound and Fury – Signifying Something’, All the Year Round 9, no. 230 (1873): 558. 65. William C. Woodbridge, A System of Universal Geography, on the Principles of Comparison and Classification (Hartford, 1824), 210. 66. Anon., ‘Noise’, New Monthly Magazine 2, no. 7 (1821): 260. 67. Charles Lamb, ‘A Chapter on Ears’, London Magazine 3, no. 15 (1821): 264. 68. Charlotte Brontë, Selected Letters, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 190. 69. Sharon Turner, The Sacred History of the World, 3 vols (London, 1832), 2:478–9. 70. Richard Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities; Or Modern Civilization Viewed in its Relation to Intelligence, Morals, and Religion (London, 1843), 110–11. 71. James Sully, ‘Civilisation and Noise’, Fortnightly Review 24, no. 143 (1878): 704–20 (709–16). 72. Ouida, Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1895), 16. 73. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839), in English and Other Critical Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1915), 221. 74. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), ed. Earl of Wicklow (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 330. 75. William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd: A Factory Boy, 2nd edn (London, 1841), 38. 76. Head, Home Tour, 133, 343. 77. Ibid., 344. 78. Ibid., 134. 79. Goldsmith, Discord, 142. 80. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London, 1835), 457. 81. Hugh Miller, First Impressions of England and its People (London, 1847), 230–1. 82. Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering, and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148–9. 83. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 187–8. 84. Korczynski et al., Rhythms of Labour, 156–7. 85. Gaskell, Manufacturing Population, 116. 86. Ibid., 349. 87. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988), 107–8.

Select Bibliography Cockayne, Emily, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Cowgill, Rachel, ‘Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens’, in The Pleasure Garden from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 100–26. Denney, Peter, ‘The Sound of the Spirit: Auditory Enthusiasm and the Attack on Methodism in the Eighteenth Century’, in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850, ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, and Karen Crawley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 123–44.

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Ellis, Markman, ‘The Buzz of Business: Soundscapes of Urbanisation in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850, ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, and Karen Crawley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 83–105. Goldsmith, Mike, Discord: The Story of Noise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile, 2013). Joncus, Berta, ‘“To Propagate Sound for Sense”: Music for Diversion and Seduction at Ranelagh Gardens’, London Journal 38, no. 1 (2013): 34–66. Korczynski, Marek, Michael Pickering, and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mack, Phyllis, ‘Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–107. Mansell, James, ‘Ways of Hearing: Sound, Culture and History’, in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 343–52. Mee, Jon, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Picker, John M., ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in The Victorian World, ed. Martin Hewitt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 603–18. ———, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Smith, Mark M., ‘The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 39–57.

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18 ‘This is/not was’: The Violence of Circulation and the Sonics of Submerged Language Andrew Brooks

W

hat is the sound of a story that cannot be told but must be told? This question reimagines a statement by the poet M. NourbeSe Philip that appears in an essay accompanying her long poem Zong!: ‘There is no telling this story; it must be told.’1 Philip’s statement refers to a massacre that took place on board a slave ship named Zong as it transported its human cargo from the African West Coast to the British plantation economy of Jamaica in 1781. Philip’s extended poetry cycle Zong! remediates the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert, a 1783 English court document that is the only remaining archival document of the massacre. The legal transcript that serves as the source material for Philip’s poem indexes not a juridical process concerned with justice for the dead but rather an insurance dispute in which the owners of the slave ship Zong (Gregson) sued the underwriter (Gilbert) for failing to pay the insurance claim for the ‘cargo’ that was destroyed. Philip’s statement speaks to the impossibility of accounting for those lives who were reduced to chattel and recorded as numbers in a ledger, as well as the necessity of historicising the terrible violence of the Middle Passage without reproducing the spectacle of Black suffering. My question is an invitation to listen to, rather than simply read, Philip’s poem. What might we hear when we listen for what is otherwise inaudible in the archives? What do we make of the noises and silences the poet finds in this document of racial violence? What are the rhythms of constraint and escape, and how do they reverberate into the present? This reframing of Philip’s question draws attention to the presence of sound in the archive of written documents so often presumed to be silent. To open our ears to the archive is to listen for the echoes that sound in the spaces in between the words that comprise the record of slavery and subjugation. It is an invitation to listen to the songs sung, the languages spoken, the screams of anguish. To open our ears in this way requires an attention to history, as well as an openness to speculation. This, of course, is a political gesture that reminds us the archive is an always incomplete operation of judgement – a site of preservation and destruction. The archive emerges from a procedure of power in which some artefacts are deemed worthy of preservation while others are discarded. The task of critically re-reading these repositories must involve listening for the sounds that resonate in the spaces between what has been recorded. Poetry is a literary mode attuned to the transformation of time and space – and of one into the other – and this renders it a

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form uniquely placed to explore the space between record and speculation, language and sound, word and silence. As Philip puts it: silence is the sound, the very sound between the words, in the interstices of time divided by the word between outer and inner space / silence is the boundary2 This essay suggests that listening to the submerged language in Philip’s poem leads us towards an engagement with the violence of circulatory capitalism and speculative finance, the birth of logistics and the counter-movement of logisticality, the afterlives of slavery and the poetics of opacity.3 In the sounds and silences of the poem we might locate a frequency that looks to the future, anticipating a world beyond the violent grammar of racial capitalism.

Positions and Coordinates To begin, some incomplete and well-rehearsed bearings. The orientation points that follow are incomplete not only because the historical record of this massacre is partial – both lost to the sea with the lives of those thrown overboard and a product of the inherently fragmented nature of the archive – but because the reclamation of a violence which leaves no trace other than enumeration is simply impossible (‘there is no telling this story’). Yet, since 1781, the story of the Zong has been told, and interpreted, many times over, from abolitionist pamphlets, to paintings, to historical studies,4 to academic projects,5 to contemporary novels6 and poems. The spectacle of Black death was instrumentalised in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaigns, with the historian James Walvin noting, ‘The line of dissent from the Zong case to the successful campaign for the abolition of slavery was direct and unbroken, however protracted and uneven.’7 The story of the Zong is rendered in J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on) where the ship appears as a vessel of European modernity, the violence of the historical period mirrored by the violence of the storm that bears down on the ship. The blur of Turner’s scene in which the ocean fuses with the sky, bodies become inseparable from waves, and the ship disappears into the horizon captures the horror of the Middle Passage. Turner’s thick layering of paint creates a canvas full of noise and turbulence. The force of nature conjoins with the violence of ‘Man’ in a scene that encodes the sonic – the screams of those thrown to ocean, the howling wind, the crashing waves, the creaking ship, the squawking of sea birds, the ferocious splashing of ocean creatures dragging the living to their watery graves – in the two-dimensional plane of the painting. ‘Turner transcended the principle of traditional landscape: the principle that the landscape is something which unfolds before you’, writes John Berger.8 In Turner’s

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paintings, Berger elaborates, ‘the scene begins to extend beyond its formal edges. It begins to work its way round the spectator in an effort to outflank and surround him.’9 The Slave Ship possesses this quality, surrounding the viewer by depicting the event in motion, capturing the vibrational intensity of the scene. The painting reverberates beyond the edges of canvas and into the viewer to be registered not merely visually but through the flesh. Turner’s depiction of the Zong massacre bears a generic title that marks it as an event both singular and typical: an event that stands in for so many other events that passed largely unremarked upon in the annals of history. For Paul Gilroy, the slave ship is best understood as ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion’, one marked by violence as well as resistance.10 Reading Turner’s painting of the massacre in his theorisation of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy draws attention to the slave ship as that which not only involved the circulation of commodities and the flow of capital, but also involved the circulation of culture and sociality, ideas and beliefs, customs and sentiments, songs and speech. Ian Baucom’s retelling of the Zong draws on Giovanni Arrighi’s historical schematic for the development of capitalism as a world system, reading the trans-Atlantic slave trade in relation to a phase of capitalism weighted towards circulation rather than production.11 Baucom argues that the slave was treated not merely as a commodity but as a speculative financial object, and the emergence of this international trade created the conditions for the ascendance of speculative financial forms like credit, insurance, and liability that structure our present more than two hundred years later. In Baucom’s reading, the cyclical recurrence of a circulatory phase of capitalism creates the conditions where speculative capital coexists with speculative forms of culture, and in the latter we can find different modes of historicising and, in turn, different ways of conceptualising futurity. If speculative financial forms are once again desperately deployed in the contemporary moment in a bid to defer to recurring crises that arise from steadily declining rates of global manufacturing over the past half century, then the speculative reconstruction of historical violence under a previous phase of capitalism dominated by circulation might provide insight into the movement towards a different future. That is, we might ask ourselves, what are the epistemological and political costs of not attending to the sounds of this massacre in the historical record? Such a question is an invitation to tune our ears to silences in the archive in order that we might hear the echoes of screams that index the violence of circulatory capitalism, as well as reckon with the lost voices and sounds that resisted the imperative of logistics and its logics of enclosure and subjugation. With these established yet always incomplete accounts in mind, I offer a truncated summary of the events of the Zong. The slave ship Zong was owned by group of Liverpool merchants looking to capitalise on the burgeoning slave trade. The traffic in human cargo – what Stefano Harney calls ‘the birth of modern logistics’12 – would mark the city, following Ian Baucom’s formulation, as an unofficial capital of the long twentieth century, facilitating the flow of commodities and capital across the Atlantic.13 The ship was acquired from Dutch merchants with William Gregson and his two sons the majority owners, and was captained by Luke Collingwood. In 1781 – having spent some months anchored off the coast of Guinea in West Africa where the captain ‘acquired’ some 440 African people as slaves, more than twice the number the vessel was designed to hold – the Zong set sail with a crew of seventeen for Jamaica where those held captive would be sold to toil on plantations. The trans-Atlantic crossing, typically a six to nine week journey, ended

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up taking four months due to navigational errors. During the voyage, Collingwood and his crew threw somewhere between 130 and 150 of the enslaved people overboard to their death with the justification that this was carried out for ‘the preservation of the rest’.14 Collingwood’s actions were explained via an appeal to a lack of provisions: it was ‘for want of water’ that some were thrown overboard to the mercy of the ocean. But Collingwood’s actions were not motivated simply by a lack of provisions, but also by the conditions of the insurance policy that covered the human ‘cargo’ aboard the ship. Treated as commodities rather than persons, the enslaved Africans aboard the Zong were insured at a value of £30 per head (a total of £13,200) under a policy that covered the ship’s owners for any losses incurred during the voyage, except for those that were a result of ‘natural death’. John Wesket explains the legal conventions of maritime insurance that were established as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: The insurer takes upon himself the risk of the loss, capture, and death of slaves, or any other unavoidable accident to them: but natural death is always understood to be excepted – by natural death is meant, not only when it happens by disease or sickness, but also when the captive destroys himself though despair, which often happens: but when slaves are killed, or thrown into the sea in order to quell an insurrection on their part, then the insurers must answer.15 Collingwood’s actions aboard the Zong were motivated by a desire to minimise uninsurable losses, to shift the financial burden of the loss from the ship’s owners (Gregson) to the underwriter (Gilbert). As Philip puts it, ‘the massacre of African slaves would prove to be more financially advantageous to the owners of the ship and its cargo than if the slaves were allowed to die of “natural causes”’.16 The legal transcript of this insurance dispute forms the basis of Philip’s poem cycle. It is one of the only surviving records of the victims of the massacre and yet the bureaucratic language of the legal document works to silence any trace of the victims’ identities.17 ‘What we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’, writes Baucom, ‘is that among the other violences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of becoming a “type”: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money.’18 The production of this type of commodity cannot be thought outside the production of racism and anti-Black violence, and the retelling of the story of the Zong often reproduces the description of Black suffering as that which spurs liberal conceptions of civilisation and progress. Too often, Blackness is subsumed within the scene of suffering where it becomes a vehicle for the narration of inequality in which the Black body becomes trapped within the logics of racialisation, proof of the reproduction of race as a structure of oppression. This circular logic involves the mutation of one form of subjugation into another, or what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the afterlife of slavery’ (think here of the way policing and incarceration have extended racialised oppression since the formal abolition of slavery as just one example).19 But as Katherine McKittrick tells us, ‘description is not liberation’.20 And so we must remember, following Fred Moten, that the type of commodity transported, traded, speculated on in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was ‘the commodity who speaks’.21 Here it would be more accurate to say that what we are referring to is the commodity who sounds, a formulation that captures not only the forms of speech that come to signify the possessive individualism that underpins

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liberal conceptions of subjectivity but more importantly, the noise of those excluded from the racialising grammar of this category.22 This, of course, is central to the work of Moten and Hartman, attuned as it is to the way Blackness is yoked to the violence of anti-Blackness yet always exceeds and therefore disrupts white supremacy. Against the tendency to focus only on the abstractions and violences of slavery, how are we to listen to the sounds and echoes that cut against description and representation and move us instead towards an encounter with liberation? What might we learn by listening for the echoes and reverberations of the voices of those who were rendered commodity objects? What is the sound of a story (and a history) that cannot be told and cannot be recovered?

From Zong to Zong! Philip’s account of the Zong offers one approach to this impossible question. The book consists of a long poem in six parts that uses the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert as a phonic and linguistic database; a glossary of terms likely heard aboard the Zong that includes Arabic, Dutch, Fon, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Shona, Twi, West African Patois, and Yoruba and that reflects the internationalism of shipping; a manifest of the African groups and languages, animals, body parts, crew, food and drink, figures of nature, and women’s names that appear in the poem; a fragmented ‘notanda’ that describes the process of writing the poem; and finally, the transcript of the ruling that the poem is derived from. The poem fragments the official archive, constructing what Philip calls a ‘recombinant antinarrative’ in which the force of the language of the law to pass judgment, transform relations, and record history is interrupted.23 The opposition to narrative is a rejection of a teleological account of the massacre (and by extension, of history itself) in which the reproduction of Black exclusion is mobilised as the grounds for the articulation and transformation of whiteness. Philip’s act of refusal is not a rejection of narrativity per se but a rejection of the master narrative of liberalism and modernity which is reproduced again and again across the historical record. Against this master narrative, Philip discovers a sonic trace that exceeds the official archive, a surplus that troubles meaning and opens towards a poetics of the unknowable and the unsayable. This ‘recombinant antinarrative’ – full of sound and silence – refuses to allow the language of the law to make sense, or rather, transforms this language into its own dissonant field of sense-making. The first transformation from language to sound occurs in the title of the poem. Philip’s addition of an exclamation mark transforms Zong from the proper name of the ship (a name that is, in itself, an error of inscription – a modulation from the Dutch word Zorg, which in English means ‘care’), to the exclamation Zong! The accidental name change occurred during a repainting of the ship’s signage, and Philip enacts a further transformation, morphing the word into a cry of voice: ‘Zong! is chant! Shout! And ululation! Zong! is moan! Mutter! Howl! And shriek! Zong! is “pure utterance.” Zong! is Song!’24 The transformation from word to utterance, language to song, identifies a surplus that moves in excess of the regulatory force of language and its capacity to transform or constrain bodies within social fields. Philip’s intervention transforms the word Zong from a signifier to what Gilles Deleuze calls an ‘utterable’, which he describes as a material that carries force beyond signification:

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Even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. We mean that, when language gets hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it gives rise to utterances which come to dominate or even replace the images and signs, and which refer in turn to pertinent features of the language system, syntagms and paradigms, completely different from those we started with.25 To hear Zong! as a chant, a shout, a moan, a shriek, a howl, a song is to listen for a force that disrupts signification, to listen for the noises and silences that signal excess rather than lack, sounds that simultaneously reveal the historical contingency of racial capitalism and an insistent movement beyond the existing terms of order. The metamorphosis of Zong to Zong! – word to song – is a movement of anteriority and escape, a movement before and beyond the regulative. Such sounds denote a surplus that cannot be reduced to fixed identity (and its reliance on both a conceptual and linguistic grammar) but can be understood as a force animating a movement of escape and antagonism able to produce shared identifications. This mutation can be heard in Philip’s durational readings and performances of the work which are often collective, involving a chorus of readers and sometimes also musicians and dancers who improvise with the poem’s soundscape. These performances often leave the poet and the performers physically exhausted, their bodies registering the relation of the sounds they produce to constraint and escape, pain and pleasure, meaning and noise. In an introduction to a collective reading of the poem in Glasgow in 2013, Philip invites the audience to embrace the polyvocality of the text: The proposal here is to engage in the process of consenting to be more than one voice. [. . .] When I say read together, I don’t necessarily mean read in unison. [. . .] There are no rules here tonight. You may begin where you want to, I invite you to.26 This invitation to read together, to move laterally through the poem from different points of departure, extends the resistance to coherence and meaning that animates the poem cycle. It is an invitation to ‘be in sharp contrast to what the ship was, which was a set of rules and regulations’.27 The slippage from speech to song (and back again) is central to the aesthetics and politics of Philip’s poetics. It is in the multiplicity of the sonic that Philip is able to construct a recombinant poetics of indeterminacy that documents the Middle Passage without simply reproducing a description of Black suffering. The consideration of sound is not just an aesthetico-political question that pertains to this poem but a formal question about poetry itself. In an essay exploring that intangible quality or spirit that Federico García Lorca called ‘duende’, Nathaniel Mackey makes the case that the sonic and the musical shape what poetry does as distinct from other literary forms. Mackey invokes Louis Zukofsky’s definition of poetry as ‘a function whose lower limit is speech and whose upper limit is song’.28 For Mackey, this upper limit moves the poet beyond themselves, beyond their univocality and towards what Robert Duncan calls ‘the trouble of an unbound reference’.29 The musicality of poetry is not simply a historical fact of the

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form but remains essential to the capacity for poetry to tap into frequencies that move beneath, beyond, or outside the normative limits of language. Mackey explains that Zukofsky ‘uses the integral sign from calculus to suggest that we are integrating that lower limit, speech, and that upper limit, song. Poetry is an integral function.’30 But integration is also deformation with the upper limit estranging the lower one, such that meaning – in language, of history and subjectivity – might become unmoored.

Stutters, Noises, Fugitivity The integration of the lower limit (speech) and upper limit (song) of poetry continues in ‘Os’, the first of twenty-six poems that comprise the opening sequence of Zong!. In ‘Zong #1’, words emerge from and dissolve into elongated vowel-sounds, sibilants, fricatives, dentals, plosives, labials, grunts, stutters, and moans.31 The poem splinters and fragments words and phrases from the legal transcript such as ‘water was good’, ‘water was sour’, ‘want of water’, ‘one day/s’, and ‘won dey’. Here the dissolution of language into heavy and elastic vowel-dominated sounds is suggestive of water – both as presence and absence, ocean and drinking supplies – that is so central to the events at hand. The phrases speak to the lack of adequate supplies of drinking water to sustain the crew of the ship and the entire hold of imprisoned human cargo, and were spoken to justify the killing of some of the enslaved in order to preserve their insurable value and the value of those that remained. Here we might recall another poem of the ocean, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and its famous lines: ‘Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink’.32 Philip’s poem allows us to hear the ocean and the rapidly evaporating drinking supplies while reminding us of the presence of the law as it reaches across the vastness of the ocean. The poem remains constrained by the language of the law, nodding to the continued centrality of legal language in the perpetuation of racial violence today, yet the authority of the legal account of events is called into question by the fragmentation of language into a noise anterior to it. In the hands of the poet, the language of the transcript is made to stutter, breaking apart and interrupting itself as it dissolves into sound, a process that invokes the expansiveness of the ocean itself which contains both silent depths and furious roars and everything in between. In Zong! it is language, not speech, that stutters. A stutter is commonly taken to be an interruption in the flow of speech, often involving the repetition, distortion, prolongation, or suspension of phonemes. It is an interruption to the flow of speech as signification, a disruption to the perceived stability of the voice as an ideal object that has come to represent the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. Here the stutter is cast as an impediment of speech, as that which impairs coherence. But if coherence presumes a singular and self-possessed subject in command of their own faculties, then perhaps the stutter offers a way of approaching that which coherence excludes, what Harney and Moten describe as ‘unformed objects, deformed subjects’ who in their irreducible sociality refuse to be made into discrete units recorded in a ledger and transported in the hold of the ship.33 The stutter reveals the voice to be always already multiple, insisting on variation and movement. Mackey identifies a structural resonance between stuttering and staggering or stumbling which he connects to the Fon-Yoruba orisha (spirit) Legba – the god of thresholds and crossroads, one who presides over spaces of contact. Mackey notes that Legba ‘walks with a limp because his legs are of unequal length, one of them anchored in the world of humans and the

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other in that of the gods’.34 His ‘impairment’ grants him the power of movement that exceeds himself, a movement of continuous variation that straddles two worlds and brings them into relation with one another. Mackey writes: His limp the offbeat or eccentric accent . . . he’s the master musician and dancer, declared first among the orishas because only he could simultaneously play a gong, a bell, a drum, and a flute while dancing. The master of polyrhythmicity and heterogeneity, he suffers not from deformity but multiformity, a ‘defective’ capacity in a homogeneous order given over to uniform rule. [. . .] Impairment taken to a higher ground, remediated, translates damage and disarray into dance.35 In another essay, Mackey identifies the spirit of Legba in saxophonist John Coltrane’s ability to simultaneously sound multiple ‘lines of articulation – doubling the voice, splitting the voice, breaking the voice, tearing it’.36 And again, he identifies this quality in Mississippi Fred McDowell’s performance of the blues song ‘Everybody’s Down on Me’: He is talking about being betrayed, and he is saying that you need an unruly, outrageous sound when you feel there is no other way you can get satisfaction. What you can say, what can be stated within the limits of conventionally articulate speech, is not enough. What you need is this sound. Notice too how he starts stumbling, how he stumbles as he tries to talk about that sound, stumbles until the sound itself comes to his rescue. Notice how the sound itself rescues crippled speech, which, again, is the eloquence of Legba, the limping eloquence, the limping enablement of Legba.37 The stutter is an opening to a polyrhythmicity that moves one beyond convention and beyond the proprietary. The voice that splits and reaches beyond conventional speech is a voice that exceeds the singular ‘I’, suggesting instead a heterogeneous collective ‘we’. But the generativity of the stutter cannot be detached from constraint either. Consider the body that stumbles and interrupts itself or the economic systems that transform humans into commodities, producing innumerable forms of violence. The construction of any normative order requires the imposition of rules and constraints: the interruption that is the stutter can only be understood against the normative order that it interrupts. To acknowledge this is not to fetishise constraint but to note the existence of an incessant movement of escape that resists and disrupts the scene of constraint, whether it be the hold of ship or conventional grammar or the relation between these two sites of regulation. The stutter, then, is a movement animated by a spirit of fugitivity that emerges from that figure, the fugitive, who is marked by enslavement and bondage yet escapes the clutches of captivity. The ceaseless movement implied by fugitivity, Mackey tells us, ‘asserts itself on an aesthetic level, at the level of poetics’.38 Mackey identifies this fugitive spirit in his reading of Amiri Baraka’s poetics, pointing to Baraka’s acknowledgement of the influence of music on his writing as that which introduces a polyvocality that moves beyond his own voice, suggesting a form of sociality that refuses ownership: [Baraka] writes of a solo by saxophonist John Tchicai on an Archie Shepp album, ‘It slides away from the proposed’. That gets into, again, the cultivation of another voice, a voice that is other than that proposed by one’s intentions, tangential to one’s intentions, angular, oblique – the obliquity of an unbound reference. That sliding away wants out.39

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But perhaps to say that fugitivity refuses possession is not quite right. Rather, as Mackey tells us, fugitivity suggests a different order of possession: ‘Possession means that something beyond your grasp of it grabs you, that something that gets away from you [. . .] gives you a voice.’40 Such fugitive possession disfigures the claim to ownership that is written into laws that uphold private property and, by extension, the selfpossessed subject that conditions the property relation. As Moten puts it, fugitivity ‘is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed’. He continues: ‘This is to say that it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety.’41 This movement beyond the proper and proposed can be heard in the splitting of the voice that occurs in musical performances involving overtones and multiphonics, or in a voice that slides away from tempered tunings, or in a scream that cuts song. The sonic dimension of fugitivity is an expression of excess, a lyric surplus that cannot be reduced to semantic meaning. A dispossessive form of possession that ‘moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes’, cutting and augmenting the authorial voice and foregrounding its multiplicity, is literalised in Zong! Philip credits an imagined ancestor, Setaey Adamu Boateng, as a co-author of the text. The gesture suggests the presence and cultivation of another voice, a voice who stands in for the many voices lost to the ocean, or the many lost ancestors severed by the Atlantic. A running footnote sits at the bottom of each page in the first section of the poem. The notes list a series of names in a tiny subscript: ‘Mausz Suwena Ogunsheye Ziyad Ogwambi Keturah’, ‘Aba Chimanga Naeema Oba Eshe’, and ‘Wafor Yao Siyolo Bolade Kibibi Kamau’.42 These are Yoruba names, a speculative calling of the dead that counters the reduction of the enslaved to numbers in a ledger, quantities of a commodity to be tallied, valued, insured, sold. One man, one woman, one child. Kamau, Naeema, Oba. For Arlene Keizer, these are ‘fugitive footnotes’ that reveal the ‘competing principles of overlap and incommensurability’ in Philip’s poetics.43 Philip’s speculative practice of naming the dead constitutes a resounding that reverberates into the present. By locating and sounding Yoruba names in a legal document written in formal, legal English, the poet performs an acoustic splitting that unsettles the proprietary nature of both the legal document and language of the coloniser. The sounding of these names is a sonic haunting of the language of the law, a spectral presence that echoes from below. The fugitive relation of constraint and escape plays out on a formal level in Zong!: the poem itself is constrained by its source material, by the incomplete record that is the legal transcript. The mutilation of the document, the violent fragmentation of the source material, can be read as reckoning with the violence of captivity and enslavement. In order for one to be reduced to a type, traded as a commodity, recorded in a ledger as a number, one must first be stripped of the capacity to signify according to Enlightenment markers of subjectivity and humanity. This distinction between subject and object can be understood, as Hortense Spillers teaches us, as a distinction between body and flesh, which she tells us ‘is the central distinction between captive and liberated subject-positions’.44 For Spillers, flesh signifies the theft of the body which erases, among other markers of subjectivity, gendered difference, simultaneously reducing the captive body to a thing at the same time that it marks it ‘as a source of irresistible, destructive sensuality’.45 Flesh makes material the abstractions of race with the absence of a subject position providing ‘a physical and biological expression of “otherness”’.46 This transformation from subject to flesh is written with whips and chains:

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‘If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative,’ Spillers tells us, ‘then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.’47 Philip’s fragmentation of the archive then might be thought as a reckoning with the violence that marks the flesh of the slave. She writes: ‘I mutilate the text as the fabric of African life and the lives of these men, women and children were mutilated.’48 The poem slides between stutters and screams, attentive not only to the fragmentation of language and grammar but also to violences that mark flesh and compel it to sound. The final two sections – ‘Ferrum’ and ‘Ebora’ – are the noisiest of the poem cycle. There is a violence to the way the text fragments as words are torn apart, slipping from semantic signification into cries and shrieks and moans. In ‘Ferrum’, the penultimate section of the cycle, we can hear the trace of scream as an uncontainable outpouring that cleaves language – a vestige of the violence written onto the flesh of those held captive, as well as an expression of a material, sonic excess that disrupts meaning. Flesh, as Spillers teaches us, does not only signify constraint and captivity but also precedes the body and, as such, also precedes the racialising grammar that accompanies the body as marker of individuated subjectivity that is inextricably linked to a notion of self-possession grounded in the perceived rationality of language and speech. The poem’s final section, ‘Ebora’, presents the text as in a layered manner – a literal overwriting at odds with insurance overwriting. Here the text is rendered in a lightened or washed-out font. The phonic trace of the scream is submerged in this section of the poem cycle, as if sounding from the depths of the ocean – an echo refusing to fade out. The sense of disorientation is amplified by the overwriting which generates moments of pure noise in which visual lettering dissolves into static, sounding amongst the sinking traces of legalese. To hear the scream merely as an index of trauma is to risk the reproduction of Black suffering as a spectacle for consumption that ties the scream to the violence of anti-Blackness. But this fails to hear what the scream – and its reanimation in Black art – instantiates. Reflecting on another famous textual scream – namely Hartman’s reading of Frederick’s Douglass’s famous account of the beating of his Aunt Hester49 – Moten writes: Black art neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma. There’s no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which the idea of redress is grounded.50 Here the scream is encountered as a sound that cannot be uncoupled from anti-Black violence while at the same time cannot be defined by it. Instead, we can hear the scream as a fugitive sound that cuts interpretation. The content of the scream cannot be represented but rather is encountered as a force, and it is this force that Philip captures in her poem. In the stutters and screams that sound in and through the text of Zong! we can locate multiple directions of escape: a line of escape from the burden of narrativity and reproduction of what Hartman calls ‘the scene of subjection’;51 a line of escape found in the analytic of the flesh which confronts the violence of enslavement by viscerally breaking apart the word in order to locate that which precedes – and so also evades – the calculative terms of Western modernity; and the decomposition of language itself which is broken down to its molecular elements as symbols and letters that float free from signification. The process of cutting, slicing, breaking, splintering, fragmenting,

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fracturing, moving, heaping, and reassembling the language of the law disrupts the repetition of a narration of history that emerges from this archive, by asking us to listen to the flesh that the archive obscures.

Stuttering Logistics The earlier sections of the poem cycle – ‘Os’ and ‘Dicta’ – play with a form that cannot be separated from reduction and constraint: the ledger. The ledger, a format for record keeping that took on increased importance during the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury expansion of colonialism and the rise of speculative finance that accompanied it, was a crucial technology to the process of reducing Black life to a crude calculus that took the preservation of private property, the recording of commercial endeavours, and the accumulation of surplus value as its primary objectives. I want to suggest that the ledger is also a form of silencing that, in the context of the Middle Passage, reduces Black personhood to quantitative measurement. The history of the ledger can be traced to earlier instances of mercantile capitalism but would take on a renewed significance during the period of England’s hegemony over the capitalist world system, spurring the development of the insurance industry and playing a central role as evidence in legal disputes. The ledger enabled mercantile capitalists to monitor stock, account for private property, and track credit and debt relations, in short, to exercise control over the flow of commodities, including those commodities held in the hold of the ship. The ledger then is a technology of logistics, which Jasper Bernes describes as ‘war by other means, war by means of trade’.52 Modern logistics translates the tactics and strategies of war into principles of trade and practices of finance central to the reproduction of capital. It is an operation that concerns itself with the movement of commodities from one place to another, the ‘science’ of controlling the flow of commodities which requires the enclosure of both space and subjects. What, then, is the sound of this war by other means? Harney and Moten argue that ‘modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak’.53 The work of such transportation is an art of silencing, one that refuses to recognise the speech of the enslaved, as well as the many other sounds of fugitive sociality, as a condition for the justification of slavery. But to figure logistics merely as an art of silence is only half the story, for this act of silencing enables the sound of commodity production to fill the empty space in such a way that elides the historical contingency of this sound. For Harney and Moten, the sound of logistics is the regular rhythm of individuation: There is a rhythm making a world, and the time and space this rhythm beats out invites individuation in this world. This is a rhythm that has been around for five hundred years. But now it sounds to itself like the only rhythm, the rhythm of the world, and of the individuals who strive to live in that world. It is the rhythm of commodity production by commodities, internally disrupted at its origin. The first beat renders each commodity separate, bordered, isolated from the next. The second beat renders every thing equal to every other thing. The first beat makes every thing discrete. The second beat makes everything the same. [. . .] It sounds out by expropriating any other movement of the beat. It asserts that nothing else can be heard, that nothing else need be felt.54

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Logistics, then, is at once a silencing, as well as the production of a standardised and metronomic beat that dispenses with differentiation, variation, improvisation. The sound of modern logistics relies upon the (re)production of a racialising rhythm in which the enslaved is violently silenced in order to be transformed from subject to flesh, voice to abstraction, person to chattel, being to number. Philip evokes the science of logistics through the form of the ledger with its adjacent columns. But in Philip’s hands the ledger is always slightly askew. In ‘Zong #4’, the text of the poem appears in two thin columns: the vertical alignment is suggestive of a distinct category in an account book yet the column on the left does not perfectly align with the one on the right.55 Instead they are stuttered, throwing the horizontal reading that defines the ledger slightly off balance. The poem’s opening couplet, ‘this is / not was’, disrupts the chronological passage of time. The calculus of the ledger is not fixed in the past – the insistence on the present tense suggesting that the time of slavery is still ongoing. The movement of the words ‘should’, ‘this’, ‘be’, and ‘not’ from one side of the ledger to the other complicates the moral distance that is put between this historical violence and the present. The triplet ‘this be / not / should be’ refuses the legal speculation that surrounds the events of the Zong, reminding us that the violence was inflicted on people rather than abstractions assigned a monetary value. Cut adrift from their sentences, the words pass from one side of the ledger to the other, progressively rearranging themselves into units of sound that pattern into the rhythmic mantra: ‘this / should / not / be’. The repetition of words coalesces as a chant, but these sequences are repetitions with difference, involving subtle shifts in tense and shifting accents as the words change position in defiance of the ledger’s rigidity. The rhythm that builds is one of variation, challenging both the reductive silence of the ledger and the one-two rhythm of commodity production it implies. Here the poem, through the force of the chant, becomes didactic, refusing to be contained by the logic of the ledger and condemning the violence that the nexus of logistics, speculative finance, and insurance produces. The final word of the poem – ‘is’ – sits outside the margins of the ledger, complicating the assertion that ‘this should not be’ with a state of being verb that implies a temporal continuity from the events of the Zong to the present. In Philip’s hand, the ledger and its calculus is made to stutter through an agrammatical play of tense that generates a rhythmic movement that refuses to become predictable. One snags on the movement from past to present tense, stumbles over the incapacity to remain in either location.

Circulation and Logisticality In the stuttered movement of language across the ledger we can also register something of the operation of capital in circulation which is, of course, not disconnected from the stuttering of time given that we find ourselves now in another moment defined by circulation, financialisation, and logistics. That is, can the poem’s evocation of the ledger as a technology inextricably connected to circulatory capitalism direct us to examine the emergence of a credit system whose flourishing was a condition of modern logistics? And might the poem’s refusal of both the operation of silencing that logistics depends upon and the equally violent standardised rhythm of commodity production encourage us to listen for those surplus sounds that exceed semantic meaning, and in doing so, also suggest a way of apprehending the force of fugitivity that moves beyond the grammar of racialisation?

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Baucom writes of the Liverpool merchants profiting from the slave trade, ‘They were not just selling slaves on the far side of the Atlantic, they were lending money across the Atlantic.’56 These merchants financed slave ships whose crew purchased or otherwise obtained cargoes of slaves and transported them to the plantations of the Americas where they assigned the cargo to a local factor or sales agent. After selling the slaves and taking their commission, the proceeds were transferred to the original merchant in the form of an interest-bearing bill of exchange.57 These interest-bearing bills of exchange, which typically ranged from three months to three years, were either held in order to receive the full payment plus interest or traded on to meet operational shortfalls and/or fund the expansion of a merchant’s operations. The recursive and recombinant movement of language in Philip’s poem cycle, and the movement of language back and forth across the ledger indexes the flexible movement of money across the Atlantic that modern logistics sets in motion. The poem – with its attention to recursive movements, turbulence, and noise – speaks to the generativity of capital and its violent capacity to accumulate surplus from speculation. Philip’s poem hints at the cyclical moveme