Silence, gender and metamorphosis in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’

This article explores paradoxical silence as a strategy of contemporary feminist short story writing in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ (2017). To draw out the story’s engagements with writing women’s agency beyond the binaries of embodiment and disembodiment, passivity and activity, inner and outer life, it reads Walsh’s text at the nexus of three interrelated traditions. First, it situates the story within a genealogy of women’s ‘non-writing’, which develops new aesthetic strategies through the short story form for both writing and reading the silences of women. Secondly, it explores the significance of women’s speech loss in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the transformative drive of Walsh’s poetics of silence, with a specific focus on the figure of Echo. Thirdly, it places Walsh’s epistolary short story into conversation with philosophical debates about the distinct silences of plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, the human and the nonhuman, by reading it comparatively with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’. In conclusion, it is argued that ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ ironizes the Ovidian topos of the silent figure who nevertheless speaks her desires in order to trouble the binaries that regulate strategies of voluntary silence in the feminist short story.

‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story

This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.

Sounding diasporic dislocation: The object voice in postcolonial short stories

Jacques Lacan conceives of the voice as more than meets the ear: that is, as an objet a that must be subtracted from the acoustic field to preserve the coherence of reality as a symbolically constructed order in which subjects are inserted and from which they derive a sense of identity. Disruptive manifestations of the object voice are frequent in the modernist and postmodernist British short story, a form which, on account of its brevity and limited scope, renders more sharply the traumatic nature of such episodes, which thus become more memorable and engaging for readers. The short story, likewise, is an apt vehicle for postcolonial and diasporic subjectivities characterized by the tensions and psychic distress provoked by their liminal location between different cultures and their heterogenous and often conflicting interpellations. After an introductory part which elaborates on the interrelations between object voice, the short story genre and the postcolonial subject, this article examines two recent stories by Koye Oyedeji (‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’) and Diriye Osman (‘Earthling’), in which existential conflicts become so acute that they trigger aural hallucinations, which determine the central characters’ predicament in the context of the migrant diaspora in Britain.

Invisible or inaudible? The representation of working-class immigrants in the short fiction of Junot Díaz

In Junot Díaz’s short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), sound plays a crucial role in the representation of the experiences of the Dominican migrants in the United States who populate their pages. The collections show the liminal situations which the stories’ characters face, emphasizing their shifting acoustic environments and the pressure to shape one’s own sonic identity to meet the demands of the new language and culture. The experiences of these Dominican migrants – particularly how they are targeted by the Americans they encounter because of their accents – reflect the politics of a cultural neo-racism which differs from the discourse of colonial Otherness but which bears the same monocultural logic. As such, the stories’ migrants become silenced rather than invisible. At the same time, a belief in the power of the Other’s personal and culturally specific voice as a transformative element is emphasized in these collections with Díaz’s use of Spanish and the narrator’s persistent presence throughout all of the stories.

‘J’ai mon silence’: The interrelations of sound, voice and silence in three short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The interrelations of sound, voice and silence in three realist short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner from the 1940s are discussed. The stories are ‘The Proper Circumstances’, ‘The Mother Tongue’ and ‘A Breaking Wave’, all published in the posthumous collection One Thing Leading to Another (1984). Warner is shown to be deeply attuned to sound and its absence in her short fiction; these motifs are integrated with other aspects of setting and with character and narration. Both sound in the text and sound of the text are of semantic importance in her work. Warner’s presentation of silence as a source of power is remarkable, silence being usually configured as lack of agency. Warner’s deployment of silence is related to her status as a lesbian writer.

‘I start again with every story, listening’: Sound, silence and voice in two short stories by David Constantine

This article examines sound and the sonic aspects of voice and silence in two short stories by David Constantine – ‘Tea at the Midland’ and ‘Under the Dam’ – to show that they are not only relevant for an analysis of his poetry but also for his short stories. Employing Jonathan Sterne’s definition of sonic culture as a theoretical starting point, the phonotextual (Garrett Stewart) multiplicity of patterns in each text is seen as an alternative to the protagonists-focalizers’ ‘silenced’ situation and is associated with their desired joys in life. In ‘Tea at the Midland’ the withheld soundscape (R. Murray Schafer) of the bay can only be watched but not heard. In the opening of ‘Under the Dam’ the auscultator (Melba Cuddy-Keane) Seth is completely oblivious of his sonic surroundings and effaces sound on the story level, but the narrator reintroduces sound on the level of discourse. Sylvia Mieszkowski’s distinction between the sound of the text and the sound in the text constitutes one of the fundamental concepts of the analysis. The findings and conclusions are interpreted in the context of Constantine’s own poetics as regards the writing of short stories. The sounds of the two short stories reinforce, through metrical, rhythmic, syntactic and sound patterns, the scenes’ withheld sonic qualities that are only perceived visually and sensed emotionally by the protagonists. These soundscapes represent alternative worlds desired by the protagonists in ‘Under the Dam’ and by the woman in ‘Tea at the Midland’.

Soundscapes, evocalization and poetics of the everyday in ‘An Epiphany Tale’ by George Mackay Brown

The article traces the orientation of ‘An Epiphany Tale’ (published in 1983) by George Mackay Brown on establishing and maintaining the contact with the reader through the development of multiple aesthetic and aural techniques that are rooted in the tradition of modernism, but expanding and transposing it to a considerable degree. Brown adopts a quasi-philosophical way of narrating a story that anticipates the contemporary existential, phenomenological and aesthetic theoretical insights. The aim of the discussion is to present the text’s semiotic patterns and relate them to the phonetic devices that contribute to what Garrett Stewart called the principle of evocalization. This helps to determine how Brown functionalizes the evoked soundscapes (as theorized by Schafer) and connects them with philosophical and anagogic orientation in reception so as to exploit the story’s thematic focus on a series of epiphanies that reveal the underlying semiotic and aesthetic aspects of ordinary existence. The short story reveals a variety of direct and indirect techniques that create an opposition between what is suggested of reality and what is demonstrated on the level of artistic, literary communication.

Gothic soundscapes and rhythm in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories

Poe’s tales, though set in decaying, gloomy and silent places, are particularly sonorous. While several sound patterns are prototypical of the gothic (gusts of wind, shutting doors, absolute silence…), others denote Poe’s interest in uncanny sound perception and illusion. Acuteness of the senses is taken to an extreme, and the sounds of death take on a new dimension. Hearing the dead as well as the living, narrators are perpetually on the brink of insanity and draw their readers into a world rhythmed by sounding clocks, hissing pendulums and unstoppable heartbeats. Binary and ternary rhythms alternate, and it is ultimately in their composition that the tales show Poe’s mastery of rhythmic patterns and of their impact on the reading experience. Self-interruptions, refrains and other rhythmic strategies give the tales a dizzying quality, keeping the reader in a perpetual state of suspense.

Aural disturbance in the stories of M. R. James

The physical process of receiving and interpreting sound creates not just an auditory experience through vibrations registering within our bodies; sounds can also evoke feeling and conjure up mental images. This is especially true of acousmatic sounds, which Michel Chion describes as sounds that are heard while their source remains invisible, and such sounds are thus perfect vehicles for conveying one feeling in particular: terror. If one is not able to see what one can hear, the ensuing sense of terror is heightened. Through the use of sound, and indeed the deliberate absence of sound, M. R. James, I would like to argue, is able to concoct in his stories an atmosphere of malevolence, in which his ‘executors of unappeasable malice’ (as Michael Cox describes them) are often heard rather than seen. This emphasis on sound over image, and the manipulation of it, can be traced back to the fact that James was an oral storyteller before he was a writer of fiction, and that his tales were originally intended for a listening audience. A linguist with an ‘ear’ for language and an aptitude for mimetic brilliance, James deploys alien soundscapes and aural disturbance to create sound as a tangible element within rich sonic tapestries that feature unique aural signatures and instances of acoustic chaos. Drawing on the work of David Hendy on ‘the primalness of the auditory’, Leigh Schmidt on ‘sound corporeality’, and Jonathan Sterne on ‘acoustic culture’, this article demonstrates how James utilized auscultation (or the act of listening) to promulgate terror through auditory images as elusive shape-shifters.