Turning Up the Volume of Inner Speech

Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and recording interior monologue—one’s “inner speech” that sounds out within the auditory imagination. Using Jonathan Sterne’s historical study of how headphones created a “private acoustic space,” this chapter postulates that listening to voices and music through headphones created a new sense of a personal and aesthetically objectified space within one’s head. Just as headphones brought unfamiliar sounds and voices into one’s private headspace, James Joyce represents the stream of consciousness as a collage of voices and sounds from literature, religion, popular culture, and the soundscape. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce creates an auditory cosmopolitanism, by allowing the languages and sounds of the surrounding world to penetrate and influence the interior monologues of his characters.

Afterword

Modernist Soundscapes encourages the reader to become receptive to the arousal of the inner ear that the modernist novel so often elicits. The novels discussed are aligned with the modernist movement, where there is a sincere drive to record the seemingly insignificant details of life, the psychological oscillations of the mind, and heightened moments—epiphanies—in the ordinary. Modernist Soundscapes shows how these gradual and small changes in auditory perception may have prompted modernist writers to take up the challenge of making their narratives auditory. Celebrating the breaking of literary conventions, as well as of the dominant ideologies of patriotism, sexism, and classism, modernists made music from the noises crashing around them.

Turning Words into Sounds

Chapter 6 investigates the auditory narrative that is created through Samuel Beckett’s repetition. As Beckett started to repeat and loop phrases in his second novel, Watt (1953), the French radio technician Pierre Schaeffer started experimenting with splicing and looping magnetic tape recordings in the studios of the Paris radio station, Radio Television Français (RTF). Building on the geographical and historical coincidence of these events, this chapter argues that the magnetic tape art of musique concrète can serve as an entry point to analyze the repetition of Beckett’s fiction. The tape recorder, famously used in Krapp’s Last Tape, can aid us in appreciating Beckett’s linguistic loops throughout his novels and short prose pieces. The recorder’s storing and replaying of speech exemplifies Beckett’s repeated suggestion in his fiction that the subject is spoken and alienated through language. Paradoxically, while his repetition empties words of meaning, bringing the reader’s attention to the sounds of words rather than their content, this same repetition, through the course of his fiction, generates its own internal effect and meaning.

Recording the Soundscape

Chapter 3 examines Virginia Woolf’s representation of real-world sound, which develops throughout her career and is crucial to her connection with the “common reader.” Woolf’s onomatopoeia indicates a desire to represent the sounds of the world without mediation—a drive that was helpfully modelled by the phonograph, which some hoped would allow composers to make music from recorded real-world sounds rather than relying on the mediation of musicians. Starting with Jacob’s Room, published in the modernist high point of 1922, this chapter evaluates Woolf’s use of onomatopoeia, which reaches a climax with her later works: The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). These novels are overwhelmingly sound-driven, with characters consistently directed and influenced by the sounds they hear. While characters often feel alienated and scrutinized when they are looked at, the act of listening has the power to unite them, even if only temporarily. On the level of form, Woolf’s onomatopoeia stimulates one’s “reading voice,” so that the reader too can be momentarily united with the text through, for example, the “chuffs” and “ticks” that sound out beyond semantic meaning.

The Modernist Soundscape

Chapter 1 questions why the early twentieth-century soundscape was called by its contemporaries “the age of noise,” and considers how the changing soundscape influenced listening practices. In particular, auditory technologies altered sound perception by creating new paths for intimacy, by exposing listeners to a cosmopolitan and bohemian world of new sounds, and by aestheticizing noise and sound through mechanical reproduction. Yet, why else might modernist literature emphasize sound in ways that the previous generation did not? Scholars such as Steven Connor, Jonathan Sterne, David Michael Levin, and Don Ihde hold that auditory experience has been neglected in modernity and philosophy, where sight is traditionally privileged. More importantly, some of these writers suggest that while the eye has a tendency to be distancing and analytical, the ear has the potential to connect humans to one another and their environment. Building on Martin Jay’s argument that a skepticism of vision began with turn-of-the-century thinkers, such as Henri Bergson, and modernist artists, this chapter argues that modernists include the auditory as a way of subverting visual-based notions of rationality and subjectivity rooted in antiquity and the Enlightenment.

Introduction

The introduction begins with a close reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” in order to clarify the influence of auditory technology on turn-of-the-century literature. While explaining the geographical scope and limitations of the project, the Introduction situates the modernist shift toward sound perception as one of the many breaks with tradition that characterized the period. It also surveys recent scholarship that begins to consider how the soundscape, auditory technologies, and music of the early twentieth century influenced modernist literature.

Inner Speech as a Gramophone Record

In Jean Rhys’s fiction, advertisements, songs, books, and voices of others impinge upon the interior monologues of her characters. In particular, the popular songs that are integrated into Rhys’s first-person novels enhance the auditory nature of her interior monologues. Yet, while the songs referenced in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) sometimes foster automatic responses and clichéd understandings for her narrators, they can also instill a sense of defiance and comfort, making music one of the few channels for a momentary sense of fulfillment and expression. By surveying Rhys’s depiction of popular gramophone recordings and their Bohemian associations in her short stories, this chapter reveals how Rhys crafts and commodifies a bohemian voice in her novels, which sounds out the dialectical relationship between a middle-class public with an appetite for lurid tales of the underbelly of society and so-called bohemians, who pushed the boundaries of individuality and freedom.

Music and the Prosody of Voice

Chapter 2 connects Dorothy Richardson’s film column for the magazine Close Up, where she criticizes the talkie for its unnatural speech and argues for the importance of the musical accompaniment of silent film, with her fiction, where she pays explicit attention to the prosody of voice and bonding qualities of music. For Richardson, the musical accompaniment of silent film is essential for connecting a viewer with the film while allowing for private meditation; conversely, the awkward enunciation of the speech of the early talkies ruined the aesthetic experience of film for Richardson. Although film viewing is not represented in Pilgrimage (1915–1967), a multivolume work that follows the life of Miriam Henderson through free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, Richardson repeatedly uses moments of listening to music to grant her characters a reprieve in their self-conscious inner speech, prompting them to relax and become more receptive to others. Similarly, the musical quality, or prosody, of voice creates intimacy among Richardson’s characters, allowing them to transcend their selfish concerns and connect with one another.