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Noisy modernists: the sound of narrative experimentation

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NOISY MODERNISTS:

THE SOUND OF NARRATIVE EXPERIMENTATION

by

Mariko Dawson Zare

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Mariko Dawson Zare

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction: Living and Reading Modernist Soundscapes 1

Chapter One: James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Bloom’s Emerging Musical Voice among the “Sirens” 40

Chapter Two: The Architectural Narrative Acoustics of
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves 76

Conclusion: Listening for Objects of Desire and
the Aurality of Reading Practices 137

Bibliography 148

iii
Abstract
Through innovative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, modernist
writers created amorphous interior narratives in an attempt to delve beneath the surface of
the individual subject. This is not to say that the focus on inner thoughts results in silent
novels. Rather sound becomes both a part of the exterior sonic environment as well as
the interior world of individual subjects. The boundaries between internal and external
soundscapes are repeatedly and constantly permeated as sounds mingle, merge and
disperse between, through and within bodies and consciousness. Modernist subjects
engage with these flowing sounds, becoming participants in the soundscape as actors who
create, as well as conduits or recipients of sound. I propose reconfiguring these novels as
sound objects themselves, thereby placing modernist novels within a soundscape that
includes the reader through a sonic engagement with the texts. Experiments with aurality
within modernist narratives operate not only diegetically, but also infiltrate the reader’s
existing sound world.
Tracing the literary roots of these trends in narrative experimentation reveals the
extent to which modernist writers pursued new ways of experimenting with sound and
consciousness. In this introduction, I will be relying on two such precursors—Charlotte
Brontë and Dorothy Richardson—to draw some provisional distinctions before moving,
in the next two chapters, to examine the aural dimensions and soundscapes incorporated
into the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Bronte’s
representations of sound in Jane Eyre are a product of the Victorian period in which her
novel was written, but also anticipate the innovations to be found in the following
iv
century. Dorothy Richardson’s twelve volume novel series, Pilgrimage, was the first to
be associated with the term which is so closely identified with modernism—“stream of
consciousness”—and also makes sound a central aspect of its impressionistic narrative,
presaging later modernist interventions.
In my first chapter I will explore Joyce’s use of sound in “Sirens” not only as an
aspect of material information, but also as he experiments with techniques to evoke aural
simultaneity, and a soundscape auscultated through Bloom’s consciousness. As a result,
sound both orients Bloom as the center of the novel, but disorients the reader, whose
perception of Bloom’s external sound environment becomes dislocated from the
originating sound objects, because the reader accesses it through the associations that
occur within Bloom’s consciousness.
In Woolf’s The Waves sounds are also expressed as an aspect of the
consciousness of the protagonists. While meeting with all the protagonists of the novel
for a dinner party, Bernard hears “cars rush past this restaurant; now and then, down the
river, a siren hoots, as a steamer makes for the sea” (182). The jingle in Pilgrimage is
described as heard through Miriam’s interior stream of consciousness, while the sirens in
The Waves are made audible not only as sound waves heard through Bernard’s
consciousness, but also made linguistically audible through his spoken soliloquy. It does
not, however, occur as an external sound object, such as the Boylan’s jingle. The only
way we know about the siren is through a process of Bernard’s perception. As chapter
two will show, the narrative in The Waves is seemingly devoid of a physical
environment—except for the six characters’ voices, which exist in a sort of soundscape of
v
emptiness. Any external sounds are made real only as aspects of their consciousnesses.
As their external contexts recede, their thoughts are textually rendered into sound, but the
act of diegetic listening is only barely implied.
As the readers, and therefore, “listeners” of texts as sound objects, we are invited
into the creative process. As objective narratives become increasingly abstract, or indeed
even fade away altogether, the modernist soundscape is less restricted simply by sound
acts within the action of the novel, and extends beyond the page to construct the novel as
a sound object, entering the auditory consciousness of the reader. The entire reading
experience becomes the soundscape.

1
Introduction: Living and Reading Modernist Soundscapes

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always
something to see something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we
cannot. (John Cage)
1

It is not merely that the world has suddenly become noisier, or that we can hear
farther or even that sound is somehow demandingly pervasive in a technological
culture. It is rather that by living with electronic instruments our experience of
listening itself is being transformed, and included in this transformation are the
ideas we have about the world and ourselves. (Don Ihde)
2

Don Ihde wrote in 1975 about the impact of new technologies upon the way we
listen to our evolving soundscape, but these words resonate with the experience of writers
fifty years earlier, whose literature in turn created new ways of listening to literary
soundscapes. Through innovative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, modernist
writers created amorphous interior narratives in an attempt to delve beneath the surface of
the individual subject. This is not to say that the focus on inner thoughts results in silent
novels. Rather sound becomes both a part of the exterior sonic environment as well as
the interior world of individual subjects. The boundaries between internal and external

1
Bull, Michael and Les Back. The Auditory Culture Reader. Berg, Oxford: 2003. p. 10.
2
Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1976. p. 5
2
soundscapes are repeatedly and constantly permeated as sounds mingle, merge and
disperse between, through and within bodies and consciousness. Modernist narratives
capitalize upon the diffuse, permeable and fluid properties of sound transmission to
explore dimensions of consciousness with characters whose experiences call into
question distinctions between “‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds, both of which exist in
perpetual states of flux and indeterminacy” (Boone 147). Modernist subjects engage with
these flowing sounds, becoming participants in the soundscape as actors who create, as
well as conduits or recipients of sound. I propose reconfiguring these novels as sound
objects themselves, thereby placing modernist novels within a soundscape that includes
the reader through a sonic engagement with the texts. Experiments with aurality within
modernist narratives operate not only diegetically, but also infiltrate the reader’s existing
sound world.
Previous scholarship on sound studies provides a foundation for building a
definition of soundscapes for a narrative context. R. Murray Schafer, the founder of The
World Soundscape Project, defines soundscapes broadly as “any acoustic field of study,”
which may encompass any “environment as a field of study just as we can study the
characteristics of a given landscape” (7). Distinguishing between various sonic registers
of a soundscape provides a means of physical orientation—by the displacement of
molecules through space over time. If soundscapes are considered social environments,
as well, then it must be considered that sound is also a route to understanding the status of
the subject in relation to others.
3
Sound in literature orients readers within the narrated soundscape, often in the
form of clearly marked dialogue—indicating who is talking, and which ideas are attached
to a specific character. If distinctions between these registers become difficult to
determine, the location of the subject becomes destabilized. Soundscapes are comprised
of a set of interactions; they are not merely a sum of discernable components. Sound
affects and changes other sounds as well as the listeners (Schafer 131). The interactions
of these sounds contain the potential for building meaning at these points of contact. A
soundscape is not only the acoustic environment, but also the acoustic communication
that occurs within that space (Truax xii). Historian Emily Thompson expands upon
Schafer’s definition in her work in modernist acoustics and architectural design, which
relies upon extending the consideration of these fields of study to include
“simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is
both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world” (1-2). While she
leaves the field of literature virtually untouched, her book’s account of the lived
experience of acoustic spaces in the early twentieth century provides insight into the
soundscapes being created in modernist novels. The “field of study” I am concerned with
is modernist fiction, which I hope to examine not only in terms of the diegetic aurality of
the novels, but also in terms of the way in which their literary soundscapes impinge upon
the reader’s experience of their own inhabited soundscape. Therefore, while sound
events are depicted as occurring within the action of the novel, there is also a sonic
texture created by the narrative, which evokes aurality within the consciousness of the
reader.
4
Tracing the literary roots of these trends in narrative experimentation reveals the
extent to which modernist writers pursued new ways of experimenting with sound and
consciousness. In this introduction, I will be relying on two such precursors—Charlotte
Brontë and Dorothy Richardson—to draw some provisional distinctions before moving,
in the next two chapters, to examine the aural dimensions and soundscapes incorporated
into the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Bronte’s
representations of sound in Jane Eyre are a product of the Victorian period in which her
novel was written, but also anticipate the innovations to be found in the following
century. Dorothy Richardson’s twelve volume novel series, Pilgrimage, was the first to
be associated with the term which is so closely identified with modernism—“stream of
consciousness”—and also makes sound a central aspect of its impressionistic narrative,
presaging later modernist interventions. In 1918 essayist Mary Sinclair wrote an article
about the first installment of Pilgrimage, in which she described Richardson’s narrative
style as a “stream of consciousness” (Fromm xvii, 18n; Rose 366). Sinclair’s metaphor,
borrowed from William James’ Principles of Psychology, evokes not only water
movement but also provides useful way of thinking about narrative as the sound wave
motion.
3
Richardson disliked the term; nonetheless, it continues to be associated not only
with her work, but with other modernist writers, most notably Joyce and Woolf. The
material environment that contextualizes these narrative soundscapes becomes
increasingly diffuse and amorphous. As the originating site of sound events within the

3
“Consciousness, then does not appear itself chopped up in bits. . . . . In talking of it
hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life”
(239). James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1950. (239).
5
novels becomes less discernible, the importance of the experience of sound as located
within the body and consciousness of the protagonists increases. Because novels are not
a sound specific medium, developing a precise vocabulary for a discussion of the sonic
life of novels is challenging, and leads to a discourse of auditory literary theory that
retains a certain reliance upon metaphoric language. In order to clarify my concepts of
literary aurality, I will outline a series of concepts and terms that will form the foundation
of my theoretical approach.
Soundscapes can be defined and measured within a strictly physical discourse
attending to such concepts as the movement of energy waves, the displacement of
molecules, and measurement of amplitude and frequencies. These factors will determine
the acoustics of a soundscape, or the physical characteristics of a specific sound. While
this study of literary soundscapes is less dependent upon a scientific vocabulary, the
acoustics of sound objects will be an element of the way sound operates as a function of
the protagonists’ experience of sound. Aspects of acoustic perception, or
psychoacoustics, however, play a more significant role in connecting the aurality of
narrative space to the reader’s heard experience (Scafer 133). Psychoacoustics
encompasses aural perception as both physical and psychological: sound touches both
the human ear and the mind (Plock 481). The absorption of sound through the bodies of
hearing subjects has implications that range across physiological, psychological,
emotional, and social spectrums.
Psychoacoustics is often associated with irritation and disruption, for even the
most foundational measure of acoustic energy is an act of disturbance; therefore sound
6
always carries with it a sense of interference (Berg and Stork 31). Science has shown that
sound travels as waves, carrying along with it energy, which disrupts the atmosphere, and
interacts with surfaces that include our bodies, most specifically as vibrations on our
eardrums (23). An infinite number of waves can exist in the same space, filling the
atmosphere to levels of psychoacoustic saturation. Through superposition “the existence
of one wave does not affect the existence of properties of another wave, even if they are
in the same place at the same time”; sound can be endlessly layered within a single
soundscape (31). Therefore sound is invasive as it comes into contact with other
“surfaces,” while nonetheless retaining compatibility with each other. While the
coexistence of a potentially infinite number of sound waves within a single space may
seem to be less threatening, because sound waves don’t eliminate or collide with each
other, these acoustic properties do not entirely cohere with psychoacoustic of listening,
because there is a difference between multiple waves coexisting in the air, and the human
act of perceiving them in the ear and mind. A listening subject can be overwhelmed by
all the sounds that can flood an environment. Or even from the perspective of a speaking
subject, if the environment is noisy, the speaker feels as if he or she must exert extra
energy to increase the amplitude of his or her voice to hold par with, or rise above the
ambient noise. Speaking more loudly to be heard over other voices/sounds/noise does
nothing to diminish the power of those sounds, but rather adds to the amount of auditory
environmental disturbance, complicating the ability to return to a perceptual equilibrium.
Withdrawal from engagement with the perceived field of study allows a hearing
subject to actively prepare for meaningful aural perception, through what Schafer calls
7
“ear cleaning” (208). He prescribes a withdrawal from engagement with the perceived
field of study, specifically by refraining from speech for several hours. The act of
speaking creates sound objects within the soundscape, and hinders “ear cleaning,”
because the “listener is also a soundmaker, and even the sound of one’s own voice comes
back to the ear colored by the environment. With sound, everything interacts with
everything else” (Truax xii). The continuous infiltration of sound interferes with the
process of priming listening subjects; however, because we can never create a completely
silent environment, eliminating our own speech from the collective sound waves
constantly surrounding us becomes the closest approximation of ideal “ear cleaning”
conditions.
This attempt at withdrawal is problematized by the way in which sound is
simultaneously heard and emitted by the body. The impossibility of silence as a viable
retreat from the incessant engagement with one’s sound environment is further
complicated by the permeability and diffusion of sound. Melba Cuddy-Keane has
studied sound as an aspect of modernism, specifically in the life and literature of Woolf.
She proposes an application of the concept of diffusion based upon a sixteenth century
usage in referring to the “act of spreading abroad or scattering widely,” which became a
metaphor in twentieth century France for radio waves (“New Aurality” 70). The
diffusion of sound, as a process of the “emission of sound from its source,” entails an
encompassing experience both from the perspective of production and reception. While
Cuddy-Keane refers to diffusion as a sonic action, the dispersal of sound evokes Woolf’s
visual metaphor for life as state of perpetual sensory immersion, rather than a series of
8
clearly delineated events: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a
luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end” (The Common Reader 154). The diffuse “halo” that exists
somewhere between transparency and opacity resonates with the incessant, yet varied
degree of absorption of sound—from background noise to clearly perceived sonic events.
The active, or at times passive, role the subject plays in both emitting and
consuming sound waves is particularly important in modernist soundscapes because of
the way sound permeates the inner consciousness. Sound does not remain an external
activity, but is ingested and consumed bodily, and “its very definition is anthropocentric”
(Sterne 11). Recognition of, and responses to, sound register in the consciousness of the
characters in these novels. The physicality of sound is certainly demonstrated through
dialogue—speech emitted through speaking mouths and absorbed, or ingested, through
listening ears. The effect of the location of the body within the soundscape has different
implications from its visual placement in a landscape. The line of vision that determines
the scope of perception in a landscape is limited not only by distance and physical
obstructions, but also by the ability of the eyes to focus in a specific direction in a single
moment. Auditory perception expands experience from the linearity of vision to hearing
from multiple directions at once. An individual can eavesdrop on conversations from
across a room, while listening to music through a haze of traffic noise entering through a
nearby window. Particularly in an urban environment, a cacophony of noises can invade
the body simultaneously. The eyes may be closed in the case of visual sensory overload,
but the feeble action of putting our hands over our ears offers little protection: “[Ears]
9
cannot be closed off at will. There are no ear lids” (Schafer 11). Literary representations
of sound can, therefore, occur not only as communication conveyed through dialogue, but
also as a threat or invasive force. And even if we had “ear lids” we would still absorb
sound into our bodies: “Phenomenologically I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear
with my whole body. My ears are at best the focal organ of hearing” (Ihde 44).
Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld uses the term acoustemology to describe the “reflexive
and historical relationships between hearing and speaking, listening and sounding” (226).
As in Woolf’s “self talking to the self”
4
, the speaking body is engaged in a self-
stimulating act, in which the speaking body is inevitably also listening. Voicing becomes
“embodied doubly” because one inevitably hears oneself as an “ongoing dialogue of self
and self, self and other” (Feld).
Therefore, the erotics of sound begin with our own masturbatory “self and self”
sound emitting practices. In reference to the phenomenology of touch, Elizabeth Grosz
writes about Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “double sensation,” or the touching of
one’s own hands together as a case in which “the subject and the object are inherently
open to each other” (Merleau-Ponty 106, Grosz 103). From an auditory perspective, the
ear and the mouth are “inherently open to each other”; not only are they physiologically
connected through the ear canal and throat, but they are operationally open to each other.
The auditory field retains a certain circular enclosure of reciprocal speaking and listening.
Douglas Kahn argues that not only is speech, therefore, an expression of thought as
corporeal, but the sensation of one’s voice speaking through one’s own body creates “a

4
From the short story, “An Unwritten Novel.”
10
fuller sense of presence” than hearing a voice from another body, which becomes diffuse
across space (7).
Most speech, however, is not intended for the purpose of the “self talking with the
self,” but as a communicative act between speaking and listening subjects. In the most
basic structure, a speaker communicates to a specific, intended listener. In light of the
privileging of visual discourse, there is an absence of auditory terms to help identify an
intended audience. Cuddy-Keane adopts the medical term “auscultation” as an aural
analogue to the narratological term “focalization” for one who sees (71)
5
. Therefore in
order to talk about “the reception of sounds in literary texts,” auscultation, and the verb
auscultize,” signify the presentation of sound as listened to”; and the auscultator is the
“person doing the listening.” In a literary text, the term auscultation can help us talk
about how the act of listening to the way a sound that is projected to an intended audience
is actually received and heard. In the most basic model of two people speaking with each
other, there is a mutuality of aural/oral exchange. Yet even in this case, the attentiveness
of the listener indicates a certain level of control over the aural exposure. Add to this
couple an unintended listener—one who is eavesdropping. While this third actor may
serve as another listener who submits attentively to the speaker, he or she may actually
perform a subversive function, undermining the intentions of the speaker, in which
auscultation is controlled solely through the act of listening, rather than through speech
projected to an intended audience. The site of agency oscillates between speaker and

5
Jonathan Sterne defines “mediate auscultation” as the “technique of using a stethoscope
to diagnose” by “listening to movements inside the body with the aid of an instrument”
(99).
11
listener. A variety of models can result in other complications: listener becoming
speaker, interference by way of ambient sound, inarticulate human sounds that do not
have a clearly intended audience, mechanically (re)produced sound—either human or
non-human in origin—and music. Multilateral sonic valences penetrate beyond an
external periphery. Soundscapes exist on material and psychological planes—both
within the characters and extending outwardly into the settings they inhabit. Reading
with an aural sensitivity not only adds another layer of understanding, but also
specifically resonates with modernists’ interest in the interplay between materiality and
consciousness.
The aural corporeality of speaking and listening subjects forms a mode of acoustic
erotics in which soundscapes operate as expressions of desire, most obviously along a
communicational model. While a speaker desires the ideal listener, the listener may
desire knowledge, information, or the hearing of a story. Not all sounds involve speech,
of course, but are a medium for the transportation of information—some meaningful,
some disruptive to the communication of meaning. The listener then, not just the
speaker, is also inevitably involved in any situation of acoustic desire: a yearning for
what Ihde calls the communicative aura. Ihde identifies a charged auditory, emotional
space as an “aura which has been cast and which places both [the speaker and the
listener] in the midst of mutually penetrating sound” (182). This aura is unstable; the
connection is tenuous, with only “moments of fragile meeting in which there is an
exchange of concentrated listening and speaking.” In these fleeting moments, the desires
of both listeners and speakers are fulfilled. Other moments, however, are broken by
12
intentional inattentiveness and deliberate acts of denial. The relationship between the
subjects determines the strength of the communicative aura, “which has been cast and
which places both of us in the midst of mutually penetrating sound.” The energy
generated through speech—the emission of sound waves across psychologically and
physically charged spaces—would seem to privilege the position of the speaker in the
communicative model. After all, it is the speaker who penetrates the soundscape with the
sound waves that move into the unprotected and passive ears of a listener. While the
vulnerability of a listening subject may indicate a submissive position, the passive or
active nature of sound is not so clearly delineated. There is also power in listening, and
in bestowing upon the speaking subject the your attention and receptiveness. Such
moments of exchange—both of sonic information and power—are fleeting and
unsustainable “moments of fragile meeting in which there is an exchange of concentrated
listening and speaking.” In the exchange, such attentiveness and attunity cannot be
sustained, and thus the balance of power is also disrupted. Inattentiveness exerts the
power of denying access to one’s receptiveness; auscultation is suspended.
The perception of soundscapes is dependent upon the individualized experience of
a sound-emitting and hearing subject as the basis for the development of a
phenomenology of sound. Although Merleau-Ponty does not write from a specifically
acoustic perspective, his assertions in Phenomenology of Perception and “Cezanne’s
Doubt” that the essence of reality is found in the experience of the lived moment provide
a path toward developing a specifically aural phenomenology. The connections he forges
between sensory perception and aesthetic comprehensions of reality cohere with an
13
examination of modernist literary soundscapes. While sound waves can be precisely
measured, and in rare cases some people are born with “perfect pitch,” an absolute
determination of reality bears less relevance on the understanding of reality than the
perception of an “expressive value” (Phenomenology 7). Science can be useful as “an
element, of consciousness,” but Merleau-Ponty is critical of a pervasive dependence upon
empiricism, which “conceals rather than reveals subjectivity” (viii). He is careful to
point out that while Cezanne strove to create a unique method of painting that captured
the moment of the “lived perspective,” he was also an arduous student of artistic
technique and studied elements of perspective from the great masters (“Cezanne’s
Doubt” 4, 6). These technical lessons, like the scientific discoveries that lead to changes
in modernist psychoacoustics, must be made relevant as an aspect of one’s “own
particular point of view or from some experience of the world without which the symbols
of science would be meaningless” (Phenomenology viii). Phenomenology’s attention to
subjective perceptions resists the reifying of scientific knowledge, or any knowledge, as
fixed. The phenomenological understanding of what “a sound means,” while partly
dependent upon the actual originating sound object and its physical environment, is
primarily determined by the various “circumstances under which it is heard” (Truax xii).
In fact, it is the very instability and “indetermin[acy],” of subjective perception, which
renders it a “positive phenomenon” (7). While a phenomenological point of view makes
the subject “the absolute source,” it also attempts to find a way of distilling a sort of
purity of perception that resists assigning symbolic meaning to these perceptions: “The
real has to be described, not constructed or formed” (Phenomenology xi). Cezanne was
14
of particular interest to Merleau-Ponty as an artist whose aesthetic evoked an
understanding of “reality without giving up the sensual surface, with no other guide than
the immediate impression of nature” (3). Although Cezanne’s medium was visual, his
adherence to creating art that communicates perception as operating in an embodied
present has applications for aural sensibilities. The modernist writers I am considering in
this project use sound to find a way to evoke in the reader’s consciousness an experience
of the protagonist’s world, not only as a set of actions and representations of reality, but
as an experience of what it is to live that reality. Much like sound waves existing
simultaneously within a physical space, the reader’s consciousness becomes imbued with
the consciousness of the protagonist. Merleau-Ponty argues that Cezanne’s paintings not
only “create and express an idea,” but like these writers, through his innovative
techniques “awaken[s] the experiences which will make their idea take root in the
consciousness of others” (8).
While phenomenology emphasizes the importance of individually determined
perceptions of reality, the subjective experience is inevitably a product of a specific
cultural context. The dominant aural concern of the early twentieth century was noise.
The modernists, however, were not the only ones to feel the barrage of increasingly
cacophonous and invasive soundscape. Although we could certainly argue that urban
noise levels a century later are greater, we have now become acclimated to noise to the
point that the technology that almost completely reduces automobile noise actually
15
becomes disconcerting, even dangerous, rather than a welcome relief
6
. Murmurings of
concerns about noise began to appear in the nineteenth century. There was little social
desire for silence before the Industrial Revolution, and therefore, few attempts to legislate
noise suppression, other than with loosely enforced local regulations, such as
“disturb[ing] the peace at night while using offensive language” (Attali 122). Everyone
had the right to make noise as “an affirmation of each individual’s autonomy.” Noise,
therefore, was not necessarily seen as disruptive and invasive, perhaps because up to the
late nineteenth century, most noise came from an abundance of “traditional sounds:
horse-drawn vehicles, peddlers, musicians, animals and bells” (Thompson117).
Initially street noise drew the most complaints, mainly from intellectuals, who
“considered noise to be a brute assault on their mental refinement” (Bijsterveld 166).
Charles Babbage published a paper in 1837 that most notably described what was to be
considered the first computer, but also included a chapter revealing his interest in sound;
he proposed the possibility that sound waves continue to exist eternally in the atmosphere

(Picker 15). His interests turned from theoretical acoustics to social legislation of noise,
and decades later in 1864 he “successfully campaigned against the ‘nuisance’ of London
street music[ians],” who were, according to Babbage, members of the “lower classes”
(Bijsterveld 166). In 1853 Thomas Carlyle’s urge to escape the noise of London lead him
to extreme measures—he attempted to build a soundproof room in the middle of the city,
so he could write undisturbed by the noises of “all men and all dogs, cocks and household
or street noises” (Picker 43). These complaints reveal more about class elitism than

6
Audi is developing an “e-sound” for their hybrid cars in order to help alert pedestrians
and cyclists of the quiet, sometimes silent vehicle’s approach (Carter).
16
anxiety about a growing dependence on machinery. Carlyle focuses his annoyance upon
organic sources, such as neighboring household animals or the people making music,
such as the “vile yellow Italian” organ grinder. Before the century was over, however,
criticism of the growing noise problem would turn to more mechanized sources, most
specifically that icon of the industrial revolution: the train. English psychologist James
Sully complained in 1878 of the “piercing noise of a train” as being a “plague” to the “ear
of a cultivated European,” while railway workers and other city dwellers were seemingly
“often indifferent” to such “torments” (95). Retaining a symbolic binary of noise/silence
and bad/good, these intellectual elites considered those who suffered under noise, and,
therefore appreciated its antithesis, to be truly more desirable: “Silence [ . . . ] was the
sign of wisdom and justice.” Sensitivity to noise was a sign of a refined sensibility,
rather than a sign of social intolerance.
While Victorians began to express in no uncertain terms their irritation with the
infiltration of noise into private spaces, it was after the turn of the twentieth century that
these growing concerns accelerated, leading to increased activities by noise abatement
organizations and a growing consciousness of the sonic toll that mechanized
conveniences were taking. Sounds of modern technology, such as streetcars and factories,
invaded the ambient realm that was once inhabited by organic or “traditional sounds.”
Writing about the function of bells in nineteenth century French villages, Alain Corbin
explains how they operated as a means of delineating space and time for the community.
They rang on specified schedules and the bell towers were usually built in the center of
town and situated in such as way as to be heard to the boundaries of the village (118).
17
The sound of the bells provided a stable relationship between time and space, which was
even at that time being disrupted as life became more mobile.
In the world of the modernist writer, sound is electronically amplified, relayed
and artificially delivered across distance. The meaning of sounds becomes mystified.
Although the ringing of Big Ben in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway may be reminiscent of
Corbin’s village bells, providing a centralized call to the inhabitants of London, when it
mingles with sounds of the backfiring of a car or an airplane flying overhead, it subverts
attempts by both the characters in the novel and the readers to orient themselves. The
body in a modernist soundscape must cope with a barrage of potentially conflicting
stimuli coming from multiple directions, at levels that cannot be easily dismissed as
background or ambient sound. Such demands force the mind, at varying levels of
consciousness, to attend to fragments of sound, compromising attempts to achieve a
unified subjective self, a notion which modernists were already doubtful. Not only has
sound become less centralized through disparate, loud, mechanical sounds that permeate
the soundscape of the city, but also the act of hearing is increasingly disorienting due to
mechanical reproduction: “Once telephones, phonographs, and radios populated our
world, sound had lost a little of its ephemeral character. The voice became a little more
unmoored from the body, and people’s ears could take them into the past or across vast
distances” (Sterne 1). Schizophonia or the “split between an original sound and its
electroacoustical transmission or reproduction,” implies an associated nervousness,
aberration and drama (Schafer 90-1). A gramophone that is mistaken for the sound of
live voices serves to confuse the listeners’ sense of sharing a spatial relationship with the
18
musicians, as well as cuts off the listener from the immediacy of a live performance.
Woolf delves into the spatial, social and political implications of reproduced sound in
Between the Acts. For the production of the pageant, Miss LaTrobe hides a portable
gramophone in the shrubs. It summons the audience to their seats for the beginning of
the performance, and when they are settled in their places, it placates them with a nursery
rhyme, but it also confuses them, because it has made the voice anonymous. The stable
spatial linearity of audience and stage is disrupted by the displacement of sound from its
source through electronic duplication and amplification. As sound objects become
increasingly diffuse, then, the differentiation of ground and figure are subverted. In a
standard soundscape the figure is the focus of interest—a signal or soundmark, while the
ground is the setting or context, including the ambient sounds surrounding the figure. As
with all things aural the perception of ground and figure is always fluid, with meaning
reliant upon subjective perception: “What is perceived as figure or ground is mostly
determined by the field and the subject’s relationship to the field” (Schafer 152). Hearing
is not fixed within a soundscape, but is fleeting, moving, transient, and characterized by a
constant state of flux. When the originating site of sound generation is dislocated
through new technologies, the sonic figure in an increasingly confused acoustic ground is
obscured.
Therefore, it wasn’t simply increased decibels that caught people’s attention but
the new sources of such increased noise that also contributed to the remarkable sound
aspects of the modern city life. The sounds that caused irritation were now primarily of
mechanical origin, and, the impact of the shift from primarily organic sound to
19
mechanical noise had a “dramatic and deeply felt” impact, which left “some energized,
others enervated; all felt challenged to respond to the modern soundscape in which they
now lived” (Thompson 117). British surgeon Dan McKenzie found the noise alarming,
writing in, City of Din, in 1916: “The motor-horn! The motor-horn! I often wonder why
in all the world such an instrument of torture has ever been permitted to exist even for a
single day!” (Bijsterveld 91). The overwhelming impression of urban noise “by 1925”
was that is “was no longer organic at all” (Thompson 117). As a result of a “challenge to
respond,” protestors distributed “hundreds of pamphlets, essays, reports, journal articles,
and newspaper items” claiming noise was more than a mere nuisance. Noise activists
“claimed that the ‘nerve-racking’ noise of modern life and of contemporary city life in
particular, had become unbearable,” and even a “general health hazard” (Bijsterveld 92).
For some, the response was to form noise abatement societies, such as the Noise
Commission of London, to tackle the problem of street noise. The Commission was
primarily concerned with street noise, even more than industrial noise, which seemed less
threatening, because it at least had a rhythm (74). Although initially the new
technological sounds that characterized the burgeoning industrial age were shocking, by
beginning of twentieth century, there is evidence that the ear had adapted to such
changes, “‘blending’ [technological sound] with the natural rhythms of antiquity”
(Schafer 74). As long as the sounds had a rhythm, people seemed to be more readily able
to adapt. The mingling of diverse layers of sounds that do not cohere into a pattern is a
dominant source of distress. Noise is a subjective category, however, and can include
unwanted sound, unmusical sound, nonperiodic vibrations, such as “white noise” or
20
“Gaussian noise,” any loud sound, or disturbance in any signaling system (182). In Paul
Hegarty’s work on the relationship between noise and music, he argues that “noise is not
an objective fact,” but is evaluated as a combination of both sensory perception and
cultural expectations (3). While some sounds may be more easily ignored, noise
demands a response and judgment.
As with anything associated with sound, these terms do not necessarily retain
their distinctions in practice. Subjective perceptions and innovative applications lead to
the aesthetic appropriation of noise into music, and sound fluctuates between meanings.
While organic sounds characterized acoustic environments leading up to and well into the
Victorian period, the modernist subject was surrounded by the clamor of automobiles,
factories, airplanes, and streetcars, as well as the sounds transmitted through innovative
means such as the radio, microphone, and gramophone. Technology filled the modernist
soundscape not only with new things to hear, but also “introduce[d] ways of listening not
previously available” (Ihde 5). Kahn argues that not only does new technology literally
affect the way sound is consumed by hearing bodies, but also that, as listeners became
increasingly familiar with the idea of using technology to record sound, if not necessarily
with its practice, the cultural understanding of hearing itself altered (4n). This shift in
psychoacoustics was a point that inspired creative innovations; artists responded to their
“noisy” environments with “a celebration of a technological age and a condemnation of
it” (Bradbury and McFarlane 46). Like the jazz “musicians and engineers [who] created
a new culture out of the noise of the modern world,” innovative writers were able use
these new “ways of listening” as an inspiration for new ways of writing (Thompson 9).
21
Although Thompson’s work focuses on architecture and engineering, particularly as it
relates to concert halls and performance venues, her insights can be extrapolated to
suggest how writers in the same period created a “new [literary] culture out of noise”
through their narrative soundscapes. Noise, which seems to characterize the period,
becomes, therefore, a source of both anxiety and creativity. The noises that make up the
soundscape on the street in The Years are comprised of unpleasant or distressing sound;
however, in the hands of writers such as Woolf, they take on an aesthetic aurality. Woolf
gives us a sense of this impact of “street noise” throughout The Years: “Against the dull
background of traffic noises, of wheels turning and brakes squeaking, there rose near at
hand the cry of a woman suddenly alarmed for her child; the monotonous cry of a man
selling vegetables; and far away a barrel organ was playing” (317). This passage presents
a combination of mechanical noise that is so incessant that is has become “dull” and
monotonous—but it is nonetheless present as a layer of the sonic soundscape. This
soundscape is penetrated, as well, by two human voices: a mother crying out of fear that
the “brakes squeaking” could endanger her child, and the vendors whose solicitations to
would-be customers add another layer to the monotonous soundscape. These cries
present an intersection between the urban subject made anxious in the face of mechanized
noise, and the laborer participating in the cacophony as an attempt at survival. Woolf
wrote this novel in an aural context in 1937 that had implications on the soundscape her
protagonists inhabit.

22
Having reviewed the theories of aurality and the evolution of sounds’ impact as
the nineteenth century moves into the twentieth century, as a prelude to my examination
of modernist soundscapes in the works by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, I want to end
this overview with an extended look at two novels—one firmly Victorian, and one
heralding the arrival of modernist inward-turned narration—in order both to differentiate
and anticipate the transformation that the form and psychological incorporation of
soundscapes makes in understanding the radical experimentations of Joyce and Woolf.
The first, as I have already alluded to, is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; the second is
Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.
While Jane Eyre is written within a Victorian tradition, amongst other novels
filled with sounds often focusing on mimetic representations of sounded aspects of
narrated events or environments, sound as a signal of narrative irony, or sound as
symbolic cues, Brontë’s novel can be read as a harbinger of the shift in the treatment of
sound as more texturally material. Several times throughout the novel, storms are
assigned distinct symbolic meaning, usually characterized by intense emotions. The first
storm comes at the very beginning of the novel when, as a child, Jane is punished by
being banished to the “red room,” made more terrifying by the “wind howling in the
grove behind the hall” (13). Among other notable storm are the ones associated with
Jane and Rochester’s wedding day. Two nights before their wedding, a storm rages while
Jane sees a specter visit her room in the middle of the night. She later learns that it was
Rochester’s insane first wife, Bertha Mason, who had come to Jane’s room to destroy her
wedding veil. The next night, the eve of their wedding, there is another storm blowing
23
while Jane awaits the chance to tell Rochester about Bertha’s visit. Once she tells
Rochester her story and he convinces her that all will be well at the church tomorrow,
Jane assures him that “the night is serene, and so am I” (244). Jane’s perceptual
experience of the sounds of the storms is not the focus of our understanding of who she
is. The storms serve as external signals that reflect Jane’s consciousness.
The recurrence of Bertha Mason’s eerie laughter throughout the novel exemplifies
the ironic and symbolic aspects of sound. Jane hears the “distinct, formal, mirthless”
laughter shortly after she arrives at Thornfield, and when she inquires about its source, it
is attributed to one of the servants, Grace Poole (91). While the laughter “struck [her]
ear” as “tragic” and “preternatural,” it is not until much later, on her wedding day with
Rochester, that Jane finally learns the “tragic” significance of the ghostly laughter, and its
real source is Bertha. The laughter provides a thread of literary irony through a
significant portion of the novel, and calls into question Jane’s ability to “hear” or read her
soundscape for meaning. From the first time she hears the sound, she senses there is
something more disturbing associated with that laughter than the unseemly behavior of a
servant. Like Carlyle and Sully, however, it seems that the explanation that an
unpleasant noise comes from a member of the serving class satisfies a certain logical
threshold to be an acceptable explanation for Jane. Thus the laughter operates both as a
literary device and reflects certain social attitudes about sound and personal refinement.
Bertha’s laughter does not operate merely as a plot device. While it is an outward
sign of her misfortune, madness, and social marginalization, it permeates Jane’s
consciousness at points that reveal her private yearnings and discontent. Jane admittedly
24
finds life as a governess in Thornfield Hall to be peaceful and pleasant; however, even as
she professes her contentment with her new life, she guiltily acknowledges her
dissatisfaction with tranquility. One evening she climbs to the top of Thornfield and
imagines the “busy world, towns, regions full of life” that exist just beyond the horizon
(93). The vision of these places does not assuage her feelings of “restlessness,” which
“agitated [her] to pain sometimes.” Looking to the open space where she can imagine
the places she has “heard of but never seen,” ignites her imagination in the absence of
visual memories. Retreating from the rooftop to the uninhabited third floor corridor,
where she paces back and forth, Jane “open[s] [her] inward ear [ . . . ] to a tale [her]
imagination created.” This inner hearing excites her “heart” which is “heaved by the
exultant movement.” Jane’s moment of private exaltation is suddenly permeated with the
sound of Bertha’s laughter, which “thrilled her.” Even as Jane knows she “ought to be
satisfied with tranquility” of Thornfield, she feels guilty, knowing that others “are
condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and [ . . . ] silent revolt against their lot.” Both
women feel confined within Thornfield. While Jane does not perceive herself as the one
“condemned” to “silent revolt,” her thrills and exaltations remain internal and silent;
Bertha, despite her “stiller doom,” acts as Jane’s voiced counterpart who is more vocally
free to laugh out loud. Jane thrills as the sound of Bertha’s laughter permeates her body
as an expression of her own restlessness.
After several more months of this quiet, domestic life, Jane leaves Thornfield
briefly to walk into town, in an effort to dispel some of her impatient energy. Jane
meditates on the “charm of the hour,” and the “thin murmurs of life” in the distance,
25
when suddenly “a rude noise” invades “the absolute hush” (95). The sound of an
approaching horse is made “rude” by it’s intrusion into a soundscape unsuited for such
commotion. It is so out of place, that Jane imagines it to be a “Gytrash,” a sort of
mythical creature, casting a spell upon the night. Once she sees the man, whom she only
later learns is Rochester, riding on the creature, the spell of the Gytrash is broken (96).
Any lingering “charm” or “spell” is obliterated a moment later when Rochester falls,
along with his horse, on a patch of ice. The sounds of Rochester’s swearing, his dog’s
barking, and his horse’s groaning accompany the crash of bodies. While these “rude”
sounds foreshadow the disruption Rochester will bring to Jane’s life, and his need for her
help after another fall, this “clattering tumble” also generates a few moments of focused
conversation, which will also characterize the most intimate moments Jane and Rochester
would later share. They both adopt a frankness of manner—with Rochester disposing of
politeness—commanding her and swearing openly in front of her, which in turn makes
Jane feel “at her ease” with Rochester. As they speak with each other they create another
sort of spell. When Jane returns to Thornfield after the incident, she lingers outside to
prolong the attachment to the momentary adventure, but when she hears the sound of a
clock strike, it “recall[s] [her] to earth” (99). Again, a spell has been broken. The
communicative aura created on the lane had ended long before, but Jane attempts to
sustain its fragile energy. She is momentarily successful through the memory of their
spoken exchange, but once a distinct, physically present sound permeates her
consciousness, the memory disperses. Nonetheless, this structural pattern of recurs
throughout the novel. Rochester’s courtship of Jane is filled with long conversations,
26
during which they speak clearly and directly to each other, free from the circumventions
of false flattery, and veiled politeness. The bonds they forge through sincere and
unadorned language, however, are undermined by deceit. The inevitable withholdings
found in Ihde’s model of communicative aura—usually in the form of momentary
distractions—are amplified by Rochester’s terrible secret that his first wife is confined in
the attic under the care of Grace Poole, due to Bertha’s violently insane behavior. What
Rochester leaves unspoken becomes far more terrible and powerful than the connection
he and Jane built through the intimate meetings of their minds through speech.
The acoustic dimension significantly shapes Brontë’s plot in the penultimate stage
of the novel, after Jane has left Thornfield. After many months apart Jane, now living
with her cousins far from Thornfield, suddenly hears Rochester’s voice call out, “Jane!
Jane! Jane!,” his cry transmitted to her as if along the windy currents of yet another the
stormy night (357). Tendrils of their communicative bonds survive, despite the lack of
any physical proximity. While the telegraph had been patented about a decade before the
publication of Jane Eyre, and use of the telephone and gramophone were yet to come,
Rochester’s disembodied cry anticipates a discourse of auditory displacement that
predates the available technology
7
. The natural laws governing the spatialization of
acoustic transmission lose their hold when sound is displaced so drastically from its
originating site. Jane calls out, “Down superstition!” and remains resolute in her belief
that she did, in fact, hear the voice as an act of “nature” (358). When she runs outside to

7
Jane Eyre was published in 1847. The telegraph was patented in 1837 (Picker 3). In
1876 Alexander Graham Bell made the famous first telephone call to Thomas Watson
(100). Edison played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a phonograph at the British Library
in 1877 (113).
27
respond to Rochester, shouting, “Where are you?” in her attempt to locate his voice, and
thereby also his body, she hears her voice echo back to her from the surrounding hills,
restoring natural acoustic laws. Even though echoes are also a type of disembodied
voicing, they are readily identified with Jane’s original cries.
Varying degrees of aural disconnect, or schizophonia, operate as sonic
permeations into consciousness and become associated with aspects of mental illness.
Bertha’s laughter is ventriloquized through Grace Poole and then penetrates Jane’s
imagination, and this disconnected vocal relay, therefore, originates from a mind
suffering from madness. As Rochester falls into depression and “wildly” cries out to
Jane, his mental instability then becomes the site of schizophonia as his voice travels
across vast space to permeate Jane’s consciousness. Jane’s sense of “where” his voice is
located is made mysterious: “Again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it
seemed in me—not in the eternal world” (359). Jane becomes the site of Rochester’s
voice; she integrates it into her own embodied consciousness. She determinedly believes
that hearing Rochester’s voice is not a sign of her own madness, but it is instead a signal
to command: “It was my time to assume ascendency. My powers were in play, and in
force” (358 author’s emphasis). Before she hears his voice, Jane seeks answers from
divine powers, but her ability to hear Rochester’s voice across space provides the answer
she has sought. While Jane is careful to take time to pray to God in gratitude, she
“seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit,” as if it is not God’s voice which has
entered her soul to offer guidance, but her own “power” and “ascendancy” that have
taken control. The infiltration of schizophonic voices into Jane’s consciousness, and the
28
moment at which their sources are revealed, become the process through which she
develops the strongest sense of her identity. When Rochester wants her to run away with
him as his mistress after Bertha’s identity is revealed, Jane hears in her own mind the
“indomitable” reply that inspires her to make the difficult decision to leave the man she
loves and who loves her in return: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more
friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself” (270, author’s
emphasis). She does cite the “law given by God” as her guidance; however, it is through
her realization that her own self respect is contingent upon honoring a belief system that
she has freely chosen that determines the choices she will make. The fulfillment of her
emotional desires becomes impossible when it conflicts with her ability to retain her
sense of self worth. She does not leave Rochester because she loves God, but because
she cares for herself. Jane absorbs Bertha’s and Rochester’s voices across space,
dislocated from the presence of their bodies. As Jane solves the problem of where these
voices are, and what these voices mean, she also solves the problem of who she is.
Pilgrimage’s narrative is immersed in the interior process of a woman’s
developing identity, where storms and dislocated sounds also play a role. The novel’s
protagonist, Miriam, works at a school in Germany as a young woman in the opening
volume, Pointed Roofs. One night there is a violent storm, and the head of the school,
Fraulien Pfaff, decides to close the drapes, which accentuates the dislocation between the
sounds of the thunder and the flashes of lightning. Their acoustic effects are is not
symbolic of a corresponding emotional state as in Jane Eyre, but rather are enfolded into
Miriam’s immediate experience of the actual vibrations and withholdings of sound,
29
which correspond with her bodily experience of the violent thunderstorm. Unlike Jane’s
“thrill” at the “strange” sound of Bertha’s laughter, which permeates boundaries
primarily as an aspect of Jane’s psychological perception, the crashes of thunder in proof
physically register in Miriam’s body. In contrast, Bertha’s laughter generates a physical
“thrill” already present in Jane’s body, which already “heave[s]” from the excitement of
her imagined “tales” (93). The powerfully loud thunderstorm is made more frightening
through Fräulein Pfaff’s insistence that the drapes be kept closed. The removal of the
lightning as an indication of the origination of the sound object adds to Miriam’s level of
anxiety: “Miriam wished they could see the lightning and be prepared for the crashes. If
she were alone she would watch for the flashes and put her fingers in her ears after each
flash. The shock of the sound was intolerable to her. Once it had broken, she drank in
the tumult joyfully” (146). Her distress is not due to the violence of the sound itself, but
the sense of detachment from origin. Fraulien Pfaff’s ability to exert her authority acts to
disconnect the sound from its visual signal, however, is not entirely successful, but
actually seems to unwittingly lead Miriam to open her senses to the pleasure of “joyfully”
exalting in the crashes of thunder, instead of plugging her ears as she normally would.
Even as Miriam complains of how “intolerable” it is to have her vision obscured, each
crash of thunder thrills her and causes Miriam to recall a pleasurable memory of a storm
from her childhood. The sound creates an intersection between aspects of a memory and
her physical sensations, much like Jane’s imagined “tale,” but Miriam remains grounded
in a materially defined soundscape.
30
In Backwater, the second volume of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Miriam,
and her mother emerge from a drawing room to London’s noisy streets to be confronted
by “the jingling of the trams, the dop-dop of the hoofs of the tram-horse [came] the noise
of a screaming train thundering over the bridge.” Rather than passively allowing herself
to become distracted by these disruptive sounds, Miriam’s fights back and “ma[kes] her
voice heard” (192). At times, though, she is still forced to wait for the sounds such as the
“roar of the bridge” to pass before attempting to speak with her mother again. Her
mother does not seem up to the task of competing in the noisy soundscape of the London
streets and remains silent. Not sure how to start a conversation with her mother, Miriam
nonetheless attempts to connect with her: “She must do something, show some sign of
companionship.” Nonetheless, the air is too saturated and “full of clamour” to allow
Miriam and her mother any space to create their own communal aura. Rather than
speaking Miriam resorts to “humming, accentuating her phrases so that the sound might
reach her companion through the reverberations of the clangour of the shunting trains”
(196). Unlike speech, the vocalizing of inarticulate sounds demand little from the
listener, making the fulfillment of communicative desire less combative on the noisy
streets.
The sonic environment of Pilgrimage is solely determined by Miriam’s
perception of her auditory environment, one that has an external materiality, while being
corporeally and internally realized through Miriam’s responses to sonic events. This
narrative offers a way of understanding how identity can be constructed as a response to
an external sonic environment. Her own body becomes permeable to diffuse auditory
31
events surrounding her. I would not wish to imply that Miriam is simply a passive
conduit or receptor of sound. While her identity is revealed through her embodiment of
sound as its emitter or producer as well as her role as an absorbent, porous participant in
the soundscape at her, she remains actively involved in her sonic environment. As she
evaluates and determines meaning for herself, Miriam’s absorption and evaluation of
sound provide a means of expressing her identity and locating herself within the novel’s
soundscape. As David Stamm argues, Miriam’s consumption of aural events allows her
to unify herself corporeally, mentally and emotionally. For Miriam, “to listen [ . . . ],
therefore, is to be engaged in a bodily listening that seizes her mind and calls forth a
response” (173).
While Miriam’s struggles to make herself heard over the sounds of London may
indicate an anxiety about the degree to which the modern, urban soundscape has of
disrupted communicative desires, this is not to say that Miriam finds the city to be void of
fulfillment. Indeed, while the passages I’ve cited thus far may seem to indicate that
Pilgrimage is wholly a narrative of unfulfilled desire, other passages convey a competing
register of sonic fulfillment. In the first chapter of the fourth volume, The Tunnel, the
sounds of London enter Miriam’s Bloomsbury room. The reverberation of “St. Pancras
bells were clamouring in the room; rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud
full thump on to the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly
touched before the top note hung again in the air, sounding outdoor clean and clear while
all the other notes still jangled together in her room.” Entering through her window, this
sound bangs “against the wooden walls of the window space,” and in turn, seems to
32
penetrate both her body and consciousnesses; each note running “through Miriam’s head”
and “clamour[ing] recklessly mingling with Miriam’s shout of joy” (23). Far removed
from the fear of the thunder, and the distracting and competing sounds of the city, these
bells bring joy: “‘How frightfully happy I am,’ she thought with bent head” (23).
Quieter sounds, meanwhile, barely register upon Miriam’s consciousness; the sounds
from the neighboring rooms come to her as mere “murmurs,” neither disruptive nor
exciting. As these sound waves gather and infiltrate Miriam’s body, they become
coherent aspects of her own force of energy, much like sound waves which can remain
compatible in occupying the same space simultaneously. The roar of the bells penetrates,
but does not invade. Rather, they are welcome, energizing, orgasmic forces that enhance
and enlarge Miriam’s consciousness rather than fragment it.
In Pointed Roofs, a passage in which Miriam listens to a church service provides a
helpful way to explore the role of the communicative aura and desire in Pilgrimage. In a
sonic relationship that involves speech, the roles of power are often in flux. The speaker
desires a listener—the listener desires a narrative. Unlike the power of the eye to
command the object of its gaze, the speaker is vulnerable to the attentiveness of the
listener. This does not necessarily guarantee that the listener has the upper hand,
however. Miriam is confined by the power of social decorum to remain seated to the end
of the sermon, arousing her strong feelings of resentment and even moral outrage:
“Listening to sermons was wrong . . . people ought to refuse to be preached at by these
men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of,
more base in submitting” (71). Miriam endures the minister’s voice, which “threatened
33
her again and again.” We sense Miriam’s helplessness even as “she tried not to listen.”
The sermon also represents Miriam’s efforts to reject patriarchal desire for the ideally
passive listener: “Those men’s sermons were worse than women’s smiles . . . just as
insincere at any rate . . and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not
agree and that things were not simple and settled . . . but you could not stop a sermon.” A
sermon as a communicational model becomes problematic in fulfilling desires of both the
listener and the speaker, because the degree of communicative exchange is limited to a
speaker and a passively silent listener. However, as the strength of Miriam’s initial
emotional response subsides, she resorts to the one means that any listener has of
subverting the power of the sermon; she recedes into her own thoughts: “The service
droned quietly and slowly on. Miriam paid no heed to it. She sat in the comforting
darkness [ . . . . ] She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection.”
Although the minister may be unaware of Miriam’s rejection, the communicative desire
and aura are denied for a moment. Nonetheless, he initially had the power to infiltrate
her consciousness enough to cause resentment. As an indication of Miriam’s
indoctrination into the patriarchal power structure of subservient listener of truth handed
down from the pulpit through the mouths of a select male representative, she later feels
guilt over her power to remove herself from the role listener. She wishes that she would
listen to sermons in the right spirit and scolds herself: “She was wrong—all wrong” (73).
Although Miriam temporarily resists her role in the patriarchal narrative that dictates that
a congregation must submit to the minister’s words, even desires submission as a sign of
34
its goodness, she finds herself unable to exit this narrative entirely. Her outrage is
replaced with guilt.
Part of Miriam’s outrage results from finding herself trapped in a passive role that
is even worse than enduring “women’s smiles,” which at least allowed for a subtle degree
of resistance. The presence of mechanical noise would seem to posit similar passive
entrapment: for how can mechanically generated sound, even if formed by a human
voice, respond to a listener’s desires? The removal of sound from the originating sonic
event through mechanical amplification and reproduction results in a disruption of the
communicative model that makes the speaker and listener mutually powerful and
vulnerable. Pointed Roofs does not often incorporate the proliferation of noise I have
already associated with the early twentieth century, nor does it typically record the
historical shift from more traditional sounds to mechanical and technologically enhanced
sounds, which Thompson describes as the major transformation in soundscapes
modernists experience. Nonetheless, mechanically (re)produced sound was a component
of the soundscapes in which modernists, such as Richardson, wrote and lived, as well as
the ones they created. The technological ability to capture the ephemerality of modern
life and turn sonic events into objects that can be controlled, transported, commanded,
and used for exchange, affects not only the way mechanical sounds are written into these
novels, but also how these and other sounds are represented. The gramophone in
Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, for example, is used as a tool of control that
commands the audience to rise, to gather, to disperse. The thunder storm at the school in
Germany in Richardson’s novel also represents such a case, and like Miriam’s response
35
to the sermon, expresses the protagonist’s desire to be considered a full participant in
sonic communication—even if not through direct speech.
Richardson’s elliptically filled narrative communicates to the readers, turning
them into the auscultized recipient of the soundscape of Miriam’s consciousness. The
reader doesn’t “hear” the words of the sermon, but registers Miriam’s perception of the
pastor’s voice and words through Richardson’s ellipses. The ellipses act as an indicator
of Miriam’s mental pauses, which allow her moments of silenced auscultization. The
communicative aura operates diegetically as a function of the exchange between the
minister and Miriam, but the field of perception the text extends outside the novel’ action
to impinge upon the auditory perceptions of the reader. In the case of the London street
noise, however, we engage alongside Miriam with the sound of the “jingle-jingle, plock-
plock” she hears. We become the listener.

Within literary soundscapes as we have seen, narrated dialogue traditionally
occurs in a delineated space in which clearly identified bodies participate in an orderly
exchange of spoken words as a way of conveying information about plot or character. In
much the same way that people in the early twentieth century were confronted with
sounds that became detached from previously understood relationships with time and
space through technology, the narrative soundscapes experienced in Joyce’s and Woolf’s
novels are fragmented and dispersed along multilateral coordinates. The linearity of
dialogue presented with a clearly determinable origin of a sound and the communication
to a specific receptor is disrupted when sound infuses narratives from multiple locations,
36
or even multiple temporal valences. The integrity of the physical relationship between
sound and the body becomes undermined, as voices flow without always referencing who
is speaking or listening, let alone their position. While this disruption of the movement
of sound within the narrative indicates the experience of the characters of the novel, it
also has a disorienting effect upon reader, interfering with a stable consumption of the
sound of the narrative.
Schizophonia is an aspect of the dematerialization of narrative soundscapes as
grounded in concretely discernable spaces. Modernism is characterized by a shift from
literature that is filled with what Woolf calls “materialism,” or “the fabric of things,” to
examining “for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (The Captain’s Death
Bed 112, The Common Reader 154). The “ordinary” is exposed as a fertile site for the
exploration of “a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the
sharpness of steel.” Woolf’s use of the term materialism denotes an attention to
unimportant details that can fill a narrative with information, but do little to reveal the
true nature of reality: “But we cannot hear her mother’s voice, of Hilda’s voice; we can
only hear Mr. Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds
and fines” (The Captain’s Death Bed 109). Therefore, Woolf’s use of material is very
different from the sensuality of tactile, physically grounded and corporeal experiences.
The drive to delve into the mundane as an important conduit to meaningful aspects of
consciousness justifies a phenomenological approach to the literary soundscapes of this
period, which not only reveals the fallacy of objective knowledge, but also calls into
question the stability of subjective knowledge. The emphasis upon the reader perception
37
of literary soundscapes leads to listening not only to the text, but to an examination of
how sound within the novels impinge upon the reader’s soundscape as a process of
extradiegetic auscultation, through which the sounds of the text are projected toward the
reader as the listening audience (Cuddy-Keane 90). We understand that Bertha laughs,
and Jane’s experience of that laughter is marked as a signal of Jane’s psychological state
of mind. As symbolic representations of emotional states, storms are not so much aspects
of acoustic texture, as they are sound signals. In contrast to Jane Eyre, reading for sound
in Richardson immerses the reader in Miriam’s experience of her soundscape. Miriam
hears the “jingle-jingle” of trams in Pilgrimage as a part of the acoustic texture of the
narrative—conveying a moment of near perceptual purity. The “jingle-jingle” of
Pilgrimage echoes a similar sound that appears as a repeated motif in the “Sirens”
episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, serving as a representation, in Leopold Bloom’s
imagination of his rival, Blazes Boylan. Unlike Joyce’s sound effect, however, the
“jingle-jingle” Miriam hears does not stand in for anything or anyone else within the
narrative. Boylan’s “jingle” resonates along multiple layers within the soundscape’s
physical acoustics, as well as within the psychoacoustics of Bloom’s consciousness,
where his sadness at the thought of Boylan’s impending meeting with Molly is registered.
In my first chapter I will explore Joyce’s use of sound in “Sirens” not only as an aspect of
material information, but also as he experiments with techniques to evoke aural
simultaneity, and a soundscape auscultated through Bloom’s consciousness. As a result,
sound both orients Bloom as the center of the novel, but disorients the reader, whose
perception of Bloom’s external sound environment becomes dislocated from the
38
originating sound objects, because the reader accesses it through the associations that
occur within Bloom’s consciousness.
In Woolf’s The Waves, any sounds like a jingle, such as a boat’s siren, are also
expressed as an aspect of the consciousness of the protagonists. While meeting with all
the protagonists of the novel for a dinner party, Bernard hears “cars rush past this
restaurant; now and then, down the river, a siren hoots, as a steamer makes for the sea”
(182). The jingle in Pilgrimage is described as heard through Miriam’s interior stream of
consciousness, while the sirens in The Waves are made audible not only as sound waves
heard through Bernard’s consciousness, but also made linguistically audible through his
spoken soliloquy. It does not, however, occur as an external sound object, such as the
Boylan’s jingle. The only way we know about the siren is through a process of Bernard’s
perception. As chapter two will show, the narrative in The Waves is seemingly devoid of
a physical environment—except for the six characters’ voices, which exist in a sort of
soundscape of emptiness. Any external sounds are made real only as aspects of their
consciousnesses. As their external contexts recede, their thoughts are textually rendered
into sound, but the act of diegetic listening is only barely implied.
As the readers, and therefore, “listeners” of texts as sound objects, we are invited
into the creative process: “Perceiving is creative, not passive” (Handel 4). As objective
narratives become increasingly abstract, or indeed even fade away altogether, the
modernist soundscape is less restricted simply by sound acts within the action of the
novel, and extends beyond the page to construct the novel as a sound object, entering the
39
auditory consciousness of the reader. The entire reading experience becomes the
soundscape.
40

Chapter One: James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Bloom’s Emerging Musical Voice among the “Sirens”
“Ineluctable modality of the audible” (3.13)
8
: Stephen Dedalus says these words
at the beginning of the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses while walking along Sandymount
Strand, and Joyce evokes Aristotle’s belief that while visible matter is unaltered by
contact with the observer, the ear of a listener does alter sound content. Sound also alters
the listener, considering the absorption of sound waves upon the body of the listener. Its
permeable and amorphous properties contribute to a sense of auditory malleability in
which “the ear participates in (and can thus modify) the substance of what it hears, but
the eye does not (Gifford 44). It is in the “Sirens” episode, however, where James Joyce
fully experiments with audible narrative—one in which Leopold Boom and the reader’s
immersion in its multifaceted soundscape creates what critics have often referred to as a
sort of literary musical composition. The episode not only includes depictions of the
plethora of sounds of surrounding Bloom’s visit to the Ormond Hotel’s bar and
restaurant, but the narrative diction produces a material soundscape that bursts from the
page.
While Bloom is relatively quiet throughout the “Sirens,” the soundscape is
auscultized extradiegetically from his perspective toward the reader. Joyce assembles
layers of sound with each one retaining a certain degree of individual integrity, but also
merging together to form new meaning through their juxtapositions. This assembly of

8
All passages cited from Ulysses will be from the Gabler edition with the episode
number and line number noted in the parentheses.
41
“fragments of dialogue, fragments of Bloom's thoughts, fragments of the songs being
sung, of objective description, of the verbal motives” forms “a unified fabric” around
Bloom, whose consciousness is revealed though his experience of this diffuse soundscape
(French 2). The narrative of “Sirens” is built of sonic layers abutting and permeating
Bloom’s experience of the Ormond’s soundscape. The soundscape of “Sirens,” however
is not simply an immersion into Bloom’s perception of these many sound events.
Nonetheless, even the conversations at the Ormond bar, outside of his hearing range or
takes place before he arrives, are understood in terms of their relationship to Bloom. For
example, a joke told at his expense draws attention to the object of the joke who has not
yet arrived. Mina Kennedy and Lydia Douce, the barmaids of the Ormond Bar, are
making fun of the “old fogey” with the “greasy eyes” who works at the chemist’s shop,
the same shop Bloom visits to buy soap earlier that day. The women then seem to
conflate him with Bloom, as the two men morph into “greasabloom” (11.169, 180).
Bloom is not yet in the Ormond at this point, but their mockery reveals his status as the
butt of jokes, not one who joins with them in laughter.
Joyce turns to sound as a means of adhering to his definition of realism, which
dictates not only that “we must accept [life] as we see it,” but also as we “hear” it
(Joyce’s Critical Writings 45 qtd in Norris 4). The evolution of Joyce’s realism from a
“style of scrupulous meanness” to “a richly textured and ever-changing narrative
reflecting states of individual consciousness mingled with a variety of public and cultural
discourses” results in a highly experimental soundscape in Ulysses, particularly in
“Sirens” (Selected Letters 83 qtd in Norris 11). Similarly to Woolf’s critique of
42
“materialism,” fastidious attention to the material details becomes something that many
modernists discard in favor of what Weldon Thornton calls the “psychic realism” found
in Ulysses (19). Frank Budgen’s evaluates Joyce’s use of Dublin as the setting for
Ulysses as a space that is not precisely mapped out for his readers, but is revealed as an
aspect of the experience of the city’s inhabitants themselves: “In Ulysses [Joyce] neither
paints nor photographs [Dublin] for our guidance. It must grow upon us not through our
eye and memory, but through the minds of the Dubliner we overhear talking to each
other” (70). Budgen not only prefers an aural metaphor to the “paints [or] photographs”
of the visual arts, but his choice of “eavesdropping” implies something illicit and hidden.
When overhearing a conversation, we are not meant to be entirely privy to all the relevant
details; we can only hope to “get a clue to the shape and colour of this place or that.”
Joyce does not set in place “a décor to be modified at will,” but evokes “the very spirit
of” Dublin. Reading as an act of listening penetrates beyond urban “décor,” a term that
calls to mind Woolf’s critique of narratives that indulge in describing in detail the
“fabric” of a story, while failing to convey the essence of consciousness. The energy
spent to give the reader access to details of the furniture and “material” of what is in the
room with a character detracts from effectively communicating the content of the
characters’ minds (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 112). On the other hand, when writing
about an auditory reading of literature, the way the narrative creates a textural
soundscape—beyond the description of sounds that are imbedded in the action of the
story—evokes a sense of the narrative itself becoming something that inserts a materiality
into the soundscape of the reader.
43
This distinction also leads to a consideration of narrative realism, less as an
operation of representations of the material environment than as a process of conveying
to the reader the lived experience of that space. At the end of the novel in the “Penelope”
episode, comprised entirely of Molly’s unpunctuated stream of consciousness soliloquy,
she hears a train whistle—“frseeeeeeeefronnnng”—demonstrating how the linguistic
representation of nonverbal noises is not simply one of mimetic phonetics, but an
operation of acoustic phenomenology (18.596). Derek Attridge points out that if a train
whistle sound effect were inserted in, for example, an audio book version of this passage,
the substitution of would not be faithful to what Joyce had written, which “can hardly be
said to aim at exact representation,” but emphasizes the need to understand “Molly’s own
perception of the sound” (“Joyce’s Noises” 471). Molly associates the train whistle with
“Loves old sweeeetsonnnng,” with exaggerated vowels, and the “nnn” sound, a variation
on humming, emphasizes Molly’s musical association, but also injects the sound with
energy
9
. While Joyce’s invented word in “Penelope” is meant to convey phonetically an
aspect of the train whistle’s actual sound, he also uses many standard words specifically
toevoke a sense of sound. Therefore, there are two distinct types of onomatopoeia in
Joyce’s work—lexical and nonlexical (474). The relationship between the word and the
sound is more direct with lexical onomatopoeia, because the meaning of the word alone
evokes the sound, as well as the actual sound of the word as spoken. Nonlexical
onomatopoeia does not linguistically convey meaning; the meaning is formed through the

9
Molly is thinking of “Love’s Old Sweet Song” by G. Clifton Bingham and James
Lyman Molloy in 1844. This is a nostalgic love song Molly will sing on the program
with Blazes Boylan (Gifford 77).
44
sound of “the letters and sounds,” which is what Joyce does with the train whistle in
“Penelope.” Often embedded within nonlexical onomatopoeia are “lexical associations,”
such as the “-ong” resonating with the “song.” Molly first associates the sound not just
with music, but also with the “strength those engines have in them like big giants and the
water rolling all over and out of them” (18.597-6). Later she hears it again, still
reminding her of the song, but this time also with the memory of her first sexual
encounter as a young girl: “Close my eyes breath my lips forward kiss sad look eyes
open” (18.875-6). The sound operates simultaneously as an actual train whistle, the
acoustic texture of Molly’s invented word, an association with a specific song, the idea of
pumping train engines, and the memory of a kiss. Thus a single sound ripples outward to
expand into these multiple layers of meaning, and then intersects with the reader’s
general knowledge of a train whistle to produce the sound as “heard” by the reader along
all of these valences. Layer upon layer of sound fills the “Sirens” episode—the material
soundscape of the Ormond includes a massive list of sounds and noises. To make a
comprehensive list would prove tedious, but a cross-section of the variety is important to
establish in order to discuss the operation of this episode’s soundscape. A list of sounds
evident in and around the Ormond is actually insufficient to encompass the soundscape of
the “Sirens.” Layers of aurality accessed through memory and spatial displacement also
build upon the noises, music and speech circulating through the bar and dining room.
Because of Joyce’s assertion that he would try to write “Sirens” according to a
musical model, the first sixty-two lines of the “Sirens” episode, “variously described as
prelude to fugue, overture to opera, and keyboard instrument to musicale performance, is
45
more like the warm-up of vocal performers and the tuning up of instruments” (Honton
41). Each element of this opening section is more fully developed later in the episode,
like “a medley” of the “sixty-seven theme-and-description motifs from the entire chapter”
(Bowen 26). While my analysis is less reliant upon the tradition of analyzing this episode
in terms of musical notation, I will refer to this section as an overture, because it is more
analogous to the overture of an opera than a prelude. Just as “Sirens” is filled with a
variety of sonic operations in the soundscape, this overture distills all these sounds into a
compact and abbreviated impression of the soundscape of the entire episode. Examining
the variety of aurality in the prelude leads to an understanding of how the soundscape
expands in the main section of the episode. So, the overture is a sort of blueprint for the
rest of the “Sirens,” in which nearly every line bristles with the aural texture that is
dispersed throughout the rest of the episode. Examining the different ways Joyce deploys
sound in the overture and tracing the cross-references in the main section of the chapter
reveal the way the concentrated aurality of the overture and the expanded use of more
fully contextualized sound events emphasize different aspects of soundscape
phenomenology.
The first line of the overture immediately draws the reader’s “ear” into the
Ormond’s soundscape with a description of sounds that are heard directly: “Bronze by
gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing” (11.1). The first line of the main section of the
episode, beginning at line sixty-three, loops back to the beginning of the prelude:
“Bronze by gold, miss Douce’s head by miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the
Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel” (11.63-4). Through the
46
expanded version of the scene, the meaning of the first line of the prelude is more clearly
revealed: bronze and gold represent the barmaids of the Ormond Bar, brunette Lydia
Douce and blonde Mina Kennedy, who hear the viceroy’s carriage horses outside the
Ormond. The prelude version of “steelyringing” instead of “ringing steel” transforms the
material of the horseshoes into an aural adjective, with the steel initially introduced not as
a metal, but an aspect of sound. The line from the overture emphasizes the aural
materiality of the moment. While the expanded version still leaves out the explicit
explanations of the action, and while Joyce employs an abbreviated syntax with an
absence of contextual information, this line from the overture extracts from the scene the
barest of elements, emphasizing aspects of sound and listening. Joyce’s experimentation
with syntax and hybridized words thus leads to emphasis upon an aural realism that
conveys “the very spirit” of the first sounds associated with the Ormond.
Perhaps one step removed from using words that mean a sound (ringing) is lexical
onomatopoeia, found a few lines later: “Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappycap” (11.28).
Although cross-referencing this line later in the chapter reveals that this is the sound of
applause that rises in response to Simon Dedalus’ singing in the Ormond, its proximity to
the first line of the overture, makes it resonate with the sound of the horse. Despite the
lexical aspect of these mimetic phonetics, sound nonetheless destabilizes the perception
of the soundscape. Reading later for a fuller description of the scene clarifies the sound as
hands clapping, rather than the clip-clap of hooves:
Bravo. Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore!
Clapclipclap clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap.
47
Encore, enclap, said, cried, slapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George
Lidwell, Pat, Mina Kennedy, Two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley,
first gent with tank and bronze miss Douce and old miss Mina. (11.755-
760)
The sounded aspect of these words contributes to the confused meaning of the words. A
“clap” can be defined as a short, sharp sound made by through the emphatic impact of
two or more objects, but the sound of hearing the word “clap” pronounce, also simulates
that sound. On its own, the word does not designate specifically how or what made these
sounds. Non-onomatopoeic words can more clearly explain that the “clapclap” is the
sound of two hands in applause, rather than that of horse’s hooves. This passage includes
the sound of the clapping as well as words cried out (“Encore!”), both of which merge
together with the sound of their hands into “enclap.” If Joyce’s combination of the two
words into an invented word destabilizes linguistic meaning, his invention actually works
to enhance acoustic meaning by associating “clap” with the audiences’ voices, instead of
the horse’s movements. The participants make up a comprehensive list of the Ormond’s
patrons—singers, employees, deaf Pat, and even additional anonymous people. The
fullness of the sound, in which the words mingle with the kinesthetic act of applause,
evokes a multilayered and vibrant soundscape. The overture’s emphasis upon the lexical
onomatopoeia of a percussive act thus condenses the scene to one specific aural element.
Even more emphasis is placed upon meaning as auditory when it is depicted
through nonlexical onomatopoeia, as in the second line of the overture: “Imperthnthn
thnthnthn” (11.2). Nonlexical onomatopoeia has linguistic associations, in spite of the
48
sounds’ lack of correlation with direct linguistic meaning. In this case, the nearly
compete lack of vowels leave little connection to a linguistic association, and just seems
to be a sort of stuttering sound, perhaps neighing associated with the horses passing by in
the previous line. Again cross-referencing the motif to later in the episode clarifies that
these seemingly nonensensical “words” are the mocking stuttering of a boy who is being
reprimanded by Lydia Douce to stop his “impertinent insolence” (11.99). The boy’s line
is identical to the overture, but the addition of Lydia’s response expands its meaning both
sonically as in fact an example of further insolence, plus it imitates the stutter’s repetition
as well, making us “hear” the stutter. The line as it occurs in the overture resonates as
nonlinguistic, perhaps nonhuman.
Repetition and echo also transmute language into sounds as, if not independent
from, then at least a distinct supplement to the linguistic: “Chips, picking chips off rocky
thumbnail, chips” (11.3). Much like the “clipclap,” there is a repetition of beginning
sounds, which lead to an almost percussive diction for this line, but the /k/ sound is
softened in the /ch/. The repetition, however, draws the attention away from the
meaning of the word “chips” to the breathy sound of the repeating word. Oddly,
however, a commentary on Simon’s “chips” is found in the displacement of Mina
Kennedy’s word, “Horrid!” which in the body of the episode is a response to Lydia
Douce’s joke about Bloom, which actually occurs before Simon enters the bar, while in
the contracted overture, Mina seems to be calling Simon “Horrid!” for “picking chips”
(11.3, 11.183). In the context of Simon’s entrance to the Ormond, the line is sandwiched
between the lines: “Into their bar strolled Mr. Dedalus” and “He strolled.” In addition to
49
a “horrid” habit, the ch-ch-ch sound of “chips” repeating perhaps resonates with his
walking movements. While the repetitive sounds of this line as read in the overture
resonate with the linguistic juxtaposition with Kennedy’s “Horrid!,” the line in the body
of the episode draws less attention to the distasteful aspects, emphasizing instead the
“chips” as a motif for Simon’s entrance.
Unpacking these different examples of sound makes it evident that the ties
between sound and linguistic meaning are not always so easy to separate. This episode
constantly leads the reader to think in terms of musical allusions and metaphors, with the
words telling the reader that music is being played and heard, and the words that describe
that music demonstrate a convergence between sound and meaning. In the overture the
line, “Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War!” evokes not only the
information of music notes being played, but also a degree of dynamic and dramatic
volume (11.20)
10
. The body of the episode, however, simply says that “we heard the
piano” as Ben Dollard plays the song, “Love and War” (11.443). The “booming” assault
on the “punished keyboard” resonates with the lyrics of the song, as well as to Dollard’s
brutal use of the instrument (11.473). With many of the lyrics from the song left out,
emphasis rests on the dramatic sounds, rather than on the playful lyrical debate between
love and war, ultimately coming to a compromise, that actually makes up the song.

10
“Love and War” or “When Love Absorbs My Ardent Soul” by T. Cooke. This is a
duet between a tenor or soprano and bass sung as a mock contest of love and war. They
can’t resolve whether an “ardent soul” is better “absorbed” by love or war, they playfully
put aside their differences: “Let’s blend love’ wounds with battle’s scars . . . / And call in
Bacchus all divine . . . / To cure both pains with rose wine / . . . . We’ll sing and laugh
the hours away” (Gifford 292).
50
Many of the sound objects tracked above are aspects of the action in and around
the Ormond that make up the acoustic environment of the episode. Throughout Ulysses,
there is a complex interweaving of cultural allusions, some more direct than others. The
“ringing” of the horse is not just any horse, but a horse that is associated with English
political power. The “boom” of the chords refers to lyrics of a specific song sung in the
Ormond about love and war. While such cultural allusions extend throughout the novel,
the aural materiality of these passages remains grounded in the literary material presence
of sounding and listening bodies, and, therefore, these lines retain an element of sonic
“décor.”
The command midway through the prelude to “Listen!” underscores the way the
narrative operates in these first two pages (11.33). This line, like everything else in this
first section, can be traced directly to the “action” revealed in the body of the episode. In
this case, Lydia Douce tells a bar patron to put a seashell to his ear to hear the ocean
(11.923). In the prelude, however, the word “listen” stands alone on its own line,
drawing attention to the command, in case the reader has neglected to pay attention to the
way sound has penetrated each of the previous thirty-two lines, and presumably to
prepare him or her to the way it infiltrates the rest of the episode. It is vital to “listen” to
this episode. The direct command, which is later revealed as spoken by Lydia Douce, in
the prelude seems to come from a narrator, or even Joyce himself, operating outside the
Ormond and speaking directly to the reader. The removal of the diegetic material
environment of the word is heightened in the narrative style of the prelude. The prelude
alone is sonically condensed, a fact accentuated by its contrast with the rest of the
51
episode. Read without the cross references to the body of the episode, the prelude stands
as a text experienced through a concentrated juxtaposition of a variety sound objects.
These different ways of invoking sound in the narrative, especially in the overture,
emphasize aural texture with varying relationships between sound and the creation of a
readerly desire to find meaning through language as something that is heard. Even with
the moments of lexical onomatopoeia, linguistic acoustics are destabilized in Joyce’s
narrative diction in this episode. The sounds create the experience of the episode, more
than any objective description of the sound of horses, clapping or mocking voices could.
A soundscape that emphasizes these nonlexical aspects of sound draws attention to the
subjective experience of the way in which the meaning of events in “Sirens” is
experienced through the dynamic medium of sound waves. The overture primes our ears
for the rest of the episode.
Extensive work has been done in cataloging all the songs alluded to in this
episode—those sung in the bar, those commented on, those whose lyrics have been
altered. For the purpose of examining the operation of the “Sirens” cacophonous
soundscape, it is, of course, important to examine Joyce’s incorporation of songs and
music. While I will refer to a few specific lyrical allusions, my main objective is to focus
instead on some of the other ways music occurs, treating these songs as sound objects,
much like the “clipclap” of applause. Reevaluating music’s acoustic role leads to a
reconsideration of sound categories, and calls into question what determines the
definitions of noise, sound, and music. Bloom explicitly rejects attempts to define
categories narrowly: “All [is] music when you come to think [of it],” he thinks as he
52
listens to the sounds filing his environment and conjures up more (11.830). While Bloom
lists many disparate sounds as qualifying as music, he is not entirely without discretion,
thinking of at least one thing that does not fit his broad classification: “Sea, wind, leaves,
thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket, cocks, hens don’t crow, snakes hissss.
There’s music everywhere. “Ruttledge’s door: ee craking. No, that’s noise” (11.963-5).
There are two things in this passage that seem to cause Bloom to reevaluate his ideas
even as they occur to him. First the “hens don’t crow”; that is not to say they aren’t
musical, perhaps, but their sound is unnamable, or simply that Bloom can’t think of the
usual descriptor—“hens cluck.” They are, therefore, included as an absence in this list of
other sounds, which are named, and thus, invoke an imagined sound to be “heard.”
Second, and more directly, Bloom excludes the sound of Ruttledge’s “craking” door.”
This sound is knowable, and, in a certain sense, nameable. Bloom does not call it
“creaking”, but “ee craking,” and therefore resorting to a nonlexical onomatopoeia,
which, however, is not completely distinct from the lexical: the “e” in creaking is
displaced and accentuated in Bloom’s fragmentation of the word into phonetic mimesis.
Nonetheless, what is it that causes Bloom to distinguish the “ee craking” door from a
cattlemarket and therefore to relegate it to noise over music? There is in implication of
an aesthetic evaluation, in which the more natural, nameable sounds of animals can be
included as harmonious, while the sound of a door—and operation of a manual
construction—becomes less beautiful. Even a site of commerce like a cattlemarket is so
characterized by the sounds of animals, that it seems to retain its connection with nature
53
and, therefore, beauty. Thus, while not exactly “all” is music, Bloom’s examples
certainly imply a more comprehensive definition of music.
While nature seems to be a guiding element for these categories, rather than the
use of the human intellect, such as would be involved in building and designing a
“craking” door mechanism, Bloom later draws a near parallel between human ingenuity
and music: “musemathematics” (11.834). Bloom again finds a musical connection with
something that is seemingly lacking in poetic or musical aesthetics. Bloom’s resistance
of conventional or consistent definition of music become a way of exploiting the fluidity
associated with sound, and connecting that fluidity with attempts to categorize sound
within discourses of intellectual and cultural production. When Bloom’s dinner
companion, Richie Goulding tells him that the song Simon Dedalus is singing,
“M’appari” from Flotow’s opera Martha, is the “grandest number in the whole opera”
11

Bloom agrees, even while the word “number” leads Bloom to a stream of free association
in which he equates mathematics with music:
Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two
divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two
plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find
out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my
mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think
you're listening to the ethereal. But suppose you said it like: / Martha,

11
This song is associated with Bloom because the title of the opera from 1847 is the same
as the woman he writes letters to: “Martha, Martha, I am sighing; / I am weeping still;
for thee; / Come thou lost one, / Come thou dear one.” Simon Dedalus is singing lyrics
from a translation by Charles Jeffreys. (Gifford 292).
54
seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on
account of the sounds it is. (11.830-7)
Bloom’s notion of “musemathematics” points to a process of calculations that produce
the aesthetics of the music, but also call into question the majesty of music, in which
“you think you’re listening to the ethereal” (11.834-5, my emphasis). Nonetheless,
Bloom acknowledges that listening to music as mathematical notation “fall[s] quite flat,”
and, therefore, implies that the aesthetics of music cannot be determined purely through
calculations. Musical notation is not itself the conversion of a symbolic language into
sound, but is the sign of that process. To reduce music to its symbolic structure removes
the “ethereality” from the aesthetic expression. The disruption of notations, through
improvisation, detaches the musical process from its codification into mathematics.
Bloom hears Father Cowley “improvising,” which Bloom consider musical, although it
depends on the “mood you’re in” (11.838, 841). Music, especially in cases of
improvisation, becomes an emotional expression in the specific, lived moment as “time
makes the tune.” Time would be an element of “mak[ing] the tune” as an aspect of
mathematics—time signature is essential to musical composition and performance, but
the temporal position of the performer and the audience also determines the associations
or “mood your’e in.” Indicating that here may be an aesthetic baseline for any
performance, regardless of what “time makes the tune,” Bloom admits that improvisation,
nonetheless, is “still always nice to hear” (11.842). The spontaneity of playing music
free from a predetermined composition reinforces Bloom’s original argument that “all is
music” after all.
55
If music is everywhere, even in a cattlemarket or a set of numbers, there is an
implication that music can be found in the most mundane environments, with the most
ordinary materials serving as instruments and everyone becoming potential musicians:
Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even comb
and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in
Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its
own, don't you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? Cloche.
Sonnez la. Shepherd his pipe. Pwee little wee. Policeman a whistle. Locks
and keys! Sweep! Four o'clock's all's well! Sleep! All is lost now. Drum?
Pompedy. Wait. I know. Towncrier, bumbailiff. Long John. Waken the
dead. Pom. Dignam. Poor little nominedomine. Pom. It is music. I mean of
course it's all pom pom pom very much what they call da capo. Still you
can hear. As we march, we march along, march along. Pom. (11.1237-
46)
Music, therefore, is not restricted to the performance on a stage, or in a bar with a piano.
Music is a universal pursuit, not in the sense that music is found in all cultures, but
because it is a part of the everyday tasks performed by average people. Musical
instruments can be as accessible as a plucked “blade of grass,” or integral to one’s non-
musical profession. It is even a part of common bodily functions. Molly is included in
this list, and even though she is clearly a professional musician, she, like everyone else,
also makes music in ordinary ways, confounding conventional categories, as when she
pees in the chamber pot, at home:
56
O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It
is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling.
Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance
changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling
water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls.
Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss. (11.979-84)
Molly retains, even in this moment of essential and basic bodily function, an association
with the high art and musicality that defies “musemathematics.” When Bloom
remembers the sound of her peeing, it also conjures up memories of Liszt. However,
when he resurfaces from this memory, to the “reality’ of the day, and Molly’s affair with
Boylan, he reverts to non-musical language: “Now. Maybe now. Before” (11.984-5).
Bloom associates Molly with music as an aspect of the intimacy of their married life,
which retains an aesthetic presence in his life, while he can only bear to acknowledge her
infidelity in abrupt and almost sterile language.
These disruptions of sonic categories often point to the corporeality of sound and
music. The body’s acoustical properties are vital to the texture of the “Sirens’”
soundscape. Naturally, singing, speaking, walking and other sounds emanate from the
body; however, Joyce delves beneath the derma to reveal the “roaring” noise within.
From the Ormond dining room, Bloom sees into the bar where Lydia, Mina, and Lidwell
take turns holding a large seashell to their ears to hear the sea: “Ah, now he heard, she
holding it to his ear. Hear! He heard. Wonderful. She held it to her own. And through the
sifted light pale gold in contrast glided. To hear” (11.930-2). Bloom observes that
57
instead of the steady sound of waves of water, they are hearing the movement of fluids
within their own bodies—the self listening to the self: “The sea they think they hear.
Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle
islands” (11.946-7). While the shell’s acoustics create an illusion of the sea, it also
conjures up a virtual Boylan, who has already left the Ormond, whom Bloom
automatically merges with the “lovely girls” inside the Ormond: “Her ear too is a shell,
the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside. Lovely seaside girls” (11.938-9). The latter
illusion, of course, evokes the “lovely seaside girls” of Boylan’s signature song
12
.
The self listening to the self is an inevitable operation of auditory erotics. Any
sound emanating from within the body will be heard not only by others from outside, but
also by the speaker from within. “Listening” to the seashell allows Lydia and Mina to
listen to their own bodies echoing in on themselves. Earlier in the episode, their
emanations of laughter permeate and penetrate each other’s bodies, making sound the
conduit of a seemingly mutual masturbatory pleasure. The shrillness of their laughter has
an almost musical “ringing” quality, lending aesthetics to their crude hysterics as they
engage in the unkind joke about Bloom:
Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to
peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to
laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I knows.
Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled

12
“Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls” are from the lyrics of the chorus of
a song by Harry B. Norris in 1899. This song is repeatedly associated with Blazes
Boylan throughout Ulysses (Gifford 76).
58
by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!), panting,
sweating (O!), all breathless. (11.174-179)
As the sounds of Lydia and Mina’s laughter mingle, the word “shrill” combining with the
adjective “deep” to become “shrilldeep,” so too their identities meld together into
“bronzegold, goldbronze,” as if they become DouceKennedy, KennedyDouce. Their
bodies join in laughter through sound, while their breathless rhythm evokes a sexual
joining of two bodies with orgasmic exclamations of “(O!).” The repeated “(O!)” again
links the two women to another one of the songs associated with Boylan
13
, as well as
foreshadowing Molly’s presumed orgasm with him later that day. Lydia’s and Mina’s
ears, held against the seashell, connect the echoing awareness of their pulsating
corpuscles, with the sound of Boylan’s song entering and penetrating the Ormond’s
soundscape. As another orifice operating as the site of sound and sensuality, lips “have
double value” (Topia 77). These lyrics blend with “Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye” in
the overture as “O rose! Castile, the morn is breaking (11.14, Gifford 291). The
combination of the allusion to Balfe’s farcical light opera and Boylan’s romantic song
colors the women’s orgasmic laughter with elements of “romantic, ethereal, idealized
figures such as they appear in love songs or heroic ballads—and a part of the body
associated with erotic caresses, drinking, eating, sensuality in general” (Topia 77).
Laughter is hysterically released from Lydia’s and Mina’s lips, the sites of sensuality and
sexual lubrication: “I wish I hadn’t laughed so much. I feel all wet” (11.182). Their lips

13
The lyrics “O rose!” are from a light opera “The Rose of Castile” by Michael William
Balfe from 1857 was originally alluded to in “Aeolus” in Lenehan’s limerick as a part of
a joke (Gifford 139, Joyce 7.591).
59
are “all flushed” and “panting” with sexual pleasure, inverting the site of orgasm from
their genital labia to their mouths.
The acoustic permeations of these various sounds, as well as many more not
catalogued here, add layer upon layer of sound to the episode, filling the soundscape of
the Ormond to cacophonous levels. As an example of one fleeting moment within this
dynamic soundscape, Cowley improvises on the piano, Lydia tells Lidwell to listen to the
seashell, and Kernan speaks: “Under Tom Kernan’s ginhot words the accompanist wove
music slow” (11.926). While the music “under[scores]” Kernan’s words, they are also
“wove[n] together.” The sounds do not stay within discrete boundaries, but permeate and
infiltrate each other, intersect, converge, and meld to create a textural complexity of the
narrative’s soundscape: “Ulysses itself is a kind of microcosm in which the varied and
unpredictable sounds of both the outer and inner world are reproduced.” (Duncan 291).
Operating on multiple registers—symbolic, imaginary, metered, memory—music in all
its variety, creates a narrative soundscape that is characterized by continuous waves of
movement. These various sounds and their simultaneity are conveyed through the
musical concert or the fugue by which Joyce structures the episode, allowing him to find
a way to make written language do things that music can easily do. Aiming to capture
simultaneity in speech, however, presents problems that do not exist with music. If two
speakers speak different words at the same time, “the resulting acoustic signal would be
judged as unintelligible rather than as a meaningful combination” (Fischer 246).
Conventions of reading are limited due to the linearity of reading left to right, top to
bottom, while musical notation allows staves stacked on the page of a score to represent
60
multiple voices singing at the same time. While Joyce does not resort to staves of
narrative, there are repeated examples of speech that are constructed to simulate the
simultaneity of intersecting sounds.
While Bloom sits with Goulding in the Ormond’s dining room, the two men
overhear the conversation in the adjacent bar about Ben Dollard having to buy trousers at
the last moment when Molly ran a second hand store, and he had to settle for a pair that
was far too tight. Joyce recreates the overheard conversation in fragmented and
incomplete words: “He save the situa. Tight trou. Brillian ide.” (11.483-4). In this
example, parts of words are actually missing, as other sounds enter to obliterate the full
meaning of the truncated words, contributing to the real-time “continuity of the events
behind the bar,” and “occasionally even the simultaneity of these events” (Stanzal 127).
Before arriving at the Ormond, Bloom stops to buy stationery for a letter he secretly
writes while dining at the Ormond to the woman, Martha, with whom he’s corresponding
illicitly. While shopping Bloom hears a “jingling,” which signals Boylan’s presence
nearby: “Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond quay. Follow.
Risk it. Go Quick. At four. Near now. Out” (11.304). The shop girl tells him the price,
“twopence, sir, [ . . . . ] and four” (11.306-8). The word “four” echoes Bloom’s thought
at the sight of Boylan, and charges the memory of the note about Molly’s meeting later
that day with Boylan with an external, sonic resonance, but the words don’t fully form:
“Bloo smi qui go. Ternoon” (11.309-310). The two moments form an “elision in
Bloom’s thought[s],” demonstrating the way the sounds of the external soundscape
permeate and are imagined in his consciousness (French 8). Bloom’s inability to form
61
the words fully indicates what is left unspoken—his pain at the thought of their afternoon
meeting. The only whole word is the single syllable “go,” which indicates his desire to
go and disrupt their meeting that “ternoon,” but the rest of the details of where and why
he wants to go become abstract and unacknowledged. Bloom does “go,” but not to
interfere with their rendezvous.
The soundscape of “Sirens” is built not only on these acoustic layers, but also
through spatial orientation by way of locating both the originating point of these sounds
and the corresponding points of perception, which play important roles in the literary and
sonic resonance of all these intersecting sound events. Two aural motifs repeat
throughout the episode: the tapping of the blind piano tuner’s stick, and the jingling
associated with Boylan’s movements around the city in his jaunty car. Both provide an
example of the way that recurring sound objects convey the temporal and spatial
movement of the narrative. Of these two, however, Boylan’s jingling resonates more
profoundly with Bloom’s consciousness. The jingling continuously intersects with
Bloom’s consciousness and the soundscape of the Ormond and “Sirens.” On the street
outside the Ormond, Bloom encounters Boylan three times, all signified by the “jingling”
that is first mentioned in the prelude of the episode: “Jingle jingle jaunted jingling”
(11.15). Even when Boylan is in the Ormond, he is present through his “jingling.” The
spatial aspects of sound are not confined to the action within the physical space of the
Ormond, or even the nearby street, but extend across time to encompass events from
Bloom’s memory, often evoked through sound objects within the soundscape of the
Ormond, as well as the sound carried in waves across Dublin. Sound operates as both
62
material and imagined, “accentuat[ing] memory, desire, anticipation, and waiting”
(Mooney 230). Thus, once Boylan leaves, his jingle continues to permeate Bloom’s
consciousness, piercing the soundscape of the Ormond where Bloom remains—an
intermittent tracking system that marks Boylan’s movements across Dublin to his
appointment with Molly and a reminder that sustains Bloom’s state of sadness and regret.
Joyce’s break with linguistic conventions is demanding on the reader, who must
not only “listen” carefully to the intersections in the layered aurality, but must also
synthesize them. Much like editing a film, or layering multiple audio tracks, “Joyce’s
cutting and splicing results in a severely weakened textual cohesion within the episode”
(Fischer 253). By tracing recurring sounds, such as the jingling, throughout the episode,
“the reader [ . . . ] creates the coherence of the episode.” The sound reverberates as an
indicator of Bloom’s state of mind as he thinks about his relationship with Molly, but
itoperates also as an infiltration of Boylan, the action of the Ormond, and the dispersal of
Bloom’s consciousness across both the interior of the Ormond bar and dining room,
across the city and into his home. Therefore, the reader’s experience of the sounds in
“Sirens” operates along various sonic operations. The sound, such as the jingling, is a
distinct action within the narrative, retaining a certain objective reality, but is also a
sound that is perceived by the characters as having subjective meaning, especially for
Bloom. The repetition of the aural motif punctuates and delineates both the temporal
action of the narrative, but also the spatial relationship between Boylan, Molly, and
Bloom. As a word that means the ringing of little bells, “jingling” becomes the sign of a
sound that evokes the reader’s memory, but one that is not subject to the non-lexical
63
onomatopoeia of Joyce’s invention in this case. Finally, all of these operations converge
in the mind of the reader when “listening” to the aurality of the text, as well as integrating
the “meaning” of these jingling bells.
In the face of all the noises, and various kinds of “music” in this episode, Bloom
remains a quiet figure in the Ormond’s sonic ground. The standard soundscape model of
figure and ground is typified by a quieter sonic landscape against which sound objects, or
louder aural occurrences, can be perceived. At its most basic level: the ground is quiet,
while the figure is loud. When evaluating the sonic elements which are accentuated in
this episode, and throughout the novel, there are certainly many noisy participants to
consider: Lydia’s and Mina’s exuberant laughter, Simon Dedalus’ singing, Boylan’s
jingling, and the intermittent tapping of the piano tuner’s walking stick, among may
other. Among the many layers of sound that fill the material soundscape of the “Sirens,”
however, Bloom becomes a sonic figure whose quiet thoughts and activities are
accentuated. Bloom does not become simply another participant amongst all the noise;
he is the medium through whom the soundscape is made comprehensible, thereby
drawing perceptual attention as the “figure” in the soundscape. The narrative takes on an
almost cinematic quality, as if it has become the soundtrack for footage shot by a
cameraperson rigged with a roving Steadicam
14
. This “footage,” however, seems to be
gathered by an unnamed figure, but is nonetheless perceptually relevant as an aspect of

14
Steadicam is a trademarked film rigging system which allows a person to carry a
camera while walking to shoot a scene as if from the perspective of person walking
through the diegetic action of the film, but allowing the footage to maintain a greater
degree of stability than if the camera were simply carried by hand, and greater mobility
than cameras attached to a dolly track system (Cassidy).
64
Bloom’s consciousness. Therefore, even in the presence of aural diffusion, the episode’s
narrative center is not entirely dislocated. Franz Stanzal argues in his study of the
function of narrative in novels of several periods that Joyce’s modernist experiment is a
“rendering of consciousness and the presentation of external events [as] extensively
intermingled,” rather than perceived directly through a single named consciousness, and,
therefore, that “Sirens” lacks an identifiable point of view (127). However, a close focus
upon the “external [sound] events,” reveals that, while Bloom may not be privy to all the
sounds, he is the center of the action, and even the sounds he doesn’t hear seem to
impinge upon his consciousness. Sound provides a way of thinking of consciousness and
“external events” as both diffuse and centered. Bloom does not hear Boylan’s “jingling”
as he makes his way across town to meet Molly—the sound cannot physically penetrate
through the walls of the Ormond. Nonetheless, the recurring motif has its most profound
meaning in relationship with Bloom’s quiet sadness—far more than as it relates to the
development of Boylan as a character, or as an indication of Molly’s state of mind.
Therefore, while Bloom is hardly the primary site of sound emissions, or in the case of
hearing Boylan’s jaunty car, the site of physiological hearing, he becomes the acoustic
center “as a sensory soundboard, packaging or transmitting acoustic and psychological
resonances or dissonances” (Plock 482). His consciousness becomes the medium
through which the soundscape of the “Sirens” is auscultated toward the reader. Bloom is
the primary sonic “transmitter” (489).
Bloom’s role as a quiet focus of the soundscape becomes most notable during the
moments when Boylan and Bloom arrive and leave the Ormond. Boylan enters the
65
Ormond announced by his soundtrack, which accompanies him throughout the episode,
regardless of his corporal presence or absence: the jingling bells, the creaking shoes, and
his song (11.337). Meanwhile, Bloom slips in at the same time almost completely
unnoticed: “Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered
hero. See me he might” (11.341-2). Taking a seat at a table in the Ormond dining room,
beyond the reach of the boisterous activities of the bar, Bloom finds a retreat from the
brutality of sexual aggression, monetary exchange, and political music, where Boylan is
welcome, comfortable and in his element—surrounded by admirers. Bloom’s position,
quietly sitting in the corner of the Ormond can be mistaken for an absence of sound:
“While sounds, songs, and chatter go on all around him, the usually garrulous voice of
Bloom is marked by its interiority and silence” (Mooney 230). Although Bloom’s silence
is infused with the poignancy of his sadness about Boylan and Molly’s assignation
scheduled for that afternoon, he does not remain a completely soundless figure. Boylan
leaves noisily, too, with clinking coins, and repeated jingling (11.455). Meanwhile,
Bloom notices from a quiet distance: “Bloom hear a jing, a little sound. He’s off. Light
sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silence bluehued flowers. Jingling. He’s gone.
Jingle. Hear.” (11.457-8). Sadness swells from Bloom out of those quiet sighs, against
the repeated, irritating jingles, and he lets out a quiet “sob of breath” when Boylan leaves
(11.457-8). Bloom stays in the Ormond, ever the quiet figure, through several more
songs, ending with the Ben Dollard singing “Croppy Boy.” Through his performance
Ben Dollard becomes the croppy boy: “Dollard the croppy cried,” and everyone in the
bar are “all lost in pity for croppy,” who dies in battle for he country he loves (11.1074,
66
11.1113)
15
. The song casts a spell over singer and audience alike. While everyone else
is listening to the song with a “thrill now,” and they “wipe away a tear,” Bloom decides
to “get out before the end” (11.1101, 11.1122). Bloom is immune to the sentimentality of
song about the young martyred hero, but leaves the Ormond filled with thoughts of his
own personal sadness: “Went Bloom, soft Bloom, I feel so lonely Bloom” (11.1136-7).
Bloom does not join in with the others’ music, and instead chooses to leave and make his
own “soft” and “lonely” music, thereby solidifying his “outsider status” (Plock 492).
The contrast between Boylan’s noisy activities and Blooms quiet melancholy,
which contributes to an inversion of the ground-figure model, continues after Boylan
leaves the Ormond, and Bloom continues his meal. Boylan’s departure signals the
approach of Molly’s infidelity, while Bloom remains still and quiet in his regret. He does
not dine alone: however, the company of a Goulding as his dinner companion does little
to draw Bloom out of his quiet position and integrate him into the layers of the noisy
“Sirens” soundscape: “Bloom with Goulding, engaged in silence, ate” (11.523). Married
life is filled with simple moments of intimacy, and while Boylan fills Bloom’s role as
husband in their bed with Molly, Goulding stands in for Molly as Bloom’s dinner
companion. Instead of being with his wife, married in orgasmic exclamations, Bloom
plays a quiet, celibate role with Goulding. At the Ormond Simon Dedalus sings,

15
“The Croppy Boy” is a song written by William B. McBurney under the pseudonym
(Caroll Malone) in the nineteenth century about the Rebellion of 1798, and a “croppy” is
an Irish rebel of that period. Most of the lyrics are sung from the perspective of the
“croppy boy,” who declares, “I love my country above the king,” and “let me go / To die,
if God has ordained it so.” By the end of the song, he has died and the singer calls for the
“good people who live in peace and joy, / Breathe a prayer and a tear for the Croppy
Boy” (Gifford 293).
67
commanding an orgasmic response Bloom is helpless to fulfill, while at home Boylan and
Molly presumably respond to the urging of the aging singer: “Co-ome, though dear one!
[ . . . . ] Come…!” (11.741-2, 11.744)
16
. Bloom imagines Molly orgasm as if
accompanied by Simon’s voice as a soundtrack:
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a switch pure cry soar silver or it leaped
serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath
he breath log life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in
the effulgence symbolist, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast
irradiation everywhere al soaring all around about the all, the
endlessnessnessness . . . . . . . (11.745-50, Joyce’s ellipses)
Simon Dedalus’ soaring voice joins with Molly’s “swift pure cry.” And as Simon sings
the end of the lyric, “To me!” the lovers’ roles mingle and meld(11.751). Molly
telepathically responds “To [Simon]!” even as she “co-come[s]” with Boylan. Bloom
also merges with Simon to become “Siopold!” at the moment of the song’s concluding
climax, which coalesces with Bloom’s imagined/memory of Molly’s orgasm:
“Consumed” (11.751). Bloom imagines the orgasm while Simon’s singing comes to a
soaring climax. Molly’s orgasm explodes within the “throbbing” of the music (11.701)
and is “consumed,” with music and sex merging. Simon and Bloom merge into
“Siopold,” but while Simon expresses a (musical) climax, Bloom quietly imagines one.
While others sing, laugh, and play music, “Bloom sang dumb” (11.776). Bloom’s
“singing” is internal and imagined. Bloom and Simon are both expressing themselves

16
See note 4.
68
creatively, but while Simon sings aloud for the crowd at the Ormond, Bloom does so
internally. He is the lonely, quiet figure who is marginalized from this intimacy. Like his
voyeruristic masturbations with Gerty on the strand in “Nausicaa,” Bloom’s experiences
sex without direct bolidy contact. His liaison with Martha is consummated through secret
letters. The sexual pleasures of marriage, however, are consummated through musical
mediation.
As noted, Goulding becomes a sort of stand in for Molly while they eat, but
Bloom has little more success in connecting through the communicative aura than he
does with sexual intimacy. Goulding talks about his memories of a musical performance
by singer Joe Maas, but Bloom is inattentive to his words, and instead starts to daydream
about Goulding. Goulding’s “rhapsodies” about Maas’s singing do little to engage
Bloom’s attention (11.626). Bloom’s thoughts turn to Goulding’s health while he talks,
rather than thinking about music: “Backache he. Bright’s bright eye. Next item on the
programme. Paying the piper. Pills” (11.615-6). Bloom’s soundscape consists of the
receding sound of Goulding’s voice, augmented by the even further removed layer of the
music coming from the Ormond bar. While these sounds permeate Bloom’s hearing,
they barely reach beyond of the surface of his aural cognition. These sounds do not
recede because he is physically becoming distanced from them, but because he
emotionally and psychologically withdraws from their communal functions. Dinner with
Goulding ventriloquizes Bloom’s marriage, in which Goulding is mouthing the role of
spouse, becoming not someone Bloom can feel intimate with, but a set of lips: “Speech
paused on Richie’s lips” (11.625). The lips are often the site of sensual and erotic
69
exchange in “Sirens.” Even when the auditory organs cannot process sound, as with Dear
Pat, the body is still penetrated by sound. While Simon sings, Pat “listens” with an “open
mouth ear,” as if his mouth “becomes an equivalent for the ear” as a means of drawing
the sound into his body (11.718, Topi 79). Ears and mouths are not the only organs of
auditory penetration. Simon and Father Cowley bawdily joke with Ben Dollard about his
singing voice, or “organ,” which is powerful that it would “burst the tympanum of her
ear,” or “another membrane” (11.537, 11.536, 11.540). So, even if Bloom does not hear
the speech that “paused on Richie’s lips,” the connection can still be forged through the
visual contact of watching his mouth form the words—Bloom’s eyes here become his
auditory organ. However, with the communicative aura, there is the psychological act of
withdrawal, as found with Miriam in Pilgrimage, when she turns her mind away from the
preaching minister to deny him momentary “penetration.” So, despite our lack of ear
lids, we are invulnerable state of aural coercion. While the mouth is a potential site of
sensual intimacy, and Goulding’s words, like sung lyrics, contain the potential for
consummation, the suspension of speech—words resting on Goulding’s mouth—renders
the exchange unfulfilled. Goulding becomes less a speaking subject capable of telling
“wonderful” lies, than a collection of ailing anatomical parts, none of which fulfill aural
intimacy (11.627). The materiality of sound is connected through the anatomy associated
with the sounds made, with the connection based upon a visual perception of the location
of the sound: Goulding’s lips become the site of unconsumed marital intimacy, while the
Douce’s and Kennedy’s lips become flushed with orgasmic release. Bloom is “married in
silence” both with Molly and Goulding, signifying a sort of corporeal withdrawal.
70
Bloom’s acts of withdrawal again augment his marginalized status, but primarily he
becomes the one who does not connect through sound—his “music” does not perform a
communicative act.
This lack of communication, however, is not really negative; in fact, Bloom’s
withdrawal becomes a sign of his agency, as someone who chooses not to participate in
Goulding’s nostalgic delusions: “Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar”
(11.627). The assumption that by staying quiet, Bloom relinquishes agency may come
from a misunderstanding of silence as still and static. Even Bloom, however, realizes
that the air still throbs with vibrations, and it is in this silence that the meaning of the
sounds can be understood: “An afterclang of Cowley’s chords closed, died on the air
made richer” (11.767). The air becomes dense with the energy and sound waves from the
music, applause, and the general aura of performing for an audience: “That voice was a
lamentation. Calmer now. It’s in the silence after you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now
silent air” (11.793-4). Ulysses reflects to some extent Joyce’s interest in contemporary
studies of the physics of sound: “Central to Joyce’s interest in the physiology of
perception is the term ‘vibration’” (Plock 481). Bloom, however, not only retains agency
through his cognizance of the power of silence, but when the Ormond’s noisiness
becomes too invasive, he leaves. Much like listening to the seashell results in listening to
one’s own body, Bloom resists the sirens by listening to his body’s “music.” Lydia’s ears
were not filled with the sounds of the sea, but instead the shell reverberated her own
body’s sounds back into itself. But the shell also presented an obstacle to hearing sounds
from outside the shell—the chatter around the bar, the music. Bloom’s fingers find music
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in the mundane by toying with the strings binding the writing paper he has purchased for
his letter to Martha: “Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hand and with slack fingers
plucked the slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged.” (11.795-6).
The plucking of the strings, much like the catgut of a violin, and holding the bundle of
stationery, echoes Odysseus’ ropes that bound him against the lure of the sirens, whereas
the vibrations from the “catcut thong” barely penetrate the musical aura surrounding
Simon Dedalus’ soaring voice. Bloom’s music is marked by futility. Ultimately,
however, it is Bloom’s body that makes the most memorable anatomical “music” in the
“Sirens” episode. Bloom seems to make poor dietary choices for his dinner with
Goulding, with the alcohol particularly disagreeing with him by the end of the meal:
“Bloom felt wind wound round inside. / Gassy thing that cider” (11.1179-80). Like
Ulysses filling his ears with wax to protect himself from the siren’s song, Bloom resists
“Croppy Boy” with the sound of his own gassy excess “tootling” in his imagination as he
thinks about the customs of the “Shah of Persia” instead of the poor “croppy boy”
(11.1053). His alimentary expression becomes an act of the self hearing the self, as well
as a “comment on the siren-songs of the Ormond” (Tucker 86).
Bloom resists the sirens of the Ormond in favor of a soundscape outside, where he
can more comfortably blend his own “music” with its sonic layers. As the quiet figure
inside the Ormond, Bloom does not participate in the music, and begins to find it
annoying, and stifling, rather than a siren’s alluring song: “Freer in air. Music. Gets on
your nerves” (11.1182). Eventually, however, even Bloom makes music. His “music”
has no place in the Ormond, and their music becomes noise to him. This coincides with
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Bloom feels an increasingly uncomfortable accumulation of gas after his meal, coinciding
with his increasing disenchantment with the music in the Ormond. After listening to the
declining quality of Simon’s aging singing voice, and then Dollard’s sentimental
rendition of “Croppy Boy,” Bloom simply decides to leave in the middle of the song.
While the others are enthralled by the nationalistic sentiments of the song, it holds no
allure for him, and he needs to find a place to express his own music. Outside in the
street sounds, he’s more comfortable and can “express” himself. Standing in front of a
shop window, where the last words of Robert Emmet, “a gallant pictured hero,” are
displayed “in Lionel Marks’ window,” he relaxes and relieves his discomfort to “express”
himself with what Maud Ellman calls his “heroic fart” (11.1274-1275; “Vernacular
Voices” 385). While Bloom reads Emmet’s words, he farts:
When my country takes herplace among. Prrprr. Must be the bur. Fff.
Oo. Rrpr. Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and
not till then. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming.
Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgun. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph
be. Kraaaaaa. Written. I have. Pprrpffrrppfff. Done. (11.1284-1294)
In this passage the words of a hero mingle with the sound of the city and Bloom’s farts,
using the tram as cover. So, his music is muffled, and hidden, but not silenced.
“Sirens” is part of a larger arc in the whole of Ulysses, which moves toward
increasingly diffuse and dematerialized soundscapes. I have shown how Joyce’s
inversions of ground and figure and Bloom’s heroic silence stretch the limits of acoustic
erotics by redefining the nature of music and aurality. This technique is not just encased
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in “Sirens,” but can be found throughout the other episodes of the novel. As Stephen
says in “Proteus,” sound may very well be inescapable, but it also has an inherent
plasticity, which Joyce manipulates to suit the various experiments of the episodes of
Ulysses. The focus in “Lestrogynians” upon Bloom’s interiority as he walks around
Dublin is instrumental in establishing Bloom as the quiet center of the novel. Similar to
his position in “Sirens,” his withdrawal from conversation and his preoccupation with his
own thoughts contrasts with the gregarious company surrounding him—on this occasion
in the form of the gossiping patrons of Davy Byrnes’ Pub. His actions and corresponding
thoughts are introduced throughout the episode in the third person as in “Mr Bloom
moved forward, raising his troubled eyes” (8.108). Like the syntax of “he said, she said”
of The Waves, the narrative quickly switches to real time descriptions in the first person
from Bloom’s point of view: “Parallax. I never exactly understood” (8.110-1). The
“Penelope” episode at the end of the novel is another example of “hearing” an unheard
inner voice—in this case Molly’s elongated stream of consciousness flowing through
pages of long sentences. Both Bloom and Molly “speak” in diffuse soliloquies similar to
those found in The Waves. However, each of these episodes is clearly embedded in their
individual, corporealized consciousnesses, even while there is a sense of voices
abstracted from their external environment. Immersing each of these episodes in the
consciousness of a single protagonist allows the narrative to retain a degree of spatialized
orientation. Bloom’s thoughts are so clearly tied to his role as flaneur that Dublin’s
geography imposes a map upon his thoughts and movements alike. We also become
aware of Molly’s environment through the repeated sound of the train whistle, which is
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similar, as we will see in the next chapter, to the siren Bernard hears at dinner in The
Waves, and in itself does not fully ground her “voice” in a discernable physical
environment. Her words, while bearing virtually no resemblance to the constraints of
standard syntax and punctuation, do retain a solidity through their expression of Molly’s
overt sensuality. Like Woolf, however, Joyce experiments with voices speaking in a sort
of imagined space in his use of the question and answer format in “Ithaca.” While there
is a clearly defined speech pattern of one voice asking questions and another providing
answers, these voices are not associated with specific people, and the conversation does
not take place in an identified space. The action of the episode centers around Stephen
and Bloom, but they are not the ones who are speaking. Both the originating site of vocal
emissions as well as the scope of perceptual space remain abstract.
The repeatedly shifting soundscapes in Ulysses, from an academic debate in a
library, to a succession of literary styles in a hospital, to the individual stream of
consciousnesses in a pub and Molly’s bed, and most markedly to the musical fugue in the
Ormond Hotel, disrupt conventional listening practices. Sound is crucial to
understanding Joyce’s modernist enterprise, with “Sirens” as the most pronounced
auditory experiment in the novel. He, like Woolf, is deeply invested in using sound as a
means of creating a realism of consciousness, which is extradiegetically auscultated
toward the reader’s aural experience. These different experiments in integrating
increasingly diffuse embodied voices with their external, material environment connects
Joyce’s achievements in “Sirens” with the work Woolf achieves with the innovative
stream of soliloquies she creates in The Waves. The process of reading Ulysses
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acoustically reveals not only aspects of the perceptual and psychological realism of its
characters’ lives on 16 June 1904 in Dublin, but also calls upon its readers to make
meaning of the literary soundscape in terms of the acoustic environment through which
they consume the novel.
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Chapter Two: The Architectural Narrative Acoustics of
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Much like architects who designed spaces specifically to manage interior
soundscapes, Virginia Woolf designed narrative spaces in The Waves where her novel’s
characters can be heard despite “the roar of London” (98). It would seem that Woolf
made the most of her culture’s anxiety about the changing soundscape from primarily
“natural” sounds to the more manufactured sounds that seem to threaten the ability of the
human voice to thrive. The Waves does not, however, succumb to a nostalgic yearning
for a pastoral peacefulness, nor does it indulge in a sort of disembodied spirituality of the
mind. The text of The Waves operates almost as an architecturally designed acoustical
space in which the speech of the six characters, Bernard, Jinny, Louis, Neville, Rhoda,
and Susan, can be heard above the uproar of the city’s changing soundscape. Voices,
grounded in their bodily expression, become not only the basis but, ultimately, the
majority of the content of the novel. Woolf’s groundbreaking narrative structure acts
much like the architectural innovations of the era in managing and manipulating sound:
“People design and use technologies to enhance or promote certain activities and
discourage others” (Stern 8). Her novels are filled with these sounds, and her acoustical
designs create narrative spaces that manipulate sound to eliminate noise and that free the
voice to be heard through its soliloquies.
Woolf’s soliloquized narrative reveals both the development of the individual
identities of these six people from childhood through to old age, as well as their acoustic,
lived environment, in fact revealing identity through their aural experiences. In a passage
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from one of Neville’s soliloquies, he moves into an indoor space, turning to his books,
while listening to the sound of people speaking on the street outside his home. His
description provides a way of thinking of reading The Waves—as entering a constructed
soundscape. It also offers an insight into the production of the novel, for it is through
listening to the seeming nonsense of the speakers on the street that Neville finds poetry in
their mundane conversation, rather than in the formal construction of lines of ordered
meter and rhyme. The poetry on the page of the book in his hand recedes to the
background as he opens himself to the poetry of what “he said and she said” outside:
But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said as if
they had been written. I go to the bookcase. If I choose, I read half a page
of anything. I need not speak. But I listen. I am marvelously on the alert.
Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. . . . . One must have
patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spider’s
delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe,
unfold too. Nothing is to be ejected in fear or horror. The poet who has
written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There
are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths.
Much is sheer nonsense. One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the
winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. . . . . And so (while
they talk) let down one’s net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and
bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry. (144-5)
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The act of opening a door and entering a room calls attention to an architectural space,
where, despite the permeability of the walls to the street sounds, Neville nurtures a sense
that this is a place to consume poetry—whether it emerges from a page or the street.
Such “reading” means submitting oneself to the absorption of sound—both of speech and
of the smallest movement of an insect. Reading, therefore, is not passive, and it takes
“effort” to hear the poetry in the cadence of ordinary life. Within the bound pages of the
book Neville holds, where he randomly turns to read “anything,” the words are measured,
punctuated and stripped of the mundane and made into “convenient lengths.” In contrast,
the streets echo with seemingly indecipherable and commonplace “nonsense.” Just like
The Waves, the poetry of the street is made of “he said and she said.” Woolf beckons her
readers to “let the light sound [ . . . ] unfold” like Neville, with effort, patience, infinite
care to “draw [ . . . ] to the surface” the poetry of The Waves for themselves.
Interior space is not the only perspective that inspires creative readings, and upon
this epiphany Neville does not cower in his home, but traverses its streets to hear the
poetry of London, which he avows exists in public spaces, rather than in books: “It is
better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue.
Here’s the food, here’s the villain, here in the car comes Cleopatra, burning on her barge.
Here are figures of the damned too, nose-less men by the police-court wall, standing with
their feet in fire howling” (143). In fact the attempt to capture the poetry of life in
writing itself damages and diminishes its vitality: “This is poetry if we do not write it.”
Of course, the irony is that The Waves itself is a highly crafted and an undoubtedly
written novel. But Woolf seems to justify her experimental form by explaining how she
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has attempted to capture the flow of life, as a means of engaging the reader in the active
creation of poetry. Poetry is not dictated to the reader. In fact, it would seem that the
book Neville holds in his hand is a less vital example of poetry than the play found on the
streets of life. One cannot help but think that these two passages imply a mingling of
printed and phenomenological poetry. The poetry of people speaking outside Neville’s
flat resonates as a contrast to the poetic form in his hands. The actions on the busy streets
of the city recall Shakespeare. In this interplay of stimuli and literature Woolf describes
and enacts the resonance between the work of the writer and the reader. Woolf, the
novelist, attempts here to find an intersection between the active process of producing
poetry from one’s personal soundscape, and inducing it to spring forth from the page.
The acknowledgment of the vibrancy and power of sound in the face of ever
encroaching levels of "noise" in the early twentieth century leads Woolf in The Waves to
her most audacious narrative experiment: to create a novelistic aesthetic that embodies
within its own form a powerful vocal resonance that not only differentiates itself from the
often oppressive, dehumanizing power of noise, but that attempts—quite literally as well
as figuratively—to allow consciousness to "be heard" by her text's readers. Woolf effects
this through her experimental device of the "soliloquies" of the six characters, who in
giving metaphoric "voice" to their experiences of the world put the reader in the
reciprocal position of having to "listen" to, not just "read," the words on the page, an
effect heightened by their enclosure in quotation marks as if spoken. Thus, just as the
characters "hear" the sounds of their inhabited world, like “the atoms as they fall upon the
mind” and “score upon the[ir] consciousnesses,” the reader's listening consciousness is
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also “scored” by the six characters' soliloquized words; the text's very form and syntax
mandates that we hear them "speak," and thus the speeches simultaneously draw our own
"listening" selves into their consciousness of being in the world (The Common Reader
155). As we (readers) embody their consciousnesses, and as their words permeate our
listening selves, we become active, intimate participants in the creation of the novel itself.
In a sense this echoes the way in which sound becomes the vehicle whereby the
consciousness of the novel's characters, as recorded in their soliloquies, become
embodied, figuratively "made flesh" as the world enters them, dissolving the permeable
boundaries between self and other, hearing and listening, sound and silence. This novel
finds Woolf embracing the messiness and the poetics of communicating through voices
and sounds. While some of Woolf’s contemporaries found the idea of noise so alarming,
a wholesale retreat into silence lacks nuance. The acknowledgement of the vibrancy and
power of sound in the face of ever encroaching levels of noise locates The Waves in an
aesthetic that strives to create a vocal resonance free from the oppressive and
dehumanizing power of noise.
Much has already been written about the role Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s
interest with music may have played in the development of her narrative experiment for
The Waves. While the details of Woolf’s musical activities are not directly relevant to the
concerns of this chapter, her heightened awareness of sound and the need for active,
concentrated listening resonate with the way she writes about the modern imperative to
redirect the focus of meaning in literary experimentation. In her essay, “Modern
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Fiction,” Woolf speaks of the attempt to capture in her writing the moment that sensory
material impinges upon consciousness:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. This mind
receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower
of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the
life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the
moment of importance came not here but there so that if a writer were a
free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single
button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series
of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous hallow, a semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness
to the end. It is not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it
may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
(The Common Reader 154)
While the images of luminous “gig lamps” and “a semi-transparent envelope” are clearly
visual metaphors, there is a diffuse and permeable aspect to them that evokes the quality
of sound. The “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” seems as elusive as a soundscape’s
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“myriad impressions” that emerge as an “incessant shower” from multiple directions. As
Woolf continues to search for a way to develop a literary form that will express all of
these ephemeral aspects of experience and consciousness, her frustration becomes
palpable in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” where she “despairingly” recalls an
attempt to write about a woman she sees on a train, Mrs. Brown: “All I could do was to
report as accurately as I could what was said, to describe in detail what was worn” (111).
She discards what she calls the materiality of literature, which has “laid an enormous
stress upon the fabric of things” (112). This “fabric” also takes on the form of the
architectural space that the Edwardian novelists have given us in the form of the “house
in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” But such
material realism, Woolf argues, does little beyond delineating a spatialized aspect of
these trivialities. Woolf dismisses the material to focus on the diffuse essence of reality.
The “detail[s]” are insufficient to convey the “all sorts of scenes” that rush into her mind
like a “shower of innumerable atoms.” Even as she “tumble[s] them out pell-mell,” as if
to capture the immediacy of her own perceptions, she is left with the fleeting and
insubstantial metaphors of “a draught or a smell of burning.” She expands on her
critique of these misguided efforts to give so much detailed information, which does little
to reveal the nature of reality, with a condemnation of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and
John Galsworthy, whom she names as “materialists, [ . . . ] because they are concerned
not with the spirit but with the body,” and “the sooner English fiction turns its back upon
them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for the soul”
(The Common Reader 151). With counter-intuitive reasoning, Woolf names the tactile
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and tangible aspects of these materialist narratives, such as what her own Mrs. Brown
was wearing, as fleeting: “They write of unimportant things . . . they spend immense
skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the
enduring” (153). The inconsequentiality of the “vestments,” the external symbols of
meaning found in these novels, become irrelevant in the face of the diffuse nature of what
is lasting and meaningful: “Whether we call it truth or reality this, the essential thing, has
moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as
we provide.” The matter that is tangible and visible is misleading, while the substance of
life is found by attempting to corral the ephemeral.
As Woolf became more familiar with new work in the study of physics and wave
particle theory in the 1920s, which “emphasized the universe as waves [and] the
porousness of matter,” she grew to believe that science substantiated her aesthetic
theories and her “sense that the real and the substantial are not the same” (Beer 118,
120)
17
. These ideas play out in the novel, as in the final section of the book when
Bernard talks about the experience of being interrupted by the sound of the telephone:
Suddenly the telephone rang with urgency and I rose deliberately and went
to the telephone [ . . . ] I marked the ease with which my mind adjusted
itself to assimilate the message [ . . . ] I remarked with what magnificent

17
Woolf became interested in the work of Arthur Eddington (The Nature of the Physical
World 1928; Science and the Unseen World 1929; New Pathways 1935), and James
Jeans (The Universe Around Us 1929;The Mysterious Universe 1930; The New
Background of Science 1933). Woolf was reading these prior to working on The Waves
(Beer 120). See her diary: Vol 3, p343, 337 (8 Dec 1930), 218.

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vitality the atoms of my attention dispersed, swarmed round the
interruption, assimilated the message, adapted themselves to a new state of
affairs and had created, by the time I put back the receiver, a richer, a
stronger a more complicated world in which I was called upon to act my
part and had no doubt whatever that I could do it. (193)
While the sound of the telephone and even the voice on the other end are dispersed as
sound waves, the “atoms” of Bernard’s consciousness mingle with the matter from the
phone interruption and are reconstituted into something new. Sound, technology and
consciousness mingle to create a heroic moment in which Bernard feels empowered to
face the “more complicated world.” The “substance” of the call is never revealed; if
Bernard is told something important to bolster his confidence, it is immaterial. The
interaction itself is the source of his strength.
Woolf’s use of sound and silence points precisely to the results of her efforts to
“violate” the literary conventions she found so incommensurate with her experimentation
with a style that “tend[s] to be less concerned with the outward realities than with the
phenomenology of perception and expression” (Harper 5). Woolf’s new syntax only
hints at the existence of houses, furniture, and other “vestments,” which must be deduced
as we listen to the human beings who fill the expanse of this novel. The narrative
experiment in The Waves determines the process of making meaning from the novel. The
reader is invited to “the experience the joy of discovery” in the novel’s soundscape as a
result of its unconventional use of soliloquies (1). One could argue that the “joy of
discovery” can be found in many literary works, regardless of their stylistic
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breakthroughs. Nonetheless, as Harper points out, the mode and manner of
experimentation is itself important to the experience of the novel’s meaning, which is
particularly relevant to apprehending, as a reader, the novel’s aurality. The mingling of
literary forms evident to the reader is further corroborated by Woolf herself; her letters
and diaries reveal her intention to create a soundful new literary form. These experiments
in generic hybridity allow Woolf to manipulate aspects of each of the forms to create a
“narrative [that] omits everything that is not essential, all the details of ‘realism’ and the
conventional novel; it renders only essences” (Harper 246). According to Woolf, the
methods of material realism limit the creativity of the author, as well as the experience of
the reader, as if confining them in a “narrow room” (The Common Reader 156).
Imagining the novel as a literary architectural space, with the author as the architect and
designer, reveals the construction of the novel as open space, with few obstacles or
barriers to block the flow of these “myriad impressions.” These “essences” are
transmitted through the voices of these six characters, absent the presence of an objective
narrator, who might interfere by imposing intrusive, troublesome “vestments,” on their
voices. In sum, The Waves is expressed through a phenomenology of the voice, that
transcends the physical or metaphoric space of “narrow rooms.”
If the development of architectural acoustics was a way of manipulating the
environment to emphasize certain sonic responses while diminishing others, then Woolf
can be said to perform the same sort of design in her novel, in which the voices of her six
speaking characters dominate the text that is written as a series of nine sections
comprised solely of their individual soliloquies, and separated by interludes written in the
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third person, in which they are absent. The novel follows the lives of these six friends
from childhood through adulthood. The interludes describe a time of day that
corresponds with the time of life for the characters in the section that follows. The first
interlude, preceding the section in which they are very young children playing together,
begins: “The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky” (3). The
interlude preceding the final section predictably begins with “now the sun had sunk.” It
also repeats the image of the invisible horizon, “sky and sea were indistinguishable,” as if
to loop back to the beginning of their lives like the waves of the ocean curling in upon
themselves (174). The musical aspects of these interludes are filled with “the sound of
the waves [ . . . ] like a continuous bass line underlying a piece of music: fundamental,
repetitive, and suggesting eternity” (Hite xl). The imagery from these interludes is
associated with the sea, and each pause in the sound of the voices returns to the sound of
the waves in the interludes. The metaphor of waves curling in on each other and their
rhythmic sound may evoke eternity, but this is ultimately undermined with the final line,
italicized like the rest of the interludes: “The waves broke on the shore” (220). The
continuity of these waves, coming at the end of the novel, at the end of the six characters’
voiced lives, is “broken.”
The majority of the novel, however, is dedicated to the sound of the voices of
these six characters. Rhoda is the most vulnerable to the abstraction of the body from
physical space. She reaches for tactile contact, as if to prevent material disintegration: “I
will assure myself, touching the [bed] rail, of something hard. Now I cannot sink” (17).
Eventually she loses the battle to remain terrestrially anchored and kills herself. In
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distinct contrast, the other two women are characterized by their corporeality, although in
markedly different ways. Susan is associated with nature as an earth mother figure, who
lives in the country both as a little child and later as an adult. Her time away from the
farm as a young girl at school, and her occasional visits to London leave her feeling out
of place and reinforce her association with nature. Jinny, however, revels in the dynamic
vitality of the city and thrives on interpersonal contact. Indulging in the sensuality of
new encounters at parties, she is acutely aware of the vibrant energy that courses
throughout the city. As the son of an Australian banker, Louis is self-conscious about his
foreign accent, which becomes an outward sign of his alienation from English society.
He becomes a banker, too, in London, but finds the city to be no more welcoming than
the school he attended as a boy. Bernard often considered the primary figure among the
friends, and dominates the first eight sections, and by the ninth he is the sole voice left
speaking. He often talks about his role as the one who “collects phrases” and “tells
stories,” making him the novel’s author figure and creator of narrative order (136).
Neville is close friends with Bernard, but more privately pursues his aesthetic aspirations.
In addition to the six speakers, there is another figure who silently draws their
attention in several of the sections of the novel: Percival. He never delivers a soliloquy,
but the others often talk about him. We “hear” his voice only as an aspect of their
mediated perceptions; for instance, Rhoda says that the others “loved [Percival’s] voice.”
As the silent character, he becomes a sort of cipher, or aural placeholder around which
the others speak. All of them are fascinated with him to varying degrees, and he “unites
them as their object of desire” (Marcus 134). While all the characters seem infatuated
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with the silent, heroic Percival, for Neville he is the object of the expression of his
awakening homosexual desire. As “the voiceless figure in the novel,” Percival becomes
a site of the suspension of the diegetic communicative aura, which can only be achieved
if the voices are auscultated toward the reader who, also silent, can fulfill the erotic
connection by “listening” to the soliloquies of the six speakers. The Waves’ reliance
almost entirely upon these soliloquies creates a sense of experiencing the characters and
the spaces they inhabit, but through some means other than filling the spaces between the
voices with intricate details on their material environment. The materiality of the
physical place in which they hear sound is made clear only through voicing the
experience of hearing.
With the removal of the outward materiality of the site of speech, the sound
waves encounter no obstacles and reach more directly into the “ears” of the readers.
Moreover, removing this barrier allows the speeches simultaneously to occupy (1) the
site of the inner lives and consciousness of each person, and (2) to maintain a tactile
connection to their embodied experience. We understand that Neville hears the sounds of
the people on the street, that he is connected to the physicality of the experience;
however, we are not distracted by the sound of their voices. We only “hear” what that
means to Neville. Likewise, the voice Bernard listens to on the telephone remains
mysterious, but the process of listening, of picking up the phone and putting it to his ear,
is made substantial. Lacking the mediating voice of an objective narrator does not render
the novel’s soundscapes as static descriptions of an imagined reality. Instead, the
speeches convey an immediacy that draws us into the soundscape with them:
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“Throughout the novel, we listen not only to the voices of the six characters, but to the
sounds that they in turn hear” (Cuddy-Keane “New Aurality” 88). The reader must
adopt an active role to make meaning from such an experience: “Do not dictate to your
author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice” (Virginia Woolf
Reader 235). Woolf distinguishes reading from seeing as a more active process, and
argues that that writing is probably most akin to reading, further emphasizing the active
and collaborative role between writer and reader. The example she gives is filled with
active listening: “Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—
how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an
electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an
entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.” Despite her urging to consider the
“whole vision,” the passage is marked primarily by its voices, recalling Neville’s
observations about the poetry of the street. The Waves’ absence of a distinct narrative
voice thus actively engages the reader, as well. If speech is predicated upon a model of
speakers and listeners, such narrative choices lead to role ambiguities. In Woolf’s short
story “An Unwritten Novel” a woman on a train imagines the story of another unknown
woman who is in the compartment with her, but the spatial relationship between the
storyteller and audience are left undetermined, resulting in the “self [that] speaks to the
self.” Who these “selves” are, however, remains ambiguous, simultaneously referring to
“the self of the author to the self of the character or the self of the reader” (Laurence 24-
25). In a novel based on voices, listening is not explicitly enacted diegetically, but it
permeates the text, and in fact is as much a dominant force within the text as is speech.
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Such a shift in objectives requires a radical experiment in narrative, leading
Woolf eventually “to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society” and in its
place create a form in which “grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated” (The Captain’s
Death Bed 115). Throughout the novel, the idea of telling stories recurs, providing
insight into Woolf’s dismantling of narrative “grammar” and “syntax.” In their
childhood, Neville seems to submit to Bernard’s desire to control the narrative and bring
order to the events they all know: “Let [Bernard] burble on, telling us stories, while we
lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence.
Bernard says there is always a story” (25). Although The Waves is organized
chronologically, there is little structural emphasis placed upon the ordering the novel
around a plot. Neville implies the triviality of Bernard’s efforts to put these events into a
“sequence,” since what is really important—their experience of what they “have all seen”
has already been achieved. Story-telling is also associated with a passive, “recumbent”
audience here, rather than an (inter)active relationship between the author and audience.
Later, Bernard also questions the value of stories. Seeing a man and woman dining
together he speculates about the stories he could imagine about them, but realizes that it
serves little purpose in understanding anything meaningful:
I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said—I can see a
dozen pictures. But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow; one
[smoke] ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if
there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s?
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There are facts [ . . . . ] but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture. (104-
5)
While any story Bernard could come up with about the unnamed man and woman would
be a playful fabrication with the permanence of a bubble, he goes on to say that similar
efforts to tell stories about his close friends would also be acts of futility. Nonetheless,
Bernard continues to create “thousands of stories” and fill “innumerable notebooks with
phrases to be used” for the quintessential, “true story, the one story to which all these
phrases refer” (136). His pursuit of this perfect narrative that will give meaning to all
these collected fragments eludes him, and he begins to wonder if it even exists: “But I
have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?” To organize
events and information into a plot does little to lead Bernard closer to understanding
truth, and after years of carrying around these notebooks, he reflects on the futility of his
lifelong practice:
Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make
up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of
stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their
feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn
upon half sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language
such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of
feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance
with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then
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undeniable. [ . . . . ] What delights me then is the confusion, the height,
the indifference and the fury” (176).
Again these “beautiful” phrases are associated with the immaturity of childhood and
seem ridiculous when now viewed in the wisdom of maturity. While the “toys” he
played with in his notebooks earlier seemed insufficient to the task of creating the “true
story,” he now finds them almost menacing, the deceptive deftness of “all their feet on
the ground,” something that he “distrusts.” In this final section of the novel, Bernard
throws away the futile practice of collecting stories and phrases in order to embrace the
aesthetics of “confusion.”
Whereas Bennett’s novels, so Woolf argues, retain physicality through a detailed
description of the external world adjacent to the character’s lives, physicality in The
Waves speech is a distillation of the consciousness of characters as filtered lived through
their material environment. Throughout the novel, there is a tension between the
narrative’s lightness, which is not weighed down by a great deal of information before
“hearing” the characters themselves, and experiencing vicariously their bodily contact
with their lived environments. Even in the case of Rhoda’s anxious fears about her body
and even her conscious self floating away, the image her soliloquy conveys is that of her
body clinging to the very solidness of her bed. Dorrit Cohn argues that novels provide a
degree of intimacy completely unavailable in our own lived experiences: “If the real
world becomes fiction only by revealing the hidden side of the human beings who inhabit
it, the reverse is equally true: the most real, the ‘roundest’ characters of fiction are those
we know most intimately, precisely in ways we could never know people in real life”
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(Cohn 5). By Cohn’s definition the six characters in The Waves could be considered
almost perfectly “real, the roundest,” with their soliloquies providing insight into their
lives unhampered by a view of how they look or sound from an external perspective.
We, as readers, do not experience what it is like to see Neville enter his flat after passing
people speaking on the street; instead we hear what it is to be Neville walking down past
them and through his door. Even when we hear Neville describe Bernard looking at a
tree, it is less a revelation of Bernard, than a revelation of Neville’s perception of
Bernard.
The soliloquies provide a way of hybridizing interiority and speech. The
soliloquies are marked as voiced, but are not natural speech, or dialogue, so there isn’t a
sense of the words being spoken as integrated into the events of the novel—they don’t
speak in a manner consistent with dinner party conversation, classroom conversation, or
the like. So, every voicing is both spatially and temporally situated within the action of
the novel—their soliloquies do pertain to their experience within the action of the plot,
but also operate as a soliloquies auscultated toward the reader as a way of conveying not
the accurate mimesis of what they say to each other, but how saying things to each other,
and hearing things with each other, has been experienced. Woolf’s use of the soliloquy
allows the reader to “hear” a more complete version of that reality. Bernard
acknowledges that when he speaks to someone, he is “only superficially represented by
what [he] was saying tonight. Underneath, and, at the moment when [he is] most
disparate, [he is] also integrated” (55). The version of himself that Bernard presents to
someone during conversation is only “superficially represented,” but through these
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soliloquies, we are presumably given access to the Bernard who is simultaneously
“disparate” and “integrated.” There is a version of Bernard who speaks at the dinner
party, who interacts with the lives of the other characters in the novel, but there is also a
version of Bernard that exists “underneath,” where he is not fragmented by the need to
communicate a version of himself as appropriate to the social situation. The Bernard
who exists “underneath” is the whole person, and Woolf’s use of the soliloquy allows the
reader to hear the real Bernard, free from the restrictions of any superficial representation
of himself.
Despite the punctuation, with quotation marks and “said Bernard” or “said Jinny”
descriptors, questions remain as to whether these are indeed voiced speeches or silent
expressions of the inner thoughts of the characters. At times, the use of the word “said”
could simply be a way of delineating one character’s thoughts from another’s. Despite
occasional moments resembling conversational interaction, especially in the first section,
there is little indication that these words are specifically meant to be heard by anyone
diegetically, with the exception of the last section of the novel, in which Bernard is the
sole speaker to an anonymous dinner companion. Having determined that these speeches
are hardly representative of dialogue, even when all the characters are present at an
intimate social occasion like the two dinner parties when they all meet in London, their
speeches are not necessarily “said” out loud to each other. As Hite comment, “The
rhetorically heightened ‘speeches’ contain the characters in the lyric present, representing
them at some points as communicating but keeping their utterances more solitary than
social” (lxi). While the “speakers ‘speak’ only metaphorically, in that their utterances are
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not dialogue addressed to other characters, nor are they precisely internal monologue or
the kind of soliloquies addressed to an audience in a dramatic performance,” there are
moments when the soliloquies demonstrate a degree of conversational interaction
between the characters (Hite xlii).
In the first section canvassing their early childhood, each speech is very short, so
unlike the long multi-page passages given each character later in the novel. These early
childhood passages contain interactive lines that are sometimes explicitly directed at the
others. While these do not necessarily read as the natural “language of everyday,” they
do convey a sense of what a child’s consciousness “sounds” like. Nonetheless, it is
startling to hear Louis say “and” in response to Rhoda’s description of a snail, as if he
heard what she said and was adding to it his own observations of the snail and the grass:
“‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said
Rhoda. ‘And burning light from the window-panes flash in and out of the grasses,’ said
Louis” (4). They each observe the “blades” of the “grasses,” but the conjunction at the
beginning of Louis’ line connects his words to Rhoda’s with an immediacy and
responsiveness that implies dialogue. A few times in the novel, Bernard seems to address
Neville directly. The first time occurs when they are small children and he sees Susan
crying. He says, “I shall follow her, Neville” (8). Often in these early passages, the use
of a second person to name each other and the use of “we” to make their words inclusive
seem to hint at an interactive dialogue, but would also be consistent with a private
soliloquy. The actual use of Neville’s name here, as well as later when they are a little
older in school, seem to indicate a more direct connection in which Bernard imagines
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Neville hearing his words: “Wait though, Neville; let me talk” (34). Louis and Rhoda
more clearly have a private conversation at Percival’s farewell dinner party, where not
only do they each address each other directly by name within the flow of soliloquies from
all six speakers, but these sections are bracketed by parenthesis: “(‘Look, Rhoda,’ said
Louis, ‘they have become nocturnal, rapt’ [ . . . . ] ‘And while it passes, Louis, we are
aware of downfalling, we forbode decay’ [ . . . . . ] ‘Death is woven in with the violets’
said Louis. ‘Death and again death.’)” (101-102). The parenthesis appear again about a
page later, as a sort of stage direction for Louis and Rhoda catching a moment again to
speak to each other: “Listen, Rhoda (for we are conspirators, with our hand on the cold
urn), to the casual, quick, exciting voice of action, of hounds running on the scent” (103).
While a soliloquy in a play is bracketed from the action on the play, as the actor speaks to
the audience, Woolf brackets Louis’ and Rhoda’s brief conversation, as if again inverting
the ground and figure of speaker and listener.
Having found fleeting passages of seemingly direct exchange between a few of
the characters, then perhaps we can consider the delineations between spoken words and
thoughts as compromised, rendering fluctuations between sound and silence. The
blurring of these boundaries creates a new, albeit somewhat volatile, narrative space for
Woolf to explore. What may be considered “problematic” seems in this light to be a
source of creative explorations of the relationship between body and mind. This
disruption results in a narrative space which hums with voices, while not beholden to
grammatical norms: “In her diary, Woolf notes that what is narrated can be thought or
speech, yet she blurs the distinction in her writing by using ‘said’ and quotation marks,
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which conventionally indicate speech, and by using the present tense, which
conventionally refers to thought” (Laurence 21-2). The sounded aspects of their words
become positional. If the novel were written as a collection of conversations between
various combinations of the six friends, it would place them in a clearly defined physical
space—one that is attached to furniture, walls, and other materiality that would anchor
their words to their actions, rather than to their perceptions. Even the reactions to their
physical space—the sound as “cars race and roar and hunt us to death like
bloodhounds”—is only available to the reader through Rhoda’s consciousness as
expressed through her speech. The sound is not its own entity; the cars’ roar does not
exist on its own. All reality is created through speech. Nonetheless, by speaking these
experiences into reality, there is still a physically embodied quality to their existence.
Consciousnesses are not untethered from lived experience: “She [Woolf] needed sounds
and speech and the processes by which we experience sound. She needed the ‘sound of a
bell’ and the realization that ‘the sensation which I describe as hearing the sound of a bell
. . . actually . . . is feeling the effect of waves of condensation and rarefaction of the air
inside my ears’ ” (Beer 121). In fact, the removal of nearly all dialogue and objective
descriptions of the material environment focuses the development of identity not only on
the interior consciousness of the speakers, but also the way the external sounds penetrate
through their bodies, into their consciousness, and then is expressed outwardly through
their mouths.
There is a materiality intrinsic to the use of speech; however, Woolf’s emphasis
upon consciousness and interiority encourages some critics to see The Waves as a novel
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of silences. In her study of silence in Woolf’s novels, Patricia Laurence argues, “Woolf
displaces the ‘speaking subject’ and speech or dialogue in the novel” to create an active
silence that has its own “enlightened presence” (11). Laurence is hardly alone in her
conclusions, although as Jean Guiget points out, accepting these as “six interlaced interior
monologues,” as “most if not all critics have assumed,” is a simplification of “so complex
and so dense a work” (282). While Laurence argues that Woolf’s search for a new
“grammar” and “syntax” has lead her to “creat[e] a lexicon of silence, a punctuation of
suspension, and metaphors of silence that signal mind and feeling, particularly the
unconscious, in fiction,” I would argue that Woolf’s narrative experiment operates
outside of a straightforward sound/silence binary (11). The misty spaces between the
voices accentuate not the silence that an absence of voices may imply, but actually the
space that allows the voices to be heard. The speeches do not necessarily provide a
conversational exchange between the characters; they are not diegetically heard events.
However, to not be heard is not necessarily the same as to be silent. The act of reading a
novel is generally a silent process—we read to ourselves, rather than aloud in most cases.
Laurence’s assertions that the speeches are “metaphors of silence” could actually be
inverted to read “metaphors of speech or sound,” turning what “Bernard said” into a
metaphor of the sounds heard by the reader. The sound waves reach beyond the ears of
the six friends, past the edges of the page, and oscillate toward the reader’s perception of
spoken words.
Degrees of sound, along the spectrum of noise and silence, however, at times also
become material and tactile ways of delineating these spaces. Pauses, or quieter
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moments, provide the ground against which the figure of consciousness, in the form of
the spoken soliloquies can be heard. The threshold of silence is acoustically magnified
by the anticipation of the sound to come. Jinny’s car pulls up to a party and she notices
that “people are arriving; they do not speak, they hasten in” (72). Aside from the “sound
of cloaks falling in the hall,” the “prelude” to the party is a quiet moment before the
music begins. Silence is not valorized over the spoken or sounded. Silence and speech
are constructed into a narrative that reconceptualizes the role of speech less as indications
of actions within a plot, than as a the transmission of waves of consciousness: “Woolf
incorporates silence into her narration as a critique of words, of ‘talkers’ and ‘phrase-
makers,’ of the ‘speaking subject,’ and of Western notions of knowing and being. She
both uses and questions language in creating a narrative space for silence” (Laurence 7).
Although Laurence argues that Woolf does this in the quest of a silent novel, this novel
uses silence to construct, much like an architect or acoustic designer, narrative spaces in
which the voices of these characters are most clearly heard. And in doing so, Woolf
creates an answer to the problem of literary noise: “Sound thus has both utopian and
dystopian associations: It enables individuals to create intimate, manageable and
aestheticized spaces to inhabit but it can also become an unwanted and deafening roar
threatening the body politic of the subject” (Bull and Back 1). For Woolf the yearning
for these “aesthetized spaces” in her narratives does not lead to a nostalgic call to for a
peaceful, natural, idyllic rural life. While city life is noisy, even intimidating at times,
The Waves does not rely upon a simple rural/urban binary. There is certainly a tension
between quieter spaces, either rural landscapes, or sequestered interiors, and the louder,
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noisy urban exteriors. As the only character who lives in the country, Susan embodies
the anxiety of contact with the chaotic city as well as the isolation of quiet farm life.
From childhood, she seems to be more sensitive to her surroundings and complains of
noises at school, where “bells ring; feet shuffle perpetually” in endless, and seemingly
mindless action, unlike the more meaningful work on the farm, where “the men in the
fields are doing real things” (38, 43). Beyond obviously noting that the London is so
noisy compared to her quiet life on the farm, Susan finds the people muted by city life.
As the character living most closely with nature, the novel’s mother earth figure, there is
a sort of purity associated with Susan but also a rigidity, an inability to integrate with the
others. While she inspires a grudging admiration in her childhood friends, they also
sense her judgment: “She has not dressed [for dinner], because she despises the futility
of London” (86). Retreat to her country home, however, does not offer Susan an entirely
tranquil respite: “I think of Jinny; of Rhoda; and hear the rattle of wheels on the
pavement as the farm horses plod home; I hear the traffic roaring in the evening wind. I
look at the quivering leaves in the dark garden and think, ‘They dance in London. Jinny
kisses Louis.’” (72). Even in her quiet home, the noise of London life impinges upon her
thoughts,, recalling old feelings of resentment and jealousy that have persisted since her
childhood. Her seemingly contented life on the farm gives way to moments of realization
that her life exists on the periphery.
The reader’s access to the characters’ interior realism poignantly contrasts with
the way the characters’ expressions of their experiences are suspended in isolation from
each other, untouched by direct narrative responses. Although they do not hear each
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other’s soliloquies, the act of speaking renders them “heard” by the readers. Of course,
any narrative passage revealing the inner workings of a character’s mind is
communicated to a reading audience, creating the “paradox that narrative fiction attains
its greatest ‘air of reality’ in the representation of a lone figure thinking thoughts she will
never communicate to anyone” (Cohn 7). Woolf’s soliloquies, however, more
emphatically draw out a listening attentiveness that creates a communicative aura
between text and reader that only tangentially intertwines the six inhabitants of the novel.
The Waves’ narrative experiment moreover, does not rely upon overly intricate language,
and, in contrast to the writings of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, she does not require her
readers to draw upon a bank of allusions for comprehension. The narrative structure
itself is the innovation, as it speaks directly to the reader, free from authoritative cues,
conveying the sensation directly to a listening, reading audience (Hite xxxvii). While
each speech does not go so far as to “dispel all sense of psychological verisimilitude,”
there is certainly a heightened sense of tangible consciousness as it is conducted very
directly into an experience of listening by the reader (Cohn 262).
The “air of reality” to which Cohn refers is not a matter of natural speech in The
Waves; we do not feel, for example, as if this is the way Bernard would actually talk to
Susan, or Jinny would talk to Louis. These are not speeches of behavioral realism, but of
a stylized realism of consciousness. Therefore, the removal of the kinesthetic acts such
as walking or dancing, reconfigures these movements as a representation of the process
of the characters’ consciousness and identity formation. The notion that The Waves is a
sort of poetry of what really happens in people’s lives, such as the conversation’s taking
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place outside Neville’s flat, is underscored by another generic element to these
soliloquies—the use of what Cohn names as “the lyric present,” or the simple present,
which is associated with English poetry (Cohn 264). The six protagonists use the present
tense to describe their own physical actions—“I walk, I dance”—as they experience
them, which combined with a formality of tone and self-consciousness, evokes a tension
between spontaneity and elaborate manipulation: “The self-narrating characters present
their immediate impressions and thoughts—and also their immediate actions—in a
grammar that is simple but not colloquial, heightened but not ornamented, direct but not
artless” (Hite xli). Because these actions are conveyed through speech, rather than
through an authoritative narrative, it is experienced more immediately by the reader,
rather than observed as detached events.
Woolf does not assemble a pastiche of literary genres in The Waves, but fuses
them together to create a “generic crossing-point,” which “explores and exploits the
confluence of drama, lyric poetry, and narrative fiction principally by fashioning
monologic texts of an unusual type,” namely the “dramatic soliloquies” she describes in
her diary (Cohn 263, A Writers Diary 156). The text Woolf produced seems to justify her
aspirations to create characters with new kinds of voices: “I think it must be something
in this line—though I cant now see what. Away from facts: free; yet concentrated; prose
yet poetry; a novel & a play.” (Diary Vol III, 21 February 1927, 128). One could imagine
assigning six actors “roles”—you be “Susan,” you be “Louis”—and having them read the
soliloquies as if from a script, and, indeed, Woolf discussed with one of her cousins,
Virginia Isham, the idea of broadcasting the novel as a play on the radio, and mentions it
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in her diary: “In my vague way, said V. Isham wants to do it—but she meant to
broadcast” (Diary Vol. IV, 3 January 1933, 140). What is difficult to imagine, however,
is how much interaction there would be between the actors either on a stage or in an
imagined auditory space. Perhaps the notion of a radio play as Woolf originally
imagined it makes more sense—the voices are spoken to an audience, rather than to other
actors in the play, in much the same way the speeches in the novel are “heard” by the
reader, rather than to other characters in the novel. While these soliloquies do give us
impressions of actual events, which can be pieced together to sketch out the highlights of
each character’s life, they more vividly communicate aspects of consciousness and
identity. Knowing that Louis frequently goes to an unappealing lunchshop to eat does
tell us something about the tedium he endures on a regular basis during his working life;
yet his words reveal even more about how he feels about this activity. As he sits eating
from “plates with buns and ham sandwiches,” he tells himself, “I cannot read my book, or
order my beef, with conviction. I repeat, ‘I am an average Englishman; I am an average
clerk’” (67). He expresses bitterness and the depth of his alienation in imagined speech
to those around him, people who are surrounded by “the rhythm [that] is cheap and
worthless” and remain “unaware” of their “degradation,” unable to appreciate the poetry
he reads from “the book that is propped against the bottle of Worcester sauce” while
eating his sandwich (68). Because the lyric holds the reader in the present, it is the state
of mind that is emphasized over the events as they unfold: “Hardly a compelling plot,
but plot is not the source of fascination in The Waves, any more than plot is what one
looks for in a lyric poem” (Hite xxxix). Louis’ frustrations are made more powerful by
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the immediacy of his desire to communicate to those around him in order to disrupt the
monotonous “rhythm” engulfing them in mediocrity. The lyrical form moves the
narrative beyond informative, to produce a rhythmic, sonic environment for the
consciousness of these six characters: “In the fiction of Virginia Woolf this freedom is
achieved through the development of a poetic language” (Harper 4).
Consciousness is diffuse and ephemeral, but the stream of phrases, when spoken
by the six characters, make existence substantial enough for contact. Bernard
understands the power of knowing that an audience lends meaning to ideas. His need to
be heard offers an insight into the ability of his voice, and those of his five friends, to
reach a receptive listener: “But soliloquies in back streets soon pall. I need an audience.
That is my downfall. That always ruffles the edge of the final statement and prevents it
from forming” (83). Louis’ frustration results partially from his inability to speak to
those around him in the eating-shop—he does not even bother: “I cannot translate [the
poetry] to you” (68). The futility of finding an audience renders him voiceless within the
diegetic space of the eating-shop, but allows his ideas to be communicatively fulfilled
toward the reader, who, presumably, would not have forgotten what the dead poet said
(68). The soliloquies in the pages of a novel, therefore, resonate beyond their covers to
find that audience. The aesthetic of speech is not one of hearing conversations, but rather
the expression of identity attained through the formation of a stylized, poetic form.
Woolf has extracted the poetry, so that we may “hear” it on these pages, not as metered,
rhymed lines, much like Neville does. So, even if these are considered metaphoric
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voices, or speeches representing consciousness, then the aesthetic still makes sense—the
“voice” embodies consciousness and renders it and present, a tactile presence.
Woolf’s hybridization of genres manifests itself along multiple valences. The
distinctions between what is a novel, what is a play, or what is a poem, further call into
question what we define as unspoken interiority, speeches, and interactions of dialogue,
as well as refigures the roles of figure and ground in soundscape models. The Waves’
soundscape, while primarily consisting of these soliloquies, is built upon layers of
silence, quiet, sound, and noise, complicating delineations between distinctions of ground
and figure: “The novel gradually builds an aural density out of layers and textures of
sounds widely diffused in space—conveying in this ‘music’ an apprehension of ongoing,
interrelational life” (Cuddy-Keane 88). The mingling of these “layers and textures of
sounds” are enhanced, rather than silenced through the soliloquy, demonstrating that
“these ‘choric voices’ are part of a continuum of experience that Woolf seeks to record
(90). I would argue that not only are the “noises treated as voices,” but the only way they
exist in the novel is through their transmission and transformation into voices.
When considering aspects of literary forms of speech, a speech/silence binary, as
before noted, is an insufficient model here. Nonetheless, additional disputes as to
whether these voiced passages are embodied speech or not, target the lack of a
representation of what can be considered to sound natural: “We realize that the verb
‘say’ (‘he said, she said’) introducing each speaker in The Waves does not bear its
ordinary meaning, that the voice it refers to speaks through no mouth, has no individual
timbre, does not use the language of everyday” (Guiguet 284). The degree to which any
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novel uses “the language of the everyday,” however, is questionable: “The special life-
likeness of narrative fiction—as compared to dramatic and cinematic fictions—depends
on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body
feels. In depicting the inner life, the novelist is truly a fabricator” (Cohn 5-6). There are,
nonetheless, subtle distinctions between the “individual timbres” of each of these six
characters. Bernard’s constant collection of phrases leads him to experiences of
interaction and observations, which approach gregariousness, or at least the desire to
reach out to make contact with others. Neville often clings to a distant and objective
evaluation of the world around him. Louis also speaks from a position of distance, but
one filled with feelings of rejection and alienation. Jinny’s voice has an exuberance,
which teeters between authentic hedonistic pleasure and fear of what it means to lose
those sensual distractions. Susan’s sensuality comes not from the tactile pleasures, but
her need to absorb the nature through her pores, to maintain an intimacy with rural life.
In sharp contrast, Rhoda’s inability to integrate her consciousness with her corporality
haunts all her words. Just as literary forms and the ground/figure become intertwined
throughout the text, the tonal consistency of each personality merge into a rhythmic
continuity throughout the novel: “In so far as the six voices are differentially marked,
they retain the same differences of style and imagery throughout” (Marcus 134). Thus a
relationship between the speeches and the speaking bodies emanates throughout the
novel. Yet, the presence of “individual timbre” does not necessarily lend itself to
resolving Guiguit’s assertions about a lack of natural speech. Certainly these are hardly
representations of how people speak to each other in ordinary circumstances, but extracts,
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as in Neville’s experience in his chamber, of the poetry making up the every day. Rather
than simply putting the passersby’s words into a passage of dialogue, filtering their
conversation through the consciousness of Neville allows Woolf to create the
“concentration” or distillation of the experience of the ordinary and convert it into a
poetic form, one that is released and expressed through the soliloquy. This distillation is
an artifice; by definition the removal of the speech of the “everyday” is what allows it to
acquire an aesthetic quality beyond the ordinary. Thus the soliloquy provides a literary
form for transmuting the poetry from the everyday. Soliloquies are often stylized speech
by definition, a sort of lyric poem performed on stage. If we consider these speeches to be
“dramatic soliloquies,” as Woolf wrote in her diary, then the allusion to the stage
emphasizes a spoken aspect to these passages. This is poetry, not merely a “transcription
nor even the translation into words of the inner life” as the term “interior monologue”
would imply (Guiguet 285). One of the characteristics of poetry is its sounded quality;
therefore it seems that Guiguet does imply that, while not necessarily conceding that
these are “spoken” monologues, there is an aspect of sound to them. The notion that
these monologues aren’t natural speech does not preclude their sounded or even spoken
nature. Because of the ephemerality of sound, if their words are spoken, but there is no
cueing to indicate listening, then there is a lack of communicative sound, despite the
spoken aspect. There is a presumption of an audience with the lyric poem, but here the
voices remain for the most part abstractions—spoken into a diffuse imagined alternative
space. Even when the action takes place in an identifiable space—a restaurant, London
Streets, school, a train, etc.—that space is not necessarily relevant to listening or where
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their voices are “heard.” Although they are occasionally directly heard in those spaces,
they are rather primarily “heard” in the space of the reader.
Building relationships through sound involves a mingling, multidirectional
exchange. Sound is internalized as both spoken sound emissions, and absorbed as heard
sound; these processes are paralleled at the social level of sound. Listening, speaking, and
knowing that one has been heard—friendship and individual identity are formed through
these actions. Neville and Bernard have intimate moments when they feel their identities
impinge upon each other, indeed form each other. “‘How strange,’ said Bernard, ‘the
willow looks seen together’” (59). Bernard notices how looking at a tree together alters
the way it appears when viewed in solitude: “Now that we look at the tree together, it has
a combed look, each branch distinct, and I will tell you what I feel, under compulsion of
your clarity.” Although much of the language involves shared visual perception, their
experience inspires the need to speak, which then leads to deeper intimacy. In response
to Bernard’s words, Neville provides an engaged, responsive audience:
You give way, you laugh and delight in me. My charm and flow of
language, unexpected and spontaneous as it is delights me too. I am
astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how
infinitely more than I can say I have observed. More and more bubbles
into my mind as I talk, images and images. This, I say to myself, is what I
need. (60)
And at the moment Bernard senses the loss of Neville’s attentiveness, rendering his
words meaningless, he realizes the importance of the reciprocity in retaining the bond of
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the communicative aura: “But stop. You are not listening. You are making some
protest, as you slide with an inexpressible familiar gesture, your hand along your knee.
By such signs we diagnose our friends’ diseases. ‘Do not, in your affluence and plenty,’
you seem to say, pass me by.’ ‘Stop,’ you say. ‘Ask me what I suffer.’” The power of
the listener is undiminished; in fact Bernard valorizes the role of the listener from a
passive role to one that perhaps accomplishes more than all his “beautiful phrases.”
Bernard takes his turn as the listener. While the act of speaking, the overtly active role,
implies a greater degree of creation, Bernard acknowledges that his own selfhood is
dependent upon the willingness of people to listen actively to him: “Let me then create
you. (You have done as much for me).” Through the pleasure of communicative contact,
which requires both active listening and as well as speaking, the self is created and
constructed. Neville later complains to Bernard, “You are not listening to me” (63). His
voice becomes tinged with desperation for Bernard to be attentive: “I am asking you to
take my life in your hands.” As if in a constant state of formation, Bernard seeks
communal contact: “I do not believe in separation. We are not single. Also I wish to add
to my collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of human life” (48). His
friends are not his only source of audience. Life is ignited through spoken words; the
communicative aura is Bernard’s life force: “I only come into existence when the
plumber, or the horse-dealers, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me
alight” (96). While his most intimate relationships center around listening and speaking
with Neville, Bernard seeks constant communicative fulfillment.
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Jinny revels in the sensuality of the fragile communicative aura, creating it not
only with her intimate friends, but remaining seemingly as perpetually open to its
permeations as Bernard. The fragility of the moment of communicative aura contains the
potential for an erotic exchange. At a party in London, Jinny meets an unnamed man,
and as they go through the motions of flirtations, aural exchange plays a role in their
growing intimacy, but begins quietly with drinking together: “I fill my glass again. I
drink. The veils drop between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another
soul” (70). As their mouths become occupied with words instead of wine, their two
consciousnesses meld through the act of speaking and listening. In this encounter talking
becomes an energetic, sensual interaction:
This is rapture; this is relief. [ . . . . ] Words crowd and cluster and push
forth one on top of another. It does not matter which. They jostle and
mount on each other’s shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble
and become many. It does not matter what I way. Crowding, like a
fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us. It settles
on his lips. (74-5)
Jinny’s words rest on the man’s lips, rather than moving from her mouth to the site of
listening—his ear. Conversation becomes a sensual oral exchange, and in Jinny’s
imagination, words travel from mouth to mouth, rather than to ears, as if in listening, he
consumes her words, like the wine he drinks, joining their lips together in an orgasmic
“moment of ecstasy,” as Jinny cries, “There!” (75). This passage is reminiscent of the
barmaids in James Joyce’s “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. Their shared laughter erupts
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from their mouths, emphasizing their lips as the location of a shared communicative
moment that is erupts in moist, orgasmic pleasure. Like the communicative aura,
however, their moment of intimacy cannot be sustained, and immediately Jinny declares:
“Now it is over” as the “slackness and indifference invade” even as they lose
“consciousness of [their] bodies uniting.” Attempts to sustain stable connections by way
of diffuse and ephemeral sound results in profound, but fleeting moments of intimacy.
The permeation of bodies into each other during such brief intestnaces, are riddled
with the potential for violation of an integral self. As young children Bernard and Susan
are “edged with mist,” and they “melt into each other with phrases,” rending their bodies
“an unsubstantial territory.’” (9). Diffusion is not the optimistic transmission of meaning
across distance, but the dismantling of self into an “unsubstantial territory.” Although
Bernard responds directly to Susan, and his soliloquy is written almost like dialogue here,
Susan does not quite seem to respond as directly, but has retreated to her inner thoughts,
which articulate her sense of remoteness from Bernard’s words: “I am tied down with
single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and
words in phrases” (9). The communal experience in which Bernard revels as he keeps
“making phrases” represents for Susan a means through which he leaves her yearning and
alone: “ ‘Now you trail away,’ said Susan, ‘making phrases. Now you mount like an air-
ball’s string, higher, higher through the layers of the leaves, out of reach [ . . . . ]. You
have escaped me’” (11). Of course, these are the words of Susan as a child, when she
and the other four children play together and their experiences are more similar and
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unified. Later, Susan, as well as the others, find their distinct vocal timbres, helping them
maintain their own individual integrity, as Harper notes:
Just as the individual waves in the first interlude become visible as the
light rises, so the individual personalities in the first chapter slowly
become differentiated. The formality and tonal uniformity of the language
of the speakers forces the narrative to differentiate them at some deeper
level. The individual voices become differentiated through the qualities of
their consciousness: what they think about and how—especially the
images which become characteristic of each. (Harper 209)
The progression toward maintaining a sense of individuality in the face of the communal
aspect of these collective soliloquies is not linear or uniform. As children they play
together in the same environment, and their words mingle more coherently as dialogue.
Even as their voices swirl and “melt into each other,” through the next eight sections of
the novel, they do retain individualized integrity. While there may be permeations and
diffusion at the margins of their voices, each soliloquy is allows a small pause for breath.
The “Bernard said” and “Jinny said” allow the voice to pause and become momentarily
suspended. In the first section, the children’s voices declare their actions, as much as
their consciousness. The space in which the voices are spoken is more readily apparent;
when the voices pause, they are still clearly situated. As they grow older, these spaces
become more abstract and impressionistic. Eventually these spaces are subsumed by the
voices. Even when the girls and boys split up to go to school, there is a tenuous
connection between them as they come of age and become socialized among other peers.
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That process, however, is also accompanied by the development of their individuality and
independence from each other, which the soliloquized form emphasizes. Even in the
moment of communication with each other, that communication occurs within a form
that continuously reinforces the abstract aspect of their interactions: they are not
conceived primarily as listening and receptive participants with each others’ voices.
Nonetheless, their relationship with their corporeal selves, and their physically placed
bodies, inform their soliloquies as much as their psychological interiority. Louis’
bitterness about his own bodily sounds (his accent), coupled with his thought on the
oppressive sounds of London, have clear resonances for his feelings of social and
emotional alienation. The aural resonance of his futile yearning to fit in further
delineates his body as foreign. The importance of athletic participation at the boys’
school is the intersection of the muscular and the musical: “I note the simultaneity of
their movements with delight. If my legs were reinforced by theirs, how they would run!
If I had been with them and won matches and rowed in great races, and galloped all day,
how I should thunder out songs at midnight! In what a torrent the words would rush from
my throat!” (33). Louis is excluded from play on the field and stream, so he is therefore
made mute as he silently “peep[s] from behind a curtain” (32-3). The reliance upon
voices and sound as the only tangible “fabric” of the narrative leads to the potential for
greater intimacy, but also, paradoxically, a greater degree of vulnerability and
estrangement.
While Rhoda often feels like she is on the verge of floating away into
nothingness, her soliloquies are not filled with an ethereal spiritual transcendence, but are
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instead shot through with her struggle to integrate her consciousness with her “ill-fitting
body” (76). When faced with a sea of “men and women, with their twitching faces,” she
is transformed into a bobbing “cork” or effervescence of “foam” upon a “rough sea” (59).
Rhoda cannot seem to become a part of the flow of the waves, but is stranded,
suspended—at the peak of a wave or on the beach: “I have no end in view. I do not
know how to run minute to minute and hours to hour, solving them by some natural force
until they make the whole and individual mass that you call life [ . . . . ] I am like the
foam that races over the beach” (94). Her sense of her own agency is intact, even
powerful in the face of natural onslaughts: “I, who could beat my breast against the
storm and let the hail choke me joyfully”, she declares. However, society and its
corresponding demand for aural/oral exchange feels like a violation that “pin[s her] down
here” and leaves her “exposed” and “broken into separate pieces” (76). The mouth is not
the site of sensual pleasure as it is for Jinny, but becomes an instrument of violent battle:
“Tongues with their whips are upon me. Mobile, incessant, they flicker over me. I must
prevaricate and fence them off with lies.” Not only is she wounded by the “tongues that
cut [ . . . ] like knives,” but their assault fragments her voice, “making [her] stammer,”
stripping away her authenticity, “making [her] lie” (77). Sound, specifically as voices,
penetrates and disperses Rhoda into fragments that she is never really able to reconcile
into wholeness, leading ultimately to her suicide.
Acoustic penetrations are not always a site of anxiety and fragmentation, and
Jinny’s body seems to meld seamlessly with her soundscape, drawing energy from it and
celebrating the aural penetration. When the three girls are attending school together the
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sound of the school bells, similar to Miriam’s experience in Pilgrimage with the bells in
London, becomes a moment that vibrates through Jinny’s body with (sound) waves of
energy: “I love to hear the gong roar through the house and the stir begin—here a thud,
there a patter. Doors slam; water rushes. Here is another day; her is another day, I cry,
as my feet touch the floor” (38). As the dormitories transform from the quiet of
nighttime into the noisy activities of morning, Jinny actually gains corporeal stability on
“the floor” as she contributes her own “cry” to the mix of sounds. Rather than being
steeped in disembodied consciousness, Woolf’s construction of identity, we see, is deeply
imbedded in a tactile interaction with the lived environment that repudiates the Cartesian
dualisms: “In many ways, The Waves creates a far more ‘solid’ fictional world than
accounts of its insubstantialized poetic mysticism would suggest” (134 Marcus). The
doors, the floor, and other material objects have a real presence in the novel as perceived
phenomenologically and expressed acoustemologically.
Attempting to disengage the various senses from each other can provide a way to
both remove consciousness from aspects of corporeal perception, while enhancing
others—such as hearing. As a child Bernard creates an enclosed space, separating his
body from his surroundings in order to recall, through his memory, the sensation of
hearing. After a bath he wraps towels around him so they “envelop” him, allowing “rich
and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind” (17). Bernard carefully tucks away
his body in order to access the “sensations” that have already entered his mind and that
currently exist as memories residing “on the roof of [his] mind.” As he goes to bed,
covering himself in the bed linens, these “sensations” surround him in the form of sounds
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“heard” through the power of his memory: “Now I tie my pyjamas loosely round me and
lie under this thin sheet afloat in the shallow light which is like a film of water drawn
over my eyes by a wave. I hear through it far off, far away, faint and far, the chorus
beginning; wheels; dogs; men shouting; church bells; the chorus beginning” (17). Under
his sheet, his vision is blurred, allowing him to be a more attentive listener. The
“sensations” infiltrate his mind at the end of day, a time associated with going to sleep
and shifting from consciousness to unconsciousness. These remembered sounds would
seem to only exist as the matter of “psychical interiority,” and Bernard’s need to access
these thoughts by wrapping himself in towels and sheets evoke a need to reach a sort of
meditative detachment from his body. This “envelope,” however, allows him to subdue
some of his senses, such as vision, to focus on other physical sensations, such as
“hear[ing] . . . the chorus beginning."
Neville, also as a child, seeks moments of privacy from his peers to find a
peaceful state in which to recall sounds he heard earlier. If Bernard’s memories are
impressionistic, leaving him with a feeling of universal, communal experiences in which
sounds join in a “chorus.” Neville’s memories of sound are more specifically tied to
language. Neville decides not to go for a walk with the other children, so that he may
have a quiet “reprieve from conversation” (15). Neville rejects one form of speech to
recall previously overheard speech—the gruesome story of a murdered man:
What I felt when I heard about the dead man through the swing-door last
night when cook was shoving in and out the dampers. He was found with
his throat cut. The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon
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glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair. He was found in the
gutter. His blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead
codfish. (15)
Neville originally heard the story illicitly, and then creates something for us to eavesdrop
on, too, by repeating the story in his soliloquy. Neville’s need to delineate a separate
acoustic space from his friends in order to process the memory of hearing the story
recreates a parallel aural experience for the reader without the overlay of the present
sounds or the intrusive voices of his friends. However, his process of recalling the story
of the murdered man not only flashes back to the experience of hearing the story, but
shapes what he heard into a meaning that he now names: “Death among the apple trees.”
The mingling of memory, forming it into a story, hearing about it initially, and then
speaking it into the narrative of the novel bring together the process of corporeal
sensation with mental processes of creativity.
Neville opens himself to the experience of the extremes of sound to find poetry;
however, for some, the experience of a cacophonous world, especially in London, proves
overwhelming. Because sound is experienced as permeations into the body, an excess of
sound can overwhelm and disrupt the body, becoming invasive and even a violation
(Attali 24). Susan notices that despite London’s clamor, “people here shoot through the
streets silently” for there seems to be little point in speaking if it’s too noisy to be heard.
(43). In the early twentieth century, in order to preserve the expression of human voices
over machines, noise had to be legislated. While initially noise abatement activists hoped
to find a way to make their cities quieter, their efforts to make public spaces less noisy
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proved to be too daunting, so legislative efforts shifted to restricting personal behavior:
“By manipulating and controlling private space, by turning inward and creating
acoustically efficient refuges from the noises of public life, acousticians offered a
compelling alternative solution to the problem of noise” (Bijsterveld, Auditory Culture
Reader 168). As noise continued to be seen as something from which to escape,
architectural innovations in acoustical design created ways to build these retreats. The
recuperation of speech through acoustic design becomes important to the restoration of
human control of sound: “If science failed to silence the city, acoustical technology
could nonetheless create quiet places of refuge within it” (Thompson 170-1). While the
use of technology to regain mastery over soundscapes and create new acoustic spaces—
especially interiors—indicates an acceptance of the inevitability of increasing mechanical
noise, the turn to engineering innovations was hardly a utopic embrace of twentieth
century urban soundscapes. The resulting soundscapes in cities like London were filled
with cacophonous outdoors noise predominated by mechanical organic sounds. At the
same time, increasing attention was given to preserving the indoors as a place were these
voices could be heard. A primary goal of manipulating acoustical spaces was to hear the
purity of the human voice. Designs that failed to muffle ambient noise created
“reverberation [that] was inefficient because it interfered with the transmission of
speech” (Thompson 171).
To the extent that good acoustical design served the voice, then we can consider
Woolf’s creation of The Waves acoustic design as approximating the objectives of
modernist architects. This is not to say that Woolf creates a narrative removed from the
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infiltration of noise—indeed Neville’s receptiveness to sound from outside his rooms
belies this—but that the use of six voices for the majority of the text creates a space on
the novel’s pages that efficiently focuses on the “transmission of speech” and limits the
reverberation of excessive ambient interference.
Nonetheless, The Waves is not a novelized version of Carlyle’s soundproof room;
these pages do not provide a sealed retreat from the lived soundscape of a noisy city in
the early twentieth century, but, like the walls of Neville’s flat, reveal a permeability
through which readers experience not only the consciousnesses these six characters, but
also an embodied experience of their lived soundscape as well as the soundscape their
voices create. While the violent, invasive aspects of sound may explain Susan’s attitude
toward London and her desire to retreat to her rural home, it is the very way noise
disrupts communication that seems most relevant to the way the six talk in isolation
rather than with each other. Susan laments being at school, detached from the vitality on
life on her farm—where she is intuned with nature and family—“but here bells ring; feet
shuffle perpetually” (38). The sounds evoke action, endless, seemingly mindless action,
and coercive uniformity, like the gramophone in Between the Acts. When Susan goes to
London, she finds a place of disrupted communication, in which the connections between
emitter, transmitter and receiver are stymied. Louis, in the midst of the noise, realizes
that it isn’t simply that people aren’t speaking, but their voices have been erased,
absorbed into a sonic monolith: “‘The roar of London,’ said Louis, ‘is round us. Motor-
cars, vans, omnibuses pass and repass continuously. All are merged—wheels, bells, the
cries of drunkards, of merrymakers—are churned into one sound, steel, circular’” (98).
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The perpetual “roar” rotates “continuously,” stopping for no one. To Susan and Louis,
the city is an oppressive machine, but it becomes both exhilarating and destructive for the
others. As she grieves for Percival, Rhoda finds the city both dehumanizing and
comforting: “Look at the street now that Percival is dead. [ . . . . ] Reckless and random
the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile
world. [ . . . . ] This is to my liking. [ . . . . ] I like the passing of face and face and face,
deformed, indifferent. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy” (115). The violence
of the cacophonous “roar” of the city allows her to recover from her grief over Percival
(115). The machinery—like the passing by of successive anonymous faces—both reject
and release her from the “hostile world,” foreshadowing her own death: “I want publicity
and violence and to be dashed like a stone on the rocks. [ . . . . ] I ride rough waters and
shall sink with no one to save me” (115). The comfort the city provides is one of
annihilation.
As in her response to the bells at school, Jinny embraces the sounds that roar
through London, but their permeations elicit conflicting responses. Initially, she draws
energy from the city’s life force:
In the Tube station where everything that is desirable meets—Piccadilly
South Side, Piccadilly North Side, Regent Street and the Haymarket. I
stand for a moment under the pavement in the heart of London.
Innumerable wheels rush and feet press just over my head. The great
avenues of civilization meet here and strike this way and that. I am in the
heart of life. (140)
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As she descends into the station, the “roar” of the very “heart of London” seems to
surround her until she has become part of its pulsating energy. In the underground space
she taps into the vitality of the city, and she is synthesized into it. This subterranean level
of the city is not entirely enclosed, and while the “wheels” and “feet” are above her, they
also, like her, descend below the city. While in this space that is part of the city, yet
removed from its “heart,” she shifts almost instantly from joy to thoughts of death and
her own aging. Like Susan, Jinny is repulsed by the people moving silently within the
noisy city: “I admit, for one moment the soundless flight of upright bodies down the
moving stairs like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards
and the churning of the great engines remorselessly forwarding us, all of us, onwards
made me cower and run for shelter” (141). Her dismay, however, is fleeting and her
optimism returns, tinged with nationalist sentiments:
Think of the superb omnibuses, red and yellow, stopping and starting,
punctually in order. Think of the powerful and beautiful cars that now
slow to a foot’s pace and now shoot forward; think of men, think of
women, equipped, prepared, driving onward. This is the triumphant
procession; this is the army of victory with banners and brass eagles and
heads crowned with laurel-leaves won in battle. (141)
While Susan never assimilates into the “triumphant procession,” seeking the quieter
spaces in the country, Jinny remains determined to align herself with the energy of public
spaces, only allowing herself glimpses of the ominous hints of its oppressive forces when
she descends below the streets. For Bernard, the city may be a machine, but one that he
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accepts as inevitable. The “chorus” Bernard heard as a boy permeates the city, and he
reaches out to commune with it. Momentarily, upon learning of Percival’s death,
Bernard retreats from the energy of the city, seeking “silence, and to be alone and to go
out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to [his] world, what death has
done to [his] world” (110). As he grieves, this “world” becomes disconnected from him:
“I note the rhythm, the throb, but as a thing in which I have no part, since he sees it no
longer” (110). Nonetheless, like Jinny’s momentary lapse into thoughts of alienation and
mortality in the Tube station, Bernard regains his equilibrium within a few minutes: “Yet
already signals begin, beckonings, attempts to lure me back. Curiosity is knocked out
only for a short time. One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an
hour” (111). A few minutes more and “chaos, detail, return” and “the usual order” is
restored (112). Bernard hesitates a bit more, resisting the “lure,” but eventually he
“want[s] life round [him]” like the “usual sounds of tradesmen calling” (114).
Bernard transformed these “tradesmen” from men into a metaphoric place
where he can “pillow [ . . . . his] head after this exhaustion” and grief (114). Efforts of
noise abatement advocates often revealed elitist attitudes about what kinds of noise were
considered acceptable, and Woolf’s six characters here are not entirely innocent of such
judgments. While societal noise abatement solutions were largely unsuccessful, their turn
to efforts on a private level accentuates both classist definitions of noise, in addition to
accentuating the corporeal vulnerability of the body and mind to permeations of sounds.
Woolf’s experiment with narrative acoustics itself seems to be less representative of a
desire to be sequestered away from undesirable sonic elements, than a yearning to find a
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way to allow individual consciousness to be heard. Jinny’s continuous search for contact
is less class-bound than many of the other characters—she finds “rapture” in contact with
those who are her social peers, as well as in the serving staff, declaring, “Anybody will
do. I am not fastidious. The crossing-sweeper will do; the postman, the waiter in this
French restaurant” (74, 84-85). Speaking about wine with the waiter is enough to bring
about an orgasmic explosion: “Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon
the rich soil of my imagination. The entirely unexpected nature of this explosion—that is
the joy of intercourse. I, mixed with an unknown Italian waiter—what am I?” (85).
Nonetheless, many of the soliloquies are marked by classist attitudes. Even the pleasure
Jinny finds in talking to the waiter is followed by an astonished series of questions that all
center most fundamentally around the one that calls into question her entire identity:
“What am I?” After she releases herself from the tactile reminder of her contact with the
waiter, she is able to recover herself: “I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to
be married. I am to dine with my friends to night.” While her engagement is perhaps a
reminder that she should refrain from flirtations, the formality of the commitment to
marriage, as well as the social occasion with her friends, invokes a certain social decorum
that implies her obligation to become more “fastidious.”
Louis’ Australian accent is an outward, sounded signifier of his feelings of
alienation from English society, and even his friends, although we don’t “hear” that
accent; Woolf doesn’t write his soliloquies out with phonetic indicators of how he sounds
different from the other five speakers. Hearing the accent would be inconsistent with the
rest of the soliloquies, which are not replications of words said within the action of these
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six living their lives. As with all the characters, what we hear is the experience of these
lived actions. So too Louis’ soliloquies allow us to “hear” how it feels to sound the way
he does. Louis’ self-consciousness about his Australian accent becomes a means of
silencing him both on the football fields as a boy, as well as in his professional adult life.
His accent is integral to his outsider status, but also drives him to conform to familial
identifiers—his father has an accent and is a banker, and therefore, so is he: “I cannot
boast, for my father is a banker in Brisbane, and I speak with an Australian accent” (21).
As someone who, like his father, works in banking, he is tied to a more bourgeois sounds,
both in the form of his accent and in his relationship to the London soundscape, much the
way noise production is associated with being less civilized (Smith, M., Auditory Culture
Reader 9). While Neville might appreciate the poetry to be found in such noise, he can
do so from the detachment of his quiet home. Louis is immersed in the soundscape of a
common lunch shop, where he can feel the order and the beauty pulsating around him,
but cannot become a part of it: “The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is
the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then
expand again. Yet I am not included. If I speak, imitating their accent, they prick their
ears, waiting for me to speak again, in order that they may place me [ . . . . ] an alien,
external” (67). Although Louis attempts to join the “harmony,” he is rejected. Therefore,
like Neville, he observes the “harmony” from the outside. The poetry of the street, and
the harmony of the shop are not generated from Neville or Louis, but seep into their
soliloquies through their listening bodies. Neville retains the ability to remove himself
voluntarily, while Louis yearns to become a part of the “noise”: “I, who would wish to
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feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye
some far horizon; am aware of hats bobbing up and down in perpetual disorder” (67).
Louis, feels trapped in these “waves of the ordinary,” and he associates them with noise
and the crude sounds that he disdains, even while he feels their rejection: “Then I shall
grow bitter and mock at them. I shall envy them their continuance down the safe
traditional ways under the shade of old yew trees while I consort with cockneys and
clerks, and tap the pavements of the city” (L 47). His disdain for the lower class workers
in London is entwined with his resentment toward Bernard and Neville, who live in a
world of “old yew trees,” instead of the endless “hats bobbing up and down.” It is
difficult to delineate the point at which Louis’ disdain for those common “cockneys and
clerks” turns into self-loathing for his own inability to harmonize with them among the
“yew trees.”
Louis’ rejection of the lowness of the shop’s “harmony” in also entwined with the
necessity of having to associate with the uncivilized, noisy commoners, rather than
occupying the security of an elevated class position. At various points in the novel, shop-
girls become the site of othering lower-class noisiness. Bernard and Neville sit in their
rooms at university and hear shop-girls passing by their windows (61). Bernard finds
them simply distracting and allows his thoughts to wander into imagining that they could
be Susan, Jinny or Rhoda. Neville, who has not yet discovered the poetry of London’s
city streets, finds their noisiness offensive: “I cannot endure that there should be shop-
girls. Their titter, their gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in
moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation” (61). The shop-girls and
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“shuffling, heavy-laden old women” are a distraction and degrade the purity of the
“buildings like these”. Presumably, these buildings, as part of a university, are meant for
more important, elevated pursuits, such as the poetry Neville had written and shown to
Bernard the previous night. After the women are gone, Neville is relieved to have
“regained our territory after that brief brush with [ . . . ] the vanishing figures in the
distracted street” (61). Despite his annoyance with the chattering shop-girls, Bernard
seems to pride himself in being comfortable interacting with people from all walks of
life. Neville notes how Bernard can talk “as easily to the horse-breeder or to the plumber
as to us” (49). He is at ease not only male tradesmen and colleagues, but when he is
stuck at a train station after losing his connection, Neville realizes that Bernard will be
able to amuse himself by talking “to the barmaid about the nature of human destiny” (50).
Nonetheless, his earlier annoyance reveals that his affinity with members of the working
class is inconsistent. He likes their sounds as an aspect of the aural texture of public
spaces, his attitude betrays a degree of territoriality as well. He turns for comfort to the
sound of the tradesmen, making them into a “pillow,” which implies inclusion in a
domestic space, but he speaks these words while interacting in outdoor public space. He
still wants his private spaces to be free from their “chatter.” Bernard and Neville rid
themselves of the contamination of the female presence, and restore the “tranquility” of
their sequestered, male space. Distraction is located on the street, and its presence in
their rooms is an invasion: “Here we are masters of tranquility and order; inheritors of
proud tradition.” The tradition of male university life is untainted by the presence of
female scholars, and the sound of unworthy women lacking intellectual interests, such as
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“shop-girls,” indicates a sonic division not only between the social classes, but between
genders.
Rhoda, however, finds solace when entering the shop-girls’ territory, which
becomes a refuge for her mourning heart after Percival dies. She enters a shop for
stockings leaving noisy Oxford Street, where she discovers “hate, jealousy, hurry, and
indifference frothed into the wild semblance of life,” to take harbor in the interior quiet
and peaceful—until a shop-girl speaks. The pleasure of the quiet of the shop, like the
“froth” outdoors, lacks heft and substance; it is wispy and ephemeral:
Here is the shop where they sell stockings. And I could believe that
beauty is once more set flowing. Its whisper comes down these aisles,
through these laces, breathing among baskets of coloured ribbons. There
are then warm hollows grooved in the heart of the uproar; alcoves of
silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth which I
desire. Pain is suspended as a girl silently slides open a drawer. And then,
she speaks; her voice wakes me. (116)
Not only does the girl “wake” Rhoda from dream-like meditations on lace and ribbon, but
she incites powerful, violent emotions: “I shoot to the bottom among the weeds and see
envy, jealousy, hatred and spite scuttle like crabs over the sand as she speaks. These are
our companions.” The lace and ribbons in the Oxford Street shop become permeated
with the emotions emanating from Rhoda’s grieving consciousness. The female space of
a shop selling stocking and lace, like the men’s buildings of tradition, are filled with
beauty, and quiet. Once a shop-girl’s speech enters these spaces, though, their purity
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becomes contaminated—not only by their voices, but also by Rhoda’s response to the
sound of their voices.
The individual characters’ spatialized relationships to their soundscapes indicate
their attitudes about themselves as listening and speaking subjects. Bernard notices that
Neville and Louis are both silent during the train ride home from school, as if to protect
selves from the presence of others: “Both sit silent. Both are absorbed. Both feel the
presence of other people as a separating wall” (47). Silence becomes a material barrier to
sound, a way of fending off unwanted contact with others. Their silence annihilates
outsiders’ attempts at communicative engagement. As the train disembarks, Louis barely
resists slipping entirely into an extra-corporal state of disengagement: “Now I hang
suspended without attachments [ . . . . ] my body passes vagrant as a bird’s shadow. I
should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading, soon darkening and dying
there where it meets the wood, were it not that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead”
(46). Louis considers the ways in the three young men create the spatialized aspects of
their soundscapes through their engagements with degrees of silence. For himself, he
wants to escape the present moment, where he “sit[s] in a third-class railway carriage full
of boys going home from the holidays,” so he considers a possible course of action, with
his usual tinge of self-hatred—to “sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice, burying
[him]self in the past, in the dark” (47). If he both closes his eyes, and at least feigns
sleep, he disengages himself from both the responsibility of listening and responding to
the others in the carriage. Louis associates Neville’s retreat with the gentility of his social
class and upbringing, again with a trace of bitterness: “Neville, who slips a look
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occasionally over the edge of a French novel, and so will always slip into cushioned
firelit rooms, with many books and one friend, while I tilt on an office chair behind a
counter.” These students are leaving their boarding schools to prepare for university, or
as in Louis’ case, to begin their professions, so he associates Neville’s literary retreat into
silence with the luxury of comfortable spaces far removed from Louis’ future of “making
money vaguely” (46). Bernard, however, fully acknowledges where he is, and
“acquiesces, telling stories” (47). Creating a narrative, and engaging with an audience,
therefore becomes an act of courage, and he does not hide from the reality of the “third-
class railway carriage.” Each of these three men find different modes of acoustic
engagement with their environment, cluing us in to their emotional relationship with each
other, as well as what this specific turning point in their lives bodes for the distinct ways
of inhabiting acoustic spaces their futures portend.
For Bernard, however, it not only the social aspect of the soundscape that lures
him into “telling stories.” He is convinced that his very identity depends upon others to
“bring [him] into existence”; therefore, words must attain their own materiality, even if
one as ephemeral as “rings of smoke”: “When I cannot see words curling like rings of
smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing” (96). Therefore, the absence of “telling
stories” or the “rings of smoke” would be a kind of death for him. At the dinner for
Percival’s memorial, Bernard marks the moment when they have all eaten, they have all
talked about their dead friend, and they have all become silent together: “Drop upon
drop, Bernard said, silence falls. It forms on the roof of the mind and falls into pools
beneath. For ever alone, alone, alone,—hear silence fall and sweep its rings to the
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farthest edges. Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content, I, whom loneliness
destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop” (164-5). As if to acknowledge the passing of their
friend, they must inhabit a moment of their own deathly silence. Susan’s words, as usual,
are associated with nature: “In this silence, said Susan, it seems as if no leaf would ever
fall, or bird fly.” The natural order of life is suspended in moments of silence. The
moment is fleeting, however, as the six friends who remain do not themselves acquiesce
to eternal silence, as they are “still vigorous” (166). Little by little, they begin to notice
the sounds outside the restaurant, as world of the living breaches their mournful
seclusion: “ ‘Silence falls; silence falls,’ said Bernard, ‘But now listen, tick tick; hoot,
hoot; the world has hailed us back to it. I heard for one moment the howling winds of
darkness as we passed beyond life. The tick, tick, (the clock); the hoot, hoot (the cars).
We are landed; we are on shore; we are sitting, six of us, at a table’ ” (165-6). As if to
join temporarily with Percival again, they have “passed beyond life” into a separate
space, characterized by passage through “howling winds” to where “silence falls” (165).
Then the “living world” beckons them back to another space—to the shore and the table.
While they have, of course, not physically moved through the course of the dinner, the
shifting soundscapes have acted as transport between different realms.
The associations of silence with death and sound with life lead to a tempting, but
insufficient binary. As discussed earlier, the excess of sound, or noise, can operate as a
sort of virtual silence in its oppression of voices and sonic distinctions. The point at
which sound and silence pivot can be considered a productive moment. Woolf creates
the metaphor of a fin breaking through water as a way of conceptualizing this emergence,
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and writes it as one of Bernard’s phrases filed under “F”: “Fin in a waste of waters”
(138). It is not until the final section of the novel that Bernard fulfills the inspiration of
the moment he saw a fin breaking through the waters. While speaking with his unnamed
dinner companion, Bernard reminisces about a literary discussion he used to have with
Neville, and again draws upon this metaphor: “[We] sank into one of those silences
which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the wastes of silence;
and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths, spreading round it a little ripple
of satisfaction, content” (202). The act of breaking through the “wastes of silence” itself
allows for the emergence of ideas; the fin, seems to create waves of sound through these
ideas, through the “ripple[s]” on the surface of the water. The act of disturbance is not
repugnant but a welcome moment of contact and creative engagement, for not only were
they talking about literature, but they were creating their own “versions” of Shakespeare
through their discussions of their critical interpretations of his texts. The silence itself,
although called a “waste,” becomes a site of “satisfaction, content,” dispelling negative
and deathly associations. It is from these quiet depths that the creative disturbance
emerges. If, however, the waters have no fins waiting in their depths, their silence does
become deathly.
Bernard begins the process of facing his own mortality, as he converses with
himself (as much as with the man at the dinner table with him), and finds himself faced
with an absence of words: “I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then
with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin-breaks the
waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no
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varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth”
(211). With the loss of words, Bernard fears a loss of an identifiable self, leading him to
regress into child’s language and inarticulate cries. His life’s work—the gathering of
phrases—becomes meaningless: “I carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded
merely changes; a shadow, I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I
proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless through a world weightless,
without illusion?” (212). His transformation into “weightless[ness],” evoking Rhoda’s
sensations,, becomes an indication of a loss of spiritual integrity: as the body loses its
corporeal materiality, the meanings associated with his body become merely “phantoms,”
no longer able “to hear echoes.” Even when perception returns, clarity of communication
does not. Bernard becomes like “a ghost,” rendering him vulnerable, and “unable to
speak save in a child’s words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases” (213). His
“phrases” have been a form of protection, allowing Bernard to determine the degree to
which he responds to his environment. As on the train, Bernard does not only want to
hear and perceive; he wants to tell stories, because that gives him a sense of his own
existence. But as Bernard acknowledges that “this little affair of ‘being’ is over,” he
finds no need for language: “How describe or say anything in articulate words again?”
(213). Not only are words unnecessary, but Bernard comes to question the validity of
narrative form: “But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning?”
(198). As he declares the death of the “man called [ . . . ] Bernard,” he discards his book
of phrases:
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My book, stuffed with phrases, has dropped to the floor. It lies under the
table to be swept up by the charwoman when she comes wearily at dawn
looking for scraps of paper, old tram tickets, and here and there a note
screwed into a ball and left with litter to be swept up. What is the phrase
for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call
death? I do not know. [ . . . . ] I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing
that comes down with all its feet on the floor. (219)
Bernard’s treasured notebook becomes as inconsequential as scraps under the table that
will be swept away when he leaves. The futility of his efforts to capture meaning on its
pages are revealed when after a lifetime of gathering these words, he cannot find ways of
expressing fundamental aspects of human existence like love and death, aside perhaps
from something trite as the phrase “its feet on the floor.” Therefore, language becomes
superfluous. Yet even as Bernard rejects words, he still desires some form of oral
expression: “I need a howl; a cry.” In the end Bernard rejects the need for the formation
of “neat” narratives filled with phrases, organized with a beginning and an ending. The
need to “howl” or “cry” expresses a sort of oral intensity and immediacy with which his
phrases could not connect him. The “language of lovers” and the “words of one syllable
such as children speak” may come the closest to conveying that sense of experiential
intensity through words.
Bernard’s realization that his phrases do not hold the keys to understanding or
communicating life with the authenticity he desires ultimately does not lead him to a kind
of fatalistic death wish. The sense of stillness and quieting the mind that accompanies the
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evacuating the noises of the self allows Bernard to perceive the sounds at him and thus
experience his life more fully. Although an old man, he emerges from the restaurant with
a renewed sense of vitality: “I am aware once more of a new desire” (220). His last
words are a battle cry: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O
Death!” By addressing Death directly as “you,” the identity of the addressee is made
ambiguous. Bernard implies the possibility of a complicit relationship between the
reader and Death in the closing line of his final soliloquy, after which both the novel and
Bernard’s voice is silenced. And, paradoxically, at the moment Bernard decides to reject
his tendency toward “neat” phrases, he comes up with paragraphs filled with poetic
metaphors that transform his contemplation of death into a meditation on life’s arc that
resonates with the immediacy of the primal “howls” and children’s simple words. His
desire is “like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back.” The
notion of facing death is one of a grand battle, with the aging Bernard as the vanquishing
hero. However, even as he deploys the majestic language of such poetic metaphors, he
mingles it with his very personal image of his friend, Percival, as a young man, the man
everyone thought of as the idealized British hero. Therefore, it is perhaps not Death
whom Bernard addresses in his final words, but it the reader, who will aid him in his
triumphant victory over Death. The final line of the novel, which follows his soliloquy in
the italicized font of the interludes, implies that this last page of the novel is a site of
fissure in the flow of the waves of consciousness and sound, but the image of the waves
breaking upon the shore also evokes the water’s continuous movement, curling back in
upon itself into infinity.
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Writing a novel during a time fraught with anxiety about increasingly oppressive
acoustic environments allows Woolf to capitalize upon new ways of thinking about
sound—ranging from the scientific, to the social, to the architectural—in order to create
an experimental narrative form that dispels established ways of arranging sound objects
as discreet and stable pieces of “furniture.” The relationship between listening and
speaking subjects becomes a metaphor for Woolf’s reliance upon voices to comprise the
majority of her narrative. As the communicative aura is reliant upon attentive listening as
a means of creating a speaking subject, the reader is a necessary component of these six
characters’ soliloquies. The auscultation of the speeches toward a “listening” reader
lends immediacy to his or her relationship with the text. By extracting these voices from
the distractions of their material environment, their voices become the primary material
of the novel. Woolf’s quest to find a new “syntax” harkens back to a prelinguistic
moment of the primordial cry with Bernard’s “howl,” which is a reverberation of the
voice at its purest. In an attempt that echoes Woolf’s own stated goals to get at the
essence of reality, Bernard dismisses his abilities to write from a material point of view,
in the face of his desires to capture an aural representation of consciousness: “I can
sketch the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work?
Can I hear her voice—the precise tone with which, when we are alone, she says
‘Bernard’? And then what next?” (57). The tension between the attention paid to creating
the material environment in which literary characters live and the inner embodied lives of
these characters is a distraction to both the author, as well as the reader, who conjures up
their image as he or she digest the words from the page. By subordinating these
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“surroundings” to the force of speech, however, Woolf creates a quieter space in which
the voices that transmit the essence of these six people can be heard, and therefore,
created through the “listening” ears of the reader.
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Conclusion: Listening for Objects of Desire
and the Aurality of Reading Practices
The noisiness of the early twentieth century not only permeates the diegetic action
of the novels by Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but infiltrates the
very structure of their experiments to create new literary forms. The sounds become
instrumental in revealing aspects of consciousness for the protagonists in each of these
novels. In Richardson’s Pointed Roofs, Miriam rebels against patriarchal listening
practices through an interior stream of consciousness whose syntax indicates moments of
her quiet retreat from aural intrusions. She explores feelings of sensual pleasure and
anxiety associated with the permeations of loud, dramatic sounds into and through her
body. While the sound events that Miriam reports are identifiable as external acts which
infiltrate her consciousness, their significance to the text is most fully realized as an
aspect of Miriam’s emotional development. The characters in Joyce’s Ulysses, most
specifically Bloom in the “Sirens” episode, experience sound as a more varied mixture of
externally generated sound events, imagined or remembered sounds, and internally
generated sound—the latter including Bloom’s nonlinguistic sighs and farts—rather than
speech. Bloom’s perceptions of these sounds are integral to his emotional exploration of
the meaning of his life and marriage to Molly. Woolf creates a soundscape in The Waves
that is dispersed across the lifespan of six different protagonists. Her soliloquized form
embeds the experience of hearing within the process of speaking, thereby making it
increasingly difficult to distinguish between the sounds as aspects of physical waves of
particles displaced through time and space and the characters’ conversion of their
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experiences of these sounds as expressions of their individual perceptions. The aurality
of The Waves is less dependent upon sound as an indicator of a clearly delineated setting
that forms a backdrop or stage for the six characters’ speech-acts than those in
Pilgrimage and “Sirens.” While the sounds of childhood, school life, trains, and the
London streets are interspersed throughout their stream of consciousness soliloquies, the
actual material environment recedes as the voices themselves assert themselves as the
primary aural fixture of the novel. Sound leads the reader though an experience of
“listening” that focuses increasingly upon apprehending the texture of words as sound
objects.
All of these novels represent sound as infiltrations that permeate into listening
subjects, regardless of the subject’s ability to determine the originating site of these aural
emissions. Meanwhile, the experimental aesthetics that emerges amid the changing
soundscapes of the early twentieth century encourage different practices by readers. The
creation of new narrative forms that, quite literally, ask us to turn an ear toward newly
disorienting aural environments destabilizes distinctions between impressions that remain
diegetically auscultated within the pages of the book, and the ways these experiences
seep into the non-diegetic soundscape shared with the readers. As the markers for
temporal and spatial orientation become more diffuse, the reader’s ability to navigate the
narrative space of these novels becomes increasingly dependent on sound as a property of
consciousness, rather than on sound as a means of understanding the physical setting for
the action of these novels.
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The movement of sound waves is commensurate with modernist ideas about
reality as a state of perpetual flux, and is, therefore, consistent with creating narratives
that explore the relationship between aurality and consciousness. Nonetheless, there are
tangible aspects to listening in these novels that affirm sound as particulate matter that is
both emitted and absorbed bodily. The Waves approximates the creation of a soundscape
that has been emptied of the physical setting for Woolf’s narrative acoustics, but it still
retains a sense of materiality that is anchored in the texture of the words and voices that
comprise the majority of the narrative. These mimetic properties of the narratives are
less faithful to the shape, or sound, of things than concerned with the representation of
the experience of these objects as they move through the consciousness of the characters
as well as the reader. Therefore, the reader becomes attuned not only to what the
protagonists hear within the narrative diegesis, but also to “hearing” these sound objects
phenomenologically, through the experience of the characters. The infiltrations of sound
into the bodies of the characters simultaneously permeates the consciousness of the
reader, thereby constructing a soundscape informed by multiple aural layers: the original
sound objects, the process of hearing or emitting these sounds (which, in turn, is also an
aspect of hearing oneself), and the expression of the experience of these sounds as an
aspect of voicing.
In the final section of Woolf’s novel, the one who tells so many stories, Bernard,
expresses a rare moment in which he is content to be with silent and exist in silence. The
quiet moment allows him to contemplate simple objects before him on the dinner table as
extensions of his meditations on his own existence: “How much better is silence; the
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coffee-cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that
opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup,
this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself” (219). Bernard has not
physically entered into a different, silent space, as indicated a moment later when he is
distracted by the intrusion of the sounds of a waiter clearing the tables of these very
objects. Yet through his temporary ability to “tune out” his environment, Bernard has
fabricated a fleeting, silent space that seems suspended outside of the course of time and
space that surrounds him. For a short time, the noises around him recede from his
sensory field, and these ordinary objects became imbued with existential significance.
Much as Woolf creates a narrative space for listening to her protagonists’ voices, Bernard
encapsulates this moment in silence, which frees him to more carefully consider these
objects, but also to speak them into existence as words with material texture.
Bernard’s newfound attention to the aural materiality of the object anticipates
Stein’s experimental use of sound in Tender Buttons. Originally, I intended to conclude
this project with an extra chapter dedicated to Stein’s modernist investments in creating
textual soundscapes; now, however, I’d like to bring these concluding remarks to a close
by indicating briefly how Stein’s achievements build on these experiments in the prior
chapters. Stein’s pursuit of the “continuous present” in texts like her prose-poem Tender
Buttons leads to an even more distinctive linguistic materiality (“Composition as
Explanation” 518). Her lines within each category, “Objects – Food – Rooms,” stand as
an apparent evacuation of any contextual soundscape beyond the words themselves. Like
Bernard’s silent moment, the environmental context recedes and almost seems to
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disappear entirely. Unlike the case studies of my previous chapters, Stein does not
directly contend with urban noise. Her literature celebrates the cacophony of modernist
life through the creation of a linguistic dissonance. Manipulating language and
subverting conventions has political implications for the nature of the production of
meaning. Drawing attention to the construction of meaning through language—and
Stein’s deconstruction of accepted cultural linguistic conventions—creates a soundscape
that must make meaning through individual, preferably sounded, interaction, for Stein’s
work is best appreciated when read aloud. The text itself is the originating sound object,
rather than being a narrative of reported or represented auditory events. She disrupts
conventions of meaning through incongruent juxtapositions of categories and descriptors.
Unlike Bernard’s table set with a logical assembly of dining implements, Stein’s section
entitled “A Piece of Coffee” does not indicate any relationship to brewing, or drinking
the beverage (463). The phrase is repeated in the body of the section, but offers no
further clarity or expected associations: “A piece of coffee is not a detainer.” The
juxtaposition of a liquid beverage (coffee) with a portioning of solid material (piece)
further accentuates the ways Stein assembles words as a way of disrupting semantic
expectations in order to draw the reader’s ear more directly into “hearing” the textural
characteristics of the words, rather than relying upon their meaning. The “piece of
coffee” does not have the existential materiality of Bernard’s coffee cups on the table—
this coffee is located in a kind of abstracted “nowhere.” Material context is not entirely
eliminated, but is instead derived from the reader’s perception of Stein’s deliberately
unsettling juxtapositions of words. Like the “piece of coffee,” Stein repeatedly assembles
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odd associations through her lexical and syntactical choices: “A seal and matches and a
swan and ivy and a suit” (462). Initially, the “seal” may be read as associated with the
matches, evoking the impression of a seal on a package, but when followed by the
“swan” one thinks of a seal as part of the category “animal.” Stein not only confounds
linguistic associations with her word order, but she also fragments words to disrupt their
individual linguistic meaning: “Eat ting, eating a grand old man said roof and never never
re soluble burst, not a near ring not a bewildered neck, not really any such bay” (494).
While the fragmentation of words in Ulysses implies an auditory layering of intersecting
sounds within a specific soundscape, and the complications for the listening subject
resulting from the multidirectionality of sound, here such fragmentation further
emphasizes the textural and syllabic characteristics of the words themselves. There are
no actions or characters to illuminate the significance of any of these words or phrases.
The novels discussed earlier locate the reader’s acoustic perception within the subjective
experience of the characters. Stein has evacuated Tender Buttons of the diegetic process
of listening, thereby auscultating her words directly into the ears of her readers. Tender
Buttons is not populated with listening subjects; the only originating sound events are the
words as they are “heard” by the reader. It seems that Stein has fulfilled Woolf’s goal to
create texts that reject the Edwardian materiality she condemned, a problem Stein solves
by eliminating all human elements until the only people who remain are the readers.
Stein’s famous use of repetition forms a temporal suspension that also works to
draw the reader more deeply into the sounds of her text. In the essay “Composition as
Explanation,” written several years after Tender Buttons, she attempts to explain the
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objects of her creative work. Throughout the essay she refers to her desire to create a
“prolonged present” or “continuous present” (517, 518). Repeated words and phrases
seem to circle back in upon each other, subverting attempts at linear progression. While
there are numerous examples of this method in her creative works, including Tender
Buttons and even this essay, it seems that the most straightforward way she can find to
explain her aesthetic objectives is to enact them: “There was a groping for using
everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable
beginning of beginning again and again and again” (519). Her definition of the
“continuous present” performs her poetic invention. In the “Food” section of Tender
Buttons she begin with a section entitled, “Roast Beef,” which again does not give an
indication of the content that is to follow:
In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening in the
morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening
there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is
mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in
feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. (477)
The lines are filled, not with any reference to food or eating, but with repeated terms that
reference, among other things, times of day, and elongate the temporality of the reading
of these lines themselves. Evening and morning seem to meld together into a continuous
“feeling” of resting, sleeping, reddening, mounting, resignation, recognition, recurrence
and pinching. Stein’s use of the present participle further emphasizes the way these are
all ongoing actions. The three words in the sequence that are not verbs all begin with
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“re” as if to point the words back into repetition, too. Even though semantically these
words don’t all reference a turning back, hearing the same syllable again and again in this
short passage acts as its own echo.
To more fully appreciate the sounded aspects of Stein’s work, which her literary
contortions lead us to believe are important, it logically follows that the sounds of her
words will be appreciated more completely through actual voicing. Because there is no
acoustic ground written into the soundscape of Tender Buttons, each word functions as a
figure sounded against the silence of the white spaces on the page. The reader becomes a
full participant in creating the figure in the literary soundscape by reading these words
aloud. Voicing the syllables on the page enacts a sounding that is less invested in the
meaning of the words, than in actively enlisting mouths and ears into creating a literary
work that accesses consciousness by kinesthetically engaging with the text. Emphasis
upon the sound of words allows Stein to detach words from the ties of historically,
culturally, and politically embedded meaning. While Stein’s abstract and bewildering
juxtapositions hardly resemble the childlike language or the primordial “howl” Bernard
seeks at the end of The Waves, Stein seems to find a sophisticated means of using
familiar words to access the same aura of that prelinguistic moment.
The “piece of coffee” evokes a new way of hearing the aural texture of these
syllables, because their meanings have been destabilized; however, there is still the trace
of their normal functional definitions. The words have meaning as they are assembled,
and beckon the reader to “puzzle” them out to determine the significance embedded
within the sounds. They are objects of meaning unto themselves, with significant aural
145
texture. For example, this passage from the “Objects” section about callouses serves not
only as a textural provocation, but also as a commentary on gender (in)equity: “Callous
is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest
in there being present as many girls as men. . . . It shows dirt is clean when there is
volume.” (462). The lack of punctuation to indicate the phrasing of the first sentence
compels at least an imagined voicing by the reader to feel one’s way toward finding the
points where the breaths and pauses would naturally fall. Seeing the words on the page is
a less efficient means of determining their cadence and rhythm. Once the phrasing rests
more easily on the tongue and ear of the reader, the meaning of the words can be more
comfortably parsed. The notion of “callous” as a hardening of the skin from repeated
friction, something that occurs on the body, also can refer to emotional callousness, or
metaphorical “hardening.” A callous on one’s body “leaves behind what will be soft”
skin, as in replacing the soft skin with the harder callous on the surface—the softness is
hidden and protected. A surface of emotional callousness tends to act as a barrier for
those who are actually psychologically and emotionally vulnerable, or “soft,” underneath.
The “interest” in “as many girls as men” may be read as an argument for a continual
commitment to feminist progress. In order to move this cause forward, it is best for girls
to hide their “softness,” their vulnerability to misogyny and discrimination, and to protect
themselves with hardening callouses. The “dirt” of patriarchy is culturally valorized, not
because it is intrinsically good, but because it is dominant, and holds the greatest
“volume” of power. The process of extracting these ideas from just a few lines of text
demands repeated readings. Even without the use of the same words or phrases, Stein
146
builds into her poetic form a necessity for the reader to return to these lines several times.
Stein invites her reader to come back again and again to find the logical meaning behind
words that individually are easily understood, but in combination present a mystery. The
repeated readings therefore lead to the achievement of Stein’s “continuous present,” not
just at the textual level of recurring words, phrases, or sounds, but as an act performed at
the point of readerly contact. The repetition leads to hearing the words in and of
themselves, with the context constructed at the moment that the text impinges upon the
mind of the reader.
Whether actually or metaphorically listening to modernist texts, readers transform
these novels, into sound objects, which permeate their own soundscapes and
consciousness. If distinctions between these registers become difficult to determine, the
location of the subject in turn becomes destabilized. In the case of Tender Buttons, the
reader is the dominant presence; in the previously examined novels, there are clearly
protagonists who provide a subjective perspective around which the novels’ soundscapes
can be oriented. Nonetheless, much as sound waves exist simultaneously, multiple
layers of listening can be imagined, too. The subjective absorption of the aural content of
these works seem to also dovetail the diegetic perceptions of the characters in the novels
with these of the reader who “listens” to their soundscape as well. While there is no
interlocking fictional consciousness with the mind of a reader in Tender Buttons, Stein’s
repetition seems to accommodate infinite sound waves converging within the extended
temporal space of the “continuous present.”
147
Modernist writers living through this era of acoustic dynamism inevitably
produced works informed by their soundscape. These novels convey an immediate sense
of the lived experience unique to their social, technological, political and cultural era.
Technology fills the modernist soundscape not only with new things to hear, but also new
ways of hearing. The historically placed environments of modernism, in addition to
personal soundscapes, create an interplay between the reader and text. Modernist
innovations with narratives of the consciousness, and this turning inward might seem to
signify a silencing of voices in favor of filling pages with “thoughts.” To the contrary:
these novels are vibrantly noisy, both as a reflection of modernist life, and as a
production of a new dimension of literary experience—the novel as sound.

148
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Through innovative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, modernist writers created amorphous interior narratives in an attempt to delve beneath the surface of the individual subject. This is not to say that the focus on inner thoughts results in silent novels. Rather sound becomes both a part of the exterior sonic environment as well as the interior world of individual subjects. The boundaries between internal and external soundscapes are repeatedly and constantly permeated as sounds mingle, merge and disperse between, through and within bodies and consciousness. Modernist subjects engage with these flowing sounds, becoming participants in the soundscape as actors who create, as well as conduits or recipients of sound. I propose reconfiguring these novels as sound objects themselves, thereby placing modernist novels within a soundscape that includes the reader through a sonic engagement with the texts. Experiments with aurality within modernist narratives operate not only diegetically, but also infiltrate the reader’s existing sound world. ❧ Tracing the literary roots of these trends in narrative experimentation reveals the extent to which modernist writers pursued new ways of experimenting with sound and consciousness. In this introduction, I will be relying on two such precursors—Charlotte Brontë and Dorothy Richardson—to draw some provisional distinctions before moving, in the next two chapters, to examine the aural dimensions and soundscapes incorporated into the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Bronte’s representations of sound in Jane Eyre are a product of the Victorian period in which her novel was written, but also anticipate the innovations to be found in the following century. Dorothy Richardson’s twelve volume novel series, Pilgrimage, was the first to be associated with the term which is so closely identified with modernism—“stream of consciousness”—and also makes sound a central aspect of its impressionistic narrative, presaging later modernist interventions. ❧ In my first chapter I will explore Joyce’s use of sound in “Sirens” not only as an aspect of material information, but also as he experiments with techniques to evoke aural simultaneity, and a soundscape auscultated through Bloom’s consciousness. As a result, sound both orients Bloom as the center of the novel, but disorients the reader, whose perception of Bloom’s external sound environment becomes dislocated from the originating sound objects, because the reader accesses it through the associations that occur within Bloom’s consciousness. ❧ In Woolf’s The Waves sounds are also expressed as an aspect of the consciousness of the protagonists. While meeting with all the protagonists of the novel for a dinner party, Bernard hears “cars rush past this restaurant

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Creator Dawson Zare, Mariko (author)

Core Title Noisy modernists: the sound of narrative experimentation

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/13/2012

Defense Date 05/04/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag auditory,aural,modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,sound

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Boone, Joseph A. (committee chair), Smith, Bruce R. (committee chair), Demers, Joanna T. (committee member)

Creator Email madawson@usc.edu,mdawsonzare@gmail.com

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Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA