Close Listening

Urban Soundscapes in Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, and Berlin Alexanderplatz

Annika Eisenberg

Sound is a sensory experience and the human ear is the designated detector of sounds. The question arises, therefore, as to whether this implies that only media appealing specifically to this organ can incorporate and communicate sound. In this chapter, I argue that sound occurs very prominently in literature — and not just as an elaborate metaphor or atmospheric background description, but as sound in the way Melba Cuddy-Keane suggests: "[By] reading for sonics rather than semantics, for precepts rather than concepts, we discover new ways of making narrative sense". In following this argument, I contribute to the growing field of Literary Sound Studies as a specialised area within the widely interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies, a field which still "lack[s] a language adequate to the discussion of sound — a language that addresses sound as sound and not as something else". In a similar manner to Sylvia Mieszkowski's Resonant Alterities (2014), this chapter will "build a bridge between the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies and literary criticism". In doing so, I regard sound in literature as a liminal phenomenon, and it will be seen not only that the notion of liminality is productive as a concept for the analysis of sound in literature, but that sound itself is staged as a liminal phenomenon in texts. I first outline possible ways of looking at literature's particular means for "staging" sound — a term borrowed from Karin Bijsterveld — by conceptualising and contextualising ideas of mimesis, representation, and other approaches to the incorporation of sensory experiences in literature in order to arrive at liminality as a heuristic concept for literary sound studies. Then, I put this into practice by punctuating the urban soundscapes of three of the most seminal city novels of the early twentieth century: James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which centres on one day in Dublin (16 June 1904) and the activities and thoughts of Leopold Bloom as a parallel to Homer's Odyssey (eighth century BC); John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), which tells the stories of six main characters as they struggle to cope with life in New York City shortly before, during, and after World War I; and Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which is about the dim-witted and gullible ex-convict Franz Biberkopf, who vows to be respectable, but finally surrenders to the temptations of bustling Berlin. I have chosen two aspects that, to my mind, lend themselves to a fruitful investigation of urban soundscapes in literature and illustrate the analytical implications of liminality: onomatopoeia and literary dialect, which I will address in the final sections of this chapter.

SENSORY EXPERIENCES IN LITERATURE

Urban sound in literature might at first seem far from a marginal phenomenon, especially since the city and its sensory experience has become a focal point in many modern and postmodern novels. But there is considerable dissent among scholars whether literature actually contains sensory material — and thus sound. Elaine Scarry, for instance, proposes a threefold typology of how sensory experiences are incorporated and staged in different media: immediate, delayed, and mimetic sensory content. The first — immediate sensory content — tends to be experienced in music, painting, sculpture, theatre, and film, since all of these appeal to the actual senses of hearing, sight, smell, or touch. The second — delayed sensory content — gives "instructions for the production of actual sensory content". To elucidate this, Scarry uses the example of a musical score that produces actual aural content only when interpreted on a musical instrument. To Scarry, verbal arts occupy the realm of the third of these categories —"perceptual mimesis" — which means that they feature "no actual sensory content, whether immediate or delayed; there is instead only mimetic content, the figural rooms and faces and weather that we mimetically see, touch, and hear, though in no case do we actually do so".

Despite this typology being frequently put to use, I do not find Scarry's distinction between delayed and mimetic sensory content convincing. Certainly, musical scores (delayed sensory content) follow different rules and conventions than literary language (mimetic sensory content) when it comes to the transcription of sounds. But do they really require two separate and distinct categories? If one tries to find other examples analogous to musical notation and the actual musical piece, one might arrive at the relationships between a screenplay and the actual film, or a script of a theatre play and its actual performance. But what if, say, the theatre script never gets produced or is even never intended to be performed, as is the case with closet dramas? And, taken even further, what about the prolific readers of musical scores who can hear the actual musical piece by reading the notation? So rather than trying to essentialise the respective art forms and media, rather than trying to decide from the outset if something mediated by paintings, musical notation, or poetry can or cannot be actually heard, seen, tasted, smelt, or felt, I would like to argue for a more dynamic and flexible model to describe sensory content in literature (and other arts) that takes into account an intersubjective perspective and the many grey areas and marginal spaces that interart and intermedia relations create for the sensory apparatus. I propose the notion of liminality to serve as such a model. The definition of liminality that I use is taken originally from the studies of rituals by anthropologists Arnold...