Sound and literature /
"A week after the end of WW2 a nightingale begins to sing in the darkness of a northwest London park. 'Figures of listeners' appear in the nearby lighted windows.1 Part of the 'emanations of peacetime', the mellifluous whistles and trills transfix but also unsettle those wit...
| Other Authors: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY :
Cambridge University Press,
2020.
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| Series: | Cambridge critical concepts.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "A week after the end of WW2 a nightingale begins to sing in the darkness of a northwest London park. 'Figures of listeners' appear in the nearby lighted windows.1 Part of the 'emanations of peacetime', the mellifluous whistles and trills transfix but also unsettle those within earshot emerging as they are from an auditory wartime regime of hyper-alert listening.2 The bird sings 'into incredulity [...] note after note from its throat stripped everything else to silence'.3 This is Elizabeth Bowen's 'I Hear You Say So' (1945), but in all her fiction, and her work as a broadcaster and writer for the BBC, Bowen had a keen ear for the acoustics of modernity, particularly the uncanny and troubling properties of found sound. In this story, too, given that the nightingale's song is acousmatic - the tiny bird unseen - Bowen plays with the confusion between 'absolute' and reproduced sound. 'Listen, they got a nightingale on the wireless!', one character exclaims.4 The BBC had first broadcast a nightingale's song (in duet with the cellist Beatrice Harrison) in 1924 and it became a popular feature, especially during WW2 when its harmonics were thought to soothe the populace's beleaguered ears. But the story also sets up complex reverberations with a chorus of nightingales, from the wartime staple, 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square' to centuries of poetic warblers: Ovid, Keats, Anne Finch, T. S. Eliot (many of these alluded to directly in story). Literary culture shapes how and what we hear, particularly in the case of a sonic fetish object as resonant as the nightingale. As one character notes: 'It's ourselves we hear'"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 volume : illustrations (black and white). |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781108479608 110847960X |