The Art of Noise: Literature and Disturbance 1900-1940
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE ART OF NOISE: LITERATURE AND DISTURBANCE 1900-1940 by Nora Elisabeth Lambrecht A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October, 2017 © 2017 Nora Elisabeth Lambrecht All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Art of Noise: Literature and Disturbance 1900-1940 is a study of noise’s role in prose literature in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. The Art of Noise focuses on what I call modernist noise, a way of leveraging noise— understood both as an auditory phenomenon (unwanted sound) and cybernetic interference (additional or garbled information that distorts information transmission)—to draw attention to, and in some cases to patch, a communicative or epistemological gap. I examine how authors leverage noise’s ability to confuse, to dismay, to pull a reader out of the flow of a text, and even to alienate her in order to create sticking points in their work that demand attention. In tracing noise’s disruptive qualities through modernist and modernist-era novels, I am particularly interested in how the defamiliarizing action of modernist noise coalesces around limit cases of social and political belongingness— narratives of extremity ranging from total war to economic and racial otherness. Scholarship on literary sound has tended to focus on musicality, or on the impact of sound technology on modernist culture. This focus has led to a general neglect of noise in se. The authors I consider—chief among them Mary Borden, James Joyce, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright—suggest that writing noise carries with it the possibility of intercourse between otherwise unbridgeable domains of experience. Instead of resolving modernist noise into a symptom of the twentieth century’s mechanized war and industry or of modernism’s own inclination toward an aesthetic of difficulty, I read its irruption into the novel as a productive disturbance. Directors: Douglas Mao and Mark Christian Thompson ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project took a village. Doug Mao has been its (and my) champion: a generous reader, rigorous editor, and truly irreplaceable mentor. Mark Thompson was a vital source of intellectual support, perspective, and humor. I am a better writer, more careful reader, and livelier thinker for having had the chance to study under faculty at Johns Hopkins and beyond, and I am grateful, in particular, for the guidance of Frances Ferguson, Isobel Armstrong, and James Eli Adams. An Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship from the Lilly Library at Indiana University made archival research on Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller possible; I benefitted from Sarah McElroy Mitchell’s assistance in navigating the collections. None of this (or most other things) would ever have happened without the work always being done by Tracy Glink and Sally Hauf, or in years past by Nicole Goode and Karen Tiefenwerth. Friends of every vintage—most particularly Sydney Schoof, Tess Rankin, Taylor Napolitano, David Panzarella, Julia Heney, Claire Rasin Caplan, and Michelle Fleming—kept me upright and walking around and, most important, almost never asked about my dissertation. I owe you and your respective pets more than I can say. Sarah Torretta Klock has given me invaluable advice for more years than seems possible and, on more than one occasion, a Brooklyn idyll to disappear to. Katarina O’Briain made six years of graduate school both bearable and (wait for it) unforgettable. Mande Zecca swept in triumphantly, the deus ex machina of ABD life. Hannah Monicken Johnson brought weekends back into the picture, to say the very least. My parents raised Cubs fans in a house made of books; I suspect there is no formula for producing Ph.D. students more effective than to bring your children up as readers with a high tolerance for delayed gratification. This is for them. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION. THE ART OF NOISE ............................................................................... 1 ONE. MARY BORDEN’S SOUNDSCAPE: MODERNIST NOISE IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE ............................................................................................. 29 INTERLUDE. CLASS AND CALUMNY AFTER THE GREAT WAR ............................ 70 TWO. NEWS/NOISE: ULYSSES ON THE ASTRAL PLANE ......................................... 99 THREE. UPTON SINCLAIR’S DISRUPTIONS OF SYMPATHY ................................ 139 FOUR. NATIVE SON AND THE PANAUDICON .......................................................... 189 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 222 CURRICULUM VITAE ................................................................................................. 250 iv INTRODUCTION. THE ART OF NOISE KATTRIN is staring into the far distance, toward the town. She goes on drumming. FIRST SOLDIER: This can’t go on, they’ll hear it in the town as sure as hell. LIEUTENANT: We must make another noise with something. Louder than the drum. What can we make a noise with? FIRST SOLDIER: But we mustn’t make a noise! LIEUTENANT: A harmless noise, fool, a peacetime noise! OLD PEASANT: I could start chopping wood. LIEUTENANT: That’s it! (The PEASANT brings his ax and chops away.) Chop! Chop harder! Chop for your life! —Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage (1939) How much noise must be made to silence noise? —Michel Serres, Genesis (1982)1 Noise, as any dictionary not written by Ambrose Bierce has it, is unwanted sound.2 “Unwanted sound” is a convenient definition, both in its apparent simplicity and broad applicability: if disruptive theatergoers can be noisy, so can an elevated train rattling along its track, an audio recording marked by a hiss or a hum, or even—to stretch very slightly from the strictly auditory into the world of cybernetics—a message or signal containing extra or distorted information.3 Further clarification seems unnecessary. You know noise when you hear it. But if noise is unwanted sound, then at the core of the idea is not a sound itself, but a subject—someone who wants or does not want a sound or set of sounds. What constitutes noise, then, is to some extent a question of taste and convention. Passive silence, for example, has only been expected of theater audiences for the past two or three 1 Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 106-7; Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995), 13. 2 The Devil’s Dictionary’s entry for noise reads “A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization” (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, vol. 7 [New York: Neale, 1911], 228). 3 See OED, s.v., “noise, n.,” 1a, 11. 1 centuries, before which some interactivity would not necessarily have risen to the level of “noise.”4 The subjective quality of noise is clarified by the freighted modes of communication that appear among extended definitions of “noise”: gossip and scandal are noise; rumor and slander are noise; nonsense is noise.5 To Bertolt Brecht’s hapless Catholic soldiers, faced with the prospect of stopping Mother Courage’s mute daughter Kattrin from alerting the Protestant town of Halle to an imminent sneak attack, the woman’s martial drumbeat registers as unwanted sound. Neutralizing it requires “another noise,” one not only “[l]ouder” but “harmless” and “peacetime”; the soldiers land, with the assistance of a peasant better-versed in the harmless and peacetime than they, on the chopping of wood. Noise battles noise. Or, more properly, as the soldiers’ noise battles Kattrin’s signal to the town, Kattrin’s noise battles the soldiers’ own transfer of information—their attempt to mimic innocent pastoral sounds and thereby to suggest that nothing out of the ordinary is occurring. Occupying opposing ends of the same information system, Brecht’s Catholics and Protestants introduce noise into each other’s communications in a battle to determine whose message will be heard, and how clearly. The soldiers, after much ineffective yelling of orders, shoot and kill Kattrin to stop her drumming. Yet the woman’s noise is victorious. “That’s an end to the noise,” says the Lieutenant, who is immediately corrected by a stage direction: “But the last beats of the drum are lost in the din of cannon from the town. Mingled with the thunder of 4 See Gareth White, “Noise, Conceptual Noise and the Potential of Audience Participation,” in Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012): 198-207. 5 See OED, s.v., “noise, n.,” 6a, 8a, 10. 2 cannon, alarm bells are heard in the distance.”6 “How much noise must be made to silence noise?” Michel Serres asks. “And what terrible fury puts fury in order?”7 Literary noise rarely takes the form of nonsense, if we take nonsense and meaninglessness as analogues.8 Brecht’s noise carries meaning: it may be unwanted sound, but sound with undeniable content; it may be ambiguous information, but it is information nonetheless.