Hearing Virginia Woolf's Novels

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sydney eScholarship Hearing Virginia Woolf’s Novels: From The Voyage Out to Between the Acts Kunyan Wan A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Sydney 26 July 2019 This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purpose. Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Abstract Introduction 1 Chapter One 13 Sonic Imaginations and Modernist Soundscape Chapter Two 27 Unconscious Listening to Beethoven’s Music in The Voyage Out Chapter Three 50 “What about Beethoven?”: Listening to Ambient Sounds in Jacob’s Room Chapter Four 88 Synesthetic Listening in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse Chapter Five 133 Point and Sound in the “Silent Land” of The Waves Chapter Six 174 Hearing Elliptical Sounds in Between the Acts Conclusion 208 Bibliography 212 Acknowledgements I sincerely thank my supervisor A/Professor Mark Byron, who gives me persistent guidance, help and support, whether academically or spiritually, throughout the whole process of thesis writing. I am very grateful for his great patience throughout the revision process, providing me with useful and instructive suggestions whenever I met problems in writing, and always giving me generous encouragement and confidence to complete this project. In a word, without his unwavering and devoted supervision, the completion of this thesis would not have been possible. My sincere thanks also goes to my family and friends, who provide me with both financial and spiritual support throughout my study. Thank you all for your love, care and understanding! List of Abbreviations AROO A Room of One’s Own BA Between the Acts CR The Common Reader CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf D1-5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 volumes E1-6 The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 volumes JR Jacob’s Room L1-6 The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 volumes MB Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings MD Mrs Dallowy Moth The Death of the Moth and other Essays O Orlando PH Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts SCR The Second Common Reader TL To The Lighthouse TG Three Guineas VO The Voyage Out W The Waves Abstract This thesis takes as its central question what it is to “hear” the soundscapes in the British modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s novels. This notion of “hearing” responds to the thriving field of Sound Studies (and its active interaction with literary studies, and Modernist Studies in particular) in the last twenty or thirty years. It means to reflect on how modern technologically mediated auditory perception influences Woolf’s formal experimentation and the construction of literary soundscapes in her novels. Modern auditory perception generates new modes of hearing, i.e. acousmatic hearing, indiscriminate hearing, unconscious hearing and synesthetic hearing, each of which will be applied to the study of soundscapes in Woolf’s novels. Based on Murray Schafer’s soundscape scheme, Steven Connor’s concept of audiovision, as well as Angela Frattarola and other scholars’ theories in Sound Studies, this study will evaluate such auditory processes in Woolf’s novels as the unconscious hearing of keynote sound, ambient sound (noise), sounds of synesthetic effect, and elliptical sound. Hearing Woolf’s novels in these ways provides auditory access to Woolf’s modernist aesthetics, especially in terms of how she incorporates modern auditory experiences into the narrative to make her novels sound differently from their realist predecessors, how she attunes the reader’s ear to listen differently to Beethoven’s music, the ambient sounds in the Age of Noise, sounds in older art forms (i.e. Greek chorus and elegy), and the intersensory transaction among different art forms. More generally, the thesis will address how Woolf makes aesthetic use of the “magic formula” of auditory perception as a way of navigating the “crisis of representation” of the Real in the modernist period. Introduction “What novels do you write?” she asked. “I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” (VO, pp.241-2) This conversation takes place between Rachel Vinrace and Terence Hewet in Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915). Though we cannot necessarily attribute what the character says – “I want to write a novel about Silence” – to Woolf’s own motives, this talking of writing a novel about Silence is textual evidence that draws our attention to the study of sound in Woolf’s novels. Silence is not a sound, but an anti- sound, or non-sound. If sound points to “that which is or may be heard” (OED) in a physical sense, there is no physical matter, whether timbre or volume or frequency, etc., that makes “silence” a sound. However, this anti-sound or non-sound quality constitutes a basic dialectic of sound in novels that write about silence. In “On Not Listening to Modernism” (2017), Julian Murphet writes, there is “a literary tendency, across modernism’s long arc, to gesture toward sounds that cannot or should not be heard, or at a utopian Silence beyond hearing – to ask us not to listen,” and this “burgeoning literary interest in a sound that cannot or should not be heard is a fascination that pertains to what Badiou calls the ‘Century,’ the twentieth century and its all-consuming ‘passion for the real’” (pp.20-1). Murphet’s precise observation is especially pertinent to the issue of writing about Silence in Woolf’s novels. But it raises a fundamental question, what is “the real”? And how does the “passion for the real” influence modernist writing about silence and sound in general? Philosophically, “the real” is considered as “the cause” for the world. Murphet quotes from Lacan who suggests, “il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche,” which is usually translated as “there is a cause only in something that doesn’t work” (p.21). In other words, essentially a negation always exists in the cause, and in the real as well. Considering that the French phrase “qui cloche” is a pun, that is, “the cause in the 1 Real both ‘doesn’t work’ and ‘rings’ like a bell,” Murphet thus suggests, “The Real is a lapse within symbolic or imaginary space, but that lapse is itself heard as a peal or audible tear in the fabric of sense. For the modernists, […] this conviction (that the Real is a pealing noise stemming from a crisis of representation) is a constant and critical concern, with the added stipulation that, […] it must or should not be listened to, or cannot be heard” (p.21). In fact, Murphet’s statement gets to the central issue: that is, the Real (or the utopian Silence beyond hearing) is the cause for the “crisis of representation” in the Century of Modernism, for modernists are striving to represent what resists representation. As Woolf’s persona admits, “I want to write a novel about Silence, but the difficulty is immense.” As to this “crisis of representation” in Modernism, perhaps we only need to think of Woolf’s critique of Edwardian materialist writers represented by Mr Bennett, and her famous image of life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope” which exceeds the traditional, materialist way of representation (“Modern Fiction,” p.160). Elsewhere she asserts that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” and concomitantly, “All human relations have shifted, […] And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature” (“Character in Fiction,” pp.421-2). In the same essay Woolf vividly describes this change in literature: “so the smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian age […] it is the sound of […] axes that we hear – a vigorous and stimulating sound in my ears – unless of course you wish to sleep” (“Character in Fiction,” pp.433-5). Woolf’s profound observations regarding the nature of representation in literature dwell in an acute “hearing” of the crashing and destruction, breaking and falling. This precisely matches Murphet’s proposition of “a pealing noise stemming from a crisis of representation.” In other words, Woolf hears the “lapse” or “audible tear” in the symbolic space, and decides to write about it in her novels no matter how immense the difficulty might be. 2 This thesis proposes to follow Woolf’s “hearing” and to explore how she transfigures that “audible tear” into literary soundscapes in her novels. But a question linked to the “fabric of sense” arises; that is, why do we place particular emphasis on the sense of “hearing” if the Real is to be represented? What makes the sense of “hearing” stand out especially in time of the modernist crisis of representation? This question goes to the heart of the central topic and its theoretical support in this thesis, of which chapter one will give a detailed account. Briefly, it can be explained in the following aspects. First, even though hearing is only one among the five (or six) senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and/or extrasensory perception) by which human beings experience and perceive the world, it plays a central role in many important hypotheses concerning the mysterious existence of the universe: for example, the Big Bang theory, the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres, and many associated themes of the literary imagination.

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