Silent Modernism Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf Lindskog, Annika J

Silent Modernism Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf Lindskog, Annika J. 2017 Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Lindskog, A. J. (2017). Silent Modernism: Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf. (Lund Studies in English; Vol. 118). Lund University. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Annika J. Lindskog Silent Modernism Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf How do you represent thoughts, feelings, and experiences for which words do not suffice? This question lies behind many of the experiments that characterize modernist fiction. Silent Modernism: Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf examines one of the solutions to the problem of representing the unrepresentable: letting silence speak instead of words. By closely examining the form and function of silence in the works of three central modernists – Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf – this award-winning study argues that silence is part of a modernist aesthetics that emphasizes suggestion rather than precision. Through silence, these three writers not only draw their readers’ attention to difficulties concerning literary representation but also suggest the very content they cannot properly represent. Silence in the modernist novel is thus not an absence but an expression in its own right – and an essential aspect of modernist realism. 9 789197 693561 LUND STUDIES IN ENGLISH Centre for Languages and Literature ISBN 978-91-976935-6-1 ISSN 0076-1451 Silent Modernism Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf Silent Modernism SOUNDSCAPES AND THE UNSAYABLE IN RICHARDSON, JOYCE, AND WOOLF Annika J. Lindskog English Studies, Centre for Languages and Literature LUND STUDIES IN ENGLISH 118 LUND STUDIES IN ENGLISH 118 Editors: Carita Paradis and Marianne Thormählen LUND STUDIES IN ENGLISH was founded by Eilert Ekwall in 1933. Published by the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University, the series consists of books on the English language and on literature in English. Lund Studies in English can be ordered via Lund University: www.ht.lu.se/en/serie/lse E-mail: [email protected] © Annika J. Lindskog 2017 ISBN 978-91-976935-7-8 (pdf) ISSN 0076-1451 Cover image: ‘An Oak Tree in Winter, Lacock’ (c. 1842–3) by Henry Fox Talbot Typesetting: Gunilla Albertén Cover design: Louice Cardell Hepp Printed by Media-Tryck, Lund University, Sweden 2017 Nordic Ecolabel, 3041 0903 Table of Contents Note on Editions 9 Introduction 11 Chapter 1 A Crisis of Realism 25 Realism: Towards the ‘Something’ Below the Surface 29 On the Other Side of Silence: Realisms, Representation, Knowledge 42 Modernist Fiction and the Aesthetics of Obscurity 62 Chapter 2 Dorothy Richardson and the Sounds of Silence 71 Dorothy Richardson and the Sounds of Silence 75 ‘A Friend in All but Name’: Dorothy Richardson and the Society of Friends 90 Towards ‘the tireless unchanging centre’: Inside the Moment of Silence 99 As ‘quiet as thought’: Nature, Silence, and the Unity of Being 117 Silence as Communication 127 Chapter 3 Dorothy Richardson and the Poetics of Silence 135 Literature and the Moment of Silence 137 The ‘underlying thing’: Reading Silence 141 A ‘Feminine Equivalent of the Current Masculine Realism’: Pilgrimage and the Real 148 Silence on the Page: Richardson and the Grammar of the Mind 157 Writing ‘Organic’ Prose: Commas and Ellipses 162 Blank Spaces 170 Chapter 4 Silence and Noise in Joyce 177 ‘Listen!’: Joyce’s Silences and Soundscapes 180 ‘Just Now in a Mental World’: Silence and the Inward Turn 191 ‘Sonorous Silence’: The Imagined Sound 204 Chapter 5 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Edwardian 215 ‘The Luminous Silent Stasis of Esthetic Pleasure’: Stephen Dedalus’s Aesthetic Theory 217 Of Lice and Men: Stephen Dedalus versus Modernism 224 Rethinking the Edwardian Novel: From Hero to Boy-Artist 235 Chapter 6 A Silence of One’s Own: Soundscapes and Silence in the Works of Virginia Woolf 247 Silence, Soundscapes, Wholeness 253 ‘All is Harmony, Could We Hear It’: Silence and Sound in Woolf’s Late Fiction 264 Mrs Ramsay’s Murmur: Listening to To the Lighthouse 270 ‘Nothing! Nothing!’: Silence and Bereavement in Woolf’s Writing 283 Chapter 7 The Silent Phrases of the Mind: Writing the Inner World in the Works of Virginia Woolf 301 ‘[I]nclined to be silent’: Silence and Vision in Night and Day 304 ‘One Thing Melts into Another’: Painting The Waves 314 Concluding Remarks 335 Acknowledgments 341 Bibliography 343 Index 367 Note on Editions All references to the works of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Vir- ginia Woolf will be given directly in the text, the only exception being essays and non-fiction, letters, and journals. The following editions and abbreviations are used throughout the study: Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage, vol. I-IV (London: Virago, 1979); referred to as P and by volume (in the Richardson chapters, Pilgrimage will only be referred to by volume and page-number). James Joyce Dubliners, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); referred to as D A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); referred to as PA Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler et al. (London: The Bodley Head, 1986); referred to as U (reference given by episode and line) Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin Books, 2000); referred to as FW Stephen Hero, ed. by Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions Books, 1959); referred to as SH 9 NOTE ON EDITIONS Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out, ed. by Lorna Sage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as VO Night and Day, ed. by Suzanne Raitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as ND Jacob’s Room, ed. by Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as JR Mrs Dalloway, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as MD To the Lighthouse, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), referred to as TL Orlando, ed. by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as O The Waves, ed. by Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2011), referred to as W The Years, ed. by Hermione Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as Y Between the Acts, ed. by Frank Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), referred to as BA The Collected Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Susan Dick (San Diego: Harcourt, 1989), referred to as CSF 10 Introduction It seems more natural to associate the early twentieth century with an in- flux of sound than with silence. The changing urban environment, the new technologies, and the emergence of a new mass culture made the soundscape something very different from what had existed before.1 But the busy sounds of the modern age also prompted a need for calm and stillness. Consequently, silence is often presented as a space for reflection and med- itation in the early twentieth century; its representation in the literary texts of the period repeatedly connects it to the inner lives of characters. Silence in modernist fiction is presented not only as an element of the aural setting but as an aspect of inner life itself. There is thus an essential doubleness to moments of silence in modernist fiction: while they define the soundscape, and are as such part of the external reality in the fictional world, they also represent occurrences in the mind and consciousness of the characters experiencing the silence. This study examines silence in modernist fiction, explaining how and why silence forms a central aspect of the kind of realism that the modernist novel aimed to achieve. It is concerned with the concept of silence both as it relates to the texts’ soundscapes and to the literary expression of which they are a part; I argue that these two kinds of silence are often related in modernist fiction, and that silence as part of the soundscape frequently represents aspects of human experience and the ‘real’ that are difficult to convey concretely in words. Throughout this study, those aspects are re- 1 The term ‘soundscape’ was coined by R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977). Initially used to refer to the sound-setting of actual life – which is also how it is used above – it has subsequently been appropriated to refer to the sound-setting of literary texts as well, which is how it is used throughout this study.

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