NOTE TO USERS This reproduction is the best copy available. UMI' Modern Noise: Bowen, Waugh, Orwell Robin Edward Feenstra Department of English McGill University, Montreal August 2008 A diesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Robin E. 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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract iii Resume v Introduction British Modernism and the Age of Noise 1 Chapter One Elizabedi Bowen's Audible Terrains 46 Chapter Two Listening to War in The Heat of the Day 89 Chapter Three Evelyn Waugh, Culture, and Noise 117 Chapter Four Phoniness and War in Put Out More Flags 157 Chapter Five Documenting Noise: George Orwell in die 1930s 184 Chapter Six The Politics of Noise: Animal ¥ arm and Nineteen Eighty-Four 236 Conclusion Reading Noise 276 Works Cited 1 Acknowledgements The completion of this thesis was assisted by a Gloriana Martineau Fellowship and a Thesis Completion Award. My special thanks go to Professor Martin Kreiswirth for timely assistance, both in the past and in the present. My thanks also go to Professors Miranda B. Hickman and Allan Hepburn for the numerous RAships over the years. I owe a debt of gratitude to Thomson House too, for making me comfortable for seven years. Noisy and quiet, there is no better graduate building, and no better staff. Though writing a dissertation in the humanities is one of the more civilized things one can do, it can be savage and isolating. I had the unusual benefit of never being alone because of an immense support network. I learned a great many lessons, good and bad, during my time at McGill University. The camaraderie and enduring friendship of my cohort made those lessons livable and memorable. I would not give back a day, and remain honoured to count myself among Jason S. Polley, Erin Vollick, Stephanie King, Liisa Stephenson, and Pauline Morel. They went first, and made my path the more sound for travel. They are bound up with knowledge for me, and I hope to continue knowing them, on and on. Numerous other friends and colleagues have supported and encouraged me, intellectually and humanely, when I needed it most, especially David K. Anderson, Joel Deshaye, Veronique Dorais, Catalina Holguin, Lindsay Holmgren, J. Matthew Huculak, Matt Kavanagh, Michael Lee, Christina Oltmann, Seth Shugar, David Wright, and my brother, Bruce Feenstra. My thanks also go to Professors Patrick Deane, from my time at UWO, and to Peter Ohlin and Ned Schantz, mentors as well as friends, for conversations that shaped the way I think about academia and noise. 11 Professor Hickman has been an unending source of inspiration, and her enthusiasm for modernist literature is a wellspring to weary graduate students. The enlivening RAships not only taught me how to be an honest, caring, meticulous scholar, but they largely funded my study at McGill and brought me into illuminating contact with the deep dark mine that is Ezra Pound. I hope my conversations with her never come to an end. Professor Hepburn, my supervisor, my editor, my officemate, my friend, is beyond compare. Anyone who knows him knows he works harder than any well-oiled machine could, and yet his "way" remains very human. His range knows no limits, his precision sense-saving and surgical. He helped shape this dissertation, from beginning to end. He taught me that relevance demands urgency, and showed me the patience of a true teacher who allows his students to falter a bit, in order to learn. My most enthusiastic thanks go to him. Gabriel W. D. Johnson has made every other Saturday something to look forward to and to cherish, bringing me comic relief and making my heart swell. Victoria Gross put noise in the palm of my hand and, with grace, reminded me what mercy feels like. To my parents, Janny and Bernlef Feenstra—what can I say? Without the steady finances of Feenstra Inc., I would not have been able to pursue this degree. Were it not for the questing spirit and unconditional love they afford me, I would not have taken the time necessary for my ideas to mature. Words can support like bone, but they give them the will to move and the heart to love. This dissertation is for them. Ill Abstract Modern Noise: Bowen, Waugh, Orwell The modern soundscape buzzes with noise. In die 1930s, telephones, radios, and gramophones filled domestic spaces with technological noise, while crowds shouting in the streets created political clamour. During the war in the 1940s, bombs and sirens broke through buildings and burst through consciousness. This dissertation examines the response of three British modernist writers to the cultural shifts brought about by technology and politics, which altered everyday experience and social relations. Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell represent noise in their fiction and non- fiction as a trope of power. Noise, as a palpable emblem of discontent and the acoustic unconsciousness of the period, infiltrates sentences and rearranges syntax, as in the invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eight-Four. Noise cannot leave listeners in a neutral position. The "culture racket" of the 1930s and 1940s required urgent new ways of listening and listening with ethical intent. Chapter One provides a reading of Elizabeth Bowen's audible terrains in her novels of the 1930s, where silences and sudden noises intrude on human lives. In Bowen's novels, technological noise has both comedic and tragic consequences. Chapter Two examines noise as a political signifier in The Heat of the Day, Bowen's novel of the blitz. Chapter Three takes up the significance of the culture racket to Evelyn Waugh's novels and travel writing of the 1930s; noise assumes a disruptive, if highly comedic, value in his works, an ambiguity that expresses what it means to be modern. Chapter Four examines Waugh's penchant for satirizing the phoneyness of contemporary culture—its political vacillations—especially in Put Out More Flags, set during the Second World War. Chapter Five considers Orwell's engagement with the emerging social and political formations amongst working, racial, and warring classes in the 1930s. Documenting noise in his reportage, Orwell sounds alarms to alert readers to the mounting social and political crises in his realist novels of the decade. Chapter Six argues that Orwell's final two novels of the 1940s, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represent the politics of noise in as much as they announce the noise of politics in totalitarian futures. Noise demarcates die insidiousness of propaganda as it screeches from telescreens, the keynote in Big Brother's ideological symphony of domination. Noise, throughout Orwell's writing, signifies the struggle for power. In its widest ramifications, noise provides an interpretive paradigm through which to read Bowen's, Waugh's, and Orwell's fiction and non-fiction, as well as modernist texts generally. Resume Le vacarme moderne: Bowen, Waugh, Orwell L'epoque moderne fait bien du vacarme. Dans les annees 30, les telephones, les radios, et les gramophones remplissaient l'espace domestique de bruits technologiques, alors que les foules protestant dans les rues creaient un vacarme politique. Dans les annees 40, pendant la guerre, le bruit des bombes et des sirenes retentissait dans les consciences. Cette etude vise a examiner les reponses apportees par trois ecrivains britanniques modernistes aux changements culturels lies a la technologie et a la politique, qui ont chamboule 1'experience quotidienne et les relations sociales de leur epoque. Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, et George Orwell representent le vacarme dans leurs oeuvres romanesques et non-romanesques comme embleme du pouvoir. Le vacarme, signe palpable de mecontentement et de l'inconscient acoustique de l'epoque, infiltre les phrases et en modifie la syntaxe, comme en temoigne, par exemple, l'invention de Newspeak dans Nineteen Eighty-Four.