This thesis demonstrates that silence and noise played a very distinctive role in shaping the literary languages of key Irish writers of the twentieth century. Specifically, I present close readings of the works of four Irish modernists: James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Blanaid Salkeld and Samuel Beckett. These readings are contextualised through historical accounts of the cultural, social and political situation in early and mid-twentieth century Ireland. In particular, a critical focus on various sound technologies such as the gramophone, the radio and the tape recorder is essential to my inquiry, because these audio media could reproduce not only the timbre, intonation and cadence of speech but also the noise and silence accompanying voices and sounds with a directness not possible for writing.
To motivate this exploration, the Introduction surveys the relevant currents of literary criticism and clarifies the aim of this thesis. As past critics and scholars have shown, media technologies not only played significant roles in the various processes of modernisation across Europe but also facilitated the literary responses to them. From this perspective, one of the crucial intersections of Irish modernism and the modernisation of Ireland should be recognised in the period of its stepwise independence from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth from 1922 onwards, as new social systems and cultural practices were developed, often supported by the new media technologies of the time. As many scholars have argued, the proliferation of the gramophone, radio, sound film and other media in post-independence Ireland led to a dynamic intermingling of a number of cultural, social and political dichotomies, such as nationalism and transnationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, the Gaelic revival and the European avant-garde, media censorship and freedom of expression, and so forth. Keeping this historical context in mind, I hypothesise that the accelerating dynamics of modernity in post-independence Ireland encouraged some Irish writers to break away from the traditional concept of literature as an art form consisting solely of articulate words. More specifically, I contend that the expansion of literature beyond articulate words is exemplified by James Joyce and his contemporary writers, notably Flann O’Brien, Blanaid Salkeld and Samuel Beckett. As the following chapters show, each of the latter three Irish modernists grappled with or rid themselves of the extremely heteroglossic styles of Joyce and sought singular modes of writing through their engagement with techniques and technologies for reproducing noise and silence. In doing so, these writers did not simply attempt to represent silence and noise by words. Rather, they interwove inarticulate noise and silence with articulate words, thereby constructing singular modalities of language other than Joycean heteroglossia. In this light, Irish modernism will be seen not as a monolithic movement conditioned by a particular historical situation but as a series of cascading reactions to the literary incorporation of noise and silence.
In Chapter 1, I examine James Joyce’s sublexical manipulations of graphemes in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) as the principal device for representing the inarticulate sounds and excessively multifaceted acoustic phenomena of human speech. I argue, on the one hand, that Joyce’s first-hand experience with the gramophone and early forms of radio broadcasting might have encouraged him to attempt a hyper-realistic representation of verbal acoustics through the decomposition and recomposition of alphabetic signifiers. On the other hand, I also demonstrate how this approach is reflected in Joyce’s novelistic techniques, in particular his dexterous manipulation of direct speech, free indirect speech and the interior monologue. This analysis shows how Ulysses and Finnegans Wake achieve what the gramophone, the radio and other sound technologies cannot: these works fictionally reproduce the ways in which voices and sounds are experienced internally by hearers and speakers. Recording such experiences is the purview of literature and is distinct from producing a physical recording of the sounds themselves. Joyce’s later works highlight the irreducible gap between sound as material and sound as experience by combining the potentially infinite diversity of singular sonic experiences with the technological exactness of their literary representation. Through such a combination, these works strongly suggest the ultimate impossibility of giving a complete representation of a given audible phenomenon. I call such a modality of language phonoglossia. Phonoglossia is a dynamic state of words symbolically encapsulating the everlasting tension between noise and silence, articulation and inarticulation, visuality and audibility etc., which would be most vividly discernible in — though not being limited to — the format of the novel.
In Chapter 2, I characterise Flann O’Brien’s language by the concatenation and intersection of articulate voices fraught with epistemological and media-technological tension. My readings of At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (posthumous; written 1939–1940) demonstrate that the garrulous textures of these novels were constituted by the intermingling of a variety of articulate voices drawn from heterogeneous cultural backgrounds, epistemological frameworks and media formats. In order to bring these heterogeneous voices into cooperative and antagonistic relationships, O’Brien emulated in his literature the formats of his contemporary media technologies, namely radio broadcasting and the sound film. The patchwork structure of At Swim and the cyclical structure of The Third Policeman can be understood as corollaries of these trans-medial techniques. In both novels, the tensions between the heterogeneous modes of signification and cognitive frameworks manifest themselves by producing various kinds of noise in the text while also becoming implicit and latent when one voice is suppressed under the dominance of another. I call such a modality of language paraglossia, which refers to the state in which heterogeneous discourses coexist with indications of their discordance. Paraglossia can be seen as a variant of heteroglossia, but with the additional tendency to control its own heterogeneity by limiting the technical arbitrariness in the representation of voices and sounds. Thus, this modality of language allowed O’Brien not only to diverge from Joycean phonoglossia but also to foreground noise as the index of linguistic and media-technological heterogeneities, an element that can serve to locate the cultural, political and epistemological discrepancies emerging in post-independence Ireland.
Chapter 3 focuses on Blanaid Salkeld, highlighting the seemingly contradictory tendencies found in her poetry: the coexistence of rhythm and non-rhythm as well as the oscillation between silence and eloquence, seeing and hearing, or writing and singing. My analyses of her poems from Hello, Eternity! (1933) and The Fox’s Covert (1935) demonstrate that Salkeld generally avoids confining words and their sounds into a coherent metre, cadence and monoglossia. However, Salkeld also refuses to boisterously make the words resound in a heteroglossic interplay of noise and signal. Rather, Salkeld’s poetic oscillations are mediated by the typographical embodiment of silence on the page, which also serves as a negative signifier of the latent tension between poetic articulation and inarticulation. I call such a modality of language antiglossia. As I emphasise through my reading of . . . the engine is left running (1937), Salkeld’s antiglossia should be understood not only in terms of such intra-textual dynamics but also in terms of the historical context in which Salkeld devoted herself to supporting her contemporary women writers, namely her activities in the Women Writers’ Club and Gayfield Press. While Salkeld was well aware of how the voices of her contemporary prominent male poets were extensively disseminated through the male-dominated publishing industry and radio broadcasting in the Commonwealth, she sought to establish alternative networks for the dissemination of women poets’ voices through the intensive use of print technology.
Chapter 4 explores the development of Samuel Beckett’s literary languages to explicate how he achieved his artistic ideal of expressing ‘that there is nothing to express’. In Molloy (1951), Watt (1953) and other earlier works Beckett addressed this aporia through the language of permutation and combination, which was closely tied to the Cartesian/Leibnizian view of the human body. Around the time when he was composing The Unnamable (1953), he began to replace this strategy with the language of voices, which was closely linked to the prosthetic body. Then, from the 1960s onwards, Beckett’s configuration of the body, language and technology was significantly transformed, in which the radio, the magnetic tape and other audio media that reproduced sounds accompanied by noise played a key role. As is exemplified in How It Is (1961) and ‘Ping’ (1966), the Beckettian narrators arrive at quaint words derived from their own consciousnesses, memories and bodies, words which seem to be phonetically articulated but are semantically unintelligible. This experience of linguistic alterity is achieved through their exhaustive observation and reuse of familiar words until they are worn down to indistinct murmurs, just as Beckett wrote How It Is based on his experience of hearing the words of his previous works broadcast on the radio, which were heavily marred by noise. The radio and other audio technologies thus encouraged Beckett to incorporate noise into his works and thereby to invoke an unknown language that expresses nothingness or silence. I call such a modality of language soliglossia. Unlike Joyce’s phonoglossia, soliglossia is characterised not by a rich variety of phonetic and semantic systems but by its user’s solitary confrontation with his own language to recognise otherness in it.
As the above discussions show, these Irish modernists developed their art of interweaving noise and silence with articulate words through their engagement with literary techniques and audio technologies that were inextricably intertwined with the culturally heterogeneous and socio-politically dynamic situation in and around post-independence Ireland. From this perspective, what I have called the ‘modality of language’ can be theoretically formulated as the ways in which literary texts attempt to record and process voices, sounds, noise and silence by directly or indirectly interacting not only with their preceding cultural memories and literature in the broad sense but also with different types of media, each of which having a particular mechanism and format for storing, processing and transmitting words, sonic phenomena and other kinds of data. In conclusion, I suggest that such a theoretical framework can lead us to consider literature to be a type of media format that makes us aware of the entanglement of sound, noise and silence in a way different from auditory — and potentially other — technologies.
To motivate this exploration, the Introduction surveys the relevant currents of literary criticism and clarifies the aim of this thesis. As past critics and scholars have shown, media technologies not only played significant roles in the various processes of modernisation across Europe but also facilitated the literary responses to them. From this perspective, one of the crucial intersections of Irish modernism and the modernisation of Ireland should be recognised in the period of its stepwise independence from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth from 1922 onwards, as new social systems and cultural practices were developed, often supported by the new media technologies of the time. As many scholars have argued, the proliferation of the gramophone, radio, sound film and other media in post-independence Ireland led to a dynamic intermingling of a number of cultural, social and political dichotomies, such as nationalism and transnationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, the Gaelic revival and the European avant-garde, media censorship and freedom of expression, and so forth. Keeping this historical context in mind, I hypothesise that the accelerating dynamics of modernity in post-independence Ireland encouraged some Irish writers to break away from the traditional concept of literature as an art form consisting solely of articulate words. More specifically, I contend that the expansion of literature beyond articulate words is exemplified by James Joyce and his contemporary writers, notably Flann O’Brien, Blanaid Salkeld and Samuel Beckett. As the following chapters show, each of the latter three Irish modernists grappled with or rid themselves of the extremely heteroglossic styles of Joyce and sought singular modes of writing through their engagement with techniques and technologies for reproducing noise and silence. In doing so, these writers did not simply attempt to represent silence and noise by words. Rather, they interwove inarticulate noise and silence with articulate words, thereby constructing singular modalities of language other than Joycean heteroglossia. In this light, Irish modernism will be seen not as a monolithic movement conditioned by a particular historical situation but as a series of cascading reactions to the literary incorporation of noise and silence.
In Chapter 1, I examine James Joyce’s sublexical manipulations of graphemes in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) as the principal device for representing the inarticulate sounds and excessively multifaceted acoustic phenomena of human speech. I argue, on the one hand, that Joyce’s first-hand experience with the gramophone and early forms of radio broadcasting might have encouraged him to attempt a hyper-realistic representation of verbal acoustics through the decomposition and recomposition of alphabetic signifiers. On the other hand, I also demonstrate how this approach is reflected in Joyce’s novelistic techniques, in particular his dexterous manipulation of direct speech, free indirect speech and the interior monologue. This analysis shows how Ulysses and Finnegans Wake achieve what the gramophone, the radio and other sound technologies cannot: these works fictionally reproduce the ways in which voices and sounds are experienced internally by hearers and speakers. Recording such experiences is the purview of literature and is distinct from producing a physical recording of the sounds themselves. Joyce’s later works highlight the irreducible gap between sound as material and sound as experience by combining the potentially infinite diversity of singular sonic experiences with the technological exactness of their literary representation. Through such a combination, these works strongly suggest the ultimate impossibility of giving a complete representation of a given audible phenomenon. I call such a modality of language phonoglossia. Phonoglossia is a dynamic state of words symbolically encapsulating the everlasting tension between noise and silence, articulation and inarticulation, visuality and audibility etc., which would be most vividly discernible in — though not being limited to — the format of the novel.
In Chapter 2, I characterise Flann O’Brien’s language by the concatenation and intersection of articulate voices fraught with epistemological and media-technological tension. My readings of At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (posthumous; written 1939–1940) demonstrate that the garrulous textures of these novels were constituted by the intermingling of a variety of articulate voices drawn from heterogeneous cultural backgrounds, epistemological frameworks and media formats. In order to bring these heterogeneous voices into cooperative and antagonistic relationships, O’Brien emulated in his literature the formats of his contemporary media technologies, namely radio broadcasting and the sound film. The patchwork structure of At Swim and the cyclical structure of The Third Policeman can be understood as corollaries of these trans-medial techniques. In both novels, the tensions between the heterogeneous modes of signification and cognitive frameworks manifest themselves by producing various kinds of noise in the text while also becoming implicit and latent when one voice is suppressed under the dominance of another. I call such a modality of language paraglossia, which refers to the state in which heterogeneous discourses coexist with indications of their discordance. Paraglossia can be seen as a variant of heteroglossia, but with the additional tendency to control its own heterogeneity by limiting the technical arbitrariness in the representation of voices and sounds. Thus, this modality of language allowed O’Brien not only to diverge from Joycean phonoglossia but also to foreground noise as the index of linguistic and media-technological heterogeneities, an element that can serve to locate the cultural, political and epistemological discrepancies emerging in post-independence Ireland.
Chapter 3 focuses on Blanaid Salkeld, highlighting the seemingly contradictory tendencies found in her poetry: the coexistence of rhythm and non-rhythm as well as the oscillation between silence and eloquence, seeing and hearing, or writing and singing. My analyses of her poems from Hello, Eternity! (1933) and The Fox’s Covert (1935) demonstrate that Salkeld generally avoids confining words and their sounds into a coherent metre, cadence and monoglossia. However, Salkeld also refuses to boisterously make the words resound in a heteroglossic interplay of noise and signal. Rather, Salkeld’s poetic oscillations are mediated by the typographical embodiment of silence on the page, which also serves as a negative signifier of the latent tension between poetic articulation and inarticulation. I call such a modality of language antiglossia. As I emphasise through my reading of . . . the engine is left running (1937), Salkeld’s antiglossia should be understood not only in terms of such intra-textual dynamics but also in terms of the historical context in which Salkeld devoted herself to supporting her contemporary women writers, namely her activities in the Women Writers’ Club and Gayfield Press. While Salkeld was well aware of how the voices of her contemporary prominent male poets were extensively disseminated through the male-dominated publishing industry and radio broadcasting in the Commonwealth, she sought to establish alternative networks for the dissemination of women poets’ voices through the intensive use of print technology.
Chapter 4 explores the development of Samuel Beckett’s literary languages to explicate how he achieved his artistic ideal of expressing ‘that there is nothing to express’. In Molloy (1951), Watt (1953) and other earlier works Beckett addressed this aporia through the language of permutation and combination, which was closely tied to the Cartesian/Leibnizian view of the human body. Around the time when he was composing The Unnamable (1953), he began to replace this strategy with the language of voices, which was closely linked to the prosthetic body. Then, from the 1960s onwards, Beckett’s configuration of the body, language and technology was significantly transformed, in which the radio, the magnetic tape and other audio media that reproduced sounds accompanied by noise played a key role. As is exemplified in How It Is (1961) and ‘Ping’ (1966), the Beckettian narrators arrive at quaint words derived from their own consciousnesses, memories and bodies, words which seem to be phonetically articulated but are semantically unintelligible. This experience of linguistic alterity is achieved through their exhaustive observation and reuse of familiar words until they are worn down to indistinct murmurs, just as Beckett wrote How It Is based on his experience of hearing the words of his previous works broadcast on the radio, which were heavily marred by noise. The radio and other audio technologies thus encouraged Beckett to incorporate noise into his works and thereby to invoke an unknown language that expresses nothingness or silence. I call such a modality of language soliglossia. Unlike Joyce’s phonoglossia, soliglossia is characterised not by a rich variety of phonetic and semantic systems but by its user’s solitary confrontation with his own language to recognise otherness in it.
As the above discussions show, these Irish modernists developed their art of interweaving noise and silence with articulate words through their engagement with literary techniques and audio technologies that were inextricably intertwined with the culturally heterogeneous and socio-politically dynamic situation in and around post-independence Ireland. From this perspective, what I have called the ‘modality of language’ can be theoretically formulated as the ways in which literary texts attempt to record and process voices, sounds, noise and silence by directly or indirectly interacting not only with their preceding cultural memories and literature in the broad sense but also with different types of media, each of which having a particular mechanism and format for storing, processing and transmitting words, sonic phenomena and other kinds of data. In conclusion, I suggest that such a theoretical framework can lead us to consider literature to be a type of media format that makes us aware of the entanglement of sound, noise and silence in a way different from auditory — and potentially other — technologies.
