Hearing Hardy
Soundscapes and the Profitable Reader
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12794315 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Lloyd James (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 131-155 |
| Publication date | 2010-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Narrative Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1548-9248 • E-ISSN: 1549-0815 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jnt.2010.0009 |
| OpenAlex | W2171507581 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
Hearing Hardy:Soundscapes and the Profitable Reader David James (bio) The idea that urban experience can be "read" more accurately through the noises than through the spectacles of a city may sound like a critical commonplace, but it nevertheless is one that drew the attention of Victorian commentators just as it still provokes the theoretical inclinations of today's cultural geographers. Writing for the Fortnightly Review in 1878, psychologist James Sully reiterates how urban hubbub remains synonymous with unfettered technological progress: Our advancing civilization clearly tends to the growth and multiplication of dense centers of population. And in so doing it no less clearly tends to substitute a noisy for a quiet kind of life. According to ample testimony, ancient and modern, town life is beset with the plague of harsh and overpowering sound, whereas country life is first of all grateful by reason of its quiet. (710-11) The auditory onslaught that Sully traces with the help of "ample testimony" exemplifies a combination of reportage and pure opinion. Speculative references to the public sphere of everyday habitation coincide with his appropriation of certain insights from the so-called new psychology of the later 1800's—a rhetorical fusion of popularized philosophy and scientific [End Page 131] diagnosis by which writers like Sully could pose generalizations about the changing condition of "town life." As he implies, metropolitan spaces appeared not to constrain the reception and cognition of sound, but to expand the spectrum of different sensory encounters through which populated places are at once collectively and personally known. The city, in effect, diversified the daily activity of negotiating the world by recourse to natural and mechanical sounds; and this diversification of the stimuli for acoustic perception in day-to-day life led Sully to warn that "if noises are a permanent—not to say continually increasing—factor in our environment, we must suppose that in time man's organism will become modified so as no longer to suffer from these sources" (711-12). Published the same year as Sully's prophecy, Thomas Hardy's iconic The Return of the Native (1878) transfers this geography of disorienting sound to the provincial setting of Egdon Heath, notionally located in east Dorset.1 That's not to say that Hardy would not have agreed with Sully over the human necessity of adapting to an increasingly cacophonous, and expansively urban, world. Rather, Hardy's interests had to do with the affective implications of perceiving—rather than acclimatizing to—spaces of sound, while exploring the way the countryside can be as acoustically complex as the city. Indeed, Hardy seemed less concerned than Sully with speculating about how our sensory capacities "will become modified" in years to come, than in developing strategies for alerting his readers to the way rural settings highlight connections between our emotional and cognitive responses to spatial sounds. Hardy's depictions of soundscapes are also, as we will see, intentionally ornamental, even hyperbolic; and they appeal today to an analysis of not only texture, distance, and scale, but also resonance, ambience, and their consequences for unpacking the language of his fiction. This sort of critical vocabulary—equipped to deal with the aesthetic ramifications of reading the textuality of sound—has recently been tested by Jenefer Robinson, who proposes an account of interpretive emotion as, above all, "a process . . . involving both affective and cognitive evaluations" (59). For Hardy's readers, acoustic aspects of spatial description often require a different level of imaginative commitment, occasioning new connections between the reader's visceral and intellectual responses to what we expect from fictional scenery. What follows is an attempt to trace how those connections are activated in order to discover [End Page 132] what Hardy's diegetic engagement with hearing in his fiction might imply about the extradiegetic role that listening can play as an aspect of interpretation. Soundscapes invite a rather different hermeneutic procedure than literary landscapes discussed purely in the visual terms of pictorial representation. This is because a novelist like Hardy—anticipating the early-modernist investment in evoking the mental effects of sensory impressions—so often manipulates our engagement with literary space by shifting between mimetic and highly metaphorical depictions of land surfaces
Acoustics · Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Civilization · Epistemology · Everyday life · Literature · Political science · Population · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Sound (geography · Soundscape · French Literature and Poetry · History · Law · Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2023 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |