Auditory obsessions and fundamental sounds: A genealogy of murmurs in literary listening through Beckett

This study situates Samuel Beckett as the culminate and nodal point in a genealogy of modernist literature as the production of a writing of murmurs, a genealogy which moves through the works of Charles Baudelaire and W. B. Yeats, Marcel Proust and Flann O'Brien, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and James Joyce, among others. It argues that murmurs emerge as the by-product of a two-sided struggle fundamental to modernist literature: on the one hand, the struggle to hear the unheard-of below or behind language; on the other, the struggle to conquer a fundamental dissonance. This struggle generates a series of auditory obsessions about whose limits the genealogy of murmurs turns: in symbolist verse, the struggle to listen to spiritual murmurs and the obsession with harmony; in fictional autobiography after the turn of the century, the struggle to hear the murmurs of unconscious memory, and the obsession with melodie continue of temporal duration; in post-war poetic style, the struggle to hear the murmurs of lost vital energies, and the obsession with the fundamental sounds of embodied noise; in the works of Samuel Beckett, the struggle to attend to murmurs as the fundamental sound of deafness to the unheard-of at the origin of all language and of disempowerment in the conquest of dissonance, a struggle which generates the obsession with listening itself. I examine not only how these auditory obsessions and fundamental sounds inform modernist developments in poetic form and literary style, but also how these developments take place in relation to the specific auditory environments of each period: how the 1848 revolt in France and the 1848 famine in Ireland impacted habits of hearing instrumental music of the concert-hall and of popular song; how the melomania of the concert hall, moved, with the retreat from the noise of the phenomenal world into the interior realm of the unconscious, from an obsession with spiritual harmonies to an obsession with the temporal melodies of memory; how post-war advances in auditory technology, the popularisation of the phonograph and radio, influenced the obsession with the emergence of noise and the disappearance of silence.