Acoustic limitrophies, or why Roald Dahl’s work sounds more serious than it seems

Abstract

The visual dimension of Roald Dahl's work is conspicuous and well known. However, his texts also articulate the author’s life-long interest in sound(s), in the aural or acoustic. The present article focuses on two regions of the sonic domain in Dahl’s work which may be dubbed “limitrophies” following Derrida’s definition of the term. It deals with what nourishes and is nourished by two limits which, against our common expectations, are not visual, but acoustic. The first acoustic limitrophy is none other than language itself, but language understood as “lalangue”, a neologism coined by the late Jacques Lacan and recently theorised by Mladen Dolar (2006), where it is singled out as the concept that signals the internal limit of language as such (144). If ”langue” refers to the linguistic system which generates meaning through differential operations, the extra ”la” points to sonic reverberations, consonances, and identities in Dahl’s use of wordplay, neologisms and nonsense. The second acoustic limitrophy is related to Dahl’s fictional exploration of the relationship between the human ear and what is commonly considered mute per se: namely, plants. The vegetal world does make sounds of its own and reacts to sounds, even if we cannot hear them.