Difficult Women: Joyce, Burns, and the Radical Passivity of Listening

Abstract

ABSTRACT Literary texts often considered difficult or challenging present formidable hindrances to literature classrooms founded on ideas of mastery and understanding. This mastery is facilitated through the visual privilege of lingering on a page of literature. Sound does not allow for this. As Walter Ong [2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge] once remarked, ‘If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence, no sound at all’ (32). Sound allows for passivity as opposed to mastery, and thus allows for what I call the radical passivity of listening. In this article, I begin with the pedagogical possibilities of audiobooks, with the 1982 RTÉ audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the centre. Here Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from ‘Penelope’ becomes a breathy spew of dialogue, often impeding the space necessary for interpretation, and calling for submission to her speech. I then move on to Anna Burns’ 2018 novel Milkman, and investigate the possibilities of ‘listening’ to a challenging text on paper as one would to an audiobook. In both cases, the female first-person narrators speak in response to rumours about themselves, and are struggling to be heard, while also calling upon the reader-listener, I argue, to suspend interpretive thought in favour of submissive listening. I thus advocate for a pedagogy of restraint, one which favours impressions over analysis and is founded in listening rather than interlocution.