Polyphony beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and Community in Coetzee and Powers

Abstract

Although most literary scholars are familiar with Mikhail Bakhtin's argument about how the orchestrates polyphonic symphony of socially diverse voices, our account of these voices, and of novelistic sound more generally, remains far from complete. Aiming to address these gaps in recent pamphlet of the Stanford Literary Lab, Hoist Katsma has reinvigorated Bakhtin's insights with the help of quantitative reading protocols to describe the patterned of the nineteenth-century (13), paying special attention to Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1869). Though I will argue that Katsma's argument is ultimately flawed because it overlooks technological and biological sounds, making this model unfit for my central case studies, novels by J. M. Coetzee and Richard Powers, the pamphlet rightly emphasizes the structural role of sound in prose fiction as well as the importance of the reader's aural experience. Katsma also proposes several hypotheses that invite further research: that loud in the nineteenth-century usually come from individuals rather than groups; that certain grammatical structures (involving commands, questions, em dashes) are better indicators of loudness than specific speaking verbs such as whisper or shout; that loudness is organized in the novel, as its quasi-musical polyphony of is systematically related to plot structure, narrative space, and chapter divisions (16); and that the quantitative analysis of this loudness reveals general muting of the over the course of the 19th century (21). This pamphlet hence illustrates how new digital techniques can enrich existing insights in literary studies. But Katsma's argument shows flaws as well. Without further reflection, he dismisses the existing work on sound in literature, confidently claiming that little has come of the study of sound in the novel (2). If he would have considered the work of scholars the intersection of literary studies and sound studies, like that of John Picker, Philipp Schweighauser, or Justin St. Clair, Katsma might also have been able to complicate his further assumption that sound in the can be reduced to the voices of narrators and characters (1): at the level of textual mechanics, novel's aural trajectory, heard by the reader, is created via the novel's string of consecutive (10). In his view, the words of storytellers and characters are quasi-heard in our minds, whereas the music, noise, and other environmental described by these words are not part of the novel's soundscape all. In footnote, Katsma admits that sometimes these human ask the reader to imagine secondary sounds via the description of raindrops, for instance, but these are supposedly less intense, fleeting and rather infrequent in every form of literature (2). This dismissal of described sound is unsatisfactory because Katsma's lopsided focus on human might explain why he finds growing stillness where others discover increasing loudness. Whereas his analysis of suggests gradual muting of the during the nineteenth century, as I mentioned, John Picker's account of described rather than imagined dialogue reaches the opposite conclusion; as fictional and other documents show, he confidently states, the Victorian age was a period of unprecedented amplification, unheard-of alive with the screech and roar of the railway and the clang of industry, with the babble, bustle, and music of city streets, and with the crackle and squawk of acoustic vibrations on wires and wax (4). Katsma fails to consider, in other words, that the growing stillness of human characters might be related to the increasing loudness of urban noise. The fact that the opening scene of The Idiot is set on train, for instance, is taken to have no implications for the sequence's loudness, even though the text mentions that it is travelling full speed and with crowded compartments. …