The Pulpit's Audible Shadow: Sonic Experience in Deborah Kay Davies's Tirzah and the Prince of Crows

Abstract

Reviews of Deborah Kay Davies’s 2018 novel <i>Tirzah and the Prince of Crows</i> praised its attention to sensory detail and the deep engagement with nature shown by its protagonist, Tirzah, as she passes from adolescence to adulthood within a small religious community in 1970s Wales. This article explores some of the many ways in which meaningful sounds affect Tirzah’s struggle against the social restrictions placed upon her by the Noncomformist ideals of her family and community. I call the sonic element of Tirzah’s struggle ‘the pulpit’s audible shadow’ in tribute to M. Wynn Thomas’s idea of ‘the shadow of the pulpit’, which traces the influence of Nonconformism on Welsh writing in English. While Thomas identifies key sonic details of Nonconformist life – ‘public prayers, testimonies, confessions, groans, tears, exclamations’ – there has been little analysis of the effects produced by Nonconformist sounds outside chapel walls. In Davies’s novel, the pulpit’s shadow is audible whenever Tirzah’s emotional development is linked to her experience of sonic effects which, as defined by the theorists Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue, emerge in the interrelationship between a sound, its physical and social context, and the experiences of the people within its range. The sonic effects of repulsion and filtration, for example, articulate Tirzah’s antagonistic relationship to her father and his religion. Repulsion, an effect ‘that produces, in an uncontrolled or conscious way, an attitude of rejection and behaviours of flight’, deters Tirzah from chapel life and guides her towards her own private theology. Filtration, ‘a reinforcing or weakening of specific frequencies of a sound’, subtly shapes the relationship between Tirzah and her father within the walls of their house. Overall, Davies’s careful representations of religiously-inflected audible events allow us to imagine the social and personal significance of historical sonic experience in Wales.