“The voices I hear are not, or not only, in my head”: Transmission through Sounds in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell

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Ian McEwan’s Nutshell – a contemporary version of Hamlet – is the account by a very eloquent in utero narrator of his mother and uncle’s plot to murder his father, John Cairncross. This contribution analyses transmission through sounds in the novel, in which the narrative is conducted by a foetus who is informed of what is going on around him mainly by what he can hear. Sounds are therefore of paramount importance in the novel.In Nutshell, McEwan provides a celebration of sounds and of the rich acoustic world we are part of without even noticing it; but beyond that, the novel is also a reflection on the nature of sounds and of the peculiar place they occupy in human cognition. As words and language can of course take on an acoustic form, Nutshell also constitutes a metalinguistic comment on the power of the spoken word. This paper first explores how the nature of sounds is presented in the novella and shows that they are intermediary entities between events and substance. The second section analyses how sounds are transmitted to the reader and shows that they induce what Patoine (2015) calls “empathetic reading” (“lecture empathique”). Finally, the third section about voices and identity shows that the characters are defined by the words they use and how they speak, so that identity itself can be transmitted through sounds.