- 1 For an account of critical receptions and discussions of Lawrence’s Studies see Lee M. Jenkins, “St (...)
1It has been one hundred years since the British edition of Studies in Classic American Literature was published in June 1924 by Secker (SCAL xvii), following the American edition the previous year. Critical discussions of Studies usually focus on Lawrence’s position as a non-American national engaging in non-academic criticism.1 His novel idea of charting an American literary canon has been met either with scorn or with appreciation. On the whole, scholarly criticism celebrates the fact that the works of Lawrence’s choice writers all delineate the “Spirit of Place” that he depicts in his often quoted introduction to Studies.
2However, Edgar Allan Poe stands out from this canonical collection of writers because, according to Lawrence, his tales “are ghastly stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes” (SCAL 66). In fact, in the introductory paragraph to his essay on Poe, Lawrence takes pains to distinguish him from the first three writers that he has discussed, namely Benjamin Franklin, Hector St John de Crevecoeur and Fenimore Cooper, by specifying that, contrary to these, Poe does not address issues related to Native Americans or nature. In the paragraphs following this statement, Lawrence unambiguously espouses Poe’s interest in rendering the agonies of the soul in the Gothic mode.
3Poe also stands out in the way Lawrence draws attention to his sensitivity to sounds and noises that build gothic soundscapes—the term “soundscape” having been popularized by the Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer—to call an isolated “acoustic environment as a field of study just as we can study the characteristics of a given landscape” (7). Building on Lawrence’s evocation of Poe’s gothic soundscapes, I explore how modernist narrative features, for instance shifts in perspective and the role given to modern electric devices, enhance sounds of the uncanny in Lawrence’s own short fiction. Because of their prevalent focus on sound, three unrelated stories titled “The Last Laugh” (1925), “Glad Ghosts” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926), all published after the first edition of Studies in Classic American Literature, are most relevant to discussing the new twist that Lawrence gives to the Gothic genre thanks to acoustic awareness.
- 2 Which translates as “His heart is a suspended lute;/ It resonates as soon as touched.”
4Lawrence’s evocation of Poe’s narratives strikingly reveals his awareness of the American writer’s sensitivity to sounds. The many quotes Lawrence chooses from Poe’s texts all resound with voices, shrieks, laughs, whispers, together with specifications about vibrations and pitch. In a brief biographical passage, Lawrence appropriates such sounds to describe Poe’s wife, Virginia, “his cousin: a girl with a singing voice” (SCAL 68-69). Similarly, in Ligeia, which Lawrence regards as Poe’s “own story,” the husband is pointedly said to remember, “I was never made aware of [Ligeia’s] entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low, sweet voice as she placed her marble hand on my shoulder” (SCAL 69). Poe’s sensitivity to sounds is further highlighted when Lawrence reminds us that “The motto to The Fall of the House of Usher is a couple of lines from Béranger [1780-1857]. ‘Son coeur est un luth suspendu ; / Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne’” (SCAL 76).2
5Indeed, while Poe’s tales combine the paradigmatic settings of the Gothic genre, composed of decaying mansions, closed chambers, vaults and coffins, with night scenes propitious to a gothic atmosphere, they also build a subjective perception of the surroundings that “participates in the [genre’s] shift towards individuality and interiority” (Ratail 132). Rendering the subjective perception of surroundings implies giving greater importance to its aural features because, as Lucie Ratail argues in her study of Poe’s soundscapes, hearing is the best sense to build up suspense “since sounds are immaterial and can thus be incarnated in any shape, body or object by the imagination” (134). This modernist “perceptual turn,” as Melba Cuddy-Keane calls the focus on acoustics (382), endows sound with the function of conveying the intensity of emotional responses to love, hate and horror. Still talking of Ligeia, Lawrence comments on her fate that consisted in dying when she so strongly wanted to live and love, writing, “No wonder she shrieks with her last breath” (SCAL 73).
6Although Lawrence focuses on the motif of love that he has identified in Poe’s uncanny tales, his discussion eventually maps out a soundscape that definitely pertains to the Gothic genre. In Poe’s narratives, sounds of horror efficiently convey the dualities of mind/body, life/death, sanity/insanity and reality/illusion that characterize the genre, but sounds of horror are also the trace of the interest in the self and the subconscious that developed at the end of the nineteenth century, an interest Lawrence also took, publishing Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and its philosophical follow-up Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) in the interval between the first version of his essay on Poe published in English Review (1919) and the revised version (1924). As Lawrence puts it in Studies, “All this underground vault business in Poe only symbolises that which takes place beneath the consciousness” (78-79, italics in the original).
- 3 See Cuddy-Keane on the need for “an appropriate language for [the analysis]” of “narrative’s new au (...)
7Some of Poe’s tales, for instance Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher, are first person narratives, this feature giving more immediacy to the aural perceptions of an unreliable narrator whose tentative interpretations and struggle to understand the truth, or to rationalize the uncanny, are the only elements readers can go by. Most often than not, words fail the narrator who is trying to assert that he is not insane. The knocking sound the narrator, Roderick, hears repeatedly in The Fall of the House of Usher is a case in point. Lawrence picks out “a clash of metal, then a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled, reverberation” (SCAL 78). Significantly, the first person narrator’s failure to speak about these sounds of which he was aware is intensified thanks to the disrupted phrasing of his utterance when he says, “I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak” (SCAL 78, italics in the original). Analysing Poe’s tale, Ratail suggests that “the inability to produce speech becomes the symptom of an exaggerated focus on the act of listening” (130). In the second part of the utterance, the repetitions and dashes do, indeed, enact the sound of “her first feeble movements” that Roderick perceives. The repetitions and dashes also break the linearity of the reading process to make Roderick’s feeling of guilt and horror at himself more audible to the readers. Therefore, repetitions and breaks marked with dashes are the textual sounds of self-reflexivity. In this way, acoustic awareness, Roderick’s hearing the uncanny sounds, shifts to, what I have chosen to call in a reversal of terms, acoustics of awareness, a growing awareness of Roderick’s own guilty passivity whose progress the readers perceive thanks to the aural narrative strategies embedded in the text. The phrase “acoustics of awareness” that I have coined designates the aural enactment of self-reflexivity in writing. It is the result of the tensions introduced by the modernist shift to interiority and individuality that invest the text with a plurality of sounds and meanings.3
8Finally, Lawrence’s sensitivity to sound in Poe’s tales leads him, in his essay, to capitalize on the multiple contextual meanings of vibrations and pitch, terms originally related to acoustics. Commenting on Poe’s love for his wife, who died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, Lawrence expands an analogy between shades of colour and sound to express a saturation point in human relationships: “With her he went in for the intensest flow, the heightening, the prismatic shades of ecstasy. It was the intensest nervous vibration of unison, pressed higher and higher in pitch, till the blood vessels of the girl broke” (SCAL 68-69). “Poe,” he continues, “drove the vibrations beyond any human pitch of endurance” (SCAL 69). Lawrence had previously used a similar analogy based on unison and pitch in Aaron’s Rod. In the “XX Settembre” chapter, an angry procession emerges into a street of Milan while Aaron looks on from his hotel balcony. Images derived from the iron industry, for which most of the demonstrators work, are fashioned to describe the gruff voices rising from the crowd “like a jarring of steel weapons” (AR 183). Industrial imagery provides a somewhat conventional metaphor (“Steam was getting up,” 184) to convey mounting tension. Significantly, the demonstrators are compared to pitch: “[Aaron] could hardly see anything but hats and shoulders, uneasily moving like boiling pitch away beneath him. But the shouts began to come up hotter and hotter” (183-184). Lawrence is, of course, playing on the term “pitch” which can also qualify a voice or sound. He turns explicitly to this meaning later in the account (“The voices rose in pitch and derision,” 184) to depict the clamour of the demonstrators.
9Therefore, in the light of Lawrence’s essay on Poe, which resolutely attracts our attention to acoustic awareness, it is relevant to examine how Lawrence puts to the test the paradigms of Gothic short fiction and, in particular, how its aural features resonate within his own uncanny tales.
10The assonantal titles of “The Last Laugh” and “Glad Ghosts,” first published respectively in The New Decameron in 1925 and in Dial in 1926, signal the prominence given to acoustics in the tales whose modernist features amplify the way hearing and not hearing fashion the uncanny.
11In “The Last Laugh,” the term “last” points to the fact that multiple laughs can be heard throughout the story. As Michael Hollington details in his study of Lawrencian Gothic, the first to laugh is Lorenzo, probably Lawrence’s alter ego, then Marchbanks, often identified as John Middleton Murray. There is also Miss James, alias Dorothy Brett, who gives “a quick chuckling laugh” (Hollington 175). But the uncanny is fashioned thanks to an unidentified laugh that seems, at first, to come from the bushes, then from a church. The latter laugh, that most critics attribute to a manifestation of Pan, is a singular sound source, in both meanings of “singular,” that the various characters experience in different ways. Multiple points of view on the Panic laugh evidence the modernist “new narrative inscription of the listening subject” (Cuddy-Keane 385) that fashions Lawrence’s own version of the uncanny. Antithetical responses to the laugh, celebration and fear, are conveyed, when, on the one hand, Miss James becomes a disciple of Pan (“The girl’s long, rippling laugh sounded through the house, uncannily,” LL 132), and on the other, Marchbanks and the policeman betray panic fear, the homophonic adjectives “Panic (laugh)” and “panic (fear)” both ironically deriving from the name of the god Pan.
12When Marchbanks first hears the uncanny laugh, his insistence on the actual process of hearing is transcribed in the narrative thanks to his unrelenting repetition of the question, “Do you hear / Did you hear some one laughing?” and also “Did you hear it?” (LL 124). For the benefit of the readers, throughout the passage, the recurrence of italics inscribes the very process of hearing, or not hearing, an uncanny sound in the material fabric of the text, as in “Do you hear somebody laughing?” “But it’s most extraordinary!” “The laughing. Somebody laughing. It’s most extraordinary” (124). Miss James, who is deaf, can only deny hearing the uncanny sound, italics, a visual device, still paradoxically signposting aural information, for example stressed words and tone of voice, as in “I heard you!” she said, in a tone which conveyed that that was enough” (124). The use of italics, which seems to recur as often as the laugh, recalls Anais Nin’s remark on Lawrence’s “megaphonic insertions” in his Studies in Classic American Literature (61).
13Thus, as Cuddy-Keane concludes, “while the Victorians do show an increasing imaginative response to […] sound, attention shifts, in the modernist period, to the precise physical characteristics of sound and the complex process of auditory perception” (383). Lawrence’s ironic twist consists in introducing a character who is deaf and therefore carries around a Marconi listening machine, an apparatus that amplifies sounds for the hearing-impaired. Paradoxically, Marchbanks’s perception of the laugh is unreliable; he needs to share the experience to be sure that it took place, whereas the modern listening apparatus provides a reliable auditory experience of sounds. Resorting to a Marconi listening machine, in this uncanny scene, recalls how at the beginning of the twentieth century, modern recording and sound transmitting devices, including gramophones, were used not only to attempt to communicate with the dead, but also to collect proof of successful conversations with the deceased (see Hollington 183). In his book Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Steven Connor mentions how “transcriptions of the utterances of spirits in the direct voice, as recorded by means of the phonograph, tape-recorder, or old-fashioned stenography, came to seem more reliable [according to] the twentieth-century spiritualist literature” (367, see also Peter Bander’s later experiments with recorded voices from the dead in Voices from the Tapes).
14In “The Last Laugh,” using The Marconi listening machine is therefore an attempt to rationalize the uncanny: the machine cannot deceive whereas human senses, and in particular hearing, are unreliable. The apparatus and also the restoration of Miss James’s sense of hearing lay the focus on the process of hearing in an uncanny context and, thereby, contribute to the shift away from acoustic awareness, narratively developed in the nineteenth-century, to modernist acoustics of awareness, when the hearing process, based on self-reflexivity, is inscribed in the text.
15In “Glad Ghosts,” the plurality registered in the title first points to the many different perceptions of one particular ghost, Lucy, who haunts the Lathkill’s family estate named “Riddings.” But such plurality also heralds the various other ghosts which haunt each of the characters; Lucy of course, then Charlotte and Lord Lathkill’s deseased children, and also the ghost of the narrator’s unfulfilled love for Charlotte who, throughout the story, gives “a schoolgirl’s snirt of laughter” (GG 177, 179, 181, 188). The uncharacteristic choice, by Lawrence’s standards, of a first person narrator, called Morier, does not dwarf the modernist shifts in perspective from one character to another that fashion a complex life-death relationship characterized by sexual desire, on the contrary the first person narrator amplifies unreliability.
16Silence and mutterings recur persistently at Riddings. This very repetition of absence of sound blurs the boundaries between life and death; “They all let their words die in their throats, as if the larynx were the coffin of sound,” says the narrator (GG 187), astutely combining the semantics of death and organs of sound, in a shift from acoustic awareness to, what I have called, acoustics of awareness. In this story, sound is not interrupted by silence as it is in “The Last Laugh,” instead overwhelming silence is broken by laughter, the narrator’s and Charlotte’s, to express their desperate plea to remain among the living. According to Paul Poplawski, onomastics suggest that the name of the family, Lathkill, may be understood as “kills laughs,” another aural pun (qd Hollington 178). It is noteworthy that “kills laughs” resonates with the name of the visitor, Morier, which suggests “more rire,” more laughter, to Poplawski and “mourir,” to die, to Hollington (178). I would further remark that, in this modernist House of Usher, Charlotte’s maiden name “Fell” is reminiscent of “Fall” to be found in Poe’s full title.
17In addition to the silences and voices, modern technology mentioned in the narrative definitely renews Gothic aural features. After dinner for instance, the acoustic manifestation of Lucy’s ghost thanks to thuds coupled with the sudden cold felt in the room borrows from the conventional paradigms of the Gothic genre. These paradigms are strikingly juxtaposed to the dance scene which follows immediately, music being played on a pianola and Victrola. Interestingly, unlike the hearing apparatus in “The Last Laugh” which provided reliable aural information, in “Glad Ghosts,” the musical devices that the characters take turns to operate blur the boundaries between reality and illusion. The pianola and the Victrola do provide the living with entertainment, but their very mechanical workings hark back to the boundary between life and death, when “the monstrous barking howl of the opening of a jazz tune, an event far more extraordinary than thuds, poured from the unmoving bit of furniture called a Victrola” (GG 196). These emerging sound technologies disembody music so that it becomes acousmatic, sound one hears without seeing its originating cause or body, as illustrated, for instance, by the well-known terrier, Nipper, and “His Master’s Voice” in the logo for Emile Berliner’s Gramophone Company. Acousmatic sound, then, is experimented with in Lawrence’s new version of the Gothic, when the disembodied ghost, Lucy, finds its acoustic parallel of disembodied sound in the musical apparatus, the Victrola in particular.
18In my understanding of the story, Morier’s own ghost, the living Carlotta, comes to him during the night and both are fulfilled in this sexual encounter. “Glad Ghosts” like “The Last Laughter” showcases, then, how Lawrence revisits the paradigms of the Gothic genre to find a means to celebrate Pan and sexuality and voice the refusal to “forge[t] we’re flesh and blood” (GG 199). Acoustic awareness and the very disembodiment of sound are further explored in Lawrence’s most famous uncanny tale, “The Rocking Horse Winner.”
19As in “Glad Ghosts” where the unlucky Lathkill family grapple with their ill-fated events, luck plays a central part in “The Rocking Horse Winner,” first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1926, and also compiled in The Ghost Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, the same year. It focuses on young Paul’s uncanny secret to get lucky and solve the recurrent shortage of money in his parents’ home. His innocent aural confusion of the words “luck” and “lucre” (he mistakes the latter for “lucker”) combined with his want of love from his mother provide, what Hollington calls, “an assonantal chain [love, luck, lucker, lucre, money, mother] that is lodged in Paul’s consciousness” (182).
20The opening of the story focuses, though, on the mother, her deepest thoughts being conveyed in indirect speech, and in particular the financial worries that haunt her and that she never actually voices, “There must be more money, there must be more money” (RHW 230). The recurrent unvoiced phrase is uncannily re-embodied in the whispers of the house as it “came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money!” (230). Again, as in “The Last Laugh,” the process of hearing is emphasized to fashion the uncanny atmosphere; the children hear the whispers and “would stop playing to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard” (RHW 231). The acoustic awareness of the characters depicted here shifts to acoustics of awareness in the way monosyllabic words and alliterations form a backward and forward movement to fashion reciprocity, as in “And each one saw in the eyes of the other two, that they too had heard” (231). Additionally, the modernist attitude to objects challenges Gothic paradigms and amplifies the stress put on the narrative inscription of the listening subject. Indeed, the re-embodiment of the mother’s thoughts in the house’s whisper is heard by the rocking-horse, and also the big doll which “could hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it” (231). The attention paid to these toys heralds, of course, the rocking horse’s agency over Paul later in the story.
- 4 For more on the names of the horses in the tale, see my forthcoming article “Against All Odds: Thor (...)
21The uncanny whispers are heard in the same way by every occupant of the house; they become mechanical because of their very repetition. Counter to this, a network of sounds builds up Paul’s obsession to become lucky and thereby “stop the whispering […] of the house” (RHW 237). During conversations, Paul is said to repeat, to insist, to reiterate. His mechanical repetition of the phrase “honour bright” (234), when making his uncle promise not to reveal that he wins money at the races, rhythmically echoes the mechanical rocking of the wooden horse. The rhythm of key sentences echoes throughout the tale, in particular Paul’s final cry, “Did I say Malabar, Mother? Did I say Malabar?” (243), which rhythmically resonates with and counters the whisper “There must be more money! There must be more money!” (230). Also, while the rocking horse has no name, Paul mounts it to experience an aural revelation of the name of the winner at the races. In fact, within the network of sounds of the house, the names of the horses on which Paul is inspired to bet are dissonant, their unexpected sonorities stressing their uncanny source.4
22Focusing on acoustics helps readers become aware, as the tale reaches its end, that the mother’s emotional distance from the child is rendered in her failure to recognize the sound of her son’s favorite toy. She perceives a “hushed motion,” the “soundless noise of the rocking-horse” (RHW 242). The oxymoron “soundless noise” depicts her lack of acoustic awareness which stands for her lack of motherly tenderness. Contrary to Roderick who, in Poe’s tale, acknowledges his guilt and horror at himself, Paul’s mother fails to engage in self-reflexivity which increases the sense of emotional emptiness. By disrupting the flow of the reading process, the oxymoron makes the mother’s emotional distance audible to readers; it functions as the textual trace of acoustics of awareness.
23Acoustic awareness in these particular stories showcases how Lawrence challenged Gothic paradigms to build a new modernist version of the genre. Like Poe, who developed the short story because its brevity amplifies internal soundscapes, Lawrence took advantage of the economy and intensity of the short story form to address the complexity of the hearing process and inscribe the listening subject in the narrative. Sounds, then, are not pushed into the background, “they are used consistently as narrative devices that convey emotions” (Ratail 141). On the level of narration, adding a further layer of meaning, the literary representations of sounds (breaks, italics and other linguistic devices) make up acoustics of awareness that signal the characters’ self-reflexive focus on the hearing process and their responses to what is heard or not heard. In this way, both sounds of modernity and the modernist interest in auditory perception are embedded with a Lawrencian twist in these masterfully uncanny texts.