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  • Silent Modernism: Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf by Annika J. Lindskog
  • Helen Groth (bio)
SILENT MODERNISM: SOUNDSCAPES AND THE UNSAYABLE IN RICHARDSON, JOYCE, AND WOOLF, by Annika J. Lindskog. Lund, Sweden: Lund University English Studies, 2017. 374 pp. 429 kronor.

This study defines silence in the modernist prose of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf as the "unsayable" (12). Annika J. Lindskog explains that the unsayable is "a term that refers to something that cannot be put into words because it corresponds to ineffable or ungraspable experiences," a fairly uncontentious claim (18). Drawing on the work of a range of scholars—in particular, that of Patricia Ondek Laurence, whose formidable The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition, sets a daunting precedent1—Lindskog progressively refines and delimits her own reading of silence to an elaboration of a descriptive textual method distinguishing between the form and function of silence in modernist fiction: [End Page 440]

Silence as form constitutes its manifestation in the literary text—that is, silence as sound-setting, literary style, graphical representation, conversational attribute, and narrative gap. Function, on the other hand, has to do with the meaning of the individual silence, and affects how the manifestations of silence should be understood.

(19)

As this definition suggests, Lindskog sets out the terms of her argument clearly and supports this with reference to a selection of existing scholarship on silence. In this sense, the study is a helpful distillation of the challenges of thinking through the aesthetic conundra of giving form to silence and, correspondingly, of the forms of silence in three writers dedicated to challenging the acoustic limits of language, both thematically and linguistically.

But there is something missing in Lindskog's survey of the critical literature. There is virtually no engagement with the field of sound studies and the work of scholars who have taken the soundscape and listening as their primary focus. In a work that includes soundscapes in its title, at least some discussion of pertinent theories, particularly modernist ones, is necessary. Instead, the meaning of soundscape is pretty much assumed. Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 is one of many examples of field-defining interventions that deserved acknowledgment here, even as part of a critical positioning of the textual focus of the study.2 This is also the case for the theoretical and critical scholarship on listening that could have enriched and complicated Lindskog's treatment of silence in Woolf, Joyce, and Richardson. She makes glancing allusions to listening in her introduction through her footnoted reference to Steven Connor's seminal essay "The Modern Auditory I" but does not emphasize the pressure he places on mediation and reading as an embodied process.3 Also rendered virtually silent is Garrett Stewart, with whom Connor shares a theoretical emphasis on voicing, listening, resonance, and the acoustic dimensions of literary texts.4 While it is unreasonable to demand that Lindskog engage with all the scholarship in this dynamic critical field, one would have expected to see some reference to alternative methods of reading silence and silent reading, if only to distinguish her own contribution more clearly.

The chapters that follow explore what reading silence in terms of the unsayable means in practice. The first chapter argues that the unsayable in the modernist novel is linked to the early-twentieth-century language crisis or "crisis of realism" (26). This is a strong section that stresses the continuities between modernist and nineteenth-century versions of what came to be known as realism, taking its point of departure from Ford Madox Ford's late 1930s redefinition of realism as "a frame of mind reinforced by the new literary technique of impressionism" (28).5 The subsequent discussion carefully [End Page 441] sets out the context in which Woolf, Joyce, and Richardson embarked on similar processes of redefinition in the wake of the evolving treatment of silence in mid-nineteenth-century to early-twentieth-century fiction and theories of fiction. This is a very useful chapter and makes a carefully considered contribution to our understanding of forms of silence in...

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