Silencing the Linguistic Other: The Underclass as Noise Pollution in George Lamming's The Emigrants and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange

"SIR," the composer Algernon Ashton wrote The Spectator in 1935, "What are the chief drawbacks in modern life? Surely 'noise' is one of the greatest. Who has not been unpleasantly aroused by the early morning jangling of milk bottles?" (19). Unlike later composers such as John Cage, Ashton, seventy-six at the time of writing his letter, does not see musicality everywhere; instead, he draws clear dividing lines between the sonic purity of the chamber music he himself mainly composed and the chaotic noises nesting at his doorstep. In the same year, Sir Henry Richards, chairman of the British Anti-Noise League, makes a similar complaint:

In quite recent years the internal combustion engine and the radio have brought with them not only an added quantity of sound but a different quality. To the rhythmical hum of a factory there is always possible a chance of adaptation, but the starting of a motor engine, the change of gears, the hoot of the horn are not rhythmical. They startle and alarm. Nor does the modern house protect us from either inside or outside noise like the very solid homes of our fathers.

(626)

For both Ashton and Richards, there is something unpredictable and untranslatable about the qualities of such noises with their lack of fixed rhythms, something startling and alarming that prevents one from domesticating them, from assimilating them into one's daily life—in short, they are something from which one requires protection given how porous the modern home is.

Both statements make reference to that year's Noise Abatement Exhibition, the first of its kind, at the Science Museum in London.¹ The exhibition displayed a vast array of inventions meant to make humanity once more the master of the soundscape, and not mastered by it, in the form of slam-proof doors, wireless receivers that do not disturb the neighbors, and silencers for engines of all kinds. Despite this unprecedented response, the problem of noise was by no means a new one, and Richards is quick to acknowledge that, while at the same time pointing out that noise "is continuous and pervading in a degree never experienced before" (626). Such noise becomes all the more pervading when it's not simply on one's doorstep but comes from inside one's own apartment building. For example, a reader of Popular Mechanics, "annoyed" by the piano and other "objectionable" sounds made by his upstairs neighbors, asked if he might soundproof his apartment. Establishing clearer boundaries between interiors and exteriors—between oneself and the world—is precisely what soundproofing enables one to do; it has the double benefit of shielding one's own private exchanges while at the same time keeping the noises made by others at a safe distance. Unfortunately, he is told that in 1955 the process remains "comparatively expensive" and that the only thing available to him is a partial treatment, one that "will very likely reduce noise from above to the point where it is no longer objectionable" ("Clinic" 226).

Peaceful, private interiors, then, were not for everyone since for much of its existence soundproofing was the privilege of the well-off individual and not of the average citizen. As seen in the above complaint, by the 1950s, for manifold social and economic reasons, one's neighbors began to have a greater effect on one's own wellbeing—in England, the outcry against such din resulted in the appointment of the Committee on the Problem of Noise in 1959—and some had many more neighbors than others. Both George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954) and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) present the lives of such individuals, "the subjects of History, not its masters,"² living in an urban England of the postwar period and the unspecified future,³ respectively (Ellis 219). Soundproofing safeguards were available, but not for Lamming's titular Caribbeans of the Windrush Generation or for the working classes stacked atop each other in a rundown tower block in Burgess...