Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
- 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
- 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
- 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film
- 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
- 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
- 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
- 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film
- 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Lokk for himself and see the old butte new. Dbln. W.K.O.O. Hear?’
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (13.13-14)‘[V]ibration in the air is sure to awaken corresponding powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as the case may be.’
Madame Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 1888If the experiment of Finnegans Wake is the harnessing of a magical understanding of transformation through a renewed relation between word and world, one of the central mechanisms for this transformation is sound. The importance of sound in Finnegans Wake is well known, and has been insisted on from Beckett's famous assertion in ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’ (1929) that Joyce's novel is not to be read, or rather is not only to be read; it ‘is to be looked at and listened to’ (Beckett 1983: 27). Another early admirer, Sergei Eisenstein, went further, suggesting that sound is at the heart of the transformatory power of the novel: ‘The effect at times is astounding, but the price paid is the entire dissolution of the very foundation of literary diction, the entire decomposition of literary method itself; for the lay reader the text has been turned into abracadabra’ (Eisenstein 1977f: 185). The word ‘abracadabra’ is not a description of a particular referent, but a release of the power of sound in order to bring something about, to effect change.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and MagicExperiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, pp. 75 - 102Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012