Worlds of Sound

When in the 1930s Mikhail Bakhtin theorized the stylistic uniqueness of the novel, he declared, “[the] human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking human being” (332). On the other side of media studies, Bakhtin's modernist insight into polyphony strikes contemporary readers as being premised on the separability of a voice from a speaker and its travel in time and space. It is a phonographic, if not also radiophonic insight, Bakhtin writing against a new backdrop of sound technology. But where the phonograph has tended to garner more scholarly attention—“literary studies has a gramophone problem,” writes Paul Saint-Amour (15)—the radio has been understudied, in part because the novel appears to be a less natural companion to the genre. Nevertheless, the acousmatic bodies of radio have been the novel's constant companion, in both fact and imagination. One thinks of Joseph Conrad's Marlow, who...