Chapter 7 - Noise

Summary

This chapter examines noise in literature. Rather than attempt to trace the myriad ways in which ‘noise’ has entered into literary works, the chapter deals with literature’s relationship to what Aldous Huxley described as the ‘age of noise’, the particular acoustic conditions produced by the modern mechanical environments and media forms of the early twentieth century. The ‘age of noise’ was acoustic – produced by factories, cars, gramophones and wireless sets – but it was also a widely circulating social discourse used to make sense of, and argue about, the perils and possibilities of the modern age. The chapter argues that writers played a central role in narrating the ‘age of noise.’ Writers who were concerned with noise in the early twentieth century, such as Georges Duhamel, not only translated the sounds of modern societies into language but also shaped the social politics of noise, playing an important part in defining what, and who, was labelled as noisy.