Hearing Spaces: Architecture and Acoustic Experience in Modernist German Literature

Hearing Spaces: Architecture and Acoustic Experience in ModernistGerman Literature

Kata Gellen

Modernism/modernity, Volume 17, Number 4, November 2010, pp.799-818 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mod.2010.0033

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modernism / modernity

volume seventeen,

number four,

pp 799–818. © 2011

the johns hopkins

university press

Hearing Spaces: Architecture and Acoustic Experience in Modernist German Literature

Kata Gellen

Well before the great nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) published On the Sensations of Tone (1860), a groundbreaking work on the physical and physiological basis of musical effects, acousticians had proven that the percep-tion of sound requires a medium.1 Whether conceived as particles or waves, sound is material, and thus must be borne by a physical element, such as air or water. Helmholtz radicalized this point in the opening pages of his work: since a stimulus causes particles of air (Lufttheilchen) to vibrate, and those vibrations produce a sensation in our ears (a musical tone or noise), the individual particles of air are themselves what we call sound.2 The medium is literally the message.3

The study of physical acoustics, which would later come to include architectural acoustics, deals with the external space in which acts of hearing take place, as opposed to physiological acoustics, which is concerned more intimately with the ear and the nerve sensations it receives, and psychological acoustics, which examines the mental process of transforming an audi-tory sensation into an image or concept. The medium connects the vibrating body and the ear, and the mind transforms these auditory sensations (Gehörempfindungen) into perceptions (Vor-stellungen). Consequently, physical and physiological acoustics must be attentive to the setting in which sounds are produced and perceived, since this space gives form to the medium. To ignore the space of hearing is to ignore the sounds themselves, since they are not only conditioned by, but consist in the space in which they are heard. The process of generating sounds

Kata Gellen is a post-

doctoral fellow in the

German Department

at Duke University.

Having completed a

dissertation entitled

Earwitnesses: Noise

in German Modernist

Writing in 2009, she is

now exploring identity

and social control in

Weiwar Cinema and

the East-European

German-Jewish novel as

a modernist genre.

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

800 involves the subtle alteration of spatial composition; these transformations are what we perceive when we hear. Such slight changes to spatial configuration are invisible and usually intangible—though certain loud and deep sounds, such as a bass line, can generate palpable vibrations in the whole body—but they are sensible to the ear.4 At a limit, audition could be defined as the perception of otherwise insensible transforma-tions of space.

On the Sensations of Tone was essential to scientific and musical research on sense perception, not least because it was one of the earliest treatises on sound and space. Before the mid-1800s, there were of course splendid examples of acoustically suc-cessful buildings (churches, theaters, opera houses), but few theories to explain why certain structures had “good sound” while others did not.5 Helmholtz’s interest in the spatial determination of auditory perception paved the way for Harvard physics professor Wallace Sabine (1868–1919), the so-called father of architectural acoustics, whose early work was devoted to solving the difficulties of understanding speech in university auditoria. Helmholtz also broke ground by trying to establish the scientific principles behind possibly the most abstract form of art, music. In this too he must be considered a precursor to Sabine, who designed Boston’s celebrated Symphony Hall, which opened in 1900. This was the first building designed according to acoustical laws and with the help of mathematical formulas for such phenomena as reverberation and the transmission of sound through walls (SM, 4, 13–57). If for Sabine the shape, size, and material of building were of paramount concern, for Helmholtz it was above all human physiology that determined auditory processes. Together, their work can be understood to stand for a thorough reimagining of the relationship between sound and space—both bodily and architectural—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Helmholtz’s work on acoustics immediately preceded the invention of numerous electro-acoustic devices, such as the loudspeaker (Siemens, 1874), the telephone (Bell, 1876) and the phonograph (Edison, 1877), and Sabine’s work coincided with the rise of radio broadcasting (c. 1920) and the invention of sound film (mid-1920s), not to mention the widespread use of the devices invented at the end of the previous century. This convergence of theoretical and practical developments in the realm of acoustics made their work all the more resonant. People were experiencing sound in radically new ways at a time when the scientific, musical, and architectural discourses of sound were redefining the way it was conceived—most broadly and pervasively, in its relation-ship to space. According to architectural historian Emily Thompson, the single most prominent feature of the “Soundscape of Modernity,” as her book is entitled, was its

reformulation of the relationship between sound and space [ . . . ]. As scientists and engineers engaged increasingly with electrical representations of acoustical phenomena, sounds became indistinguishable from the circuits that produced them. (SM, 2–3)

In modernity, then, sound became space. Whether one calls space a context, a medium, a channel or a circuit, the point remains the same: sound without space is not only inaudible, it is unthinkable.

GEllEN / hearing spaces

801The aim of this essay is to explore the literary implications of this linking of sound and space in modernity. By examining works by three major German modernist authors—Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka—this essay will first of all demonstrate the interconnected discourses of sound and space in their texts. These writers are fascinated by the sensory challenge posed by indeterminate or unusual sounds (jumbled noises, incomprehensible voices, discordant music), particularly in the context of constructed enclosures, such as buildings, rooms, and underground caverns. In their works hearing defines or is defined by the physical structures in which it takes place. Whether architecture or the ear occupies the position of mastery is an open question: sound can appear as a product of architectural space, or it can reveal or even generate that space.

It is not, however, the case that Kafka, Musil, and Rilke learned the lessons of modern acoustical research and incorporated them into their writing in the hopes of achieving a new kind of scientific realism.6 To claim this would be to give them too little and too much credit at once. It would be to underestimate their radical attempts to reinterpret human sensation through aesthetic means, and to overestimate their scientific knowl-edge.7 Still, their techniques of representation align so neatly with scientific notions of the spatial constitution of auditory experience, that some explanation of this parallel discovery in science and art is required. How is it that modern physics and modernist literature both arrived at the conclusion that when we hear, we hear space?8

Musil, Rilke, and Kafka lived in a world that had been fundamentally transformed by acoustical science and the technological innovations it enabled. This is not only a biographical fact, but one that is reflected in their writings. Rilke wrote about the gramophone in “Primal Sound” (1919), Kafka about the telephone in The Castle (1922), and Musil about stereo-acoustic hearing in “The Blackbird” (1936) and his wartime diaries from 1915, to name just a few examples. They all went to the theater, saw mov-ies, and heard concerts; they attended and performed readings of literary works; they listened to live voices on the radio and recorded ones on phonographs. Their lives and works were deeply informed by the technology, architecture, and physiology of hearing in the modern world. It is not hard to believe that their literary works also reflect the intimate relationship between sound and space.

This essay aims to specify this link through close analysis of particular works, in order to demonstrate how these writers engaged the question of acoustic experience in modernity—and, in particular, in the spaces of modernity. Moreover, it seeks to uncover a logic of sensory experience, derived from the relationship of sound and space, that informs a significant strand of modernist writing. Kafka, Rilke, and Musil collectively develop a theory of literary production based on sensory imbalance: the condition of possibility of writing is a deficit or excess of perceptual stimuli, often in the auditory realm. Inadequate and unsuccessful acts of hearing, the consequence of listening in enclosed spaces, generate problems for figural representation and narrative develop-ment. The thin walls, flimsy doors, and porous concrete buildings of modernity and modernism transmit either a jarring acoustic mélange or an isolated indecipherable tone. Consequently, these authors are constantly being forced to write against such


802 noises: to explain, rationalize, silence, or aestheticize them. This difficult task, even when it fails—and it usually does—determines the activity of modernist narrative. Whether meaning is overwhelmed by an overload of sound or thwarted by a lack of auditory information, the difficulties that ensue in its absence become a touchstone of literary modernism. Musil, Rilke, and Kafka do not resolve the problem of noise, but find ways to represent it through a spatialized discourse of sound.

This essay is part of a growing trend to revaluate noise: rather than view it as a disruption, a distraction, and a disturbance, scholars from a variety of disciplines have come to see noise as a highly productive, if not entirely positive, force. This trend began in the late 1970s with such works as Jacques Attali’s Noise (1977) and Michel Serres’s The Parasite (1980).9 Challenging the conventional opposition of music and noise, Attali argued that music is nothing more than the organization of noise; both acoustic phenomena should be considered as markers and predictors of social and political life. To ignore or suppress noise is to be blind—or deaf—to the economy of power it both reflects and governs. In a related move, Serres sought to overturn the signal-noise dichotomy upon which theories of communication are generally based. The signal, he argues, fundamentally relies on noise, a parasite that enables communication precisely by threatening it. The goal of communication cannot be the elimination of noise, since this would require dissolving the medium or channel through which messages are sent and with it the very act of communication. In a work that imaginatively explores numerous institutions and disciplines (including myth, literature, thermodynamics and economics), Serres argues for the fundamental reliance of systems on parasites.

In the wake of these works, there have been numerous theories of listening (Szendy 2000, Nancy 2002) and histories of the ear (Sterne 2002, Smith, ed. 2004), countless studies of the voice (Göttert 1998, Meyer-Kalkus 2001, Kittler, Macho and Weigel, eds. 2002, Dolar 2006), and a few examinations of noise.10 Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999) is a notable example, since he treats noise as a major cultural force in the twentieth century.11 The phenomenon of noise in lit-erature has received less sustained attention, except by Philipp Schweighauser in The Noises of American Literature, 1890–1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics, for whom literary noise reflects and embodies certain social, political, and aesthetic realities, much as “actual” noise did for Attali.12 Recent collections on sound and Ger-man culture (Alter and Koepnick, eds. 2004, Silberman, ed. 2006) tend to favor more familiar and less recalcitrant sound objects, such as music and the voice, though certain contributors do tackle the problem of meaningless sound.13 This essay hopes to help soften the resistance to literary noise by paying sustained attention, for the first time, to a specific aspect of it: the relationship of sound and space.

Robert Musil and the Unfiltering of Modern Acoustic Experience

Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (1936) is a heterogeneous work of cultural commentary, philosophical reflection, and fictional exploration. It is divided into four parts: “Pictures,” “Ill-Tempered Observations,” “Unstorylike Stories,”


803and a short fictional work called “The Blackbird.” The second part contains a piece entitled “Doors and Portals,” an exposition on the contemporary status and function of these liminal architectural structures.

A door consists of a rectangular wooden frame set in the wall, on which a moveable board is fastened. This board at least is still barely comprehensible. For it is supposed to be light enough to be easily pivoted, and it fits in with the oak and walnut paneling that until recently adorned every proper living room. Yet even this board has already lost most of its significance. Up until the middle of the last century you could listen in with your ear pressed against it, and what secrets you could sometimes hear! The count had disowned his stepdaughter, and the hero, who was supposed to marry her, heard just in time that they planned to poison him. Let anybody try such a feat in a contemporary house! Before he even got to listen in at the door, he’d have long heard everything through the walls. And what’s more: not even the faintest thought would have escaped his ear. Why has no radio-poet [Rundfunkdichter] yet taken advantage of the possibilities of the modern concrete structure [Betonbau]?! It is undoubtedly the predestined stage for the radio play!14

Ostensibly “Doors and Portals” documents the waning cultural significance of the two architectural features its title names. The quoted passage reveals the loss that ensues in the realm of literature: eavesdropping at someone’s door no longer serves as a useful and powerful narrative device for novels, particularly those with romantic and sentimental themes; doors have therefore lost their power to produce and organize literary knowledge. Another section of the text recapitulates a long list of proverbial and colloquial references to doors and doorways in order to highlight their current obsolescence. All this might seem rather odd, unless one assumes that Musil is not genuinely lamenting the decline of these structures, but ironizing the nostalgia of a conservative cultural criticism that rues the onset of any and all change.

And yet, as is often the case in Musil’s writings, the tone is inconsistent and therefore difficult to discern. A layer of light sarcasm notwithstanding, architecture serves as a metaphor for consciousness and physical sensation: doors and doorways are figures for the points at which thoughts and perceptions enter and exit the human mind and body. To claim they are obsolete is to say that there is no longer a clear boundary between inner life and external circumstances, that stimuli flow freely through individuals without filters and constraints, and that modern man cannot impose order on his perceptions and experiences. Indeed, he cannot even know what it means to have perceptions and experiences. Musil’s Betonbau, with its porous walls, floors, and ceilings representing acoustic transparency, is a metaphor for the overloaded and disorderly state of human consciousness—even its dissolution—in modernity.15

Whether Musil wants to explore aspects of the modern psyche and soma, perform a cultural critique of architecture, or simply mock those who bother to criticize such things as architecture, “Doors and Portals” clearly seeks to represent a real human condition—social, psychological, aesthetic, and perceptual—through architectural discourse. What is less obvious is that this representation, whatever its intended or unintended effects, draws heavily on acoustics: the architectural structures Musil in-vokes, the door and the concrete building, are defined by the sounds they do and do


804 not transmit. Hearing, not vision or touch, is the sense through which the inner spaces of architecture are accessed.

Musil’s piece argues that architectural evolution has brought about a transformation in auditory sensation. The door, back when it had a proper function, leaked significant information, as well as misinformation, to curious and well-situated individuals. It filtered sounds and thereby shaped hearing: by blocking most sounds, the ones that did pass through it took on heightened importance. These acoustic nuggets, one gath-ers from Musil’s (feigned) excitement, were responsible for the dramatic twists and sentimental storylines of a certain literary genre, the romantic or sentimental novel. In such works, doors enabled the communication of precious secrets, covert plans, and potentially explosive information to unintended listeners. Musil’s own fanciful concoction, compressed into a single humorous sentence, involves romantic intrigue, inheritance, and murder! Eavesdropping was thus a literary cipher for meaningful listening: to put a character’s ear to a door was to signal that an important message would be transmitted. In the golden age of doors, Musil suggests, authors could not only produce a sense of secrecy and mystery through closed doors and acts of sly eavesdropping, they could posit the existence and communicability of discrete and comprehensible messages.

The depiction of the servants Rachel and Soliman in The Man Without Qualities also reveals Musil’s ironic interest in the trope of the eavesdropper. In one passage these characters peep through a keyhole and listen in through a door on a meeting of the “Parallel Action,” the nebulous planning project for the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Austro-Hungarian emperor’s coronation. In the process, they are both overcome by an exaggerated sense of thrill at their stealthy adventure. Rachel and Soliman are quixotic figures who have imbibed countless sentimental novels, which they now mimic in their spying and gossiping. However the exhilaration they feel derives not from the actual event they are earwitnessing (the meetings of the “Parallel Ac-tion” are incontrovertibly dull and uneventful) but from their enactment of a familiar literary trope—only in Musil’s novel no useful information is gleaned. Though its form can still be mimicked, eavesdropping no longer guarantees a meaningful message; its literary cachet has run dry.

If architectural structures once channeled sound and thereby enabled acts of mean-ingful listening, so the argument runs in “Doors and Portals,” presently they allow the free flow of acoustic material: the “faintest thought” is transmitted from one room to the next. The result of this constant, unfiltered torrent of sounds is noise. Musil is criticizing the flimsiness of modern architecture, but he is also suggesting that the thin walls and cheap materials of modern buildings represent the porousness of the modern mind and the exposed nature of personal thoughts. Architectural acoustics offers an apt metaphor for a consciousness that can no longer be contained, an inner world accessible—“audible”—to anyone.

The surprising twist in Musil’s architectural history is that modern buildings not only transform auditory experience, but also dispense with long-standing novelistic conven-tions and transform literary genres. As in the earlier model of acoustic transmission, in


805which doors enabled meaningful acts of listening in prescribed literary contexts, the acoustic paradigm opened up by the concrete building corresponds to a kind of litera-ture: the Hörspiel, or radio play, in which the acoustic dimension of literary expression received newfound consideration. This genre was conceived in the early 1920s as a marriage between the acoustic and the literary, but its most experimental manifesta-tion, examples of which could be heard in the period that Musil wrote “Doors and Portals,” abandoned a script in favor of an acoustic montage produced by juxtaposing and sequencing disparate sounds and voices.16 For example, Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 piece, Weekend, is a sound collage of various activities and events (from car horns and slamming doors to a child’s voice reciting poetry) drawn from a Berlin weekend. Musil’s idea of basing a radio play on the sounds generated within and around a city apartment building would have been the perfect complement to Weekend. His acoustical work was structured by a temporal principle (different sounds taken from a given time), while Musil’s Betonbau—if we may give this hypothetical work a title—proposed to experi-ment with a locational constraint (different sounds taken from a given place). Though Musil’s imagined radio play was never realized, he hardly abandoned the Hörspiel as a speculative notion.

Musil is interested less in the practical possibilities of the radio play than in the relationship to sound it seems to capture, which reflects a contemporary attitude to-ward listening. Filtered sounds produce not only coherent messages but a belief in the communicability of ideas. Noise however produces confusion, alienation, distance, and self-doubt. If the radio play can capture and reproduce inchoate sounds, it can serve as a cipher for a number of modern woes. When modern man listens, he can no longer assume that he will discover comprehensible messages; the necessary link between audibility and meaning is gone. The radio play reflects this new acoustic uncertainty.

The final section of the Posthumous Papers, “The Blackbird,” is a story that explores, in writing, some possibilities offered up by the radio play: it conveys an array of promising sounds in a decidedly indeterminate fashion.17 In this fictional narrative, the character Azwei (A-two) relates three episodes from his past to his friend Aeins (A-one), each of which centers on a cryptic but deeply moving acoustic experience. The first episode begins with a description of a Berlin “Hof,” the small courtyard that forms where the backs of several buildings meet. The narrator explains not only how various voices and the sounds of domestic activity move through this enclosure, but also describes the crowded arrangement of rooms, walls, and furniture in these buildings—an order determined by a deficit of space. “The Blackbird” thus depicts a modern Betonbau, and the assortment of sounds it emits and transmits, as the site at which acoustic drama unfolds. It is the realization, in written form, of Musil’s proposed radio play.

When Aeins asks Azwei to unfold the collective meaning of the three stories he has told him, the listener reveals a false assumption about the necessary interpretability of sound in narrative: “aren’t you implying [ . . . ] that all this is supposed to have a common thread [einen Sinn gemeinsam]?” (PP, 145). Implicit in the act of storytelling, Aeins seems to be saying, is the possibility of discovering a coherent meaning. The storyteller’s response debunks his friend’s supposition without offering a new interpre-tive scheme in its place:


806 “no — [ . . . ] this is just the way it happened; and if I knew the point of it all, then I wouldn’t have had to tell it in the first place. But it’s like hearing a whisper [flüstern] and a rustling [rauschen] outside, without being able to distinguish between the two!” (PP, 145).

This remark can be read as a programmatic statement on the undecidability of sound in narratives. If in former times sounds foregrounded in written fiction neces-sarily signified (the eavesdropping-at-the-door model), Azwei declares this convention misguided and obsolete (the Betonbau model). We can assume neither that the noise of modern experience can be decoded and rationalized, nor that it defies order and comprehension. The status of sense experience in modernity is thoroughly destabilized: narrative form no longer implies the existence of coherent and discernible meanings, nor does it deny this possibility. The modern condition, and hence the condition that writing must somehow accommodate, is that we are unable to determine whether what we hear is Rauschen, senseless noise, or Flüstern, secrets that encode meaning. It is not that former times made sense and that the modern age makes nonsense, but rather that we no longer know what listening will yield.

In representing personal memory as an accumulation of seemingly disparate auditory perceptions that resist interpretation, “The Blackbird” hints at the same problem that “Doors and Portals” addresses: narrative fiction may no longer be capable of reckoning with contemporary modes of hearing, since the only tendency it knows is rationalization and explanation; it lacks the means to deal with sounds that are not messages—that is, with noise. Both texts suggest that a flight from traditional written forms might be the only way to attune literary sensibility to the changed ways in which modern man hears the world, changes which themselves derive from modifications in architecture and the configuration of space. Thus they refer, directly or indirectly, to the radio play. This new form, above all a new way of experiencing literature, promises to reflect the new spatialization of sound in modernity.

It seems, then, that Musil was perhaps more intrigued by the idea of the radio play than by its execution. This is why his works propose not so much to abandon writing in favor of new artistic forms as to transform written texts on the basis of contemporary aesthetic innovations. The result would be a kind of writing that accommodates the indeterminacy of noise: it does not insist on extracting a message from its component sounds, nor does it dismiss them as senseless garbage. Such writing might replace the sequential uncovering of meaning in linear narratives with acoustic montage in written form. The effect and interest of this mode of representing sound lies in how it resists being resolved into meaningful elements. Ideally, literary acoustic montage would suspend the analytical process in the hopes of activating and expanding the reader’s sensory world, forcing him to confront its Rauschen. Auditory inundation would also reveal the new indeterminacy of information in modern writing—the fact that sound no longer promises signification and that hearing no longer guarantees understanding. Musil’s reflections on the changing relationship between sound and space thus signal the dawn of a new aesthetic of uncertainty.


807Rainer Maria Rilke: The Mental Space of Hearing

If Musil was suggesting that the noise and confusion of modern life could find their expression in the radio play or a commensurate form of writing, the opening pages of Rilke’s 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, proleptically fulfill Musil’s proposal. Rilke’s montage of noises could be given the title “Betonbau”:

That I can’t give up sleeping with the window open. Electric trolleys race ringing through my room. Automobiles rush over me. A door slams shut. Somewhere a pane of glass shat-ters, I hear the big fragments laugh, the small splinters titter. Then, suddenly, a muffled, confined noise from the other side, within the building. Someone is climbing the stairs. Coming, incessantly coming. Is here, is here a long time, passes by. And the street again. A girl screams: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley comes running up all excited, runs on over it, over everything. Someone calls out. People are running, overtake each other. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning even a cock crows, and that is an indescribable blessing. Then I suddenly fall asleep.18

This passage constitutes the novel’s second section. In its first, Malte roams the streets of Paris, experiencing the city through his sense of sight, smell, taste, and touch. What is noticeably absent from this array of sensations is any acoustic impression. “I have been out,” Malte reports, and he has encountered stimuli for all but one of the five senses: not a single sound, it would seem, has been produced or heard (N, 1). Only when he goes inside does he begin to register and record auditory impressions. Indeed, once he is confined to an indoor space sounds seem to dominate Malte’s sensory field and crowd out all other perceptions.19 This division of sensation suggests a link between hearing and spaces of enclosure.

When he is outside, Malte’s perceptual experience is coordinated: it offers a coher-ent, multi-sensory image of a city suspended between life and death, one that invokes feelings of sickness, anxiety, and disgust. Once he is indoors and the only input he receives is aural, the wholeness of the image disintegrates. If visual space is legible and rational—Malte is, after all, “learning to see,” and succeeding at it—acoustic space is decidedly unruly. Perhaps the sounds of modernity resist ordering, or maybe Malte’s difficulties stem from the isolation of hearing. As he lies in bed awaiting sleep, he hears everything and nothing: the sounds of automobiles and streetcars, footsteps, slamming doors and rattling windows, human voices and animal cries. These sounds are discrete and identifiable, but they cannot be combined into a meaningful whole, or even described in complete sentences. What unites them is that they are all heard at a particular location, Malte’s room in a shabby Parisian hostel, a physical edifice that filters sound. The building has become, as Musil would put it, “the predestined stage for the radio play”: it transmits the sounds in its vicinity unselectively, resulting in an acoustic experience that is varied and lively, but also jarring and chaotic. Architecture provides a site for auditory experience, but it cannot guarantee its meaning or utility. Indeed, because acts of hearing within enclosures constrain the other sensory faculties (Malte hears everything, but at the expense of seeing, touching, smelling, or tasting


808 anything), acoustic experience seems to prevent a complete and unified perceptual experience.20 The spatialization of sound in Rilke’s rendition of modernity is decidedly isolating and confusing.

If the dreary and melancholy images of the novel’s first section represent an es-sentially Romantic expression of modern reality, the montage presented in the novel’s second section reflects a new aesthetic of uncertainty. Malte’s collage of sounds awak-ens the impulse and desire to interpret, which cannot be satisfied. One can begin to order the sounds Malte invokes, or at least identify dichotomies into which they fall (mechanical/natural, human/animal, intentional/accidental, alienating/comforting), but this only produces stale categories that do not reflect the overall impact of the acoustic description. Nor is it satisfying to ignore the specific make-up of the din and conclude that Malte’s experience reflects the overwhelming of the modern subject through excessive stimulation; Rilke is too careful a writer for such facile conclusions. Malte’s sensations leave the reader with the same interpretive problem that Musil hints at in “Doors and Portals,” namely that there are ways to present acoustic experi-ences consistent with the realities of modern life, but it is unclear what their place in literature should be. Should they be taken as indecipherable Rauschen or as sounds that contain hidden meanings waiting to be discovered? For example, the dog’s bark and the cock’s crow bring Malte a sense of calm and relief. Unlike the noises that pre-cede them, which derive from humans and machines rushing about in crowded urban spaces, these sounds belong to the countryside. Perhaps they appeal to Malte because they remind him of the slower pace of rural life. The cock’s crow, which announces the onset of morning, signifies a calm and predictable temporal order, as opposed to the hurried pace of city life. The representation of different noises thus allows Malte to contrast various modes of temporal experience in modernity. While this interpretation is plausible, it is based on the assumption that Malte’s catalogue of sounds is a portrait rather than a scribble, that it contains signals rather than noise, and that these acoustic orders can even be distinguished. Rilke’s acoustic montage urges us to question such assumptions, at the same time that it prevents us from rejecting them entirely. The passage suspends interpretation, revealing the unsettling effects of spatialized sound in modernist writing.

Like Musil, Rilke suggests a program for modernist literature based on the un-knowability of whether sounds signify or are senseless noise. In fact, Rilke’s proposed aesthetic of uncertainty is more radical and explicit than Musil’s: he shows, in the second half of Malte Laurids Brigge, that the very condition of possibility of modernist writ-ing is sensory incompleteness. Through an extended allegory of poetic creation, Rilke specifies the theory of modernist unknowing we have been sketching. According to him, it is not only that we cannot know exactly when and how to apply our interpre-tive energies because we do not know what we are hearing; more fundamentally, we cannot write unless we lack this knowledge. Rilke advances a negative epistemology as the basis of a modernist poetics.

The central episode of architecturally mediated listening in Rilke’s novel revolves around the sound of a tin can lid falling to the floor in a neighboring apartment. This


809banal event serves as the basis for a lengthy reflection on the nature of perception, imagination, poetic production and ethical life.

Almost everyone knows the noise that some kind of tinny, round thing, let’s say the lid of a tin box, causes when it slips out of your hands. Usually it doesn’t make much of a noise when it lands: it hits, rolls on its edge, and really only becomes unpleasant when the wobbling runs down and it tumbles noisily in all directions before coming to rest. So then: that’s the whole story; some such tinny object fell next door, rolled, and lay still, after, at certain intervals, thumping. Like all noises that are produced repetitively, this one too had organized itself inwardly; it transformed itself, it was never exactly the same. But precisely that spoke for its regularity. (N, 130–31)

Here Malte is anything but overwhelmed and confused by the sound he hears through the walls of his room. The sentences are not short and jumpy as they were at the outset of the novel, but elegant and precise; they betray calmness and control. Indeed, Malte is so clearheaded about his auditory experience that he not only identifies the sounds and their sources, but also justifies his conclusions through a subtle argument about the law of repetition. As it happens, this is not “the whole story.” It is in fact only the very beginning of a sophisticated treatise on the tin can, one that will, over the course of several pages, proffer a series of narrative and theoretical claims about the relation of humans and objects in modernity.

At first glance, this acoustic experience seems utterly unlike the one with which the novel opened. Both episodes depict sounds heard through walls and closed doors and independently of the other four senses, but one is overwhelming and chaotic, while the other is minimal and a source of great intellectual and aesthetic productivity. They both, however, contain ideas about literary production in the midst of modern noise. Rilke demonstrates that noise can arise from two seemingly opposite situations: excessive or deficient sound. In the first case, the disparate clash calls for new forms of repre-sentation which may or not reveal acoustic meaning. In the second case, the bareness of a single isolated sound activates the mental powers of the perceiving subject. The tin can episode serves as an example of fanciful speculation motivated by meaningless sound, and it offers an implicit theory of the relation between perceptual constraint and imaginative activity.

Malte’s empirical knowledge of the tin can is limited to what he hears through the wall. Even the fact that it is a tin can is not so much known as inferred: the perception of a certain sound allows him to assume the presence of the object commonly associ-ated with that particular sound. We regularly extrapolate in this way when first-hand experience is limited, but Malte goes several steps further. He describes, in intimate detail, what the tin can looks like, its exact location in his neighbor’s apartment, as well as the series of events that causes it to tumble to the floor at irregular intervals. The precision and length of his account cannot easily be reconciled with the bareness of the auditory experience. In a sense, Malte is a typical neo-Romantic, overstepping the bounds of verifiable knowledge in order to expand the realms of thought and experi-ence.21 The Romantics sought to liberate the imagination from its Kantian strictures,


810 wherein its central function is to order perceptions. For them, imagination was a creative power, the privilege of the artist who was free and daring enough to explore and represent mental activity beyond the confines of reason and understanding.22 Malte’s musings are an example of this freedom of the mind to explore possible but unverifiable realities.23

As the passage progresses, Malte’s reflections grow increasingly distant from their point of origin—the tinny clang emanating from his neighbor’s room. He goes on to imagine other objects that might have stood on the mantle next to the supposed tin can (a mirror and a monkey) and to ponder, on the basis of a complex and counterintuitive analogy with damaged objects, the degraded condition of mankind in modernity. The claim, in brief, is that humans are fundamentally dissatisfied with their lives, which leads them to act carelessly and hastily; objects witness this behavior and imitate it, resulting in a world of bent and broken things. The “fall” of the tin can lid is thus literal and figurative, and a direct consequence of the bad example set by human beings. Even before he begins to elaborate this strange comparison, however, Malte’s reflec-tions have already accrued a theoretical status on the basis of the imagined objects he conjures. The mirror, in its capacity for reflection, and the ape, as a proverbial imitator, are pointed—even clichéd—references to a Romantic model of aesthetic production. Prior to developing an abstract theory of human-object relations (with clear biblical and ethical overtones), the imagery of Malte’s account has already revealed his aspirations in the realm of aesthetic theory.

While it is probably going too far to say that Malte advances a full-blown account of literary creation, his notes on the tin can posit a necessary link between perceptual constraint and imaginative activity. This point is demonstrated by the stream of thoughts triggered by a minimal noise, and it is implied by the confident tone in which the en-tire episode is narrated. Throughout these pages, Malte speaks with uncharacteristic self-assurance, despite the fact that almost everything he says is actually unverified hypothesis.24 This tone is especially surprising given what we know about Malte’s gen-eral mood of anxiety and self-doubt. It should be taken as an indication that Malte is thoroughly at home in the realm of imagination—more at home, in fact, than he is in the realm of empirical sensation. His exposition on the tin can is not meant to compete with reality. Rather, it exists in another realm, one that opens up precisely at the limit of sense experience. Malte thereby suggests that there is a kind of knowledge borne of the imagination whose very condition is perceptual lack. The images and narratives he conjures compensate for the limits of sense experience: they produce a substitute for a reality that cannot be known. The generation of this ersatz, if we read his exposi-tion as a kind of aesthetic theory, is the work of poetic creation. The results of Malte’s imaginative processes are evidence of what speculative thought achieves under condi-tions of architecturally constrained hearing: literature.

Numerous critics have examined the implicit theories of aesthetic experience and reception in Malte Laurids Brigge, but their grounding in a deficit of sensory input has not been addressed. Spatial constraints not only reveal the limits of the human senso-rium, but also enable a kind of hearing in the mind. The sounds heard, or conjured, in


811this mental space are not subject to the laws of physics, physiology, and architecture, but they are enabled by the constraints these laws impose upon the perceiving subject. The mental space of hearing is conditioned not by walls, floors and building materials, but by a need for knowledge that outstrips perceptual capacities. Rilke’s model of literary creation thus operates according to a compensatory epistemology: it produces a kind of knowledge (in the form of imagined sensations, images, stories, and theories) through speculative acts enabled and inspired by a paucity of direct sensory experience.25

Franz Kafka and Architectural Narration

The works of Franz Kafka are so full of buildings, houses, and castles, as well as various architectural features associated with them (walls, staircases, towers, gates, and rooms of all sorts, including classrooms, bedrooms, and courtrooms), it seems justified to speak of architectural narration as a mode of expression in his writing. Of course, these edifices are often absent, as in The Castle, or provisional: “The Great Wall of China” names a structure that is under construction and unfinishable, and in “The Burrow” we find a sort of negative edifice, an intricate underground cavern that is deconstructed over the course of an unfinishable narrative. The fact that buildings are so central to Kafka’s literary imagination, coupled with the fact that they are never really there, or really done, or really what they seem to be, helps explain the confu-sion and desperation that characterize so much of his fiction. His characters survey and they build, often with zeal, but rarely if ever are they able to grasp or complete an architectural project. This circumstance produces a mode of discourse that I have termed architectural narration.

Kafka’s unfinished story “The Burrow” elaborates the acoustic conditions of archi-tectural narration: in order to tell the story of the burrow, the narrator must describe a process of auditory exploration. The narrative fragment consists of the agitated reflec-tions of an unnamed creature (we will call him the burrower) who has built himself a safe underground home which he hopes to inhabit in peaceful isolation. It chronicles his labor, both its successes and its shortcomings, and culminates in the completion of the burrow. This event would seem to require that the story come to an end, given that the burrower’s existence is guided by a single aim: the construction of a secure enclosure. And yet Kafka and his burrower persist. As if to save “The Burrow” from closure, Kafka introduces a nagging hissing sound into it. This disturbance, a noise that simultaneously threatens and sustains the burrow, guarantees the (tortured) continu-ation of narrative.

“The Burrow” addresses a general question about narrative fiction: is it possible to write a story about a house or a home? Epics tend to be about coming home or leaving home—for example the Odyssey or the Aeneid. Simply being at home is too static a condition for narrative; it lacks movement and direction, some form of which is required for narrative progression. It is easy enough to think of novels that thema-tize and problematize domestic existence (Madame Bovary, Mrs. Dalloway) and ones that use the setting of the home to explore memory and childhood (In Search of Lost


812 Time), but these works do not rely solely on the physical space of habitation for their narrative motivation.26 In them, the house or the home provides a site for an activity, or it triggers memories or feelings out of which a narrative develops. In Kafka’s story, however, the burrow is not a mere setting or pretext for reflection; it is not a point from which to explore the past, the future or another place. “The Burrow” is, quite plainly, about the here and the now. One can argue that the space it describes is symboli-cal,27 but even so its physical contours are its most prominent feature. “The Burrow” is about dwelling in a particular architectural enclosure, and as such it is a story with nowhere to go. Its first sentence—“I have established my burrow, and it seems to be a success”—announces an end point; indeed, it sounds more like a closing remark than an opening line.28 Kafka’s story has reached a conclusion at the moment of its incep-tion. The narrative is stuck.

The typically Kafkan paradox at work here is that the very thing that threatens the physical structure (the burrow) enables the progression of the story (“The Burrow”). This thing is the “hardly audible hissing” that seems to confirm the burrower’s fears about invasion and validate his expositions on the principles for safe existence (K, 177). The noise simultaneously justifies and nurtures his anxieties, giving him an enemy against which to struggle. Kafka’s burrower finds or produces this object of threat and potential destruction, and thereby furnishes the story with a conflict that enables nar-rative progression. The noise in the burrow thus offers purpose and direction to the narrative. If the desire for safety in solitude leads the burrower to build his home, the noise guides his paranoid destruction of it.

The disturbance, however, never materializes. Or, to be more precise, it never de-velops a material existence beyond its acoustic effect; it remains no more and no less than a disembodied sound. The noise is named and renamed according to the acoustic impression it makes at any given moment (hissing, scratching, whistling, etc.) and it is interpreted and reinterpreted in accordance with the burrower’s paranoid whims: the enemy is single or multiple, capricious or scheming, vicious or simply careless, and so on. This indeterminacy is what makes the sound menacing, and thus an effective narrative device. It suggests that the enemy is neither a creature nor a sound, but a lack of definite knowledge.

In addition to being unidentifiable, the noise is ineradicable. In fact, if there is one thing the burrower knows, it is that there is no escaping the noise in his home. Brief moments of silence are overshadowed by fearful anticipation that the noise will return, or even worse, that the enemy will appear soundlessly. Though the burrower wants nothing more than peace and quiet, the story cannot afford to silence the noise in his home—to explain what it is, what has caused it, and why it is there. To do so would be to eliminate the informational gap upon which Kafka’s narrative thrives. It would be to bring closure to a story that Kafka not only left unfinished, but which is in its essence unfinishable.

How exactly does the noise in the burrow nourish and sustain “The Burrow”? The noise leads the burrower around his home: he roams, he pokes about, he bumps up against its walls, he begins to take it apart . . . Listening serves as a guide for architectural


813exploration and, as it were, deconstruction. The noise in the burrow thus determines the course of the burrower’s physical movement and the direction of the narrative. When he hears something he cannot identify, he is forced to consider the fact of an outside world, a realm beyond the enclosure in which he dwells that is accessible only through its sounds. As a result, hearing becomes the basis for the burrower’s partial, speculative, and contingent knowledge about external reality. Unlike Malte, he does not confidently embrace the power to imaginatively embellish his limited auditory perceptions. Rather, his fragmentary and deficient knowledge is a source of considerable anxiety, but also a wellspring of narrative activity. In both situations, architecturally constrained hearing enables narrative activity and suggests a theory of literary production, but in Rilke’s work this reflects the potential of unbridled imaginative thought and in Kafka’s story it is the terrifying result of a futile attempt at solitary existence.

One might think that Kafka’s architectural narration governs only those works in which the existence, construction, or destruction of a physical edifice is at issue, but in fact the most compelling instance of it can be found in “Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People,” a story that not only lacks buildings and enclosures, but seems to take place in a spatial vacuum. The story centers on a remarkable but uncharacteriz-able sound, Josefine’s song, and the audience of mice who listens to it. This auditory activity occurs in a place that is neither inside nor outside, a space utterly devoid of architectural markers. Is it possible to hear in the absence of space? The lesson of “The Burrow” is that spatial structures condition acts of hearing, which in turn motivate narration. The second part of this description applies quite well to “Josefine,” a story that derives much of its narrative impulse from failed attempts to unlock the mystery of Josefine’s song. And yet the story has no buildings, houses, caves, walls, or gates, not even a stage or a podium for Josefine to stand on. There is only the undifferenti-ated and seemingly bare space in which the mouse folk scurries about and performs an unspecified variety of work.

While there are no fixed structures and locations in “Josefine,” the story offers mo-ments of fleeting, organic spatial organization. Josefine strikes a pose and suddenly all the mice stand frozen before her: they are not buildings, but figures that temporarily configure the space of narrative. Indeed, Josefine’s special gift seems to lie not in her voice (in the end, no distinctive acoustic quality or effect can be discerned) but in her ability to generate an architecture of the body:

to gather around her this crowd of our people, who are almost continually in motion, shooting off here and there for purposes that are often not very clear, Josefine generally needs to do no more than assume that stance—her little head tilted back, mouth half-open, eyes turned toward the heights—that indicates that she intends to sing. (K, 98)

Josefine’s gift is to unify the mice into a “Volk der Mäuse,” or mouse people. It might seem that she accomplishes this through her voice, but in fact she achieves it through her body. Singing is an afterthought. By the time she opens her mouth, Josefine has already captured the attention of the mice and gathered them into a unified group. The mice, who spend their days running about in all directions, have been stunned


814 into stillness by this piece of murine architecture. Josefine’s corporeal steadiness halts their formless activity: it literally gives shape to the community. Her calm and motion-less stance imposes order and direction on the disorderly mass. All of the mice look toward her and, like so many works of architecture, she channels their gazes upwards. A pillar, a simple column pointing to the sky, Josefine literally embodies the basic principle of all building.

Numerous critics have struggled to reconcile two central ideas in “Josefine”: the fact that she exerts a unifying force over the mice, and the fact that her singing is not special. Though the story begins by distinguishing her as a singer, her status as a musi-cian slowly unravels over the course of a narrative that cannot sustain any claims about the distinctiveness of her vocal activity. But wherein lies her power if not in her song? The answer proposed here is that her ability to unify the mouse folk derives from her physical position, her self-transformation into a piece of architecture.

This is not to say that acts of listening in the story are insignificant. As the narrator tells us, Josefine’s song must be grasped with the ear and the eye: “to understand her art, you must not only hear but also see her” (K, 96). The vision of Josefine produces architectural space, which is the condition of hearing. Before Josefine arrives on the scene there is a spatial vacuum that prevents perception altogether: there is mindless hustle and bustle, but no unity, no structure, and no perceptual activity. The laws of science teach that there can be neither vision nor hearing in the absence of space, since these activities rely on the movement of material (sound or light waves) through a medium. Josefine’s physical presence cancels this spatial void and thereby enables the mice to see and to hear. She emerges on the scene as spatiality itself—the condition of possibility of perception, the very medium of sensory experience.

If Josefine the mouse-singer is distinguished not by her song but her stance, what distinguishes “Josefine” the story is the purity with which it employs architectural nar-ration as a discursive mode. It is not merely the case that buildings and structures help maintain narrative suspense; here architecture is responsible for the very existence of the narrator. Before Josefine, no mouse is distinguished from the masses. But when Josefine strikes her pose, she not only makes a name for herself—she is literally the only named mouse in the story—she introduces the idea of individuation into the com-munity. The immediate consequence of this is the emergence of the narrator-mouse, who uses the apparently irresolvable mystery of Josefine’s song to showcase his own talents as a storyteller. This is why he brings Josefine to our attention only to systemati-cally discredit her: his carefully orchestrated struggle to account for Josefine’s song is in fact a carefully orchestrated display of his own virtuosic narrative abilities. Though he remains unnamed, he is the strongest evidence that architecture conditions not only perceptual experience but narration itself.

“Josefine” is a limit case for a kind of modernist fiction that figures the emergence of narrative from an incomplete, overwhelming, or otherwise indecipherable auditory experience, itself conditioned by architectural structures. These works seem to struggle against auditory constraints at the same time that they are shaped by them. The reli-ance of this form of writing on architecture is most pointed in the instance where that


815structure is most minimal: the simulated, contingent and tenuous quality of Josefine, the living pillar. There is no inner space to give form to auditory activity in “Josefine,” but hearing and narration are still functions of a physical structure that organizes and enables mouse activity. Indeed, the minimal difference that seems to mark, at times, Josefine’s vocal activity as singing (“Singen”) as opposed to mere whistling (“Pfeifen”), consists not in an acoustic quality but in a spatial one. When audible differences must be explained in spatial terms, the transformation of sound into space is complete.

Spatial Turn, Acoustic Turn

Something is amiss about the quantity of acoustic material in modernist German literature: either the ear is overwhelmed, as in the opening pages of Malte Laurids Brigge and the description of the concrete building in Musil’s “Doors and Portals,” or the ear receives too little sensory information, as in Malte’s acoustic encounter with the tin can lid and the noise in Kafka’s burrow. In both cases the listener is stimulated by noise, but lacks the perceptual information needed to bring order and meaning to the experience. Encounters with noise are usually confusing and irritating, but they are also motivating: they produce a drive to describe and explain, to speculate and imagine, and above all to narrate. I have suggested three ways in which noise enables narrative: in Musil noise raises the question of interpretation and posits the undecid-ability of meaning in modernist writing; in Rilke it triggers imaginative thought and thereby opens up a realm of experience and knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible; and in Kafka the haunting menace of noise and the curious indeterminacy of voice pose problems for inquisitive narrators to investigate.

Noise, then, is a central feature of modernist writing, or at least of the works of these three authors. It is deeply implicated in their reflections on the nature of literary creation in general, and modernist narrative fiction in particular. Furthermore, we have seen that any exploration of sound is also an exploration of space. Musil, Rilke, and Kafka depict acoustic phenomena and auditory activities by describing the architectural structures in and around which they take place. These buildings and burrows constrain hearing and prevent understanding at the same time that they enable a discourse of sound. The most revealing example of this is Kafka’s “Josefine,” in which sound becomes a function of space: it presents a musicality that is so elusive and undefinable because it consists not in melodies or harmonies but in a certain configuration of architectural space.

Kafka’s fictional tale thus expresses an intuition the author seems to have shared with the great scientist Helmholtz: that sound is space. This early theoretician of acoustical science had suggested that the ear is more sensitive to space than any other sense or-gan. The reason for this is that space is not a mere context or precondition for auditory activity. Rather, hearing could be understood as the perception of ever-so-slight changes in the medium, variations inaccessible to the rest of the human sensorium. Sound, for Helmholtz, consisted in space, and in particular in its fluid transformations.

Helmholtz thus hit upon what literary critics might today call the convergence of the spatial turn and the acoustic turn. (Of course, he was doing science and trying to


816 describe the physical world, whereas we are engaged in textual interpretation in order to describe literary phenomena; still, there is considerable crossover appeal.) We are all well-versed in the centrality of spatial forms for cultural understanding, and many of us are also familiar with the guiding role of acoustic and auditory experience for culture. This essay has aimed to demonstrate the intimate relationship of these discourses in modernist German literature. It thus challenges the conventional notion that space reveals itself to the eye and that the medium of sound, especially music, is time. Nei-ther of these assumptions is wrong, but they are limiting—according to science, and according to literature. Indeed, the early twentieth century saw the birth of an entire field of science, architectural acoustics, out of the realization that space fundamentally determines how and what we hear. Musil’s, Rilke’s, and Kafka’s works not only reflect a cultural sensibility that has absorbed this lesson: they contain creative and disturbing reflections on the implications of this convergence of spatial and acoustic thought for modernist literary narrative.

Notes1. Stephan Vogel, “Sensation of Tone, Perception of Sound, and Empiricism: Helmholtz’s Physi-

ological Acoustics,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 261. While the sixth-century Pythago-reans, and subsequently Aristotle and his school, already had theories about auditory perception, the modern science of acoustics is thought to stem from the work of Joseph Saveur, Leonhard Euler, Ernst Chladni and Georg Ohm in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on whose work Helmholtz built. On the origins of acoustic science, see Grove Music Online, “Acoustics, §1: Room Acoustics” (by Ronald Lewcock, Rijn Pirn, with Jürgen Meyer) and “Physics of Music” (by Sigalia Dostrovsky, Murray Campbell, James F. Bell and C. Truesdell), http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 21 April 2008). On the history of architectural acoustics, see Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). The latter is henceforth abbreviated as SM.

2. Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1877), 16. Translations are mine.

3. This statement, in addition to playing on Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, reflects the ancient problem of distinguishing, in acts of sensation, among the sensing organ, the sensible object, and the medium in which the act of sensation takes place. If in acoustic sensation the line between the sensible object and the medium is blurred, in Aristotle’s account of tactile sensation the distinction between the organ and medium of touch is difficult to grasp. Helmholtz’s theories seem to confirm the Aristotelian insight that all perception requires contact: the medium connects the vibrating body (the sound source) to the ear (the sound receptor). On contact and touch in Aristotle’s theory of sensation, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone, 2007), 26–30.

4. Clearly not all sounds can be heard: for example, very low volumes (less than zero dB at 1000 Hz) and high frequencies (above 20,000 Hz) are inaudible to humans.

5. Marshall Long, Architectural Acoustics (Burlington, MA/San Diego, CA/London: Elsevier, 2006), 30–31.

6. I will not argue that noise in modernist writing reflects a socio-cultural reality, though contem-porary accounts of urbanization and mass culture would support this claim: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), especially 174–78; Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), especially 327.


8177. Musil presents a significant exception. He studied under the influential experimental psycholo-gist Carl Stumpf and wrote a dissertation on the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, famous for his work on the perception of moving objects and sounds. This paved the way for his interest in Gestalt psychology and psychotechnics, both psycho-scientific theories centrally concerned with subjective perceptual and cognitive processes. He was familiar with Stumpf’s work on acoustical phonetics and Erich Waetzmann’s studies on the perception of noises produced by military vehicles and weapons, both of which rely on Helmholtz’s theory of tone (Christoph Hoffmann, Der Dichter am Apparat: Medientechnik, Experimentalpsychologie und Texte Robert Musils 1899–1942 [Munich: Fink, 1997], 43–66, 141–56, 188–96, and 232–46).

8. On Helmholtz’s influence on popular conceptions of sound, see John Durham Peters, “Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History,” in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 187.

9. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2003); Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

10. Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004). Karl-Heinz Göttert, Geschichte der Stimme (Munich: Fink, 1998); Reinhardt Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho und Sigrid Weigel, eds. Zwischen Rauschen und Of-fenbarung: zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002); Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

11. Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

12. Philipp Schweighauser, The Noises of American Literature, 1890–1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006). My dissertation is another full-length study of noise in literature (Kata Gellen, Earwitnesses: Noise in German Modernist Writing [PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010]).

13. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); “The Art of Hearing,” a special issue of Monat-shefte 98.2 (2006), edited by Marc Silberman.

14. Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (Hygiene, CO: Eridanos, 1987), 57. Hereafter cited as PP.

15. Stefan Jonsson’s reading of Musil’s works is deeply engaged with the question of whether they exemplify an expressivist paradigm, in which external conditions, such as architecture and urban space, reflect internal realities (Stefan Jonsson, Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 60–96).

16. For a concise history of the German radio play, see Hans-Jürgen Krug, Kleine Geschichte des Hörspiels (Konstanz: UVK, 2003).

17. Bernhard Siegert, “Rauschfilterung als Hörspiel. Archäologie nachrichtentechnischen Wis-sens in Robert Musils Amsel,” in Robert Musil. Dichter, Essayist, Wissenschaftler, ed. Hans-Georg Pott (Munich: Fink, 1993), 193–207. Hoffmann makes a related point: “The Blackbird” should be understood in the context of advances in listening culture brought on by the telephone and radio; the story thus generates not so much an implied reader as an implied listener (Hoffmann, Der Dichter am Apparat, 187–88).

18. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Burton Pike (Champaign/London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 2. Hereafter abbreviated as N.

19. This claim might seem overstated, given that Malte’s experience involves tactile sensation: he senses the rumblings of the streetcars with his entire body. It is hardly a coincidence that when hear-ing bleeds into another sense, it should be the sense of touch: for Aristotle all sensation was based


818 on touch, and Helmholtz defined hearing as the subtle movements of the medium making contact with the ear. See note 3.

20. A great deal of critical work has been done on Rilke’s interest in the expansion and coordination of sensation. See especially Silke Pasewalck, »Die fünffingrige Hand«. Die Beduetung der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung beim späten Rilke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002).

21. Patricia Rae challenges the idea that creative imagination in modernist literature is always tied to a Romantic sensibility. There is ample evidence to suggest that a scientific understanding of the mind, derived especially from the empiricist psychology of William James, lies behind the idea of “inspiration” in modernist literature (Patricia Rae, “Modernism, Empirical Psychology and the Creative Imagination,” Modernism, vol. 1, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska [Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007], 405–18). While the Romantic impulse in Rilke’s account of creative imagination is undeniable, Rae’s suggestion is worth considering, especially in light of the technical, pseudo-scientific tone Malte adopts in this passage. On modernist writing and empirical psychology, see also Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

22. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Einbildungskraft/Imagination,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 2, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 104–106.

23. On Malte’s exploration of hypothetical realities, see Judith Ryan, “‘Hypothetisches Erzählen’: Zur Funktion von Phantasie und Einbildung in Rilkes »Malte Laurids Brigge«,” in Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Rüdiger Görner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 245–84.

24. Ryan, “‘Hypothetisches Erzählen,’” 256–60.25. Michael Cowan’s essay on hearing in Rilke’s novel argues that it valorizes silence for the sake

of meditation and inwardness. While these are important aspects of Malte’s acoustic experience, Cowan’s essay does not do justice to the creative potential that Malte discovers, perhaps unwittingly, in noise (Michael Cowan, “Imagining Modernity Through the Ear: Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge and the Noise of Modern Life,” Arcadia 41, no. 1 [2006]: 124–46).

26. This is the kind of reflection on enclosed space that Gaston Bachelard seems to have in mind in The Poetics of Space (1958). His domestic interiors need not be sustained as sites of direct experi-ence, since they are locations endowed with personal, psychological and historical meaning (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [Boston: Beacon, 1964]). For a critique of Bachelard’s reading of domestic space in Rilke’s novel, see Cowan, “Imagining Modernity,” 140–42.

27. For a reading of Kafka’s burrow as an allegory for World War I trenches, see Wolf Kittler, “Grabenkrieg—Nervenkrieg—Medienkrieg. Franz Kafka und der 1. Weltkrieg,” in Armaturen der Sinne. Literarische und technische Medien 1870–1920, ed. Jochen Hörisch and Michael Wetzel (Munich: Fink, 1990), 289–309. For a reading of the burrow as Kafka’s tuberculosed body, see Britta Maché, “The Noise in the Burrow: Kafka’s Final Dilemma,” The German Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1982): 526–40.

28. Franz Kafka, Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 162. Hereafter cited as K. That these words seem to mark an endpoint, a completed action, is clearer in the German original: “Ich habe den Bau eingerichtet und er scheint wohlgelungen” (Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit, in Franz Kafka. Schriften, Tagebü-cher. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley and Jost Schillemeit [Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002], 576).

Hearing Spaces: Architecture and Acoustic Experience in Modernist German Literature

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