Academic literature on the topic 'Auditory hallucinations – Fiction'

This article is a series of excerpts from the author’s most recent book Sinister Resonance. It begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence both in the head, at its point of source and all around, and never entirely distinct from auditory hallucinations. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there. The history of listening must be constructed from narratives of myth and fiction, silent arts such as painting, the resonance of architecture, auditory artefacts and nature. In such contexts, sound often functions as a metaphor for mystical revelation, instability, forbidden desires, disorder, formlessness, the unknown, unconscious and extra-human, a representation of immaterial worlds. Threaded through is Marcel Duchamp’s curious observation – ‘One can look at seeing but one can’t hear hearing’ – and his concept of the infra-thin, those human experiences so fugitive that they exist only in the imaginative absences of perception.

Waugh's last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a radio: he transmits his thoughts and then receives them as external signals in order to communicate with them. Pinfold's auditory hallucinations are caused by the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, writing is also a dissociative activity. Concerned with the writer's block, the novel reflects on the creative process and illuminates the relationship between madness and creativity. If dissociation, or the splitting of the mind, is a defence against trauma, the traumatic experience Pinfold attempts to suppress is the Second World War. The unusual state of mind accentuates the contingency of Waugh's radio writing; his preferred medium is cinema.

The ubiquitous presence of ambiguous voices in Beckett’s work remains an enduring mystery. The narrative work is no exception, to the point that Beckett’s fiction after Murphy (1938) can be read as, to quote The Unnamable (1953), “entirely a matter of voices; no other metaphor is appropriate” (319). Given the alien qualities of these voices, their intrusive independent agency, and their sometimes tormenting phenomenology, two frameworks of interpretation have so far prevailed. On the one hand, there are narratologists such as Brian Richardson (2006) who have proposed an “unnatural” reading of these voices, by arguing that these alien, multiple, sourceless voices cannot be traced back or ascribed to any actual experience within the human domain; that they cannot be “naturalized” (Culler 1975; 2018; see also Fludernik 1996) by the reader. On the other hand, there is a long-standing “pathological” framework, which sees voices in Beckett’s work as a fictional rendering of a wide range of experiences associated with mental illnesses, mostly of auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVHs) typical of schizophrenia. This chapter suggests that an alternative, natural, and non-pathological experience is the target of Beckett’s fictional cognitive models having voices as core modeling elements. By drawing on contemporary cognitive research on inner speech (roughly speaking, the activity of silently talking to, with and within oneself), it is advocated that voices in Beckett’s models target the working of inner speech, only defamiliarized or, as we shall see, “detuned” as a modeling alteration to explore its functioning within human cognition.