Audionarratology

Es ist erfreulich, daß sich nach langer Vernachlässigung eine recht populäre Medienform wie das Hörbuch als Forschungsgegenstand der Literaturwis-senschaft etabliert. Das Hörbuch ist ein Medium der Literatur, 1 das teilweise noch gegenüber dem Buch als angebliches Nebenbei-Medium abgewertet wird (S. 8). Die Grenzen zu Medienformen wie dem Hörspiel sind dabei als fließend zu betrachten. 2 Auch verdient das Hörspiel eine vom Hörbuch in mancher Hinsicht distinkte Würdigung, um seine Spezifika erfassen zu kön-nen. 3 Zur nachhaltigen Etablierung einer soliden Hörbuchforschung trägt auch der vorliegende Sammelband bei, der auf eine Bochumer Tagung im Winter 2010 zurückgeht. Er ergänzt eine kleinere Publikation derselben Herausge-berinnen, die sich auf anregende Weise dem Thema Literatur und Hör-buch widmete und als Einstieg in das Thema sehr empfohlen werden

Thomas Pynchon’s interest in music is audibly reflected in the rich intertextual environments of his works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel which includes numerous allusions to musical pieces, descriptions of performances, and song lyrics. The latter stand out from prose narrative as they introduce new diegetic dimensions to the novel by offering playful commentary on its plot and characters. The present study examines the novel’s acoustic background, pointing to the formal structure of songs and its role in locating singing human voices in opposition to noises emitted by technological devices such as V2 rockets. A classification scheme shows how Pynchon’s formal experimentation juxtaposes written and oral variants of language, thus connecting songs to one of the novel’s thematic centers — problematics of order. This function of songs is examined in an episode of Vaslav Tchitcherine’s mission of promoting literacy among oral tribes of Kazakhstan, that serves as a commentary on the conventional character of writing systems and their ability to transform the poetic quality of language into a systematic structure.

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra, refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fiction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fiction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass’s Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction’s music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music’s physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen—to musical words and worlds.

This chapter wants to look at the different ways that video games use sound in
any form to create or enhance the narratives that they are telling. Video games
have from their beginning been a medium that integrated visual and aural information
in order to heighten gameplay fun and have first and foremost undergone
changes, we tend to think, in terms of graphics (this is, after all, what the term
“video” in video games refers to).

Das Hörspiel gehört zu den faszinierendsten Kunstformen des 20. Jahrhun-derts und der Gegenwart, das jedoch in mancher Hinsicht nicht die gebüh-rende akademische Aufmerksamkeit erfährt. 1 Es dürfte wohl der Dominanz des Visuellen zuzuschreiben sein, daß Hörspiele im akademischen Unter-richt so gut wie keine Rolle spielen. Andererseits ist aber auch die diszipli-näre Ordnung der Diskurse mitverantwortlich für die oft eher sporadisch wir-kende wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit Hörspielen. Denn es ist umstrit-ten, ob man Hörspiele als eine textbasierte Kunstform selbst mit textanalyti-schen Kategorien verstehen kann oder ob es nicht vielmehr einer Hörspiel-semiotik bedarf, die den Eigenwert des Klangkunstwerks erfassen kann. 2 Heuser geht nun in seiner ausgesprochen informativen und lesenswerten Studie über das amerikanische Radiohörspiel vom Ende der Zwanziger Jah-ren bis zum Jahr 1954, als es mit den meisten Hörspielserien rapide zuende ging, in reflektierter Weise von einem Vorrang des Textes aus, er als Skript

Abstract


In line with the strong emphasis on visuality in the wake of the “visual turn” in literary and cultural studies, graphic novel adaptations of literary texts have recently been the objects of scholarly study and narratological theory building. Much less attention, if any, has been accorded to radio play adaptations of novels like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. An analysis of radio play adaptations acquires a special significance in the case of this highly enigmatic work, which makes a seriously playful use of postmodern narrative strategies. It is perhaps above all this feature which made the adaptation of the novel’s first instalment, City of Glass, into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli so successful. While the graphic novel visualizes characteristic features of its mother text, this paper explores the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster’s novel. Alfred Behrens’ Stadt aus Glas, Katharina Bihler’s Schlagschatten, and Norbert Schaeffer’s Hinter verschlossenen Türen employ narrative devices like voices in both German and English, the evocation of city soundscapes, the narrative uses of music as well as issues of the simultaneity and/or difference of story and discourse time. The narrative auralization of Auster’s novels in the radio plays under discussion can be shown to foreground non-visual aspects of the pre-texts and to add further dimensions for interpretation that underline the usefulness of audionarratological analysis for adaptation studies.

In his now canonical 1977 work, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, composer and scholar R. Murray Shafer (1994) coined the term “soundscape” to describe the “acoustic environment” or the universes created through the perception of sound (3). The term has since become accepted parlance to describe the worlds created in audio fiction by voices, music, noise, and silence. Yet, as Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel (2016) have noted, although the term is derived from the visual descriptor “landscape,” soundscapes are composed of ephemeral acoustic acts that “cannot easily be demarcated” (4). They do not directly represent a particular place, but rather evoke an image of it in the listener’s mind by drawing on a recognizable language of acoustic signifiers. In audio fiction, where the listener must depend solely on the aural sense to discern plot, setting, and characters, this critical difference raises important questions. What is unique about the symbolic and representational forms of sound? And what other models might help us to conceptualize the way that audio fiction soundscapes take shape and create meaning?

In the following, I propose reading audio fiction soundscapes as audiotopias. Audiotopias, according to Josh Kun (2005), describe “sonic spaces of . . . utopian longing, where several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought together” (23). Like the heterotopia, from which it is derived, audiotopias are real, a construction of the material reality of sound, yet also unreal, evoking imagined spaces and places in the mind of the listener. Their multiplicity is a product of the ambiguous nature of sound, where a single acoustic act can reference an infinite number of literal and metaphorical meanings. The listener is thus forced to engage with numerous meanings and perspectives at once. As a result, audio fiction soundscapes, like Foucault’s (1984) mirror, “exert a counteraction” on the position that the listener occupies (4), encouraging reflection on, and deconstruction of, the self. Audiotopia thus describes both the form and function of the audio fiction soundscape—its ability to create multilayered, heterogeneous worlds in which culture can be “contested and consolidated” (Kun 2005: 22).
This chapter focuses on two German radio dramas from the mid-twentieth century, Heinrich Böll’s Tapping Signals (Klopfzeichen; NDR 1962) and Jan Rys’s Border Crossers (Grenzgänger; NDR 1960), to demonstrate how audio fiction exploits the soundscape’s ambiguous, multilayered nature—using simultaneity as a technique to create the experience of contemporaneity (being in two time frames in the same moment) and bilocation (being in two spaces at once) as a narrative construct. This is achieved through narrative stacking, where shifts between narrative levels are made evident to the listener through sound signals, the audiopositioning of the listener, and the manipulation of vocal quality and sound. These elements orient the listener within a particular level of the sound world, but they can also blur boundaries by claiming reference points in another time or space. As the receptor of these sound signals, the listener becomes a participant in and co-creator of the different, simultaneous worlds that compose the soundscape as audiotopia.

This article analyses the German radio play adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Indignation (Empörung, 2010) from an audionarratological perspective and shows how both the book and the radio play offer potential for multisensory experiences on the part of readers and radio audiences. The article furthermore explores how the two media differ in their semiotic and sensory affordances and possibilities. It is argued that aural signs and signals predetermine certain aspects of the storyworld in the radio play: for example, characters' and the narrator's voices, soundscapes, but also ambient sound and music. Due to its focus on the aural channel, radio drama calls on audiences' imagination in distinct ways, while also complicating narratological concepts. The ‘transcriptivity’ from written to spoken text that is inherent in the transposition of novel into radio play accounts for the fact that the radio play also adds new multisensory and interpretive dimensions to its pre-text. It therefore has to be considered in its own right, as an artistic form appealing to its audiences through its own sensory channels.