Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening

[Dave Monroe]

http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/catalogs/routledge_literature_research/1/10/

The Academic Website of Justin St. Clair

http://www.soundculturestudies.net

These three audio technologies — the player piano, radio, and TV audio
— all “aspire,” according to St. Clair, to the “condition of Muzak,”
or music as “aural anaesthetic, sonic persuasion, (im)pure
background.” Muzak is, in a way, the fulcrum of the study, as it
perfectly exemplifies an audio transmission that is supposed to be
heard rather than listened to, but that is far from innocuous. Thomas
Pynchon is famous for interrupting his narratives with song lyrics,
the equivalent of foreground music, but St. Clair devotes the fourth
chapter to his background music, the “wordless melodies” and
“out-of-frame audio that reverberates in the corners and pervades the
margins,” from kazoo concertos to buzzing metronomes. In The Crying of
Lot 49, Oedipa Maas reflects on the role of the Muzak Corporation’s
massive social experiment in shaping the American soundscape, one that
in a “subliminal, unidentifiable way” influences our behavior: one of
their actual slogans was “Boring work is made less boring by boring
music.” Gravity’s Rainbow, for its part, exposes the philosophies and
strategies of the Muzak Corporation, whose project “seeps” and
“contaminates” the soundscape in the same way that the Pavlovian
“Mystery Stimulus” (which is, significantly, auditory) does. Pynchon
transforms the mystery stimulus into a plastic named Imipolex G, which
despite its powerful smell, “behaves in an audible fashion,” and into
Soniferous Aether, a kind of of “audioanalgesia,” heavenly and
ethereal as Muzak is supposed to be.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/listening-to-the-novel-the-soundtrack-of-postmodernism
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l