Acoustic limitrophies, or why Roald Dahl’s work sounds more serious than it seems

Abstract

The visual dimension of Roald Dahl's work is conspicuous and well known. However, his texts also articulate the author’s life-long interest in sound(s), in the aural or acoustic. The present article focuses on two regions of the sonic domain in Dahl’s work which may be dubbed “limitrophies” following Derrida’s definition of the term. It deals with what nourishes and is nourished by two limits which, against our common expectations, are not visual, but acoustic. The first acoustic limitrophy is none other than language itself, but language understood as “lalangue”, a neologism coined by the late Jacques Lacan and recently theorised by Mladen Dolar (2006), where it is singled out as the concept that signals the internal limit of language as such (144). If ”langue” refers to the linguistic system which generates meaning through differential operations, the extra ”la” points to sonic reverberations, consonances, and identities in Dahl’s use of wordplay, neologisms and nonsense. The second acoustic limitrophy is related to Dahl’s fictional exploration of the relationship between the human ear and what is commonly considered mute per se: namely, plants. The vegetal world does make sounds of its own and reacts to sounds, even if we cannot hear them.

KEYWORDS:

• Limitrophy
• lalangue
• phytoacoustics
• Roald Dahl
• The BFG
• “The Sound Machine”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Also quoted in Dolar (2006, 147).

2. Six leçons sur le son et le sense collects a series of lectures originally delivered in New York during the Second World War with Claude Levi-Strauss in the audience, who confessed that their impact on him had been so profound that they were the direct source of inspiration for his project of structural anthropology (Dolar 2006, 145).

3. The first is a quotation from Iona Opie and Peter Opie’s The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, 117). Alongside “rules” I have highlighted the adjective “normal” to call attention to the root of the word: norm.

4. Page references between parentheses or brackets are to the Puffin 1998 edition of Dahl’s The BFG.

5. It comes as no surprise that The BFG is the major source of examples quoted in the entries of the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary compiled by lexicographer Susan Rennie.

6. “Wigglish” means precisely “nonsense or words that don’t make any sense,” though, when inventing it, Susan Rennie suggests, “Roald Dahl may have been thinking of wiggly English” (Dahl 2016b, 280).

7. Two versions of this section were presented at the following conferences: in Galician, at Soundscapes: Cartografías Sensoriais e Paisaxes Sonoras (University of Santiago de Compostela, 16 June 2022) and, in English, at the 45^th Conference of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN) (University of Cáceres, 16–18 November 2022).

8. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s books the trees of the Middle-earth communicate acoustically, they speak, but these are works of fantasy fiction, not science fiction (Ryan 2015).

9. We can hear an audio clip of snapping due to cavitation at: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/215961/215962.

10. Actually, the term was coined by Bernie Krause in his 2012 book The Great Animal Orchestra, as Farina himself acknowledges.

11. Farina states: “In the soundscape, geophonies are the sonic sources that have a direct influence on biophonies and secondarily on anthrophonies. Anthrophonies can strongly impact on biophonies” (2014, 11).

12. Page references between parentheses or brackets are to the Penguin 2010 edition of Dahl’s “The Sound Machine.” I have found no evidence of Dahl’s knowledge of electroacoustics. However, we know he fought in the Royal Air Force during World War II and was the co-inventor of the Wade-Dahl-Till Valve (patented in 1962) used not till very long ago in surgery to release cranial pressure (Wade was hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade and Till was neurosurgeon Kenneth Till). For a study that focuses on the importance of music in Roald Dahl’s work which includes references to “The Sound Machine” see Merchán Sánchez-Jara, Gómez Díaz and García Rodríguez (2020). The authors of this article relate music in Dahl to the idea of musica universalis originated in the philosophy of Pythagoras. Certainly, Klausner wants to hear the music of the universe and even conceives eternity in acoustic terms as a set of sonic layers that grow in frequency ad infinitum (154). In the story, we come across a statement by Klausner that comes close to the sonic sublime and echoes (intentionally or contingently) the passage from chapter 20 of Eliot’s Middlemarch: “‘I believe […] that there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It is possible that up there in those high-pitched inaudible regions there is a new exciting music being made, with subtle harmonies and fierce grinding discords, a music so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it” (155). The BFG also warns Sophie in passing about “‘Such wonderful and terrible sounds I is hearing! […] Some of them you would never wish to be hearing yourself! But some are like glorious music!’” (46; emphasis added).

13. For a recent reading of Roald Dahl’s ecological sensibility and of his work as source of the environmentalist inspiration see Albuja Agular (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion [PID2021-122433NB-I00].

Notes on contributors

Jorge Sacido-Romero

Jorge Sacido-Romero is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). His research of the last fifteen years had focused mainly on modern and postmodern British short fiction, on which he has published several articles and (co-)edited volumes such as Gender and Short Fiction (Routledge 2018). He has supervised four projects on this topic funded by the Galician Regional Government (2008-2011) and the Government of Spain (2013 onwards), the last one GLOBALBORDERS (PID2021-122433NB-I00 P–AEI/FEDER). He has also published widely on the topic of voice in fiction (Sound Effects, co-edited with Sylvia Mieszkowski, Brill 2015; or “Sounding Diasporic Dislocation”, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 2021). He is part of the Research Group Discourse & Identity (GRC2015/002 GI-1924) and a member of the board of directors of the international network SILKWAY: energy, connectivity, environment, people.