"The Noisiest Novel Ever Written": The Soundscape of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep
1989; Duke University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/441774
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Resumoidentifies one of the most striking and unusual features of Henry Roth's novel: this text opens up a world of sound as few others seem to do. Although most fictional imagery is, like our language itself, overwhelmingly visual, Call It Sleep offers many lessons in the verbal evocation of soundscape-a term coined by the composer R. Murray Schafer in his highly original study of the sonic environment The Tuning of the World. Schafer advances many new terms and concepts which, by overturning the visual bias of our language and culture, create a vocabulary that helps to explain the operations of sound in the world of young David Schearl, Roth's central character. Roth's uncanny evocation of David's sonic environment does much to account for the emotional intensity felt by most of the novel's readers. Call It Sleep is, I am convinced, still undervalued. Though the peculiarities of the novel's publication history-its virtual disappearance in the Thirties, its acclaim after the paperback edition of 1964-are well known to Roth's readers, the book since then seems to have become pigeonholed as a novel, rather than the essential American novel that I think it is. There may well be, as Leslie Fiedler has said, no more Jewish book among American novels,2 but the impact and significance of this book extend far beyond its Jewish interest, profound as that may be. No other American novel dramatizes so powerfully the
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