Ontology of sound in Harold Pinter’s radio drama

ABSTRACT

Can sound be an ontological index of existence? The paper examines this question of sound ontology in Harold Pinter’s radio drama. It foregrounds the ontological gap between linguistic and non-linguistic sounds in A Slight Ache (1959) to track how they solidify existence as a play of presence and absence. The sound problematic in A Slight Ache rests on a wordless character who is not soundless. The presence of such a character in the radio problematises existence through sound. The article takes this dynamic through philosophical literature on sound ontology to make an argument about the dramatic alteration of a sonic situation. Family Voices (1981), the second play under the scanner, indicates another dimension of sound ontology by proposing the voice as a transformation of the epistolary function of writing. The characters in the play are voices, standing in for letters that never reach each other. The paper highlights a pressurepoint between ontology and epistemology in relation to sound. It also shows how Pinter’s radio drama is able to mark the “unsaid” as something that can be heard through the connecting function of the radio audience. We have a potentialist sonic ontology here that dismantles the binary of sound and silence.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound ontology
• voice
• silence
• Pinter
• radio drama

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the Pinter Scholar, Mark Taylor-Batty (School of English, University of Leeds) for his thoughtful suggestions on the early draft of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arka Chattopadhyay

Arka Chattopadhyay is assistant professor of literary studies in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is a B.A., M.A., MPhil in English Literature, from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. He has written his MPHIL thesis on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou and finished his PHD from Western Sydney University on Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Arka has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett and journals like Miranda, Textual Practice, S, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature and a Bengali critical compendium on the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya. Arka is the chief editor of the online literary journal Sanglap (http://sanglap-journal.in/). He has guest-edited the SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real has been published by Bloomsbury in 2018.