In 1942, while stationed at a German army garrison on the Eastern front, Gottfried Benn privately published Twenty-Two Poems. A volume of his selected poems had appeared in 1936, but in 1938 the National Socialist Writers Association banned his writing and prohibited further publication. His 1942 chapbook includes “Verse,” a grave poem that envisions the ultimate triumph of poetry over the lethal violence of nationalism: “the strophe roams from mouth to mouth, / it outlives the strife of peoples / and outlasts power and the murdering gangs.” Here are the final lines as translated by Michael Travers:
Power goes under in the scum of its deceits,
while a verse helps build the dreams of peoples
and removes them from lowliness:
immortality in word and sound.
Benn says “word and sound,” not meaning and wisdom. A poem, initially encountered, is a poised ferment of word and sound that promises a third thing. Sound tells us that we are on the brink of the actual. When we sit alone and read, what is the sound humming in our heads while the poem’s intimations begin to murmur?
Challenging “the metaphysical tradition’s pictorial bias in which ‘I see’ always exceeds ‘I hear,’” Lawrence Kramer unfurls “a new examination of how sound is represented and imagined” in The Hum of the World. He begins with two big claims: first, “sound is the primary medium through which the presence and persistence of life assume tangible form”; second, “this animating power of sound acts as a general background to sense perception.” A professor of English and Music at Fordham University, Kramer asks us to ponder a fundamental question: “How does finally learning to listen change our perception of the world? In other words, what does sound, as sound, contribute to the production of human knowledge?”
The “immortality” Benn hears as a product of poetry evolves from a certain way of listening for and to the poem. Typically, in school (including in workshops) we may ask: What can we know about this poem? But if we follow Benn, we ask instead: What does this poem enable us to know? Sound tells us something is imminent — then carries us to what is immanent. I extrapolate this from the same questions Kramer asks about music.
Many things in the world are audible. But Kramer urges us to listen for something more pervasive, if often elusive. He calls it, this hum, the audiable. Throughout the book, he returns to the term, suggesting ways of hearing the audiable. Here’s one flight of explanation from an early chapter:
The past and future are silent; the present is sonorous. From this simple, basic, but neglected fact we tend to infer the converse: the sonorous is present. But sound intends the future. Like melody, it embodies a principle of continuation in being perceived. Where melody seeks repetition, and shapes future hearings with each repetition it finds, sound in general is a sensory promise of more sound to come. The world is alive with sound because sound is the sensory form of continuation. Sounds cease; sound does not. The sensory form of that difference is the audiable.
The heightened threat to humanistic understanding spurs Kramer to regard “sound studies” broadly as cultural history redrafted as auditory history. With digital technologies and simplified ideologies come the dominance and dispersion of images, and with them, a diffusion of our close attention. Earnest about its polemics, The Hum of the World repeatedly glosses its themes and restates the qualities of attunement to sound. We are being tutored to listen — but not only for sheer enjoyment or more complete comprehension. Here, the stakes are very high. “The audible is … a revelation of the spiritual primacy of the secular.” And that leads us to Kramer’s more ambitious aim, namely to create a text that comprises the hum itself, or gestures toward it, or disrupts standard pedagogy to the point where the audiable seems to hover in the spaces between his sentences. “There is no proof of the audiable,” he writes. “It is observable, but its existence cannot be verified by observation. It exists only in my recognition of it and expresses itself only in my report of it.”
His reports are allusive and discursive, and though lyricism isn’t his forte, Kramer’s prose often resonates provocatively. After a making a forceful case for his main concepts, he shifts gears toward “vignettes and short essays.” Not surprisingly, some of his most illuminating and expressive sections deal with music or the presence of sound in literary works. As for the richness of his citations, one eight-page sub-chapter, “Music in the Air,” touches on Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, an eclogue by Virgil, Shakespeare’s Caliban. Browning’s Caliban, Wagner’s Siegfried, James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Shelley, Auden, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, W.E. B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and more.
Poetry may not be the prime matter in The Hum of the World, but the humming he alludes to has everything to do with poetry. When he says, “Language often seems to make meaning with sound at the expense of the meaning in sound,” I’m reminded that some poets are often tempted by the former, a more direct means toward proclamation, judgment, and warning. Benn’s poem itself, facing peril and censorship, seems to favor statement over resonance, at least in translation. Kramer leads us back toward the diffidence of poetry, its unique capacity for nuance and suggesting the density and mystery of experience. “Writing borne on the medium of vibrancy induces a type of perception that might be called the half-heard,” he writes. This sound about-to-be-a-meaning becomes, for Kramer, a classical antidote to tyranny and dehumanization. The audiable “aspires to an immanence with the force of transcendence without the credos.”
Sound isn’t meaningful. It becomes meaningful. Whether we intend to listen to music or to read a poem, the attuned listener cultivates a “readiness to be caught unawares.” A bit later: “When words are enigmatic, they impel us to find an understanding that will let the words themselves assume the peculiar qualitative character of making sense.” Then, “The audiable is the sound of sound. Its relationship to audible sound matches that of sourceless light to the visible scene.”
This philosophy of listening clashes with titans — Plato and Aristotle loaded the deck in favor of the visual, awarding sight the top tier among our senses. Kramer responds, “The visual aestheticizes despite itself.” It is sound that delivers the verve of the ordinary. He bemoans “the relative failure of ‘dissonant’ sounds in concert music to win auditors during the twentieth century” as compared to the broad acceptance of “dissonant” visual arts: “Jackson Pollock, yes. Elliott Carter no.” Why is it hard for some ears to hearken to Carter’s music? Kramer ends, “Like us, says the audiable, the world is nothing in itself alone. The world needs voice. It comes to being in a call.” The caller he chooses as exemplar is Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, 1855, lines 584-88:
I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
And accrue what I hear into myself … and let sounds contribute toward me.
I hear the bravuras of birds … the bustle of growing wheat … gossip of flames … clacks of sticks cooking my meals.
I hear the sound of the human voice … a sound I love,
I hear all sounds as they are tuned to their uses …
[Published March 15, 2019 by the University of California Press, 256 pages, $29.95 hardcover]