Twilight and the Bell: An Exploration of the Auditory Imagination in the Work of Lafcadio Hearn

    “Japan was to provide Hearn with the means of artistic fulfilment for which, in retrospect, he had spent his life up to this point preparing... It was in fact a double vision: he was concerned not just with explaining Japan to his Western audience; he used Japan as a mirror to show the …

From V(isual) to A(uditory): Hegel through Saussure to Lacan

The theories of Hegel, Saussure and Lacan have played pivotal roles in shaping modern understanding about  language, self and world. However, accounting for that development can be challenging, as these thinkers often deal with concepts that elude precise definition. This perhaps explains Lacan and Hegel’s frequent recourse to literature and art to illustrate their ideas …

The Silence at the Eye of the Scream: The Auditory Aspect in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Beckett’s post war work involved a paring down of language in an attempt to capture the essential. His most concentrated period of creativity became known as the “great siege” of 1947 to 1949, when he locked himself away in his Parisian garret to produce an epoch-defining trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable …

Appendices to “Twilight and the Bell”

  Notes on the Auditory Imagination in Poe's stories. In a later lecture on ‘The Supernatural’, Hearn also picks up on the auditory aspect in the work of Poe’s fiction. Poe gave us peculiar details of nightmare-experiences, such as horrible sounds. Often, we hear in dreams terrible muffled noises, as of steps coming. This you …

Bibliography and Footnotes for “Twilight and the Bell”

Bibliography Abrams, M.H, ‘Coleridge and the Aesthetics of Organism’, in The Mirror and the Lamp, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971) Carter, Steven Haiku Before Haiku, (New York, Columbia University Press,2011) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Frost at Midnight’, in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Halmi, Nicholas, Magnuson, Paul and Modiano, Raimonda (New York, W.W Norton, 2004) …

Twilight and the Bell: Conclusion.

  Lafacdio Hearn produced a body of work that, at its best, reflects the insights of a remarkably poetic thinker and perceptive writer. As a writer who saw himself as simultaneously Irish and Japanese, Hearn was deeply attuned to the issues relating to ontological and cultural identity in the face of globalised modernity. This dissertation …

The Auditory Imagination and “A Promise Broken”

Hearn found a sanctuary from this ‘monstrous utilitarianism’ among the ghostly twilight of Japan, where- via the auditory imagination- the realm of the twilight and the bell loomed near the surface of the everyday. The chilling tale of a ‘A Promise Broken’ (from Hearn’s collection A Japanese Miscellany)  concerns a dying wife of a samurai …

Lafcadio Hearn and Cultural Nationalism

For Hearn and Eliot, the 'auditory imagination' helped to re-experience, and thus reclaim the past as a living influence upon the present. This also happened to be a key theme of the Cultural nationalist project- known as the 'Celtic Revival'- that engulfed Ireland in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. As we have …

The Auditory Imagination in the Face of Modernity

T.S Eliot (1888-1965) Modernist Poet and Critic The auditory faculty thus became for Hearn a gateway to a 'twilight' ancestral world; a realm obscured from the harsh glare of the modern era, but one whose physical remenants  still survived in Japan. He saw these locations as  sites that could still provide glimpses of twilight to …

Lafcadio Hearn and the Role of ‘Ghostliness’ in Art.

Lafcadio Hearn was the earliest translator of Basho’s poetry into English, and included Basho’s ‘old pond’ haiku in his work Exotics and Retrospectives (1898). Hearn subsequently included other translations and commentaries of Basho’s haiku, referring them by their older designation, hokku, in his collections Shadowings (1900) and Kwaidan (1904).[54] Hearn admired Basho as ‘the greatest …

Haiku and the Auditory Imagination

  Another important figure in the development of Yugen in Japanese art was the haiku poet Matsuo Basho (1644–1694). Like Ze Ami and Shotetsu, Basho was a devoted practiconer of Zen, and the Zen aesthetic that priveliged direct experience over abstract analysis seeped into Basho’s art. One of Basho’s achievements was to perfect the form …