‘Sound’ in Tom McCarthy's C

トム ・ マッカーシー 『C』 における ｢音｣

‘Sound’ in Tom McCarthy's C

Creators Takamoto Takako

‘Sound’ plays a vital role in Tom McCarthy's C (2010). First, the sounds of the words used in the novel attract the reader's attention to its masked intertextuality. For example, ‘Serge’, the protagonist's name, is an allusion to ‘Sergei Pankeiev’, one of Freud's patients. As analysed by Sigmund Freud, Sergei's hidden sexual desires are revealed through the similarities in the sounds of the names of things that he dreams about. Accordingly, the allusion to Sergei causes the readers of C to observe the implied significance behind the similarities in the sounds of words, and this observation warns the readers against reading C as a traditionally realistic novel, Second, throughout the novel, sound acts as an important leitmotif. Sound and silence in C represent life and death, respectively, and are uniquely intermingled. This is observed in the following descriptions from the novel: the silent explosion of chemicals and a record's soundless parts full of static. These metaphors pervade the text and give the impression that the author endorses Serge's and Sergei's obsession with ‘death in life’. In line with this, communications between the characters in C have been compared to static or meaningless sounds. However, in the last scene of the novel, Serge, who is dying, dreams of gigantic waves of static overwhelming the world since the waves contain all the messages that were sent and all the words that were spoken throughout history. This depiction, undoubtedly, expresses McCarthy's zest for life. Although he acknowledges the meaninglessness of human life and communications, McCarthy does not give in to pessimism. In conclusion, the sound is an important aspect in C since it creates a unique, seemingly realistic novel rich with intertextuality. In addition, it introduces the concepts of death and meaningless communication, and subsequently uses the sheer volume of human sounds to override the negative connotation of these concepts.

[ISSN]0370-9361