Recounting Rome's Resonances: Diffractive Listening to Lahiri’s Racconti in the Eternal City

Abstract

The city has the same structure as text (De Certeau; Iovino) and is of a palimpsestic nature (Huyssen). It has layers that are both discursive and material, and consist of spaces, humans and other-than-humans. Together they form a vibrant assemblage (Bennett). One layer that often gets little attention, is that of sound. Attending to sound can open up a space for voices and stories for which there is no room in the visual realm of the city. Sound studies takes a corrective attitude to the visual biases of the ‘ocularcentric’ academy. Urban sound studies does so in the realm of the city; literary sound studies, on the other hand, in literary scholarship. My research is positioned on the crossroads between these two fields, in relation to the modern city of Rome. I listen to alternative literary narratives that make noise inside the city, and that consequently contribute to the deconstruction of the stable image of the ‘eternal city’, a tenacious, limiting and fixed narrative that clings to it, while instead this city continuously changes (Holdaway & Trentin; Thormod). To pair literary-urban sound as my object of study, this research also takes a sonic theoretical and methodological approach. The concept that I introduce for this, is resonance, interpreted both metaphorically and materially. Building further on Dimock’s “Theory of Resonance”, I shape a resonance theory that has a stronger spatial focus as it looks at how certain literatures resonate while they are set in the city of Rome. Also, my theory stands more explicitly in relation to intertextuality. To my case study –Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of Racconti romani – I will apply the method of diffractive listening (Barad; Oliveros) in a threefold way: I will listen to intratextual, intertextual and extratextual resonances; the latter, I argue, being an urgent and inevitable consequence of any kind of intertextual analysis, especially in my case. In this last part, I bring Lahiri’s racconti and the city into dialogue by engaging with the method of ‘research-creation’ (Manning). My hypothesis is that the stories I intend to discuss, resonate internally and externally in their deconstruction of the narrative of Rome as the ‘eternal city’, while explicitly positioning themselves as ‘Roman’ (romani). In their narrations of isolation, hybridity and liminality, they are as fleeting as sound; they urge us to listen to them beyond the eye; and they form a vibrant assemblage of echo’s and overtones, in relation with other racconti and with the city they are deeply rooted in.