Sirens - Michael Bull. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
Editor’s note: While Sirens was released in 2020, Professor Paul Carter was approached only earlier this year to write a review in the midst of his busy schedule. The editors are grateful to Paul Carter for his timely review.
By Paul Carter
The inventor of the modern siren, Cagniard de la Tour, found that air pushed through a rotor device produced a musical tone. Underwater water pressure could also be used to make a sound, and this property of “being sonorous in the water” caused de la Tour to call it a siren. The fact that Michael Bull consigns this information to a prefatory endnote signals what Sirens is not: a cultural history of Sirens/sirens, mythical and mechanical. Instead, it is something much subtler, original, and interesting, a fascinating exercise in what Bull calls “sonic understanding,” to which end he describes the book’s intention as one of threading together Sirens (Homer) and sirens (think the Blitz or Kurt Vonnegut’s Dresden) by “tracing” connections, not as a unified whole but “prismatically,” wherein the sonic is refracted through disparate historical and cultural examples to produce a range of “soundways” (p. 9). Inverting the cultural studies perspective, which is likely to explore the cultural variations on a theme, Sirens uses cultural “traces” to extend, as Bull puts it, what a sonic explanation of Sirens “looks” or, preferably, “sounds” like.’ (p. 12)
As Bull emphasizes in the first of his traces, wherein the acousmatic nature of Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens is linked to the compositional phenomenology of electroacoustic composers like Pierre Schaeffer, a theory of “sonic explanation” cannot be assumed. While the connection between Siren and siren, outrageous as the pun may be, can be seen – such is the visualist foundation of our epistemology – an argument from sound logic remains to be made. The Homer/Schaeffer trace is acousmatic, referring to a way of listening where, the sound source being out of sight, the listener brackets off visual contextualization in order to hear the sound as such. Having established this trace in sonic logic, Bull is able to spread his cultural net widely, focusing particularly on the way the acousmatic has been weaponized in misogynistic transferences in which, quoting Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, “[t]he woman musician becomes a siren, becomes sexually available” (p. 24). As Bull notes, “an iconography of misogyny” is certainly a way of seeing women. The novelty of his approach is to nuance this observation through an instance of the cultural construction of sound.
While acousmatic listening aims to minimize semiotic distraction, air-raid sirens, in order to be effective, depend entirely on the conventional meaning ascribed to them: air-raid coming, (with the associated subtext) take cover! The urban siren rapidly lost its admonitory power, as Bull traces, becoming a signifier of emergency dissociated from any concomitant action. Either there was nowhere to hide, or the authorities that deployed the siren warning had so proliferated as to create a near permanent and ubiquitous state of emergency (the condition in many cities now). As Bull writes, for sirens to signify, a training of sensibilities was needed, an art of listening as waiting (pp. 44-45). The object of sonic training was to use one sound to indicate another, but the association ran both ways: children during the London Blitz said that what they feared most was not the bombing but the noise of the siren, and then, waiting itself produced a new sonic object, sound’s negative, an ominous silence. Gradually, air-raid siren deployment built a new listening culture, one of internalized obedience orchestrated by noise. The loudspeaker system installed during the Vietnam War, “once there to warn inhabitants of aerial attack, now delivers messages from local authorities, government and banks as a form of peacetime Orwellian sonic ubiquity delivered by the siren” (p. 50). Perhaps this analysis mistakes the messenger for the message. As market-square radio broadcasts in the 1930s showed, “sonic ubiquity” was the message; sirens were merely an instance of broadcasting’s power. Against this cultural generalization, Bull argues that sirens produced an auditory imprint of their own: associated with danger and the largely forfeited promise of safety, they become, at least in Edgard Varèse’s childhood memory of “a high whistling C sharp” replicated in “the lonely foghorns” of the Hudson River, associated with the nostalgia of exile. Hence, unlike radio (the medium), Bull’s post air-raid sirens trigger cultural associations and psychological symptoms that reflect a distinctively sonic logic (in this case the new and anxious attention to the silence of waiting).
In another variation, or development, air-raid sirens clearly collude with the destruction from which they purport to protect us. For all their noise, they represent the power to silence. “It is the logic of domination articulated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” and in this sense, Bull writes ironically, modern sirens are more “democratic” than Homer’s Sirens: these latter are heard against a backdrop of misogyny, but the sirens of war back a genocide without consideration for gender (p. 75). As Bull writes: “The air-raid sirens of Dresden and Hiroshima were silenced by the deadly technologies of the state” against which they had originally served as warnings (p. 86). In a parallel train of sonic thought, Bull refuses to be seduced by Kafka’s perversely silent Sirens. Linking them to Kafka’s interest in silent cinema and to the curiously one-sided correspondence with his long-distance fiancé Felice Bauer, Bull repeats what is perhaps the general message of his book: the “male creation of woman as imaginary ‘other’ – which, in Kafka’s case undergoes a curious reversal, as the silencing of that ‘other’ makes the male author the other’s ‘muse’” (p. 91). As for Kafka’s own other muses, the women of the streets, they signify a further physical reduction, one that Bull links to Hans Andersen’s fairytale – in which the mermaid has her tongue cut out so that she can neither speak or sing – and to the further dismemberment of this story in Walt Disney’s later treatment (p. 93). While this sonic genealogy is salient, I wonder whether Bull turns a deaf ear to Kafka’s irony: who, really, is enveloped in silence in his fable? Discussing Stormy Daniel’s arrest for certain activities at the Sirens Gentleman’s Club, Bull reflects: “In the Odyssey it is the Siren voice which is described as deadly to the men who listen. Three thousand years later in Columbus, Ohio, it is the voiceless Siren who suffers the consequences of physical contact with those who merely look” (p. 96). All here have fallen under the spell of visual dissociation; no-one is listening.
Supposing Homer’s Sirens were real, much effort has gone into locating where they lived. Bull gives a generous number of pages to German media theorist Frederik Kittler’s researches off the Li Galli islands in the bay of Salerno. Apparently, Kittler was impressed by one Ernie Branford’s ear-witness reports off the coast of Li Galli during the Second World War. Apparently, Branford (or Bradford – both spellings appear) was influenced by Norman Douglas’ Siren Land. In this case, a sonic event appears to be the echo of a silent history. Without going into details, Bull finds in this palimpsest of geographical soundings the one story that permeates the whole of his study: “The consistent meaning attributed to Sirens over millennia, its gendered nature” is a function of “its orientation around the nature of male desire” (p. 96). Bull’s short book stimulates the thought that listening is gendered. The colonial literature is filled with examples of inexplicable sounds, echoic, as it were, of the silencing that was happening. These sounds were not particularly gendered, negative Sirens, if you will. Clearly, sirenic discourse, ancient and modern, has reflected patriarchal ideology, and privileged white males need no special pleading, but, reading Sirens, I am struck by the collective (male) self-deafening that Siren lore and siren warnings represent. In short, his book, as rich as it is concise, not only lives up to its promise of prismatic analysis but also produces reflective resonances that extend well beyond his pages.
