An instance of paradoxical hearing

As the eponymous character in John Williams’ novel Stoner lies in bed dying, he has a strange auditory experience. ‘His hearing seemed to go outside his body and hover like a cloud above him, transmitting to him every delicacy of sound. But his mind could not exactly distinguish the words’ ([1965] 2012: 284). I am intrigued by the layers of paradox here. Firstly, Stoner’s hearing seems to detach itself from his dying body and actually take on a vague shape, but it is a nebulous, shapeless kind of shape. What shape is a cloud after all? The possibilities are almost infinite. Secondly, Stoner’s hearing produces a kind of remote sensing that nonetheless remains closely connected to him, a disembodied type of embodiment. Thirdly, perhaps Stoner’s auditory perception remains acute while his comprehension poor, but it seems to me more accurate to say that his perception of sound is both exquisite and muddled simultaneously.

It is fascinating to read Williams playing with the thoughts and sensory impressions that come to Stoner as he gradually edges over the lip of his life. His hearing (though also his vision) remains sharp:

‘He heard the distant sound of laughter, and he turned is head towards its source. A group of students had cut across his back-yard lawn; they were hurrying somewhere. He saw them distinctly; there were three couples. The girls were long-limbed and graceful in their light summer dresses, and the boys were looking at them with a joyous and bemused wonder. They walked lightly upon the grass, hardly touching it, leaving no trace of where they had been. He watched them as they went out of his sight, where he could not see; and for a long time after they had vanished the sound of their laughter came to him, far and unknowing in the quiet of the summer afternoon’ (ibid: 287).

The adjective ‘unknowing’ is fascinating here too. I never think of sound as knowing (for instance of itself), intentional, and here that absence of consciousness is underlined. The sound is not aware, for Stoner, that it is reaching a dying man, or that it is speaking to him so profoundly and across such a distance of life at its most rich and vigorous. It raises the question: what if sound were to be ‘knowing’?

Reference

Williams, John. [1965] 2012. Stoner. London: Vintage Classics.