Boris Previsic – Conference Paper 2019 for the lecture series “Sound & Literature” Trauma and polyphony. Point of Audition and an extension of narratology in testimonial literature Trauma and polyphony. Point of Audition and an extension of narratology in testimonial literature Boris Previsic 1. Theoretical aspects „Sound & Literature“. That’s the name of your lecture series, to which I am happy to contribute. The relationship between the two fields can be very different, just think of the two extreme cases, on the one hand the so-called ‘performative’ literature, which becomes completely sound and maybe even music, on the other hand the purely descriptive literature, which keeps sound occurrence in their description. We are not interested in these easily assignable categories, but in hybrid ones, in which the descriptive mode becomes a sound event and, conversely, certain musically grounded acoustic forms become recognizable again in the literary-linguistic materiality. We are particularly interested in the hypothetical soundness, whose thematization and structure grounds the narrative communication. So I would have to slightly revise the title of your lecture series to „Sound in Literature“. What is presupposed in poetry and drama slightly disappears in the narrative apparatus of the novel: the sound of language – or more precisely: the sound of the voice that articulates the narrative instance. The narrative literature of our present day focusses on its sound without being immediately performative, and thematises it without making it the actual object of its description. Significantly, this double acoustic link between performance and description is intensified in the literature that bears witness to it: in testimonial literature. Since the Shoa at the latest, it has formed a formal impetus that concentrates on the voices of those who bear witness. These voices are acoustic and always address the sayability or unsayability of the traumatic experience. As an introduction, I will therefore address the theoretical aspects before I present the literary corpus. Overview 1. Theoretical aspects 1.1 Second-order narrative coherence 1.2 Findings from the eyewitness testimony of the Shoa 1.3 Corpus of contemporary literature: Gehen, ging, gegangen and Schildkrötensoldat 2. Narrative theory and acoustics 2.1 From visual non-perception to the victims’ voices 2.2 Narratability: phatic and conative function in the Schildkrötensoldat 2.3 Point-of-audition and internal auditor 3. Trauma and polyphony 3.1 Dissociation of the recipient 3.2 Polyphonic dissociation in the victim-perpetrator structure