Patricia Waugh

Muriel Spark's 'informed air': the auditory imagination and the voices of fiction.

Textual Practice 2018 Patricia Waugh 5 citations

'Events occur in my mind', Spark has written, 'and I record them'. What does it mean to hear something that isn't there? Hearing inner speech or sounds, not as silent thoughts but as quasi-perceptual events in the world, confounds settled distinctions between perception, memory and imagination that structure our feeling of the real. This essay shows how her capacity for complex 'listening in'...