Noise and intelligence: radio listening and Liu Yichang’s wartime writings

Abstract

This paper traces the acoustic imagination of modern Chinese literature, specifically through a close examination of the writings of Liu Yichang from wartime Chongqing. From 1942 to 1945, Liu worked as a radio transcriber prior to his literary stardom. He transcribed and translated English radio broadcasts into Chinese articles that would appear in print the day after they were broadcast, while writing intermittently for literary magazines. This paper analyses how the close listening–or the process of detecting and decoding information from noise–emerged out of wartime intelligence, governing Liu’s creative process. I argue that the desire to trace the source of sound is the driving force of the narrative in Liu’s short stories and prose. Furthermore, this paper studies the way in which Liu’s inattentive mode of listening transformed noise into productive disturbance that ensure a more active readership. By arguing for the central place for the acoustic aesthetics in Liu’s works composed between 1945 to 1950, this article constructs an interpretive frame that invites us to think about historical aural subjectivity modulated by the expressive and affective potential of wartime radio; and to explore the aesthetics of noise that emerged from new techniques of listening.