Sound, Music and Listening in Oscar Wilde and James Joyce

In his writings Joyce often expressed a sense of closeness to and profound fascination with Wilde as both a great artist and an outsider. Wilde the aesthete was in some ways a forerunner of Joyce and both writers were to become exiles. Moreover, both authors often conceived their writing intersemiotically, that is, through the lens of other art forms, such as music and the visual arts. In this sense, Joyce and Wilde’s Irishness also coincided with the two writers’ interest in the oral dimension of folklore, i.e. in literature as sound and music, an element that powerfully emerges in Wilde’s short stories and in Joyce’s novels. Most importantly, both Wilde and Joyce seem to invite us to think of literature as a musical performance. In short, in the very act of reading, we literally ‘play’ Wilde, we ‘play’ Joyce; the reader becomes, in other words, an echo chamber exceeding the realm of the self, in a vital and never-ending vibration with and through others.