AustLit

'A key 'road ahead' in Australian literature resides in the prominence of spatial narratives that interrogate the manifold ways in which heterogeneous cultural identities and histories converge on common terrain. This essay considers Gail Jones's fifth novel Five Bells (2011) as an 'acoustical novel' in which embodied experiences of sound catalyse a spectral form of remembering that unsettles the boundaries of self and cultural identity. In particular, I identify three operative models of sound in the novel; sound as revenant, listening as vital to the appropriation and production of space, and aural modes of trauma recall, arguing that each develops the ongoing concerns of Jones's fiction in new ways. From registering synchronicities in traumatic events which permeate geographical borders in a globalised world to reinstating the body-in-space within a zone of potential encounters, the embodied response to sound emerges as pivotal to the 'spatial practice' of the novel concerned with the potential for imaginative labour to more actively implicate the subject within the spaces of everyday life. ' (Publication abstract)