From plaintive whimpers, to low moans, to high-pitched cries, to deep grunts, sex is an incredibly audible phenomenon. Despite sex’s aurality, literary criticism as well as modernist studies tend to interpret sexual intercourse and the like through the visual field instead of through other sensory forces, including the aural. Alongside modernist literature’s tendency to fill out the sensory world, its narratives also flesh out the sounds of sex, so to speak. Developing in tandem with the modernist movement, Freudian psychoanalysis also takes a keen interest in audible phenomena, especially the sounds of speech, not only by listening to an analysand’s symptoms but also by attuning to the sexual undercurrents flowing and emitting from their vocals. Instead of reproducing the readily identifiable sighs and wails of arousal, foreplay, and orgasm, European and American modernist texts as well as Sigmund Freud’s writings offer multiple acoustics to evoke sex. Loose Lips: Sex and Aurality in European and American Modernist Fiction examines the ways modernist fiction’s experimental aesthetics appeal to the ear rather than the eye when rendering sex acts, behaviors, and desires. Whether through voice, sound, or noise, these texts convey sexual acts across a variety of bodies, sexes, and sexualities as a sprawling resonant force that enters one’s ear but can never fully escape from one’s mouth.

Following and extending the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic premise that sex is untethered from knowledge yet bounded to pleasure’s and unpleasure’s irreducible mixture, modernist fiction takes up the formal trouble of conveying sex’s aurality. Thus, this project follows the double trouble of trying to read it. Fiction across the modernist spectrum—from its canon, its peripheries, to its late iterations—instantiates an array of aural sex: from the pleasures and pains of overhearing intercourse in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; the reignition of an orgasm through memories in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; and the sensorial cartography of climactic ecstasy in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Together, the analyses of these texts demonstrate the ways literary renditions of both sex and aurality rework and reform each other, creating more capacious, unbounded erotic soundscapes in the process. With modernism’s investment in saying the unsayable, these texts find that sex, even in its aural forms, reaches a limit of expression. Modernist literature deploys the aural to render sex, not as a means to transcend the representational constraints on sexual acts, pleasures, and desires, but to amplify these very boundaries, to make the edges of the ineffable resound instead of remaining silent.