Automatic Voices: Modernism, Telephony, and Delusion

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the publication of several studies warning of pernicious psychological effects that new communications media might inflict upon their users. At the same time, technological forms of influence recurred in numerous clinical accounts of psychotic delusion. This chapter examines this historical convergence of voice hearing, telephony, and psychopathology in late-modernist fiction. In Patrick Hamilton’s novel, Hangover Square; Or, the Man With Two Minds (1941), the meaning of voice hearing is ambiguously poised between the everyday experience of technological communication and paranoid delusion. The effect is an erosion of phenomenological differences that would mark off ‘normal’ from ‘pathological’ experiences. This chapter positions Hangover Square in the context of work on modernist literature and telephony, engages with ongoing efforts to conceptualize the phenomenology of voice hearing, and examines the roles that experimental narrative forms may play in the representation and management of such lived experiences.