Sonic Materiality in Brian O’Nolan’s Fiction

This article argues that Brian O’Nolan’s fiction consistently stages sound as a material force, one that becomes most tangible at the moment of its mediation. Drawing on theories of sonic materiality and transduction, it demonstrates how O’Nolan’s novels, short stories, and columns transform gramophones, records, and radios into sites where sound’s physicality collides with technological systems. He treats repetition, replay, atmospherics, and static as events of sonic excess. His works literalise the slippages between body and voice, signal and noise, machine and medium, revealing how sound is always stored, reanimated, and degraded through material infrastructures. By situating O’Nolan within the acoustic environment of early twentieth-century Ireland, this article shows how his comic absurdities make audible the unstable material conditions of modern listening.