Entendre l’Inouï: resonance, volume, and transduction in Gilbert Gatore’s Le passé devant soi

This paper analyses three features of sound – resonance, volume, and transduction – in Gilbert Gatore’s novel of memory and the Rwandan genocide, Le passé devant soi [The Past Before Us]. Theorising two modes of resonance in Gatore’s novel – thematic and semiotic – I demonstrate how the novel is structured by semantic forms of resonance, how those resonances incite significance, and how they are augmented by a semiotic resonance that produces “vibratory meanings”. I subsequently examine the novel’s depiction of shatteringly loud volume, its ability to obliterate thought, and to cause physical harm. Elaborating reasons why the term volume is rarely used in sound studies – its polysemic breadth, its imprecision as an acoustic measurement, and its multiply mediated and contingent character – I show how these very properties make it particularly significant to the novel. Finally, I turn to a sound technology central to inciting the genocide – the radio transducer – and the chain reaction of conversions it triggers. I trace this chain of transduction from the electromechanical conversions of the radio to the tympanic membranes of human ears, to the neural signals conditioning speech, to social circuits, semiotic and affective force fields, and ultimately to beliefs, decisions, and behaviours.