59 pages • 1-hour read
The History of Sound: Stories
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Phonograph Cylinders
The phonograph cylinders that Lionel Worthing and David make during their summer together are symbolic of memory and time. In “The History of Sound,” Lionel receives the 25 cylinders in the mail from an anonymous sender decades after David’s death. Despite how many years have elapsed since Lionel and David were together and made the cylinders, their appearance on Lionel’s doorstep immediately resurrects his buried memories.
The cylinders are recordings of music and monologues that Lionel and David put together during the summer of 1919, when the lovers traveled around Maine, collecting the locals’ folk songs. David invented the project because he was fascinated by American folk music, and the story’s recordings capture the way art can survive over time. The cylinders are a way for Lionel and David to catalog and preserve the essence of the past via music.
At the end of the summer, Lionel and David have a few leftover cylinders. David ends up using these cylinders to record audio messages for Lionel. In the narrative present, David’s voice fills Lionel’s living space when he plays the cylinders. The way he describes his response to hearing the cylinders conveys how David’s voice reawakens the past in Lionel’s present reality:
But this cylinder reminded me of what I’d missed—which is, I think, a life that I didn’t know but of which David was a part. The real one. And how ridiculously short it had been. Only a few months. The memories of fireflies and swimming naked in the waterfall did nothing but make very fine and long incisions in the membrane of contentedness I’d built over the years […] A wasted life (26).
Decades have passed since Lionel and David were together, but the cylinders reawaken this era. Lionel experiences emotional distress as a result. At the same time, revisiting his memories with David also offers Lionel insight into the love he did experience.
The cylinders also reappear in “Origin Stories” and have a similarly moving impact on Annie. Annie doesn’t immediately understand the significance of the cylinders, but they lead her to Belle and to a revelation about her own life. Much like the great auk in “Radiolab: ‘Singularities,’” the cylinders are artifacts that pass through multiple stories, guiding the characters through time or toward personal revelations.
Songbird Painting
Will Snowe’s songbird painting is symbolic of expression and communication. The painting appears in both “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” and “The Silver Clip.” In the former story, Edwin Chase is moved the instant his mother’s childhood love Will shows him his painting of the songbird. Edwin has “never seen anything so wonderful,” and is particularly intrigued by the painting’s simultaneous familiarity and newness; to Edwin, looking at it feels “something like remembering” (44). He later discovers that Will has left the painting behind for his mother Laurel, and the painting becomes symbolic of Will’s love and his hopes for Laurel.
The painting itself is simple, depicting “a songbird standing on a table, with a blue ribbon tied to its leg”; the “feathers and the beak and the feet” have depth and the ribbon looks real, “as if it were spooling out from the small canvas” (43-44). Will has rendered a simple image with artistic complexity, and the bird becomes Laurel herself. Although Edwin sees her as being plain and predictable, Laurel is in fact a complex woman with a rich personal history.
The painting also conveys notions of entrapment and freedom, ideas Will tries to communicate to Laurel without using language. In “The Silver Clip,” this aspect of the painting resonates with the unnamed first-person narrator. Upon first glance, the songbird seems to be held down by the ribbon. Upon closer inspection, he realizes that the ribbon is “curled in such a way that it simply fold[s] over the bird’s foot,” proving that the bird is in fact “free to go” (63). Via this painting, Will was trying to tell Laurel that to free herself she only needed to exercise her agency. The narrator of “The Silver Clip” takes this message to heart—ultimately leaving Nantucket and taking more immediate action to make a life for himself as an artist.
The Great Auk
The great auk is symbolic of hope and possibility. Like the cylinders and the painting, the auk appears in multiple stories and thus impacts multiple characters. In “Radiolab: ‘Singularities,’” Anna Mott first encounters the great auk in a photograph taken in Newfoundland in 1991. Anna is immediately moved by the image because “the last time a great auk was seen was 1844 off Iceland,” roughly 150 years “before the picture was taken” (189). Anna is so intrigued by this mystery that she travels to Newfoundland in search of answers. She never finds the auk, but seeking the mysterious bird reawakens her to all that life might offer.
The great auk has a similar effect on Will Hunt in “The Auk.” Faced with his failing business and his wife’s waning health, Will excavates a taxidermied great auk from his attic to distract himself. He starts photographing the auk out on his boat to play a prank on his brother, a pastime that amuses Will and alleviates his stress. Soon, hunting the auk enlivens Nora, too. When she sees Will’s photos, she insists that they go in search of the bird together. Her spirits improve and Will feels hopeful that he and Nora have a little more time together. The auk reminds Will, Nora, and Anna that life’s mysteries can open the heart to joy.
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