Published Paper Details:

Surrealism has been talked about as the disruption of visual, the dream images, fragmented landscapes, the symbolic waste. In A Passage to India and Kafka on the Shore, however, surrealism is not first of all manifested spectacularly. It arrives through sound. In this dissertation, it is proposed that E. M. Forster as well as Haruki Murakami employ the experience of sound, echo, music, voice and silence to subvert the rational meaning and challenge the narrative logic in terms of dream formations instead of causality. In A Passage to India, the collapse of meaning is what is brought about by the Marabar Caves. Recalling the echo, it is completely undistinguished, depriving language, morality, and hierarchy into one vibration, which colonial rationality fails to hold. In Kafka on the Shore, on the contrary, music does not annihilate meaning but suspend it. The song of Miss Saeki is a relic of emotional reality that cannot be understood cogently, but remains as an unchanging piece of time, a frozen fragment (Murakami). In putting these novels into comparative discourse, the paper hypothesises that surrealism is a sensory and epistemological state that occurs when the systems were set up like imperial law, identity and memory as the basis of stabilising experience. It is through sound that this failure is not explicated but is suffered. Instead of considering surrealism as a purely European avant-garde, this dissertation disperses it as a transhistorical mode, based on listening, in which sense collapses or its meaning falls outside the salvage operation.