Auditory Experience in Joyce's Portrait*

One. Noise is experienced as a beating, restricting, persecutory agent. Loud noise can ‘humiliate’ (make one shrink psychologically) as well as terrorize.

Two. The fact that noise can be experienced as a painful, suffocating or immobilizing contact experience apparently is the reason the sound-sensitive hero associates such experiences with a painful, suffocating, or immobilizing bad death.

Three. The noise-induced affect of terror often is elicited by authority objects who have become associated with bad sound. One way the sound-sensitive hero reduces his fears of these objects is to identify with them.

Four. In sound-sensitive literature, the affect of humiliation is often associated with the hero's being defeated in “three-person relationships” or noisy conflicts with brothers, sisters or the father for the love of the mother. To cover feelings of humiliation or helplessness, the hero will often affect a haughty pose of contemptuous disdain, or will appear to be exceedingly proud or independent.

Five. The vulnerable sound-sensitive hero is extremely envious of and hostile to rivals for the mother's love. One of his most intense wishes is to exact revenge or to turn the tables on these rivals.

Six. The target of the hero's greatest hostility, however, is the mother or her surrogate. Behind the hero's complaint that his mother has deserted him to love or care for others (has