An evening of short talks, live music, and readings exploring the nature of voices and the interpretation of them through creative forms. Victoria Hume guided the diverse audience through the evolution of her work The Isle is Full of Noises, talking about how she worked from and interpreted contributions from voice-hearers, and performed excerpts from the piece. There were open mic slots for anyone to perform music or read their own poetry or prose. There was also an option to contribute writing that was then read – or voiced – by someone else.

The Isle if Full of Noises has now been installed online, and can be accessed here.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness offers vivid, insightful accounts of Daniel Paul Schreber’s extraordinary experiences – bodily miracles, mental and physical penetration by God’s rays, persecution by little men, and transformation into a woman – intended to furnish proof of his divine mission and to argue against his incarceration in a psychiatric asylum.

On Friday 13th of January, Durham’s Empty Shop was offered to interdisciplinary sound artist Richard Crow, novelist Alex Pheby, and academic Angela Woods for a rich exploration of Schreber’s world. Text met sound, radio became theatre, analysis became playful. Logic was defied. Sherry was even served.

The evening’s protagonists included:

• Daniel Paul Schreber, a distinguished jurist who was spent years in the Sonnenstein Asylum (Germany) at the end of the nineteenth century. Self-published in 1903, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is still in print and has established Schreber as “the most quoted patient in psychiatry.” Starting with Freud and continuing to this day, Memoirs has inspired over a century of analysis, debate, and creative expression.

• Richard Crow, an inter-disciplinary artist working in the field of experimental audio research, live performance and site-specific installation. He utilises sound and noise in a performative way, for its disruptive and subjective qualities and above all for its psycho-physical implications for the listener and viewer. His “Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic voices” investigates the recurring theme of ‘hearing voices’ in sonic and literary works by paying homage to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.

• Alex Pheby was born in Essex and moved to Worcester in his early childhood. He currently lives in London, where he teaches at the University of Greenwich. His first novel, Grace, was published in 2009 by Two Ravens Press. His second novel, Playthings – about the life of the Daniel Paul Schreber – was published in 2015 by Galley Beggar Press. Widely acclaimed in media from the Guardian to the New York Times, and called “the best neuro-novel ever written” in the Literary Review, Playthings was shortlisted for the 2016 £30,000 Wellcome Book Prize.

• Angela Woods is Co-Director of the Hearing the Voice project, and a major contributor to the Hearing Voicesexhibition on at Palace Green library until 25 February. She has written about Schreber in her book The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2011), and has also blogged about Schreber and the bicentenary of the Sonnenstein Asylum.

Explore our website for further information about Daniel Paul Schreber, and broader experiences of suffering, surviving, healing and empowerment.

Both moving and mysterious, Samuel Beckett’s Company is the story of a voice that comes ‘to one on his back in the dark.’ This voice, which can neither be verified or named, ‘tells of a past.’ In a reading of the text that was at the same time immersive and exploratory, each member of the audience was invited to lie in one of the nine beds placed in the chapel, thereby becoming the central character in this enigmatic story world.

Performances took place daily at 3pm, 5pm and 7pm in the darkened Chapel of the Holy Cross.

Producers: Marco Bernini, Mary Robson
Voice: Peter Marinker
Sound designer: Martin Hodgson
Light designer: David Martin
In collaboration with Jonny Heron and the FAIL BETTER Beckett Lab (Trinity College Dublin)

You can learn more about the work and life of Samuel Beckett here.

Samuel Beckett wasn’t particularly tender with academics. He withdrew from a promising career at Trinity College in Dublin at a very young age, and consistently resisted academic scrutiny of “those bastards of critics,” who were asking him for elucidations of “mysteries that are all of their making” (Letter to Alan Schneider in 1957). Far from an attitude or a pose, Beckett’s negative stance towards academic explanations, knowledge and interpretations was due to his attempt to deliver what he calls in another letter an “acceptance of ignorance” – about our self, our minds, our human quest for meaning. Among the mysteries that Beckett’s work is asking us not to grasp but to experience is our drive to concoct stories about ourselves; an incessant activity that supports our feeling of identity and coherence. In Company, he challenges the structure of our inner storytelling by letting us perceive the paradox of being at the same time creators, narrators, and characters of our life in/as narrative.

Renowned Beckett scholars and performers were invited to challenge their knowledge of the author and of the text by attending a performance of Company in the Holy Cross Chapel in Durham. In this public event, they reported on their experience of the performance, and on how this affected, confirmed, enhanced or called into question previous understandings of the author, of voices in his work, of the text, and of their own human inner storytelling activity. In this “little session of autology” – as Beckett defines introspective moments of exploration – knowledge and ignorance alternated in an ope discussion about the enigmatic need for stories, voices, figments and company.

Do novelists and poets ‘hear’ the voices of the characters and speakers who people their imaginary worlds? In what sense can voices from the literary past enter a writer’s creative process? Do readers experience fictional beings as heard presences?

This public symposium explored the minds of writers, readers and characters as participant agents in literary experience. With a lecture by Professor Pat Waugh on Virigina Woolf, followed by a conversation with the acclaimed novelist Pat Barker and a panel discussion led by Professor Linda Andersonfrom the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, the symposium opened up new perspectives on literature in order to challenge our understanding of creativity, reading, fictional minds, narrative and inner speech, memory, trauma and therapy.

A wine reception between 5pm and 6pm featured readings of specially commissioned works by Gillian Allnutt, winner of the 2016 Queen’s medal for poetry.

Learn more about the the diversity of voices in literature, and enjoy a podcast of Professor Pat Waugh’s public lecture here.

Listen to visitor reflections on the Literary Minds symposium in this podcast.

Dickens’s universe is thronged by innumerable well-defined voices, and his fiction carefully renders the acoustics of individual human speech and utterance. But what does Dickens reveal about what it’s like to overhear others? In this lecture, Peter Garratt suggested why overhearing can help us unlock Dickens’s writing and creativity. Overhearing is a special form of listening: it implies being drawn into secretive, fragmentary and possibly unsolicited auditory contact with proximate voices. As a novelist, Dickens felt he overheard some of his characters in the act of inventing them, such as Mrs Gamp, the alcoholic nurse from Martin Chuzzlewit, who would whisper incessantly to the author around the time he was writing the novel–a jovial torment Dickens was unable to fight off. At another level, the narrative style of his novels positions the reader at times as an overhearer, while overhearing becomes a dramatic device of its own when voices travel and escape from context or cross boundaries in key scenes. And, related as it is to eavesdropping and spying, overhearing divulges narrative secrets and misinformation. Most strikingly perhaps, Dickens’s most autobiographical fiction suggests that memory can take the form of overhearing oneself.

Explore our website to learn more about Charles Dickens and the characters he ‘overheard.’