ABSTRACT
The sounds of bells resonate throughout Doomsday Book. Kivrin needs bells with a known history in order to orient herself in the fourteenth century. Dunworthy hears the same bells in his century; he also objects to tinny recordings of “The Carol of the Bells” and negotiates the needs of a visiting American handbell group. The ubiquity of the bells suggests that Willis means for them to signify something, but what does bell speech mean? Richard Wilbur notes that “the selfsame toothless voice” speaks “for death or bridal,” notes also that the significance of bell speech has diminished in recent history as human listeners have “not attended” to their sound. Most profoundly, John Donne recognizes that the bells speak for God, calling human beings to “catholicity” (including solidarity) and charity, among other things. The bells in Doomsday Book, like the bells in Donne’s Devotions, call their hearers into communion, both across time as they recognize continuity with the traditions they inherit and across ideologies as they charitably recognize the commonness of the human condition and accept the differences of others.
