Silence, Dissonance, Noise: Guided Listening in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Abstract

Abstract: Sinha’s Animal’s People is a novel premised on sound, through the transcription of Animal’s voice and recorded interviews. Despite its centrality, sound is occluded by the novel’s own textual form. This essay explores the metatextual relationship between sound and text, subaltern voice and novelistic form, by focusing on a particular moment of “guided listening” in Animal’s narration. I propose that Animal’s invitation to the reader, to hear beauty in the deathly silence of the Kampani’s abandoned, toxic factory, compels a mode of counterintuitive listening. This moment presents an impasse, advocating experimentation and a reflexive encounter with the novel going forward. In doing so, Animal’s “guided listening” reconfigures Animal’s voice not as a matter to be recuperated by the reader and represented through the text, but rather as a voice whose agency lies in its capacity to reorganize the novel’s associative economies and inspire the reader to do the same.