Textual Hearing Aids

Abstract

This chapter argues that attending to sound in fiction can improve one’s sense of hearing. It explores how contemporary novels and stories prompt us to hear things differently. These differences are noticeable as changes in a person’s subjective experience of sound. Augoyard and Torgue’s idea of sonic experience – the fact that everyone listens ‘in their own way’ – offers a conceptual framework with which we can analyse sound in novels and stories. In Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive, we encounter two different narrators who both conceive of sound as a process, while one of them also attends to sounds as objects. Attending to their words, we can glimpse the many currents of personal, social, and political meaning that flow between self and sound. Because novels and stories may prompt us to reflect on the relationship between who we are and how we hear, reading may lead people who have hearing loss and tinnitus towards a richer experience of sound.