Sounds of the Contemporary: Listening to the Present in Richard McGuire’s Here

This essay suggests that the sounds in Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here provide a readerly experience of the challenges of the contemporary. The difficulties of talking about the present – especially amidst literary inquiry’s pressure to periodize – often emerge from the contemporary’s immersive qualities and its constant propensity to change. While images can seem to extract or freeze historical moments, sounds keep these moments moving; they establish resonances and dissonances that undermine the stability of a singular present. Comics, unlike moving picture arts like films or videogames, require readers to extrapolate temporal rhythm, pace, and duration, and this constructive act is crucial to a contemporary that is immersive and always in formation. Here’s visual collage of three billion years of history invokes the representational allure of images; by reading it with an ear for sound, I argue that the sonic disrupts the temporality of its images and installs a sense of the liveliness and density of the contemporary. In effect, close listening to silent texts provides a way of grappling with the elusiveness of “now,” and a sonic vocabulary can help articulate how recent literary texts conceive of a multi-layered, ever-changing present that defies the privilege of critical distance.