Is there a sound in this text? toward a noisy textuality

It has become cliché to decry the decay of reading in an age of distraction. Yet for every literary scholar who proclaims the destruction of attention, another points out that today’s nostalgic version of attentive reading never really existed. How might we disentangle reading and attention to articulate forms of textual engagement befitting the noisiness of today’s information environments? This essay pursues an expanded field of reading that involves not just deciphering writing, but navigating (and getting lost in) split attention and sensory distraction. I analyse musician Matthew Herbert’s The Music (2018), a book composed entirely of descriptions of sounds. Through ostensibly silent invocations of sound, The Music prompts a phenomenology of reading that wavers between the sensory and figurative dimensions of listening. I argue that the “noise” of reading – its movement between signal and sense, meaning and indeterminacy, focus and distraction – calls for a textual aesthetics that drifts beyond linguistic representation into messy encounters between bodies, texts, and world. By examining the book’s interpellation of readers, its defiance of recording and playback, and its emphasis on the bodies and breaths undergirding reading, I probe an atmospheric, inattentive style of reading wherein words are sparse nodes in an expansive process of mediation.