ABSTRACT
In “Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works,” British novelist Tom McCarthy insists that literature is governed by an “acoustic logic” (McCarthy 2012).
My aim here, in this essay, is not to tell you something, but to make you listen: not to me, nor even to Beckett and Kafka, but to a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play – in their lines, between them and around them – since each of these forms began. I want to make you listen to them, in the hope not that they’ll deliver up some hidden and decisive message, but rather that they’ll help attune your ear to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity – in other words, that they’ll enable you to listen in on listening itself.
(McCarthy 2012)