Silent Listening: The Aesthetics of Literary Sounds

This essay explores how one “listens to”—that is to say, how one takes in, makes sense of, and reacts to—“sounds” that are not really sounds at all but that are simply evocations of sounds served up by the authors of fiction. Although the essay’s conclusions apply to literary sounds in general, the examples on which the essay bases its observations and arguments are drawn—because their affective range is so very, very wide—from the vintage literature of so-called horror fiction. After a discussion of why some instances of scary literary sounds are more potent than others, emphasis is placed on sounds featured in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, writers celebrated for their “aurality” yet whose structural use of sonic imagery—in dynamic patterns in the case of Lovecraft, as markers of plot points in the case of Poe—has hitherto been neglected. Throughout the essay parallels are of course drawn between literary sounds and actual sounds encountered both in the real world and in the fictional worlds of film, television, and radio drama. Readers of the essay are invited to decide for themselves, but it is suggested here that “silent listening”—because it demands creative involvement on the part of its participants—results in a richer aesthetic experience.