Sound and Form

Listening to Affective Forms in the Soundscapes of Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth

Abstract

In the past 20 years, formal study of the novel has been re-emerging as a method for understanding not only what a text says, and in what context it is said, but also how it says it. Meanwhile, sound studies in only now beginning to reassess its technological and cultural biases for "authentic" and recorded sound. Instead, we have an opportunity to bring text and sound together as commensurate ways of knowing that challenge how we think and live in the world. In this article, I read Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth for its investment in the soundscapes of Nanuvut in northern Canada. Tagaq, as a throat singer, songwriter, and writer, writes with sound. Her multiform "novel" is model for listening-in-relation to the traces of sound that we cannot hear because of our own biases. Approaching reading as a form of listening, I argue that the unrepresented soundscape of Tagaq’s narrative refigures sound as affective form. By reading form – the modes by which a text represents the world and the human/nonhuman relations within it – not for what it can represent but for the ways in which it reveals the traces of what cannot be represented by human language, I view genre as an invitation to work through the layers of experience that are not readily available, the ways in which relationships that are not visible in the text are structured. In conversation with Tagaq's writing and music, I explore the performativity of sound, a possible counter to the nonperformativity of colonial speech acts that privilege reconciliation over meaningful relations and speech over careful listening.