The proliferation of literary studies of sound has productively complicated the idea of what it means to ‘listen’ to texts. In postcolonial criticism, listening as a form of attention often provides a framework for thinking about the ethical encounter with the Other. This case has been made for Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), a novel that traces the fate of three British Muslims of Pakistani descent in a retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. Critics have read the novel’s preoccupation with various forms of auditory sensibility in terms of the cultural politics of listening. Listening here is understood as a metaphor for conscious attention to the Other and a means of ensuring intersubjectivity where vision and other senses either fail or actively prevent it. Shamsie’s novel, however, also demonstrates that listening as a metaphor for diligent attention to Otherness demands greater awareness of the qualities of listening as a sensory act. This is particularly important because an examination of this act reveals the ambiguous effect of listening, which in turn complicates its abstract understanding as a moral act. This essay investigates this dynamic by comparing Shamsie’s exploration of the intersubjective nature of listening with Chuck Palahniuk’s exploration of the same idea in The Invention of Sound (2020), a novel featuring a protagonist strikingly similar to Shamsie’s Parvaiz as regards their auditory sensibilities. It concludes that listening as a sensory experience is far more ambivalent, ethically speaking, than abstract conceptions of sound and listening suggest.

Keywords: sound; hearing; listening; intersubjectivity; Kamila Shamsie; Chuck Palahniuk