Alex Benson's "Sound-Blind"

Alex Benson is an associate professor of literature at Bard College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sound-Blind: American Literature and the Politics of Transcription, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops us into a discussion of an obscure 1886 study of the human stride—particularly in some of its “afflicted” forms—by physician Georges Gilles de la Tourette. When a brief summary of the study went out on the newswire and was printed in dozens of American newspapers, there was no mention of Gilles de la Tourette’s interest in neurological disorders. Instead, the summary underscored the novelty of his basic method: measuring the average forms of a behavior, walking, almost never given any thought. Having discussed this theme in the reception of an obscure medical history, page 99 then explains how it connects to the chapter’s larger questions about ability, race, and rhythm.

Even for a reader who starts on page 1, that explanation offers some necessary orientation, since this chapter, “Gatsby’s Tattoo,” isn’t about gait analysis. Nor is the book as a whole about medical history. So the Page 99 Test may paint a slightly skewed picture of the texts and genres I mostly write about. Yet it does give a good sense of the moves the book likes to make. Page 99 touches on questions about how to represent a nonverbal event in text. It addresses the fraught concept of the “normal” body, a concept that bridges the politics of ability and ethnicity. And, following the walking study’s print trajectory across academic and popular contexts, it suggests the kind of archival methods I use to reconstruct histories of texts in their composition and circulation.

Most importantly, the page begins to indicate how the idea of transcription (the book’s real keyword) operates in the larger argument. At issue in the story of Gilles de la Tourette’s study is, first, how one can take the multisensory activity of a human stride and make it something graphic, textual, and interpretable. And then there’s the question of how, and with what political meanings, this representation gets mediated on a wider scale. The experiment I’m carrying out in Sound-Blind involves reading American literature across similar scales of transcription—thinking about the smallest graphic and sonic details of literary expression as articulated within and against large frameworks of settler-colonial power in which the very notion of textuality takes on a charged role. Drawn mostly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (when “sound-blindness,” a term for certain auditory processing impairments, entered the lexicon of cultural theory), my case studies include a cattle brand printed in a short story, a poem recited before a statue of Sequoyah, an anecdote about Helen Keller receiving a delivery, and a poem that W. E. B. Du Bois decided not to write—along with The Great Gatsby and a forgotten study of how people walk.

Visit Alex Benson's website, and learn more about Sound-Blind at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue