Sound Writing: Popular Music in the Contemporary Caribbean Novel

"Sound Writing" examines the tension between the high cultural milieu of writing, and the pop cultural milieu of music, the two polarized axes along which autocthonous Caribbean cultural expression has developed. Using as hermeneutical tools both the phonograph (sound writing) and the aesthetics of calypso, bolero, reggae and dub respectively, I analyze four novels that explicitly juxtapose writing and music, and that use the aesthetics of Caribbean popular music as models for their novels. My central argument is that these novels---Lawrence Scott's Night Calypso (2004), Oscar Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain (1998), and Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge (2003)---are engaged in sound writing , not only marrying two genres that have long been considered polarized, but also challenging unsound writing that silences Caribbean peoples. Appropriating Caribbean popular music allows these novelists to recover vernacular forms of storytelling while deploying various innovative narrative techniques that address the sounding of suppressed memories and narratives.;Simultaneously listening to and reading these novels, I attend to the ways that these diverse writers interrogate and rethink Caribbean literary aesthetics and identity through music, and the range of ways in which music informs novelistic narration. Beyond what particular songs, musicians and music forms signify culturally, sound writing as critical practice means interrogating the impact of recorded/recording music in the novel on the formal and aesthetic level. "Hearing" music as written in the novels means engaging with both theme and form, attending to the translation of music into a form that deals in words. Ultimately, by bringing together these disparate texts from across the Caribbean, and putting these different musical genres in conversation, I hope to demonstrate the fruitfulness of sustained sound readings and hearings of "literary sound recordings" beyond the novels that I study here. Given the centrality of music to Caribbean people's self conceptions, music can be not only a "vital and valid literary model," but also a vital and valid critical model as well.