MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Misheard phrases, mispronunciations, fumbled words: we might describe these as examples of linguistic error, even of difficulty and strain. But in Michael Davidson's latest book, Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error, they also become the impetus for a wider engagement with aesthetics and literary and artistic production. Under Davidson's purview, error becomes not only failure to understand or to express, but also a generative opportunity to explore the categories and processes that inform a work of art. It also becomes an opportunity for examining the gaps that inevitably surface within art and life, between the body and the world around it, and across various forms of media.

The title Distressing Language is itself a double-entendre. On one hand, linguistic errors, like slips of the tongue and of the ear, reveal deeper layers of materiality, of the body and the senses and the variable nature of words. They can take on their own aesthetic value: think of the intentionally distressed, pre-ripped jeans or faux aged furniture that flaunt their apparent imperfections as part of their fashionable veneer. Yet the same errors can also be distressing, tied to the affective states that arise with making sense of hostile or difficult-to-understand words. Across the book's seven chapters, Davidson deliberately incorporates these double meanings of distress as he examines various locations where language can feel "strange, troubling, loud, or difficult" (4).

Distressing Language is a book deeply informed by disability studies, yet its greatest strengths arise when Davidson brings these existing scholarly approaches to reflect more broadly on art and its place in the world. The book easily cuts across genres, material locations, and different forms of communicating through the body and through technology. Throughout his study, Davidson contemplates how error might simply be "constitutive of novel ways of thinking and doing" (24), as well as how it can lead us into deeper questions of genre and of physical sensation. Error can compel us to reconsider what music, sculpture, or spoken or written words mean if they cannot be witnessed or understood—or if our understanding is belated, fragmented, altered, or incomplete.

This book is a fitting companion to Davidson's earlier book, Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (2019), in which he traces how modernist depictions of the disabled, mad, and traumatized body challenge typical classical aesthetics. This book [End Page 740] also expands Davidson's longstanding interests in the intersections between disability and literary and artistic form, starting with Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (2008). It joins other recent titles in New York University Press's "Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies" series, from scholars such as Robert McRuer and Maren Linett, and it is also a provocative addition to other books that consider the intersections between disability and linguistic difficulty, such as James Berger's The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity (2014).

Davidson acknowledges the influence of books such as Berger's, and he also directly weaves his own experiences of progressive deafness into his reflections on "the quiddities of generative error" (3). As he puts it, "My increasing deafness has been my guide through each of these questions, pointing me toward the sensory logics that organize what passes for truth and providing alternative paths when the trail is blocked or its trajectory hard to see" (24). The media and materials included in this book are varied, the theoretical questions they raise expansive—but, as Davidson explains, this is a deliberate choice, and one that complicates fixed generic categories and ideas about embodiment.

Using the complex embodied experience of progressive deafness as a loose guide, then, Davidson transports us through a thoughtful reconsideration of hearing, speaking, and understanding. In chapter 1, "Poetics of Mishearing," he assesses the relationship between hearing and understanding by engaging with poets and artists who center mishearing in their work. Though much linguistic and rhetorical theory is based on an ideal of mutual understanding, Davidson uses mishearings and misunderstandings to reveal "a new kind of understanding in which communication's indeterminate character is exposed" (31). He engages with the 1974 Roman Polanski film Chinatown, mondegreens and misheard song lyrics, the misheard phrases Gerald Shea calls "lyricals" (38), and the written fragments of the deaf artist Joseph Grigely. Davidson emphasizes how mishearing occurs in various modalities, through the ambiguous and often-poetic traces of language that shape how we understand.

In chapter 2, "Siting Sound: Redistributing the Senses in Christine Sun Kim," Davidson considers how artistic and epistemological understandings of hearing are not restricted to sound or to typical auditory listening alone. In Christine Sun Kim's visual and performative art, both sound and voice become redistributed across different senses, platforms, and prostheses. Davidson articulates how Kim's drawings and installations expose the social currency of sound while [End Page 741] centering different sensory orientations, distributing voice across various senses, and emphasizing the power of a d/Deaf epistemology.

Chapter 3, "Misspeaking Poetics," examines how speech has become valorized in western society, with consequences for people who stutter, mispronounce their words, or experience various "slips of the tongue" (73). This chapter is a particularly rich exploration of the art of error as "an internally distanced relationship to an ideology of embodied wholeness and verbal clarity." Davidson considers poems by Norma Cole and Charles Bernstein, who respectively experienced stroke and cognitive dyslexia, alongside a thoughtful exploration of the shibboleth as an ancient linguistic strategy for detecting social outsiders. He then applies these insights to the work of Jordan Scott, a poet with a lifelong stutter who transforms misspeaking into a deeper exploration of sound's physiology, and to Teresa Hak Kyung Cha's investigations into the relationship between speech, immigration, and national power and social identity.

Chapter 4, which focuses on the work of the poet Larry Eigner, pairs well with chapter 3 in its focus on misspeaking, constricted speech, and linguistic difficulty. Eigner, who writes "slow / is / the poem" (25), produced a body of work that can lead us to rethink the temporalities of disability and of poetic production, something Davidson assesses through his concept of slow poetics as a reflection of physiology. Eigner's "distressed and distressing" (100) voice can give us an example of avant-garde art and language through cripping typical understandings of vocal authority and normative temporality.

Chapter 5, "Diverting Language: Jena Osman's Corporate Subject," is the one chapter in this book not explicitly related to disability, though it retains the same concerns with how artists and writers appropriate cultural texts or rhetorical frameworks. It reveals how distressing language and poetic difficulty can also apply to other sites of artistic creation and bodily precarity—in this case, Jena Osman's poems, which appropriate and distress the language of corporate subjectivity and jurisprudence into a new (though still-opaque) form for the lyric.

The book's final two chapters reconnect with Davidson's autobiographical insights about engaging with music and with captioning technology, respectively. In the former, Davidson explores the extent to which aurality informs our understanding of music, performance, and sound, primarily through exploring the work of composers and film artists, such as Alison O'Daniel, who occupy spaces in between hearing and deaf worlds and who create artworks that reveal the hierarchies and (not-always-auditory) soundscapes associated with [End Page 742] listening. And in the latter, Davidson considers the work of artists who repurpose captions for critical and cultural commentary, including more of Kim's work alongside other artists such as Liza Sylvestre and Carolyn Lazard and the poet Robert Fitterman. The disorientation of these repurposed captions can, in Davidson's words, lead us into "a new awareness of what it means to be oriented in a hearing world, what expectations about human intercourse are taken for granted, and how those expectations marginalize others" (180–81). As the book concludes, disorientation is a new and unexpected window to examine how human beings make meaning, as well as what is truly at stake in meaning-making and its various assumptions.

In foregrounding disorientation and error as central to linguistic and artistic production, Davidson provides a refreshing set of critical perspectives on physiological and linguistic experiences of liminality and uncertainty. His explorations of error and how it distresses the ways we use and produce art have much to offer to scholars of disability and Deaf studies, and in its larger considerations of aesthetics and genre it will also be of broader interest to theorists of form as well as of scholars of contemporary art and poetry.