‘I listen to plenty’: Digital Playlisting and Sonic Experience in Marlon James’s <em>A Brief History of Seven Killings</em>

Set in Kingston and New York over a 15-year period from 1976, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) dramatises the lives of people involved in the real-life attempted assassination of Bob Marley. The novel’s most prominent critics emphasise its cinematic atmosphere, the polyphonic force of its many narrators’ voices, and its distinctive use of music. However, the novel also explores how literary representations of historical sounds relate to the media technologies that became ubiquitous after the novel’s action takes place. James’s distinctive audiovisual sensitivity, I argue, is rooted in a formal orientation towards digital media. His novel itself behaves as a kind of playlist, subjecting both its characters and its readers to many different styles of audiovisuality, and switching between them at a high frequency. Thus it acts as a textual demonstration of Jim Collins’s argument that contemporary ‘watching, reading, surfing, and listening are all subsumable to the pleasure of playlisting’. This term encapsulates both the specific action of creating or accessing a sequence of media products, and the general ‘curatorial’ process in which users of ‘digital archives’ like tablet computers or smartphones experience narrative ‘worlds built out of our cultural obsessions’. By attending to how the novel approaches sound, we can see that Brief History acts as a container for audiovisual representations that embody different production values and aesthetic parameters. Thus it anticipates a literary culture that would become increasingly responsive to the sonic characteristics of digital technologies.