By Anna Torres

Abstract

This article reads Diamela Eltit’s Sumar as a laboratory for thinking sonic citizenship under conditions of urban expulsion, economic pressure, and bodily exhaustion. Departing from the expectation that marches appear as loud, unified occupations of public space, it follows the novel’s diminished forms of audibility – murmurs, complaints, insults, pauses, repetitions, bodily creaks, and the precarious mediation of a battered megaphone. Drawing on phenomenologies of listening and on theories of assembly, the article argues that Sumar does not simply represent sound; it writes listening through Aurora’s mediated voice, syntactic accumulation, repetition, and rhythms of endurance. The march of expelled street vendors thus becomes a politics of the faint: a collective presence that persists not through volume, sovereignty, or heroic speech, but through fragile forms of resonance at the edge of exhaustion. The article also considers how “the coin” operates as an economic and sensory force that regulates who can appear, sound, and remain audible in the city. In this way, Sumar expands sonic citizenship toward precarious, literary, and low-intensity modes of public audibility.

Introduction

Marches are often imagined as scenes of heightened sonic intensity: chants, shouts, choruses, megaphones, the audible occupation of public space. This was the case, for example, during the Chilean social uprising of 2019, when the march became a visible and sonic form of contestation over citizenship. In Sumar, however, Diamela Eltit redirects that expectation into a different register. The novel follows a group of street vendors expelled from the streets, whose march moves through a hostile, surveilled city shaped by the omnipresent pressure of the coin. Yet rather than advancing as a triumphant crowd, these bodies sustain a trajectory marked by exhaustion, precarity, and the difficulty of remaining in public space. Here, the march does not emerge as an epic irruption carried by a full collective voice. Instead, it gradually takes shape as an experience of wear, slowness, and fragile persistence. Sound, likewise, does not appear as an immediate sign of political force. What the novel renders audible are diminished forms of audibility – murmurs, complaints, insults, pauses – that accompany the group’s fatigued advance and invite us to think the sonic otherwise. From that inflection, Sumar opens a space for asking what sonic citizenship might look like when it no longer depends on the spectacular affirmation of public voice, but on the precarious possibility of continuing to sound, however faintly, within a city that expels, hierarchizes, and surveils.

Rather than proceeding from a closed thesis, this article asks how Sumar might be read as a laboratory of sonic citizenship. More specifically, it traces the novel’s precarious modes of collective audibility while also asking how the sonic becomes thinkable in a written medium that does not materialize sound. The issue is not simply to identify the sounds represented in the march, but to follow the procedures through which writing makes an experience of listening legible in a non-sounding medium: the mediation of the narrator’s voice, syntactic rhythm, repetition, attenuation, and the unequal distribution between those who speak, those who listen, and those reduced to noise or remainder. Viewed in these terms, the novel does more than represent a collectivity in motion. It also explores the conditions under which certain bodies still manage to make themselves heard in public space, even if only intermittently, faintly, or unstably. Reading Sumar through this lens, then, makes it possible to trace a politics of listening less tied to heroic or unified sonority than to a shared presence marked by fragility, exhaustion, and the difficulty of sustaining itself.

Methodological Approach

This analysis draws on a phenomenological approach to listening that treats the sonic not as an isolated object, but as a sensory relation to the world. For Jean-Luc Nancy (2007), listening entails an openness to resonance and to that which passes through the subject before being fixed into meaning; for Don Ihde (2007), sonic perception can be understood as a bodily and situated experience shaped by proximities, distances, orientations, and thresholds. From this perspective, Sumar is approached not as a novel that merely represents sounds, but as a mode of writing that organizes an experience of listening through rhythm, repetition, attenuation, and the fragility of certain utterances. Such a framework allows attention not only to what is heard in the march but also to how the novel distributes unequal forms of sensory exposure and audibility.

Listening as Method

This dimension becomes especially significant in Sumar because the novel does not let voices circulate as though they formed an open and transparent polyphony. Instead, they are mediated by a narrator who perceives, selects, modulates, and paces the collective movement. By centering on Aurora, the novel shifts perception away from panoramic vision and toward a more situated mode of attention, one in which space does not appear as a stable tableau but as a weave of signs apprehended through listening. What she hears and chooses to narrate draws attention to the march’s soundscape: cars, shouts, murmurs, warnings, scattered voices. At times, space is disclosed less through visual description than through acoustic signals. The route can therefore be read as a form of soundwalking, insofar as listening guides movement and reveals how space itself organizes the march through marks, thresholds, and sonic frictions. At the same time, this gesture suggests a relation of topophonophilia: place does not settle merely as backdrop but is composed through listening, as if Aurora were operating as an “echo nymph” (Eltit, 2018, p. 61), receiving and returning sounds rather than mastering them from outside.

Accordingly, the march is not presented through conventional cartography or from an all-encompassing point of view. It is constructed through an internal, bodily exposed focalization. Aurora does not simply recount what happens; she listens to variations, registers fatigue, catches alerts, and modulates the intensity with which certain sounds or phrases reach the narrative surface. The reader is therefore not given a stable acoustic whole or a closed sonic composition, but a fragmentary and situated auditory experience shaped by exhaustion, proximity, and vulnerability. Within this frame, murmurs, complaints, and insults cease to serve as secondary details and become indices of precarious audibility. The narrator does not simply describe the march; she makes it listenable through a sensibility attuned to its fragile rhythms.

This operation becomes even clearer when Aurora defines herself in terms that suspend classical psychological interiority. In Sumar, she does not appear as a consciousness grounded in inward self-knowledge, but as a surface exposed to what reaches it. “I am pure exteriority” (Eltit, 2018, p. 35). The phrase does not merely describe a subjective state; it also marks a formal position. The novel brackets the model of introspective subjectivity and privileges another task instead: receiving voices, noises, slogans, rumors, and warnings; letting the common enter first through the ear rather than through the concept. From there, Aurora can be read as an auditory device, a recording surface through which a low-intensity vocal ecology is managed – enough to keep the community from coming apart, though never under the illusion of mastering meaning. If the novel marches, Aurora does not watch it from outside; she listens as she moves through it.

The same logic becomes more explicit when Aurora imagines herself as an echo: “I am the representation … of the irreplaceable Echo Nymph” (Eltit, 2018, p. 61). To be echo is not to possess an original voice or to speak from a fully self-owned source. It means inhabiting rebound, return, and the resonance of what is already in circulation. When she adds that she is “inhabited by others’ voices” (Eltit, 2018, p. 62), what comes into view is not merely an emotional state but a material condition of enunciation. Her voice appears crossed by the emissions of other bodies, by remnants of speech, by signals that exceed her. At that point, the narrator ceases to serve as a stable point of view and becomes a medium of passage. The sign does not originate in her sovereignty; it passes through her, reverberates in her, and is modulated in that transit. Mimesis in this novel, then, can no longer be thought solely in visual terms. Here, to represent also means to listen, to let pass, and to transform that listening into writing.

The city, moreover, enters first through sound. The march appears first as an acoustic landscape rather than a visual panorama: “We hear …”, “through the megaphone … we are told …”, “we heard …” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 76, 101, 185–186). The order of these verbs matters. Before seeing, one hears. Before space stabilizes as a scene, it appears as vibration, warning, rumor, slogan, or interruption. The city is not presented as a bounded picture but as a sonic circulation composed of heterogeneous layers. Nor is that circulation neutral. What passes, what is cut off, what turns into murmur, what must remain low in volume so as not to trigger punishment – all these points point to a politics of audibility. The narrator does not explain the city from above; she measures it through her exposure to sonic intensities. Narrative mediation thus not only organizes the perception of space; it also makes it possible to trace how that space unequally distributes the possibilities of being heard.

Seen in this light, Aurora’s mediation is not merely a technical device but a decisive condition for thinking the sonic citizenship that the novel puts to the test. Through that filtered, partial, and vulnerable listening, Sumar does not present a community erupting with a full voice, but a collectivity that barely sustains its presence through weak rhythms, insistent repetitions, and fragile emissions. Narrative mediation, then, guarantees neither transparency nor totality. Instead, it lets us hear the precariousness of shared listening itself and shows – or rather, lets us hear – that the march is also played out at those thresholds where a voice still manages to pass, however minimally, intermittently, or fatigued.

1. At the Threshold of Expulsion

One of the novel’s earliest moves is to show that the expulsion of the “Chilean street vendors” (Eltit, 2018, p. 18) from the streets compromises more than their material subsistence. Their labor depends not only on bodily movement and the circulation of goods, but also on an insistent orality that offers, calls out, hails, and establishes contact with passers-by. It is no accident that they are perceived as “excessively loud” (Eltit, 2018, p. 25), since their urban presence also rests on that capacity to break acoustically into common space. When the narration recalls that “we are the ones who grant delirium to the streets … the specular sounds of voices that signal that cities do exist and that we exist in cities … the explosion of balloons, the more than offensive music … the children’s snoring … and the unheard-of races of our Olympics at the arrival of the police and their sickening harassment” (Eltit, 2018, p. 182), what emerges is not merely an inventory of noises but a sonic way of inhabiting the street. Eviction, therefore, begins to appear not only as the cancellation of an economic activity but as the interruption of a mode of public appearance grounded in voice, noise, and bodily insistence. What is lost is not simply the place from which one sells, but also a precarious, unstable, yet effective way of making oneself heard in the city.

Understood this way, expulsion makes visible how sonic citizenship comes into focus precisely when certain subjects cease to be tolerated as audible presences and instead are perceived as excess, nuisance, or intrusion. The novel suggests, then, that urban space distributes not only routes and social hierarchies but also perceptual thresholds and defines which forms of presence are acceptable. In Sumar, the city seems to privilege visual cleanliness, separation, and control, while relegating the sonorities associated with the street, informal commerce, and direct contact among bodies to the status of residue. The armored glass walkway is especially telling at this point, because it inserts “the spectacle of poverty” while simultaneously reordering who looks and who remains exposed (Eltit, 2018, p. 28). This is not merely an infrastructure that regulates circulation. It condenses an urban sensibility that elevates certain presences, protects certain distances, and renders others more visible in their precarity and, for that very reason, less tolerable in the way they make themselves heard. The street vendor’s voice, which once intervened in space through calls, offers, and fleeting contacts, is displaced by a city more willing to accommodate regulated transit than to accommodate the insistent orality of those who survive on the street. More than eliminating an occupation, that urban order filters a form of sensible appearance and unequally redistributes the right to be heard within the city.

Exclusion, then, appears not only as a social fact but also as a spatial and perceptual experience insistently produced through writing. This rendering of public space as distribution, obstacle, and sensation allows space to be read, in Luz Aurora Pimentel’s sense, as a textual effect produced through the selection, ordering, and reiteration of traits that orient reading (Pimentel, 2001). The sidewalk is not given “in a single glance”; it is assembled in fragments as the narrative unfolds, and each new mention forces the reader to readjust their mental map. Something similar occurs with the word street/streets, which in the novel is far from functioning as a neutral setting. “Everything happens in the streets, everything occurs there, in the most astonishing indifference”; shortly afterwards, the text adds that before the march they lived “in the midst of a perfectly planned ring of silence” designed by “traffic engineers” and “concessions” intended to “excavate hydric soils” (Eltit, 2018, p. 58). Here, streets are charged with a precise predicative force: they do not simply sustain the common, but produce indifference, administer silence, and appear as the result of a technical-administrative design. That semantic charge intensifies through lexical repetition and through the return of the same spatial scene, as the word reappears throughout the novel: “I am in the street awake and anxious” (Eltit, 2018, p. 18), “goods strewn across the street” (Eltit, 2018, p. 50), “we experience the street” (Eltit, 2018, p. 78), “we remain in the street” (Eltit, 2018, p. 97), and “we once again occupy the streets” (Eltit, 2018, p. 124). Writing thus does more than name a setting; it fixes the street as an administered site where ordering and silence impose themselves as conditions of the common. The initial expulsion consequently ceases to appear as an isolated episode. Instead, it becomes the threshold from which the novel asks who may remain, who may sound, and under what conditions certain lives become audible in the city.

2. Marching Faintly

The loss of that public voice does not entirely cancel the possibility of collective presence. In Sumar, the march gradually becomes the space where the sonic reappears in other forms: no longer through the forceful slogan or the noisy occupation of the street, but through registers shaped by exhaustion, wear, and shared persistence. As the narrative moves forward, the narrator selects words that do not describe sound extensively yet still allow it to be imagined through the body that produces it: “to sit on the curbs when our feet begin to throb” (Eltit, 2018, p. 19), “my feet were throbbing because we had walked so much …” (Eltit, 2018, p. 64), “a bone came loose from his head because his whole skull creaks” (Eltit, 2018, p. 129). The novel does not imagine a crowd sustained by a unified voice, but a collectivity that barely persists through fragile rhythms, exhausted bodies, and a continuity held together by accumulated wear. What emerges, then, is a low-intensity sonority in which the tired body does not fully replace the voice yet becomes the site from which a minimal audibility can still be sustained.

Such faint audibility appears not only in the bodies moving forward, but also in the internal tensions that traverse the march. Fear of failure can be heard in the “murmurs that burrow through the marches and provoke deep divisions” (Eltit, 2018, p. 102), or in the doubt that surfaces when the narrator asks whether “we exist or whether we are merely a simple echo of the rhetoric recorded in the first radio speeches” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 181–182). In that context, Casimiro Barrios emerges as an attempt to order that dispersal through another voice: that of the leader, “efficient, exact, and reliable” (Eltit, 2018, p. 38), whose authority rests on command, experience, and the capacity to speak in the name of the group. Yet as the march goes on, even that voice does not remain intact. His authority begins to show signs of erosion, as if leadership itself were affected by collective exhaustion. Rather than staging a simple opposition between disorder and command, the novel presents a scene in which even the voice that organizes begins to wear down.

At the same time, the march's continuity also depends on small protocols of support that regulate the group’s survival. “Resting exhausted in the gutter to have a little tea” (Eltit, 2018, p. 130) is not fully restorative, but it does function as a pause for regrouping, a minimal interval that keeps dispersal at bay. In those moments, the sonic reappears differently – not as a slogan or a frontal confrontation with the street, but as a conversation, exchange, and accompaniment. The narrator recalls that, thanks to their own words and the ingenuity of “a very special group of street vendors,” there emerged “unexpected or surprising or forbidden topics,” followed by “slight shivers” or “off-key laughter”; these, she says, were “the habits we street vendors had to get through those desperate lost hours, or else as a prelude to running from the police while provoking a pathetic stampede” (Eltit, 2018, p. 159). The street-side pause does not simply interrupt the march. It also creates a space for listening among them, a time in which certain voices find a small margin to circulate and, however provisionally, sustain the group’s continuity.

Much the same occurs when the street vendors decide to “carry out something like an improvised assembly of street vendors” (Eltit, 2018, p. 27). If, in a classical deliberative model, the assembly promises consensus and shared resolution, in Sumar it operates instead as a precarious assembly: it does not fully repair the fractures of the collective or produce cohesion, but it does establish a minimal order that allows them to continue. Here, “assembly” is understood in its deliberative sense, as a space oriented toward agreements and legitimacy through public discussion, in line with Habermas (1996). “Precarious assembly,” however, seems more precise than “fragile assembly,” because what is at stake is not an occasional weakness but a structural condition: a “we” that must sustain itself amid dependence, exposure, and the threat of dissolution. In that respect, the scene also resonates with Butler’s understanding of assembly as a contingent, plural, and performative production of the common under conditions of precarity (Butler, 2017). What opens here is an unstable field of deliberation made up of “requests, complaints, endless chatter, incoherent proposals,” alongside “mystical outbursts with which they praised the march” (Eltit, 2018, p. 76). 

Meanwhile, the discussion narrows urgent priorities to postpone collapse: “We needed guarantees regarding food and water. Control over the cell phones. Extra clothing and vitamins. Precautions against infectious diseases. The most basic things” (Eltit, 2018, p. 76). What matters here is that the collective is not organized through the fullness of a common voice, but through the precarious management of needs, complaints, and minimal care. The assembly does not unify; it barely sustains.

For that very reason, the low intensity of the march should not be read as an expressive deficit or political weakness. Rather, it is the specific way in which the novel makes audible a collective experience shaped by fatigue, fragility, and exposure. Murmur, complaint, labored breathing, or barely sustained movement do not replace a voice that was once supposedly full; in Sumar, they are the concrete forms taken by sonic citizenship when public space expels, wears down, and reduces the possibilities of speaking with authority. Eltit does not present a community entirely deprived of its capacity to sound, but one that persists in minimal registers, where audibility depends on the bodily effort of continuing to be there. From this perspective, the novel lets us perceive a politics of the faint: a form of collective presence that asserts itself not through volume, but through duration, insistence, and shared vulnerability.

That attenuated sonority, moreover, does not depend only on what the novel describes, but also on how it is written. In Sumar, repetition, accumulation, and syntactic movement all contribute to producing a sense of fatigued duration that paces the marchers’ trajectory. Rather than organizing a narrative oriented toward climax, the prose insists, returns, and stretches out, conveying the experience of a movement that persists without resolution. This becomes visible each time the narrator states that they “advance” and the text almost immediately introduces an adversative turn: “We were moving forward and had to face a series of adverse situations” (Eltit, 2018, p. 67); “as we advanced, the harshness of other streets awaited us” (Eltit, 2018, p. 68); actions meant to “impede our advance” (Eltit, 2018, p. 48). Even when progress seems to affirm itself, it is measured in minimal units, as in “until it moved forward an entire block” (Eltit, 2018, p. 146), so that movement communicates neither triumph nor arrival, but only duration. Wear, then, appears not only as a theme but as a formal effect. The reader does not simply understand that the bodies are exhausted, but that exhaustion is felt in the texture of the narrative itself. Writing thus does more than represent a precarious march: it constructs an acoustics of fatigue in which verbal rhythm renders sensible a form of citizenship sustained at the edge of exhaustion.

3. Acoustics of Power

This faint persistence of the march does not unfold in a horizontal space shared on equal terms. In Sumar, the city distributes sight, listening, and speech hierarchically, and that inequality becomes especially visible – or rather, audible – in the verticality of urban space. From above, one watches, judges, and insults; below, the marchers move forward exposed to commentary and contempt. The narrator registers this clearly when she says: “We listened to the obscene words shouted at us by company executives … filled with contempt and drenched in the disgust we provoked in each of the (few) owners of the coin … from the windows of the buildings” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 67–68). The scene distributes positions sharply: above, one speaks and rejects; below, one endures exposure. Verbal violence is thus tied to space itself, because the height of the windows organizes who looks, who speaks, and who remains exposed in the street. The spatial exclusion that gave rise to the march is then prolonged into verbal and perceptual exclusion. Not all voices occupy the same position or enjoy the same legitimacy: those who inhabit the buildings can issue complaints, judgments, or aggression from a protected place, while the bodies that march carry a more vulnerable audibility, more easily degraded into noise, nuisance, or invasion. Sonic citizenship no longer appears here as a shared right but as a stratified relation in which some subjects retain the authority to name, reject, and monitor. In contrast, others barely sustain their presence under constant exposure.

Another form of command, less localized but no less effective, accompanies that hierarchy of heights: the insistent presence of the coin. In the novel, the coin does not need to speak in a voice of its own or erupt as a clearly identifiable sound to impose its power. Its force operates more diffusely, as a pressure that invades consciousness, shapes desire and reorganizes the perception of the social world. More than an inert object or a simple medium of exchange, writing allows it to appear as an animated entity capable of acting upon bodies and space alike. Naming it in the third person does not weaken its agency; on the contrary, it sharpens the division between what counts as operative force and those reduced to “a multitude of beings so gloomy, half-bizarre, blurry” (Eltit, 2018, p. 74). This hierarchy of animacy is stated insistently: “the coin laughs out loud” (Eltit, 2018, p. 102), "the coin reveled in its successive triumphs” (Eltit, 2018, p. 164), “the coin breaks the most minimal rules of coexistence” (Eltit, 2018, p. 186), and it is also associated with “its traps” (Eltit, 2018, p. 35). What matters here is not only personification itself, but what that personification makes it possible to think. The coin acts as a structuring force that reorders the route, imposes pauses, produces detours, and forces regrouping, as if the march had to keep readjusting its form to continue under its pressure.

That pressure is not limited to the outside. The coin also invades the narrator’s thoughts and dreams, colonizing her sensibility in an almost obsessive way. “I need the coin. Yes. I need it …” (Eltit, 2018, p. 31), Aurora says, and soon after she admits: “to migrate away from the coin … I would like to leave it, abandon it, even if doing so pushed me toward my own dissolution … but migrating away from the coin is impossible” (Eltit, 2018, p. 33). Later, that internalization becomes even more explicit: “Before, I looked at the coin from afar, only occasionally. It was and was not part of my life. But later I learned that the coin is crucial in any of its dimensions” (Eltit, 2018, p. 30). The coin no longer appears only as an external economic structure, but as a presence that penetrates subjectivity and conditions one’s relation to the world from within. The novel also renders it sensible through a toxic, material atmosphere: “the coin.” The image repeated itself over and over. “It melted dangerously because of the swift liquid darkness of calcined metals, which gave off the trail of an exceedingly discordant smell, so extensive and offensive” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 14–15). Its power is therefore not perceived only in abstract terms; it is also felt as emanation, combustion, fetor, contamination. The coin reorganizes space not only through its capacity to order value, but through the sensory atmosphere it leaves in its wake.

The acoustics of power in Sumar, then, do not end with the scene of voices shouting insults from above. They also include that less visible force that determines which bodies count, which trajectories remain tolerable, and which presences may make themselves heard without punishment. The coin acts upon the sensible field by making the appearance of certain subjects more or less bearable in the city. By the same token, audibility becomes subordinated to an economy of value: some lives can sound without difficulty because they fit the dominant order, while others become excessive, bothersome, or disposable. In Sumar, then, the coin regulates not only material exchange; it also intervenes in the distribution of the perceptible, conditioning who deserves to be heard and who is reduced to remainder, interference, or noise. The march persists, yes, but it does so within a city where power not only watches and expels it but also organizes listening and hierarchizes the very right to sound.

4. Insurgent Interruptions of the March

Even within the urban order that expels, hierarchizes, and wears bodies down, the novel opens moments in which collective audibility is partially and unevenly reorganized. Rumor and assembly are especially significant because they interrupt, however briefly, the monotony of forward movement and create shared points of attention among the marchers. What emerges is not a unified voice or a fully consolidated community, but precarious forms of articulation in which the collective briefly regains consistency through exchange, circulating versions, and mutual listening. In such moments, Sumar suggests that sonic citizenship depends not only on the possibility of making oneself heard before power, but also on the capacity to sustain minimal spaces of resonance among those who march. Rumor and assembly do not overcome the group’s fragility, but they do open a zone in which that fragility becomes relational, shared, and therefore temporarily habitable.

The novel also introduces scenes in which music, performative gesture, or the irruption of an event alter the march’s exhausted cadence and momentarily reshape the collective’s self-perception. If internal organization is understood as practice in act, then the march itself begins to appear as performance – not as a closed representation, but as a way of producing collectivity in the doing. At that level, the “march of the century” already functions as an implicit performance through its scale and persistence. The narrator calls it “the largest of the twenty-first century” (Eltit, 2018, p. 18) and describes it as founded “on the power of its persistence and length” (Eltit, 2018, p. 19). Its political force, then, seems to lie not in arrival or completion, but in the insistence on continuing to appear as a collective body still capable of being perceived. Butler’s argument that collective appearance is itself a performative act helps clarify the scene (Butler, 2017), as does Solnit’s suggestion that movement itself can become a form of speech (Solnit, 2001). What matters, however, is that Sumar does not present this performativity as plenitude, but as something intermittent, precarious, and always on the verge of coming undone.

The novel does more than suggest that basic performativity. It also assigns to certain figures within the group the role of interrupting exhaustion through small scenes of display, rhythm, or distraction. Ángela, for instance, activates a bodily repertoire that predates the march: she “was one of the pioneers in practicing contortionism … her only job was to exhibit herself and earn a few coins” (Eltit, 2018, p. 78). Once incorporated into the route, the text insists on both the continuity of that act and its reinvention (Eltit, 2018, p. 166), as if the scene had to be reactivated again and again to sustain movement. Something similar happens with Diki, though in another register. He “exercises his power … around a rhythm already well consolidated” and belongs to a genealogy of “neighborhood music” linked to “a ruined but legitimate desire for expression” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 85–86). His desire seems reduced to a minimal vital wish: “all he wanted … was to rap and laugh” (Eltit, 2018, p. 155). When the Ángela–Diki duo takes shape, performance becomes even more visible. He “starts to rap … masterfully … with … a fragile … arrogance” (Eltit, 2018, p. 85), and the scene is met with applause and coins. Yet that recognition remains ambivalent, since some neighbors read it in a domesticating way, as if it were merely “a show to brighten their day … promoted by … state authorities” (Eltit, 2018, p. 87). The interruption does not cancel the order that contains it; it merely opens, within that order, a different use of body, rhythm, and attention.

Something comparable occurs with Lalo, though in a riskier key. The car race appears as a “dangerous but indispensable entertainment … a small distraction” (Eltit, 2018, p. 107), a “fleeting celebration” that “suspended disgust” and made it possible to continue (Eltit, 2018, p. 107). The scene works as a momentary release, but repetition gradually wears down its effect: it “repeats itself every day” (Eltit, 2018, p. 120). Even so, the logic persists – “Once again, Lalo wins … and leaves El Colombiano behind” (Eltit, 2018, p. 121) – and eventually intensifies into a “death competition to reach the coin” (Eltit, 2018, p. 132). Even his death becomes material for staging: a “popular, street-vendor, victorious tribute” is projected for him, led by Casimiro’s “magnetic discourse,” with “cheers and applause” and a “programme of festivities” devoted to commemorating him (Eltit, 2018, p. 115). The march, then, does not simply advance or tire; it also produces small sensory assemblages, brief ceremonies, and improvised rituals that suspend, for a moment, the monotony of exhaustion.

Casimiro’s voice belongs to that same logic, though in a particularly ambivalent way. The narrator perceives in him a “strange superiority,” even a “triple Chilean imposture” in his way of speaking (Eltit, 2018, p. 42). Later, there appear “changes of tone” and “unusual parodies” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 42–43), modulations that “amuse and lighten [the] immovable march” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 42–43). His speech does not organize only through content; it also acts through inflection, rhythm, and its capacity to alter the group’s mood. Yet that relief repairs nothing, because it does not alter the material conditions that produce exhaustion; it merely suspends them temporarily and makes continuity more bearable. Hence, the decisive ambivalence when Casimiro addresses the group “as if we were worth something,” while at the same time naming them “substitutes or placebos” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 42–43). Recognition is thus tinged with substitution: it does not restore full dignity but manufactures an affective truce that allows the group to continue without addressing the underlying precarity.

Taken together, scenes such as Diki’s music, Ángela’s contortions, Lalo’s race, or Casimiro’s vocal modulations do not function merely as narrative detours. In them, the march’s sensible landscape is rearranged. The sonic ceases to be a simple background and begins instead to reorganize attention, redistribute intensities, and produce brief forms of co-presence. These are not redemptive scenes, nor moments in which precarity is overcome. They are interruptions that briefly suspend the monotony of exhaustion and make it possible to imagine other, still fragile, ways of being together. Sumar thus experiments with a sonic citizenship that also takes shape in these minor inflections, where community is affirmed not through stability or lasting cohesion, but through its fleeting capacity to resonate amid exposure.

The megaphone belongs within this horizon as well. Rather than functioning as an emblem of popular sovereignty, it appears as a precarious prosthesis of audibility. The novel does not present it as the guarantee of a full voice or as an epic instrument of collective enunciation. Instead, it describes it through its material deterioration: “We have this device which, although completely battered, a true ruin, is indispensable for amplifying orders and guiding the forms of the walk” (Eltit, 2018, p. 101). What matters here is not symbolic power but technical precariousness. The megaphone does not create a people that asserts itself; it administers thresholds of volume, coordinates movement, and sustains continuity when the body can no longer sustain the shout on its own. It functions, then, as support rather than consecration. Yet that very condition also reveals the edge of the regime: the prosthesis can enable the march and, at the same time, betray it. In an environment of murmurs, any amplification of the voice can quickly be recoded as noise, disorder, or threat. The prosthesis does not glorify; it sustains and exposes. By insisting on degrading adjectives – “completely battered,” “a true ruin” (Eltit, 2018, p. 101) – the text shifts attention away from grandiloquence and toward technical detail, revealing a sensory politics of the threshold in which voice depends on fragile artefacts, cuts, distortions, and returns. In this way, the megaphone extends the logic of the march itself: it does not amplify plenitude but helps sustain an already eroded collective presence.

5. Writing at the Threshold

If the previous sections have traced expulsion, the march’s low intensity, the acoustics of power, and the partial interruptions that momentarily reorganize collective audibility, it is worth pausing now on another plane: that of writing itself. In Sumar, the sonic does not depend only on the scenes the narration describes, or on the sounds the characters emit or recall. It is also at stake in the form of the text, in the way the prose manages repetition, interruption, insistence, and duration. The novel, therefore, not only represents a precarious sonic citizenship; it also formally inscribes it in a mode of writing that makes perceptible the effort of sustaining a collective presence at the edge of exhaustion.

In Sumar, orality does not enter as the full unfolding of discourse or as a picturesque mark of popular speech, but as a vocal remainder, as a diminished emission that barely reaches the threshold of audibility. What matters is not so much what these voices “say” as the way they still manage to sound within a regime of wear. The novel accordingly avoids a celebratory aesthetics of subaltern speech. Instead, it constructs a verbal economy of minimal forms in which requests, litanies, diminutives, and insistences replace argumentative development with the mere persistence of utterance. This becomes especially clear when the unborn children break into fragments that verge on babble: “Auntie, auntie … the coin … a coin to charge the cell phone …” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 64–65). Here, the phrase does not advance, explain, or persuade; rather, it stumbles and circles back, as if language could only sustain itself through a precarious phonetic thread. Something similar happens when Lalo reduces his intervention to an almost automatic formula: “God punishes, God punishes …” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 151–152). In both cases, repetition thins out semantic content and foregrounds a voice that insists without fully becoming strong discourse. Language grows worn, but it does not disappear. Degraded orality thus functions as an archive of vocal traces: not the finished expression of a sovereign subjectivity, but the remainder of an exhausted population whose presence is played out in that ambiguous zone between word, noise, and sustained breath.

This sonic precarity is also inscribed in the novel’s syntax. The prose of Sumar turns movement into burden, contiguity, and support, as if it were accompanying a march that does not progress triumphantly but continues through the accumulation of bodies, obligations, and minimal forms of holding up. Parataxis is crucial here, since sentences appear as blocks added by contact rather than by causality, as if the writing were following a logic of summation rather than organic progression. When the narrator notes that “Other street vendors of whom we had no news joined us. […] They arrived tired, but certain. Endowed with a curious fullness” (Eltit, 2018, p. 28), the phrase does not organize a strong narrative arc but a sequence of brief supports, almost like footsteps. The same occurs in “He felt ill. It was obvious at first sight. Anyone could perceive it” (Eltit, 2018, p. 11), where syntax dispenses with explanatory linkage and leaves only a shared surface of signs, without extended psychology or interiority. To this block-like logic the text adds an insistence on verbal periphrases that turn duration into obligation: “I have to get to the coin” (Eltit, 2018, p. 30), “I lie down. I have to endure them. Endure the four unborn children […]” (Eltit, 2018, p. 24), “As a mother of children (four), I have to calculate everything […]” (Eltit, 2018, p. 29). “Have to” thus ceases to function only as content and becomes cadence, a verbal harness that adjusts action to a regime of endurance. Even when rest appears, the novel does not fully release that forced continuity: “We drift off sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, embracing one another …” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 189–190). Lists reinforce the same logic by turning common life into an inventory of minimal supports: “We needed guarantees … food and water … extra clothing and vitamins …” (Eltit, 2018, p. 76). Writing, therefore, does more than represent a precarious march; it formally reproduces it as a syntax of support, where advancing means less to progress than to go on barely.

Alongside that syntax of endurance, the novel also organizes a prosody of recommencement: a verbal regime in which continuity is achieved not through linear development, but through returns, anaphors, and small resumptions that prevent collapse. Repetition in Sumar does not function as a rhetorical ornament or simple expressive intensification. Rather, it operates as a mechanism for the survival of rhythm. This can be seen in sequences such as “He said that he was the most powerful representation of the failure produced by repetition. He said that …” (Eltit, 2018, p. 41), where each resumption seems to restart the step without guaranteeing definitive advance. The phrase begins again because it cannot rest in stable continuity. Something similar occurs with refrains that hammer the ear and partially empty meaning in favor of an acoustic trace: “without negotiating, without negotiating, without negotiating” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 70–71), “Karl Benz, Karl Benz, Karl Benz …” (Eltit, 2018, p. 109), “sleeping, sleeping, sleeping” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 189–190). In each case, repetition does not seek to convince or close, but to sustain a minimal vibration: a worn-out slogan, a desire reduced to a loop, a rhythmic fall that avoids any heroic ending. Even degrading series such as “gloomy, semi-human or subhuman … poor zombies” (Eltit, 2018, pp. 88–89) make audible an accumulative friction in which naming weighs as much through what it means as through the sonic violence with which it classifies and debases. The prose of Sumar, then, is organized not around climax, but around an undulation made of returns and breaks, dragging long sentences and short blows that interrupt them. What emerges is a writing that breathes with difficulty. That, precisely for that reason, renders sensible a community that does not assert itself through plenitude of voice, but through the capacity to begin again and again at the very edge of exhaustion.

Taken together, this formal dimension makes clear that sonic citizenship in Sumar is sustained not only by what characters say, hear, or remain silent about, but also by the way writing distributes thresholds of audibility, verbal intensities, and rhythms of duration. The novel makes an exhausted community perceptible not through the affirmation of a unified collective voice, but through vocal remains, syntaxes of endurance, and prosodies of recommencement. In this way, the form of the narrative itself becomes one of the sites where the politics of the faint running through the novel is tested: a shared presence that does not impose itself through volume or authority, but through the fragile persistence of continuing to sound, however barely.

Conclusions

To conclude, Sumar makes it possible to think of sonic citizenship not as the full, stable, and guaranteed exercise of a public voice, but as a fragile practice of persistence within a city that expels, hierarchizes, and unequally administers the audible. The novel shows that certain lives do not entirely disappear when they are denied authority or visibility; rather, they continue to sound faintly in murmurs, repetitions, pauses, forms of wear, and rhythms of endurance. Eltit thus offers not an epic of seizing the word, but a politics of listening attuned to minimal utterances, intermittent resonances, and forms of co-presence that do not assert themselves through volume or sovereignty, but through the shared vulnerability of continuing to remain there. Read from this angle, Sumar not only expands reflection on the sonic in literature, but also renders imaginable a community that, even when pushed to the edge of noise or remainder, persists in making itself perceptible within an urban and economic order that would prefer to render it inaudible.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish are my own.