Catalan Review XXVII (2013), 137-155 - issn 0213-5949 BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND SOUND: SPACE AND THE AURAL SUBJECT IN QUIM MONZÓ’S UF, VA DIR ELL TANIA GENTIC ABSTRACT This article argues that in Uf, va dir ell (1978), Quim Monzó complicates the idea of a nationalist politics rooted in language by shifting the reader’s attention from voice, tex- tuality, and orality to the role of aurality in producing subjectivity. Constructing a se- ries of listening subjects who move through urban soundscapes, the collection construes sound as a felt, corporeal experience that is communicated textually via onomatopoeia, prosodic rhythm, and the representation of a globalized soundscape. As the article shows, this globalized aural construction of space, language, and subjectivity challenges nationalist attempts to link language directly to Catalan national identity. Nevertheless, by addressing the work to an audience who must “hear” the soundscape as they read, the collection ultimately reinserts sound into a politically-engaged aural imaginary de- fined by the Catalan community. The reader as listener, then, occupies a dual position, both corporeally hearing language as sound and understanding the political significance of this gesture within a larger national debate. Monzó’s texts thus demonstrate the im- possibility of thinking subjectivity solely in terms of a national identity defined by lan- guage, while also reaffirming precisely how sound acquires its own form of politicized referentiality in any space of community in which it is heard. In 1978, Quim Monzó published his first collection of short stories, Uf, va dir ell. 1 The collection includes eighteen texts, several of which are no more than a page long, and most of which, like many Catalan literary works of the seven- ties, play with language to deconstruct the notion of a stable referentiality in representation. 2 As several critical texts have shown, Monzó’s work was (and still is) easily contextualized by the debates on national literature and the role of language in Catalonia, with Monzó’s irreverent oeuvre confronting the lim- its of linguistic normalization that characterized these discussions. 3 Through- out the collection, the stories incorporate English borrowings and onomato- poeias that reflect the influence of North American writers like Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth on Monzó’s work. They also invert the relationship of power between reader and writer, reflecting the postmodern turn, and they depict often-nameless characters moving through ambiguous urban spaces that are defined not by the physical environment of city space, but instead by the constantly-moving circulation of globalized, mediatic im- ages and sounds. Here I describe how these mediatic images contribute to Monzó’s postmodern depiction of space in “Sobre la no compareixença a les