Vibrant Matter, Polyphony and the Ecology of Attention in Sarah Moss's Summerwater

Sarah Moss’s penultimate novel, Summerwater (2020), tackles essentially phenomenological questions concerning subjectivity, embodiedness, and perception. The novel unfolds on a single rainy August day in the Trossachs. From dusk to sunset, the reader follows various British families on holiday in a cabin park while heavy and ceaseless rain pours down and an East European family keeps everyone awake by throwing a wild party at night. In such a restricted milieu, we are given access to the minds of the characters while family tensions and frustrations lurk beneath the surface of everyday life. Interleaved between each of the character’s interior monologues, are lyrical meditations on the wildlife around the holiday park. Thus, by means of narrative fragmentation, free associations, shifting focalisation, attentiveness to the invisibility and inaudibility of the non-human, Summerwater exhibits a fractured narrative form that resonates with the literary imagination of the Anthropocene. In this chapter, I will address the entanglement of human and non-human, audibility and inaudibility, vibrant materiality and social invisibility, self and community, by analysing the ways Moss directs the reader’s attention to the reciprocal interdependence of the human body and the material environment. I will first discuss the polyphonic format of the novel, shedding light on the ways the narrative mobilises the characters’ and the readers’ distribution of attention. Then, I will examine how the novel thematises such vulnerable manifestations as social invisibility and loss of community. And finally, I will contend that such poetic choices favour a certain fascination with an ecology of attention, in the sense put forward by Yves Citton.