Part 4: Sound and Fury
"We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic species."
Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia
One of the wholly remarkable things about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the fact that it is a talking book. Better still, its voice came from the dulcet larynx of Peter JonesΦ. Likewise, if you ask any book publisher about audio, the chances are that he or she will think you're referring to an actor reading aloud in a recording studio. Thus have the ears of the publishing industry been closed to the full artistic and sensual possibilities of sound.
This is not to say that audio books don't have their place. On the contrary, they are extremely handy for anyone wanting to absorb some literature while driving or exercising (not to mention the visually impaired). And now that the mobile gadgets formerly known as phones are well on their way to becoming listening and reading devices of choice too, words can be packaged together with sounds, enabling readers and listeners to skip at will between one medium and the other, or choose both. A good example of this is the recently released iPhone version of The Death of Bunny Munro, a novel by Nick CaveΦ.
And for certain pieces of work an audio version is not merely a convenience, it can represent a genuinely better way to access the work. For example, a good reading voice can heighten our absorption and enjoyment of poetry. (Which, in fact, I have always seen as something akin to music played with words. Reading poetry without hearing it – even if I have to read it aloud myself – is almost as unappeaing to me as looking at a piece of sheet music without listening to its performance.)
To illustrate this point, here are two poems, starting with a popular classic. Using the controller below, you can listen to the poem being spoken as you read the words.
Audio: BBC Radio 4
The Listeners
by Walter de la Mare
'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champ'd the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Lean'd over and look'd into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplex'd and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirr'd and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starr'd and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:–
'Tell them I came, and no one answer'd,
'That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Next a remarkable surreal poem penned by a creative genius not usually recognised for his literary skills – but appropriately enough often credited with the invention of sound recording itself. Again, use the controller below to listen while you read.
Audio: BBC Radio 4
Untitled Prose Poem
by Thomas Edison
A Bowery angel smoking a palm tree stubbed his toe on a comet, and pimples came out on his toe nail as big as mountains.
He swore so much that God made eight new planets out of the conversation & peopled and fauna'd and flora'd them eccentrically.
The almighty has a vein of humor.
He made these planets & peopled them to give amusements to beings on the rest of the celestial plantation.
The men were 800 miles long & 1/4 inch thick.
They slept on telegraph poles, and animals with bodies as big as a pea with 900 eyes each as big as a saucer lived on these long men by catching them by the feet and sucking them in like macaroni.
My point is not that these are great poems (the latter is more of a curiosity really), but rather that they are more effective poems for being read aloud as well as printed on the page. Consistent with this, the BBC has run a whole series of programmesΦ during 2009 based on the premise that poetry will come to mean more to a greater number of people if they can hear actors, comedians and other celebrities reading it aloud. True, electronic reading devices increasingly come equipped with automatic text-to-speech software, but when entertainment and emotion is called for (as opposed to the mere conveyance of facts) it's hard to imagine that some people won't always be willing to fork out a bit extra to listen to a talented human. After all, even computer-animated films are voiced by real actors.
The Edison reading above was, of course, by an actor. But the intonation, at least to British ears, makes us feel almost as if we are listening to the author himself. And this raises another very important use of audio, as Robert Fulford has pointed outΦ:
Hearing the voice of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader's connection with an author's work, not profound, but intimate.
This is very similar to what my colleagues and I have found in the much less literary domain of the Nature PodcastΦ, an audio supplement to the scientific journal. Hearing a person's voice is informative in a way that reading their words can never be. Though a four-minute interview cannot possibly offer the factual depth of a densely written research paper, it offers a different kind of depth – one which the author becomes a person instead of a name, and the experiments become personal endeavours and triumphs instead of a dry set of graphs and conclusions. As in science so in literature. Here is Robert Fulford againΦ:
Many years ago, I was jolted by a record of James Joyce reading a delirious passage from Finnegans Wake, an often incomprehensible but nevertheless enchanting experiment.
Until then, Joyce had existed for me only as words on the page. He was disembodied, the pure spirit of the English language at one of its greater moments. I was therefore astonished to hear him speaking much like a stage Irishman... That subtly changed my feelings about him. It made him more local, more obviously the magnificent product of one particular time and place. 'All talent is clannish,' said Isaac Bashevis Singer. Joyce was triumphantly clannish, and never more than in his speech.
But let us turn from the authors themselves to their work. Since we're on the subject of Joyce, consider his magnum opus, UlyssesΦ. Though I'm a fan, I confess to finding many sections impenetrable. Listening to a good recordingΦ, however, makes them more accessible because the professional actor is better equipped than the untrained reader to convey the rhythm and emotion that Joyce (presumably) intended.
For example, on encountering Molly Bloom's famous closing soliloquy – more than 24,000 words of life-affirming but kaleidoscopic and virtually unpunctuated prose – the temptation is to speed-read, merely skimming the surface of the stream of consciousness. To see this, have a look at the last 500-odd words (some might say that the hyphen is not required):
...the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Like an over-rich dessert, I find this prose alluring but also difficult to digest. The best way to enjoy it, I think, is in the company of an expert who will force us to adopt a more measured pace – and in doing so to savour the words all the more...