Abstract
An editor’s introduction to a multiauthored collection of essays is almost of necessity parasitic on what it introduces, yet Matthew Rubery’s is the most stimulating part of this book. In a clear and systematic way, he sets out the main critical questions that audiobooks raise. What does it mean to ‘read’ something? How does the experience of listening to an audiobook differ from that of reading in the conventional, silent way? Since the arrival of recorded literature, how have our reading practices evolved?
In audiobook readings, several communicative channels are established between the author of the book and the audio reader of it (including the author as audio reader); between both of these and the audio listeners; and, in terms of their understanding and enjoyment of a particular book, between the audio listeners and those who read it for themselves. Do we gain more from listening to an audiobook if we have first read the printed version? And to consider just one further, simple dilemma: when an audio reader reaches that part of a novel that contains dialogue between two colourful characters, should she imitate the way they speak – try to impersonate the characters – or retain the voice of the author (itself a presumptuous concept)?
Matthew Rubery cannot be faulted for the way in which he sets out the critical agenda, yet the contributors’ response to it is generally disappointing: the issues are either treated in an unilluminating way or ignored altogether. While Rubery defines audiobooks as any spoken-word recording of books, periodicals or other printed materials (autobiographies are very popular), we might find it helpful to consider them in terms of the main literary genres – poetry, drama and the novel – and their historical development. Poetry and drama are presumed to have originated in a largely pre-literate era. They took the form of artefacts that either evolved purely through word of mouth or were written down only to enable bards and actors, whether by reading or memorising them, to perform them to a listening audience. Poetry’s qualities of rhythm and rhyme afforded not only aesthetic satisfactions to the listener but a useful mnemonic for the performer. But notwithstanding the dramatised recitations of Charles Dickens, the novel, which evolved in its recognisably modern form only at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is regarded as wholly the child of print: it was predicated on an audience of readers, not listeners. It is therefore pertinent to ask how our renewed culture of orality, of which audiobooks are one manifestation, has affected these genres.
Since the principle of orality and performance has continued to govern plays throughout the print era, we can perhaps set drama aside, but what has happened to poetry and the novel is more complicated. Some of the contributors to this collection seem inclined to the view that, for poetry, the return to orality is a relatively straightforward and beneficial matter. In his essay entitled ‘Poetry by phone and phonograph: tracing the influence of Giorno poetry systems’, Michael S. Hennessey claims that the purpose of the collection is to affirm ‘the centrality of sound to our understanding of poetry’ (p. 76). Nevertheless, over several centuries, the culture of print, which fosters silent reading and thus prompts the reader to interiorise the acoustic elements of poetry, has had an irreversible impact on the genre, rendering it a highly complex art form to which oral delivery and listening are no longer equal. In the spatial, fixed medium of print, which allows the reader to stop, ponder and reread, poetry has become much more gnomic: dense, implicit, allusive and sophisticated. Even its ostensibly acoustic elements – pre-eminently its rhymes – often appeal primarily to the eye because they are no longer needed as mnemonics by rote-learning performers nor even, to any great extent, to delight the ear of the listener. The rhyme scheme of, for instance, Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ embraces off-stressed syllables, including an indefinite article (coast a/poster) and a conjunction (sand/and).
In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that in his essay ‘Learning from LibriVox’, Michael Hancher is quite dogmatic about what constitutes a good poetry recitation, praising a particular performer of Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn’ because ‘he respects the enjambments; too many contemporary readers of verse rest at the end of each line, no matter what the syntax is doing’ (p. 207). That may be, yet in respecting the enjambments and ignoring the line endings, is the performer giving full weight to the rhymes? The sophistication of the rhyme scheme (ababcdedcce in the opening stanza, every line rhyming with at least one other) suggests that Keats wanted us to take the line endings fairly seriously. The point, then, is that because of the superimposition of the culture of print upon that of orality in poetry, the performer is pulled in two directions. To put it another way, the semantic principle, which focuses on syntax, and the acoustic principle, which focuses on the ‘music’ of the verse, get in each other’s way. The return of poetry to a culture of orality is not a simple matter and not an unalloyed benefit, and although it could be argued that audiobooks provide the sounds of poetry while retaining the stability of print, they do not afford the same easy overview that print does. When silently reading and, for the purposes of fuller understanding, rereading some lines of verse, we can simultaneously ‘hear’ them: indeed, it is perhaps the case that we cannot read them without hearing them in this way, and this seems to make print still the more efficient medium for most poetry.
But what do audiobooks do for that child of print, the novel? It seems reasonable to suppose that they could have contrasting effects. When the language is complex and syntactically elaborate (one thinks of the fiction of Henry James or James Joyce), it could be hard for the listener to follow. On the other hand, unconstrained by metre or rhyme, fiction is typically more explicit and expansive than verse, and in that respect easier to grasp. The one assertion we can safely make about all audiobooks, whether fictional or factual, poetry or prose, is that in some degree they appropriate functions that would otherwise be performed by the silent reader, and the question that preoccupies most critics is whether this is for better or worse. The advantages are apparent and hymned in this collection: audiobooks allow us to consume literature in situations where reading it for ourselves would be impossible. They also animate literature, the audiobook reader drawing our attention to meanings and nuances that we might have overlooked on the page and enriching our understanding of the work as a whole.
Yet the limitations are also real. Since the audiobook does not engage our eyes, the scope for distraction and loss of concentration is considerable. Moreover, the particular reading of a work that it offers necessarily precludes other readings, and thus other understandings, of it. In this sense, audiobooks are anti-literary: they privilege performance over the printed text, which is a fixed repository, however variably accessed, of numerous different interpretations. In silently conducted reading, these interpretations remain simultaneously possible and can be adopted, adjusted and discarded almost from moment to moment. This is an assertion of the superiority of the printed word which not everyone would accept: there is certainly a debate to be had. But it is not, alas, to be found in this book.