#49: Listening to literature

 

Lately I’ve been listening to, rather than reading, literature, partly because of some eyestrain and partly because of reading Walter Ong’s 1982 work Orality and Literacy, in which he recommends ‘liberating our text-bound minds’. He describes how reading has shaped the human psyche, causing an ‘inward turning’, enabling ‘strenuous, interiorised, individualised thought’ of a sort ‘inaccessible to oral folk’.

In his view literacy has been necessary for consciousness to evolve and writing has enabled people to reach a greater potential by storing and passing on knowledge. In addition, writing is now our collective memory, freeing up our mental capacity to innovate instead of memorise.

Sight dissects, hearing unifies

Yet he warns against any devaluing of cultures which are or were oral, and rejects in particular the term ‘pre-literate’, which in his view is like defining a horse by saying what it lacks in comparison with a car. He speaks of thought and experience in oral cultures as ‘empathetic and participative rather than objective’. He comments that vision tends to a dissecting function, hearing to a unifying one, saying memorably: ‘sight situates the observer outside what he views… sound pours into the hearer’. Written text, he says, is divorced much more easily from the human life-world than speech is.

Listening now

But of course we don’t live in a culture wholly based on writing. Most of what we say is never written down, and despite the popularity of texting over voicemail (why?) continue to speak and listen. According to Ong we live in a ‘secondary oral culture’ in which radio and TV are types of ‘literate orality’. And of course our ways of listening and writing have expanded along with the types of technology we use, just as the particular characteristics of reading and listening are blurred. So listening, say, to a podcast can be just as solitary as writing. And with communication technologies written text can reach a group of people and be read simultaneously, no longer a solitary act.

So have I liberated my mind, as Ong recommends?

Noticing different things while listening

I was surprised, listening to Wordsworth’s The Prelude (on the excellent Scribd app), how much things I would normally focus on when reading — line endings, ambiguities — disappeared. But what came through strongly was the rhythm, Wordsworth’s iambs, which I would not notice so much on the page. Overall form came through strongly, especially the overflowing, cascading shape of ‘It Was an April Morning, Fresh and Clear’ (which I still haven’t read on the page). Initially this seemed a mass of levels, perceptions, feelings going well with the movement of water which the poem describes. In ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth talks of ‘the language of the sense’ — I wonder if this is the structure of the sense. Ong speaks of sound ‘pouring into’ the hearer but I would say this is more like being enveloped, the sound flowing around me.

Loss of control

Along with this reduced time to pause went a loss of control, and with that a relaxation. Less strenuous, as Ong says. And I do tend to fall asleep often while listening, not so much while reading. Another aspect of this loss of control is giving control to someone else’s interpretation and voice. So a kind of liberation, yes.

Other people’s experiences

I was curious about other people’s experiences of reading or listening, and did a straw poll of some friends (most names changed here). Jenni, doing a PhD in Shakespeare, said she preferred listening to his plays even than seeing them:

‘To fully engage with [the text] in radio/CD performance without the noise of visual clues or stage business is to engage directly, with only the actors’ intonation to guide you to THAT production’s interpretation. All the acting must come out of the voice and all the voice has to work with is the text, the text and nothing but the text.’

Another friend, June, said she doesn’t like listening, even to audiobooks, because the actor’s voice distracts her and she starts wondering about the actor as a person, for example how much work they have. In Ong’s terms, the ‘human life-world’ of the speaker disrupts the way she wants to enjoy the work.

Robert, a translator, said that he prefers listening because a health condition makes it difficult for him to read, and since he spends so much time with written words during his job wants a break.

Peter, who both reads and listens, spoke of storytelling as ‘an act of service’, even if recorded.

What’s clear is that listening and reading is no longer an either/or — they can complement each other, happen simultaneously or separately. Also people have rich ways and different reasons for choosing and even thinking about these two modes of communicating.