Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies

Matthew Rubery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136733321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik Geschichte & Theorie

This is the first scholarly work to examine the cultural significance of the "talking book" since the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the earliest machine to enable the reproduction of the human voice. Recent advances in sound technology make this an opportune moment to reflect on the evolution of our reading practices since this remarkable invention. Some questions addressed by the collection include: How does auditory literature adapt printed texts? What skills in close listening are necessary for its reception?

What are the social consequences of new listening technologies? In sum, the essays gathered together by this collection explore the extent to which the audiobook enables us not just to hear literature but to hear it in new ways. Bringing together a set of reflections on the enrichments and impoverishments of the reading experience brought about by developments in sound technology, this collection spans the earliest adaptations of printed texts into sound by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and other novelists from the late nineteenth century to recordings by contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison and Barack Obama at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the voices gathered here suggest, it is time to give a hearing to one of the most talked about new media of the past century.

Part I

Sound Experiments

1 The Three-Minute Victorian Novel

Remediating Dickens into Sound

Jason Camlot

Among Thomas Edison’s speculations about the significance of the phonograph in his 1878 essay “The Phonograph and Its Future” was the prediction of audiobooks, or as he called them, “Phonographic books.” As he forecast: “A book of 40,000 words upon a single metal plate ten inches square … becomes a strong probability. The advantages of such books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention. Such books would be listened to where now none are read. They would preserve more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author; and, as a bequest to future generations, they would be unequaled.”¹ Edison may have dreamed about having a novel in its entirety (he is said to have referred to Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby as his example) on a compact audio record, but it was not until the 1930s, under the initiative of the Library of Congress Books for the Adult Blind project, that books the length of Victorian novels were actually transferred into the medium of sound.² And even then, when Victor Hugo’s Les misérables was produced in talking book format on records that played at 33 1/3 rpm—much slower than the then commercial standard of 78 rpm—it still ran to an unwieldy 104 double-faced disks.³ The audiobook as we now think of it was not a material possibility in the early days of sound recording. The basic navigation and storage constraints of the Edison cylinder and Victor flat disc record circa 1900 set the parameters for what this medium could mean for literature during the acoustic era of sound recording.

This chapter examines some of the earliest adaptations of Victorian literature into sound and focuses in particular on one case study that is useful for understanding how early spoken recordings were shaped by precedent media and forms of literary expression, and how audio technologies of the early-twentieth century were imagined for use in teaching “new” kinds of literary experience. The story of early adaptations of Victorian literature into sound introduces a variety of diverging plotlines about remediation, although all of them can be understood to display the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy—transparency and opacity—outlined by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, wherein “immediacy dictates that the medium should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented” and yet simultaneously demands that the user take pleasure in the act of mediation by calling attention to the specificity of the new media form in itself and in relation to other media.⁴ The oscillation between immediacy and hypermediacy provides clues about how a new medium refashions older and other contemporary media. Again, as Bolter and Grusin argue, “Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium. Thus immediacy leads to hypermediacy.”⁵

Sound recording technology was marketed for its immediacy from the day it was introduced.⁶ Edison was not alone in identifying his invention of the phonograph as an apparent transcendence of the “technology” of reading (as decipherment), leading to an experience that was even more intimate than that of the reader with his printed book (as he says of talking books, “such books … would preserve more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author”). Late-Victorian fantasies concerning a book that talks (some of them promotional in their conception) often focused on the author’s individualized presence for the “reader” as a result of the preservation of his or her voice. The phonographic book represented the fantasy of “a spoken literature, not a written one” that would allow writers to communicate “with all the living reality of the present moment.”⁷ Whereas such effusive testimonials asserted the utter novelty of a technology that could capture the voice and character of an author without the mediation of the printed page, the true novelty of the invention of sound recording lay at least as much in its storage capacity, in its ability to preserve something “practically forever,” as in its ability to deliver a new, aural experience of authorial presence or literary immersion.

Much recent scholarship has demonstrated that the voice of the author and storyteller was made available to the Victorian reading public “with all the living reality of the present moment,” repeatedly, in the form of “At Home” theatricals and public readings for decades prior to the existence of a talking machine.⁸ Any account of the new media claim for an invention like the phonograph—that it supersedes the print-based book in its delivery of vocal presence—must consider the Victorian book not as a silent repository of text awaiting an automated sounding technology but rather as the locus of what Ivan Kreilkamp refers to as Victorian “performative, mass reading,” by which he means,

a mode of literary consumption that is intersubjective, often occurring communally; vocal rather than silent; productive and active rather than passive and receptive; often occurring in public spaces rather than interior, domestic ones; and—perhaps most significantly—somatically responsive, involving a performance or display of physical reaction.⁹

With this conception of reading in mind, Edison’s bequest might seem somewhat unidirectional and somatically delimited, might sound inflexible, even a little tinny. It is precisely in such qualitative distinctions between mediated modes of literary expression that we can begin to articulate a historicized conception of a medium’s relationship with an art form. To tell the story of early phonographic books, both as they were imagined and as they existed, one must consider the kinds of literary practice that informed them as well as the literary works that furnished them with content to replay. In doing so, we come to understand the import and function of a medium. John Guillory has made this point recently in a statement that may also serve to elucidate Bolter and Grusin’s argument about hypermediacy: “It is much easier to see what a medium does—the possibilities inherent in the material form of an art—when the same expressive or communicative contents are transposed from one medium to another. Remediation makes the medium as such visible.”¹⁰

Early spoken recordings were produced for varied purposes and according to diverse models of generic adaptation, aesthetic and social value, display, dissemination, use, and experience. For example, the story of the numerous recordings made around the turn of the century by professional actors and elocutionists of Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” would involve discussion of the origins of the Mechanical versus Natural schools of elocution (John Walker versus Thomas Sheridan) in the eighteenth century; the widespread appearance of Tennyson’s poem in Victorian recitation anthologies and elocution manuals and what that meant as a context for social interaction and personal acculturation; the rivalry between gestural versus dramatic/instinctual elocutionary methods at the turn of the nineteenth century (Genevieve Stebbins versus Samuel Silas Curry) and the aesthetic weight attributed to these different schools of oral performance; the commercial and cultural significance of the individuals who made these recordings (elocutionists and actors such as Lewis Waller, Canon Fleming, Henry Ainley, and Rose Coghlan); and the generic identification and placement of these recordings in early record catalogues and speculation about how exactly they were used.

Even among the few examples of Victorian novels that were adapted into early sound recordings, significant distinctions concerning the media, meaning, and marketing trajectories must be acknowledged. If you compare, for example, recordings of the transformation scene from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as recorded by Len Spencer for Columbia Records in 1905, Svengali’s mesmerism scene as recorded by Herbert Beerbohm Tree for The Gramophone Company (later HMV) in 1906, and the numerous Dickens recordings made by the likes of Bransby Williams (between 1905 and 1912 for Edison, HMV, and Columbia Records) and William Sterling Battis (for Victor in 1916), you encounter three quite different contexts of adaptation and models of remediation.¹¹

Tree’s Trilby recording can be traced as an adaptation from George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel to Paul Potter’s popular dramatization in which Tree performed the role of Svengali to great acclaim. In this sense, it represents an audio memento to supplement the stage-production photograph albums that were developed for this purpose. The recording was presented in the manner used to market early commercial music recordings by the likes of Enrico Caruso and Adelina Patti. It was sold as one among several of the roles to which Tree applied his distinctive genius, along with Hamlet’s soliloquy on death, Falstaff’s speech on honor, and Mark Antony’s lament over the body of Julius Caesar, all of which were also recorded and released in that same year.

Spencer’s Jekyll and Hyde recording, another dramatization of a popular work of fiction, stands in contrast as the recording of a seasoned phonograph performer playing a role on record that he had never played on the stage. Spencer and other recording artists like him, including Russell Hunting, John Terrell, and George Graham, had long, successful recording careers making records ranging from early phonograph promotional poems and “high” literary recitations to dialect sketches, recordings of famous historical speeches, and multivoice dramas (both comic and serious). Representative of a domestic, “family circle” genre of recitation, the varieties of materials performed by individual recording artists like Spencer suggest that they were not simply identified as specialists in the elocutionary or ethnic personae that they performed but rather were versatile impersonators and monopolyloguists.¹² The virtuosic demonstration of vocal and characterological plasticity was a key selling point of early spoken recordings. Consequently, it might be more important to understand Spencer’s recording of this transformation scene (which entails the performance of two character voices, that of Jekyll and that of Hyde, and brief vocal appearances by Utterson the lawyer and Poole the butler, before the door goes down) in terms of his fame as a master mimic and performer of multiple voices than as a recording from a stage adaptation of Stevenson’s novella.

In the present chapter I will focus on the contexts and models that inform our understanding of the last set of recordings mentioned above—the Dickens records made by Bransby Williams and, especially, by Williams’s less famous epigone, William Sterling Battis. Whereas Williams (after Dickens himself) may have been the original Dickens imitator—the better Dickens man, so to speak—Battis’s story is compelling from the perspective of media history as it relates to literary history and newly mediated ways of teaching literature to students. Despite the distinctive remediation narratives informing the examples of early adaptations from fiction into sound, such recordings were usually categorized together in record catalogues as entertaining novelty items up until the second decade of the twentieth century, when record companies began to develop their own education departments, drawing upon the recordings in their backlist, commissioning new ones, and organizing them all into separate “Educational Records” sections at the back of their regular monthly catalogues. Such educational sections began to appear around 1910 as single-page lists featuring a few dozen records, rerationalized according to the lower educational levels (kinder-garten, primary grades, intermediate grades, grammar grades, high school) and with minimal instructions for use. Then, as record companies began to identify schools as a potential market for records and record players, they developed more explicit pedagogical arguments for the use of sound recordings in the classroom, produced new records for this purpose, and published discrete education catalogues designed to serve as manuals with suggested listening programs for use by teachers.¹³

The Dickens records of William Sterling Battis stand as the earliest fiction-based audio adaptations produced specifically for pedagogical application and thus represent an interesting bridge between ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Talking Books
• Part I Sound Experiments
• Part II Close Listenings
• Contributors
• Index