= : TALK : =

The Voice the Eye Hears
or
"Listening to a Book is Not Better Than Reading It"

a comment on an oddly superficial article in the New York Times

I am sorry that Farhad Manjoo feels he is the victim of "deep cultural bias" in his preference for audiobooks, but in his urgency to "liberate the audiobook from the murky shadow of text," he has obscured something obvious.  Audiobooks are not text but performance, the translation of printed words into a different art form in which a voice actor interprets a text for you.  For some people and in some circumstances, that's more convenient than doing it yourself, but convenient does not automatically equal better, or we'd all choose to live our lives lying in bed ingesting food through tubes.

Audiobooks, moreover, are often the favored form of people who want to take in a book while doing something else, like driving or housework—"multitasking."  They feel as if they are getting more while investing less.  Convenience plus efficiency.

But a text created for the page—and this discussion is going to assume that in this context "book" means fiction, a novel—is written for a certain level of committed attention, for a reader who has agreed to engage the page, who has agreed to silence in the library in order to hear something that haunts in the mind.  If you don't make that investment, you don't pull the dividends.

No doubt some writers do indeed write in anticipation of the audiobook.  And yes, you can also always translate or interpret a print book into an audiobook—or a TV series, or a ballet for that matter.  But when a writer consciously writes for the page, that text is not written for interpretation that the ear will hear, but written for the voice the eye hears as it moves across a line, over and down and across the next line as your eye is moving now.

And that voice is not, by the way, explicitly the author's own physical voice.  The author is an actual person.  The narrator is an uncanny person.  Not a voice actor, but an uniquely disembodied personality (another subject for discussion at another time.)

Audiobooks are not books, as Manjoo himself at least seems to recognize; they are interpretations of books.  The voice actor is another artist, not the original author.  And text is originally created, shaped and paced for turning pages.  That's not a cultural bias, it's an art form.  The voice actor may be brilliant (or not), and the auditor may enjoy the interpretation hugely and get a great deal from it (or not).  But the experience of silent reading is not in any way a "murky shadow," even if Mr. Manjoo can't apparently, see into it.  The problem lies not in inadequacies in the text or the culture, but in his inability to read in such a way as to "get" what the page has to offer.

But I'm not actually trying to disparage the way Mr. Manjoo's mind happens to work, and I'm not trying to answer his screed against silent text with a matching screed against audio interpretation.  I'm not trying to squelch his preferences, even if they're not my own.  I'm simply trying to correct the failures of his argument that everybody should make the choices he makes or they are oppressing him—or having an inadequate experience.  I'm just trying to point out that his position is missing something not only major but definitive.

It is as pointless to disparage audiobooks as it is to disparage interpretation per se.  But Mr. Manjoo's heavy sales pitch argues vigorously that his preference is "better" without considering what the alternative, silent reading, has to offer (besides cultural snobbery), or how silent reading works.  That's the problem.  He appreciates what he's arguing for, but he seems to have no real understanding of what he's arguing against.  To do that adequately would certainly require much more space than is available here, but let's give it a start:

Writing words began as a way of recording spoken words, it is true.  But that was a long time ago.  Now we have the works of Homer, Gilgamesh and early medieval heroic narratives and romances, Eastern and Western, preserved only as text.  The voices that spoke (or sang) those words, pulling them from memory or from creative improvisation, did not make audiobooks and have been silent for thousands of years.  And once the printing press made print widely available, and once Miguel de Cervantes way back in the seventeenth century created with Don Quixote the modern form we call a novel (not so novel any more), printed text itself became a distinct art form.

And in response to that new form, the human mind developed a pretty astonishing new capacity, the capacity to take in and process the words of another person without that person—or any person—being actually present.  In silence and alone, just the words, just an absent person's thoughts.  We're always trying to identify what makes us different from animals (more important to some people than to others), well, here's a difference: animals can smell, but they can't read.  The wonder of language is something that has drawn much thought and exploration, but the page (or its inferior simulation, the screen) covered with cryptic markings (such as the ones you're looking at), and the experience of what happens when we cast our eyes over it, is another level of the miraculous.

Silent reading works differently in ways that most people are barely aware of.  To begin with, the eye "hears" even more quickly then the ear does (light is faster than sound), and, therefore, the inherent pace of silent reading is much swifter than that of oral reading.  And that has consequences not just for your expenditure of time, but for the quality of your experience.

For example, staccato dialogue is much faster and lighter on the page than read aloud, when it is weighed down by voice and articulation.  When I first read P. G. Wodehouse, I would just double over laughing.  But any film interpretation I've ever seen (heard)—besides leaving out all the wit of the narrative—delivered dialogue that felt strained even though it was performed by skilled actors.  The essence of comedy is timing, and all the lines when spoken in auditory time were just "off," took a little too long, seemed to involve a little too much effort.  Sound just couldn't replicate that flickering quickness lifted by your eyes from the perfect deadpan of a white page that hefts no corporeal weight whatsoever.

But there are other more subtle problems inherent in audible interpretation.  In the process of taking longer, hearing can allow for mis-apprehensions.  Because in hearing you hear only one sound at a time, you can anticipate wrong.

So a text may begin to describe something as...the first syllable will sound like noo.   Taking it in auditorely, you actually hear one syllable at a time, one syllable first, and then the next one.  So hearing that, you may, in a microsecond, anticipate that the word is going to be neutral.   But then the word will turn out to be nuanced.   The brain quickly corrects—sometimes you notice that you jumped to the wrong conclusion, sometimes you don't. But either way, your comprehension stumbled, if ever so briefly.  But the eye will never make a mistake like that because it sees the whole word (and more) at once.  And, while we're at it, the eye never mistakes "the wondrous cross I'd bear" for "the wondrous cross-eyed bear" or "kiss the sky" for "kiss this guy."  That's an auditory confusion.  It never assumes the wrong homonym.  Oral is one thing.  Aural is another.  And the printed words "They killed the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green," never for a moment accidentally suggest that two people were killed, the second being Lady Mondegreen."

And more about speed: Even though some people, or some readers under some circumstances, read quickly, the skilled writer, like someone writing music, designs the pace of the words on the page not relative to the speed of reading, but relative to one another—by paragraphing, punctuation, caps, skipped lines, italics, and so forth, a pacing that will not be distorted by varying speeds of silent reading.  So just as a musical performer may play a piece of music faster or slower, but still treats with great respect the difference between quarter notes and eighth notes, the skilled text writer paces a written line.  Along with pitch, the relationship between the differing lengths of the notes is what defines a particular melody.  Something comparable also defines a written style.

But in the audio presentation of a text, that kind of relationship can be distorted readily, not only by a voice actor's stretch/shrink interpretations introduced for the actor's own sense of dramatic effect, but by the fact that some words simply take a tiny bit longer to pronounce in spoken time than they do in the flash of an eye.  Just the fact that an actor may do something like run the reading of two paragraphs together as if they were one, disregarding the visual direction given by the author's careful formatting, will make a difference.  This is generally, of course, more subtle than a singer's screwing with note lengths, or a conductor's chopping a lyric phrase, but in changing the "timing" of the text elements, it does change the effect.

The page of a novel is not a play script; it is not lacking sound or theatrical rendering, not a prompt for an audible performance.  It controls a performance that occurs in the mind of the reader and nowhere else.  Novels can certainly be read aloud, and always, from time to time, have been, even by their authors.  But the written (or printed) page is a distinct and singular art form.  Silent reading even stimulates a different part of your brain from auditory performance, a part much more conducive to introspective thought because it enters your mind purely, in a place where you are alone.

There is a level of fineness to the text on a page that the selectively sensational audio experience can easily just ignore, because it's hard to argue that any one of these tiny differences individually is going to cry out, and becasue no one of us can fully explain, after all, what we're "getting," let alone know with any depth and complexity what someone else is "getting."  But art is in the details; we can all agree on that.  And just because you didn't notice it doesn't mean you didn't experience it.  I think we can all agree on that as well.

The very comprehension of words and sentences itself takes time—micro time of course, but time nonetheless.  Our sensory and analytical nerves transmit very swiftly, but not instantly.  Skilled writers, as well as skilled speakers, know this.  And that's why I still insist on leaving two spaces after a period, for just that shaved instant of "sink in" time.

And there are more important issues that relate to speed (you see, we've come this far and there's still more to say about speed).  While the writer designs the rhythm and cadence of the sentences and other elements, it is the reader, the writer's essential partner, who determines how fast to read and how long to take to think about what has just been read.  So a voice actor may rush forward for dramatic effect, where you as a silent reader might linger to savor.  Do you want those choices made for you, or do you want to make them yourself?  The eye perceives quickly, yes, and then the silent reader—not an intermediary—decides when deliberately to slow down or speed up, and more than that, when to go back to re-read if you want to, when to pause and let the mind wander, argue, associate.  An audio will just keep moving.   You can hit pause, of course, rewind, play something back, but that's pretty clumsy.  Silent reading is inherently much more interactive than audio listening, and naturally so.

Moreover, the eye grasps not only a whole word at once, but the larger units as well, even, peripherally, the whole double page; and this allows is to anticipate in ways the ear cannot.  Again, I am talking about a book printed on paper.  As you turn and begin reading the left hand page, you glimpse that dialogue is coming up on the right hand page, for example, or that in a few paragraphs the chapter will come to an end.  There is no such anticipation in an audiobook.  A voice actor's narration is always in the moment.  It has the sensuality of sound, but it lacks the "surround" of page reading.  You don't get to turn a page and see, not just the next words, but the next environment.  Again, although the printed word was originally created to record spoken words, a novel isn't spoken words.  After thousands of years, it has become in essence a visual form.

Some people even see letters as having colors.

And yet you "hear" the words in some way.  As you read, the eye visually distinguishes words like so, sow, and sew clearly and unmistakably.  Yet in some ineffable way the eye manages at the same time to "hear" the words differently.  It is difficult to explain, but somehow, in the voice that my eye hears, the word sew is more pursed, and the word so more open.  The word sow is infinitessimaly longer, with a kind of closing at the end.

It is true that a conventionally spelled sentence won't convey regional accent.  But because received spelling and punctuation are so conservative, the eye actually "hears" something else—faint echoes of a word's history that linger in the spelling.  I somehow "hear" in my mind the w in sword.   If I saw the word as sord (which in English actually means a flock of mallards—who knew?), I would associate it reflexively with deafness because sordo means deaf in Spanish.  And if you want to make a character's dialogue sound kind of stupid, or at least ignorant, spelling some of the character's werds phonetically is a common trick for doing it.

A voice actor will introduce all the qualities and personality of that actor's own voice, including residues of native accent, but the printed word enters the mind with what, for the individual reader, feels like a neutral accent, usually your own accent—no matter what you accept as the speaking character's expected accent, unless as a reader you make a conscious effort to "hear" a South Carolina lilt, for example—or unless the writer has made a conscious effort to present something distinctive, as by altered spellings or the use of characteristic terms from historical time, place, or class.  Scottish dialect interpreted on the page for the non-Scottish reader, for example, can get as challenging for the eye as for the ear, and Sir Walter Scott's classic Rob Roy sometimes looks as if someone had vigorously shaken a can of apostrophes all over the page.

In sum, the addition of an actor's voice, no matter how entrancing, cannot be assumed to be nothing but improvement and enrichment for a novel.  It's not another level; it's just another thing. It can even be like colorizing Citizen Kane, layering on a presumed enhancement that you're better off without.  Some readers I know even experience a voice as an intrusion, gross, as if someone had interrupted you while you were reading and just started talking.  I love theater, I love radio plays, I love movies.  I've written in those forms.  I have even myself been a performer as long as I have been a writer.  I have even—in the most ornery spirit possible—done readings.  So it is not without respect for the spoken word that I assert that an audiobook is not the same as—certainly not better than—reading without anybody's moving their lips.

A written novel is not just a script, even though it may handily be used as one.  The page and the visual reading of it constitute a complex and—considering how long it's been around—not very well understood art form.  And although we frequently take reading from a page for granted, it is not without consequence replaceable by a juicier, more sensual form that demands so much less of you.  While it is true that such a form—audible and in some ways pre-digested—may be perfect for your needs in certain circumstances, especially in the case of non-fiction where it might be genuinely helpful, or if you are visually impaired, blind or selecting a book you want to have read but don't actually want to read--or, let's face it, if you're facing a very long drive, it is never "just the same as."  The experience of the silently read book is meditative, an art form that reaches in and makes your own mind the creator, alone inside your thoughts, in the company of thoughts that have miraculously entered from elsewhere, very possibly through words that—even though your eye "hears" them—were in reality never, anywhere or by anyone, uttered aloud at all.

"Where Do Ideas Come From?"

a few notes on transpresence and St. Peter's Wood

One of the most common questions people ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?"   That's a stumper, because it's always going to be different for every work, and it's always going to be complex.   But since I insist so frequently that "a novel is not the plot; it's the experience," let me offer an answer about the odd incipience of St. Peter's Wood in which a couple of disconnected moments actually generated characters, situation, plot, ideas, and everything that was to follow.   It's not the way I always work, but it's one of the ways, and sort of a curious one.

From time to time—and this has happened all my life—I will have a sudden peculiar experience that I call transpresence.   It will happen without warning and often without any particuar prompt; I will feel that I am somewhere else, sometimes, in fact, that I am someone else.   I am having someone else's experience.   It is extremely vivid, down to very small sensory details.   The air is different.   The light is different.   My body is different.

I don't lose who I actually am or where i actually am, but, perhaps, like a dream suddenly piercing waking consciousness, I am, for a vew uncanny moments, in both places.

A transpresence isn't always the trigger of a story, or at least one that I feel the need to write, although it is certainly story stuff.   But sometimes, oh yes, it certainly is.

For example, St. Peter's Wood began when out of nowhere I had an extraordinary experience of walking in the woods in the winter.   It was exceptionally clear.   I don't remember where in actuality I was, maybe just in bed thinking, waiting to fall asleep.   But I could smell the fresh winter air, outside, twilight.   The sun was setting behind the trees ahead of me.   I could hear the slight crunch of my footsteps on the ground.   I could feel the weight of a heavy woolen cloak of some sort, the warmth between my body and the loose wool, how the cloth moved and shifted as I walked.   Oddly, I was uneasy.   I wanted to be there, but I also felt some trepidation, alone in a place at once quite familiar and very unfamiliar.

Therefore, the two dogs appeared, walking and sometimes sniffing, wandering along in front of and beside me, and their appearance made me feel safe and not alone.   There was something about them that controlled an uncanny sense of displacement both in me and in another woman, the someone else whose experience I seemed to have entered.

I left it at that.   I forgot about it.   It drew me back.   Ad then went away.   But some time after—I don't know how long, maybe months—I had another transpresence, this one quite different.

I was suddenly in a half empty old train, rushing and rumbling along through the countryside in bright daylight.   But the floor was cold, spring cold—I could feel that settled pool of coldness up around my ankles.   And the floor was flat but gritty, as if from people climbing into the train and bringing grit from outside.

Speed will make your body feel pulled slightly backward, and I put my hand on the back of a seat to steady myself—a cane seat maybe, and my hand was larger than my own hand.   Again, I didn't lose awareness of my actual experience or my actual self.   But I knew that I stood unsteadily in an old, moving train, inside the experience of a character that wasn't me, hanging onto a seatback with somebody else's hand.

Writing a novel takes me years, at least three or four when life is making other demands on me.   So one of the things that contributes to my recognition that a particular transpresence event is a clue to a novel (I think of it as a "glowing pod," the story alive inside it) is that it takes hold of me, and I know I can stay with it for as long as is is necessary.   I was interested by the fact that both experiences involved moving.   Why?

Then it made sense, I thought, that they involved two characters moving towards one another.   But I also felt they were moving towards a place.   The place they came together was as important as the fact that they came together.   I felt the first character, the one in the woods, was a woman, the second—not sure, then became sure—was not.

So that was the incipience of St. Peter's Wood, those two characters, in the train, in the woods, wintertime, hope, anticipation, determination in the face of a glimmering surrounding anxiety, hurrying towards one another, and towards some place of sanctuary in the woods.   The smell of pine and soil.   Two dogs whos presence was unexplained.