Bookplanet: the acoustics of the narrative voice

Very interesting piece on the actual sound of the author's voice -- and a suggestion that books should come with a sound chip that has the author reading the first paragraph, so you know how it should sound in your head. Good idea, I think: after hearing Sapphire read from her novel "Push," I read the book with her voice in my head, and it made a huge difference.

From the Financial Times: The sound of somewhere else -- by John Sutherland

One may as well begin (to echo Zadie Smith echoing E.M. Forster in her latest novel) with the start of Shalimar the Clown: “At twenty-four the ambassador’s daughter slept badly through the warm, unsurprising nights. She woke up frequently and even when sleep did come her body was rarely at rest, thrashing and flailing as if trying to break free of dreadful invisible manacles. At times she cried out in a language she did not speak... According to one report she sounded guttural, glottal-stoppy, as she were speaking Arabic. Night-Arabian, she thought, the dreamtongue of Scheherazade. Another version described her words as science-fictional, like Klingon.”

This is Salman Rushdie at his most flamboyant. But the rhapsody embodies a fundamental truth about the art of fiction. Like Scheherazade (the teller of the Arabian Nights’ 1,001 tales, who will die if her tales ever cease, or cease to amuse) latterday fictioneers must create their particular dreamtongue. Every original work of fiction now patents its own language. Its idiolect.

On the other hand, Scheherazade’s head would soon lie smoking in the executioner’s basket should she resolve to go all the idiolectical way and regale her captious lord in Klingon. Fiction is all about compromises: finding the precarious balance between self expression and serving the reader.

There’s a revealing moment in Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s saga of first-generation immigrant life in East London, when the heroine, Nazneen, hears a new word: “Hospital, hospital, hospital. She had another English word. She caressed it all the way down the corridor.”

An Eastender who doesn’t know the word “hospital”? I suspect other Anglophone readers were, like me, pulled up short with the sudden realisation that the novel is happening (linguistically) not in the Queen’s English which one sees on the page, but in Bangla.

If Brick Lane were stylistically ethical it would have been written throughout in a dialect that would have restricted its circulation to Brick Lane itself, not the many hundreds of thousands in the English-speaking world who bought it. The novelist who wants to get on to the bestseller lists and into the educational curricula (as Ali, happily, has done) must reach out - and, where required, sell out.

Walter Scott dealt with this problem in his historical novels: how, in Ivanhoe, set in the 14th century, could one have an authentic (seeming) style of dialogue and description that would neither weary the reader with dry-as-dust antiquarianism nor render itself absurd with theatrical “tushery”?

A slight stiltedness was Scott’s solution; as in, for example, in: “’By my halidome,’ said Fitzurse, ‘the plan was worthy of your united wisdom’... “ It sounds slightly off, but is not entirely offputting - even to modern readers, who don’t know their halidome from the Millennium Dome. No contemporary of Richard the Lionheart actually spoke that way. But the “slight stiltedness” device enables the reader to get into Ivanhoe’s long-distant past.

The most impressive historical novel published this year is James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love. It’s by an English writer for an English-speaking public, yet the action is set in Siberia in 1919 around a historically unregarded sideshow of the Russian revolution.

The idiom of the novel, as confected by Meek, is cunningly off-key. At one point, for example, a member of a sect of fanatic Siberian self-mutilates announces: “I am castrated. And I am happy.” One can’t imagine anyone brought up in the English tongue saying it quite like that. Meek contrives, with his carefully measured stiltedness, to avoid the woodenness of standard translations from the Russian. But there remain moments when, for all the stylistic poise, the narrative wobbles. The following, for example: “Viktor Timofeyevich Skachkov, Land Captain of Yazyk, was eating breakfast alone in the dining room when his wife shrieked the name of God three times upstairs, each time louder than the last, then let out a long howl, which rolled from high to low, ending in a gurgle of pure foundedness, like a baby laughing.”

What, precisely, is a “Land Captain”? To the Anglophone ear it sounds like Toyota’s latest SUV. How is shrieking “the name of God” different from shrieking “God”? And what, in that God’s name, is “a gurgle of pure foundedness”?

Overdo the stilts and the novel topples. This, alas, happens in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation - an “I-narrated” account of a boy-soldier’s experiences in Africa’s civil wars. Among the overwhelming scenes of horror, the lad is raped (in the line of duty) by his “Commandant”: “Then he is saying, remove your clothe [sic]. So I was removing them. And then, after making me be touching his soldier and all of that thing with my hand and with my tongue and lip he was telling me to kneel and then he was entering inside of me the way the man goat is sometimes mistaking other man goat for woman goat and going inside of them.”

The bestial goat has neither nation nor language. Nor does this infantile warrior. Iweala (a writer who has roots in Nigeria and a degree in English from Harvard) bequeathes his hero a primitive pidgin. One can see, and even respect, why it’s done. But it grates alienatingly on the ear.

Just as works of fiction - the best of them, at least - craft their own idiolect, so do they carry unique authorial markers. So distinctive are they that a literary cryptanalyst such as Professor Don Foster can identify authorship as confidently as the forensic scientist identifies a criminal by voice-print, as he did with Joe Klein, the “anonymous” author of Primary Colors. And one needs the professor. If he saw lines from The Prelude running wild in the deserts of Arabia, Coleridge said, he would shout “Wordsworth!” Who, reading Shalimar’s first paragraph, would not shout “Rushdie!”

It takes a long time, the trumpeter Miles Davis said, before you can play like yourself; or, one would hazard, write like yourself. It can also, on the reader’s part, take a while to learn not merely how to read, but how to hear a novel. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce asserted, required a lifetime’s listening. The boilerplate prose of Jeffrey Archer can be mastered in the delay between check-in and take-off.

”Read, read, and read the Victorians,” the historian G.M. Young liked to instruct his students, “until you can hear them.” It’s not just a matter of grinding away. Tuning one’s set so as to hear a novel is tricky. Rushdie, as his public readings make clear, likes his prose to go at a rattling pace - allegro. J.M. Coetzee, as the title of Slow Man signals and the opening lines confirm, is adagio by preference: “The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.”

The words drop like pebbles into a well. The intervals sometimes seem longer than the words themselves. And should the mind’s ear insert a vowel-flattened South African accent? The hero, Paul Rayment, is French by origin. Should that condiment (”limbre”) go into the auditory mix?

John Banville’s meditative and retrospective The Sea insists on being heard as a langorous internal monologue - with an Irish inflection and an old man’s weariness of manner. The novel swells gently, like the element of the title. Again the opening lines will serve: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes.”

Banville’s cultivated Irish tones are different in class dialect from the street Irish of William Wall’s This is the Country, whose “I-narration” is done in the chippy vernacular of a petty crook. It opens with him contemplating the courthouse statue of justice: “The shades are waiting on the steps. It’s a damp morning. I look up and see that since I was away they gave old Justice a steam cleaning. She has a shiny new dagger and scales, and she’s white as ash.”

Caryl Phillips sets himself a complex problem in Dancing in the Dark, a bio-fiction of the early-20th-century Afro-American vaudevillian Bert Williams. Off-stage a cultivated and melancholy man, on stage Williams is required by his white audiences to play the jolly dancing darkie. His partner George protests at the racial and linguistic travesty: “Listen to me, Bert, the so-called character that you’re playing is a damn-fool creature who has been created by the white man, and this ‘smoke’ fixes us now in their minds as hopeless failures. But times have changed now and we should no longer be standing up in front of the white man and delivering simplistic stories with the right amount of darky naivety. I mean, let me ask you, how many of our own people are truly happy to eat just watermelon, or fall over on their faces, or mispronounce the English language?”

How should George’s dignified outrage be heard? Cultivated American? Or cultivated American with a tang (”daaamn- fool”) of soft black drawl?

By linguistic origins Caryl Phillips is Caribbean not American. How accurately does he catch the nuances of American speech? Can an outsider ever completely master a tongue, or dialect, in which they were not brought up? Conrad never did and nor did Nabokov, although their failures are magnificent.

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is set, virtually entirely, in New England. She herself spent a couple of years there, at Harvard, after the success of White Teeth. Again, what accent should the reader’s ear impose on the following description of bulimic January in a New England woman’s hall of residence: Smith’s Cambridge England voice or her Cambridge Mass. voice? “In January, at the first formal of the year, the tremendous will-power of Wellington’s female students is revealed. Unfortunately for the young women, this demonstration of pure will is accredited to ‘femininity’ - that most passive of virtues - and, as a result, does not contribute to their Grade Point Average. It is unfair. Why are there no awards for a girl who starves herself through the Christmas period?”

Snooty cis-Atlantic, homely trans-Atlantic, or bland mid-Atlantic? The passage means something different in each case.

The acoustics of fiction matter. Our obsessive concern with “reading” and “literacy skills” has created a public that has a disabling hearing problem when it comes to fiction. Educators could usefully address the issue. So, I think, could the creators and producers of novels, locked as they are in an obstinately soundless print format which has barely changed since Caxton. A hi-tech civilisation which can come up with Christmas cards that sing carols can surely invent an electronic tuning fork for fiction. Why not a novel which, when opened, recites for its reader the first paragraph in the author-approved voice? Remember, you read about it here first.