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Monday, October 29, 2007
He Do The Police In Different Voices
Something lighter than the philosophical fare I’ve been flogging in recent days. I’ve lately discovered the joys of the audiobook. Amusingly, my first two picks at Librivox - Dracula and Our Mutual Friend - contain incidental, but fairly substantial, meditations on the relative advantages and disadvantages of audiobooks.
Mina Harker listens to Doctor Seward’s phonograph journals, then - with exquisite, feminine virtue - transcribes them for the benefit of the boys. (Seward is narrating at this point, i.e. composing in his diary. I like the way the characters spend so much time diarizing away that they actually spend quite a bit of time recording in their diaries about reading each others’ diaries - the better to fight the fiend!)
I had just finished Mrs. Harker’s diary, when she came in. She looked sweetly pretty, but very sad, and her eyes were flushed with crying. This somehow moved me much. Of late I have had cause for tears, God knows! But the relief of them was denied me, and now the sight of those sweet eyes, brightened by recent tears, went straight to my heart. So I said as gently as I could, “I greatly fear I have distressed you.”
“Oh, no, not distressed me,” she replied. “But I have been more touched than I can say by your grief. That is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one must hear them spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.”
“No one need ever know, shall ever know,” I said in a low voice. She laid her hand on mine and said very gravely, “Ah, but they must!”
“Must! But why?” I asked.
“Because it is a part of the terrible story, a part of poor Lucy’s death and all that led to it. Because in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get. I think that the cylinders which you gave me contained more than you intended me to know. But I can see that there are in your record many lights to this dark mystery ...
The moral of the story: audiobooks are more emotionally effective, but if you actually want to study a text, it’s best to have it down in print - the better to flip around and establish relationships between different parts. The better to fight the fiend!
In Our Mutual Friend, for the sake of something “as’ll reach right down your pint of view,” Silas Wegg is retained to read to Boffin from the eight volumes that the latter has “ranged flat, in a row, like a galvanic battery”, in literary expectancy of the Decline and Falling Off of the Rooshan Empire. As Adam R. notes, pronunciation errors afflict the genre:
Then, Mr Wegg, in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by Hadrian, Trajan, and the Antonines; stumbling at Polybius (pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it); heavily unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus: who, under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been quite unworthy of his English origin, and ‘not to have acted up to his name’ in his government of the Roman people. With the death of this personage, Mr Wegg terminated his first reading; long before which consummation several total eclipses of Mrs Boffin’s candle behind her black velvet disc, would have been very alarming, but for being regularly accompanied by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her. Mr Wegg, having read on by rote and attached as few ideas as possible to the text, came out of the encounter fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring with his eyes and mind at the confounding enormities of the Romans, was so severely punished that he could hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and articulate ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Commodious,’ gasped Mr Boffin, staring at the moon, after letting Wegg out at the gate and fastening it: ‘Commodious fights in that wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times, in one character only! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into the same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, Commodious, in another character, kills ‘em all off in a hundred goes! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats six millions’ worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy, but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even now that Commodious is strangled, I don’t see a way to our bettering ourselves.’ Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the Bower and shook his head, ‘I didn’t think this morning there was half so many Scarers in Print. But I’m in for it now!’
I can’t swear as I understood all that. Then there is Dickens’ most famous audiobook reader, Sloppy:
‘For I aint, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’
If you don’t happen to know: “He do the Police in different voices” was Eliot’s working title (or subtitle) for “The Waste Land”. A quick Google reveals that, as recently as 1968 - when Eliot’s drafts were discovered - this was a source of some confusion:
The initial blast was the revelation that The Waste Land was originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. There is no clue to what Eliot meant by this unfortunate title. An off-the-cuff guess is that Eliot was alluding obscurely to cockney slang or to a vaudeville routine. Another speculation is that this was a working subtitle expressing Eliot’s preoccupation with authority: one of the main theological theorems of The Waste Land is that God, who utters words like datta (give) and shantih (the peace that passes all understanding), speaks neither sense nor English but, like men, in many voices and even in bad grammar.
I don’t have a point here. But maybe I can pretend to, like so: I tend to think of the audiobook as a recent literary form - or, rather, as not really a distinctive form at all. So it is amusing to keep running across discussions of it. (Well, why not? People used to read aloud to each other a lot more - maybe more than they sat quietly and read to themselves.) Anyone else want to chip in their examples, or thoughts in the significance of the fact that novels and the written word in general can be read silently to yourself, or - alternatively - delivered dramatically to an audience. Suggestions of good audiobook fare would also be welcome.
Comments
"People used to read aloud to each other a lot more - maybe more than they sat quietly and read to themselves.”
People used to not read silently at all, either to themselves or in the presence of others. St. Augustine rode three days on a mule to see a monk who could look at a text for a few minutes without uttering a word, and then answer questions about what was written in it. (Brandom makes a big deal about this in one of his Locke Lectures.) I have no idea when silent reading became the norm (or at least stopped being worth a three-day-trip to see), but it’d be interesting to find out.
Henry Louis Gates has a chapter in The Signifying Monkey about the talking book as a trope in African-American culture.
You’re neglecting an important influence on all this—one that I know about, as the author of Sun on the Surface—that the first books that everyone encounters are read to them. I think that it’s quite different to the child from a story, or from a recording (of whatever sort); the book has to be fetched, so the story is in some sense in the book, but it needs what is sort of the first type of translation.
Daniel, I don’t have sources to back me up, but I suspect silent reading became more common after spaces and punctuation marks were introduced to writing. Back when manuscripts were just one long back-and-forth stream of letters, making sense of them without vocalization really would be a remarkable cognitive stunt.
Chaucer is a good source to see changing reading trends. I don’t have the references in front of me (I’m at work) but I believe in the beginning of House of Fame he talks about those who read “dumb as any stone.” Then at the beginning of the second book of Troilus, Pandarus walks in on a group of ladies reading aloud a romance. Just wanted to add my two cents :)
Fiona Shaw did a one-woman whatsit of ‘The Wasteland’ a few years ago. I heard her talk about it on some radio thing, and she made much play of the ‘He do the Police in different voices’ aspect. If I remember correctly, she said there was a lot of comedy in ‘The Wasteland,’ and she performed it that way.
Ivan Illich writes about the Augustine episode in “In the Vineyard of the Text”.
"He Do the Police in Different Voices” is also the first cut from the Loud Family’s excellent albums “Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things.”