Today, if you pick up a printed and bound copy of The Iliad or The Odyssey, what you may notice first is not the richness of the storytelling but the sheer size of the thing. The epics are long and sprawling, and though they are strewn with mnemonic devices that would work as mental bookmarks for the would-be memorizer—vivid phrases and epithets such as “gray-eyed Athena,” or “Zeus who wields the aegis”—it is still incredible to think that once upon a time people commited them to memory. Not only would a good rhapsode have both stories stored in his head, but he would be able to pick up either tale at any point and recite onward without a hitch. This is mastery of a sort that has become foreign to most modern people. With schools having largely withdrawn from the practice of making students memorize poetry, few of us today have anything approaching the interior resources of a rhapsode. You might argue that we don’t need them: books are inexpensive and widely available, and we can use the Internet to look up pieces of writing that we may have forgotten or that we want to read. The rhapsodes themselves were obsolete long before the digital age was a glimmer in the eye of the future. Still, though they’ve long since disappeared, their role in the ancient world is a reminder that in reading aloud, we are taking part in one of the oldest and grandest traditions of humankind. Indeed, the long and rich lineage of reading aloud, as a type of oral storytelling, stretches back to the days before anything was written down.
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LIKE A PERSON today who picks up a novel and reads out loud, rhapsodes were in the business of transmitting, not inventing. The opening words of The Odyssey—“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story”—make this clear: The storyteller is acknowledging at the start that the tale he tells is not his own, and that he hopes for divine assistance in telling it well. You or I may not take such precautions when we open a storybook and read the words, but, like a rhapsode, we too are serving as a kind of artistic medium. We are drawing upon a story not of our own creation, and the story travels through us—through the concentration of our faculties, the inflection of our voices, the warmth and presence of our bodies—to reach the listener.
It is a marvelous thing: simple, profound, and very, very ancient. What Salman Rushdie calls “the liquid tapestry” of storytelling is one of the great human universals. So far as we can tell, starting in Paleolithic times, in every place where there are or have been people, there has been narrative. Here is Gilgamesh, the Sumerian epic recorded on clay tablets in cuneiform script 1,500 years before Homer. Here are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, vast Sanskrit poems dating from the ninth and eighth centuries BC. Here too is the thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon legend Beowulf, the Icelandic Völsunga saga, the Malian epic Sundiata, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Persian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian ferment of The Thousand and One Nights, and the nineteenth-century Finnish and Karelian epic the Kalevala. This list is necessarily partial.
Once upon a time, none of these stories had yet been fixed on a page (or a clay tablet), but were carried in the physical bodies of the people who committed them to memory. Long before Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, and a thousand years before cloistered monks and their illuminated manuscripts, the principal storage facility for history, poetry, and folktales was the human head. And the chief means of transmitting that cultural wealth, from generation to generation, was the human voice.
In ancient Greece, the voices belonged to rhapsodes; in ancient India, to charioteer bards called sutas. Elsewhere were skalds (Nordic history poets) and rakugoka (Japanese storytellers), along with the jongleurs, minstrels, and troubadours of medieval Europe. Shamans passed on the stories of tribal people native to North America. In West Africa there was, and is, an itinerant class of griots, the traveling tale-tellers and musicians who have been called living archives.
Even as human societies confided their stories and histories to print, people continued to rely on the voice to make sense of what was written. Until the tenth century AD, in fact, writing was not something to take in through the eyes and consider in silence with the mind. Rather, it was a mechanism for a kind of reverse dictation. To read at all was to read out loud. Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, manuscripts in Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew, the illuminated Christian Gospels, the Talmud, the Koran—with these forms and collections of writing came the expectation that a person would read them out loud and would, in a manner of speaking, conjure their reality. In his book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel points out that Aramaic and Hebrew, the “primordial” languages of the Bible, draw no distinction between reading and speaking. The same word stands for both. Buddhism and Hinduism also give an exalted place to the spoken word. What, if not reading aloud, are the guided meditations of Buddhism? What else is happening when, at the spring festival of Rama Navami, Hindus listen to readings from the Ramayana? (As a late-nineteenth-century Anglican visitor to India marveled, “Much merit is supposed to be derived even from the hearing of it.”)
Silent reading of the sort we practice with our books and laptops and cellphones was once considered outlandish, a mark of eccentricity. Plutarch writes of the way that Alexander the Great perplexed his soldiers, around 330 BC, by reading without utterance a letter he had received from his mother. The men’s confusion hints at the rarity of the spectacle. Six hundred years later, Augustine of Hippo witnessed the Milanese bishop (and fellow future saint) Ambrose contemplating a manuscript in his cell. Augustine was amazed by the old man’s peculiar technique. “When he read,” Augustine marveled in his Confessions, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”
For Augustine, as Alberto Manguel observes, “the spoken word was an intricate part of the text itself.” We don’t think that way now. For us, the written word has the real weight and gravitas. We joke: “It must be true, I saw it on the Internet,” in an echo of the old line about the sanctity of print.
Yet as Dante observed, speech—the words we say, the pauses between them, and our inflection—is our native language. Writing is the crystallizing of liquid thought and speech, and therefore a kind of translation. When a girl in modern times listens to her mother or father read an abridged version of The Iliad or The Odyssey, in a curious way she is hearing Homer translated at least four times over. What began as spoken Greek became written Greek, which was translated into written English, and then, in a final transformation, was freed from the page and set loose in the air as spoken English.
The liberated word is a marvelous thing, because almost everyone can take it in without making any effort. The reader (or troubadour or skald) must expend some energy to present a text, but for the auditor there is no requirement other than to supply his attention. If you are listening, it makes no difference whether you’re hearing a narrative taken from someone’s memory, à la rhapsode, or a text read from the page of a book. In either case, you are getting the story in its living, spoken form.
Speech is the way language comes to all of us first, in the beginning. We hear it. Then we speak it. Only later and with considerable study will we learn to read and write it. As we know from the troubling statistics about American high-school graduates, not everyone reaches proficiency. According to the United Nations, about 14 percent of the world’s adult population is unable to read. Yet if illiteracy is a barrier to economic advancement, it has never been an obstacle to the enjoyment of storytelling, either for unlettered adults or for children who may not be old enough, deft enough, or motivated enough to decode a printed text. For them, as for the men and women in fourteenth-century England who gathered to hear Chaucer read from his Canterbury Tales, or the villagers in eighteenth-century Mali who came running when the griot turned up, the oral tradition offers sanctuary and delight.
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HOW DO STORIES begin? “Once upon a time,” as the rhapsode on the amphora in the British Museum is shown to say. These are the real magic words, whether in that most familiar form, or in a variant heard in Indonesia, “It was . .
. and it was not,” or in the Jamaican way of opening stories, “Once it was a time, a very good time. Monkey chewed tobacco and he spit white lime . . .” Faster than a genie, the words conjure a portal and take us through it, transporting us from the here and now to the realm of storytelling, a place that may be fantastic or realistic or some combination of the two. “Who can catalog the myriad ways that human beings use to signal, ‘Now, I am telling you a story’?” asks the literary critic Laura Miller. “The speaker leaves off ordinary talk, the listener recalibrates her attention, and both enter into a relationship older than the memory of our race. A story takes us, for a while, out of time and the particularities of our own existence. The initiation into this ritual might come as a pause, a change of tone . . . [and it] tells us that a special kind of language, the language of story, has begun.”
One autumn afternoon not so long ago, the initiation into this ritual took the form of a school principal handing a microphone to a twelve-year-old boy who was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and turquoise socks. Throughout the morning, the fifth-grader and the other pupils at an all-boys school in suburban Maryland had competed in preliminary rounds of a tournament called “the Bard.” I’d watched the younger boys taking turns reciting poetry in the sunshine at the foot of a small stone amphitheater. Some of their pieces were short: at least two boys confined themselves to the six brief lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle”; but I’d also seen a fourth-grader reciting the G. K. Chesterton poem “Lepanto” for what seemed like a good ten minutes. The fifty-odd little scholars fanned out on the steps had surprised me with their attentiveness, though the vigilance of their teachers probably also had a pacifying effect.
Now everyone had jammed into the gym to hear the finalists. You can imagine the roar. Fve hundred boys between the ages of nine and eighteen were jostling for seating. It is perhaps harder to imagine (but I promise it happened) the total silence that fell when the principal put the microphone into the hand of that fifth-grader. This boy had won the middle-school preliminary round. Now he began to recount one of the most poignant farewells in literature, from book 6 of The Iliad.
“‘Hector hurried from the house when she had done speaking, and went down the streets by the same way that he had come,’” the boy recited, loud and clear. “‘When he had gone through the city and had reached the Scaean gates through which he would go out on to the plain, his wife came running towards him.’”
Hector does not know, but suspects, that it may be the last time he sees his wife, Andromache, and their infant son, Astyanax, a child “lovely as a star.” Andromache begs her husband not to go: “Your valor will bring you to destruction; think on your infant son, and on my hapless self who ere long shall be your widow.”
Hector can foresee the awful consequences, but he has to go into battle; honor demands it. In his final moments with his wife, he tries to steel them both for the fates they can expect at the hands of the Greeks: for him, a violent death; for her, enslavement in an invader’s household. He hopes to die first, and be spared the sight of her suffering: “May I lie dead under the barrow that is heaped over my body ere I hear your cry as they carry you into bondage.”
Moved by his own words, Hector reaches for his son but Astyanax, frightened by his father’s shining armor and his helmet with its nodding horsehair plume, hides his face in the bosom of his nurse.
“‘His father and mother laughed to see him,’” declaimed the boy in the gym, pacing a little, “‘but Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it all gleaming upon the ground. Then he took his darling child, kissed him, and dandled him in his arms, praying over him the while to Jove and to all the gods.’”
I looked across the gym. Some of the younger boys were fidgeting in their seats, but no one talked or goofed around.
“Jove,” Hector cries, “grant that this my child may be even as myself, chief among the Trojans; let him be not less excellent in strength, and let him rule Ilius [Troy] with his might. Then may one say of him as he comes from battle, ‘The son is far better than the father. May he bring back the blood-stained spoils of him whom he has laid low, and let his mother’s heart be glad.’”
A moment later the scene ended. Feet pounded, hands clapped, throats vibrated, and the bleachers thundered. Through a skinny medium in surprising socks, Homer’s poetry and pathos had reached, as if with a giant hand, from the foreign, distant past to hold these modern boys in its grip.
You might think there could be no real continuity between a bearded rhapsode in classical Greece two-and-a-half millennia ago and a boy in a modern gym. Yet there is a direct line, for reading aloud—its capacity to enthrall and enrich—is not in the look of the thing. It is in the telling.
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ON A SEPTEMBER morning in 1858, in the town of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, a man sat weeping as Charles Dickens read aloud to a large audience from his novel Dombey and Son. The death of six-year-old Paul Dombey seemed to have been the poor fellow’s undoing, and his sorrow was not lost on the author. “After crying a good deal without hiding it,” Dickens wrote to his sister-in-law, Georgy, “he covered his face with both his hands and laid it down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion.”
In the audience at the same reading, Dickens reported the presence of “a remarkably good fellow of thirty or so,” who was so tickled by the comical character of Toots that “he could not compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. And whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh, and when he came, he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him.”
Novels including Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and David Copperfield had made Charles Dickens the J. K. Rowling of the nineteenth century. His readers in the United States were so worried about the fate of poor little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop that crowds mobbed the docks in New York for the latest installment of the tale, much as, a hundred and fifty years later, hordes would assemble outside bookstores to await the midnight release of the newest book in the Harry Potter series.
In the time of Dickens, reading aloud at home was very much a common household entertainment. The practice had become broadly accessible in Britain a hundred years earlier, with the spread of literacy and the increased availability of books and periodicals. As Abigail Williams writes in The Social Life of Books, “People shared their literature in very different ways: reading books together as a sedative, a performance, an accompaniment to handiwork, a means of whiling away a journey or a long dark evening. They saw reading as a pick-me-up and a dangerous influence, a source of improvement, a way to stave off boredom, and even as a health-giving substitute for the benefits of a walk in the open air.”
From a commonplace diversion, reading out loud became fashionable. The burgeoning elocution movement drew aspirants from up and down the social scale—from bakers’ apprentices to clergymen to cloistered noblewomen—all eager to learn to read with elegance and panache. A person could gain social credit by reading well, whereas, of course, reading poorly meant courting embarrassment. Elocution guides warned of the shame of speaking with monotony, “like an ignorant Boy, who understands not what he reads.” (History records the discomfiture of the great Jane Austen, who suffered one evening in 1813 as her mother rushed inexpertly through a passage of Pride and Prejudice. “Though she perfectly understands the characters herself,” Austen confided in a letter to her sister, “she cannot speak as they ought.”)
For Dickens, reading out loud in company was sufficiently popular that he could count on his audience knowing what he meant when he began his presentations, as he did, with a request: “I would ask that you imagine you are with a small group of friends, assembled to hear a tale told.” Ladies and gentlemen in large, crowded public places might ordinarily wish to guard their emotional expression. By urging them to think of themselves as “a small group of friends,” Dickens was inviting his listeners to surrender to the story with all the si
ncerity and openheartedness they would risk in private. As we know from his letters and diaries, people gave themselves up altogether to the emotional transport that he offered. Dickens was a talented reader who spent weeks practicing his delivery before taking his stories on the road. In the manuscripts that he used for public readings, he made marginal notes to remind himself of the various tones to strike from passage to passage (“Cheerful . . . Stern . . . Pathos . . .”) along with gestures (“Point . . . Shudder . . . Look Round in Terror . . .”).
Charles Dickens had to be sure that his paying customers went away satisfied. He was doing the job for money, after all. For most of us, the stakes are not economic. Reading at home, for love, we don’t have to render up the prose in quite such a polished way. Even without shudders and well-timed moments of pathos, it is astonishing how effective a good story read aloud can be.
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WHILE DICKENS WAS entertaining audiences in England and Ireland, across the Atlantic settlers were fanning westward across the United States, and they took his writing with them. For many emigrant families, a good session of reading magazine serials aloud in the evenings offered diversion from the lonely, arduous work of busting sod and planting crops. The chief difficulty was getting hold of fresh copies of magazines that carried the stories of Dickens, Victor Hugo, and others. After the opening of the transcontinental railway in 1869, the transit of the mails became smoother, but people still couldn’t predict when or if their longed-for parcels, letters, or publications would arrive. As one emigrant recalled: “We were never able to be sure that we would be able to understand the next chapters in serial stories, which were our delight. I remember being very engrossed in one of Charles Reade’s novels, the heroine of which was cast on a desert island . . . the story was published in [a magazine called] Every Saturday, and at first it came weekly, but after we had become most deeply interested, five weeks passed during which not a single number was received, and we were left to imagine the sequel.”
The Enchanted Hour Page 4