In case you missed it, here's Verlyn Klinkenborg's "editorial observer" piece from this past Saturday's New York Times, entitled "Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud."
Popular as it has become, "listening aloud," as Klinkenborg calls it, "isn't the same as reading aloud." In the same way that we as a culture have largely abandoned the practice of making our own music in favor of listening to recordings made by professional musicians, we have given up the experience of reading out loud and outsourced it to the pros.
“Listening aloud,” says Klinkenborg,
“isn't the same as reading aloud...”
In the brief 700-word piece, Klinkenborg makes some complicated and interesting assertions about the meaning of words not just as representations of a writer's intentions but also as having a life of their own as they pass through the body (and soul!) of someone reading aloud. Heavy.
I have a couple of thoughts about this:
First, I like both to listen and to read out loud, although I think I prefer the later. I listen mostly as a matter of convenience, very seldom to hear a particular narrator's performance. Mostly I listen for professional reasons, or to make the most of my drive time, or to keep me entertained in the kitchen. I read to my wife. I read to my 18-year-old daughter on the rare occasion when she'll let me. And, as Klinkenborg suggests, my experience of a written work is quite different when I read it aloud. When you let the words do the work for you, something powerful happens.
Second, I'd probably like listening to professional audiobooks better if they were produced to a higher standard. Though there are a lot of talented audiobook readers in the business these days, sadly, many of the productions that come my way are good but not great. In many of the works I listen to, there are at least a few serious mis-readings that make me cringe and wish that there had been a director to stop and ask the narrator to read it once more, "but this time, with the emphasis here not there."
We don't talk about this much in the audiobook industry, but many productions are recorded without benefit of any direction at all, often by a narrator working alone from a home studio.
So we have indeed outsourced our reading out loud, but not necessarily to the same extent that we've outsourced our musical production or to the same caliber of professionals. According to Klinkenborg, just as with music, we have lost the ability to let the work come out of ourselves, speak through us, affect us.
At 700 words, Klinkenborg's piece is really only a sketch. For rhetorical purposes, he's forced to overstate his case slightly, but the ideas he puts forth are subtle and complicated. His reflections on the written word and the spoken word are worth thinking about -- not just in passing, but in depth. I recommend reading the whole piece through at least a couple of times -- maybe even out loud.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
BTW, the Tantor Audio production of Verlyn Klinkenborg's latest book, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile is available on Playaway.
