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So there you are on a sunny Saturday morning, setting aside a whole day in an idyllic garden with your favourite novel, thinking to yourself: today’s the day.
But then a minute goes by, two minutes, ten minutes. Your eyelids start to get heavier. Your surroundings start to distract you. Words turn into squiggly lines and before you know it…
Where’s the snooze button?
One of the biggest challenges with reading literature is that sometimes, we fail to click into the story. Words start to isolate us, make us doubt our abilities and sometimes we do wonder if we should’ve left the difficult task to stamp-licking academics.
But what if I told you that you’re one step away from that total immersion in literature? Intrigued? Let’s talk about it.
1: The Curse of Silent Reading
There’s this bad habit we picked up from school: we always see reading from the page in silence as the only and the best way to experience fiction.
My favourite activity in middle school was the afternoon “nap”. Our teacher, Mrs. Young, would get us to lie flat on the floor while she read out a story from some Reader’s Digest issue. The stories were so fun that most of us stayed up during the supposed nap time.
However, for some bizarre reason, all this reading out loud stuff flies out the window in high school. There was a general consensus that reading aloud is an inferior way to read, reserved for the remedial classes.
But a quick look at history tells a completely different story:
Traditionally, fiction is experienced communally in the form of epic poems, Greek/Roman theatre, and poetic compositions, which are prevalent in Eastern cultures. For the West, the intellectual ideal is usually attained through dialogue, debate and public engagement. And for the East, composition isn’t seen as the work of a solitary and thoughtful genius, but a communal act of entertainment.
Take the Japanese Haiku, for example. The word literally means “playful verse”. Its primary purpose is to amuse and delight, like a kind of game played in a group, and people are encouraged to read their poems out loud.
Also, for the West, silent reading is a quite recent concept. One of the earliest accounts can be found in St. Augustine’s Confessions, where he was confused by St. Ambrose’s weird act of silent reading.
The idea eventually caught on, and with the aid of the printing press and the rise of the middle-class, silent reading became a dominant practice. So popular, in fact, that people were afraid of children/women reading sexually deviant material in the privacy of their minds.
Consequently, literature, from how they’re written to how they’re consumed, shifted from words in a public forum to an interior experience.
But around the 19th Century, a chap, whose giant moustache made his name, had a different idea.
3: Nietzesche: DEVELOP YOUR THIRD EAR, DAMN IT!
Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil:
“What a torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear.”
Though it definitely isn’t a torment (he was being dramatic), he does have a point. Sometimes, merely reading from the page is not enough; we need to hear the prose to squeeze all the juice out of a book.
When I was in my senior year in college, I took a French class called: The Rise of the Novel thinking it was going to be a breeze. Little did I know, upon walking into the first class, our professor assigned two novels: L’Étranger (Camus) and Madame Bovary (Flaubert).
Camus was okay with my shaky French at the time, but Madame Bovary rewound my reading clock back by 20 years as flashbacks of “a is for apple” and “w is for window” haunted me. I was definitely not proficient enough to read French in my head in silence.
So I retreated to my remedial corner, closed all the blinds and started reading the book out loud. It sounded like nonsense at first, but then something clicked…
Even without fully understanding the language, there was a musical quality to the prose that kept me going. Then the music became words, words turned into objects, objects morphed into scenes, and scenes started filling up with characters’ voices. I finished the book one afternoon on campus, soon realising that I fell in love with Flaubert’s music first, and his story second.
It’s easy to overlook this process with our native language. We forget that there is a musical component long before we learned to read in silence. Brilliant prose work from Woolf, Joyce and Meville can only express their colours in full when we learn to listen, and immersion happens when we learn to love the music before the meaning.
But why does it work? Why is it the case that reading things out loud usually makes a more vivid reading experience?
3: Language: The Common Currency of Writers and Readers
Let me drag my favourite critic, James Wood, back into the room.
He argued that “even complex prose is quite simple” because no matter how much writers twist and turn their words, they remain just that: language. Or, in Wood’s words: “the ordinary medium of daily communication”.
I went on many dates before I met my partner, and time and time again, I fell in love with those nervous lip bites, the chuckle covered by both hands and the crow’s feet around their eyes way before I paid attention to whatever the hell they were actually saying.
Literature assumes the same mechanism. Great prose doesn’t usually focus on what is being said literally but how it is said. Language dashes ahead of meaning before we have a chance to parse every word.
Flaubert once had a famous sentence I’ve cited before. In a scene after Charles got Emma pregnant, the description went: “L’idée d’avoir engendré le délectait” which translates to “The idea of having engendered delighted him”. But see, the English version, in its attempt to capture the literal meaning, loses that rhyming quality while taking up more space.
And this rhythmic precision wasn’t an accident. Great writers usually take great care to achieve a kind of “mathematical finality” with their sentences. Flaubert, for one, was known for reading out loud as he composed. As a scene in How Fiction Works puts it:
“The study at Croisset, the slow river outside the window while inside the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, [Flaubert] groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonisingly as a fuse.”
Imagine all that agony reduced to silence just because we don’t want to look stupid when we read aloud. You can be damn well sure that Flaubert has not only turned in his grave, but has punched through his tombstone while leaving an inscription in granite dust:
“Listen! Damn it, listen!”
So, for the sake of a good night’s sleep for everyone, please put Flaubert to rest and when in doubt, read with your third ear.
Until next week
Robin
' Great writers usually take great care to achieve a kind of “mathematical finality” with their sentences. '
That was an excellent way to put it. English classes (literature and composition) that I used to take had a really good teacher who emphasized style. I wasn't taught where she got all those ideas about what would improve writing, such as avoiding adverbs and verb-forms of "to be" because those sentences tend to be less economical about what the writer meant to say. I don't follow all those rules now, obviously, but I remember how that opened up this whole new room of sort of thinking about writing language but mathematically.
Robin, this is an idea I think about a lot for a very particular reason. I worship Nietzsche, so when I came across him saying this in BGE, I knew that I should do this; that books ought to be read aloud. But see, idk... The problem I face is that once I start reading a text alound, the comprehension part of my brain just, shuts down? I mean, my brain just decides to direct my mental capacities to enunciating instead of understanding. I often read texts, both fiction and theory, with friends and at that time I am reading it out aloud, but if an especially complicated part comes about I need to pause and read it silently to comprehend what it means. This just infuriates me...