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Thursday
With my computer-savvy youngest brother having recently taught me how to access Libby book recordings on my cellphone, I feel like I’ve entered a brave new world (in Miranda’s positive sense, not Huxley’s negative). When a mellifluous British voice reading a Maisie Dobbs mystery issued forth from our car’s sound system, I felt like I was no longer in Kansas. Enthralled, all the past week I have been sound-surrounded by a John Galsworthy Forsyte novel as I wash dishes and pick up the house. Immersion in fictional worlds has never before felt like this.
To be sure, there can be dangers to the new technology. I was so involved in the Dobbs mystery as we were driving through Arizona two weeks ago that I failed to note that, having just gotten off the interstate, I failed to adjust my speed. The officer who stopped the car told me I was lucky he wasn’t charging me with a felony. (Thankfully, he gave me the option of taking an on-line course rather than going to jail or paying a heavy fine.)
In one way, listening to novels is a throwback to Victorian times when people would sometimes assemble in the village square to hear public readings of the latest Dickens novel. George Eliot talks about reading novels aloud with her companion Henry Lewes before the fire, and many other couple and families did the same.
And that practice was itself a throwback to the days before the novel came into existence, when most literature was consumed publicly. Plays, of course, ave always public, but poems too were often meant to be passed around in a group. John Donne, one can imagine, must have had fun sharing erotic poems like “The Flea” and “Sun Rising” with courtiers in King James’s court. In the movie The Libertine, meanwhile, we see the dissolute but talented rake John Wilmot (played by Johnny Depp) recounting how he was banished from court after he baited King Charles II with an insulting poem about his sexual prowess. Imagine being the king and hearing the following passage from the poem read aloud in a public setting:
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such
And Love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
The “she” in this case is Nell Gwynn, the king’s mistress, while the brother is the future James II, who was in fact somewhat dimwitted. Hearing the poem from a man who essentially functioned as his court jester was too much even for the easy-going Charles.
Despite the commotion caused in this case, there was something wonderful about poetry functioning as an integral part of social discourse. As my dissertation director J. Paul Hunter has noted, the novel disrupted all this. In an article imaginatively titled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader,” Hunter notes now people found threatening the privacy involved in reading a long book. Husbands, for instance, worried when their wives disappeared into the pages of Samuel Richardson’s million-word-long Clarissa. Who knew where their minds went when they retreated for days into rooms of their own (at the time called closets).
Indeed, Hunter notes how anxiety over the new privacy was the subject of novels themselves. In a work like Tom Jones, one regularly encounters characters telling stories, while Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy treats readers as though they are actually in the room with him. (At one point, he tells the reader that he/she can leave the room while he recounts the next chapter.) In short, the novel represented a disruption to normal literary consumption that novels themselves noticed.
The rise of books on tape and disk bring back some of that social dimension, even though often we’ll listen to books in the privacy of our cars. But there’s something else that happens with Libby that adds a wonderful new wrinkle, albeit something that 19th century listeners might have experienced: when I listen on my phone, I don’t know how much of the book is left.
Jane Austen calls this “the tell-tale compression of the pages.” In the final pages of Northanger Abbey, she worries that the suspense about Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney has been ruined for readers because of where they are in the book:
The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.
This passage is the subject of a literary discussion between two English professors on the final page of David Lodge’s comic campus novel Trading Places. Apparently looking for a way to end the work, the author–a literary theorist before he turned to novel writing–decides he’ll do so by focusing on endings:
Philip: You remember the passage in Northanger Abbey where Jane Austen says she’s afraid that her readers will have guessed that a happy ending is coming up at any moment.
Morris: (nods) [quotes the passage]
Philip: …Well, that’s something the novelist can’t help giving away, isn’t it, that his book is shortly coming to an end? It may not be a happy ending, nowadays, but he can’t disguise the tell-tale compression of the pages. I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you’re reading, you’re aware of the fact that there’s only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it.
Philip goes on to contrast novels with films, where
there’s no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There’s no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we’re watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just…end.
And then, to complete his novel, Lodge gives us one final paragraph:
Philip shrugs. The camera stops freezing him in mid-gesture. THE END.
Libby has added this filmic experience to my engagement with novels. And the experience doesn’t occur with disks and tapes because one knows when one is listening to the last one. Nor does it happen with Kindle books since one is reminded constantly of the percentage of the book remaining (or is this a feature that can be turned off?). But happens with Libby books unless one takes the trouble to scrutinize the screen (which I don’t).
As a result, I found myself looking for subtle clues as to when Galsworthy’s novel would end. Only because the last chapter is entitled “The Final Chapter” did I realize that I was nearing the end, and even then I didn’t know how close I was. Instead, the novel seemed to feel as though, potentially, it could go on forever. Or in Lodge’s words, it went along just as life goes along.
It was a wonderful feeling and something quite new to me. Or rather, I hadn’t experienced something like this since reading as a child, when I lived more in the moment so that books seemed infinitely expansive.
Who knew that I’d develop a new relationship with novels after turning 70?