The word made flesh

Reading prose aloud is a skill one never anticipates having to learn when first sitting down to spin a wee yarn at the typewriter. It’s a whole other art, beholden to ineffable laws of musicality, rhythm, oratory and performance. Many’s the writer who’s been approached after a reading with the admission, ‘Ah, now I understand what you were banging on about!’ At a Faber event in October, certain ladies and gentlemen of the London publishing trade confessed to yours truly that passages of John the Revelator made a lot more sense when rendered in a quasi-Wexford accent.

The oral tradition far precedes the written one. Before we ever learned to inscribe hieroglyphics on the wall of the cave, we communicated through grunts and gesticulations. The shaman and the seanchaí dominated the tribe’s hive mind way before the printing press or telecommunications media. Revivalist preachers lived and died by their ability to set fire to the holy texts. The west African griot held the mantle of original outsider artist, a poet-singer with a licence to speak the unpalatable truth, but in return had to forfeit his social identity and live on the margins, to the extent of being buried apart, upside down in a dead tree.
Books were written to be read, not heard. But the template of the text can also be used as a springboard for a sort of incantatory music. Sure, there have been god-like writers who were godawful readers of their own work: Yeats and Eliot come to mind. But Dylan Thomas became a star in America through lecture tours that exploited the sonorous splendour of his Welsh lilt.
Having heard a writer deliver the work in his own voice, you never experience it in quite the same way again. The Beats excelled at spoken word performance. Kerouac’s prose takes on indelible echoes of the jazzy, exultant whimsies of his recordings. Ginsberg employed the laws of the Om, Jewish liturgy and Blake and Whitman’s long-line rules of deep breath punctuation in order to turn performances of ‘Khaddish’ and ‘Howl’ into full blown operas. Burroughs is my favourite: his cracked, sardonic reading of ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ harks back to Bierce and Twain, and the Hal Willner-produced Dead City Radio might just be the greatest spoken word album of them all (Willner’s excellent Edgar Allan Poe tribute album Closed On Account Of Rabies, featuring Gabriel Byrne, Iggy Pop and Diamanda Galas amongst many others, is also a treasure, a baroque, gothic audio film).
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a meaty story interpreted by a powerful orator: the audiobook of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, read by actor and Vietnam veteran Richard Poe, is a tour de force. Sean Penn’s take on Dylan’s Chronicles is another feast for the ears.
The book industry, stricken by recession panic, might do well to open its own permanent recording wing. Harassed commuters starved of reading time turn to the audiobook as a means of making the car journey pass faster. Radio plays and abridged book broadcasts still far exceed their public service remit in terms of audience numbers, especially when streamed online. And let’s face it, everybody loves a bedtime story.