Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
26.1 Medium and performance
Unit 26 Literature in performance
Section 6 Media: from text to performance
Ask almost anyone what the main kinds of literature are and they will say novels, poems . . . and plays (see Unit 4, Genre). For many people involved in theatre, however, plays are not literature - or rather, they are more than literature. Plays, they suggest, combine all the conventional literary qualities with something more: the performance, spectacle and pleasures of social occasion associated with theatre.
Discussion of the slightly odd place of drama in our notions of literature tends to develop in two main directions. In one direction, printed versions of plays are viewed as merely notation for the fuller experience of theatre; this way of viewing drama is discussed in Unit 25, Ways of reading drama. In the other direction, drama serves as the exemplary case of a broader issue: the relationship, in general, between all literature, viewed as a set of books, and literature thought of as something different and less tangible. That different and less tangible something may be stored in books but its essence would be found elsewhere: perhaps in a set of values, or in an attitude of mind, or in particular ways of reading.
This second direction in debates over drama is the topic of this unit. Among the issues it raises are how far what we consider to be literature can exist in forms or media other than on the printed page, and how relevant or applicable the ways of reading we develop for literature are when we engage with other kinds of text.
26.1 Medium and performance
One important consideration here is ’medium’: the distinction, for example, between writing and speech. Most literary works are fixed as printed (written) text, yet one of our deepest habits in reading is to imagine a sort of speaking inner voice. Until relatively recently, in historical terms, people did in fact mostly read out loud, to children, family and friends - and also to themselves. (Remember, too, that not all adults can read even today - literacy rates vary significantly from country to country and community to community.) Many people still do read aloud to children, and books are serialized and read aloud on radio, as well as being available to buy as audio-books. Even considering literature narrowly as a set of books requires us to take into account its interaction with the spoken and performed.
26.1.1 Oral literature
Literature that is spoken is not new. In many oral societies (that is, societies that do not employ writing as a system of representation), stories and lyricism are presented in memorized and extensively improvised spoken performances. Such standardized oral forms are collectively known as oral literature, a term that can at first seem paradoxical: the word ’oral’ means to do with the spoken; yet the etymology of ’literature’ in ’litterae’ (Latin: ’letters’) suggests a central preoccupation with, or existence in, the written form.
Composition of oral literature in oral societies often occurs as a communal practice of improvisation. It is only with a transition to a substantially literate society - especially one that develops institutions of print literacy - that the modern category of the author emerges (see Unit 14, Authorship and intention).
The classical Greek culture of Homer, around the eighth century bc, represents an especially significant historical moment, being often considered the beginning of the development of Western, writing-based literature (see Ong, 2002). The elaborate patterning of poetic language found in Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, appears to have developed cumulatively over many generations, the result of a combination of tradition and improvisation. Writing was not commonly used at the time for literary purposes, so bards recited without the aid of a written text. Instead of composing and memorizing fixed works, they used a large stock of verbal formulae that enabled them, by altering and recombining elements to suit the context, to perform long poems more or less spontaneously. The poems now attributed to Homer may in fact be substantially a written record - a transcript - of earlier, oral production.
Traditions of oral composition and performance are neither historically or geographically remote. Nor do they exist only in cultures without writing systems. Oral traditions can be found in industrialized, especially multicultural, societies where they flourish alongside written literatures. In Britain, some poets (especially poets with Caribbean origins or links, such as Grace Nichols or John Agard) recite in ways that foreground oral tradition and performance, as well as publishing collections of their poetry. Oral storytelling traditions from Africa, the Indian sub-continent and among Native Americans exist in a flexible relation with published, printed texts. Several generations of performed ’pop’ poetry have existed in Britain: Liverpool poets (alongside Merseybeat pop music in the 1960s); Punk poets during the 1970s; and recently improvisatory poetry performance events, known as poetry slams (or sometimes as poetry jams), on both sides of the Atlantic.
26.1.2 Public readings
Poetry slams now form part of a literary performance scene that also includes more formal readings by the authors of published novels and poetry collections in bookshops and at literary festivals. Possibly the most celebrated example of a novelist giving public readings, however, comes much earlier in the history: that of Charles Dickens (1812-70).
Dickens had a lifelong enthusiasm for amateur theatricals, and began to read to friends as an extension of his involvement in dramatic entertainment, before going on to read in public for charity. Gradually, he developed public reading into a lucrative business, despite initially sharing the reservation of many of his contemporaries that paid public speaking undermines the dignity of literature. Even relatively early in his reading career, Dickens performed to audiences of nearly four thousand and went on tours of between fifty and a hundred readings (eighty-eight readings in ninety days in 1858). When he started his farewell tour in 1869, on one occasion at least a thousand people had to be turned away because the auditorium was full.
This example of Dickens’s public readings makes clear, in respect of fiction, what is evident already in the example of drama: the stereotypically lonely creative experience of an author writing is interwoven with more social institutions of performance and reception; there is no historically fixed or impermeable boundary between literary writing and various kinds of performance.
26.1.3 Literature, lyrics and music
Interconnection between literature and performance can also be seen in the cluster of literary concepts involving lyrics and lyricism. The word ’lyric’, for instance, may now evoke particular poetic qualities (e.g. individual contemplation of experience); but the term originally meant to do with the lyre, the musical instrument on which Classical Greek poetry was conventionally accompanied. (The Muses of Classical Greece were each thought to preside over a verbal art that would be accompanied by a specific type of music: flute music, choral songs and dance, and music on the lyre.) In medieval France, lyric forms such as the canzone and rondeau were developed by troubadours and trouveres for singing; and in Germany the early singing lyricists were called Minnesingers. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain, the term ’lyric’ also applied to verse that was sung (as in madrigals or the songs of poet-singers and composers like Thomas Campion or John Dowland), though increasingly the term was also used of verse that was not sung. In some cases we may now find ourselves, without being aware of it, reading a poem on the page that was actually composed as a song and originally performed with musical accompaniment.
In the contemporary period, lyricism also combines with forms of accompaniment, most notably in popular music. Emerging from traditions of toasters and DJs, rap forms involving highly accentuated speech based on rhyming couplets have come to prominence in mainstream media. Connecting this popular tradition with high-cultural literary expectations, some recognized poets have performed from published works but with backing bands (as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah have done); and some singer-songwriters first successful in the music field have represented themselves as poets (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Vega, etc.). Such performers evidently blur boundaries between high and popular culture; but they also blur traditional boundaries between verbal and other (audio and audio-visual) arts centred on performance.