Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

26.2 How does performance affect reading literature?
Unit 26 Literature in performance
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

The two illustrations above - of oral literature and lyricism - suggest that our notion of literature and the literary cannot easily be separated off from formal and historical links with performance. But how do such interconnections affect the process we call ’reading’?

If you ’read’ a novel or poem in audio-book form, you are likely to be highly sensitive to its sound properties: the text performed is the text. Equally, if you go to a public reading, you may be struck by how differently phrases and sentences are grouped together, or particular words given emphasis, as compared with your own mental representation of the printed page. Speech on the public platform or on tape not only combines with extra, visual cues given by facial expression, gesture and posture; it also performs aspects of language that are only reflected in very simplified form in writing.

Alongside accent (see Unit 6, Language and place), features of tempo, voice quality, pauses and intonation - collectively, language’s prosodic and paralinguistic systems - add emphasis and signal a speaker’s attitudes towards what is being said. Intonation in particular negotiates nuances of meaning that may remain unspecified on the printed page. The linguist Roman Jakobson reports how, for example, the Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) developed verbal subtlety through intensive training, and is said once to have required an actor at audition to depict forty distinct situations just by saying the Russian words for ’This evening’ (Jakobson, 1987, p. 67).

With theatre evolving as a social institution over many centuries, some aspects of performed speech have become codified or stylized. Voices in stage drama have to fill a large auditorium, and so specialized, theatrical styles of projected speech have developed: speech that is often declamatory or ritualistic (and which employs some techniques whose seriousness, in an era of modern media, can now be difficult to maintain, such as the stage whisper).

In different periods of theatre, how far play scripts mirror conversational styles has varied, with arguably a gradual, long-term shift taking place from declaimed, public rhetoric towards close-up representation of face-to-face interaction. However, even where written dialogue seeks to simulate speech closely - as many contemporary stage and film scripts do - such written speech never precisely matches naturally occurring spoken discourse; it is always a selective, conventionalized representation. (You can check this by comparing pauses, repetitions and local incoherence in real conversation with dramatic dialogue on the page; for discussion of differences between conversation and written dialogue, see also Unit 22, Speech and narration.)

As written stage dialogue is realized in a performing voice, performance extends what is said on the written page, by adding features of sound that were not notated in the written form. It also narrows it down, by tracing a specific, spoken path between multiple possibilities that can co-exist in silent reading (see Unit 25, Ways of reading drama).