Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
26.3 The influence of medium
Unit 26 Literature in performance
Section 6 Media: from text to performance
As well as interpreting - both extending and narrowing - what is said on the page, the process of turning writing into performed speech also has an effect of unsettling conventional notions of literary achievement and value, because of differences between the two media in which literature then exists.
A written text performed as speech problematizes, for instance, where we draw the boundary between the work, anchored on the page, and variable performances of it. A public reading of a printed poem may be a performance; but if that performance is then made available in recorded form, it is a text again - though now with an added audio or audio-visual dimension. The awkwardness of such distinctions is one reason why many people prefer simply to view all kinds of language performance as texts. We could then say that there is no need to fix any particular boundary between literary text and performance, since we already recognize that texts come in many versions (such as different editions), and performance simply gives us parallel versions of texts in different media.
Definition matters, however, if you feel that the core objects of literary enquiry need to be distinguished from related but arguably secondary texts and contextual material that surround them. Few people doubt that a TV or film serialization of Pride and Prejudice can be an enjoyable and worthwhile version of Jane Austen’s novel (1813). But there continues to be vigorous argument about whether such an adaptation should be read as on an equal footing with the novel it is an adaptation of; whether it is a useful supplement to reading the novel but of secondary importance to it; or whether the two texts should be treated as for all practical purposes different works. Alternatively, cutting through such distinctions, we might say that we can now only see Jane Austen’s ’original’ novel through the lens of all these other, performed versions that we have heard or seen. If so, then these other versions are no longer merely incidental, later performances but instead an addition to the literary work itself. (Think of all the films and TV drama serializations you know that have either a direct, an indirect or a remote link to a particular literary work if you think there is a clear-cut answer to these questions; and for further discussion, see Unit 13, Intertextuality and allusion and Unit 24, Film and prose fiction.)
26.3.1 Competing myths of print and live speech
A further consideration makes defining a boundary between literary work and performance more than a question of placing textual versions relative to a historical original. In matters of textual circulation and influence, written and spoken are not treated as equals: the medium of a text itself affects that text’s perceived value, because of potentially confusing myths - or sets of unexamined cultural beliefs - that attach to print and to live speech as modes of representation.
What might be called a ’myth of print’ is created, for instance, when a piece of language is considered disproportionately important, authoritative, or final and non-negotiable, simply because that utterance appears in print. Such mythical attributes arise as a result of both the technological and social history of literacy. Until the advent of sound recording, there was no means of replicating spoken performance permanently; and without a permanent record speech was often viewed as inconsequential or even unreliable, with reports of speech mere hearsay. In contrast with the fleeting or ephemeral nature of speech, anything in a book came to be seen as more serious; and written and printed texts came in many cases to be revered documents, enjoying far higher cultural status than the same words in speech would have done. Special authority has been conventionally attached, in many cultures, to religious and legal documents within the broader range of religious and legal practices; and something of the authority associated with religious books in particular is claimed for literature when traditions of literary work are referred to as a canon, or specified set of holy books.
Much in the cultural history of Western literary traditions is connected with this special status of print. Literary institutions have been closely involved with book production and preservation, as well as with ’battles of the books’; and conventional literary scholarship and hermeneutics, or efforts to understand written texts from earlier cultural moments, are in many respects a bibliophile, or book-loving, activity - an aspect of literature that is reflected in the closeness between two historically influential senses of being ’literate’: being able to read, and being well read.
The ’myth of print’ collides, however, with an equally pervasive cluster of beliefs that surround use of speech. A competing ’myth of orality’ is created when special value is placed on the presumed power of speech (and, with it, live performance in general) to offer direct or immediate expression of physically lived experience. When that speaking self addresses others, a further valued effect is thought to be created: that of closeness or communion between speaker and hearer(s) - even, paradoxically, if they are shouting at each other.
The myth of orality underpins the high value often placed on performance. It encourages us to see the uniqueness and ’unrepeatability’ of a live, performed event as inherently worthwhile and desirable, rather than as an inevitable, practical consequence of performance as a real-time event (as it had to be, before audio and audio-visual recording). It also drives our wish to hear an author read, even if we already know the book, because in presenting in person an author will give us what we then see as a more personally authentic version of it. Performance in this sense embodies or breathes life into a literary work (note the vocabulary here of closeness between oral performance, the human body and claimed vitality).
There is also a cultural dimension to the myth of orality. Oral expression is sometimes treated as if it is the essential channel, or lifeblood, of any organic or fundamentally united community, in which people would talk directly with one another rather than communicating at a distance. Many modern poets have aspired, as would-be bards from an oral society, to this promise of the spoken, as compared with the isolated garret and presumed disempowerment associated with writing.