To Hear is not To Read

How do we compose oral tales?

What Was Will Be Again

In ‘Tales of Future Past’ I gave the reasons why I think oral storytelling will come back to dominate tales. Radio will surpass television, audiobooks will be more popular than printed books.

But how do you compose for speech?

Radio

Radio tales still exist in recordings available on disk and online. If you want to write with radio in mind, all you need to do is listen to the old recordings and learn from those that strike you as the best.

Radio is a sort of drama played for the ears alone. A cast take different roles, dialogue predominates, exposition hides within dialogue. Music and sound effects round out the soundscape, with the possible addition of a Chorus in the form of a Host or Narrator who is usually confined to the general Introduction and Envoi or summing-up of the tale.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks have so far been readings from tales composed to be read. At most the current audiobooks are ‘composed for the medium’ when they are abridged; some abridgments call for additional words to cover what has been left out, and this is written with the audiobook in mind. For the rest, the audiobook is a printed text’s poor cousin.

Books today are composed to be read. Rare is the author who considers how his prose will sound if read aloud. Since almost all of his readers will read the text, and not hear it read out, this is the proper strategy of today’s author. It would be foolish of him, and bad for his talesmanship, if he were to compose with an alternate medium in mind.

Oral storytelling of tales still has a foothold in children’s books, especially those books aimed at the youngest children who don’t yet know how to read, and are learning. These books are meant to be read out loud by parents to their children. But because the books have the additional aim of teaching the child to read, children’s books are not wholly composed to be heard. They include pictures for the child to look at, and lay the page out so as to help the child pick out the words and connect them to the pictures. Words are chosen not only for their sound, but also for how easily the child will be able to spot them on the page; vocabularies are confined to what the child should learn to read and write. So children’s books are a step towards oral tales, but in the end, since they are meant, even they, to be seen on a page or screen, they don’t give us a good line on what oral storytelling should be. And of course, children’s books are meant for children and not the rest of us.

The True Oral Tale

There remains an oral tradition, that descends from the first talesmen more than 100,000 years ago, for us to learn from. Various ethnographic and folklore scholars have recorded oral tales from many cultures, and these should be studied. They are most valuable when they are least aware of tales written to be read, and innocent of the whole reading realm.

For the rest, we can start with a few basic observations.

Structure in an Oral Tale

The first thing to notice is that the paragraph has no meaning in an oral tale. The paragraph is a fairly recent invention; the medieval European manuscripts and first books printed in Europe had no paragraphs. Paragraphs were created to help the reader navigate through the sea of letters and words.

A paragraph in its ideal form should still have some meaning in oral tales. The paragraph that represents a complete subsection of the tale’s argument or progress still makes sense. But often enough the paragraph today exists simply for its original intended purpose, to guide the reader’s eye across the page and substitute in visual layout for the otherwise necessary words to make transitions and links.

Time is crucial to an oral tale, and absent from a tale to be read. The print-author can’t know how fast his readers will take in the text; some may skim, some may feast over every word and phrase. But the oral talesman has absolute control over the relative pace of his tale. (It is possible with digitally-recorded oral tales to play them back at different speeds, and compensate for the shift in pitch; so long as the playback speed is constant throughout, however, the relative pace will remain as it was first recorded.)

Thus we can say that the pauses that the oral talesman takes will stand in for such printed devices as the paragraph or the skipped-line ‘thought break.’

The chapter may or may not exist in the long oral tale. Most oral tales have been short stories, tales that could be told in no more than an hour or so. Longer epics and linked story cycles have existed, though, and were meant to be recited or told over a series of nights or story-sessions.

Since in the ‘future past’ we are imagining, there may well be such things as audiobooks or other recordings of the telling of oral tales, we have to ask whether it is better to break long audiobooks into separate, smaller files, which would serve as chapters, or to include chapter markers inside the one long file to serve as navigation guides, or to leave the tale as one long, unmarked reading.

Best to me seems the collection of smaller files. Worst of all would be the one long reading, though this could find its place under a device or software that would remember whatever place the reader/listener last got to — for example, audiotape players will stop reeling the tape across the playback heads and hold that position until the next time playback begins.

These smaller files (or chapters within a longer file) I think will take a different shape than most of today’s printed chapters. One of the aims of an author of printed text, when he designs his chapter breaks, is exactly not to give his readers a break or pause from reading. Though a chapter break may appear to offer the reader a spot at which he may put the book down, in fact the author designs the break so that the reader will find it hard to put the book down there, and will want to read on. ‘Just one more chapter,’ is what the author of a page-turner hopes all his readers will chant.

Instead of this, in the world of oral tales, each chapter should have its own complete action. It should complete some phase of the talesman’s argument or the progress of the tale’s journey.

I will have much more to say about all this, once I figure it out.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 7, 2008)