Speaking and listening have been part of the National Curriculum since its inception in 1992 but only in the last two years has any serious attempt been made to encourage teaching in this area - and then only in primary schools. One of my own most vivid memories of primary school was sitting in class in what was designated as a ‘silent reading’ session, quivering with fear as the teacher castigated us all because one or two of my friends were moving their lips as they read; that was a babyish thing to do. The students I teach now have much the same attitude – except now they quiver with fear when I first ask them to read out loud. On the principle that one should never ask someone to do something that one is not prepared to do oneself, I believe it is important to read to them –and not just in a rushed this-is-the bit-I-mean fashion, but really read. Once they have realised how written language, particularly the language of poetry, often makes so much more sense when it is heard, and even more when they have spoken it and felt it in their own mouths, they become delighted converts to the importance of sound.
Sound is not just the medium in which stories and poems were conveyed before they could be written down. Until the beginning of the last century it was probably the way in which most people (even most educated people) most frequently encountered written language, as they listened not only to plays and sermons, but also to family members reading aloud from books and newspapers. We must assume that authors knew this and wrote partly with that in mind. Sound is a fundamental aspect of literature. It is also an aspect of language that predates language. It thus forms part of both the sense and the sensuality of language and literature. Most of us are born with hearing, we are even, so neurologists have now demonstrated, born with the memory of sounds we have heard in the womb; we recognise mummy’s voice and that helps us recognise her face, because different sensory experiences are mutually reinforcing.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of that approach to literary study which went under the name of ‘cultural materialism’ was that it failed to pay due attention to the materiality of the written language it was ostensibly describing. Close reading analysis went out of the window and as a result, students who can happily sit down with a pile of secondary reading to turn out an essay on sexuality are non-plussed when asked to describe how it is that something they are reading achieves its effects of sensuality. Although many, reaching back to conventionalised approaches to close reading that they learnt in some dim past at school will happily tell you that any succession of ‘s’ sounds in a sentence is reminiscent of a snake - whether that is relevant to the content of the piece under discussion or not.
We live in a noisy world, and we therefore all have to learn to listen to distinguish between sound that is significant and sound which is not. Though it is difficult to appreciate this today, sound presupposes silence. Many of our students never experience silence. Not only does the noise of the modern world drown out the natural sounds that are stuff of so much poetry written before the twentieth century, but it makes it even more difficult to learn to concentrate on those sounds that are significant. And if sound is neglected in literary criticism and teaching, the silence that surrounds words, that makes rhythm identifiable and that makes sound significant, is almost never heard. Students who only do silent reading never notice silent characters in a play, for example, and never experience the emotional charge of a pause.
The conference The Sound of English at the British Library in April 2006, organised by the English Subject Centre in conjunction with the British Library Sound Archive, was the first in what we hope might be a series of events to try to redress this balance. The day started with an introduction to the wealth of resources in the Sound Archive itself by Steve Cleary, Curator of Drama and Literature. This was followed by a demonstration of the Archive’s resources on regional speech, by Jonnie Robinson, Curator of English Accents and Dialects, who has recently completed an online archive of dialect recordings. Mick Short from the University of Lancaster (someone who is famous for his use of an inflatable ‘arbitrariness hammer’ on students who make those conventional statements on alliteration) ran a provocative workshop on ‘Teaching your grandmother to suck alliterative, assonantal and rhyming eggs’ in order to try to distinguish ‘which sound symbolic reds are living under the bed’. Derek Attridge from the University of York, equally provocatively, spoke about ‘how not to teach rhythm and metre’; they are, after all, two distinct things, although they are often confused. Finally the award wining performance poet and musician, Zena Edwards put all these aspects of sound and sensuality, language and literature together in a session that was part performance and part workshop.
Perhaps things are changing - and not just because of the popularity of audio books and celebrity author readings at literary festivals. This year’s BBC Reith Lectures, given by the pianist and composer Daniel Barenboim, were devoted to the cognitive and social importance of learning to listen, and there is growing research interest in the soundscapes of literary works and of the cultures that produced them. Given the success of The Sound of English event, and the feedback it generated, the English Subject Centre would therefore like to run some follow-up sessions. If you have any suggestions for such events, please contact Jonathan Gibson or me r.king@soton.ac.uk.
