Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Savoring Sound
Posted by Zach in News

Recently, I’ve been reading ballads. I happened upon one called “The Three Ravens.” It was published in 1611, but it is probably older. Perhaps you’ve encountered it through the magical tones of Peter Paul and Mary. Basically, it’s a song about three ravens discussing breakfast. Because they’re scavengers, they consider eating the body of a recently fallen knight. Unfortunately for them, his falcon and hounds guard the body. A fallow doe (mystical representation of the knight’s sweetheart) then comes along, kisses his wounds, and bears him on her back. She buries him in a lake and then dies before evening falls.

So, despite missing breakfast (and very likely lunch and dinner) the crows are still good sports and say:

“God send euery Gentlemen,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman.”

The group with the perky name, “Boiled in Lead” chose to record a somewhat more pessimistic version called “Twa Corbies,” or “Two Ravens.” In this version, the dog and falcon run off to chase other game, and the poor knight’s sweetheart immediately takes another mate. Needless to say, the birds pick his skeleton clean and the ballad ends with these words.

“Oer his white banes, when they we bare,
The wind sall blow for evermair.”

The nihilistic turn is a bit unpleasant, but I’m struck by the idea of a story that benefits more from auditory transmission than visual transmission. The wind blowing over white bones might be an interesting visual, but it is certainly a powerful auditory suggestion (I’m loathe to call it “auditory image”). In the early 1600s, English literacy rates (especially in the country) were still suffering under of the high cost of printing. The oral transmission of information was still the primary means. Even in the latter part of the 1600s when literacy rates were much higher (30% for males in the country and 80% for males in London) folks didn’t go to see a play. According to Pepys diaries, they went to hear a play. The auditory bias persisted.

Throughout the 1800s many people continued to experience stories through the ear. Listening to someone read was an evening pastime that stretched from the Regency Era of Austen to the Victorian era of Dickens. Perhaps aural sophistication is necessary for Poetry to survive. At any rate, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Longfellow had plenty of appreciators.

Though poetry has lost its popular appeal, isn’t it interesting that in a spectacle heavy society, literature still retains a bias toward music/rhythm? For instance despite the barrenness of post-Hemingway prose, Tom Wolfe is considered a better writer than say, Michael Crichton, and Helprin is critically preferred to Clive Cussler. Even though an ambitious novelist strives to dazzle the inner eye, he dazzles it via the inner ear.

Consider this sentence from Freddy and Fredricka by Mark Helprin, “The wind was luffing over the tablelands of Skye as a storm built up at sea, but its slow passage promised hours more of sunshine and that the lakes would stay blue.”

By contrast, Michael Crichton publishes long screenplays that are bound and marketed as novels. Like the auditory fans of Romantic poets, Crichton has no shortage of visual fans. These readers are grateful for the minimization of the narrative voice and the absence of anything that would distract from the action.

I wonder if the day will come when our popular preoccupation with images (Crichton does sell a zillion books) will become our critical preoccupation (but his books are dismissed as pop fiction). Maybe a visual obsession will pluck clean the skeleton of rhythmic aural prose, and the wind will whistle through its whitened bones.

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