The pleasures of reading aloud

pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff!
Hobble leg, hobble leg,
Hobble leg owhmmm!
Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under!
pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff!

This is the voice of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, as recorded by Thomas Edison in 1890 and phonetically or farcically transcribed in a novel by Nicholson Baker over a century later. Drowned in static, ‘valley of death’ sounds like ‘bottle of fluff’, ‘rode the six hundred’ becomes ‘rubbed the stuff under’ and ‘Hobble leg owhmmm’ is — of course — ‘Half a league onward’. It’s as if Edison had invented a machine for dismantling sense, or a mechanical ‘medium’ for psychical research (nonsense and disembodied voices both being High Victorian hobbies), bringing messages from an already posthumous laureate.

Verse came first in the recorded history of the voice, because the tinfoil cylinder could only play for a few minutes, and was suited to nursery rhymes or snippets but not much else. ‘Mary had a little lamb’ were the first infant words that Edison’s brainchild repeated back to him, in December 1877. We need to recover a sense of the technological comedy and hauntedness of that moment.

Uncertainties surrounding the new medium were more than acoustic, and The Untold Story of the Talking Book is their secret history. Audio was ashamed of itself from the start, an apologetic alternative to reading. Even now a whiff of illegitimacy lingers: when Colm Tóibín compares reading to listening as ‘the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV’ you know what he means.

The confusion of terms is itself telling — the absence of a stable word for an act of listening that is also a version of reading. And what to call the results? Phonographic books, talking books, recorded books, spoken word, books on tape, audiobooks — the names mark the eureka moments of cylinder, shellac, LP, cassette and CD download.