Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Autobiographical Memoir, published after her death in 1876, that “when she was young it was not
thought proper for a young lady to study very conspicuously; she was expected to sit down in the parlour
with her sewing, listen to a book read aloud, and hold herself ready for callers. When the callers came,
conversation often turned naturally on the book just laid down, which must therefore be very carefully
chosen lest the shocked visitor should carry to the house where she paid her next call an account of the
deplorable laxity shown by the family she had left.”
On the other hand, one might read out loud so as to produce this much-regretted laxity. In 1781, Diderot
wrote amusingly about “curing” his bigoted wife, Nanette, who said she would not touch a book unless it
contained something spiritually uplifting, by submitting her over several weeks to a diet of raunchy
literature. “I have become her Reader. I administer three pinches of Gil Blas every day: one in the
morning, one after dinner and one in the evening. When we have seen the end of Gil Blas we shall go on
to The Devil on Two Sticks and The Bachelor of Salamanca and other cheering works of the same class. A
few years and a few hundred such readings will complete the cure. If I were sure of success, I should not
complain at the labour. What amuses me is that she treats everyone who visits her to a repeat of what I
have just read her, so conversation doubles the effect of the remedy. I have always spoken of novels as
frivolous productions, but I have finally discovered that they are good for the vapours. I will give Dr
Tronchin the formula next time I see him. Prescription: eight to ten pages of Scarron’s Roman comique;
four chapters of Don Quixote; a well-chosen paragraph from Rabelais; infuse in a reasonable quantity of
Jacques the Fatalist or Manon Lescaut, and vary these drugs as one varies herbs, substituting others of
roughly the same qualities, as necessary.”
Being read to allows the listener a confidential audience for the reactions which must usually take place
unheard, a cathartic experience which the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós described in one of his
Episodios Nacionales. Doña Manuela, a nineteenth-century middle-class reader, retires to bed with the
excuse of not wishing to become feverish by reading fully dressed under the light of the drawing-room
lamp during a warm Madrid summer night. Her gallant admirer, General Leopoldo O’Donnell, offers to
read to her out loud until she falls asleep, and chooses one of the pot-boilers that delight the lady, “one of
those convoluted and muddled plots, badly translated from the French”. Guiding his eyes with his index
finger, O’Donnell reads her the description of a duel in which a young blond man wounds a certain

---

Monsieur Massenot:
“How wonderful!” Doña Manuela exclaimed, enraptured. “That blond fellow, don’t you remember, is the
artilleryman who came from Brittany disguised as a pedlar. By his looks, he must be the natural son of the
duchess.… Carry on.… But according to what you just read,” Doña Manuela observed, “you mean to say
he cut off Massenot’s nose?”
“So it seems.… It says clearly: ‘Massenot’s face was covered with blood which ran like two rivulets across
his greying moustache.’ ”
“I’m delighted.… Serves him right, and let him come back for more. Now let’s see what else the author
will tell us.”
Because reading out loud is not a private act, the choice of reading material must be socially acceptable
to both the reader and the audience. At Steventon rectory, in Hampshire, the Austen family read to one
another at all times of the day and commented on the appropriateness of each selection. “My father reads
Cowper to us in the mornings, to which I listen when I can,” Jane Austen wrote in 1808. “We have got the
second volume of [Southey’s] Espriella’s Letters and I read it aloud by candlelight.” “Ought I to be very
pleased with [Sir Walter Scott’s] Marmion? As yet I am not. James [the eldest brother] reads it aloud
every evening — the short evening, beginning about ten, and broken by supper.” Listening to Madame de
Genlis’s Alphonsine, Austen is outraged: “We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad
translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure; and we changed it for [Lennox’s]
the Female Quixote, which now makes our evening amusement, to me a very high one, as I find the work
quite equal to what I remember it.” (Later, in Austen’s writings, there will be echoes of these books she
has heard read out loud, in direct references made by characters defined through their bookish likes or
dislikes: Sir Edward Denham dismisses Scott as “tame” in Sanditon, and in Northanger Abbey John
Thorpe remarks, “I never read novels” — though he immediately confesses to finding Fielding’s Tom
Jones and Lewis’s The Monk “tolerably decent”.)
Being read to for the purpose of purifying the body, being read to for pleasure, being read to for
instruction or to grant the sounds supremacy over the sense, both enrich and diminish the act of reading.
Allowing someone else to speak the words on a page for us is an experience far less personal than holding
the book and following the text with our own eyes. Surrendering to the reader’s voice — except when the
listener’s personality is overwhelming — removes our ability to establish a certain pace for the book, a
tone, an intonation that is unique to each person. It condemns the ear to someone else’s tongue, and in
that act a hierarchy is established (sometimes made apparent in the reader’s privileged position, in a
separate chair or on a podium) which places the listener in the reader’s grip. Even physically, the listener
will often follow the reader’s cue. Describing a reading among friends, Diderot wrote in 1759, “Without
conscious thought on either’s part, the reader disposes himself in the manner he finds most appropriate,
and the listener does the same.… Add a third character to the scene, and he will submit to the law of the
two former: it is a combined system of three interests.”
At the same time, the act of reading out loud to an attentive listener often forces the reader to become
more punctilious, to read without skipping or going back to a previous passage, fixing the text by means
of a certain ritual formality. Whether in the Benedictine monasteries or the winter rooms of the late
Middle Ages, in the inns and kitchens of the Renaissance or the drawing-rooms and cigar factories of the
nineteenth century — even today, listening to an actor read a book on tape as we drive down the highway
— the ceremony of being read to no doubt deprives the listener of some of the freedom inherent in the act
of reading — choosing a tone, stressing a point, returning to a best-loved passage — but it also gives the
versatile text a respectable identity, a sense of unity in time and an existence in space that it seldom has
in the capricious hands of a solitary reader.
Master-printer Aldus Manutius. (photo credit 8.5)

---