Proust Moment, May 7, 2003

The Sincere Taste of Mamma

From what I gather, there are two distinct philosophies among people who produce audiobooks. The common one is that the book should be read with great expression, adopting different voices for the characters and so forth -- you know, make it "come alive." The other is to read clearly and distinctly but with an overall minimum of drama, not letting one's voice come between author and reader. I've heard brilliant examples of both. Frank Muller's reading of Moby-Dick is an intense dramatic monologue that is riveting even when the book is at its most knotty and ruminative. Wolfram Kandinsky's reading of The Education of Henry Adams, by contrast, shows how a focused and perfectly articulate voice can become a vessel for the author's brilliant prose.

Like most people who read aloud to children, Marcel's mother is the dramatic type. She goes for the gusto, squeezing all the drama out of Sand's old-fashioned tale and skipping over any love scenes that might trigger questions. Her taste in literature is not high, and she appears to have fond in Sand her type of book, one that confirms her own sentimental view of life.

While Mamma reads aloud much as she reads privately -- revelling in what she can relate to -- it must be added that she nonetheless reads with all the warmth of her great, good soul.

Marcel is of course a far more creative reader and listener, whose interest lies not so much in a story but in what the story suggests; every book conjuring a kind of imaginative Ur-book in his mind, waiting for a magic touch. Mama's censorious ellipses add an intoxicating layer of mystery.

"Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen Francois le Champi, whose reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality in my eyes and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist. That prepared me in advance to imagine that Francois le Champi contained something inexpressibly delicious. The course of the narrative, where it tended to arouse curiosity or melt to pity, certain modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader, and which, with a little experience, he may recognise as 'common form' in novels, seemed to me then distinctive—for to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself—an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar essence of Francois le Champi. Beneath the everyday incidents, the commonplace thoughts and hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an intonation, a rhythmic utterance fine and strange. The 'action' began: to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd changes which take place in the relations between the miller's wife and the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of love can explain, seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I could readily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of Champi, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own bright colour, purpurate and charming. If my mother was not a faithful reader, she was, none the less, admirable when reading a work in which she found the note of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice. It was the same in her daily life, when it was not works of art but men and women whom she was moved to pity or admire: it was touching to observe with what deference she would banish from her voice, her gestures, from her whole conversation, now the note of joy which might have distressed some mother who had long ago lost a child, now the recollection of an event or anniversary which might have reminded some old gentleman of the burden of his years, now the household topic which might have bored some young man of letters. And so, when she read aloud the prose of George Sand, prose which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral distinction which Mamma had learned from my grandmother to place above all other qualities in life, and which I was not to teach her until much later to refrain from placing, in the same way, above all other qualities in literature; taking pains to banish from her voice any weakness or affectation which might have blocked its channel for that powerful stream of language, she supplied all the natural tenderness, all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to phrases which seemed to have been composed for her voice, and which were all, so to speak, within her compass. She came to them with the tone that they required, with the cordial accent which existed before they were, which dictated them, but which is not to be found in the words themselves, and by these means she smoothed away, as she read on, any harshness there might be or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling."

--"Overture," Swann's Way