Literature needs to be heard:


I particularly remember Basil Rathbone's readings of Poe and Hawthorne. I loved The Hobbit performed by Nicol Williamson and listened to it dozens of times. As I approached 10, I discovered the tragedies of Shakespeare with actors like Paul Scofield and Claire Bloom. I remember recovering from the flu while listening again and again to Anthony Quayle reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. To this day I cherish an abridged version of Whitman's Leaves of Grass with each syllable enunciated and expanded to the limits of possible meaning by the booming voice of Orson Welles.

[After all, wasn't narrative in the beginning always oral? Read on]

[Let us remember this quote from E.M.Forster's Aspects of the Novel:

A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. 'The king died and then the queen died,' is a story. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: 'The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.' This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say: 'And then?' If it is in a plot we ask: 'Why?' That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by 'And then--and then----' They can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also."]

Rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonc