Hearing Hardy, talking Tolstoy : the audiobook narrator's voice and reader experience

The present chapter examines the implications of the voicing narrator's presence in the audio text and, more broadly, of affect and audiobook listening. I will be focusing the conceptual work around a discussion of unabridged audio treatments of the novels of Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy: very different figures in the nineteenth-century literary canon, but both writers credited for their capacity to evoke the world of sound. According to musicologist Murray Schafer, it is the "special talent of novelists like Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and Thomas Mann" to "have captured the soundscapes of their own places and times." Although having less of the "latent aurality" of Dickens's novels, Hardy's Wessex stories and novels lend themselves to audio performance. His use of the vernacular of the rural workers of Dorset calls on a narrator's skills of characterization and voicing-markedly so in Under the Greenwood Tree. Tolstoy presents challenges of quite another order to production teams and voice actors, particularly when the length (and thus duration) of the work is concerned. The cast of characters in War and Peace-a cast so large that it has traditionally presented problems to translators needing to bring to the English language the idiosyncratic argot, vernacular, and diverse characteristics of speech of a wide variety of stations and classes of persons-presents, by corollary, an almost overwhelming challenge to a performer doing a voice performance of the work. Thus whereas listeners to the audiobook productions of the unabridged War and Peace embrace the translation of form for its capacity to clarify action, and distinguish to the ear one character from another, the defrayed labor of listening is gained at the expense of the phenomenal amount of work involved in voicing the performance. But the labor of performance gives body to voice and is instrumental in shaping the presence of the narrator.