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>> This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
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>> Generalizations are always problematic, but when it comes
to Western culture, there is one generalization
that will not get you into any trouble at all.
Western culture is thoroughly phyloscopic.
Phyloscopic is a fancy way of saying
that we privilege vision over any of our other senses.
Scope from the Greek scope pain to watch.
I'm amazed at the enormous efforts we have put
into enhancing our video technologies,
while we let our audio technologies degenerate all together.
Our computers and television give us the most extraordinary
high-definition images, yet those same devices come
with the most god-awful sound systems.
We don't mind listening to Edge of 17
on a radically compressed YouTube audio file,
as long as we can see every curl and Stevie Nicks hair.
The audio technology is out there, we just don't avail ourselves
of it very much.
Not anywhere near the extent that we avail ourselves
of video technologies.
It seems that on our scale of sensory values,
listening comes in well-blows seeing, and probably comes
in below taste, too, since most of us would spend our money
on a good restaurant meal rather than on good speakers
for our cars.
But I can tell you this much, there's all the difference
in the world between a good sound system and a bad one.
Whether you're listening to me pronouncing these words,
as you are now, or listening to the bass, drums,
and guitar flourishes coming up.
[ Music ]
Looks so good, it looks so cool, you're planning to live
into the...
Why is it that we live in a visual culture rather
than an audio-visual culture?
The answer to that question takes us way back, all the way
back to the ancient Greeks whose philosophers determine
so much of our subsequent Western values and thought.
Plato, for example, did not have much use for hearing.
He conceived of knowledge as a kind of intellectual vision.
The knowing mind does not hear the truth, it sees it
by contemplating the ideal form of things.
Plato's word for the ideal form is edos,
which means the visible aspect.
And our word idea comes from the Greek Idaya, literally,
the look of a thing, from Edane to C.
Ultimate knowledge was conceived of by Plato
and Aristotle as theoretical knowledge, again,
from the Greek word, theodane to look at.
This typically Greek and above all platonic privileging
of sight as the highest mode of knowledge stands
in contrast to the Hebrew tradition where knowledge
or access to God comes about primarily through hearing God's
call and commandments rather than from viewing him in his form.
That's why when Philo Judeus of Alexandria set out
to plateanize Jewish philosophy in the first few decades
after the death of Jesus, one of the first things he did was
to insist on what he called the conversion of ears into eyes.
Commenting on the phrase in Exodus, which says,
"And all the people saw the voice of God."
Philo remarks, I quote him,
"The human voice is to be heard, but God's voice is in truth
to be seen."
Why?
Because that, which God speaks, is not words, but works,
which the eye discriminates better than the year.
This same Philo claim that when Jacob takes on the name Israel
as described in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob transitions from hearing
to seeing, quote, "Jacob is the name for learning and progressing.
That is, for the powers that depend on hearing.
But Israel is the name for perfection, for it means seeing God."
False etymology, by the way.
Philo, however, goes on to say, I quote,
This is an example of the kind of allegorical interpretation
of Hebrew scriptures that eventually led to a fusion of
plateanism and Christianity in the West, a fusion that once again
privileged spiritual vision is the most exalted mode of knowing
and relating to the divine.
But what about hearing?
What about listening?
What about this other fundamental sensory mode that attunes
us to the world that mediates our relationship to nature, to God,
or to one another?
I mean the auditory.
How do things stand when it comes to hearing and listening?
That's the question we're devoting our show to today.
And the person who joins me in the studio is currently writing a
book on the history of listening.
And she has many thoughts to share with us, not only about the Greek
and Hebrew traditions, but also about the role of that
listening is played in traditional folk culture, especially
Russian culture, as well as in the modern and contemporary
errors in general.
Gabriela Safran is the professor in the Department of Slavix
here at Stanford and is currently the chair of Stanford's
division of literature, cultures and languages.
We will be posting her distinguished academic profile on the
website of entitled opinions.
But I for one am eager to hear her talk about listening.
So let me welcome her to the program without further ado.
Gabriela, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thanks.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you, Robert.
So we agreed that we would try to cover four important aspects
of the history of listening in our show today.
The first one being the visual versus auditory as a way of knowing
the second has to do with the modes of listening and pre-modern
cultures in the third.
We'll talk about listening experiences in the modern era.
And if time permits, we'll move on to listening in the present.
So I already made some comments about the visual versus the
auditory in my opening remarks, but I'm sure there's a lot more
that you'd like to add to that topic.
Yeah, I'm very, very intrigued by the kind of dichotomy that
you've set up between Judaism and Christianity, between the Hebrew
Bible, the Greek Bible, and kind of linking the older Jewish
tradition to hearing and listening and the newer Christian one
to the visual, and indeed to our Western ideas as they've
developed.
I think there's, you know, there's so much truth to what you're
saying, the fundamental prayer in Judaism, the is the Shama, which is
the kind of prayer that affirms monotheism that says, listen,
listen Israel, there's just one God, right?
Listen or people sometimes translated here, here, oh, Israel.
And certainly from from inside Judaism and from inside the Hebrew
Bible, there's a kind of anxiety about the visual and a kind of
preference to preference of listening, over seeing.
And a sense that that the visual is dangerous.
The visual is a route maybe to away from monotheism, a route
to starting to believe in more than one God.
And if you look from inside the Jewish tradition, you see a kind
of suspicion of Christianity and specifically of its use of the
visual, you know, Christianity uses the visual certainly.
The Al-Sizam Eastern Orthodoxy images are used and that religion
kind of grows strong from it.
And you sort of look from inside Judaism and you think, you see
Jewish thinkers thinking, this is this is dangerous.
This is sort of leads you toward away from monotheism.
But but I think if we look more closely, what we see in both of
these religious traditions is a kind of concern about what
effective hearing or listening is versus ineffective hearing
or listening.
Remember Psalm 135, if you quote the King James version of the
Bible, the idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work
of men's hands, they have mouths, but they speak not eyes have
they, but they see not.
They have ears, but they hear not.
Neither is there any breath in their mouths.
They that make them are like unto them.
So is everyone that trust in them.
Right.
So so the Psalmist here in number 135 is saying those heathen,
right?
Those people from before, from before the Israelites, those
people are there's some incorrect hearing going on around them.
And seeing and seeing.
Yeah.
All of the senses are not working for them.
But but if you kind of focus on hearing, they have, they have
ears, but they hear not.
They seem like they're hearing.
Maybe they're hearing, but they're not listening.
Why can I see, but they're not hearing?
Why do you think there's a specific paranoia about the visual
and monotheism?
And from inside Judaism.
I think that it has to do with this anxiety about the idol
worshippers, that the people that this
relates are constructing themselves against, they they
like to, as we see in Psalm 135, they like to portray
other religions as religions of false
constructions of God, religions that that create these, you
know statues and that worship them and the and what false is
especially this sense that those, those other religions
believe that there's a kind of listening happening, happening
by those statues that's not real.
And I think that the Israelites construct, they imagine their
deity as one who can hear.
So they can hear each other Israelites hear each other.
They say they're Shama and then they think their God can hear
them.
And because that's so powerful, that's so powerfully expressed
in the Hebrew Bible, we really associated with with the
Israelites, but what I find fascinating is that if we move on
to to the Greek Bible to the Christian Bible, you see that
this same, the same concern about good hearing, correct
hearing, hearing that's really effective, that that's something
that the that the writers of the Gospels share as well.
You know, in Matthew 13, he's talking about, he's citing
Jesus and Jesus is explaining why he speaks in parables.
And and Jesus says, therefore, speak eye to them in parables
because they seeing see not and hearing they hear not neither
do they understand.
So there's this sense in in the Gospels as well that we need
to distinguish good hearing from bad hearing.
Oh, for sure.
I mean, the Gospels are are very Jewish in their in their
sources.
The juxtaposition that I was playing with this more about
Greek and especially platonic philosophy, which privileges
vision and the way the Christian church fathers took over a lot
of these platonic elements and and fused with Christianity
giving a certain sort of primacy to vision in their in their
theology, specifically speaking.
Now, if we go back to the role that hearing plays in the in the
Hebrew scriptures, the idea that God speaks, I think that
Philo really distorts the facts about the facts, distorts might
understanding of the role that Yahweh's voice plays there in
the old passages there where it's above all the voice of
commandment.
And it's a voice that calls on his people.
So there is something in it, which is not just as he says the
works that God through his works becomes visible and you
hear him through through seeing.
And I the one question I'd like to ask you is whether you
believe that there's something about the way in which history
has such an important role to play in the Judeo Christian
notion of a more rectilinear time as opposed to the Greek
notion of cyclical time.
In so far as hearing our sense of hearing is something that is
profoundly embedded in the temporal.
You have to wait until I finish my sentence before you can
understand what it is I'm trying to say.
Unlike vision where you can look at a totality of elements,
almost in one sort of syncretic moment, which is why the Greeks
took vision as the kind of most divine sense because you can see
the hold in one instant whereas with hearing you hear
things in time.
And therefore there's a temporal aspect to the, you know,
just on the very physiological level that is not the case
with vision and that therefore it's maybe not by accident
that Judaism and then with Christianity gives us a kind of
linear narrative kind of temporal notion of something unfolding,
God unfolding his providential design through history rather
than in a transcendent, a temporal space.
That's very fascinating.
I'm not, I'm trying to think about how to respond.
I think if you, you know, what I, what I've studied is sort
of late 19th century, early 20th century, Russian Empire.
And I'm especially interested in the interactions between Jews
and Christians in that space.
And you know, Russian, Russian, Christian culture,
Eastern Orthodox culture is heavily influenced by Greek models,
of course.
I think what you, what you tend to see there is a sense
of a sense of Jewish time as being very present-oriented.
So Jews, in fact, Judaism is interested in the end of time.
It's, it drives toward.
Messianic.
Yeah, it's Messianic.
It, it imagines that you're, you're moving toward some end.
And that things that happen in the present have to make sense
in relation to the end.
And in that way, of course, it's very similar to, to Christian culture.
But when you look kind of on the ground at this, this situation
I'm familiar with, which is Christians observing Jews
and Jews observing Christians, what you see as Christians thinking
about Jews that they, they live very much in the present
and that they're very, very noisy, that they're, they're somehow,
loud and that they're, their worship is loud, that they, you have these fascinating descriptions.
One, for instance, by Dstayevsky who was in prison in Siberia in the 1850s.
And in his prison, there was a Jewish prisoner.
And he writes about this Jewish prisoner, he's siphoned each in his memoirs.
They're called the memoirs, I called Notes from the House of the Dead.
And Dstayevsky describes how every Friday night this, this Jewish prisoner,
he's siphoned each was, was allowed to perform his religious rituals.
And so he would like candles and he would say prayers.
And Dstayevsky describes this as sort of very oral, very performative,
very, very present, very physical in a way that does not really, um,
that doesn't parallel ways in which Dstayevsky describes Eastern Orthodox ritual.
That's pretty, that's spirituality.
And spirituality.
Yeah.
So you have a sense, I think that that, that orality, um, that somehow,
Jewishness is perceived as oral, um, for Dstayevsky,
the Dstayevsky perceives Jewishness as oral and, and perceives Christianity as perhaps
more visual, he's very interested in, um, depictions of Jesus, uh,
the, especially of course, um, the crucified Jesus, the, the dying Jesus,
the dead Jesus, that's those images are very fascinating for him.
So I think what we have is a, um, sort of literary tradition that sort of
heightens and re, re-inscribes this idea of, um, Judaism being about sound and listening
and Christianity being about looking and seeing.
Right.
And, uh, you know, let's, we'll move on now to our part two, but if you have a religion
that believes in the, the doctrine of the incarnation, namely of, of God becoming
human, that's already the, um, let's say the theological foundation for this
phyloscopia that I was referring to.
And so far as God now has become visible here in our midst, in our presence
at, in human form.
And therefore the incarnation of according to a lot of Christian theologians is
really the basis for why there is this massive iconographic tradition of,
the representation of, uh, you know, the divine invisible forms.
Okay.
That's very, that's very much, uh, the case for Russian Orthodox theology,
sort of Russian Orthodox, um, icon, the theology of icons is really based on the
idea that just as, um, the divine can come down to earth and take on human form
with the incarnation.
So the image of the divine can take on material form in the icon and any,
any Orthodox church that you go into, um, will be full of icons.
And they won't just be pictures, you know, in the mind of the believer.
They're, they're pictures, but they're also windows or their doors.
They're, they're ways of accessing the divine and you do it through sight,
not, not through hearing, but through sight.
Right.
In fact, I did a show a few years ago with our colleague, Bisa
Pincheva in art history on the icon and, and, uh, the Virgin Mary and, and the way
that these icons are actually animate with a certain presence, uh, visual,
but that she claims that there's the other senses are brought into it because
you have, um, you know, the incense and you have music and so forth.
But anyway, your, uh, this whole phenomenon of listening, obviously,
it, it goes far beyond the traditions that we're talking about because we're
talking about one of the fundamental, um, uh, uh, senses by which we perceive, uh,
all sorts of things from nature to, uh, each other.
And we, that we can only do a very tiny select history of it here with you
today. Now, your specialization, as you said, is Russian culture, 1819,
early 20th century. What can you say about, uh, the cultural history of
listening, uh, jumping into your, uh, the field that you're most comfortable
with here? Um, well, I'm, I'm very, I'm very fascinated by the idea that
there's, uh, there's shifts in how we listen that listening is something that you
can historicize, that you can really, that it's meaningful to say people listen
differently in 1500 versus 1800 versus today. Um, you know, I think we're,
we literary scholars tend to think that you write in genres and forms,
right? And, and we tend to certainly linguistic and virologists agree that you
speak in genres and forms, you know, our utterances have a kind of shape. And, um,
and they take on meaning within a kind of form or a shape. And, and I think it
makes sense also for us to think about genres of listening and how they can
change over time, how your act of listening today, right now to this radio
show is different from other acts of listening that you might be performing,
you know, listening to your family, listening to listening in a court, listening to
someone accuse you. That's a different kind of listening. And, um, and, and
listening is, is something it can be active. You're doing it. You're not, it's
not just something, you know, sound being imposed upon you. You're listening.
And so what I'm very, uh, what I'm writing about is the idea that, um, there's a
real, there's an important shift in genres of listening, modes of listening in, um,
in the Russian Empire. Um, at some point around 1860s, 1870s, um, that, you know,
before the 1860s, in the Russian Empire, you have, um, such surfoning
society, you have 80% of the population are slaves, um, very, very archaic
legal system. And, and there's a certain kind of listening that happened in that
context. And then you have this shift where suddenly surface of freed in the 1860s,
a new legal system comes in new professions, new kinds of ways of living. And
people start to listen differently. And I, I think we should pay attention to
that and think about how maybe we can reread some great works of Russian
literature, recognizing that they're occurring at the moment of this shift in
listening. So what would you say were the dominant genres of listening prior to
these changes you're describing? Well, I think the way people listen in a slave
owning society is, um, is very specific. And there's, there's actually great, um,
historians of the US, um, the US South in the, um, pre civil war era who
talk about how there was a kind of, uh, valorization of a certain kind of
silence. So slave owners would like their slaves to be not too loud. They want
to, they want to experience the, the plantation is quiet. Or they, they can also
appreciate a certain kind of, um, controlled sound singing, contained sort of
singing. And, um, and I think what you, um, what you see in the Russian context is
very similar to what you see in the US context in terms of pre, pre 1860s, pre
emancipation that, um, that you have listening that's, uh, very class, class
based, right? The, the people in charge, the landowners, the surf owners speak
and the surf's listening. And what's interesting about Russian, as opposed to
English, is that these roles are reflected in the language itself. So in Russian,
the verb for, uh, for to listen slushets and the verb for to obey is slushets.
It's the reflective form of that same verb. And, um, and there's an adjective
plus slushly, which means obedient. So if you're obedient, then you're a listener.
Right. That, um, that's all fascinating. I was thinking about the origin of the
blues. We did a two-part show on the blues and then the call and response origins in the fields,
uh, you know, through, um, song and sound and anyway, but that's a, that's a
different issue. So, and I would imagine that storytelling was a, uh, genre of
listening among the surf's that was, it must be hard for us to imagine in, um, in
our own era because of all the changes that have taken place in the society as, as large
and, and that, um, when, when, what have to use a lot of imagination to, to, to, um, reconstruct
what the, the listening to an oral recitation of a story would have been there. Yeah,
and it's, it's a very, um, it's, it's an interesting question. Of course, there's all this
great work by father Walter Ong on, um, orality and literacy where, where he asks, you know,
how do you, if you're not literate or if you're not very literate and if you grow up in an,
an oral society and you, you listen, you listen to stories, you listen to songs, does
that make you think differently? Can we ever recapture the experience of listening as, for
someone who's primary mode of taking in information, taking in words is listening. You know,
we, for whom our primary mode of taking in words is, is looking and, and, and reading, maybe
we can't ever, we can't ever get at how it felt to just listen. And what about the, um, the
orthodox mass? Was that highly, um, participatory and where there, there was a lot of listening involved
and responding? He know there's a choir, you listen to the choir and sermons, you know, sermons
are not so traditional in Russian orthodoxy. I mean, today, yes, but in the period I study sermons
were rare, they were once or twice a year. Um, and I don't think there's such a sense that it was part
of the duty of an orthodox priest to sort of say his own words. I think the priest really
said the words that were, that were part of the liturgy. So, so that's, um, that I think
is a kind of listening that it's, um, that we, we tend to not, uh, think about enough.
What does it mean to listen to something that you listen to every year or to listen to something
that you listen to over and over? I think we, especially here in academia, we privilege
the, um, taking in of information that's new. And we're very interested in, um, what happens
when you read something for the first time. Of course, we're teaching students who are reading
things for the first time or we talk to them or we hope we're saying to them things they're
hearing for the first time. So we get, I think, a little bit too, too focused on, on that, that
kind of information going in, the sensory experience, the listening or hearing, listening
or seeing experience of information going in. But I think there's a lot of important listening
experiences that have to do with hearing it again, hearing it, richually experiencing pleasure
from hearing something over and over again, being part of a maybe cyclical, um, sort of calendar
in which you know you're going to hear a certain liturgy because it's Easter and, and
you, you feel sort of satisfied that it was Easter because you heard that liturgy. And
then of course, if you're an orthodox believer, you go around and you say to everybody,
Christ is risen, he is truly risen, you're speaking and listening to each other and that,
um, that affirms for you something about who you are and what you believe.
Yeah. The modern day equivalent of that would be like the people who go to rock concerts
to go in here, the song that they've listened to a thousand times, we perform their
life, you know, in a ritualistic kind of mass of the rock concert.
Gabriela, when we move to the modern period and there are all sorts of huge inventions
and changes that can't but affect that transformation in the genres of listening. And I hate
to brutally kind of yank us into a completely different context. But could you say a few
things about this sort of the concussions that take place in the modern era when it comes
to listening? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because we, because the visual, you know,
our experience of the, the word as a visual thing has always been mediated, right? You
don't have the written word until you have the technology of writing and that, that
seems very natural to us. But what's interesting about technologies of sound is that
they get introduced all of a sudden, you know, there isn't, and then there is, um, especially
with, um, so something I'm very fascinated by is the gramophone, which, you know,
1890s, there's gramophones. People are traveling around. They're traveling to little Russian
villages far away from, from anything and they're bringing a gramophone. And, and that's
suddenly, imagine how that must have just blown people's minds to, to realize that the
word, the spoken word, which had always been so tied to that moment of hearing it, suddenly
it can be untied from that moment and heard again later. I'm convinced that it's a momentous
cultural revolution when you can hear the dead speak in their own voices for the first
time through recording technologies and not have the actual presence of the person, you know,
it behind the voice. And, you know, I believe that the poet traditionally has served as
the voice for the dead, whether the epic poet, like, um, through a disheous who goes and talks
to the dead in Homer or whether it's Orpheus who descends into the underworld of the lyric
voice, this kind of traditional role that the poet has played now, all of a sudden with
recording technologies, we can hear Martin Luther King still today in his voice or we can
also see through images the same thing. So it must have had a, you know, huge impact as
you're suggesting. Here, you know, you let me this article that I read through it's by
Hillel Schwartz on the indefensible ear history and there there's a passage where if I
can just read it, maybe we can talk about some of the things that he introduced it, the
centrality of hearing itself was being reassessed at the turn of the 20th century. We
are told by cultural critics and historians that modernity has been marked by a supreme victory
of the visual over the oral in the hierarchy of the senses, but to people between 1870
and the First World War, the most amazing new elements in modern society were keenly oral in
their impact and influence. The player piano, the gramophone, the telephone, the radio,
the subway train, the elevated train and during the Great War, the loudspeaker and high
powered extremely loud artillery and then he goes on, she goes on more, more sort of examples
and there you mentioned the gramophone, but it's true also that the gramophone is part of a larger
nexus of a soundscape that is very different than what it was just a few decades earlier.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely true and that's, you know, that's what I find fascinating,
is what I've been researching is when you suddenly have the introduction of all these
technologies, the change, your experience of listening that allow you to hear things you couldn't have
heard before and that make those things that you might have already been hearing much, much louder,
or that just produce new, there's just new experiences that are allowed in like trains, you know,
in a way that you just didn't have before, I think what you see in Russian literature and I'm sure
it's not only in Russian literature from after the 1870s is people writing about wanting to avoid
that excess sound, people writing very kind of persuasively and kind of compellingly about
about wanting to turn off the voice of the other, wanting to escape, wanting to get out of that
new loud sphere and kind of fantasizing about about pushing it away, shutting it down and at the same
time I think what you see in these, in these fictions and I'm thinking about stories I've found
by Tolstoy and to stay up ski and check off at the same time I think there's an awareness that
you can't escape it. So say something about those authors if you don't mind about where listening
comes into those fictions you're referring to. Well, so I found this short story by Chekhov called
Drama that's from the 1880s where it's about a writer who's just sitting sitting at home in his
studio in his home and a woman comes to him and says you need to listen to my play that I
wrote you need to listen to it right now and he kind of weakly protests but she comes in and she
starts speaking she reads it to him and he kind of goes crazy as he listens to her and then he
throws a paperweight at her and he kills her and then he's put on trial and he's exonerated
and what's interesting to me is that and I think I'm the first one to realize this but so
a couple years after that Tolstoy who loves Chekhov he loves Chekhov's well he loves some of Chekhov's
stories but he loves this story for sure and he he actually loves reading it out loud and he loves
having other people read it out loud to him it's a short story it's five pages you can all go home
and find it and read it out loud so Tolstoy loves this this story and just two years after Chekhov
writes this story Tolstoy writes his own story which is a very famous story called The Croixer Sonata
and the Croixer Sonata is about it's set on a train it's about a man a conversation on a train in
which one man says to his fellow passenger you may have heard of me I'm very famous I killed my wife
this is how it happened hi my wife met this she's a piano player and she met a violinist and
she started to perform with his violinist and she and when they performed the Croixer Sonata
I felt very jealous and one day they performed the Croixer Sonata and he says and I feel okay and I go out
of town and then I hear that she's seen this violinist again and I become incredibly jealous and I
go take the train back to Moscow and I go into where my wife is playing piano and I kill her
and then he's he's also exonerated and and what I find fascinating is that these two stories which
which are so close in time I mean they're about sort of familiar topics of 19th century literature
romance violence you know things we all know about but at the same time they're about listening
and they're about how listening can drive you crazy listening can be too much and what's what's interesting
to me is that they're on the one hand they're about kind of familiar listening experiences listening
to a play listening to music but they also both of these stories talk about listening in court
because in both of these stories the the main character the murderer is ultimately put on trial and that
knew that that kind of listening listening in a court having trials by jury in which
you know people get to speak in their own defense and they have lawyers and
and then there's a jury that listens and it it issues a verdict that was a completely new thing
in the Russian Empire that was something that only came into place in the 1870s so at the time of
Chekhov and Tolstoy's stories this was an institution that was only in place for you know a decade
and it was it was very new and it was very weird the idea that you could people maybe people who
were who were peasants who were very poor could be on a jury where they would listen to somebody
who might be an aristocrat tell his story and then they the jurors could decide that the person was
guilty that was a completely new sort of listening experience that Russians were kind of dumped into
in the 1870s and that I think was tremendously uncomfortable as sort of symbolic of a kind of
modernity that was full of these very difficult listening experiences and that people wanted to
maybe escape yeah I wonder about the phenomenon of hearing voices inside your head when you were describing
the husband who murders his wife and and this I don't know what the history of listening
says about this I I'm trying to think of any kind of classical stories about
protagonists hearing voices inside their head and going crazy and then doing something and I can't
think of any I'm wondering if it has something to do with the the excess of noise you were referring
to earlier where in we live in an era where things are so loud or the volume just amped up so much
that this is a psychological symptom of some modernity where you start hearing voices inside
your head and I could be completely wrong about that but it is interesting the way when you're
talking about the actual situation of a jury in a court trial that you hear the verdict or you listen
first thing you listen to the evidence and then you end then you hear the verdict but this is also
the fundamental example of what the voice of conscience has always been for a certain certainly
in the among the Puritans where they heard an internal voice which they had to associate with a
voice of God we said this is wrong this is or this is right and that voice of conscience is one that
has something about the tribunal about it because it is passing judgment but it's silent but the
sanctity of the voice of conscience is something you know that was a huge hugely important for
the Protestant Reformation for sure so it's it's really quite interesting when you start putting
these things together and so a history of listening has to be totally fascinating you can't go wrong with it
no well of course that's my feeling right and so you have you've written that Russia's most
prompt I'm quoting you your Russia's most prominent writers are motivated to experiment with
depictions of listening as unexpectedly difficult requiring filtering through psychological barriers
and background noise and that sentence of yours there is something I got me thinking also about hearing
voices and the background noise and the psychological barriers so what is this difficulty that you
find represented in the text you work with the difficulty of listening properly yeah I mean in this
this very famous Tolstoy story the court's there's anada there's there's a lot of references to
how difficult it is to hear the story on the train right so this main protagonist the murderer is on
this train speaking to our our frame our frame narratee right the guy who's hearing the story and
and he keeps referring to how the train made all these sounds rumbling over the tracks and then
there's these other passengers in the compartment who who don't turn out to want to hear the story of
the murderer but they they make noise going out of the compartment and then the murderer himself
makes noises that that are inadvertent he makes these kind of clearing his throat noises I've always
wondered if if he has Tourette's or if there's some kind of of a physiological thing that Tolstoy
is gesturing toward when he talks about how it's it's hard to you have to sort of filter out what
what the the real story is from the sounds that the that the murderer is making that the story
teller is making it and when the story teller when the murderer talks about his wife playing piano
he uses that same term for sounds that Zwookia that the that the near AT uses when he's talking about
how it's hard to understand the murderer so you get this this sense of of a world that's full of noise
but in which it's very hard to figure out what it is you're supposed to what meaning you're
supposed to derive from all these sounds well it makes sense to me because we I think you and I are
both musicians it and you know what it's like when you want to listen to a some music but most in most
cases that music very few people sit there and actually listen to it very attentively it's always
in the background as part of the noise and sometimes you know the people who are really committed to
music get get exasperated at the way in which for a lot of people music is something that plays
in the background and it commingles promiscuously with the tinkling of glasses and conversation and
other kind of noise and things like that is just that is something certainly that an author
would also have the same anxiety about I imagine because when you write a when you write a novel
you are expecting maximum attention and concentration from the reader because I believe reading
is a form of listening more than it is a visual a visual sense and you have to hear the voice in the
prose or the poetry whatever it is and that requires blotting out a lot of the background noise
and I guess the modern era the lament is that it's just louder and louder noisier and noisier
and our friend Hillel Schwartz my quoted earlier says well every era believes that
it's the loudest and most raucous and vulgar and so forth but so it's almost generational every
generation thinks that their children are louder and more raucous and then they were
who knows if it's objectively the case but we do live in extremely loud environment there's no
doubt about that and listening as a form of concentrated attention it's something I think that
you have to find sanctuaries for and literature might be one of the places where you do that
yeah yeah I mean I think we you know we yearn for a kind of authentic and singular experience
and we yearn we fantasize that we're going to get it through listening we fantasize that we'll get it
through the voice you know I think we I've noticed that we tend to easily be skeptical about how
things look maybe that's because we're a phyllis copic society and we're obsessed by how things
look but but we we quickly dismiss you know someone's looks where it's easy for us to believe
that someone looks a certain way because of surgery or makeup or you know it can be fake looks can
be fake I think we believe that but I think we we are much more naive listeners than we are
lookers right we we we believe that the voice is real we believe that a voice that shakes is one that
that sort of conveys real emotion to us we we believe that there's some kind of
that we can hear the truth in a way that we might not be able to to see the truth and and I think
that that that sort of very earnest belief on our on our part is sort of the flip side of the fact
that we think the world is too loud you know everybody is preventing us from hearing that that one
real that one real message you know that one true thing it's of course you know how beautiful
that you instructed me to turn off my cell phone before we began this recording session because
otherwise that that unwanted extra background noise would have come in and and prevented this you know
sort of authentic conversation from happening I think we're constantly figuring out how to how to cope
in a world of too much noise we're we're constantly buying noise canceling earphones and you know
we're paying higher rent so that we can live in a quiet neighborhood quiet neighborhood to us means
in a elite neighborhood silence is a commodity for us that's that's available at a at a price
we want we want less sound but we also want exactly the right sound and it makes me think that we
we have something in common with the the writers of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles right they
they also want that definitive listening experience right they wanted to to hear the voice of god they
wanted to affirm a kind of a monotheism right a kind of single truth and they felt that that
affirmation could happen orally whereas maybe the visual would distract you and and you would
start to you know follow other gods too many other gods I think we want to you know if you think
about that that statement from from Matthew you know I speak in parables because they hearing they
hear not you know we we want to believe that we're the people who hearing we would hear right we
would we would hear the the truth we're kind of we're able to have authentic listening experiences
because we are authentic listeners ourselves and I think we reject all kinds of other listening
experiences as inadequate maybe because we feel we fear that we're inadequate or we reject other listening
experiences in as inauthentic maybe because we fear that we're inauthentic but but you know I
I suspect that that you can never be fully satisfied with your listening experience you can never
have that kind of fully adequate fully authentic experience of listening why do you say this is a
challenge to you well I I don't know if you buy that you mean that's some kind of permanent
transcendent communion with the divine but there are plenty of it kind of every day occasions where
you have listened to a great album or you have heard a great talk or or you've listened to a great
episode of entitled opinions and you you know you just say wow that's what that has kind of gathered
my concentration in such a way that I have heard or you know what the ros says that you awaken
to the hearing of things that you had that you're not hearing usually and when it comes to the voice
I I agree that there's a kind of nostalgia for an authentic voice in people and it's quite astonishing
about how first thing that can be manipulated appearances are deceiving in visual appearances are
deceiving but also the voice you know actors show us every every time they go on stage that
emotions can be fain through the voice and so forth and it's amazing to me how often we will
detect false notes in what someone else is saying and is that a product of their voice or is it
something in the intonation is it something where through our hearing we are actually connected what is
this access to authenticity that we have or that is presupposed by the fact that we can detect a note
of inauthenticity and what we hear it happens all every day you know yeah yeah I mean maybe the way
maybe the way to answer this or the way that you're answering this challenging that this
challenge that I'm putting forward which is that you know we can't have authentic listening experiences is
you're saying we can have them but not in a permanent way we have them in time so it gets it gets back to
this this point you were raising at the beginning which is that listening is temporally extended
right listening happens in time as opposed to looking which happens almost out of time and and it can
you know the the artifact the visual artifact goes on existing forever and the sound artifact doesn't
even when it's been recorded when you listen to something that's been recorded you have to go
through that same temporal expanse that the recording took when it was first made right that the
the speaking first required so so we have to we we can believe that there's a kind of authentic listening
if we're willing to to live in time well exactly I agree with that it completely and so far as
the listening experience takes place in time a guston saniguston has this um whole analogy and
is confessions about the way in which time is like a sentence or it's like a paragraph that you have
and in Latin especially because you have to usually wait till the end of the sentence in order
to find out with the subject and the good so you really meaning is so interwoven in the temporal
process of the unfolding of something in time that he said I get to the end of the sentence and
then I have to get to the end of the paragraph and I get and in time we never get to the ultimate end
so there is something as you were suggesting about listening that does not arrive at some kind of
absolute uh resolution of stability because it has to keep being reenacted in time and that's
why a guston says it's only when you finally get to the end of time god the second coming all that
that's why I think there is this messianic linear sort of sense of the end time because otherwise
we're going to have to repeat what we just said and undergo the listening experience in time
over and over again because as you said it doesn't last whereas Plato chose a vision because the
vision is you can have a paint the difference from having painting and a piece of music is that
the painting can be there comes a temporal you see it it has the illusion of a certain kind of permanence
in its form whereas a speech a piece of music and so forth it's deeply embedded in time and so
I wonder if some of our some of our impatience with all the sound that fills our lives is a kind of
impatience with the temporal that we we somehow imagine that if you could um if you could just block
out all that sound you would have um some kind of you would have your time back you wouldn't have
to experience you wouldn't have to go through all the time in which you listen to these sounds that
you that you find irritating you know other people's conversations on their cell phones well I like
the way you put it there that you would have your time back as opposed to the way you first phrased it
which is that we it there's some kind of um resistance to the temporal in the objection to noise
I think the objective my objection in noise and I'm hugely misophonic I really am phobic about
excess of noise is that I cannot hear time taking place and in fact I think the reason that we drown out
the silence so much in our world is because a lot of people don't want to hear time taking place
in the moment that is taking place forget it you know to distract yourself from the fact that we
are caught up in time so I think there that an excess of noise in the world is I'd say a symptom of
yeah the fact that we're anxious about time rather than um uh to commit it to it mm-hmm okay
so Gabrielle one last question uh how far into the present will you take your own book on
this history of listening you know I'm I'm thinking I'm kind of playing with different ways of
of constructing this book it it might be that I um that I have this book move from examining the
kind of irritating voice of the other in 1870s and 80s Russian literature through
through looking at literature and performances that really make the irritating voice of the other
comic and I might end up then with um looking up looking at vaudeville and looking at the US and looking
at maybe stand-up comedy in the US and the way that uh plays with our irritation at the voice of
the other and our irritation at listening to other people and at the same time are kind of our
compulsion you know the way that we can be fascinated by voices that simultaneously irritate us we
we can listen very carefully and and in a really compelled way to voices that we that we
simultaneously sort of make our flesh creep and I think there's a lot of radio that does this you know
very very beautifully um so so we could go it could go up to the present that's great or it could
just stop in the Russian Empire and we'll see what happens well I'm I'm for the latter alternative I mean
take it up to the present latter or former I don't remember now so uh best of luck with that
project we've been speaking with Gabriela Safran from the Department of Slavics here at Stanford
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions thank you again uh Gabriela for coming on we're going to
leave our listeners with a song uh by pj harby called the wind or listen to the wind blow how about
that listen into the wind blow take care thanks again thank you
Katherine like time places
I am I am a house a place making noises like whales places like the whales and she built a chapel
with her image an image on the wall at least wishing rest and rest and a place where she could
wash
listen to the wind blowing
and listen to the wind
listen to the wind
she's
she was
she
was
she
nothing
she
was
lady
with
her
oh
the city
my
oh
the
I see her
the
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