Special Offer to all new subscribers (there is no charge) to my newsletter: Now through November 30, 2021, I will send you a code good for one Audible performance download of the first volume of the Bennet Wardrobe series (US and UK sites only…I will email to ask). “The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey. Please enjoy my regular musings on the world of Austenesque fiction and 11 hours and 27 minutes of Amanda Berry’s performance.
One of my favorite mantras to students—be they history or writing—is that “if it sounds weird, it probably is weird.” Oh, I know, this is odd to be coming from the podium at an august institution of higher education, but it is spoken with the best of intents. ’Tis my fun way to encourage the l’il darlin’s to proofread aloud. That way they will hear their words and understand that if they are spewing a mouthful of gibberish, they likely have written something semantically incomprehensible.
This exercise is rooted in my belief that every single syllable, pause—partial or full—sentence, and paragraph have grown from Humanity’s effort to preserve that which came first; the spoken word.
Recall that ’twas the Greeks who invented vowels (after they pinched the Phoenician alphabet in the mid-700s BCE to replace Linear B from the pre-Greek Dark Ages days: nobody could read it!) so that they could preserve the Homeric Epics after Homer died.
I mean, how would The Illiad read if there was an eternal confusion over (This is English, but imagine an Athenian bard trying to sing for his supper) whether the word “dg” was “dog,” “dig,” “dug,” or “dag?” The cardinal vowels (a, e, i, o, u…forget about the cross-dressing “y” and “w”) were created to allow the Greeks to record their favorite after dinner entertainment. OK, Plato surely reported on many down-and-out poetry slams where Alcibiaedes and Socrates would try to drink each other under the klismos, but that was after a local minstrel had recited a few dozen stanzas of something designed to show the cultural chops of the party’s host.
Once the Greeks relearned the art of writing, they captured the eloquence of Homer’s words—and later those of Sappho, Aeschylus— on vellum and parchment. However, given that the secret of reading was known to very few, these written works were still designed to allow an oral performance before an audience. Otherwise, how else could Homer be performed if Homer was already sleeping the cemetery sleep?
This is, I admit, a long way around the block to get me to the point of saying that all writing is rooted in the oral tradition. If that is the case, should not all writing when heard sound as good as (if not better than) when read silently?
In the #InspiredByAusten world, Austenesque authors over the past few years have been bringing their works to a broad public using a range of electronic publishing options: e-books, unlimited reading subscription services, and print-on-demand. One more venue appeared in the mid-2010s: #Audible which became the logical successor to books-on-tape and CDs.
Of course, these were usually the author or celebrity author reading their word into a microphone. The utility was that one could listen to a book…and hear the author’s voice…without having to cease other tasks to flip pages. But ’twas “just” a reading, not a performance.
With ever-expanding server farms, more opportunities to move books to recorded arenas are now available. And, in the process, new voice artists are bringing their talents to performing and interpreting the books. And that led to new opportunities for new creative partners to join the world of Jane Austen variations. Throughout the past five or six years, we have seen countless voice artists bending their talents to add more than just their voices to Austenesque work.
The performers—not narrators—with whom I work offer just that. Stevie Zimmerman is arguably the most prolific partner in the Pride and Prejudice Variation world. Her artistry is featured on hundreds of Austenesque variations. Stevie’s efforts on The Longbourn Quarantine elevated the novella to new heights.
When I began my time in the Austenesque vineyard, I gravitated toward new voices. Barbara Rich (Lessers and Betters) and Amanda Berry (The Bennet Wardrobe and In Plain Sight) brought their training and experience to play to present listeners with a uniquely different experience. Both are now so much in demand that I cannot get a new piece onto their schedules.
The best interprets the pacing of the writing. They assume the nature of the characters. They bring emotion to the passages and, hopefully inspire reactions not experienced by readers of the printed books. They draw you in…much as the ancient Greek and Roman rhapsōidos did 2,500 years ago. And, in the process, make the words I have laid down sound much as they did when I imagined them.
Get a taste of how a great performer can elevate the entire story! Please read along this excerpt from Chapter 15 and 16 of the sixth volume of the Bennet Wardrobe (the printed version below may be longer…or shorter) while you enjoy listening to the audio sample as performed by Amanda Berry found at https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Avenger-Audiobook/B07YLZ1JMZ
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This excerpt from “The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament” is ©2018 by Donald P. Jacobson Any reproduction without the expressed written consent of the author is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.
Her eyes drifted shut as she slid down through the layers of noise that had impeded her mentalitée until she arrived at a space so familiarly quiet that an ineffable sense of peace flooded over her. ’Twas then that she felt the other: one particularly familiar in her ancient comfort yet having not been called upon for decades.
Is it you? I thought you had abandoned me.
>could not rise past lace, children, confusion, anger, fear
Why now?
The form/not form/color/arc shot throughout the vault, as if rejoicing in its liberation. In its passage, a calming smoothed the matte surface that was the slate of her inner being.
>exagoras agapis[i]
Exagoras agapis? What is that? From where did it come?
>the love that redeems
>given you by the Bennet, grasped by your soul
>the desire to be the better version of self
But why now?
>Founder needs you, your strength. but I cannot…
>too new…draw closer for help
At this, a great china-blue strand whipped across the field. With dread, Fanny observed a night black blade drop and cleave it in twain. One portion shriveled and vanished, the other floated, unanchored.
>take it
As the viable strand passed into her possession, she was surrounded by sand dunes covered with carpets of roses…of all colors. The sound of the sea swished in her core, and she sensed another approaching, sweeping down from behind the crest of the sandy mounds. Then all sound was cast in the richest of green hues.
>mother Gardiner-Bennet
Do I know you?
>i am of yours…not the countess, but her guide…here for moment.
Are you suggesting that you are “neither Kitty nor Kate” but are like mine, but hers?
>yes…ask…
Where is my girl?
>…not here…gone out, above plane…ask
What happened to her?
>blackness…around…suddenness…noise…pressure…release
What???
><indistinct> winter rose
The flower? There are no roses that bloom in winter.
>truth…browned canes…waiting pruning…even now…black flower.
>rosa chinensis will triumph…ask
Rosa Chinensis like what I introduced from Mama’s garden into Longbourn’s?
>…Gardiner is mother bush from which all Bennet roses bloom…
>…Founder cannot succeed without the Rosa merytonensis…
>…help him, mama…ma…ma………..ma….
A great wind arose and swept the emerald filament off into infinity…and silence resumed.
A tear slid down from beneath a closed lid as Mrs. Bennet realized that, for all the abuse and disquiet she had absorbed over fourteen years in the wilderness, she was the missing link.
Chapter 16
Bennet had ground to a halt as his wife subsided into a deep silence but without tears or protestations, only a gentle rise and fall of her shoulders as she slowly breathed. He had brought his story to the summer of 1944. He had yet to reach those awful final moments before he realized that Mrs. Bennet was attending to something other than he.
He waited, but not for long.
Then she turned to face him and dropped back onto the trunk by his side. She queried in a low tone. “Tom, are you known as ‘The Founder?’ ’Tis an unusual styling, and I have not heard it before, but I have just had the most remarkable experience. So, please tell me.”
Bennet took her question in stride, wondering at the source of her knowledge, but he did not hesitate. “It seems that our descendants have started to refer to me as such. Perhaps it came from my establishment of the Trust. I am not certain.
“But, my dear, how did you uncover that term?”
Fanny was momentarily embarrassed, not by his question but rather that he might consider her reply to be unschooled and mired in superstition. Yet, deep in her heart, she knew that bridges had been built this day, and now t’was up to her to trust in them. And, thus, she forged ahead.
Squaring her shoulders, she spoke in a low, but firm voice. “You saw me just now. You may have thought I was not attending to that which you were saying. I assure you that I was—on one level.
“However, most of my senses were elsewhere. ’Tis akin to a trance, I imagine. I fall into it when I clear away all distractions and carefully focus my eyes on something like the canopy above us or the upper corner of a room where two walls and the ceiling meet. That permits me to separate myself from my cares and concerns, something I wish I had done these fourteen years past.
“As my concentration deepens, my eyes eventually drift shut, the outside world vanishes, and, with my mind clear, I find myself able to commune with…with…oh, I do not know with what or whom. ’Tis a force or a being. I have always called her my Guide.
“We have conversations. I ask her questions, and she helps me find true solutions to my problems where, in my consciousness, I would seek to derive emotional comfort from false or partial solutions. These invariably lead to nowhere.
“Consider the ultimate false solution.
“I forced you to bow to my demand that each of our beloved girls come out when she reached fifteen. I wanted each to steal a march on other young ladies in her cohort; to attract the attention of a marriageable man and secure her…my…future.
“While the first four avoided disaster, we now know what my need to protect the girls from the entail led to with the fifth. Lydia will enjoy few of the perquisites relished by our other girls who waited until after their twentieth year to wed despite the fact that her lieutenant seems resolved to carve a new trail for himself.”
Fanny had once again clambered off the fallen tree trunk, so comfortable for her long-legged husband, but a bit elevated for a woman who barely troubled five feet when measured in her satin dance slippers. She stood facing Bennet and made her case with hard-edged hand gestures and broad arm sweeps as if the bowl of Oakham’s slope rising above was home to benches filled with eager students. From time to time her sky-blue eyes would settle on Tom’s hazel orbs and her voice dropped as she sought to drive home her points.
“False solutions, Tom, are the path to ruin,” she continued. “I know.
“’Tis not that I had forgotten about my Guide or what I could accomplish with her aid, but rather I was so disturbed after…well…the babe…that I could not settle myself long enough to seek her out.
“I became more and more like my sister; concerned about fripperies and gossip and not about our family. Would that I could have modeled my comportment after Edward.”
Throughout her oration, Bennet had scarcely shifted. At this point he raised a hand to interrupt with a question. “I have never heard what you are now telling me from any other person. I would imagine that if this were a widespread talent, natural philosophers would have declaimed upon it before now. My old colleagues at Cambridge would have been in a fever to examine the proofs of what you have told me.
“That said, there are other talents, particularly amongst our daughters, which offer evidence that there are more mysteries than certitudes when one deals with the human condition.
“Fanny, what you suggest sounds eminently feasible and akin to that which the Orientals have proposed about the layers and stages of the human mind. At some point, according to their mystics, adepts have tunneled down until they have reached the very wellsprings of the universe and have tapped into the elemental forces that bind Creation together. These, too, apparently can be found in each of us.
“How came you to learn this technique?”
Mrs. Bennet answered quickly, “My grandmother Gardiner taught me. ’Twas something that my family has used since my great-great grandfather, the first Edward Gardiner, left John Company and followed your ancestor, Christopher Bennet, to Meryton. He must have picked it up in Madras where he served as a factor.
“My sister could not sit still long enough to achieve anything.
“My brother, on the other hand, can muster such unbelievable concentration that he is virtually impossible to disturb. His interactions are so profound that his Guide can control Edward’s body and write messages! I have seen them! The answers which I fight to remember, for they fade so quickly when I return, are there for him to consult. Edward has these missives written in his own hand—the results of automatic writing as he calls it—for posterity.
“I was with my Guide these past few minutes. What I learned in that time has confirmed what I have long suspected. Jane and Lizzy have the right of it: love governs all. Your love for me will hold me safely. And mine for you will see us through the darker days ahead as we sweep away the falsehoods ten or more years in the making.”
[i] Redemptive love. See D. Jacobson blog post The Fifth Love: That Which Redeems, Austen Authors.net, March 17, 2018. https://austenauthors.net/the-fifth-love-that-which-redeems/
Hi...love to know your thinking on why we write (or orate).