Richard Cullen Rath - How Early America Sounded

Sound was more important to early Americans than it is to you. Their world was in many respects a quieter one. There were no radios, no cars, not even the hum of a refrigerator, a fluorescent light, or a computer. But there were other sounds that would be unfamiliar to you: the handbell and calls of the town crier, women batting their laundry, or horses hooves and ironclad wheels on cobblestones. You, on the other hand, might turn on a radio or television to drown out the roar of a nearby highway. The noises of appliances and other electronic devices and equipment escape your hearing unless they are brought to your attention. The world of early America was also darker than yours. When the sun went down, only dim lamps and fires remained. Your neighborhood might be lit up as bright as day every night. Technology, bright and loud, has attenuated your auditory and accentuated your visual perceptions of the world about you. Throughout the seventeenth century, however, sound had a more immediate power that we no longer associate with it: it was a tangible force laden with intent rather than your harmless whiff of disturbed air.

Perhaps you find my addressing you directly here as peculiar, perhaps even intrusive. I might have chosen instead to introduce this book by writing that sound was more important to early Americans than it is to present-day Americans, allowing you a comfortable distance from the text, giving it the appearance of a thing to be consumed, evaluated, and judged. In contrast, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chroniclers were likelyto narrate a book as I have, saying, You have heard rather than We have seen. For a reader to have heard implies sound: before, and perhaps during, the reading of such a book it would have been assumed that you were as likely to listen to ideas as to see them. The use of you interrupts the modern objective gaze that we have come to take for granted. That gaze is steeped in the culture of print and reading, where the eye is the primary organ of perception.

Here and there in this book I have indulged in the conceit of talking about a somewhat homogenous modern or postmodern us that perceives the world differently than the subjects of this book. The we in question is highly literate and visually oriented. In using this construct, I in no way mean to infer that you have grown deaf in some irretrievable fashion. In fact, I rely on you to hear the page as well as see it. This act of synesthesia is only possible to the extent that your auditory imagination is in working order, so it is not a deafness that I propose, but a loss of some measure of hearings importance, and the setting aside of older ways of hearing that has taken place over many generations. I ask you to pick these ways up from their corner, as it were, dust them off a bit, and consider them anew, perhaps like another synesthetic medium, an old vinyl record.

For its part, early modern reading was a different and much more variegated species than it is today, centered on hearing the page as much as seeing it. Just how different it was is only partially demonstrated when you are confronted with elements of print style that were perfectly acceptable then. Texts used italic, blackletter, and bold typefaces to indicate verbal emphases in seventeenth-century print, giving sonic cues we now find strange. Reading itself was often performed out loud, so that even the illiterate could benefit. Learning to read was an intensive process of sounding out letters, and for most non-elite readers it may have stayed that way. Silent reading was perhaps the exception rather than the norm.

Maybe you have let my direct address pass, this being the books preface. Over time, direct address in books was relegated to prefaces, which were meant to frame the book for the readers. Then even this vestige disappeared, even though frames of this sort are generally conservative. There is more at stake here than the preface.

The subject of this book -- how people heard their worlds in early America -- requires an ability or at least a willingness on your part to be repeatedly decentered. It requires you to think about the process of taking in knowledge through the eyes from a black-and-white, two-dimensional page, and to think of that act as a socially learned rather than natural way of coming to know things, one that has had profound effects on how you perceive worlds beyond the printed page. This denaturalization, this historical situating of your own reading and its cognitive effects, is a necessary starting point for coming to grips with a sometimes alien world of powerful sounds. Thus the task with which I charge you is to be conscious of the visually centered ways you silently read, to set your habits aside here and there in order to hear more clearly how early America sounded -- not to us, but to its denizens.