Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (review)

On the second page of Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, Elspeth Jajdelska states her “central hypothesis” clearly and directly: “In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for the first time in England, a large enough group of children became sufficiently skilled in silent reading to constitute (in adulthood) an audience for a new style of writing. This style arose from the development of a new model of reading, as hearing rather than as speaking ... The change in underlying reading models, and consequently in prose styles, created a need for what is now called ‘the narrator’ and was central to the development of all kinds of prose genres, including the novel” (4). She goes on to explain the difference in these models of reading: “Reading aloud creates an identification between the writer and the reader. The reader is a speaker, the writer’s mouthpiece, with the writer’s words in his or her mouth. Silent reading creates a different relationship between writer and reader. Instead of identifying with the writer as the speaker of his or her words, the reader becomes an (internal) hearer of the writer’s words” (6).

In her first chapter, Jajdelska discusses the material, intellectual, and ideological changes that enabled the growth of silent reading. She notes that fluent silent reading comes only as a result of much practice in reading and argues convincingly that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries conditions were in place for at least “the children of the well-off and worldly” (23) to acquire such practice, thanks to changing patterns of consumption and new ideas about childhood education and the moral status of recreational reading, among other factors.

Chapters 2–4 focus primarily on the writing of two men, one the canonical Joseph Addison and the other the more obscure Ralph Thorseby, an upwardly mobile Leeds antiquarian and member of the Royal Society. Jajdelska defends her choice to focus closely on only two writers, one of whom is not in the literary canon, by saying that since her aim is not “to add to the existing literary criticism of the period’s great prose writers” but rather to show how the new model of reader “can transform the approach to prose and narrative of a writer who adopts the new model,” it makes sense to study two writers in depth (17). She chooses Addison because he is an acknowledged master of the new prose style that she attributes to the reader-as-hearer model, and she chooses Thorseby, provocatively, because he strives, but fails, to adopt this new style.

Chapters 2 and 3 are more specifically linguistic in nature, both dealing with pauses, those marked by punctuation in chapter 2, and those that are more syntactical in chapter 3. One especially compelling point Jajdelska makes here is that the idea of the sentence as the basic unit of prose “is of limited relevance to a writer like Thoresby, that is, a writer who conceives of the reader as a speaker rather than a hearer” (80). Thoresby tends to pile clause upon clause, ending sentences only when his topic changes; Jajdelska attributes this reluctance to pause to an awareness in the reader-as-speaker model that a listener may take a pause as an opportunity to interrupt.

In chapters 4 and 5, Jajdelska brings in the contexts that she contends interacted with these changing models of reader: “the growing culture of politeness and new conceptions of the self ” (4) in letter-writing and the recreational diary, respectively. In her final chapter, she gets to what will probably be of most interest to many readers: the “birth of the narrator.” She divides the broad term “narrator” into two more specific ones. The first of these, the “Storyteller,” comes with the reader-as-speaker model and, she says, “brings the text to completion through performance” (169). The second, the “Narrator,” comes to be through the reader-as...