Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of "Books That Sing" by Justin St. Clair (review)

"While sound and print media are typically apprehended as discrete modes of expression in an increasingly competitive cultural landscape, the reality is considerably more complicated. For more than a century, books and records have been deeply intertwined and the collision (or collusion) of sound and print has produced thousands of multimedia artifacts ranging from early-twentieth-century children's books to twenty-first-century e-reader apps" (1). So does Justin St. Clair introduce Soundtracked Books (2022), whose title carries nicely the trajectory of the text itself, partly a history of the soundtracked book, partly a close reading of several examples of it, and partly a theory of it. At any rate, from storytelling records in the early parts of the 20th century to online playlists for books, the soundtracked book has seemingly become less and less dependent on each respective physical medium, particularly in the current day.

And yet, if it is too hasty to simply understand sound and print as "discrete modes of expression," the soundtracked book does depend upon two discrete modes of perception for its uniqueness. Beginning with R. Murray Schafer's idea of schizophonia, which denotes sound's ability to be disconnected from its source and played back out of context, as it were, St. Clair takes issue with "the ideological presuppositions inherent in his pathologization of electroacoustic sound" (3). But "Schafer's somewhat hysterical insistence on the corrosive aberrance of reproduced sound" (4) is not only, or perhaps not primarily, problematic; it is, first and foremost, beside the point. Instead, St. Clair proposes the term schizotemporality to describe the "temporal bifurcation" that "represents the soundtracked book's most significant formal attribute, and one, frankly, that few other media forms possess" (6). In other words, since soundtracked books deploy the aural and the visual, they necessarily involve two times: the fixed runtime of an audio recording, and the variable time spent engaging a text, that is, "readtime" (5). There is a danger, when thinking about medium specificity, to attend too closely to the medium and not enough to the experience of engaging it, thereby instrumentalizing the object of study in service of a larger theoretical goal. Luckily this is not the case with Soundtracked Books; far from it. The distinction or disjunction between the two temporalities carries across all of St. Clair's examples. The experience of soundtracked books, both in general and in particular, is never far off.

St. Clair begins with the early example of Bubble Books, Ralph Mayhew's 1917 "talking book" invention that "lifted directly from the long English tradition of nursery rhymes and Mother Goose tales" while at the same time claiming to be "the wave of the future" (19). This paradox foreshadows the schizotemporality that, on an individual and experiential level, is characteristic of soundtracked books in general. Perceptively, St. Clair notes that this schizotemporality is modeled by the content of soundtracked books themselves, which "frequently [express] dissatisfaction with the present by imagining a future firmly rooted in the past" (15). On a larger scale, then, these books are responding to a problem with time.

Furthermore, it is not only that reader-listeners are split between two times. Even this very division itself is not clear. Mayhew's patent filing for what became the Bubble Books contained vague instructions for how to operate the records in tandem with reading the books, thus heralding an "operational ambivalence that would, in equal measure, beguile and bedevil users of soundtracked books for a century to come" (27). Perhaps this is a point where St. Clair's reading can be opened up, for it seems that Soundtracked Books treats its subject as both beguiling and bedeviling in a critical sense. None of the examples offered, it seems, can serve as the ideal soundtracked book, and in what seems to be the standout case of Mark Z. Danielewski's House...