It has not been sufficiently emphasized that although we possess an enormous mass of written documents, and also visual documents, from the past, nothing is left to us of voices before the first nasal-sounding phonograph records of the nineteenth century. What is more, as far as the representation of speech is concerned, nothing, or virtually nothing, was achieved before certain great novelists or dramatists of the nineteenth century. By that, I mean that they were the first to register conversation in all its spontaneity, its disjointed logic, its complex byways, its lacunae, and its unarticulated implications without passing through tragic or comic stylization or lyric outburst.

Neither antiquity nor any of the intervening centuries offers us the equivalent of a conversation between Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in Tolstoy, between Ibsen’s Rosmer and Rebecca West and her wily brother-in-law, or—at opposite ends of the spectrum—Vautrin’s words as he propounds his views on life to Lucien and the brief interchange between Marcel and the doctor who comes to listen to his grandmother’s heartbeat. The transcription of speech in terms of pure realism, without any sort of bias, is curiously contemporaneous with those two mechanical means of reproducing the object as it is, the phonograph and the photograph.

Mutatis mutandis, the same observations can be made about the unspoken words which take shape within us under the sudden impact of an experience—Rastignac’s impressions as he looks out over Paris from the heights of Père-Lachaise, the last thoughts that