Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia

breathless

Allen S. Weiss

Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut

Published by Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, CT 06459

© 2002 Allen S. Weiss

All rights reserved

ISBN 0-8195-6591-1 cloth

ISBN 0-8195-6592-x paper

Printed in the United States of America

Design and composition by Chris Crochetière,

B. Williams & Associates

Cataloging-in-Publication data appear at the end of the book.

5  4  3  2  1

ISBN: 978-0-8195-6592-1

Cover: Toni Dove.

For those without voice

Ptyx or Styx?

(A possible epitaph for the author)

Contents

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

Chapter 1: Purity of Essence 1

Chapter 2: Death’s Murmur 29

Chapter 3: Erotic Nostalgia and the Inscription of Desire 67

Chapter 4: Narcissistic Machines and Erotic Prostheses 87

Chapter 5: Libidinous Mannerisms and Profligate Abominations 115

Notes 139

Selected Bibliography 165

Index 175

Preface

Respiration attests to the unity of time, just as it reveals the unicity of the self

/ Alain Corbin, Le miasme et la jonquille

This book found its first manifestation in the plot of a short story I had begun to write for a volume of my theoretical fiction, The Aphoristic Theater. In this tale, the protagonist was to have been a radio producer who made his fortune by creating an apparatus that permitted the dead to speak. This electronic miracle is achieved through a program that analyzes the totality of sound patterns of a sampled prerecorded voice, which becomes the basis of a synthesis permitting any previously recorded voice, even that of the dead, to speak artificially, by simply entering the desired text via the keyboard. At the time, this seemed to be an ingenious science fiction plot device, until I heard a report on National Public Radio that somebody was, in fact, close to perfecting such a program!

The irony and anachronism behind this anecdote were not lost on me, for my profound concern was to imagine a device—whether electronic, literary, or theoretical—that would effectively thwart death, circumventing that arch mortality whereby the I of writing (active subject) is insidiously and immutably transformed into the I of the text (inanimate object). I sought a textual circuit whereby the rhythms and tonalities of breath would continue to exist, in viva voce, beyond the moment of enunciation and transcription. This circuit is, of course, that of sound recording, with its possibilities of inscription, reproduction, transmission. But how are such simulacral effects represented in the written text? What paradoxes are thereby posed? How do they activate the poem? How do they generate narratives? How do they transform speech?

The origins of any book are heterogeneous, and often contradictory. Breathless has at least three major inspirations of which I am conscious. The first is literally my own recent breathlessness, as the increasing level of air pollution in Paris began to cause asthmatic attacks during my extended sojourns. This book is in part the sublimation of my nocturnal crises, where I learned that alterations in breath elicit mutations in thought. Second are my continued investigations of experimental radio and sound art, begun in Phantasmic Radio and pursued in Experimental Sound and Radio—research on contemporary audio experimentation that demanded a genealogical study of the origins, both technological and poetic, of phonography and radiophony. Finally, there is my perennial collaboration with radio artist and producer Gregory Whitehead, notably a radio documentary on dolls, L!indomptable (The Untamable), created for the Atelier de la Création Radiophonique of France Culture (1996), and more recently our collaboration on Theater of the Ears, a play for electronic marionette and recorded voice adapted from Valère Novarina’s theater, produced by the California Institute of the Arts (1999). It has become clear to me that the nature of Whitehead’s work—stressing the prosthetic aspects of recorded and broadcast sound and establishing a veritable sonic dance of the dead—places him in a long tradition of American eccentrics, from Poe through Cage and Burroughs, who have transformed our soundscapes and our mindsets. Breathless is in part a prosthetic device to capture in printed form the qualities of Whitehead’s distant, solipsistic, and eminently arcane voice.

Now, after the recent celebrations of the centennial of radio, it is apparent that sound recording and broadcast offered radically new discursive formations at the inception of modernism, a phantasmatic matrix of paradoxes and desires from which arose new modalities of poetry and prose, noise and silence, eroticism and nostalgia. The subject of this study is threefold: to investigate how the nineteenth century realities and fantasies of sound recording transformed lyric poetry (with its intimate ties to music); to consider how the perpetuation of the voice beyond the grave radically changed our relation to disembodiment, death, and nostalgia; and to trace out the aesthetic and epistemological implications of the newfound objectification of the voice, whose manifold manipulations would give rise not only to a new poetry and music but also to hitherto unimagined forms of sound art. Breathless will investigate the engagements of Edgar Allan Poe with mortality and morbidity, of Stéphane Mallarmé with the inner and outer voids, of Charles Cros with time and memory, of Paul Valéry with the limits of poetry and the anxiety of influence, of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam with progress and modernity, of Jules Verne with technology and phantasmagoria, and of Antonin Artaud with the tortured self and God. This study is not a celebration of death but of the literary presentation of death, revealing improbable objects, incoherent subjects, and impossible worlds at the dawn of the modernist epoch. From the century that spans the death of Poe in 1849 to the death of Artaud in 1948, Breathless will trace the relations between the origins of sound recording and the loss of voice in lyrical poetry. This loss inaugurated a modernism that still haunts our inscriptions of desire and our figurations of nostalgia.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the organic metaphor still reigned: perfume companies produced crystal bottles in the form of coffins intended to hold, in a futile gesture against irreparable loss, the last drops of the departed beloved’s perfume. Soon afterward, thanks to the invention of the phonograph, the voice of the deceased would continue to resonate, even as the mortal body dissolved into the inert matter of the universe. The uncanny confluence and confusion of human and machine, motivated by the eternal struggle against death, would evermore change the expectations and forms of mourning and melancholia, transfiguring the very modality of our intimate relation to death. This epochal paradigm shift constitutes the subject of this book.

Acknowledgments

An early version of part of Death’s Murmur appeared in Essays in Sound, no. 4 (1999); the other part was published in Women & Performance, no. 21 (1999), as Pierrot contra Derrida. A short version of Erotic Nostalgia and the Inscription of Desire was also published by Essays in Sound, no. 2 (1995); the complete text appeared in Experimental Sound and Radio, edited by Allen S. Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2001). Libidinous Mannerisms and Profligate Abominations was part of 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud, edited by Edward Scheer (Sydney, Power Publications and Artspace, 2000.) Purity of Essence and Narcissistic Machines and Erotic Prostheses are previously unpublished, though the opening section of the latter appeared in Sulfur, no. 33 (1993), as The Theater of Possession.

breathless

1 / Purity of Essence*

One always sleeps with the dead.

/ Proverb

In January 1842, Edgar Allan Poe’s young wife, Virginia, sustained a horrifying accident: while singing, she began to bleed from the mouth. This incident was in fact a pulmonary hemorrhage, symptomatic of tuberculosis, the white plague that would take her life. For two weeks after this event, Virginia lay in bed terribly ill, hardly able to breathe. The progress of her illness followed its inexorable course through to the moment of her death, on 30 January 1847, at the age of twenty-five. This tragedy would mark one of the obscure and catastrophic origins of a modernism that arose from the ruins of classic forms and romantic passions. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag characterizes the nearly mythic signification of tuberculosis as it was perceived in the nineteenth century: disintegration, febrilization, dematerialization, speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it, the preferred way of giving death a meaning—an edifying, refined disease, the romantic disease which cuts off a young life, an aphrodisiac, a decorative, often lyrical death.¹ In what would become a decadent fin-de-siècle symbol, the white death marked a certain dystopic erotic ideal, until the moment that it was definitively supplanted in morbid symbolism first by the extravagantly symbolic gesticulations of hysterics diagnosed and idealized by Charcot and Freud, and then by the real and aesthetic ravages of the cubist war, which brought disfiguration and morbid prosthetic reconstruction to new heights. Finally, the proto-modernist aesthetic pathology of the white death would be inverted and deposed by the high-modernist anti-ideals of schizophrenia and the black death, most notably instantiated in Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and the Plague, a danse macabre itself prefigured by Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Poe’s writing bears a unique place in the mid-nineteenth century paradigm shift at the origins of modernism, insofar as it established new connections and novel contradictions between voice and body, corporeality and disembodiment, signifier and signified, sense and signification, cognition and dissociation, love and death, rationalism and theology.

Poe’s work is imbued with death in the vast multiplicity of its forms; as J. Gerald Kennedy points out, in Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing: Here we find a writer whose entire oeuvre is marked by a compulsive interest in the dimensionality of death: its physical signs, the phenomenology of dying, the deathbed scene, the appearance of the corpse, the effects of decomposition, the details of burial, the danger of premature interment, the reanimation of the dead, the lure of tombs and cemeteries, the nature of mourning and loss, the experience of dread, the compulsion to inflict death upon another, and the perverse desire to seek one’s own death.² Noteworthy is the fact that Poe often aestheticized death by symbolizing diseases of the lungs and derangements of breath. For Poe, such mortal illnesses and forms of death were steeped in the uncanny, consciously and unconsciously linked to the death of his mother, Eliza, a famous actress and singer, who died in 1811 when Edgar Allan was still an infant. The work of mourning associated with these events—ephemeral beauty, loss of breath, silencing of voice and song, the advent of illness, horrible death—was the key to his psychology and iconography, and constituted a central aspect of his narrative innovations. Such is the condition of all writing, as Kennedy suggests:

Indeed, we might say that the desire to write originates in the paradox that the death of writing—the fixed body of the text, as it were—insures the life of its spirit or sense. It is a commonplace that writing has an existence independent of its author, but Ong locates an additional truth: that writing incarnates the very principle of life in its removal from the carnal world of time, change, and death. While the finality of death creates in the self that desire for symbolic transcendence which culminates in the temporal activity of writing, inscription must be seen—also paradoxically—as an effacement of self and an escape from the temporal order.³

It is this paradox and its morbid truths that we shall trace out in the present study, specifically in order to reveal how the nineteenth-century phantasms and realities of sound recording transformed the conditions of such mourning and melancholia, consequently establishing new possibilities, both formal and symbolic, for the lyrical nostalgia inherent in a certain trend of early modernist poetry and fiction. The epistemological paradigm shift caused by the advent of recording technologies established a new order of prosthesis that augmented the powers of the senses. Such mechanical or electric prolongations and perpetuations of body and soul transfigured the very forms of romantic narration and subject construction, as well as the modalities of temporality and representations of the body.

One of Poe’s early poems contains a couplet that could well serve as an epigraph to his entire work, or even an epitaph to his life:

I could not love except where Death

Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.⁴

In The Oval Portrait, as the portrait of the beloved becomes more beautiful and more complete, the sitter becomes weaker and paler, and when the portrait is finished, she dies: consumption by art is equivalent to consumption by death, and aesthetic gain is tantamount to existential loss. As the painting was completed and the protagonist-painter-murderer stared at it, "he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!"⁵ Eros and Thanatos find the common ground of their eternal tryst in the work of art. Here, the ambiguities and paralogisms inherent in the difference between death in life and life after death—both signified by the symptoms of tuberculosis—would generate the guiding narrative dynamic that constitutes the uniqueness of Poe’s work. Whence that strangeness, which is like the indispensable condiment of all beauty, so admired by Baudelaire in his appreciation of Poe.⁶ Whence those impossible incarnations and reincarnations, resuscitations and suspensions, motivated by the machinations of a morbid nostalgia where the work of death entails an eternally fixed seduction. Whence the wounds of an impossible love.

/

The locus classicus of the psychoanalytic study of melancholia is Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, where he explains that The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathected energy from all sides … draining the ego until it is utterly depleted.⁷ The clinical picture of melancholia is characterized by feelings of dejection, loss of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of activity, lowering of self-regard, self-reproach, and in extreme cases, delusional expectations of punishment. We find here most of the major themes of Poe’s poetry and prose. While in mourning the world becomes empty (through a real loss of love object), in melancholia it is the ego that is voided or, it might be said, transformed into the site of emptiness. Poe will tie these two voids, inner and outer, in a tour de force of moroseness, despondency, and the macabre. In melancholia there exists a narcissistic identification with a love object that is substituted for an erotic cathexis onto that object. Thus, through introjection, a part of the ego is split off from the rest of the ego and set up as an object, henceforth subject to those melancholic self-accusations that in fact are more appropriate to the abandoned and introjected love object than they are to the self. Consequently, there is a cleavage between the ego altered by identification and introjection and the ego’s criticizing faculty. Is not this egological split precisely a mainspring of the dynamics of modernist narrative, where the multiple points of view, subject positions, and identificatory possibilities stem from, and evoke, a disrupted, decentered, disequilibrated mode of subjectivity? In substituting identification (that is, the identification of the ego with an abandoned or lost love object) for the love object itself, there is a rebellion, a revenge upon the original love object, manifested as self-punishment. This self-punishment results in an inhibition, circumscription, depletion, and ultimately an emptying out of the ego. This mode of turning away from reality through delusion may be manifested as either a constitutional problem (hence touching every relation to the loved object) or as derivative from the particular, real circumstances of a given love relation (with all the complexities of the love/hate struggle inherent in desire.) The syndrome of melancholy may continue indefinitely, or it may end in one of two ways: either the libidinal fury will be spent, or the object will simply be abandoned, no longer deemed valuable. Needless to say, one mode of exhausting these passionate forces is through the derealizations and fantasies of aesthetic sublimation.

Many psychological syndromes may be understood as types of ego-defense mechanisms. Melancholia falls into the category of ego defense that deals precisely with the past and the loss of a love object. Thus melancholia—as the extreme manifestation of nostalgia, which usually appears in a nonpathological mode—may be classed among those psychological phenomena that directly aid in grasping, reinterpreting, and ultimately defending ourselves against the past: mourning, déjà vu, disquieting strangeness, disturbances of memory, daydreaming, delusion. The most extreme instances of such psychotaxis (a mode of thinking that does not admit disagreeable thoughts) lead to a