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Technologies of Forgetting: Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti’s Woodspurge
Victorian Poetry ( IF 0.1 ) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 , DOI: 10.1353/vp.2017.0009
Veronica Alfano

Introduction In her recent book Listening Publics, Kate Lacey makes a compelling claim about the origins of sound recording, proposing that "the phonograph was prefigured" in the literary culture of the nineteenth century. Lacey believes that what she calls the "phonographic imagination," which involves "the separating of sound from time, place and body," both anticipates and helps to shape recording technology. Especially given that the phonograph works by making a series of inscriptions first on tinfoil and later on wax, it thus represents an "extension of textual practices." (1) Douglas Kahn, too, associates phonography with the widespread nineteenth-century trend of transferring "the voice of presence into the contaminated realm of writing" (p. 70). In an age of rising literacy and unprecedentedly large-scale publication, when reading was increasingly silent and private yet also part of a shared cultural experience, the displacement of this "voice of presence" was a significant literary phenomenon. (2) If Kahn is justified in grouping all "mnemonic ... and conceptual means of sound recording as both technological means, empirical fact, and metaphorical incorporation" under the umbrella term "phonography" (p. 16), then his definition covers the mnemonic structure of poetic form. A poem's iterative formal patterns, like the cylinders of the phonograph that Thomas Edison initially saw as a means of capturing not music but speech, constitute a mechanism for the mental preservation of language; they allow readers to evoke, appropriate, and recontextualize the nebulous "voice" of verse. Lacey is chiefly concerned with the role of sound technology in the emergence of the modern public sphere, and Kahn focuses on the aesthetics of sound and noise in the twentieth century. But I elaborate on the notion that literature prefigures or portends Edison's invention by discussing Victorian lyric poetry--which often features conspicuously anonymous and dislocated voices, emphasizing the disconnection of a putative utterance from a quasi-anthropomorphized poetic speaker--as a particularly revealing example of the phonographic imagination. The work of literary critics as well as media theorists shows that this topic is ripe for further investigation. Emily Harrington has recently suggested that both recorded and lyric voices are "defined by repetition and mechanical or metrical functioning and a disembodied state"--ideas that I expand on in the pages that follow. (3) Margaret Linley posits that Victorian lyric's "attempt to conjure dead, absent, and lost voices while talking (figuratively) about voice" should be reconsidered in light of Victorian anxiety regarding the question of whether phonographs, like telegraphs and cameras, were "remapping human coordinates." (4) At a time when embodied speech was being displaced and destabilized, when (as I claim later in this essay) poetic fixation on the vanished past signaled the elegiac nature of the age, and when the waning of religious faith and the vogue for spiritualism ignited new uncertainties about whether the dead could speak, the admittedly problematic urge to personify marks on a page provided an intriguing counterpart to the urge to personify recordings. Frederick Garbit's 1878 attribution of human traits to the phonograph (it is "tractable, teachable and humble, ... faithful, outspoken and devoid of all treachery"), his proposal that such a machine be placed inside the Statue of Liberty, the fact that Edison manufactured talking dolls containing phonograph cylinders, the use of phonographs to synchronize recorded dialogue with silent films: all reflect the desire to reunite disembodied sound with human presence. (5) Yopie Prins, concentrating on a mnemonic formal feature that I also scrutinize, argues that the metrical strategies of Victorian poems were "preceding and perhaps even predicting the sound reproduction technologies that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. …

中文翻译:

遗忘技术:留声机、抒情之声和罗塞蒂的木刺

简介 在她最近出版的《聆听公众》一书中,凯特·莱西 (Kate Lacey) 对录音的起源提出了令人信服的主张,提出“留声机是在 19 世纪的文学文化中被预言的”。Lacey 认为,她所谓的“录音想象”,包括“将声音从时间、地点和身体中分离出来”,既预测又有助于塑造录音技术。尤其是考虑到留声机的工作原理是先在锡纸上刻上一系列铭文,然后在蜡上刻上铭文,因此它代表了“文本实践的延伸”。(1) 道格拉斯·卡恩 (Douglas Kahn) 也将留声学与 19 世纪普遍存在的将“在场之声转移到受污染的写作领域”的趋势联系起来(第 70 页)。在识字率不断提高、出版规模空前庞大的时代,当阅读变得越来越沉默和私密,但又是一种共享文化体验的一部分时,这种“在场之声”的置换是一个重要的文学现象。(2) 如果卡恩将所有“助记符......和录音的概念性手段归为技术手段、经验事实和隐喻结合”,归为“录音术”这一总称(第 16 页),那么他的定义涵盖诗形式的助记结构。一首诗的迭代形式模式,就像托马斯·爱迪生最初认为的留声机圆柱体,它不是捕捉音乐而是捕捉语音的手段,构成了一种心理保存语言的机制;它们允许读者唤起,适当的,并将诗歌模糊的“声音”重新语境化。Lacey 主要关注声音技术在现代公共领域出现中的作用,而 Kahn 则关注 20 世纪声音和噪音的美学。但我通过讨论维多利亚时代的抒情诗来详细阐述文学预示或预示爱迪生的发明的概念——这些诗通常以明显的匿名和错位的声音为特征,强调假定话语与拟人化的诗意演讲者之间的脱节——作为一个特别具有启发性的例子留声机的想象力。文学评论家和媒体理论家的工作表明,这个话题已经成熟,可以进一步研究。艾米丽·哈灵顿 (Emily Harrington) 最近建议录音和抒情声音都“ 将页面上的标记拟人化这一公认有问题的冲动与将录音拟人化的冲动形成了一个有趣的对应物。弗雷德里克·加比特 (Frederick Garbit) 于 1878 年将留声机的人类特征归因于留声机(它“易于处理、受教且谦虚,......忠实、直言不讳且没有任何背叛”),他提议将这种机器放置在自由女神像内,事实爱迪生制造了包含留声机圆柱体的会说话的娃娃,使用留声机将录制的对话与无声电影同步:所有这些都反映了将无形的声音与人的存在重新结合的愿望。(5) Yopie Prins 专注于我也仔细研究过的助记形式特征,认为维多利亚时代诗歌的格律策略是“ 甚至预测了 19 世纪出现的声音再现技术。…
更新日期:2017-01-01
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