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  • Of Barks and Bird Song:Listening in on the Forgotten in Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert
  • Robert Ryder

In Grammophon. Film. Typewriter (1986), Friedrich Kittler cites in its entirety a fantastical tale by Maurice Renard, originally entitled "La mort et le coquillage" (Death and the Shell, 1907),1 in which an accomplished composer, Nerval, attempts one night to transcribe the sounds he hears from a seashell. Despite being "among the most famous" of composers, Nerval is unable to transcribe the mysterious sounds "dictated" to him, and later that night—perhaps after recognizing the impossibility of his task—he dies. The entire story of Nerval's death is narrated by one of his friends, left unnamed, who throughout the short story describes the night's events to Nerval's doctor. The friend wants to convince the doctor that his diagnosis for Nerval's death, a stroke,2 was incorrect. What killed Nerval, according to his friend, was putting his ear to the seashell, a fate that the friend thinks he will soon share himself:

Do you believe that there are poisons for the ear modeled on deadly perfumes and lethal potions? Ever since last Wednesday's auditory event [l'audition] I have not been feeling well. It is my turn to go … Poor Nerval! … Doctor, you claim he died of a stroke … and what if he died because he heard the sirens singing? Why do you laugh?3

Laughter is the only indication of the doctor's response to the story as a whole, to which Kittler responds that "als Schlußsatz einer phantastischen Erzählung gab es schon bessere Fragen" (Kittler 87; "there have been better questions to conclude fantastic tales," 55). Not unreasonably, Kittler aligns Renard's fantastical tale with contemporaneous technical manuals that describe phonographs, graphophones and other early sound recording instruments as being able to bring back the dead, going so far as to propose that "[die] Muschel, der Renards fiktiver Komponist lauscht, … nicht am Strand einer Natur gefunden [ist]; sie vertritt die Muschel eines Telephons oder Fernsprechers, der Zeitenfernen überbrücken kann, um ihn an eine Antike vor jedem Diskurs anzuschließen" (Kittler 88; "The shell that Renard's fictitious composer listens to was not found on a natural beach; it takes the place of the mouthpieces of a telephone or a loudspeaker capable of bridging temporal distances in order to connect him with an antiquity preceding [End Page 55] all discourse," 55). This media-historical argument, in which new media bridge time immemorial, is itself an old story. Long before that other Muschel, the telephone earpiece, seashells that emit sounds when listened to had their own long history of linking a distant, otherwise inaccessible auditory past to the present.4 In other words, the sounds of a seashell have always transported the shell—and with it the listener—from where it was first picked up, whether from a natural beach or a mantelpiece.

One hundred and ten years earlier, Ludwig Tieck published Der blonde Eckbert (1797).5 While Tieck's tale involves no characters putting their ear to a shell and was written long before the conditions of gramophony or telephony existed, certain words and sounds nevertheless reverberate throughout Tieck's story and have a similarly poisonous effect on its two main protagonists, Bertha and Eckbert. Like Renard's tale, Tieck's story concludes with an acoustic aporia that appears to lead to madness, if not death. Moreover, the poisonous sounds appear equally contagious: just as Nerval's friend fears he may succumb to the same fate as Nerval, so does Eckbert hear the same dog's bark and bird's song that Bertha once heard, thereby linking Bertha's fate to Eckbert's via these recurring sounds. The word "fate" moreover seems inextricably linked to the sounds heard by the protagonists in both tales: it is as if specific sounds are the harbingers of fate for all who hear them, threatening whatever secure future the listeners felt they may have had.

But perhaps the most important quality of the sounds in both Renard's and Tieck's stories is that they seem to echo from an ancient, otherwise inaccessible...

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