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

Notes

Notes 1 / Purity of Essence 1.SusanSontag,IllnessasMetaphor(NewYork:Vintage,1979), 5-19. 2. J. Gerald Kennedy,Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 3. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Cited in Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe:Mournful and Neverending Remembrance (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1991), 78. 5. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Oval Portrait," in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe(New York: Modern Library, 1938), 292.Further references in the text to tales and poems by Poe are from this volume, with page numbers given in parentheses. 6. Charles Baudelaire, "Poe," in Oeuvrespoetiques (Paris: Gallimard /Pleiade), 128. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from the French are by the author. 7. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), in General Psychological Theory (New York: Collier, 1963), 174. For an account of the aesthetic implications of this syndrome within modernist art, focused on the work of Hollis Frampton, see Allen S. Weiss, "nostalgia: Melancholy and Aesthetic Irony," Le Mois dela Photo a Montreal (September, 1991); 30-32. The reader is directed to Peggy Phelan's brilliant study of mourning in relation to contemporary issues of performance and performativity , Mourning Sex (New York: Routledge, 1997.) 8. Jean Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard , 1976), 196. / 139 Notes to Chapter1 9. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," in The Complete Tales and Poems, 449. The hominess of the grave is an ancient desire, epitomized by the entire ancient Egyptian religion of death. This symbolism is central to the phantasms that Saint Anthony experiences in the desert. 10. Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique et la mart, 12 n. 2. n. Death is the epitome of nonsense, and its discourse establishes the limits of all meaning. At a conference on nonsense that I organized at the Whitney Museum in 1990, the only point common to all the presentations was that each was somehow centered on death. I am convinced that this was not a coincidence . The papers were published in Nonsense, ed. David Allison , John Hanhardt, Mark Roberts, and Allen S. Weiss, a special issue of Art Esf Text, no. 37 (1990). 12. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum," in TheComplete Tales and Poems, 247. 13. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Premature Burial," in The Complete Tales and Poems,267. 14.CitedinKennedy,Poe,Death,andtheLifeofWriting,39. 15.Silverman,EdgarA.Poe,240. 16. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire dessymboles (Paris: Seghers, 1973), 2:89-92. 17. The sentiments of the poem might therefore be coherent with the spiritualist phenomena that were to sweep the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century; the spiritualist hypothesis provides an interesting solution to the anxiety of influence. See also Victor Hugo peintre, the catalog of the 1993 exhibition at Venice's Galleria d'Arte Moderne Ca' Pesaro. The relation of the varied forms ofecrits bruts and the spiritualist phenomena to modernist literature has only begun to be explored; see Michel Thevoz, Le langage de la rupture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978); Allen S. Weiss, Shattered Forms:Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Maurice Tuchman and Carol Eliel, eds., Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Princeton University Press, 1992); and Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 18. A humorous contemporary analogy is evident in a tale re- / 140 Notes to Chapter 1 counted by the film historian and theorist David Bordwell. While visiting a friend's house, he noted that each time someone put the kettle up, it seemed to begin whistling just before the water came to a boil. The source of the sound was a parrot that had learned its sonorous lesson and timed its whistle to begin just before that of the kettle. This tale of unhuman dubbing might well serve as a necessarycomplication in theories of subject construction and spectatorial position. Even more humorous is the reported story that in India, where direct contact is crucial in political campaigns, one candidate sent parrots around to the far reaches of his region to proclaim his name! Whether or not this is true, the idea adds a new dimension to the history of recording. 19. Michel Foucault, "Fantasia of the Library" (1967), in Language , Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 90...