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Journal of Modern Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-14



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Death by Gramophone1

Ohio State University

On August 12, 1877, or thereabouts, Thomas Edison shouted "Mary had a little lamb" at a cylinder wrapped in tin foil, cranked the machine up again, and heard a reproduction of his voice.2 There are others who can claim to have invented the gramophone--Charles Cros had already shown how it was to be done before the French Academy four months earlier, and Scott de Martinville did much the same thing as Edison before Queen Victoria in 1857--but Edison was the first to take out a patent. "Speech has become, as it were, immortal," said Edison, who immediately foresaw many possibilities for his machine, some of which are still currently in use: the taking of dictation, the recording of books for the blind, the teaching of foreign languages, the reproduction of the last words of dying persons, and, most far-sightedly, the potential for connecting his new device to the telephone, to make the telephone an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records.3 Edison recorded on vertical cylinders and called his machine the phonograph; his main rival in the early days of the recording industry, Emile Berliner, used horizontal disks and called his invention the gramophone. Berliner had hopes similar to Edison's, foreseeing a time when "future generations will be able to condense within the space of twenty minutes a tone picture of a single lifetime: five minutes of a child's prattle, five of the boy's exultations, five of the man's reflections, and five from the feeble utterances of the death-bed."4

It is immediately interesting to see that, from its infancy, the gramophone is associated by both of its progenitors with the utterances of the death-bed, and the recording of the dying. The [End Page 1] gramophone as musical device grew up quickly: Bettini's spider attachment in 1897 was capable of bringing several different vibrations to a single recording pin; by 1902, the quality of the singing had improved from obscure French baritones banging out the Toreador song to Enrico Caruso's recordings in Milan. By 1909, when Berliner Gramophone introduced a model with a constant turntable speed, a spring motor, a new sound box, shellac disks, and an advertising campaign featuring a black-and-white fox terrier listening to His Master's Voice, the gramophone industry had reached maturity. During the same period, modernism also began to find its distinctive voice--"Prufrock's Pervigilium" was begun in 1910--and found itself in competition with the gramophone throughout its lifetime.

Modernism grew up right alongside the gramophone: Rainer Maria Rilke remembers in "Primal Sound," an essay written in his thirties in 1919, that "It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented," and compares the line carved by a phonograph needle onto a cylinder to the coronal suture of a skull.5 Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence were all also children in the 1880s, developing as writers as the art of recording on both sides of the Atlantic became more sensitive. For them, and for such later writers as Beckett, Huxley, and Greene, the gramophone brought death, was a kind of death: the opposite of what they were writing for and a direct threat to their writing lives. Modernism embraces the audience, the speaker, the human connection. Far from creating the "Shock of the New," as Robert Hughes famously puts it, modernists were shocked by the new, afraid of this new technology, distrustful of its disembodied voice and its claims to immortality.

The clearest early statement of what was wrong with the gramophone comes from John Philip Sousa.6 This is odd, since Sousa profited considerably from his early gramophone recordings: his pieces were short, vibrated both well and within defined parameters, and could be repeated ad nauseam, a necessary requirement in the early days when each performance could be copied onto only ten cylinders before having to be recorded...

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