The Death of a Gramophone in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September

The gramophone in The Last September seems innocuous for most of the novel, until it crashes to the floor, asserting its unexpected complexity. The gramophone’s prominent destruction prompts the reading of gramophonic imagery as signals of traumatic moments in Lois’s proximity to war. The gramophone reveals the violence necessary for creating a physical or metaphysical record (represented by the Anglo-Irish War), the anxiety over the fidelity of that record in the wake of said violence (an attribute of trauma narratives), and the transformative “thingness” of the accounts that complicates attempts to reconcile trauma within the historic or novelistic narrative.