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  • Fidelity and Paul Laurence Dunbar's Voice(s)
  • Justin C. Tackett (bio)

By 1897, when Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in London to recite his poetry, both America and Britain were preoccupied with attaching voices to—and detaching them from—bodies. When he was born in 1872, the telephone, phonograph, microphone, and wireless did not exist; by the time he died at age thirty-three, in 1906, they did. In between, the transatlantic world renovated an old term, steeped in fealty and religious devotion, to address a property that was emerging from these inventions: "fidelity"—that is, the degree to which a reproduction or transmission of a sound resembles its original. In the decade in which Dunbar was born, the American George Bartlett Prescott first used the word to assure consumers that the "speaking telephone" accurately transmitted the human voice. The year before Dunbar came to Britain, Guglielmo Marconi used it in filing his patent for the wireless apparatus he'd been experimenting with in Italy and Britain ("Fidelity"). The concept of fidelity altered the way we think about voice.

Many scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gavin Jones, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Nadia Nurhussein, have noted the richness of Dunbar's voice, a feature he himself drew attention to in titles such as Majors and Minors. His poetry, novels, essays, and performances toggle deftly between so-called standard English and several dialects, including African American English, Irish English, and Midwestern American English. Often his works are analyzed in terms of "identity" and "authenticity," concepts that pervade our complex discussions of transatlantic politics, racialization, and literacy. Nineteenth-century critics often spoke of "sincerity" or "naturalness," and they frequently compared Dunbar to Robert Burns, even using "unco guid" (a Scottish term meaning "rigidly righteous" that Burns helped usher into English) to describe characters in his prose (O.O. 108). But what if we thought about Dunbar in the context of the late Victorian idea of fidelity? What might it tell us about his London poetry recitals; his collaborations with Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; his first novel, The Uncalled (1898), written in London; or the popular recitals he gave for audiences of blind people when he returned to America? I argue that fidelity can help us hear Dunbar differently by making the constructedness of voice more obvious and by promoting idiolect over dialect.

Today, we tend to think of fidelity in terms of objective accuracy: high fidelity is more accurate; low fidelity is less accurate. But as Jonathan Sterne, [End Page 26]


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Fig 1.

Announcement for Dunbar's 1897 collaborative recital with Coleridge-Taylor in London from Henry F. Downing. "Samuel Coleridge Taylor [sic]." Messenger, vol. 8, no. 9, Sept. 1926, p. 267.

Courtesy of the Stanford University Libraries.

Emily Thompson, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and others have shown, there is another aspect of fidelity that dominated in the nineteenth century—namely, whether the sound machines used to record, transmit, or amplify voices worked at all. A machine had to emit a voice that was "faithful" enough to the original to be recognized by listeners; in turn, listeners had to have "faith" that the machine had actually succeeded—that the voice they heard from the telephone, phonograph, or microphone was the same voice that went into it. Faith was required because all sounds emitted from such machines were acousmatic—their original sources could not be seen (a concept theorized by Pierre Schaeffer). The identity between a sound and its source was not a given but had to be learned and rehearsed by both machine and listener. Fidelity, in other words, was socially constructed. It was not just a passive reproduction of essential sound, a myth that Eidsheim calls the "cult of fidelity" (21).

So how can acknowledging fidelity's constructedness help us better understand Dunbar's writing? For one thing, Dunbar was immersed in technology. He was a childhood friend of the Wright brothers, who gave him a bicycle; he worked as an elevator operator; he frequently used the telephone; and [End Page 27] he dictated to typists. (Suggestively, the Dunbar house museum in Dayton, Ohio, also displays a phonograph in the parlour.) While...

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