The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice

After "filling four dozen cylinders," Mark Twain confessed to William Dean Howells in April 1891 that he had given up trying to dictate his latest novel The American Claimant into a phonograph that Howells had rented for him. ¹ As a result of his experience, Twain, unlike those astounded early listeners who found the Victorian phonograph a "recording angel," concluded it was a corrupting demon. "You can't write literature with it," he wrote to Howells, "because it hasn't any ideas & it hasn't any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil" (641). Within the novel itself, Twain blasted the supposed utility of the new invention when his hero Colonel Sellers proposes a "grand adaptation of the phonograph to marine service": "You store up profanity in it for use at sea . . . a ship can't afford a hundred mates; but she can afford a hundred Cursing Phonographs. . . . Imagine a big storm, and a hundred of my machines all cursing away at once--splendid spectacle, splendid!--you couldn't hear yourself think. Ship goes through that storm perfectly serene--she's just as safe as if she'd been on shore." ²

With his fruitless experiment in dictation, Twain joined an increasing number of writers who recognized that while the phonograph, which had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1878 and "perfected" by him ten years later, might delight and affirm those recording their voices, it could also mock and betray them. Endless repetition of a disembodied voice had the potential to distort even the most benign speech into a monotonous rant that sounded diabolical, perhaps even terrifying. As an audience member at one of the early demonstrations of the machine famously put it, "It sounds more like the devil every time." ³ Although the art of ventriloquy historically had fostered the notion of a gap between speaker and voice, the phonograph mechanized this theatrical act, displacing it with a simple scientific process that had similar results. Quite suddenly in the late 1880s, throwing voices became easy, but lost was the control that the ventriloquist had always had over placement and timing. With such fiendish possibilities, the operation of the phonograph carried inherent risk, for the playback process was open to manipulation by anyone with access to the controls. Having made a record, how would it be used, and when, where, and for whom would it be played? Those questions occupied fin-de-siècle authors as they explored the impact of the phonograph on the relations between voice and identity, and the dynamics between mastery and degeneration.

While moderns like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot used the gramophone, the rival and ultimate successor to the phonograph, to depict their concerns over the disintegration of artistic "aura" in an age of mechanical reproduction (to echo the title of Walter Benjamin's formative essay on the work of art in the modern era), Victorians utilized the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. Criticism has begun to identify a "phonographic logic" operating in Joseph Conrad's turn-of-the-century writing, and to claim, rightly, I think, that Conrad sees the "phonographic" process of disembodying voice into contextless synecdoche as ultimately destructive and inadequate, in ways that are distinct from later modernist attitudes. The value of such criticism lies in its focused illumination of the way technology can influence technique in the work of a pivotal literary figure. ⁴ My work, on the other hand, takes a broader approach to the varied, often contradictory late-Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in which the machine, in its power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. What made the phonograph uniquely both thrilling and...