Ulysses Pianola

22 Pages·2015·1.61 MB·English

]
130.1
Pianola
Ulysses
paul k. saint-amour
“Does this thing play?” . . .
“Like a musical gorilla with ingers all of one length. And a sort of soul.”
—H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909)
he pianola “replaces”
Sappho’s barbitos.
—Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
L
ITERARY STUDIES HAS A GRAMOPHONE PROBLEM. WHEN REACH-
ing for a sound-r eproduction technology to set beside literature,
scholars now habitually grasp the phonographic assemblage. Un-
derstandably so: this is a device whose best- known names—phono-
graph, graphophone, gramophone1—announce its relation to writing,
speciically its claim to write speech. Much of phonography’s early dis-
course reinforces the conceit of vocal inscription these names encode.
“Whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph,” said
Scientiic American in 1877, “has the assurance that his speech may be
reproduced audibly in his own tones long ater he himself has turned
to dust” (“Wonderful Invention”). In its early stenographic uses, the
phonograph ofered a means of commercial correspondence. But Edi-
PAUL K. SAINT-AMOUR teaches in the
Department of English at the Univer- son cylinder recordings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning,
sity of Pennsylvania. He is the author and Mark Twain reading or reciting their work helped turn the tech-
of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, nology, through its association with the authorial voice, into an auratic
Encyclopedic Form (Oxford UP, 2015) and
end in itself. From the mid- 1880s on, the phonograph also cropped
The Copy wrights: Intellectual Property
up as a prized diegetic object in works of iction by Edward Bellamy,
and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP,
Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Bram Stoker, and others.2 As Ivan
2003). With Jessica Berman, he coedits
Kreilkamp has shown, the device haunts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
the book series Modernist Latitudes, at
Columbia University Press. Darkness (1898), in whose play with disembodied speech it is nowhere
© 2015 paul k. saint-amour
PMLA 130.1 (2015), published by the Modern Language Association of America 15
16 Ulysses Pianola [ PMLA
named but everywhere implied. And in a num- ment: in amplifying one technology of sound
ber of celebrated modernist works—James reproduction, it has efectively muted the rival
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), T. S. Eliot’s he Waste and neighboring regimes in relation to which
Land (1922), homas Mann’s he Magic Moun- phonography emerged and was deined.3 his
tain (1924), William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dy- silencing oversimpliies at least two stories:
ing (1930), Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts our account of the discourse networks of the
(1941), and Ralph Ellison’s he Invisible Man late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
(1952)—we ind prominent phonographs wired ries and our history of the period’s literary
tightly into the texts’ formal self- conceptions. soundscapes. Stripped of its competitor and
No wonder modernist studies has been quick tributary technologies and thus of its contin-
to appoint phonography its cardinal regime of gencies, phonography gets conigured as the
sound recording, storage, and playback—and unavoidable route to the sonic present, its his-
to ind implicit in the gramophone not just the tory narrated from that present’s vantage—
audiobook but the book, period. narrated, too, through the speech- writing
his interest in analog sound reproduc- dialectic native to phonography rather than
tion has produced a wealth of absorbing through exogenous terms that could produce
scholarship. Some of it views the gramophone a diferent account. While this dialectic holds
as a death-b ringing object against which mod- sway, even the most historically inclined
ernism “embraces the audience, the speaker, students of the connections between sound
the human connection” by insisting on the recording and the literary text will tend to
superiority of live performance (Knowles 2). understand phonography as either asserting
More often, scholars of literary phonogra- the primacy of speech over writing or expos-
phy participate in a Derridean critique of ing speech’s ineliminable ties to diference,
phonocentrism, reading in the gramophone delay, absence, and partiality. But this op-
an extreme case of the voice’s detachability position will underwrite a profounder collu-
from speaker, body, and presence (Stewart; sion: as long as the celebrants and the critics
Kreilkamp; Scott). Or they use a text’s pho- of phonocentrism remain inside the speech-
nographic hardware to entrain literature into writing complex, they will continue to sustain
a Kittlerian discourse network—to connect a deepening regime of gramophonocentrism.
“abstract meanings to real, tangible bodies, his article ofsets the gramophone prob-
and bodies to regimes of power, information lem by drawing attention to a technological
channels, and institutions” (Suárez 748; see assemblage that was roughly coeval with pho-
also Rice; Sterne). In sorting them this way, nography, developing alongside it in mixed
I have made the Derridean and Kittlerian ap- relations of rivalry, symbiosis, intimacy, and
proaches sound discrete, even incompatible. indifference, an assemblage whose elements
But in fact they are powerfully allied, for me- have become variously extinct, exotic, and
dia histories of phonography receive categori- ubiquitous. I refer to the player piano, or pi-
cal het from a deconstructive speech- writing anola, a pneumatic playback instrument whose
analytic they in turn endow with historical bellows were operated by a human “pianolist”
depth. he gramophone is not only the pri- pumping two foot pedals or by an electric mo-
mary site of this improbable alliance but also, tor and whose approach to recording, storing,
by now, its sign—the technology that millen- and replaying sound contrasts with phonogra-
nial scholars of sound and literature would phy’s. Where Edison’s analog device physically
have needed to invent had it never existed. cut sonic vibrations into hard storage materi-
What I am calling our gramophone prob- als, the pianola transcribed the mechanical
lem arises from the success of this rapproche- elements of a keyboard performance into a
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130.1 Paul K. Saint-Amour 17
binary machine language encoded in perfora- It might seem too soon to rescue the
tions on a paper roll. Phonographic playback player piano, which can still be heard in re-
involved acoustic amplification and varied cordings and seen in the odd home or pizza
modestly from one machine to the next; the parlor. But if the pianola remains in sight, its
pianola’s pneumatic system translated binary strangeness has gone into hiding: for most
code back into mechanical- acoustic events it is a curiosity unworthy of attention, while
subject to the idiosyncrasies of the playback those who do attend to it, whether as boosters
instrument and capable of being signiicantly or detractors, have tended to do so in reduc-
altered by the pianolist through expressive tive or emblematic terms.5 Some of the most
pedaling, transposition controls, and manual vehement haters have been postwar novelists.
levers afecting tempo and dynamics. In Player Piano (1952), his first novel, Kurt
As against the purely analog phonograph, Vonnegut made the instrument the master
the player piano was a binary- analog hybrid, emblem for a dystopia of automation. Wil-
allowing for greater interactivity even as the liam Gaddis nursed a pianola obsession for
sight and sound of the instrument “playing over five decades, pursuing the instrument
itself” were at least as uncanny as the phono- through he Recognitions (1955), J R (1975),
graph’s disembodied voice. Although it used and the posthumously published Agapē Agape
its pneumatic lungs to replicate the work of (2002), whose original subtitle was “A Secret
fingers—to play rather than to reproduce History of the Player Piano.”6 Although Gad-
singing or speech—the pianola was dissev- dis was more engaged than Vonnegut with the
ered neither from the voice nor from the pianola’s development and cultural history, he
mark: piano rolls were crisscrossed with mul- too inally saw it as epitomizing technology’s
tiple forms of writing unique to the medium, rationalizing energies. Both writers were ex-
including the perforations that activated in- tending a strand of antimechanical modern-
dividual notes, inked tempo and dynamics in- ism that we can trace back at least to Joseph
structions for the operator, and song lyrics for Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), in whose
the beneit of singers. he pianola was proto- Silenus beer hall a clangorous pianola is an
karaoke: not an acoustic capture of a single omen of the “perfect detonator” imagined by
vocal performance for later listening but a the book’s resident nihilist, the Professor (93).
spur to participatory singing, a song prompter Meanwhile, the player piano’s most original
whose disorienting bottom- to- top manner of and inluential later- twentieth- century propo-
lyric scanning continues to fascinate poets nents, the composers Conlon Nancarrow and
and visual artists.4 And this is to speak only of György Ligeti, praised the instrument’s ability
the instrument’s more technical and material to exceed the precision, speed, and dexterity
aspects. There will be more to say about its of human performers, embracing the very as-
cultural ambidexterity as a durable good for pects of the device that chilled its disparagers.
brothel and living room, dance hall and con- he pianola has thus been diicult to keep in
cert hall; its gendering work as prop and stage focus as a speciic series of assemblages, tend-
for a certain model of bourgeois femininity; ing to congeal into an ahistorical emblem of
its play with aura and distance in being able dehumanizing mechanization or superhu-
to reproduce, with greater and greater idelity, man capacity. he instrument’s susceptibility
the nuanced pianism of great performers; its to allegory is part of the cultural history with
debatable efects on piano pedagogy and ama- which we will need to come to terms. I propose
teur music; and its way of alternately vexing to do this by resubjecting this frozen iconicity
and materializing the recording, storage, and to the instrument’s technological and cultural
playback technology we call the novel. particulars, at the same time reentangling
18 Ulysses Pianola [ PMLA
them with a cultural history of phonography he insists on the inseparability of these two
that has become all too discrete. he idea is laughters—the yes of memory and the yes of
not to replace one technology—much less one airmation—Derrida implicitly charges his
technological determinism—with another. audience to listen more closely to the latter:
Quite the contrary: it is to restore some lost to attend to Joyce’s work less as a “machine
complexity to the sound- capture, -storage, of iliation” grounded in professional compe-
and -playback universe to which twentieth- tence than as a rebuke to competence whose
century literary works oten turned in testing preemptive energies are “joyfully dispersed in
and revising their self- concepts. a multiplicity of unique yet numberless send-
ings” (294, 304). Understood along these lines,
“Ulysses Gramophone” might as accurately be
Against Ulysses Gramophone
titled “Against Ulysses Gramophone.”
As a way of weakening our gramophono- Despite its frequent conscription by
centrism, I would like, a little perversely, to scholars of literature and sound media, Der-
pay more attention to a particular gramo- rida’s essay is not occupied with the kinds of
phone: the one Derrida theorizes in “Ulysses technological and historicist questions that
Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” which most concern those scholars. It spends little
he delivered as the opening address of the time with the famous gramophone passage
1984 International James Joyce Symposium in Ulysses’s “Hades” episode, less with the
in Frankfurt and subsequently published.7 machine’s reappearance in “Circe,” and none
hirty years on, Derrida’s essay has become unfolding the history of phonography or its
a touchstone for studies of sonic modernity, engagement by Joyce’s work. In fact, Der-
its identiication of a “gramophone efect” in rida’s gramophone is less acoustic playback
Joyce’s novel licensing the argument that lit- device than computer, “programophoned”
erature might do more than represent sound- (283), a preprogrammable archive, a “hy-
reproduction media, might imitate, even permnesic machine” (281). he gramophone
adumbrate, the gramophone’s grasp of speech effect in Joyce’s work takes shape as “the
as inscription (276).8 Without exhaustively re- most powerful project for programming over
reading “Ulysses Gramophone,” I suggest that the centuries the totality of research in the
one price of its touchstone status has been a onto- logico- encyclopedic field,” and its au-
loss in the essay’s argumentative bandwidth— thor “has at his command the computer of
a loss, speciically, of Derrida’s critique of the all memory” (281). Having igured Ulysses as
oten cited gramophone efect. Far from sim- a gramophonic computer, Derrida imagines
ply promoting the gramophone as an emblem Joyce studies as a computer of the same kind:
of a triumphant antiphonocentrism, Derrida a remotely searchable compendium of all of
invokes it, too, as shorthand for a totalizing Joyce’s works and their critical commentaries,
drive in Ulysses to archive all knowledge as ready for ininite queries, operating only in
well as to preempt all future discourse about En glish and with a United States patent (286).
itself. Gramophony in this sense, implicitly a But the computer is not only a figure for
form of graphomania, indexes “a yes- laughter Ulysses’s encyclopedic conceit, or a device for
of encircling reappropriation, of omnipo- twitting American Joyceans for their mono-
tent Odyssean recapitulation,” an ungener- lingualism. he essay closes with a fantasia
ous laughter in contrast to which Derrida about a second machine, an “nth generation
celebrates “the yes- laughter of a git without computer that would be up to the task” of
debt, light airmation, almost amnesic, of a testing Derrida’s reading of the yes in Joyce.
git or an abandoned event” (294). Although his imaginary device would at once fulill
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130.1 Paul K. Saint-Amour 19
and explode the dream of competence; it a single recording “in a multiplicity of unique
would typologize, in all languages, the yeses yet numberless sendings.” It enables playback
of the text while also working against typol- while soliciting song.
ogy by understanding how yes eludes meta- To read “Ulysses Gramophone” as a cri-
language; and it would trace the interplay of tique of what Derrida calls the gramophone
the two yes laughters without presuming to efect is not to level the same critique at schol-
separate them through reductive binarisms, ars of literary phonography, even those who
instead attending to their doubling, their mu- cite Derrida’s essay as a warrant for their
tual countersigning, their forming, together, work. No one who studies the phonograph
a vibration. “I hear this vibration,” Derrida would draw a straight line between its par-
writes, nearing the end, “as the very music ticular technological and cultural capacities
of Ulysses. A computer cannot today enu- and the abstract work Derrida has it do in
merate these interlacings, in spite of all the “Ulysses Gramophone.” But to weaken the
many ways it can help us out. Only an as yet affirmative bond between those terms—to
unheard- of computer could, by attempting to insist that the essay neither equates Ulysses
integrate with it, and therefore by adding to it with a gramophone nor posits the device as
its own score, its other language and its other the novel’s logo or coat of arms, that it rather
writing, respond to that in Ulysses” (308). resists such identifications—allows us to
Two computers: a present- day one that consider what ways of reading Ulysses might
materializes the Joyce industry’s completism emerge from Derrida’s critique of gramo-
and competence fetish (its gramophone ef- phonocentrism. How might we approach the
fect) and a future device that would respond problems of recording, storage, and playback
uniquely and unforeseeably to what is unique in Joyce’s book without deepening the rut
in Ulysses (the very music of Ulysses) instead of the speech- writing binarism? If, as I have
of subjecting the text indiscriminately to a argued, Derrida’s essay subjects the gramo-
string of preset operations. Were Derrida of phone it names to a haunting by the pianola
the party of Conrad, Vonnegut, and Gad- it does not, what alternative portrait of the
dis, he would have named the bad computer novel might appear under the sign of that
ater the player piano, that emblem of dead- spectral instrument, with its self- depressing
ening mechanization. But the pianola goes keys?9 And what uninvited guest might come
unmentioned by Derrida, despite playing as to occupy the player piano’s empty bench?
prominent a role in Ulysses as the gramo-
phone. Nevertheless, an essay that names the
Mechanical Music Makers
gramophone without dwelling on it can be
understood to dream of, without naming, the So far I have pitted the gramophone and the
pianola: a device whose “computer reading- pianola against each other, in part because,
head” registers the music of Ulysses by add- as we will shortly see, the “Circe” episode in
ing to it its own score (307)—an assemblage Joyce’s novel stages a kind of duel between
comprising a scrolling code, a given instru- them. But the gramophone and the pianola
ment with unique timbres, a singer or sing- were, if not born together, at least reared
ers, and the inimitable acoustics of a room. in adjacent nurseries. As the two media
In exceeding its own binarity—in quantizing emerged, they were oten spoken of in a sin-
music without dematerializing it, in subject- gle breath—“linked,” says the historian David
ing the purity of its signal to the noise and Suisman, “as two aspects of a single phenom-
risk of multiple contingencies—the pianola enon” (17). he United States Copyright Act
instantiates the yes of airmation, dispersing of 1909, he reminds us, handled them under
20 Ulysses Pianola [ PMLA
a single legal device, the new compulsory standard piano, making it visible as already
mechanical license, which permitted the cre- extravagantly mechanical. We might think of
ation of “mechanical reproductions” (as dis- the player piano as a reading of the piano—or,
tinct from copies) for a preset royalty, without equally, as the piano’s metaictive turn: as ma-
the consent of the copyright owner. Writing terializing the piano’s self- understanding as
during the debates that led up to the 1909 act, mechanism. Among the things it underscores
the composer John Philip Sousa also lumped is the standard piano’s conscription of a hu-
the phonograph and the player piano together man player less as an agent of self-e xpression
as “mechanical reproducing machines” in than as a part of the instrument’s sound-
deploring their efect on amateur musician- reproduction mechanism. Classical players, in
ship. Not least that of American girls: “let the particular, spend years developing disciplined
mechanical music- maker be generally intro- techniques, oten involving repetitive biome-
duced into the homes; hour for hour these chanical relex conditioning, in order to ex-
same girls will listen to the machine’s perfor- ecute pieces in the manner designated by the
mance and, sure as can be, lose inally all in- composer. As Suisman puts it, “[T] he point of
terest in technical study.” A single- technology the player’s labor was, just as it would be later
view of the phonograph or the pianola misses with increasingly mechanized technologies,
how they were paired, even conflated, by reproduction of sounds determined earlier,
copyright law and by those who saw “the me- by someone else” (21–22); in other words, the
chanical music- maker” as a unified regime alpha version of the player piano was the clas-
posing one dire threat to amateur music. sical pianist. his sounds darkly Foucauldian,
And another threat to a musically interpo- but it might prompt us to reconsider Sousa’s
lated model of femininity: the girl who would deploration over amateur music’s death at
rather listen to a player piano than practice the hands of mechanical music makers. Say
her scales would have her counterpart in the for the sake of argument that the “technical
phonograph- wielding mother at bedtime. study” of the piano, even for nonprofession-
As Sousa asks, “[W] ill she croon her baby to als, required the acquisition of competence
sleep with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be (to use Derrida’s word) through numbing,
put to sleep by machinery?” (281). strenuous, repetitive discipline. Perhaps then
I will consider, below, how Ulysses rep- the pianola, long accused of dehumanizing
licates and travesties the pianola’s staging of musical expression, should be reclaimed as an
gender. But before turning to Joyce’s novel, emancipatory technology: as a device to root
we should dwell on the piano itself for a mo- out routinization. his would be to ind the
ment, to prize it apart from its automation pianola’s relexive turn exposing as fake the
and to ask why a novel might ind one of its organicism that surrounds the standard in-
self- concepts in a player piano as opposed to strument—to ind metaiction publishing the
the standard instrument. To call the pianola a hidden regimens of iction.
mechanized piano is to imply that the piano
alone is not already mechanical. But, as Suis-
Ulysses’s Pianola
man again reminds us, the modern pianoforte
results from centuries of Western keyboard- The pianola makes its appearance late in
instrument development crossed with Joyce’s book, in the hallucinatory “Circe” epi-
nineteenth- century industrial manufacturing. sode, written in the form of a dramatic script.
Not an incursion of mechanism, the pianola Leopold Bloom has followed the inebriated
is an intensification of it. This realization Stephen Dedalus and his friend Lynch into
helps dispel any organic fantasies about the Dublin’s red- light district, where they have
]
130.1 Paul K. Saint-Amour 21
entered a brothel run by Bella Cohen. here, (472; 15.4137–39). here follows a long para-
through an open window, the Yorkshire- born graph in which the lyrics of the pianola’s song
sex worker Zoe hears a group of people in the are interspersed with references to earlier epi-
street singing “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl”: sodes in the novel; at the end of this, a vision
of Stephen’s dead mother rises through the
zoe loor, precipitating one of the episode’s crises.
hat’s me. (she claps her hands.) Dance! Dance! Pianola, like zipper, thermos, and heroin
(she runs to the pianola.) Who has twopence?
(and, for that matter, gramophone and pho-
bloom
nograph), is a proprietary eponym—a term
Who’ll . . .?
that started out as a brand name but became
lynch
a generic, in this case for any player piano. So
(handing her coins.) Here. . . .
we will not expect to be able to identify the
zoe
(turns the drumhandle.) here. speciic instrument in “Circe.” Instead, in ac-
(She drops two pennies in the slot. Gold, cord with the episode’s dream logic of conden-
pink and violet lights start forth. The sation, what we ind is a conlation of several
drum turns purring in low hesitation discrete machines, a synchronic capsule his-
waltz. Professor Goodwin, in a bowknot- tory of the player piano. As if in answer to
ted periwig, in court dress, wearing a Bloom’s asking, “Who’ll . . .?” (play the pi-
stained Inverness cape, bent in two from
ano, presumably), Professor Goodwin, Molly
incredible age, totters across the room, his
Bloom’s former accompanist, now retired,
hands luttering. He sits tinily on the pia-
appears. His age and the “handless sticks of
nostool and lits and beats handless sticks
arms” he lits and beats on the keyboard make
of arms on the keyboard, nodding with
him an anthropomorphic version of the Aeo-
damsel’s grace, his bowknot bobbing.)
lian piano player, or “push- up player” (ig. 1), a
(468–69; 15.4004–22; 1st ellipsis in orig.)
separate device that was wheeled up to a regu-
The table is pushed to one side so that Ste- lar piano until its sixty- five leather-c overed
phen and Zoe can dance as Bloom looks on. ingers were positioned over the correspond-
ing keys. But earlier in the episode Bloom
(The prelude ceases. Professor Goodwin, had heard piano playing from the street—“A
beating vague arms, shrivels, shrinks, his man’s touch. Sad music. Church music” (387;
live cape falling about the stool. he air in 15.1278)—and, thinking the touch might be
irmer waltz time sounds. Stephen and Zoe
Stephen’s, had asked Zoe whether Stephen
circle freely. he lights change, glow, fade
was inside. Once he enters the music room
gold rosy violet.)
eight hundred lines later, Bloom indeed inds
the pianola
Stephen standing at the instrument—“with
Two young fellows were talking about
two ingers [repeating] once more a series of
their girls, girls, girls,
empty iths” (410; 15.2072–73). he accessibil-
Sweethearts they’d let behind . . . . . .
(469; 15.4047–53) ity of the keyboard here implies not a push-u p
player but an “inner player” (fig. 2), an up-
The pianola continues to speak or sing the right piano with the pneumatic and mechani-
words to the song, as if it were part gramo- cal stack of the push- up player built into its
phone. As the dancers whirl with greater cabinet. hese instruments irst appeared in
abandon, the stage directions mime their dip the late 1890s, which squares with Zoe’s ask-
and spin. An apparition of Stephen’s father, ing Bloom, in the wee hours of the novel’s 16
Simon, says, “hink of your mother’s people!” June 1904 setting, “Are you coming into the
to which Stephen responds, “Dance of death” music room to see our new pianola?” (408;
[
22 Ulysses Pianola PMLA

F . 1
IG
Ad for a push-up
pianola.
15.1990–91). But the fact that Zoe can select not surprise us much given that the song “My
a particular tune by “turn[ing] the drumhan- Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” was not published un-
dle” indicates an instrument with a sophisti- til 1908, four years ater the novel’s action. In
cated device permitting multiple rolls, such Ulysses’s Homeric intertext, Circe can see the
as Wurlitzer’s Automatic Music Roll Changer future. What would have been chronological
(ig. 3). hese precursors of the jukebox would howlers in other episodes seem commensurate
have been installed in coin- operated instru- with the porous temporality of Joyce’s “Circe.”
ments such as the Wurlitzer IX (ig. 4), whose Looking closely at the ad for the Auto-
electriied motor relieved humans of having matic Music Roll Changer, we see the menu
to pump and whose backlit art- glass front “Classical, Opera, Songs, Dances, or the Na-
could have supplied those fairground- like tional Airs,” indicating the broad variety
“gold, pink and violet lights” that start forth. of musical genres available as pianola rolls.
Machines like this did not appear until 1910 A playback machine with easily exchanged
at the earliest, but such anachronisms should rolls could play almost any kind of music and
]
130.1 Paul K. Saint-Amour 23
FIG. 2
Ad for an inner
player (Everybody’s
Magazine, 1900).
[
24 Ulysses Pianola PMLA

FIG. 3
Ad for the
Wurlitzer Auto-
matic Music
Roll Changer.