“The Megaphone of Destiny—” Composition, Voice, and Multitude in the Auditory Avant-Garde of the Twentieth Century: Gertru
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“THE MEGAPHONE OF DESTINY—” COMPOSITION, VOICE, AND MULTITUDE IN THE AUDITORY AVANT-GARDE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: GERTRUDE STEIN, SAMUEL BECKETT, JOHN CAGE, AND FRANK ZAPPA by Tomasz Zbigniew Michalak B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1999 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 2001 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (English Literature) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2013 © Tomasz Zbignew Michalak, 2013 ABSTRACT This thesis traces the critical history of the term ‘auditory turn.’ Following Marshall McLuhan, I argue that the emergence of sound and sound-oriented concepts in Twentieth- Century literature and culture exemplifies a paradigm shift in the way a literary text operates. This shift affects not just literature but forms of literacy and literary analysis. By drawing on McLuhan’s notions like ‘the scandal of cubism’ and the ‘acoustic space’ as well as Walter Ong’s ‘secondary orality’ along with subsequent research in media and sound studies, I examine a group of selected works that manifest the idea of auditory text, a text characterized by performative sonority, aspiring to the condition of music. The thesis offers four ‘representative anecdotes’ of the ‘auditory turn’ in avant-garde and experimental literature, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, and Frank Zappa, each of which is engaged in a separate chapter. Chapter 1 draws on the relationship between sound and presence and landscape as it applies to Stein’s ideas concerning composition and landscape theatre. Chapter 2 turns to selected short prose works of Beckett to demonstrate the attention to sound in the way in which the problem of voice as a marker of self preoccupies Beckett. Chapter 3 examines selected writings of John Cage that engage the problem of sound and voice both theoretically, as themes addressed critically, and in his practice of using voice as an instrument. Chapter 4 directs critical attention to Frank Zappa’s writings as well as musical compositions that explicitly engage the issue of sound, voice, and noise in popular culture. The four chapters help develop systematically the structural argument of the thesis concerning the interface of sound, text, and image, demonstrating this interface to manifest in three related ways, as composition, voice, and multitude (also referred to as peopling). ii PREFACE This thesis contains original, independent, and never previously published work by Tomasz Michalak. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. ii PREFACE.. ................................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................. iv LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION: THE AUDITORY TURN-ON ...................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE POETICS OF AURALITY ............................. 30 1. 1. Toward a Sensory Arousal ................................................................................................. 30 1. 2. The Geography of Text: Composition Decomposed ........................................................... 39 1. 3. Radio Aurality: Voice Meditating Immediacy in Landscape Theatre ................................. 67 1. 4. From Landscape to Luminescence in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights .......................... 100 CHAPTER 2: THE AUDITORY SCRIPTURES OF SAMUEL BECKETT ........................... 120 2. 1. Composition, Voice, and the Multitude in Beckett ........................................................... 120 2. 2. Groping on the Auditory Field: The Discourses of Sense, Sound, and Self in Beckett and Contemporary Theory ................................................................................................ 132 2. 3. Narrative In/Formation: Traversing the Plane of Immanence of Beckett’s How It Is....... 155 2. 4. The Lonesome Multitude of Company .............................................................................. 172 CHAPTER 3: JOHN CAGE’S POETICS OF THE AUDITORY TEXT ................................. 189 3. 1. DJ Cage on Composition and Nothing .............................................................................. 189 iv 3. 2. The Sound of Silence: Composition Recomposed ............................................................ 198 3. 3. Empty Voices Raging: Toward an Auditory Reading of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” ... 213 3.4. The Rhizomatics of a Hiccup: Writings Through as Evocative Texts ............................... 227 CHAPTER 4: FRANK ZAPPA, THE M/OTHERS OF US ALL ............................................. 252 4. 1. At Studio Z: Uncle Frank, Audaciously ............................................................................ 252 4. 2. Image and Sound: Toward the Zappa Composition .......................................................... 261 4. 3. The Three Functions of the Voice in Apostrophe (’) ......................................................... 278 4. 4. Logos, Pathos, and Ethos: The Rhetoric of the Megaphone in Zappa’s Joe’s Garage ..... 301 CONCLUSION: TOWARD NOISE ......................................................................................... 321 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 335 DISCOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 345 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Trance-Fusion, Frank Zappa Album Cover Art ................................................... 263 Figure 2 Apostrophe (’), Frank Zappa Album Cover Art ..................................................... 280 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deep gratitude to Rena Del Pieve Gobbi for loving attention, inspiration, and support in critical stages of this project. Special thank you to Anne Ahmad for stimulating conversations about McLuhan and sound studies and for proofreading. Very special thanks to Charles Ulrich for offering to read the Zappa chapter, his editorial suggestions, and attentive comments regarding the content of the chapter. vii INTRODUCTION: THE AUDITORY TURN-ON A recent conference hosted by the Butler School of Music at Austin, Texas, Thinking Hearing — The Auditory Turn in the Humanities (2009) offers in its title the term ‘auditory turn,’ declaring in the conference proposal the importance of ‘the auditory’ as an emerging paradigm in the humanities and social sciences, calling on scholars to turn critical attention to sound and aurality as pertinent areas of investigation: “Are the humanities on the verge of an ‘auditory turn?’ Do we need an equivalent to visual studies — aural studies, as one might call it?” The ‘auditory turn’ may indeed be a gesture in the direction of aural studies. Applied to literature and writing, and so closer to the purview of this thesis, the term helps to make sense of the growing theoretical and critical interest in what Marshall McLuhan, early in the history of media studies, called the ‘acoustic space,’ the space of listening, of the ear and orality. McLuhan’s critical interest in the auditory/acoustic draws the literary scholar’s attention to the ear as a silenced organ of perception. In McLuhan’s mind, print-oriented cultures marginalize the ear, replacing it with the eye as the preferred mode of sensing and of making sense. The eye becomes the dominant regime of thought, understanding, and culture of the so-called Gutenberg civilization with its complex ocular epistemologies of seeing, sight, and vision. However, the explosion of the mass media in the 1950s and, increasingly, of the audio-visual-computer media of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s that foreshadowed the global- digital synergies of today, brings the aural/auditory world into the foreground. In this thesis, I examine auditory snapshots of that foreground. 1 Although it’s difficult to pinpoint the ‘auditory turn’ at a particular historical moment, it clearly traverses several points of the Twentieth-Century with its unprecedented surge of new recording and communication technologies, calling for new forms of literacy and social and cultural practices. Here the ‘auditory turn’ helps to group related cultural phenomena, understand them in the context of larger social practices, infer relationships between them, and draw their larger cultural implications. More specifically, the emphasis on the auditory/acoustic helps to interrogate the eye as an organ of unique insight and a model for understanding in the systems of knowledge referred to by McLuhan as the Gutenberg Galaxy (also the title of his cultural-ethnographic magnum opus); it then extends the eye telescopically as an instrument of understanding beyond sight and vision by connecting and relating it to other senses. At stake is the capacity to make sense of multi-media and multimediation as the epistemic-aesthetic paradigm of the century, to image beyond the gaze, as an acoustic perception, floating in the non-localizable, multi-perspectival