Reverb: American Literature and Sonic Media, 1876-1952

Reverb: American Literature and Sonic Media, 1876-1952 By Sean Michael Keck B.A., Boston College, 2007 M.A., Boston College, 2009 M.A., Brown University, 2011 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Sean M. Keck This dissertation by Sean M. Keck is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_____________ _____________________________________ Stuart Burrows, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_____________ _____________________________________ Tamar Katz, Reader Date_____________ _____________________________________ Daniel Kim, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_____________ _____________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Vita Sean M. Keck was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey on June 4, 1985. He graduated summa cum laude from the Boston College honors program in 2007 with a B.A. in English and minors in Art History and Creative Writing. While an undergraduate, he received the Kelleher Prize for Poetry, the Mary A. & Katherine G. Finneran Commencement Award, and the J. Robert Barth, S.J. Arts Excellence Award. Keck remained at Boston College to pursue an M.A. in English, which he completed in 2009. As a master’s student at BC, he received the Andrew Von Hendy Prize for Graduate Writing, served as Assistant Managing Editor of Post Road magazine, and taught in the First-Year Writing Seminar program. Keck received an M.A. in 2011 and a Ph.D. in 2015 from Brown University. While at Brown, he was awarded a Manning Graduate Fellowship III, Cogut Center for the Humanities Fellowship, and Dissertation Completion Fellowship. He presented his research in a number of venues, including the annual conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modern Language Association, and he published an article in The Wallace Stevens Journal. In Providence, he taught courses for Brown’s Department of English and its Pre-College Programs and he co-led creative writing workshops for Rhode Island adults with developmental disabilities through the Brown Writers’ Group volunteer organization. iv Acknowledgments Thomas Watson told Mark Twain that “1500 men had been at work on the telephone for 5000 years” before it was finally realized.1 I too owe a debt of gratitude to a large number of people for making this project possible. Stuart Burrows, my director, has time and again demonstrated a level of intellectual, professional, and personal generosity that is simply staggering. His enthusiasm and guidance have helped me transform a question I first asked in his 2010 seminar on “The Rise of American Realism”—a question about sound in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—into a dissertation. My readers, Tamar Katz and Daniel Kim, have been remarkably giving with their time and their counsel. The many conversations we’ve had together have been both invaluable and enjoyable. I am grateful to the participants in the Cogut Center for the Humanities Fellows’ Seminar, the Graduate Student Forum, and the New England Americanist Collective for reading early drafts of much of the material which follows. Thank you as well to Deak Nabers, who read the first version of my work on Stephen Crane’s The Monster as a seminar paper in 2011, and to Timothy Bewes and Michelle Clayton, who invited me to participate in events on Brown’s campus that helped clarify my work with sound studies. It is hard to imagine anything happening in the Department of English without the incredible Lorraine Mazza, Ellen Viola, Marilyn Netter, and Marianne Costa; this dissertation is no exception. Thank you to my parents, Brian and Patricia Keck, and my brother Adam for their support and for never asking why we needed so many books in the house. Finally, thank you Emily for helping me hear the music in every day of our lives together. 1 Mark Twain, The Complete Interviews, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 256-57. v Contents Introduction 1 1. Ethical Interference: Mark Twain’s Communications Breakdown 19 2. Stephen Crane’s Phonographic Corpus: Recording, Race, Realism 61 3. Her “Master-Piece” Voice: Gertrude Stein’s Continuous Gramophone 112 4. “Lower Frequencies”: American Culture and Ralph Ellison’s Radio 152 Bibliography 199 vi INTRODUCTION In 1883, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells debuted Colonel Sellers as a Scientist. Their play recounted the continuing exploits of its title character, a buffoonish speculator and inventor who had first appeared in Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel The Gilded Age (1873) and had met with mixed theatrical reviews in Colonel Sellers (1875). Colonel Sellers as a Scientist did not improve Twain’s reputation as a dramatist, but the sequel did promise audiences a glimpse of one of the period’s emerging stars. In the Colonel’s laboratory, among instruments for re-materializing dead spirits and achieving other such fanciful objectives, is a phonograph, a machine Thomas Edison had introduced and begun exhibiting to the American public only five years prior to Twain and Howells’s play. Colonel Sellers touts his version of Edison’s machine—a “Ship’s Phonograph for the application of stored Profanity”—as a cost-saving and more reliable substitute for the labor of a class of middle managers (i.e., first mates and factory foremen) whose chief value is imagined to lie in their ability to verbally abuse their workers.1 Twain and Howells parody Edison’s claim that the phonograph will replace human labor by allowing businessmen to “dispense with the clerk” when dictating correspondence.2 Sellers also proudly describes how the device can be made to 1 Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist [1883]: A Comedy by S.L. Clemens and W.D. Howells, in The Complete Plays of W.D. Howells, ed. Walter J. Meserve (New York: New York University Press, 1960), 223, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88- 2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xr i:lion&rft_id=xri:lion:ft:dr:Z000780321:0. 2 Thomas Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” The North American Review 126, no. 262 (May/June 1878): 533, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25110210. 1 “eavesdrop” on anyone speaking in close proximity to it.3 Twain and Howells cross these two functions for comic effect, and at various points in the play the phonograph emits a mélange of hyperbolic curses and fragmented dialogue, racial dialect, song, and even the sounds of a cat fight. There will be much more to say about Colonel Sellers as a Scientist in chapter 1. But for now I want to focus on what it would have meant for a phonograph to “speak” on stage in 1883. While the phonograph, as a “real” invention, stands in stark contrast to the other devices that figure prominently in Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, its “realization” on the stage would have been no less artificial and imaginary than that of Sellers’s apparatus for re-materializing the dead. Not only is it highly unlikely that Twain and Howell’s could have secured one of Edison’s exhibition machines for their play, but, even had they managed this feat, the phonograph could not have done what their script asked of it.4 The machines Edison demonstrated before American audiences in the late 1870s and early 1880s recorded their messages on a thin sheet of tinfoil, and this “could only be played until it was removed (and thus, destroyed) from the rotary drum.”5 The repeated playback Sellers advertises for his “Ship’s Phonograph” had thus yet to become a technological possibility. Moreover, the speech to be recorded had to be very brief in duration; when Edison commercialized a wax cylinder version of the phonograph in 1888, even its more durable and replayable recordings could not exceed two minutes in 3 Twain and Howells, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, 241. 4 Even when the “perfected” phonograph first became commercially available in 1888, Twain was unable to secure two of the machines for himself, despite attempting to jump the queue of eager consumers by sending multiple entreaties directly to Edison. Harriet Elinor Smith, “Introduction,” in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 20, n48. 5 Kyle S. Barnett, “Furniture Music: The Phonograph as Furniture, 1900-1930,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18, no. 3 (Dec. 2006): 320, doi: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2006.00096.x. 2 length.6 Finally, the theatrical phonograph’s ability to “eavesdrop” suggests a level of aural sensitivity that the real phonograph would never achieve. Given the technological limitations of the latter (e.g., the volume and closeness with which one must speak or sing into the recording horn), accidental recording, or “eavesdropping,” could not have occurred. Rather than saving labor by replacing human voices, Twain and Howells’s “phonograph” must therefore have required a significant investment of human effort in order to maintain the fantasy of its automatic recording and speaking abilities. In place of an actual (impossible) record containing all of the various sounds called for by the play, one imagines a carefully timed chorus of actors’ voices and sound effects delivered from offstage, an ironic ventriloquizing of the object whose major claim to fame (in the play but also in Edison’s rhetoric) was its ability to record “faithfully” and to reproduce real sounds with a level of precision and indexical authority beyond the capacity of human beings.7 The audience, listening to this staging of the phonograph, would have had to suspend their disbelief in order for its autographic claims to resonate.

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