Lee Carleton Assistant Director

Lee Carleton Assistant Director

7313 Longview Dr. Writing Center

Richmond, VA 23225 University of Richmond

Waxing Whitman: Sonic Metamorphoses & Conceptual Compulsions

Where has the body of the fable gone? The body of metamorphosis,

the one of a pure chain of appearances, of a timeless and sexless

fluidity of forms, the ceremonial body brought to life by mythology,

or the Peking Opera and Oriental theater, as well as by dance:

a non-Individual body, a dual and fluid body – body without desire,

yet capable of all metamorphoses – a body freed from the mirror of itself…

(Baudrillard, Ecstasy 45)

Obscure Origins

The origins of human language naturally begin with noise, making sounds with our mouth as modeled by many of our fellow creatures, but the evanescence of sound and the consequent lack of sonic artifacts make the certain charting of the early evolution of language impossible. As Christine Kenneally observes in The First Word, the occasional cranium or mandible can only reveal so much.

The difficulty “lies in the nature of the spoken word. For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere.”(6)

Though she reviews current theories and major thinkers, Kenneally admits that even with modern technologies and insights what we have is “the twenty-first century’s best guess at humanity’s oldest mystery.” (6)

Like handwriting, each human voice is unique to the body that produces it, a distinct “self-mark” or autograph, but inscribed briefly on the air rather than marked on a surface. An individual voiceprint is so specific that spectrographic analysis of voice has become one of the tools of biometrics, the ‘security’-oriented science of identification and control of the human body. Steve Cain of Forensic Tape Analysis, Inc. explains the autographic nature of the voice:

There are two general factors involved in the process of human speech. The first factor in determining voice uniqueness lies in the sizes of the vocal cavities, such as the throat, nasal and oral cavities, and the shape, length and tension of the individual's vocal cords located in the larynx. The vocal cavities are resonators, much like organ pipes, which reinforce some of the overtones produced by the vocal cords, which produce formats or voiceprint bars…The second factor in determining voice uniqueness lies in the manner in which the articulators or muscles of speech are manipulated during speech. The articulators include the lips, teeth, tongue, soft palate and jaw muscles whose controlled interplay produces intelligible speech. …The likelihood that two people could develop identical use patterns of their articulators also appears very remote.

(Expert Article Library)

Early Autographic Inscriptions

Though traditional US history generally claims Edison as the sole genius and inventor of sound record and replay technology, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Kittler reviews the early history of sonic artifacts and our desire to find a way to capture immaterial sound in material substance. Noting the “humble, or animal origins of our gramophone needles,” Kittler tells of the 1830 discovery of “etched frequency curves” made on sooty glass by Wilhelm Weber by attaching a pig’s bristle to the tine of a tuning fork. This experiment was followed by the invention of the “phonautograph” by Edouard Léon Scott in 1857 where voice is amplified when spoken into the horn, vibrating a membrane attached to a pig’s bristle and transcribing the sound on a soot-covered cylinder – sound can now be seen. (26)

Edison and others follow up on this, experimenting with wax paper and tinfoil, eventually using cylinders made with a base of asphalt and carnuba wax coated with a metallic soap made of stearate soda and a metal hardener as the inscription surface. Though Whitman died in 1892, and the composition of the contested Whitman cylinder is unknown, by 1888 brown wax cylinders had become standard and according to the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s “Marius Barbeau Wax Cylinder Collection”, between 1895 and 1901 the composition of the wax was “a mixture of mineral, vegetal and animal wax. (100 parts yellow ceresin, 25 parts beeswax and 25 parts stearic wax),” the likely composition of the controversial “Whitman wax cylinder” explored in this essay (Canadian Museum). These cylinders were inscribed either “vertically” with the sound vibrations marked on the bottom of the groove, or “laterally” with the marks of sound recorded on the sides of the groove. (Fabrizio)

Below we see a photo of one of the cylinders from the Barbeau collection next to an early promotional image of a potential application of the new technology – note the horizontal cylinder at the bottom and to the right of horn.

Chance encounter & aural expectation

My interest in wax cylinders and my first introduction to them sprouted years ago when I found a CD of wax cylinder recordings by the infamous libertine, mountain climber and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley – known for his part in the occult revival in Britain that eventually spread to the US. Knowing all of this and having seen pictures of him where he hyped his tabloid reputation as “the Great Beast,” I was quite surprised when I heard his voice.

The unexpected sound of his high pitched and droning voice led to that familiar ‘mismatch’ of experience where the face we encounter after hearing the voice is not the face we expected. I had seen pictures of Crowley and assumed a deeper more authoritative voice would come from the wax cylinder now digitized on CD.

At issue were my expectations and the actual qualities of the voice, just as it is for the controversial “Whitman wax cylinder,” a 36-second recording of the voice of a man reciting one of Walt Whitman’s more obscure poems “America” – a sound that has been digitized and continues to echo on the web today.

Whitman’s voice or not, I am struck by the series of material manifestations that have kept this voice alive, and the span of time contained by that voiceprint: an artifact that originally traveled from the embodied speaker, that was translated over the history of sound recording from analog voice prints on a wax cylinder to encoding in an aluminum-polymer CD sandwich, to a digital mp3 file posted on the web. The voice that can be heard today has come a long way. It first came from a specific human body, was inscribed on the air and then in wax, transferred to magnetic tape, broadcast over the radio, captured again on tape, and then reproduced on cassette before it was digitized for the web.

Authenticity, contested & invented

Though this voice is now globally available and largely identified as Whitman’s voice, there is disagreement between audio experts and humanities scholars on the identity of the speaker. Library of Congress experts and other audio technicians have judged the recording as a forgery while some literary scholars, particularly Larry Griffin while at Midland College in Texas and Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa, are convinced the speaker is Whitman. Though the original wax cylinder is missing, perhaps by reflecting upon the material manifestations of this voice combined with the analysis of humanities scholars and Whitman’s pantheistic celebration of embodiment in his poetry, we can hear the echoes of his voice – but as Bertolini suggests we will have to participate if we want to hear.

[Whitman] “continually tempts the reader to identify the speaking “I” of his lyric with him, he also repeatedly deflects those identifications, inviting the reader instead to see the self gaining expression in the poetry as “being realized”—being instantiated, rendered real, brought into being—through the reader’s participatory agency.” (1047)

It may be that, in our exploration of this recording, what we get out of it will “not have to do with the kind of representational or narrative closure that motivates (auto)biography and that obliterates the distinction between the speaking self of lyric and the historical author,” but will lead us to an expanded conception of identity, voice and embodiment. (1050)

Nietzche suggests another perspective on embodiment and identity when he wonders in The Will To Power:

The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible phenomenon: to be discussed first, methodologically, without coming to any decision about its ultimate significance. The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? (270)

Later Nietzche notes that such concepts are the result of “the inventive force that invented categories [which] labored in the service of our…need for security, [and] for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds,” and that it is “the powerful who made the names of things into law.” (277)

In an 1873 manuscript unpublished in Nietzche’s lifetime, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” he celebrates the “liberated intellect” rising above such linguistic limits, “that vast assembly of beams and boards to which the needy man clings.” Urging self-authorized engagement, Nietzche’s liberated intellect uses traditional taxonomies “as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks,”

He will speak only in forbidden metaphors and unheard-of combinations of concepts so that, by at least demolishing and deriding the old conceptual barriers, he may do creative justice to the impression made on him by the mighty, present intuition. (“On Truth” 152)

Thus only can we escape our automatic “compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws…as if they enabled us to fix the real world” and realize that their utility is not in their ultimate ‘truth’ but their usefulness in helping us to create “a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.” (Will 282)

Against automata

McLuhan and Adorno also noted the human tendency to automatism in perception, thought and action, “the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by [media] on our senses.” (Understanding Media 81) McLuhan saw the potential for awakening from this trance in hybrid technologies and techniques that jolt us out of our patterns of conditioned consciousness. In The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, Menke defines Adorno’s practice as “the peculiar de-automatizing processuality of the realization of aesthetic understanding,” – the key to breaking from conditioned responses and interrupting our automatic processes of sensory perception and interpretation.

In Adorno’s theory, final identification of meaning is neither possible nor desirable as Menke explains:

…the aesthetically processual enactment of understanding lacks such rules that make identification possible. For this reason, aesthetic understanding does not result in any identifications of meaning or its bearer…the aesthetic enactment of understanding vacillates between sound and meaning, as it hesitates in identifying either one of them. (33-34)

And, as Bertolini reminds us, Whitman assists us in this “processual enactment” by refusing to fix his identity, instead offering us a more plastic persona:

…it is something about the mobility and plasticity of the Whitmanian persona, as well as the way his distinctive “voice” opens itself to resignification in the voices of American Others, that seems to be at the root of this rhetorical function. The ability of Whitman’s verse, on this view, to circulate among various embodied readerships who can then employ him in cultivating their own self-expression depends in some measure on his speaker’s abstractness. (Bertolini 1050-53)

Whitman’s poem in print

The poem being recited on the contested recording is “America,” a fairly obscure one that rarely makes it into anthologies, but which was part of the 1889 edition of Leaves of Grass. Though the poem, first published in The New York Herald in 1888, is six lines long, the speaker only recites the title and the first four lines:

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

These lines are missing on the recording:

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

Some insight on these lines can be found in Bertolini’s “’Hinting’ and ‘Reminding’” where he discusses Whitman’s “rhetoric of performative embodiment” and characterizes Whitman’s descriptive approach to Americans as “particularizing types of subjects according to their embodied and material attributes,” emphasizing a “radical equality.” (1052) This poem has a clear focus on equality and embodiment. Gender and generational differences, robust physicality, and identification with the ongoing life of the Earth comprise the foundation for the equality of person that Whitman sees as a core American value.

Whitman’s ambiguity and ability to speak as “kosmos,” a kind of universal voice speaking through others, is a rough parallel to the series of material objects through which the voice reciting “America” has traveled. Bertoulini briefly outlines the slippery multiplicity in Whitman’s narrative voice:

…the curious status of poetic communication in his text

has much to do with the notion of his speaker being metaphorically rematerialized in the embodied subjectivities

of his readers.…refusing to offer it as a graspable referent

of his representations, …refusing a conception of poetic communication understood as the reader’s extracting

semantic content located inside the hypostatized container

of the text. (1053)

Even if the speaker is not the poet Walt Whitman, might there be some cause to consider the voice to be Whitman’s in a pantheistic sense, as the recording of his poetry traveling through various embodiments, ultimately “refusing to offer…a graspable referent?” (1054) Perhaps, but those of a more technical turn of mind reject the recording outright.

Technical Objections

In an email interview about the authenticity of the cylinder, Peter Shambarger Executive Director of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) notes:

Many early record scholars are convinced this cylinder is fake. I have heard from several that the physical material of [the] cylinder and the cutting style of the groove wasn't even correct for the period up to early 1892, the time of Whitman's death. It has been speculated that this cylinder was probably made much later - late 1890s through the early 1900s by a charlatan trying to cash in on some money and a good story to go with it.