Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia

by Allen S. Weiss

Breathless explores early sound recording and the literature that both foreshadowed its invention and was contemporaneous with its early years, revealing the broad influence of this new technology at the very origins of Modernism. Through close readings of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Cros, Paul Valéry, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Jules Verne, and Antonin Artaud, Allen S. Weiss shows how sound recording's uncanny confluence of human and machine would transform our expectations of mourning and melancholia, transfiguring our intimate relation to death. Interdisciplinary, the book bridges poetry and literature, theology and metaphysics. As Breathless shows, the symbolic and practical roles of poetry and technology were transformed as new forms of nostalgia and eroticism arose.

Genres: Theory, Music

170 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2002

Reviews

[Troy S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the effect of this quite similar to reading Specters of Marx, or listening to a William Basinski or Caretaker album. Also, the day I finished reading this piece I saw Evan Caminiti play through Toxic City Music with visuals by Paul Clipson, which, with Breathless on my mental forefront, became an exercise in critical cultural history.

Anyways, Weiss' contextual figurings were sometimes absolutely brilliant and beautiful: from the very beginning of the book imprinting the image of the gruesome death of Edgar Allen Poe's dear Virginia, to the very pertinent inclusion of Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph / recorded music, invented primarily to capture the voices of loved ones before they die. There is a lot of text worth reading on the archive as tomb, technology as a circumvention of death, but Breathless deals with the ontological implications of preserving the primordially (perhaps not-so) abstract voice. There were some brilliant inclusions of referential material, Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, Scarry's The Body in Pain, discussions of composers BESIDES John Cage (refreshing when people can write about other interesting and complex composers).

Breathless does a job of opening new ways of thinking about sound that have been largely untouched. At times, Weiss gets waaaaay too into talking about literature, particularly about Mallarme, I thought. Perhaps me not being too crazy about Mallarme, and finding Igitur in particular unremarkable, made the material on the poet feel irrelevant and tangential sometimes, but I can appreciate that still as part of the excitable intellectual's ride through thinking.

After, or even during reading this, I would certainly recommend listening to some old records, and think about what your listening to in regards to this book. You'll hear it with another dimension. Who says philosophy isn't practical?

[Cambra · Rating 4 out of 5]

rx: read in conjunction with The Audible Past and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.