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| ISBN-13: | 9780520960404 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 06/09/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sounds
The Ambient Humanities
By John Mowitt
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96040-4
CHAPTER 1
Echo
So it happened that a nightingale sang in the garden of a country home. Her voice could be heard clearly in the house. A radio company that discovered the nightingale decided to place a microphone next to the tree where the bird had its nest. The tenant of the house, listening to the broadcast and the live voice of the nightingale at the same time observed that the broadcast nightingale was heard earlier than the live one,—the difference being due to the different velocities of electrical and acoustical waves. The real nightingale sounded like her own echo.
—ADORNO, Current of Music
The accent I have placed on the problem of how sound challenges our thinking about context calls for elaboration and development. Although concerned here to trace the catachrestic loop between the contextualization of sound and the pressure of sound on the work of contextualization, my attention to echo is meant to tease out of the emergent field of sound studies not just another phenomenon of scholarly or aesthetic attention—the echo—but a supplemental concept for thinking the work of contextualization in the humanities as a whole. The value of the audit will be put to the test, quietly (that is, on the expository periphery), in helping fix (on) the constraints brought to this problem by the gaze and the logic of specular reflection.
I open this line of inquiry by reading an early "novel" of Michael Ondaatje's, Coming through Slaughter. What strongly recommends this text for consideration is the fact that, in exceedingly intricate ways, it addresses the problem of thinking the origin of jazz by connecting it to the figure of Charles "Buddy" Bolden and, in turn, connecting Bolden to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century. The text, in short, is a snarl of contextualization and sound, and what attracts attention is the place of echo in this snarl. Or, stated in terms put in play in my epigraph, the text sings and acts like a nightingale.
For those unfamiliar with Ondaatje's text, a sketch of some of its defining contours will prove useful. Generically, and according to Barthes, this is what Goldmann means by form; the text exhibits qualities of a police procedural or detective novel. Not far into the text we are introduced to a character named Webb, who is a cop looking for Buddy Bolden, a friend who has gone missing under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Ondaatje works the discrepant relation between story and plot to give us insight into Bolden as a person but also to deepen the enigma around his disappearance. The reader is coaxed into caring about the question: why would a guy like this just up and disappear?
The text is divided into three sections, and in the first we are introduced to Bolden, who is depicted as a caring father (he walks his kids to school); passionate husband (he is a dexterous and attentive ravisher of his bride); talented, if inebriated, barber (his shop, "N. Joseph's Shaving Parlor," buzzes with activity); and a daring, even dangerously talented, cornet player. In large part this section is focalized through an omniscient narrator but one whose omniscience is constantly interrupted by "testimony" from friends of Bolden who narrate from within the narration, hovering between first and third person. Webb appears in this section setting the dynamics of the narrative in motion around a double enigma: where is Bolden, and why is he there? In a deft metafictional gesture Ondaatje has the reader following the steps of Webb's investigation. In strict conformity with Hitchcock's dictum, "never give away the beginning," the text—apparently narrated after the fact of the resolution of the enigma—solves the mystery by insinuating that, despite all appearances, Bolden is mad. It is not that he has gone away; it is that he is put away. Significantly, this positions the reader ahead of Webb, but it does so before one knows quite what to do with this information and, in effect, after the fact.
Sections 2 and 3 of Ondaatje's narrative trace out the pertinent plot details. We learn that Bolden's wife, Nora, is a former prostitute; that he has a friend, Bellocq, who photographed prostitutes and other denizens of Storyville and who, after being visited by Webb, immolates himself in his shop; that a friend of Bolden's, Tom Pickett, sleeps with his wife and that Bolden retaliates by taking a straight razor to Pickett's face and body; that during a gig in Shell Beach—not far from New Orleans—Bolden abandons his band and moves in with the Brewitts, a married couple; that Bolden is seduced by Robin Brewitt and reconstructs the fateful triad of his own home (Bolden-Nora-Pickett cum Bolden-Robin-Jaelin); that Webb finds Bolden and convinces him to return to New Orleans and to his family; and finally, that while struggling to reestablish himself, Bolden, as he is blowing his horn in a street parade, succumbs to his demons and is institutionalized at the East Louisiana State Hospital, where he dies. Unlike section 1, sections 2 and 3 are focalized through multiple narrators, including Bolden himself. Although there is considerable reported speech, none of it—with the exception of recorded testimony—is marked as such through punctuation. This touch draws direct attention to the problem of punctuation in the "novel," a problem to which I will be compelled to return.
What makes this text vital for my purposes is the fact that it quite explicitly seeks to contextualize the origin of a sonic practice, of jazz. Charles "Buddy" Bolden is largely recognized—most recently in Ken Burns's monumental Jazz from 2001—as the horn player who synthesized the decisive musical components—ragtime, the hymnals of the black church, the Afro-Caribbean rhythmic patterns (the so-called Big Four), and the call and response structures of field hollers—that modulated the blues up into jazz. In Bolden, Ondaatje is attempting to inscribe the relation between a music and a place into a text. Indeed, Bolden is depicted as someone whose "mind became the street" (Ondaatje 42). But Ondaatje is also and above all trying to write a text that meditates in a distinctly metafictional register on its own relation to the work of contextualizing jazz. It is here that Coming through Slaughter engages most directly the structure and logic of the echo.
While one might certainly want to draw attention to the turn-taking among multiple narrators that organizes the text so as to capture the peculiar way in which the text "solos," more important I would argue is the shape, the syntax of the text when considered from the point of view of its source material. Here is what I mean. The text opens with two mechanically reproduced images: a photograph of Bolden's band (the very photograph Webb goes to Bellocq to secure) and three sonographs of a dolphin's "voice" taken from John Lilly's Mind in the Water. It closes with reels from a film and a list of credits, sources, and acknowledgments. The mechanically reproduced images are indices, that is, signs formed by having entered into what Peirce called actual physical contact with their objects. As such they underscore the text's ambition to render the causal connection linking Bolden, jazz, and New Orleans.
Even as the text puts these indices to work, however, it interferes with their functioning. The photo, the only really existing image of Bolden, appears in the plot as the object of Webb's quest: he wants an image of Bolden so that as he approaches people along the path of his search, he can ask, "Have you seen this man?" Significantly, the photo fills the space of a disappearance. Bolden, thus, both is and is not where jazz begins. In fact, after Bellocq prints a copy of the negative for Webb, he destroys the negative saying of Webb, "Hope he don't find you" (Ondaatje 53). But a further detail of this exchange bears emphasis.
Once Bellocq decides to accommodate Webb, they develop a print. The narrator describes the process thus: "Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile that may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity" (Ondaatje 52–53). Here the development process is compared directly to Bolden's absence, but just as importantly, it has Bolden "floating" into view, coming not so much through Slaughter (a nearby town) but through water. I stress this because it helps us think about the syntactic function of the sonographs of the dolphin's voice, the other mechanically reproduced images with which the text begins.
The text that accompanies, even captions, the sonographs reads:
Three sonographs—pictures of dolphin sounds made by a machine that is more sensitive than a human ear. The top left sonograph shows a "squawk." Squawks are common emotional expressions that have many frequencies or pitches, which are vocalized simultaneously. The top right sonograph is a whistle. Note that the number of frequencies is small and this gives a "pure" sound—not a squawk. Whistles are like personal signatures for dolphins and identify each dolphin as well as its location. The middle sonograph shows a dolphin making two kinds of signals simultaneously. The vertical stripes are echolocation clicks (sharp, multi-frequency sounds) and the dark, mountain-like humps are the signature whistles. No one knows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously. (Ondaatje, no pagination)
While these too are indices, they are indices of sounds, sounds humans can hardly hear. Like Bolden they are present, but as absences for us. If this were all they were, little more comment would be warranted, but one of the intriguing features of Ondaatje's text is that it seeds itself insistently with material from this unpaginated page, the zero degree of the text.
One senses this first perhaps in a passage like the following, where Bolden is narrating an interaction with Webb and the Brewitts: "and me rambling on as they were about to leave, leaning against the driver's window apologizing explaining what I wanted to do. About the empty room when I get up and put metal into my mouth and hit the squawk at just the right note to equal the tone of the room and that's all you do" (Ondaatje 101). This is the first of four "human" squawks that punctuate the text. The last, in fact designated as the "last long squawk" (Ondaatje 131), marks the moment of Bolden's collapse in the parade, his last performance. Not only is this squawk tied to Bolden's instrument, the "impure" sound of his cornet, but it is also depicted as "emotional," just as the sonograph commentary specified. Bolden's squawk is at once a signal in a lonely room and a death rattle.
A similar point can also be made about echolocation or, more particularly, the echo. In a passage narrated by Frank Lewis, the clarinet player in Bolden's band, Lewis muses about Bolden's music: "We thought it was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot—see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.... He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number" (Ondaatje 37). The stress here on "pain and gentleness" restates the theme of the squawk, its emotional character, but the sound's lack of purity is given important detail. Specifically, Bolden's notes, earlier described by Lewis as calling out to be "cleaned," are here characterized as oxymoronic. This particular quality gestures back to a different sonogram, the one that prompts the narrator to observe: "No one knows how dolphins make both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously." Indeed, this double character of Bolden's sound—his signature (the whistle) and his situation (the echolocation click)—is expressly developed in the text as a way to describe jazz. The relevant passage, narrated by the trombone player in his band, reads as follows:
Thought I knew his blues before, and the hymns at funerals but what he is playing now is real strange, and I listen real careful for he's playing something that sounds like both. I cannot make out the tune and then catch on. He's mixing them up. He's playing the blues and the hymn sadder than the blues and then the blues sadder than the hymn. That is the first time I ever heard hymns and blues cooked up together.... It sounded like a battle between the Good Lord and the Devil. (Ondaatje 81)
This "first time" is presented as a birth, the beginning or upsurge of jazz as the unholy fusion between the blues and hymn music. From a musicological perspective this may ring false, but in the text it is clear that Bolden's capacity to blow two sounds at once explicitly "echoes" the dolphin's capacity to whistle and click simultaneously, and both are connected to the emergence of jazz in New Orleans at the threshold of the twentieth century.
But other details in Frank Lewis's observations bear comment as well. Recall that he also drew attention to the dual character of Bolden's notes—at once gentle and filled with pain—and added that they sounded as if Bolden was lost, hunting for the right notes. The fact that he also invokes "echoing" as a way to describe the relation between Bolden's life and his music strongly suggests that Lewis understands Bolden's music, jazz, as a form of echolocation. The "right accidental notes" are not necessarily ones that work musically but ones that articulate, even if accidentally, signature and situation, whistle and click. In this, Ondaatje's text offers up the echo as a figure for the work of contextualization. As Lewis says, Bolden's music and life were on top of each other, "echoing." Or, put differently, Coming through Slaughter urges us to think of the echo as a way to designate how jazz belongs to without reflecting the African American experience in the southern United States.
The figure of the echo echoes repeatedly in Ondaatje's text; in fact, at times it organizes the very logic of its sentences, as when, for example, Bolden bids farewell to one of his bandmates in Shell Beach: "They were shouting back and forth in musical terms. Crawley knew he was saying goodbye to his friend. He was saying goodbye to his friend" (Ondaatje 33). Although the Ovidian allusion is certainly interesting—the two subjects, the water, the incompletion and distortion of echo's utterance—I want to stress something else about the material narrated by Lewis—namely, the fact that this narrator appears in the text as one of its sources. He is not merely another narrating soloist; he is a "real person" who "really appears" in the only really existing photograph of Bolden and is a person whose contribution to the text is acknowledged, albeit implicitly, in the acknowledgments.
This bounces us back to what I referred to earlier as the syntactic structure of the text, the photos with which it opens and the acknowledgments with which it closes. If, as I have proposed, the text floats "echoing" as a way to think the relation between signature and situation, text and context, then the syntactic structure of the text—including, of course, the relay between story and plot, the past and present of narration—could be said to be structured like an echo. This means not only that the text's beginning and end echo one another but that Ondaatje's text, at a metafictional level, understands itself as the echo of its source material, some of which is charged with the authority of oral history. It is not, however, uninteresting that Coming through Slaughter places the echo in the beginning, and while it is certainly worth thinking about the specific way in which Ondaatje invites us to ponder the relation connecting cetaceans, language, and music, it is likewise important to recognize that Ondaatje's ontology insists that this relation is echoes "all the way down." In other words, if the source material echoes the text matter, then the latter can hardly be said to "reflect" the context secured by such materials. Nor, I should add, does it make sense to simply reverse the problem and propose that the source material, the context, reflects the text, for the problem is with the specular character of reflection itself.
Certainly one of the more powerful theoretical treatments of reflection is found in Macherey's "The Problem of Reflection" from the mid-1970s. This is an intricately argued text, one that seeks to formulate an aesthetics consistent with the tenets of "structural Marxism," where, among other things, it is conceded that the lonely moment of the last instance may never come. Perhaps this is because it is echoing. Regardless, what bears emphasis here is the motif of a foundational distortion or disorientation. At bottom, reflection—modeled as it is on the logic of specular repetition—gives expression to an epistemological axiom consistent with "visualism." Mind mirrors world, and the putative task of human endeavor is to perfect this mirroring. This does not mean simply bringing mind and world into an alignment that is free of distortion but one that it is immediate. Reflection is, in effect, what Paul de Man meant by the symbol when he contrasted it with allegory in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," and it is on this epistemological basis that one sustains political evaluations of "correct ideas" or, for that matter, "realism."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sounds by John Mowitt. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsINTRODUCTION: SQUAWKING
1. ECHO
2. WHISTLE
3. WHISPER
4. GASP
5. SILENCE
6. TERCER SONIDO
Notes
Works Cited
Index