- 1 Cf. See especially ‘Gouraud and his family at Little Menlo listening to Edison’s voice’ from the Il (...)
1At the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, where Thomas Alva Edison’s phonograph received a grand prize stirring up quite a universal interest (McCormick 2, 15), there was one painting capturing the late nineteenth-century audiences’ preoccupation with sound, its recording and listening: ‘Milton dictating “Paradise Lost”’ to his daughters by the Hungarian born artist Mihály Munkácsy which incidentally also received the grand prize of the judges (Story 76, 172). Reading one of the painting’s contemporary descriptions with its focus on the painting’s three listening characters, one is reminded of the many images illustrating the Victorians’ fascination with Edison’s voice-capturing device:1
Milton is seated in a large chair near a window, which gives the light of the whole picture. His three daughters are grouped about a table, one engaged in writing to his dictation, and eagerly reaching forward, intent to catch his words. The second is sewing. Her attention is, for the moment, attracted by what he is saying, and she listens with her hand and thread suspended. The third, who is standing, is also arrested by the poet’s lines, and half turns round to listen. Milton himself, buried in thought, sits sunken in his chair, profoundly immersed in his subject, and utterly forgetful of himself. (Story 76)
Fig. 1—A page of the Hungarian newspaper Magyarország és a Nagyvilág reporting the news of Munkácsy’s prize and publishing a reprint of his painting on August 18, 1878. Public domain.
http://virtualis.sk-szeged.hu/kiallitas/munkacsy/mo_nagyvilag_1878_08_18.jpg
- 2 I would argue that even the sense of horror felt by the very same Victorian audience upon realising (...)
- 3 For a study of the explicit references to Milton’s Paradise Lost by Arnold, Hunt, Landor, Hopkins a (...)
2This alone, of course, would hardly justify my attempt to discuss Milton and Edison yoked together in the Victorian imagination. For one, Edison was not interested in capturing the voiced thoughts of authors already dead but in preserving the actual voices of authors yet living (e.g., Gladstone, Tennyson, Browning). Reading contemporary news articles reporting on phonograph listening sessions, one indeed has the impression that the late nineteenth-century audience approved Edison’s preference of recording as they too were more keenly interested in ear-witnessing a disembodied voice identifiable to them, such identification being in fact one of Edison’s own ‘selling’ points (Edison 1878, 532).2 For two, Milton as an author had ceased to have a marked eminence among the Victorians and their literati especially if compared to the preoccupation the Romantics had for every facet of the poet’s life and work. Or so it would seem. Yet, as Erik Gray reminds us, the Victorian period was ‘filled with echoes and allusions to Milton’ (Gray 3).3
3So much so, that these echoes and allusions will pop up in scholarship on the Victorians too and bear witness to the invisible presences of Milton. A good example is John M. Picker’s Victorian Soundscape which predictably, given its timeframe and topic, has not a single mention of Milton. But one does not have to read extensively into Picker’s monograph to bump into a Miltonic allusion in the quotation from James Clerk Maxwell’s Rede Lecture (1878) in which the noted physicist praises Helmholtz’s success in bridging ‘that untrodden wild between acoustics and music—that Serbonian bog where whole armies of scientific men and musical men of science have sunk without filling it up’ (Picker 10). Namely, Maxwell’s evocative imagery is unmistakeably an echo of Milton’s from Paradise Lost of
A gulf profound as that Serbonian Bog
Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old,
Where Armies whole have sunk. . . (2.592–94)
4The Maxwell quote—with its easy recollection and appropriation of Miltonic phrases—perfectly illustrates Gray’s claim that ‘by late in the nineteenth-century, Paradise Lost had become a school text, and hence not only familiar but overfamiliar’ (33). However, beyond these echoes and allusions, there is a particular idea that brought Milton to the Victorian mind along with a handful of others, specifically Edison: the notion of the solitary genius. The quintessentially romantic notion of art as ‘a production of the intuitive and solitary genius’ (Cancilini in Wu 40) was perpetuated in the Victorian period with an unfaltering conviction in the continued development of human race that manifested itself in the peak of utopian literature. This utopian imperative of the late nineteenth century is especially ostentatious in the loquacious subtitle of the American Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, claiming to be ‘a repository of science, literature, and general intelligence devoted to ethnology, physiology, phrenology, physiognomy, sociology, psychology, education, mechanism, agriculture, natural history, and to all those progressive measures which are calculated to reform, elevate, and improve mankind, spiritually, intellectually, and socially’ (vol. 80 old series—vol. 31 new series, 1885). In one of its volumes (1889), an exposition on the ‘Gift of the Gods’ exemplifies genius with the following:
We are accustomed to ingenuity on a large scale, though when it assumes colossal proportions, it is no longer known by that unpretentious title. It is at once recognized as inspiration, talent, genius. Columbus giving to Castile and Leon a new world, Milton constructing a ‘Paradise Lost’, Wren building his Cathedral of St. Paul’s, Stevenson running his steam engine, and Edison listening to the weird messages of his phonograph, are all subjects for the world’s admiration and applause. (Le Row 65)
5We find a similar list of geniuses in the nineteenth-century Reform Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf’s Evolution and Judaism (1887) written in response to the age’s popular cultural scepticism in an attempt to justify the continued relevance of Jewish religion (and the inspiration of the Old Testament books) amid a continuously evolving universe:
The telescopic mind is capable of receiving the highest impression and of transforming it in the kneading trough of its own brain . . . Such, too, was the mental process that inspired Phidias to carve the Olympian Jupiter, led Columbus to discover the new world and Newton the law of gravity, Galileo to determine for the earth her path, Milton to write his ‘Paradise Lost’, Franklin to conduct the fire from the clouds, Lincoln to proclaim the word ‘emancipation’, Montefiore to make the cause of suffering mankind his own, and Edison to make forces of nature serviceable to man. (Krauskopf 11–12)
6And again, in Psychology and Psychic Culture (1895) by Reuben Post Halleck, a writer of nineteenth-century textbooks on American and English literature, psychology and physiology:
Something is to be learned from the life of every great man. Thus, an ideal may embody the energy of Napoleon; the integrity and patriotism of Washington; the iron will of Cromwell; the sympathy with humanity of a Howard, a Clarkson, or of a greater One; the ambition of a Newton or a Franklin to discover new laws, the inventive genius of a Watts, a Morse, or an Edison; the determination of a blind Milton to leave behind something worthy of himself, which posterity would not willingly let die. (Halleck 177)
7The chronological and topical range of the three quotations above lends some significance to the fact that the two consistent examples for the inspired genius are those of Milton and Edison. Based on the location of the sources, one could surmise this as a peculiarly American juxtaposition, were it not for ‘Edisoniana’ in the London Punch (vol. 76, 1879) which mocks the superfluity of Edison’s patented inventions and exemplifies his and Milton’s genius in terms of the public’s misunderstanding of their greatest works:
Some of the greatest men have set a different estimate on their production from that entertained by the outside world. Milton, for example, it is said, thought more highly of his Paradise Regained than his Paradise Lost. In Mr Edison’s case it is well understood that his surest claim to fame and fortune and the future Presidency of the United States, is his Electric Pen-wiper. (13)
- 4 That this sense of the word genius was prevalent and understood by the Victorians, moreover, applie (...)
8There is, therefore, a congruent perception of Milton and Edison in Victorian popular imagination which, I think, is connected to the late nineteenth-century idea of the phonographic author. Especially, as the idea of a genius itself was rooted in the notion of hearing voices. Namely, genii in Roman mythology were a sort of lesser gods, attendant or guarding spirits presiding over individual humans, communities, locations, often whispering their guidance into the ears of their protegees.4 They were providing inspiration, so to speak, for to inspire meant literally to breathe or blow and, thus, produce movement of air—the prerequisite of sound making. No doubt, the most familiar example of such inspiring working of a genius was that in Socrates which was oft quoted and discussed in nineteenth-century texts:
There has been much discussion about the ‘divine sign’ (daimonion) of which Socrates used to speak as a supernatural voice which guided him every now and then, according to Xenophon telling him to act or not to act, according to Plato only to restrain him from action, never instigating. Later writers, especially in Christian times, speak of it as a daemon, genius, or attendant spirit. . . . Socrates . . . had certain vivid presentiments which he took for special divine monitions; and it is possible, as has been suggested, that he was subject to occasional hallucinations of hearing, such as may occur even in quite sane and healthy persons. (Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, s.v. ‘Socrates’, 549)
9The synaesthetic description above, which ascribes vividness to hearing sounds, and calls Socrates’ recorded aural experience a ‘hallucination of hearing,’ is another interesting feature of nineteenth-century discussion on genius in which sensory perceptions were ‘pregnant causes mixt’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.914). However, the most dominant feature of these discussions is that of solitary isolation, reclusion that would in fact allow the inspired individual to hear the voice of his or her genius. In The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius (1822), Isaac Disraeli writes that ‘[t]he inventors who inherited little or nothing from their predecessors, appear to have pursued their insulated studies in the full independence of their mind and the development of their inventive faculty; they stood apart, in seclusion, the solitary lights of their age’ (176). Such were, according to him, ‘Bacon and Hobbes, Newton and Milton’ (176). For ‘[n]o considerable work was ever composed, till its author, like an ancient magician, first retired to the grove, or to the closet, to invocate’ (225). It seems that in order to receive the guiding voice of an attendant spirit, muse or daemon, one has to sound a supplication, invocation of his or her own, and ascertain, of course, a circumstance receptible for such aural exchange.
10In light of Picker’s chapter 4 in the Victorian Soundscapes which describes the ongoing battle of professional intellectuals against the disruptive noise of street-music (organ grinders) and increased urban noises, the recycling of the solitary genius trope in the second half of the nineteenth century is quite understandable. However, solitariness was not only made in reference to ideal sound(less) circumstances of invention and creation but more pertinently to the uniqueness of the gifted individual, his or her election above the rest. This painted an image of the genius working independently of any influence, in Disraeli’s words, inheriting ‘little or nothing from their predecessors’ (176). Such pretention of isolated creativity has been since clearly exposed in subsequent scholarship as a myth in general, and in case of Milton (Dobranski) and Edison (Lemley) in particular. Curiously enough, there were instances among the Victorians, when they simultaneously upheld the myth of the solitary genius/inventor and yet felt the need to mitigate the independent solitariness of the very same genius. E.g., a monograph by James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America: Founders, Promoters and Noted Men, written following the inauguration of Morse’s statue in Central Park, New York on October 10, 1871, is dedicated to Morse, his life and achievement, celebrating his genius. Yet the author clearly attempts to situate Morse within a larger context of related discoveries, thus, mitigating the myth of the solitary genius in chapter six. The added interest of this chapter is that it starts with a Milton quotation solidifying my claim that the image of the solitary genius often embodied and evoked Milton in the Victorian mindset (Reid 66):
- 5 Of the numerous inventions of the age, discussions of the electromagnetic telegraph have often evok (...)
Th’ invention all admir’d, and each, how hee
To be th’ inventor miss’d; so easie it seemd,
Once found. . . (PL 6.498–500) 5
- 6 The terms phonographer and stenographer are often used interchangeably, even amongst the practition (...)
11So, in the following, I will focus my study on the (de)construction of the idea of the phonographic author and clarify what I mean by this term. A clarification is especially called for as the term ‘phonographic author’ was used by Ivan Kreilkamp in Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (2005) referencing Charles Dickens in somewhat different terms than I mean to employ. For Kreilkamp it signified Dickens’s literary style ‘informed by the technique and rhetoric of phonographic shorthand’ (Kreilkamp 89–90). It is almost fitting that I would appropriate the term in a discussion related to Edison. Namely, the word phonograph itself was appropriated by Edison for his voice recording device, for originally it denoted a character/type in phonography—a phonetic shorthand technique developed by Sir Isaac Pitman in which, again in a sort of synaesthesia, ‘the very sound of every word’ was ‘made visible’ (Pitman 8). Pitman’s phonography was immensely popular before Edison’s phonograph due to his Phonographic Institute’s world-wide corresponding courses and extensive publications promoting phonographic skills. Envisioning the primary function of his phonograph, Edison in fact posits it as a mechanical substitute of skilled human phonographers. In ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’ Edison expounds the benefit of recording a communication with his device by stressing the privacy of the process as it does not require ‘the presence of a stenographer’6 (Edison 1878, 532; cf. 1888, 646). Therefore, concerns regarding Edison’s phonograph were often the topic in The National Stenographer, a periodical of phonographers published in Chicago from 1890 onward. One of its reports from the Pittsburg Association is especially interesting as it captures the ambivalent approach to Edison’s threatening invention among their members. One dismissed shorthand as a desirable profession for being ‘mere machine work at best’ with a lousy pay, and the profession itself ‘no longer necessary’ with the stride of inventions such as Edison’s phonograph. Another member argued on behalf of the machine as it ‘will increase the amount of work that a stenographer can do, and thus increase the remuneration’ one can receive (1.6 [June 1890]: 200). A note from an Australian reader also shows how global those concerns were: ‘How far the introduction of this machine [the phonograph] will injure the shorthand profession, I know not, and would be pleased if one of your numerous contributors would throw some light upon the subject’ (1.4 [April, 1890]: 121). Yet despite these concerns and sometimes hostile perception of the machine phonograph, Sir Isaac Pitman himself was made into one of Edison’s captured voices:
Phonography and the phonograph were in pleasant companionship last night. The occasion was the first annual meeting of the National Phonographic Society—an association founded to advance a well-known system of shorthand writing, and to test, and attest by diplomas, the efficiency of public teachers of the art. The venerable founder—Mr Isaac Pitman—was unable to be present, but the speech that he would have delivered was spoken by him at Bath on the previous day, and recorded by one of Edison’s phonographs. (Summers)
12More important than these projected consequences of the invention and use of the phonograph, at least for the present discussion, is Edison’s vision of the impact the phonograph will have on the composition of texts, namely, on the authoring process itself.
13Edison, in the aforementioned article on the future of his phonograph, clearly states the main utility of the device being ‘for the purpose of letter-writing and other forms of dictation’ (531) with the added benefit that such dictations ‘may be as rapid as the thoughts can be formed, or the lips utter them (532). Although Edison lists examples for other forms of dictation, like ‘books, education, reader, music, family records’ he does not seem seriously to suggest the idea of composing literary works on the phonograph. In his first elucidation on books, he suggests using the phonograph for recording the contents of already existing books that they might be ‘used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick-chamber, or even with great profit and amusement by the lady or gentlemen whose eyes and hand may be otherwise employed’ (Edison 1878, 533). However, he later introduces the possibility of phonographic books—books produced via recording—although quite vaguely:
Phonographic Books.—A book of 40,000 words upon a single metal plate ten inches square thus becomes a strong probability. The advantages of such books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention. Such books would be listened to where now none are read. They would preserve more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author; and, as a bequest to future generations, they would be unequaled [sic!] (Edison 1878, 534)
- 7 The curious addendum that this way, namely, by publishing their books in a phonogram format and pre (...)
14Here, Edison does imply the possibility that authors could record and make public their work in their own voice, consequently, the phonographic records preserving ‘more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author’. In a subsequent article, ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, the possibilities of the phonetic author are more explicit, although the phonographic composition is primarily suggested for ‘fleeting ideas and brief notes’ (Edison 1888, 647). The emphasis is laid on the possibility for authors to publish their novels and essays, Edison writes, ‘exclusively in phonogram form, so as to talk to their readers personally’ (Edison 1888, 647).7
15Edison’s reasonably cautious predictions are of course taken up in popular print with added exaggerations, announcing with the advent of the phonograph not just the end of the phonographic/stenographic profession but the end of the books-to-be-read also. Helen Groth’s article ‘Phonographic Books and the Late Nineteenth-Century Reader” (2014) gives an intriguing insight into the contemporary imaginative responses to ‘Edison’s vision for the phonograph as a reading machine’ both negative and positive. Apart from essays and newspaper columns, Groth analyses three literary works ‘projecting their readers into a future where the printed book is already obsolete’: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1899) and Octave Uzanne’s ‘The End of Books’ (1894). While Groth’s study focuses primarily on the nineteenth-century assumptions about reading (and how those will be affected by modern technological advances), I will content myself with Uzanne’s hyperbolic ideas of Edison’s phonographic author.
16Uzanne’s short story was first printed in the Scribner’s Magazine—one of the four prestigious American monthly journals of that time (Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Century being the other three)—in an edition printed in London too. Interestingly, the translation appeared first, and the original only a year later as ‘La Fin des livres’ in Contes pour les bibliophiles (1895) (Silverman 284, n. 88). That he would express a positive spin on the possibly annihilating impact of the phonograph on books is remarkable given his renown as a consummate French bibliophile obsessed with the materiality (binding) of books, although, as Willa Z. Silverman observes, Uzanne ‘valued the increasing sophistication of printing processes and other such technological innovations . . . insofar as they helped advance an elitist aesthetic of the book based on originality, novelty, and fantasy’ (Silverman 240).
17Uzanne’s vision of the future of books is set in an immediate context and shows just how engaged the Victorians were with public scientific debates. Namely, the narrative framework of the story is a convivial discussion among five men who have just attended a lecture delivered at the Royal Society by Sir William Thomson on the mathematical certainty of ‘the end of the terrestrial globe and of the human race’ which were to occur ‘in precisely ten million years’ (Uzanne 1894, 221). Sir William Thomson (1824–1907), better known as Lord Kelvin, was a physicist and engineer knighted by Queen Victoria in 1866 for his work on the transatlantic telegraph project and embroiled in debates on the age of the Earth. His lectures delivered at various events on geology and general physics were published in 1894 (volume two of his Popular Lectures and Addresses), the same year Uzanne’s short story on ‘The End of Books’. The characters of the story, inspired by Lord Kelvin’s lecture, discuss their own visions of future set some 100 years ahead of their time. It is in this context that the principal character of the story, Bibliophile (Uzanne himself) is goaded into sharing his ideas with the following exclamation: ‘Tell us how it will be with letters, with literature and books a hundred years hence!’ (Uzanne 223).
18Though only 11 pages long, with 12 illustrations by Albert Robida—some of which, were it not for the distinctive Victorian fashion of the dresses, could have been a snapshot of our own headphones-sporting age—, the short story has a rich interpretative potential which, alas, I will not explore in full. I will merely highlight details which elaborate on Edison’s preliminary ideas of the phonographic author.
19When addressing the process of authoring the books of the future, Uzanne starts with a curious allusion to Milton’s panegyric on books which ‘are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a viol the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’ (Milton 2013, 185). For the book, claims Uzanne, by that time ‘will have lived’ and the author will become his own publisher (Uzanne 225). He proceeds to echo Edison’s claim that publishing their works in a phonogram format and recorded in their own voice will enable authors to ‘protect their works from being stolen by means of defective copyright laws’ (Edison 1888, 647). Consequently,
[t]o avoid imitations and counterfeits he [the author] will be obliged, first of all, to go to the Patent Office [how Edisonian!], there to deposit his voice, and register its lowest and highest notes, giving all the counter-bearings necessary for the recognition of any imitation of his deposit. (Uzanne 225)
20‘Having thus made himself right with the law’ the phonographic author of Uzanne’s vision will ‘talk his work, fixing it upon registering cylinders’ and, henceforward, not called a writer but a narrator as
[l]ittle by little the taste for style and for pompously decorated phrases will die away, but the art of utterance will take on unheard-of importance. Certain Narrators will be sought out for their fine address, their contagious sympathy, their thrilling warmth, and the perfect accuracy, the fine punctuation of their voice. (225)
- 8 In the Victorian imagination persistently and erroneously envisaged as one of his daughters (cf. Ko (...)
21Had Milton lived at that time, in certain respect he would have been the perfect embodiment of the phonographic author/narrator. Blind by the time he composed Paradise Lost, he dictated it to amanuenses8 anticipating not a readership but ‘fit audience [. . .] though few’ (PL 7.31). In words of a Milton scholar, John K. Hale, Milton was ‘oral in conception, execution, and first reception’ (Sherry 17). Moreover, Milton contributed to the idea which made Edison’s and Uzanne’s conception of the phonographic author seem feasible in the mind of the Victorians. Namely, in the invocation of Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton depicts his poetic persona simultaneously as a phonographer of the Muse and as a phonographic author himself. Anticipating inspiration and ‘answerable style’ for the changing tune of the remaining part of his epic, he claims that his Muse deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplor’d,
And dictates to me slumbring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse. . . (9.22–24)
The expression ‘unpremeditated Verse’ is meant to recall an earlier scene from the epic, the morning hymn of the prelapsarian Adam and Eve in praise of their maker
. . . in fit strains pronounc’t or sung
Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence
Flowd from their lips, in Prose or numerous Verse,
More tuneable then needed Lute or Harp
To add more sweetness. . . (5.148–52)
22Progenitors not only of mankind but of all poetry of ‘various style’, Milton’s Adam and Eve produce their orisons promptly, spontaneously, and without need of premeditation or revision, their eloquence and inspiration being immediate and in no need of elaboration from musical instruments. This likeness to their Maker, who created with ease for ‘what he spake / His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave affect’ (PL 7.174–5), is imitated by Milton in his claim of free-flowing verse bringing forth the well-structured world of his epic. As a matter of fact, Uzanne is also invested in presenting himself (in the character of Bibliophile) as one who articulates his ideas unpremeditated: ‘. . . the ideas which I am about to open to you are . . . not ripened by reflection. I serve them up to you just as they come to me. . . .’ (Uzanne 224). He doubts not that they will exhibit an effectual might and become truths as ‘the wildest paradoxes of the philosophers of the eighteenth century are to-day already partly realized’ (Uzanne 224).
- 9 The necessity of revision was a ubiquitous idea in the Renaissance, often employing the metaphor of (...)
23However, the alignment of Milton’s composition to that of the Edenic pair is hyperbolic to say the least, for we do know that Milton employed extensive revisions in his own work of poetry and prose. The late Barbara K. Lewalski in her biography on Milton notes this contradiction between the invocation’s claim of unpremeditated verse and the account of Milton’s authorial process by Jonathan Richardson the Elder from 1734. Richardson reports that Milton ‘would dictate “perhaps 40 Lines as it were in a Breath, and then reduce them to half the Number”’ (448). So, in effect, Milton revised his composition by tightening/deleting from his original dictation. Even prior to his magnum opus (and his blindness), Milton valued the practice of revision so much so that it became one of the driving arguments of his opposition to censorship and licensed printing in Areopagitica (1644). Milton argues the need of revision because of creative fecundity and claims that such corrections to the text dependent upon licensing would be made extremely cumbersome: ‘the Presse must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author loose his accuratest thoughts, & send the book forth wors then he had made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall’ (Milton 2013, 199).9
24In contrast to this reality of authorial revisions, which Milton deems crucial for the true accuracy of thoughts, Edison highlights authorial intention caught in the way words are being uttered. For dictating onto a phonograph ‘[i]nterjections, explanations, emphasis, exclamations, etc., may be thrown into [. . .], ad libidum’ (Edison 1878, 532). One wonders if Mark Twain’s complaint to William Dean Howells about his inability to produce literature with the phonograph (Picker 126) had to do with both. Namely, frustration over resounding already recorded phonographic cylinders either because he had a revision in mind or because Edison’s machine could not at the time render Twain’s voice with ‘a felicity of expression’ and, instead, produced a recording ‘grave & unsmiling as the devil’ (Picker 127). Especially, since expectations to the contrary were ripe and running amok with Edison’s remark just quoted. For example, R. Balmer, librarian of the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, in a short article entitled ‘Whispering Machines’ (March 1885) effuses:
No book is ever read as its author intended it should be read. . . . The full realization of what the printed book was intended to do will be the glorious mission of the phonographic reading-machine. The written word has been immortal; the genius of man will soon give immortal life to the spoken word. For the first time authors may be said to truly live in their works; and soon the generations will mingle in closer communion; and the dead will speak to the living. (Balmer 498–99)
25Edison and Uzanne were more pragmatically inclined despite the latter’s futuristic visions. Namely, Edison in listing the empathetic use of recorded books for the reading disabled or obstructed (a sentiment also echoed by Balmer) pragmatically adds that ‘the greater enjoyment’ is ‘to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader’ (Edison 1878, 533). Uzanne, who by the time of writing his short story had probably heard snippet recordings of authors, will have realized—despite his praise of ear ravishing narrators—that authors are not necessarily good readers of their own works and might prove to be Edison’s average readers. ‘Authors who are not sensitive to vocal harmonics, or who lack the flexibility of voice necessary to a fine utterance, will avail themselves of the service of hired actors or singers to warehouse their work in the accommodating cylinder’ (Uzanne 226). A fate Uzanne envisages also for all the dead but still relevant authors as ‘Goethe, Milton, Byron, Dickens, Emerson, Tennyson, Musset, and others will have been “vibrated upon cylinders by favorite Tellers”’ (Uzanne 226).
Fig. 2—Manufacturing of phonographic books on one of the illustrations by Albert Robida for Uzanne’s short story in the Scribner’s Magazine (page 227). Milton is displayed on the second shelf on the right.
26The concept of the phonographic author, who is able to record the offspring of his or her brain as quick ‘as thoughts can be formed, or the lips utter them’ (Edison 1878, 532) without the laborious process of writing and revision, and with elocution proffering enjoyment to the listener, has proven to be a fictitious construct detached from reality. Uzanne’s vision of the ‘annihilation of printed things’ (Uzanne 231) has not replaced the author as a writer with the phonographic author as a narrator. As Walter J. Ong noted in Orality and Literacy first published in 1982—around the time Uzanne picked for his vision of future—‘secondary orality’ ushered in by inventions sustaining and capturing fugitive sounds will not divest of texts completely as it will depend for its ‘existence and functioning on writing and print’ (Ong 11). Moreover, I would argue that Uzanne’s vision of post-text future is essentially textual in nature and goes against what Ong describes as the feature of oral/aural cultures. For Ong claims that:
[t]he elements of orally based thought and expression tend to be not so much simple integers as clusters of integers, such as parallel terms or phrases or clauses, antithetical terms or phrases or clauses, epithets. Oral folk prefer, especially in formal discourse, not the soldier but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak. Oral expression thus carries a load of epithets and other formulary baggage which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tiresomely redundant because of its aggregative weight. (Ong 38)
27Uzanne, envisaging the transformative change the phonograph will have on journalism and literature, claims that ‘the highest situation will be reserved for robust young men with strong, resonant voices, trained rather in the art of enunciation than in the search for words or the turn of phrases; literary mandarinism will disappear, literators will gain only an infinitely small number of hearers, for the important point will be to be quickly informed in a few words without comment’ (Uzanne 229). His vision of the end of books is entrenched in the high literacy of his own age and, therefore, bookish nonetheless both in terms of production and reception. In the latter sense, Uzanne’s vision is even divorced from the early Victorian literary reception so prominently exemplified by Charles Dickens and the communal experience of his works by listening audiences. What Ong describes as the participatory feature of oral culture, ‘encased in the communal reaction’ (Ong 45) is nowhere to be seen in Uzanne. His listeners of phonographic books are essentially individual ‘readers’ presaging Harold Bloom’s description of the solitary activity of reading (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3—Albert Robida’s illustration of Uzanne’s users of phonographotecks, collections of phonographic books at the disposal of listeners in all circumstances. Here travellers on railway are depicted immersed each individually by a listening device into a phonographic book title of their own choosing (Uzanne 228; 230).
28All in all, Uzanne’s observation about the disappearance of literary mandarins and reflecting the literary taste of his own time, might also explain the receding echo of Milton by the turn of the century. Similarly, Edison’s phonograph, as a device of authoring, has remained—in the words of Balmer—‘unfinished and useless, at best a toy to play with’ (Balmer 499). However, revisiting these late nineteenth-century ideas might bring us closer to our own online culture, especially now that we seem stranded on online platforms ‘in which text recedes to the background, and sounds and images become the universal language’ (Manjoo).