Unrecordable Sound
Julie Beth Napolin · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020
Long before the invention of the phonograph, the twin themes of storage and communication oriented Western literary production and its modes of presentation. From Homer’s evocation of the Sirens in alliterating sibilance to the heteroglossia that Mikhail Bakhtin took to be the defining gesture of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s and Charles Dickens’s social style, literature is a sound recording technology, documenting vocal rhythms, tones, and idiolects. Though he did not remark upon the technological reality of his 1930s context, Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, or the multiplicity of speech types that populate fiction’s social space, strikes one today as related to the rise of the phonograph, ‘an extreme case of the voice’s detachability from speaker, body, and presence’, so much so that Paul de Man readily embraced Bakhtin’s dialogism, not as ‘voices of authorial identity and identification […] but voices of radical alterity, […] their otherness their reality.’