Fabio L. Vericat

When T. S. Eliot adapted Murder in the Cathedral for a radio broadcast by CBS’s Columbia Workshop Series in 1937 he cut out Thomas Becket’s prose sermon. In so doing, Eliot was inexplicably doing away with the heart of the play, in what was a reluctant incursion into radio drama. By the time of writing Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot had paid precise critical attention to the Anglican sermon as a popular prose genre capable of poetic heights; for Eliot the prose sermon at its best is “applied poetry,” which he may have aimed to emulate as he trained himself as a radio broadcaster for the BBC. If Eliot had misgivings about the aural blindness of the radio, as he had for the blind Puritan poet John Milton’s auditory imagination, the sermon came to his aid. It illustrated the poetic power of “the sound of the sense of the word” in dealing with visual impairment. Thus, the sermon anticipates acousmatic radiophonic experience (of disembodied voices), as it had originally capitalized on the reverberating architectural acoustics of churches and cathedrals. However, that Eliot’s faith in the radiophonic powers of the sermon faltered in the CBS production of Murder in the Cathedral goes to show that, tragically for his dramatic poetry, Eliot could not trust radio prose to do the poetic job he assigned to verse on the stage. If Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the poetic allegiances of prose and verse, the absence of the prose sermon in the CBS adaptation of the play reverses the poetic victory of Becket’s martyrdom in the stage play, leaving the chorus’ lyricism at the mercy of the knights’ vernacular. Eliot found refugee, henceforth, in a verse drama for the stage which he could not be sure had any poetry in it.

This essay proposes to consider how The American (1875) is symptomatic of Henry James's elocutionary insecurities about the demands the European nineteenth-century novel placed on the authorial voice—crucially aggravated by the American stutter that accompanied the young writer on arrival in Paris. James would, however, learn to turn such insecurities to his advantage by attending the Théâtre Français and paying close attention to the declamatory style of the melodramatic actors at a time when his first ambition had been to become a playwright. James tried his hand at playwriting from the start, adapting Daisy Miller and part of The American for the stage in the early 1880s. Back in the 1870s, heavily under the spell of melodramatic theater, James's refusal to transcribe the American accent of Christopher Newman into writing testifies his affront to the realist novel's reduction of character to idiomatic stereotypes with the author as master ventriloquist. More importantly, it led the way to the reinvention of the novel's acoustics. If traditionally subjugated by the domineering visual aesthetics of formal realism, which reduced voice to a rescindable soundtrack chained to a referential world, with James the novel itself becomes the aural experience of a textual performance in the declamatory tradition of the Théâtre Français—ultimately operatic at that. His late practice of dictation may be best understood as a kind of recitative—and justly as he learned to manage his stutter in the process. James would crucially, if perhaps reluctantly, inaugurate acousmatic abstraction as a dare for future modernist writers to see with their ears.

This paper wants to introduce the reception of Henry James’s late style to an aural approach by way of investigating his method of dictation. James used the aid of an amanuensis as a result of a sore wrist in 1897 – of which the most famous was his last secretary, Theodora Bosanquest, who reflected on James method of dictation in her Henry James at Work. I want to challenge the idea that his late style is the product of the idiosyncratic oral delivery of the Master’ voice passively recorded by a typewriter. Dictation should be conceived instead as a textual performance. To do so one must contextualize it in the unsuccessful dramatic years of 1890-1895, but mainly his American lecture tour in 1904-5 whose closing lecture “The Speech of American Women” will be considered in some detail. This lecture expresses James’s misgivings about the decay of American pronunciation, particular women’s. It will be argued that James’s attempt to draw corrective attention to a tone-standard really implies that one should pronounce as if reading from a written text. The importance of James’s American lecturing lies in precisely putting this dictum to the test. His style as a lecturer was variously praised and criticized in relation to the difficulty of his written style, but, at all events, which did not sound as any particular voice – certainly not American. It sounded like a text, whose phonemic content James did his best to vocalize. Equally his dictation must be understood, not as the oral expiration of authorial inspiration, but as a vocal performance intent on doing aural justice to a text simultaneously coming into existence.

In Translated Accounts (2001), James Kelman does not try to write in Scots as he had been doing in his previous work and has done since. The issue is whether, in this other work, Kelman was legitimately transcribing Scots into writing or rather offering a phonetic translation of Scots into English orthographic conventions. Phonetic writing is problematic in this respect. It risks exacerbating the stereotype of Scots as and English dialect on which it would largely depend to be written down, unintentionally perpetuating the misconception that Scots is a debased form of English. Literary Modernism opened up the way to writing in Scots, but also foreclosed its cultural rootedness as a self-avowed synthetic language. This Modernist catch may be said to be still at work in Kelma’s novels. The literary anomaly of Translated Accounts in the corpus of Kelman’s work may be interpreted as a further literary experiment which side-steps this danger by not trying to write in Scots in the first place. Instead, this novel is composed of testimonies that have been "transcribed and/or translated into English, not always by persons native to the language," but whose cultural identity remains mysterious. Kelman appears casual about what is a pertinent difference, leaving one to wonder whether these unidentified individuals speak English as a second language and are thus transcribed, or have originally written their accounts in their native language which has then been translated into English. Rather than pay the toll of linguistic subservience to English risked in writing Scots phonetically, Kelman opts for turning the tables on English nationals daring them to recognize the English in this novel as their own or else become foreigners to the ‘English’ which, in the context of global culture, is no longer or perhaps ever was just their own. Scotland becomes in this novel an unidentified foreign – perhaps, African – country, where the indeterminable combination of both translating and/or transcribing into English inversely places it at the receiving end of a foreign linguistic utterance. The results are grammatical oddities; the rotten English resulting from ‘abusive translation.’ What this kind of translation gains in writing – by dethroning Standard English – is legitimacy for the transcriptions of what would be otherwise belittled as Pidgin English, but is really another’s language. Thus, if phonetic writing in Scots risks being taken as mere translation into English orthographic conventions, Translated Accounts would reinterpret that translation as a transcription of Scots in its own inglis terms.

When Henry James visits New England in his 1904-05 tour of America he seeks out the geographical testimony of Hawthorne’s literary heritage in Concord and Salem. As James tells us in The American Scene, he does not exactly find what he is looking for, in what is a reversal of the natural urge to seek in life the validation of one’s aesthetic evaluation of literature. James had written his evaluation of Hawthorne some twenty-five years before in 1879, just about the same time that it had taken James to return to America, “time to become almost as ‘fresh’ as an inquiring stranger,[though not] enough to cease to be, or at least to feel, as acute as an initiated native” (The American Scene). Standing before Salem Witch House, James’s freshness rubs against his nativity, in that he knows enough to appreciate something is missing, though not enough to put his finger on it. James finds a way of putting it, in what he refers as ‘the mystery of antiquity.’ Salem has become a literary theme park of America’s past. What is missing is nothing less than life, and that is saying a lot, for it is precisely what James comes for: “the appreciation of life itself” (The American Scene). James’s encounter with his old country is the tediousness of the new, a ‘reconstituted antiquity.’

In 1904, James does not find Hawthorne in Salem (USA) as he had found him in the Florence or Rome (Italy), and London or Manchester (UK) in Hawthorne (1879): “the last of the old-fashioned Americans” whose worst mistake in The Marble Faun was “ceasing to tread his native soil [...] for his contact with the life of the country, its people and its manners, was simply that of the ordinary tourist” (Hawthorne). Hawthorne’s literary flaw is linked to his inability to relate to the surrounding life as his own; that it is not America’s begins to sound hollow. In treading Hawthorne’s native soil, James draws no obvious advantage as it becomes apparent that the life of Hawthorne’s romances is not accessible, either as geographical actuality or as a ‘reconstructed antiquity’ in America. Yet the Romance claims location, as sure as James bothers to seek it out. James too is a tourist, but a tourist who, by his own admission, has learnt to play it to his own advantage, paradigmatically evidenced as the ability to see his own country as a foreigner. Yet, this is the advantage that, in Hawthorne, James denies the romancer in Italy, but should be implicitly conceded by the James of The American Scene. Such concession should necessarily condition the limitations James attributed to Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun in 1879. The aesthetic implications of national estrangement and the authenticity of the past in the appreciation of the Romance are what this paper proposes to explore.

This article considers how Breaking Bad exploits the tension between hearing and seeing in the perception of space. Breaking Bad dramatizes how TV shows struggle to remain loyal to their radiophonic heritage, as in the ‘soap opera,’ in the face of the persistent imagistic allure of the cinema. Whereas Walt White develops into the master criminal Heisenberg, whose manifest power is that of silencing those who oppose him; his henchman, Jesse, seeks shelter in acoustically controlled environments, such as domestic spaces, to save himself. Jesse will not be smothered by Heisenberg’s visual overkill because he persists in reading the world for rooms to inhabit. Others, such as Gale, may perish in the attempt, but ultimately leave a literary trail that will finally prove acoustically fatal to Heisenberg’s oculocentric reign of terror.

This essay will cover some of Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent movies up to and including Blackmail (1929), of which he filmed both a silent and a sound version simultaneously. Hitchcock’s success with sound was directly linked to his training in silent technique. Silent movies actually allowed him to explore how they were capable of sound. This essay will consider how silent movies were able to induce an acoustic experience without the aid of extra-diegetic practices that added live – and sometimes gramophonic – soundtrack to films. What I am interested in is the aural effect of the visual experience of the screen alone. In the early days of cinema, the frame was silently read for all kind of sounds heard in the head of the spectator.