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Article Excerpt
"The Voice [...] functions as a strange body [...]
which can never be pinned to a definite visual object; and this changes the whole economy of desire." --Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom
In 1930, H.D. privately published a short story, "Two Americans," based on her experiences working with the famous singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson on the silent film Borderline (released in 1930). Although the talking cinema had been launched three years earlier with The Jazz Singer, in 1930 H.D. found herself in the curious circumstance of starring in a silent picture with one of the era's most celebrated vocalists. Whereas Borderline, a silent art film in the age of Hollywood, could not seem further from mass culture, H.D.'s contemporaneous "Two Americans" is obsessed with the sound s of entertainment. In H.D.'s characteristic style of roman a clef, "Two Americans" lightly disguises Paul Robeson as Saul Howard and H.D. herself as the protagonist, Raymonde. A classic alienated, white, expatriate American in Europe, Raymonde comes to embrace her national identity through a strange encounter with Saul, a black American singer with a famous and widely recorded voice. In "Two Americans," H.D. demonstrates how the mass reproduction of the voice was beginning to draw modern conceptions of racial and national identity away from fixed associations with bodies and nations by rendering such identity as seemingly fluid and disembodied as sound itself.
Walter Benjamin, in his well-known work on mechanical reproduction, invests the new media of the early twentieth century, especially the photograph and the cinema, with the potential to change "humanity's entire mode of existence" (222). With such change, he suggests, "human sense perception"--how we experience the world--will also change (222). While Benjamin looks primarily at the visual aspects of the new mass culture, contrasting the cinema and photography to painting and sculpture, H.D.'s story presents the early twentieth century as awash in mechanically reproduced sound. Moreover, while photography was a child of the nineteenth century, the gramophone, the wireless, and the talking cinema, or "talkies," did not take hold until the twentieth. In "Two Americans," H.D. focuses in particular on the reproduction of the human voice, bringing strikingly Benjaminian intuitions about changing modes of existence into the realm of sound.
In a revealing parallel to H.D.'s focus on the voice, psychoanalytic critic Slavoj Zizek has more recently discussed how the early-twentieth-century rise of the talking cinema, what he calls the "advent of the voice," produces the voice as its own "strange body." According to Zizek, the voice circulates at an uncanny distance from the figures appearing on the screen and "can never be pinned to a visual object" (1). H.D. was keenly aware of the introduction of the voice to cinema. In fact, "Two Americans" was conceived during the period of her early writing on film for the avant-garde Close Up, a journal that vigorously lamented the rise of the talkies. "Two Americans" registers the aftershock of this arrival of the voice in terms that resemble Zizek's account but that delve more fully into the problem of embodiment. In H.D.'s conception, the mechanically reproduced voice, divorced from the body and disseminated en masse, seems to dissolve the human being into sound. Through this new mass reproduction of human sound, the voice is capable of disrupting and fragmenting notions of the body, including the racialized body, as an integrated whole. At the same time, the floating voice intimates a new relationship to rootedness, to location in space, and, as H.D. will demonstrate, to the national space of one's country of origin. The mechanically reproduced voice is thus uniquely 'capable of motivating the breakdown of the unified self, as well as the new set of identitarian possibilities, so often associated with modernism and modernity. Quintessentially human and yet ineffably ghostly, of the body and yet disembodied, the mechanically reproduced voice echoes the ambiguous and paradoxical condition of the alienated modern subject in the interwar years.
Whereas H.D. wrote copiously on film during the interwar years, in "Two Americans" she focuses on the gramophone. Long before it reached the height of its popularity in 1920, the gramophone provoked an exploration of the relationship between the body and recorded sound. For instance, early-twentieth-century audiences delighted in the gramophone's seemingly magical ability to transport celebrity singers and orchestras into the home. A 1912 advertising campaign for Victor records appealed to this domestic impulse by suggesting that by merely buying a record you could have "Sousa [...] out on your lawn" (Kenney 54). Marketers foregrounded this dissociation of the body from the voice most blatantly in the British gramophone company's iconic trademark, "His Master's Voice," which depicts a bewildered fox terrier peering into the brass horn of a gramophone, looking in vain for the speaker behind the words. At the same time, audiences were fascinated by the gramophone's ability to preserve a person's voice even beyond his or her lifetime. By reproducing the voice in the absence of the living body, the gramophone seemed to defy the laws of nature, thereby troubling biological conceptions of the body as an integrated whole.
Because so many black American musicians became recording artists during this period, the seeming fragmentation of the body also had implications for conceptions of race. Black musicians made many of the popular jazz and blues recordings of the era, and most audiences heard these musicians on the gramophone rather than seeing them live in the concert hall. Music historian Andre Millard notes that "Louis Armstrong was already famous in Europe before he actually went there on tour and started playing--his records had preceded him" (110). Overwhelmingly, the sounds of black American music circulated at a continental remove from the bodies that produced them. Through recordings, black American voices and instrumentation entered homes across France and Germany, entertained British ladies in their parlours, and kept time at local dances in the Netherlands. The international phenomenon of the jazz age rested on a technology that brought black American sounds into European homes while the actual performers remained at a distance. In "Two Americans," H.D. brings a black American performer directly into the domestic space shared by the gramophone, juxtaposing the mechanically reproduced voice with the physical body that produced it. Within the small space of the story's Swiss apartment, the complex relationship between the black body and the recorded voice emerges as a signature characteristic of modern times.
It is not surprising that an encounter with Paul Robeson would prompt H.D.'s fictional exploration of the voice and embodiment. Robeson was famous for his voice to such an extent that his own son recalls, "My earliest memories of my father are of his voice pouring out in song from that magical...
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