Writing is as much an effect of history as history is an effect of writing. In retrospect, Friedrich Kittler’s radical appropriation of Marshal McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy explains the difficulties that Ralph Ellison encountered in his years as a musician divided between two traditions.
“To record the sound sequences of speech, literature has to arrest them in a system of 26 letters, thereby categorically excluding all noise sequences. Not coincidentally, this system also contains as a subsystem the seven notes, whose diatonics — from A to G — form the basis of occidental music.” (Kittler: 3)
Whereas classical music can be stored in scores, a linear and discrete notation system cannot possibly do justice to the improvisations and polyrhythms of jazz, gospel and blues music. Reading ‘Living with Music’ through McLuhan and Kittler explains that “negro folk music” is a data flow that cannot be captured by the symbolic grid of writing. The minor discourse of Ellison’s musical past is part of the postulated, non-textual supplement to the Gutenberg Galaxy. In fact, there is no place for any minor discourses in the ontology of this medial episteme. The Gutenberg Galaxy is a writing system in which a hegemonic discourse and a universal medium coincide. This media–theoretical insight adds another dimension to Ellison’s existential dilemma: he no longer only has to choose between productive determinism and crippling freedom, but also between historical recognition and complete oblivion. Posed like this, it becomes clear why Ellison opted for the first horn of the dilemma. His sudden career shift from musician to author, was an attempt to subscribe to the Gutenberg Galaxy and to achieve artistic and political recognition. The price that needs to be paid for entering history, however, is to accept the definite loss of the expressive modalities — in this case the sounds and music — that belong to a minoritarian position.
Thus the crimes and aspirations of my youth. It had been years since I had played the trumpet or irritated a single ear with other than the spoken or written word, but as far as my singing neighbor was concerned I had to hold my peace. (Ellison: 192)
Unfortunately, in ‘Living with Music’ writing is no longer capable of eliminating the tension between a minor and major discourse. The story takes place after the shift from the Gutenberg Galaxy to a new medial episteme has already occurred; the protagonist has just failed to notice. The narrator — looking back from a future perspective — does not. The story portrays Ralph Ellison as a paralyzed author, struggling with a typewriter rather than a feather or a pen. Even more tellingly, is the fact that his writer’s block stems from all kinds of audial disturbances or, in Kittler’s words, streams of data that cannot “pass through the bottleneck of the signifier”. These not-so-silent-witnesses testify to the disavowal of writing as a universal medium as well as to the decay of a hegemonic discourse. Although the author is bothered by these noises, he is not yet — and no longer — capable of recognizing them as legitimate data flows, let alone as manifestations of a minor discourse. These sounds and songs do not correspond to the keys on his typewriter.
The author’s constant irritation with the outside noises and his neighbor’s singing turn out to be mere projections that distract from the underlying problem: the typewriter’s incapacity to live up to its original promise. The audial disturbances are not the actual cause of Ellison’s writer’s block, they only function as an outlet to him. His real frustration derives from the fact that his political choice for the dominant medium of his times — the typewriter — did not unambiguously release him from the problems that stem from a minoritarian position. The aspiring author remains caught between the contradictory demands that the two conflicting discourses impose on him. The shouting and singing are constant reminders of a repressed outside. These audial data streams point to the fact that the minor discourse is just banned to the background and did not really disappear. As a reaction, the author employs in vain several strategies to eliminate this non-textual noise. A real solution to his problem, however, comes to him by accident. When Ellison turns on the radio in a state of complete despair, a female voice tells him: “Art thou troubled? Music will calm thee…” (193)
The starting author decides to take this advice literally. In order to outdo the background nuisances and to create a quiet space for his writing, he goes out and buys a gramophone. In practice, however, the manner in which he initially uses the technical device is far from relaxing nor does it release him from the noise. On the contrary, rather than simply enjoying recordings of his favorite music, Ellison abuses his latest acquisition. In his hands, the gramophone becomes a means of sonic warfare. “Now when jarred from my writer’s reveries by some especially enthusiastic flourish of our singer, I’d rush to my music system with blood in my eyes and burst a few decibels in her direction. If she defied me with a few more pounds of pressure against her diaphragm, then a war of decibels was declared.”(Ellison: 194)Whenever his neighbor starts her vocal exercises, the narrator counters the dilettante by playing loud music of outstanding singers. The gramophone helps him to outperform his competitor in both a qualitative and quantitative manner. It is actually the total degradation of the neighbor instead of the initial goal of peace and quietness that now motivates the author to write. “For instead of soothing, music seemed to release the beast in me.” (194)
Against Ellison’s hopes and expectations, however, the singer uses her defeat as an incentive. She starts mimicking the recordings that her neighbor plays to silence her, and thereby improves her singing substantially. It is her unexpected tenacity that makes the author conscious of his own artistic and moral shortcomings.
And although I was now getting on with my writing, the unfairness of this business bore in upon me. Aware that I could not have withstood a similar comparison with literary artists of like caliber, I grew remorseful. I also came to admire the singer’s courage and control, for she was neither intimidated into silence nor goaded into undisciplined screaming; she persevered, she marked the phrasing of the great singers I sent her way, she improved her style. (Ellison: 194)
To Ellison’s disgrace, the singer conceives the confrontation with her imperfections as a stimulus to improve rather than an excuse to give up. As soon as Ellison recognizes the instructive relation between the gramophone and his neighbor, he completely reverses his attitude towards music. Along with his neighbor’s progress, her singing gradually becomes an object of admiration rather than irritation to the author. “Better still, she vocalized more softly, and I, in turn, used music less and less as a weapon and more for its magic with mood and memory. After a while a simple twirl of the volume control up a few decibels and down again would bring a live-and-let-live reduction of her volume.”(Ellison: 195)Ralph Ellison now realizes that sound is more than just territorial marker; it contains something irreducible that eludes writing. According to him, this magical element is an alternative past that cannot be captured in the alphabetical characters and spaces of the typewriter.
The strange duet between Ellison’s neighbor and the gramophone, prefigures a more organic way to live with music. Although the author initially bought a record player to literally deal with noise, the device has now transgressed its immediate practical use. Its sounds are no longer solely a defense system against everyday nuisances, but offer an alternative to a redundant text-based concept of history.
Perhaps in the swift change of American society in which the meanings of one’s origin are so quickly lost, one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time. In doing so, it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are. In the swift whirl of time music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspired. (Ellison: 196 – 197)
At the end of the story, the narrator claims that music functions as a temporal compass. It possesses this capacity, because it imbues the present with lost times. These lost times, however, do not only consist of actual representations of the past, but they also contain repressed or forgotten loves, heartbreaks, expectations, dreams, nightmares, etc. Music superimposes a virtual layer on top of an actual one; it stores the major discourse as well as its minoritarian becoming. By inserting this multilayered past into the present, the author believes it to be possible to determine the course of time.
new adventures in low-fidelity
Writing is as much an effect of history as history is an effect of writing. In retrospect, Friedrich Kittler’s radical appropriation of Marshal McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy explains the difficulties that Ralph Ellison encountered in his years as a musician divided between two traditions.
Whereas classical music can be stored in scores, a linear and discrete notation system cannot possibly do justice to the improvisations and polyrhythms of jazz, gospel and blues music. Reading ‘Living with Music’ through McLuhan and Kittler explains that “negro folk music” is a data flow that cannot be captured by the symbolic grid of writing. The minor discourse of Ellison’s musical past is part of the postulated, non-textual supplement to the Gutenberg Galaxy. In fact, there is no place for any minor discourses in the ontology of this medial episteme. The Gutenberg Galaxy is a writing system in which a hegemonic discourse and a universal medium coincide. This media–theoretical insight adds another dimension to Ellison’s existential dilemma: he no longer only has to choose between productive determinism and crippling freedom, but also between historical recognition and complete oblivion. Posed like this, it becomes clear why Ellison opted for the first horn of the dilemma. His sudden career shift from musician to author, was an attempt to subscribe to the Gutenberg Galaxy and to achieve artistic and political recognition. The price that needs to be paid for entering history, however, is to accept the definite loss of the expressive modalities — in this case the sounds and music — that belong to a minoritarian position.
Thus the crimes and aspirations of my youth. It had been years since I had played the trumpet or irritated a single ear with other than the spoken or written word, but as far as my singing neighbor was concerned I had to hold my peace. (Ellison: 192)
Unfortunately, in ‘Living with Music’ writing is no longer capable of eliminating the tension between a minor and major discourse. The story takes place after the shift from the Gutenberg Galaxy to a new medial episteme has already occurred; the protagonist has just failed to notice. The narrator — looking back from a future perspective — does not. The story portrays Ralph Ellison as a paralyzed author, struggling with a typewriter rather than a feather or a pen. Even more tellingly, is the fact that his writer’s block stems from all kinds of audial disturbances or, in Kittler’s words, streams of data that cannot “pass through the bottleneck of the signifier”. These not-so-silent-witnesses testify to the disavowal of writing as a universal medium as well as to the decay of a hegemonic discourse. Although the author is bothered by these noises, he is not yet — and no longer — capable of recognizing them as legitimate data flows, let alone as manifestations of a minor discourse. These sounds and songs do not correspond to the keys on his typewriter.
The author’s constant irritation with the outside noises and his neighbor’s singing turn out to be mere projections that distract from the underlying problem: the typewriter’s incapacity to live up to its original promise. The audial disturbances are not the actual cause of Ellison’s writer’s block, they only function as an outlet to him. His real frustration derives from the fact that his political choice for the dominant medium of his times — the typewriter — did not unambiguously release him from the problems that stem from a minoritarian position. The aspiring author remains caught between the contradictory demands that the two conflicting discourses impose on him. The shouting and singing are constant reminders of a repressed outside. These audial data streams point to the fact that the minor discourse is just banned to the background and did not really disappear. As a reaction, the author employs in vain several strategies to eliminate this non-textual noise. A real solution to his problem, however, comes to him by accident. When Ellison turns on the radio in a state of complete despair, a female voice tells him: “Art thou troubled? Music will calm thee…” (193)
The starting author decides to take this advice literally. In order to outdo the background nuisances and to create a quiet space for his writing, he goes out and buys a gramophone. In practice, however, the manner in which he initially uses the technical device is far from relaxing nor does it release him from the noise. On the contrary, rather than simply enjoying recordings of his favorite music, Ellison abuses his latest acquisition. In his hands, the gramophone becomes a means of sonic warfare. “Now when jarred from my writer’s reveries by some especially enthusiastic flourish of our singer, I’d rush to my music system with blood in my eyes and burst a few decibels in her direction. If she defied me with a few more pounds of pressure against her diaphragm, then a war of decibels was declared.”(Ellison: 194)Whenever his neighbor starts her vocal exercises, the narrator counters the dilettante by playing loud music of outstanding singers. The gramophone helps him to outperform his competitor in both a qualitative and quantitative manner. It is actually the total degradation of the neighbor instead of the initial goal of peace and quietness that now motivates the author to write. “For instead of soothing, music seemed to release the beast in me.” (194)
Against Ellison’s hopes and expectations, however, the singer uses her defeat as an incentive. She starts mimicking the recordings that her neighbor plays to silence her, and thereby improves her singing substantially. It is her unexpected tenacity that makes the author conscious of his own artistic and moral shortcomings.
To Ellison’s disgrace, the singer conceives the confrontation with her imperfections as a stimulus to improve rather than an excuse to give up. As soon as Ellison recognizes the instructive relation between the gramophone and his neighbor, he completely reverses his attitude towards music. Along with his neighbor’s progress, her singing gradually becomes an object of admiration rather than irritation to the author. “Better still, she vocalized more softly, and I, in turn, used music less and less as a weapon and more for its magic with mood and memory. After a while a simple twirl of the volume control up a few decibels and down again would bring a live-and-let-live reduction of her volume.”(Ellison: 195)Ralph Ellison now realizes that sound is more than just territorial marker; it contains something irreducible that eludes writing. According to him, this magical element is an alternative past that cannot be captured in the alphabetical characters and spaces of the typewriter.
The strange duet between Ellison’s neighbor and the gramophone, prefigures a more organic way to live with music. Although the author initially bought a record player to literally deal with noise, the device has now transgressed its immediate practical use. Its sounds are no longer solely a defense system against everyday nuisances, but offer an alternative to a redundant text-based concept of history.
At the end of the story, the narrator claims that music functions as a temporal compass. It possesses this capacity, because it imbues the present with lost times. These lost times, however, do not only consist of actual representations of the past, but they also contain repressed or forgotten loves, heartbreaks, expectations, dreams, nightmares, etc. Music superimposes a virtual layer on top of an actual one; it stores the major discourse as well as its minoritarian becoming. By inserting this multilayered past into the present, the author believes it to be possible to determine the course of time.