No More Learning

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Last Wednesday night, on the day before the accident, I dined at Ner- val's. His close friends have been meeting there every Wednesday for twenty years. There were five in the beginning. But this time, and for the first time, there were only two of us: a stroke, a contagious flu, and a suicide left Ner-
val and me facing each other. When you reach sixty such a situation has nothing amusing about it. You keep asking yourself who will be next.
The meal was as gloomy as a funeral feast. The great man remained silent. I did everything possible to cheer him up. Maybe he was mourning other deaths, the secrecy of which made them even more bitter. . . .
Indeed, he was mourning others.
We went to his study. The piano had not been closed; on it there was the first page of a new composition.
" What are you working on, Nerval ? "
H e raised his finger and spoke like a sad prophet announcing his god:
"Amphitrite. "
"Amphitrite! At last! For how many years have you been saving her up? " "Since the Rome prize. I waited and waited. The longer a work is al-
lowed to mature, the better it is, and I wanted to infuse it with the dream and experience of a whole life . . . I believe it is time . . . "
"A symphonic poem, isn't it? . . . Are you satisfied? "
Nerval shook his head.
"No. In a pinch, it might work . . . My thoughts are not distorted be-
yond recognition . . . "
He interpreted the prelude with great virtuosity: a " Train of Neptune. "
You will relish it, Doctor; it is a miracle!
"You see," Nerval said to me while striking strange, outrageous, and
brutal chords, "up to this fanfare of Tritons it works . . . "
"Marvelous," I answered; "there is . . . "
"But," Nerval continued, "that is all there is to it. The choir that fol-
lows . . . a failure. Yes, I can feel my powerlessness to write it . . . It is too beautiful. We no longer know . . . It would have to be composed the way Phidias created his sculptures; it would have to be a Parthenon, as simple
as . . . We no longer know . . . Ha ! " he suddenly screamed, "to have arrived there, I . . . "
"Listen," I said to him, "you are among the most famous, so . . . "
"So, if this is how I end up, what do others know? But at least their mediocrity is a blessing, which is itself mediocre and satisfied with little. Famous! What is fame when engulfed in sadness! . . . "
"The peaks are always clouded! . . . "
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"Enough," Nerval resumed, " a cease-fire for flattery! This is truly a sad hour, so let us, if you wish, dedicate it to real sorrows. We owe it to the departe d . "
Following these rather mysterious words he took a phonograph from underneath a blanket. I understood.
You can well imagine, Doctor, that this phonograph did not play the "Potpourri from The Doll, performed by the Republican Guard under Pares. " The very improved, sonorous, and clear machine only had a few cylinders. It merely spoke . . .
Yes, you guessed it: on Wednesday the dead spoke to us . . .
How terrible it is to hear this copper throat and its sounds from beyond the grave! It is more than a photographic, or I had better say cinemato- graphic, something; it is the voice itself, the living voice, still alive among carrion, skeletons, nothingness . . .
The composer was slumped in his chair next to the fireside. He listened with painfully knit brows to the tender things our departed comrades said from the depths of the altar and the grave.
" Well, science does have its advantages, Nerval! As a source of miracles and passions it is approaching art. "
"Certainly. The more powerful the telescopes, the larger the number of stars is going to be. Of course science has its good sides. But for us it is still too young. Only our heirs will benefit from it. With the help of each new in- vention they will be able to observe anew the face of our century and listen to the sounds made by our generation. But who is able to project the Athens of Euripides onto a screen or make heard the voice of Sappho ? "
He livened up and played with a large shell he had absentmindedly taken off the chimney mantelpiece.
I appreciated the object that was to revive his spirits, and because I an- ticipated that the elaboration of the scientific, if not paradoxical, theme would amuse him, I resumed:
"Beware of despair. Nature frequently delights in anticipating science, which in turn often merely imitates it. Take photography, for instance! The world can see the traces of an antediluvian creature in a museum-I believe it is the brontosaurus-and the soil retains the marks of the rain that was falling when the beast walked by. What a prehistoric snapshot! "
Nerval was holding the shell to his ear.
"Beautiful, the roaring of this stethoscope," he said; "it reminds me
of the beach where I found it-an island off Salerno . . . it is old and crumbling. "
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I used the opportunity.
"Dear friend, who knows? The pupils of the dying are said to retain the last image they received . . . What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment-the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone? All in all, you may be listening to the surf of oceans centuries old . . . "
But Nerval had risen. With a commanding gesture he bid me be quiet. His dizzy eyes opened as if over an abyss. He held the double-horned grotto to his temple as if eavesdropping on the threshold of a mystery. A hypnotic ecstasy rendered him motionless.
After I repeatedly insisted, he reluctantly handed me the shell.
At first I was only able to make out a gurgling of foam, then the hardly audible turmoil of the open sea. I sensed-how I can not say-that the sea was very blue and very ancient. And then, suddenly, women were singing and passing by . . . inhuman women whose hymn was wild and lustful like the scream of a crazed goddess . . . Yes, Doctor, that's how it was: a scream and yet a hymn. These were the insidious songs Circe warned us not to lis- ten to, or only when tied to the mast of a galley with rowers whose ears are filled with wax . . . But was that really enough to protect oneself from the danger? . . .
I continued to listen.
The sea creatures disappeared into the depths of the shell. And yet minute by minute the same maddening scene was repeated, periodically, as if by phonograph, incessantly and never diminished.
Nerval snatched the shell away from me and ran to the piano. For a long time he tried to write down the sexual screaming of the goddesses.
At two in the morning he gave up.
The room was strewn with blackened and torn sheets of music.
"You see, you see," he said to me, "not even when I am dictated to can I transcribe the choir! . . . "
He slumped back into his chair, and despite my efforts, he continued to listen to the poison of this Paean.
At four o'clock he started to tremble. I begged him to lie down. He shook his head and seemed to lean over the invisible maelstrom.
At half past five Nerval fell against the marble chimney-he was dead. The shell broke into a thousand pieces.
Do you believe that there are poisons for the ear modeled on deadly
perfumes or lethal potions? Ever since last Wednesday'S acoustic presenta- tion I have not been feeling well. It is my turn to go . . . Poor Nerval . . .
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Doctor, you claim he died of congestion . . . and what if he died because he heard the sirens singing?
Why are you laughing?
There have been better questions to conclude fantastic tales. But in ways both smooth and comical Renard's fantasy finds its way into technical manuals. In 1902, in the first German monograph on Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines (Phonograph, Graphophone and Gramo- phone), Alfred Parzer-Miihlbacher promises that graphophones-a Co- lumbia brand name also used by Renard-will be able to build "archives and collections" for all possible "memories":
Cherished loved ones, dear friends, and famous individuals who have long since passed away will years later talk to us again with the same vividness and warmth; the wax cylinders transport us back in time to the happy days of youth-we hear the speech of those who lived countless years before us, whom we never knew, and whose names were only handed down by history. 67
Renard's narrator clarifies such "practical advice for interested cus- tomers" by pointing out that the phonographic recording of dead friends surpasses their "cinematographic" immortalization: instead of black-and- white phantom doubles in the realm of the imaginary, bodies appear by virtue of their voices in a real that once again can only be measured in eu- phemisms: by carrion or skeletons. It becomes possible to conjure up friends as well as the dead "whose names were only handed down by his- tory. " Once technological media guarantee the similarity of the dead to stored data by turning them into the latter's mechanical product, the boundaries of the body, death and lust, leave the most indelible traces. According to Renard, eyes retain final visions as snapshots; according to the scientific-psychological determinations of Benedict and Ribot,68 they even retain these visions in the shape of time-lapse photography. And if, in strict analogy, the roaring shell only replays its agony, then even the dead- est of gods and goddesses achieve acoustic presence.
The shell that Re- nard's fictitious composer listens to was not found on a natural beach; it takes the place of the mouthpieces of a telephone or a loudspeaker capa- ble of bridging temporal distances in order to connect him with an antiq- uity preceding all discourse. The sound emanating from such a receiver is once again Rilke's primal sound, but as pure sexuality, as divine clameur
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sexuelle. The "rosy lips" and the "double-horned grotto" of its anatomy leave that in as little doubt as the death of the old man to whom they appear.
Thus Renard's short story introduces a long series of literary phan- tasms that rewrite eroticism itself under the conditions of gramophony and telephony. As a result, apparitions no longer comprise those endear- ing images of women whom, as Keller put it, the bitter world does not nourish; instead, the temptation of a voice has become a new partial ob- ject. In the same letter in which Kafka suggests to his fiancee and her par- lograph firm that old-fashioned love letters be replaced by technical re- lays of telephone and parlograph,69 he relates a dream:
Very late, dearest, and yet I shall go to bed without deserving it. Well, I won't sleep anyway, only dream. As I did yesterday, for example, when in my dream I ran toward a bridge or some balustrading, seized two telephone receivers that happened to be lying on the parapet, put them to my ears, and kept asking for nothing but news from "Pontus"; but nothing whatever came out of the telephone except a sad, mighty, wordless song and the roar of the sea. Although well aware that it was impossible for voices to penetrate these sounds, I didn't give in, and didn't go awayJo
News from "Pontus"-as Gerhard Neumann has shown,71 in pretechni- cal days this was news from Ovid's Black Sea exile, the quintessential model for literature as a love letter. Letters of this kind, necessarily re- ceived or written in their entirety by women, were replaced by the tele- phone and its noise, which precedes all discourse and subsequently all whole individuals. In La voix humaine, Cocteau's one-act telephone play of 1930, a man and a woman at either end of a telephone line agree to burn their old love letters. 72 The new eroticism is like that of the gramo- phone, which, as Kafka remarked in the same letter, one "can't under- stand. "73 "The telephone conversation occupies the middle ground be- tween the rendezvous and the love letter" :74 it drowns out the meaning of words with a physiological presence that no longer allows "human voices" to get through, as well as by superimposing a myriad of simulta- neous conversations, which in Kafka's The Castle, for instance, reduces the "continual telephoning" to "humming and singing. "75 Likewise, in Renard's short story the superimposition of all the goddesses and sirens that ever existed may have resulted in white noise.
There can be no doubt that Kafka dreamed telephony in all its infor- mational and technological precision: four days prior to his dream he read an essay by Philipp Reis in an 1 8 63 issue of Die Gartenlaube on the
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first telephone experiments. 76 As is clear from the essay's title, "The Mu- sic Telegraph," the apparatus was built for the purpose of conveying the human voice. It failed to do SO,77 but like Kafka's imagined telephone mouthpieces it was capable of transmitting music.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has been keeping a list of partial ob- jects that, first, can be separated from the body and, second, excite desires prior to sexual differentiation: breast, mouth, and feces. Lacan added two further partial objects: voice and gaze. 78 This is psychoanalysis in the me- dia age, for only cinema can restore the disembodied gaze, and only the telephone was able to transmit a disembodied voice. Plays like Cocteau's La voix humaine follow in their wake.
The only thing that remains unclear is whether media advertise par- tial objects or partial objects advertise the postal system. The more strate- gic the function of news channels, the more necessary, at least in interim peace times, the recruitment of users.
In 1980 Dieter Wellershoff published his novella The Siren, unfortu- nately without dedicating it to Renard. A professor from Cologne plans to use his sabbatical to finally complete his long-planned book on commu- nication theory. But he never gets down to writing. An unknown woman who once witnessed Professor Elsheimer's telegenic partial objects on a TV screen starts a series of phone calls that begin like a one-sided suicide hot line and culminate in mutual telephonic masturbation. 79 Written the- ories of communication stand no chance against the self-advertisement of technological media. Even the most taciturn of European " civil services" 80 recruited for "the profession of telephone operator" and made it "acces- sible to German women," because from the very beginning its "telephone service" could not "do without" the "clear voices of women. "81
Therefore, Professor Elsheimer's only means of escaping the spell of the telephonic-sexual mouthpiece is to use one medium to beat another medium. During the last call from the unseen siren he puts on a Bach record and pumps up the volume. 82 And 10 and behold, drowned out by Old European notated music the siren magic ceases to exist. Only two technical media communicate between Cologne and Hamburg. "Here," Kafka wrote from Prague to his beloved employee of a phonograph man- ufacturer, "by the way, is a rather nice idea; a parlograph goes to the tele- phone in Berlin, while a gramophone does likewise in Prague, and these two carry on a little conversation with each other. "83
Wellershoff's The Siren is an inverted replay of "The Man and the Shell. " Renard's fictional composer had not yet acquired the technologi- cal skill to employ, of all pieces, the Art of the Fugue as a jammer in the
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? "When telephone and gramophone . . . " Caricature, ca. 1900.
war of the sexes. On the contrary, he wanted to transfer onto musical sheets what was no longer fugue or art: "a goddess's lusty scream," which coincided with the roaring of the sea.
It remained an impossible wish as long as it depended on the five lines of a musical staff, but that changed in the founding age of modern media. In the beginning there was, as always, Wagner, who, by courtesy of ice-cream poisoning in La Spezia, experienced an acoustic fever delir- ium of "swiftly running water" that suggested to him the Rhinegold pre- lude. 84 Debussy's Sirenes for orchestra and female voices followed in
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1 89 5 , the score o f which n o longer dictated words, o r even syllables or vowels, but sums, as if it were possible to compose the noise of channels or, as Richard Dehmel put it a year later, the "hollow din" of the "tele- graph wires. "85 Between 1903 and 1905 Debussy completed the "sym- phonic poem" which in Renard's tale was named after a Greek sea god- dess but which Debussy simply called La Mer. Finally, in 1907 Wagner's monotonous, ice cream-induced E-flat chord with all its overtone effects became Nerval's unwritten Amphitrite, that "poison for the ear. "
Berliner's gramophone is to the history of music what Edison's phono- graph is to the history of literature. At the price of being monopolized and mass produced by big industry, records globalized musical noise. Edison's cylinders in turn made the storage of speech a daily enjoyment, even if in each case only a very few copies could be made. As a result, literature's letter-filled papers suffered the same crisis as sheet music.
In 19 16, three years before Rilke's "Primal Sound, " Salomo Friedlaend- er delineated the new constellation of eroticism, literature, and phonog- raphy. More than any other writer of his time, Friedlaender, better known under the pseudonym Mynona (a palindrome of anonym), made stories again out of media history. In 1922 he published the novel Gray Magic, which anticipates a technological future in which women are turned into celluloid (and men, incidentally, into typewriters). In 1916 he wrote a short story that conjures up the technological past in the shape of Germany's ur- author in order to predict the transformation of literature into sound.
SALOMO FRIEDLAENDER, "GOETHE SPEAKS INTO THE PHONOGRAPH" (1916)
"What a pity," remarked Anna Pomke, a timid middle-class girl, "that the phonograph wasn't already invented in 1 8001 "
"Why? " asked Professor Abnossah Pschorr. "Dear Pomke, it is a pity that Eve didn't present it to Adam as part of her dowry for their common- law marriage; there is a lot to feel pity for, dear Pomke. "
"Oh, Professor, I would have loved to listen to Goethe's voicel He is said to have had such a beautiful organ, and everything he said was so meaningful. Oh, if only he could have spoken into a phonographl Ohl Ohl"
Long after Pomke had left, Abnossah, who had a weakness for her
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squeaky chubbiness, still heard her groans. Professor Pschorr, inventor of the telestylus, immersed himself in his customary inventive thoughts. Was
it possible retroactively to trick that Goethe (Abnossah was ridiculously jealous) out of his voice? Whenever Goethe spoke, his voice produced vi- brations as harmonious as, for example, the soft voice of your wife, dear Reader. These vibrations encounter obstacles and are reflected, resulting in a to and fro which becomes weaker in the passage of time but which does not actually cease. So the vibrations produced by Goethe are still in existence, and to bring forth Goethe's voice you only need the proper receiver to re- cord them and a microphone to amplify their effects, by now diminished. The difficult part was the construction of the receiver. How could it be ad- justed to the specific vibrations of Goethe's voice without having the latter at one's disposal? What a fascinating idea! Abnossah determined that it was
necessary to conduct a thorough study of Goethe's throat. He scrutinized busts and portraits, but they provided a very vague impression at best. He was on the verge of giving up when he suddenly remembered that Goethe was still around, if only in the shape of a corpse. He immediately sent a peti- tion to Weimar asking for permission to briefly inspect Goethe's remains for the purpose of certain measurements. The petition was rejected. What now?
Furnished with a small suitcase filled with the most delicate measuring and burglary equipment, Abnossah Pschorr proceeded to dear old Weimar; incidentally, in the first-class waiting room he happened to come across the locally known sister of the globally known brother in graceful conversation with some old Highness of Rudolfstadt. Abnossah heard her say, "Our Fritz always had a military posture, and yet he was gentle; with others he was of truly Christian tenderness-how he would have welcomed this war! And the beautiful, sacred book by Max Scheler! "
Abnossah was s o shocked he fell flat on his back. He pulled himself up with difficulty and found lodgings in the "Elephant. " In his room he care- fully examined the instruments. Then he placed a chair in front of the mir- ror and tried on nothing less than a surprisingly portrait-like mask of the old Goethe. He tied it to his face and exclaimed:
"Verily, you know I am a genius,
"I may well be Goethe himself!
"Step aside, buffoon! Else I call Schiller and my prince Karl August for
help, you oaf, you substitute! "
He rehearsed his speech with a deep sonorous voice.
Late at night he proceeded to the royal tomb. Modern burglars, all of
whom I desire as my readers, will smile at those other readers who believe that it is impossible to break into the well-guarded Weimar royal tomb.
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Please remember that a s a burglar Professor Pschorr i s ahead o f even the most adept professional burglar. Pschorr is not only a most proficient engi- neer, he is also a psychophysiologist, a hypnotist, a psychologist, and a psy- choanalyst. In general, it is a pity that there are so few educated criminals: if all crimes were successful, they would finally belong to the natural order of things and incur the same punishment as any other natural event. Who takes lightning to task for melting Mr. Meier's safe? Burglars such as Pschorr are superior to lightning because they are not diverted by rods.
In a single moment, Pschorr was able to give rise to horror and then im- mobilize those frozen in terror by using hypnosis. Imagine yourself guarding the royal tomb at midnight: suddenly the old Goethe appears and casts a spell on you that leaves only your head alive. Pschorr turned the whole guard into heads attached to trunks in suspended animation. He had about two hours before the cramp loosened, and he made good use of them. He descended into the tomb, switched on a flashlight, and soon found Goethe's sarcopha- gus. After a short while he was acquainted with the corpse. Piety is for those who have no other worries. It should not be held against Pschorr that he sub- jected Goethe's cadaver to some practical treatment; in addition, he made some wax molds and finally ensured that everything was restored to its previ- ous state. Educated amateur criminals may be more radical than profession- als, but the radicalness of their meticulous accomplishments furnishes their crimes with the aesthetic charm of a perfectly solved mathematical equation.
After leaving the tomb Pschorr added further elegance to his precision by deliberately freeing a guard from his spell and scolding him in the afore- mentioned manner. Then he tore the mask off his face and returned to the "Elephant" in the most leisurely fashion. He was satisfied; he had what he wanted. Early next morning he returned home.
A most active period of work began. As you know, a body can be re- constructed by using its skeleton; or at least Pschorr was able to do so. The exact reproduction of Goethe's air passage down to the vocal cords and lungs no longer posed any insurmountable difficulties. The timbre and strength of the sounds produced by these organs could be determined with utmost precision-you merely had to let a stream of air corresponding to the measurement of Goethe's lungs pass through. After a short while Goethe spoke the way he must have spoken during his lifetime.
But since it was not only a matter of recreating his voice but also of having this voice repeat the words it uttered a hundred years ago, it was necessary to place Goethe's dummy in a room in which those words had fre- quently been spoken.
? Abnossah invited Pomke. She came and laughed at him delightfully.
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"Do you want to hear him speak? " "Whom? "
"That Goethe ofyours. "
"Of mine? Well, I never! Professor! " "So you do! "
Abnossah cranked the phonograph and a voice appeared:
"Friends, oh flee the darkened chamber . . . " et cetera.
Pomke was strangely moved.
"Yes," she said hastily," that is exactly how I imagined his organ. It is
so enchanting! "
" Well, now, " cried Pschorr, " I d o not want to deceive you, my dear.
Yes, it is Goethe, his voice, his words. But it is not an actual replay of words he actually spoke. What you heard was the repetition of a possibility, not of a reality. I am, however, determined to fulfill your wish in its entirety and therefore propose a joint excursion to Weimar. "
The locally known sister of the globally known brother was again sitting in the waiting room whispering to an elderly lady: "There still remains a fi- nal work by my late brother, but it will not be published until the year 2000. The world is not yet mature enough. My brother inherited his ancestor's pi- ous reverence. But our world is frivolous and would not see the difference between a satyr and this saint. The little people in Italy saw a saint in him. "
Pomke would have keeled over if Pschorr had not caught her. He blushed oddly and she gave him a charming smile. They drove straight to the Goethehaus. Hofrat Professor Bbffel did the honors. Pschorr presented his request. Bbffel became suspicious. "You have brought along a dummy of Goethe's larynx, a mechanical apparatus? Is that what you are saying? "
"And I request permission to install it i n Goethe's study. "
"Of course. But for what reason? What do you want? What is this sup- posed to mean? The newspapers are full of something curious, nobody knows what to make of it. The guards claim to have seen the old Goethe, he even roared at one of them. The others were so dazed by the apparition they were in need of medical attention. The incident was reported to the Arch- duke himself. "
Anna Pomke scrutinized Pschorr. Abnossah, however, was astonished. "But what has this got to do with my request? Granted, it is very strange- maybe some actor allowed himself a joke. "
"Ah! You are right, that is an explanation worth exploring. I couldn't help but think . . . But how were you able to imitate Goethe's larynx, since you could not have possibly modeled it after nature? "
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"That is what I would have preferred to do, but I was unfortunately not given the permission. "
"I assume that it would not have been very helpful anyway. "
"Why? "
"To the best o f my knowledge Goethe i s dead. "
"I assure you, the skeleton, in particular the skull, would suffice to as-
semble a precise model; at least it would suffice for me. "
"Your skill is well known, Professor. But what do you need the larynx
for, if I may ask? "
" I want to reproduce the timbre o f the Goethean organ a s deceptively
close to nature as possible. "
"And you have the model? "
"Here! "
Abnossah snapped open a case. Bbffel uttered an odd scream. Pomke
smiled proudly.
"But you could not have modeled this larynx on the skeleton? " cried
Bbffe! '
"Almost! It is based on certain life-size and lifelike busts and pictures; I
am very skilled in these matters. "
"As we all know! But why do you want to set up this model in Goethe's
former study? "
"He conceivably articulated certain interesting things there; and be-
cause the acoustic vibration of his words, though naturally in an extremely diminished state, are still to be found there-"
"You believe so? "
"It's not a question of belief, it's a fact. "
"Yes? "
"Yes! "
"So what do you want to do? "
"I want to suck those vibrations through the larynx.