Hearing Trilby: A Phonographic Reading of Sonic Nostalgia

Abstract

Abstract:This article reads George Du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby as a text concerned with manifestations of the human voice in a fast-advancing consumer society and with the phonograph as a technology that carries the voice beyond the human body. This phonographic reading highlights the novel's treatment of Trilby's voice as a limitless instance of sublime presence that incites sublimated attempts to possess, hold, own, and consume the voice. As a bound, material repository of text and images, the novel exists as evidence for the impossibility of capturing the very entity it strains desperately to communicate for our hearing, the virtual voice of La Svengali as transduced through the mesmerized body of Trilby. The article argues that Du Maurier's novel can be understood as a nostalgic, consumerist sublimation centred around the figure and phenomenological effects of this virtual manifestation of voice, and that Trilby attempts to keep commodification and voice separate from each other. Mobilizing concepts from sound and media studies (Michel Chion, Lisa Gitelman, Brian Kane, Brian Massumi, Brian Rust) and tracing the novel's presentation of voice according to a series of overlapping binaries—including hearing vs. buying, virtual vs. analogue, public vs. private, ephemeral vs. material, massive vs. intimate—this phonographic reading of Trilby explores the meaning of nostalgia when technology enables a sonic event to be commodified as a static surrogate.