Laughing Matter: Charles Cros, from Paléophone to Monologue

Abstract

Nineteenth-century poet, savant and inventor Charles Cros is a figure whose endeavours were exceptionally wide-ranging. They include a proposed instrument which would be the first of its kind capable of recording sound (the ‘paléophone’); treatises on photography and interplanetary communication; poetry, and a body of comic monologues which belong to the current of fumisme. This article argues that Cros's monologues are subtly inflected by his interest in the faculty of speech and technologies of sound reproduction. While they do not explicitly evoke such technologies, they show an acute sensitivity to the quirks and accidents of the spoken word to which neither dramatic convention nor indeed norms of social discourse attribute sense. It is this ill-formed matter, amounting to a kind of discursive ‘noise’, which allows Cros to offer a wry commentary on the pretensions of a fin-de-siècle culture preoccupied with the strategizing of utterance and the production of an objectified record of the spoken word.