The Grooves of Temporality
This essay takes W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a model of modern black temporality and cultural practice rooted in and routed through the sonic. While Souls blends together history, eulogy, sociology, personal anecdote, economics, lyricism, ethnography, fiction, and cultural criticism of black music, Du Bois’s central aesthetic achievement in this epochal text appears in bars of music placed before each chapter. The way the “Sorrow Songs” are threaded throughout the text is the key to Souls’s sonorous ignition. Besides the musical epigraphs, references to hearing and the “Sorrow Songs” close both the “Forethought” and “Afterthought,” underpinning the manuscript both graphically—through musical notes—and in its content—through Du Bois’s theorization of black music’s place in U.S. and world culture. When Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 2; emphasis mine) first introduces the “Sorrow Songs” in the “Forethought,” he links them directly to the souls of black folk: “Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music, which welled up from black souls in the dark past.” Moreover, in the “Afterthought” to Souls, Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 217) asks his readers to “Hear [his] cry,” and the best way to hear the souls of black folk, as Du Bois remarks at the end of chapter 1 (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”), is to listen to the “Sorrow Songs.” Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 12) does not ask his readers to view or see the souls of black folk, but instead he writes so “that men may listen to the souls of black folk.” Much in the same way that Du Bois appeals to the ear in his theory of double consciousness, this injunction to imagine blackness sonically provides a phono-graphic guidepost for reading and hearing Souls.
Contemporary critics agree that the sonic signs taken from the Western tradition of musical notation cannot form a mimetic merger with spirituals. Eric Sundquist (1993: 470), for instance, states that “the musical epigraphs are . . .an example of a cultural ‘language’ that cannot be properly interpreted, or even ‘heard’ at all, since it fails to correspond to the customary mapping of sounds and signs that make up the languages of the dominant (in this case white) culture.” Of course, these notes were also unable to faithfully reproduce the Western classical music for which they were originally designed; for example, they cannot capture the full range of a performance of a Bach fugue, since the piece will be interpreted and performed differently depending on who plays it and when and where it is staged. As Alan Durant (1984: 98) has argued, “Notation marks an ordering of bodily movements of musical performance in addition to immediate verbal directives, and provided historically the possibility for pieces of music of a specialized, if restricted, kind of permanence. In this sense, notation was one necessary condition to take on, as composition, a temporal and aesthetic independence from particular versions and collaborations of its realization.” By incorporating musical notes into his text as doubles for spirituals, Du Bois attempts to make the musical works that comprise this body independent of their performances and locations in history while also ensconcing them in new forms of contextual codependency.
Instead of being placed within a particular historical framework, the spirituals now signify and stand in for a general black American future-past. Du Bois (re)defines the spirituals he employs by fusing them with Western canonical literature, rendering these songs usable and audible African American futurepasts that bridge the gap between the nineteenth century—slavery and white transcribers— and the twentieth century—the color line. Thus, the “Sorrow Songs” are severed from their origins by transmogrifying them into grooves for Du Bois’s dub mix, which allows Souls to be audible and legible as the first literary sound recording (phono-graph) of sonic Afro-modernity.1
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Notes
- I defi ne sonic Afro-modernity in relation to the advent of technological sound recording at the end of the nineteenth century (embodied in the phonograph) that offered the ability to split sounds from the sources that (re)produced them, creating a technological orality and musicality in twentieth-century black culture. In other words, oralities and musicalities were no longer tied to the immediate presence of human subjects; they became technologically iterable in a Derridean sense that occasions not so much a complete disappearance of the human subject but its resounding through new styles of technological folding. On the one hand, this disjuncture between sound and source rendered the former more ephemeral since it failed to provide the listener with a clear visual point of reference. On the other hand, sound gained its materiality in the technological apparatuses and the practices surrounding these devices and in the process rematerialized the human source. This interplay between the ephemerality of music (or the apparatus) and the materiality of the audio technologies/practices (or music) provides the central, nonsublatable tension at the core of sonic Afro-modernity. For a different consideration of Afro-modern time, see Hanchard 1999.