Two of the most robust areas of inquiry in 19C Americanist studies are sound studies and environmental studies (which includes climate, ecological, and geological investigations). Each field has complex origins: sound studies is closely linked to new media histories, but also to strains of inter-arts inquiry. Environmental studies—especially as mediated by theorizations of the anthropocene—feeds and is fed by fascination with the non-human, geological time, and concepts of cosmos.
This paper explores the logic linking these two interpretive domains. And it suggests that our contemporary moment may share important metaphysical commitments with the late nineteenth century’s fascination with both the sonic and the chthonic. In one sense, these two ideas appear to be polar opposites: the sonic—quintessentially, but not exclusively, instantiated by music—is an emblem of the irreducibly fugitive, while the chthonic indexes a nearly inconceivable durability. On the other hand, the fugitive and the static were coming closer together in the nineteenth century. Under the massive influence of Lyell and others, America was learning to understand the earth itself as in motion, as recording an active, if difficult to apprehend, historicity. Meanwhile, physiological aesthetics, and its technical partners (Edison, e.g), pursued the question of sounds can be inscribed, pulled from the fleetingness of their aerial life and incised in a form that can be preserved and replayed.
I will approach the complex question of what the sonic and the chthonic shared in the 19C through the narrow gate of the life and work of Francis Grierson (aka Jesse Shepherd). Grierson grew up in frontier Illinois, the child of immigrant English parents, and from this remote location cobbled together a remarkably cosmopolitan career as a musician, writer, and savant. Grierson is best known today for The Valley of the Shadows (1909), a kind of mystical memoir of his childhood in Illinois in the years before the Civil War. Edmund Wilson, Van Wyck Brooks, and others were admirers of this work, though as his latest biographer (1966!) points out in a metaphor of interest to this paper, Grierson’s story keeps “fad[ing] out like a lost radio band.” Grierson’s musical gifts were apparently prodigious: he specialized in piano improvisations that for his audience evoked primal experiences of being transported through time and space: “Then the music swelled and became strangely urgent—I felt there was an image that wanted to break through—a consciousness of some mighty presence—and all at once it was there: “The Nile!”.”.
How the Nile with all its chthonic resonance appears out of improvised music is the puzzle one wishes to solve.
My paper will suggest that a metaphysical commitment to an invisible pulsatile material cosmos provided passage between the sonic and the chthonic. Is there such passage between today’s critical work on sound and ground? If so, what might make such connection possible?
So: a sketch of a little-known but fascinating 19C figure who casts light on speculative energies of his time, and some meta-critical questions about our own moment.
