| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: “[T]his war with everybody really everybody listening to the radio, there is nothing but music.” —Gertrude Stein, Paris France (1940) Une voix, une voix qui vient de si loin Qu’elle ne fait plus tinter les oreilles, Une voix, comme un tambour, voilée Parvient pourtant, distinctement, jusqu’à nous. […] Ne l’entendez-vous pas? —Robert Desnos, Contrée (1944) The following is an attempt to shed some light on the as yet unacknowledged significance of Robert Desnos’s interest in music at the time of the Occupation and, specifically, his enthusiastic support of the production and playing of phonograph records as a meaningful form of cultural practice during the war years.1 Unlike those of his wartime contemporaries who refused to publish in the German-controlled public sphere, Desnos remained throughout the Occupation an assiduous contributor to the non-clandestine press, including a longstanding role as “critique de disques” at Aujourd’hui, a collaborationist Parisian daily where he penned on average one or two record reviews each month between October 1940 and February 1944—the last entry appearing just six days before his arrest and deportation for Resistance activities.2 These reviews, virtually unknown today,3 provide a revealing map of his frequent interventions in the non-clandestine press of the period. Like the Pathé-Marconi index of record releases that Desnos reviewed in 1941, these texts—for all their apparent triviality—offer “de précieux documents pour l’historien futur qui voudra écrire, d’une part l’histoire de l’état d’esprit actuel, d’autre part le tableau d’une activité intellectuelle en laquelle il est permis de placer notre espoir” (Aujourd’hui June 26, 1941). In a surprisingly candid fashion given the context in which the statement is made, Desnos urges not only his contemporaries but also later historians of the war years to listen in on the sounds of Occupation France as they are captured on records. How and why the poet came to attach so much importance to such an activity will be the focus of the following reflections. By the time the war began, Desnos had already produced a significant body of writings attesting to his fascination with sound recording, spanning not only the many texts he wrote for various newspapers and magazines as a discographer, but also his own creative production as song writer and poet.4 While a full analysis of these texts would require significantly more discussion than can be allowed here, a brief introduction to some primary images and concepts can prove helpful for situating the subsequent evolution of Desnos’s handling of similar themes during the war years. Indication of both the perils and promise of the newly popularized technology of sound recording dates back to even his earliest works, as seen in the pre-Surrealist collection, Prospectus, written in 1919, where Desnos dreams of relegating the role of speaker to a phonograph that will one day churn out songs and phrases on behalf of the poet after his death: Sur mon tombeau un phonographe chantera soir et matin la complainte du guerrier cafre navré d’un coup d’œil libertin. Sur mon tombeau un phonographe récitera cette épitaphe LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ. (Œuvres 20) In these early verses, the phonograph’s transmittal of sound has a strong sense of displacement, with the depiction of the mechanized “singing” of an African warrior’s “complainte” and “recitation” of the poet’s own epitaph together working to undermine the immediacy of voice typically associated with lyric poetry. Recalling, in this sense, Dada’s invitation to the reader “to reimagine artistic practice in this age of media and technological warfare” (Dickerman 7), Desnos here transforms the poetic text into a funereal space where subjective presence is replaced with a decontextualized mechanical reproduction of someone else’s words. A similar image of phonographic reproduction resurfaces in another early poem, “Le marché aux oiseaux,” this time in a passage where the oddly prosthetic device gives voice thirty-one times to the poet’s thoughts: “Le phonographe recommence pour la trente et unième fois / l’énumération de mes idées” (Destinée arbitraire 41). Here again the phonograph’s entry into poetic...
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