Ann Quin on Tape: Three’s Auralities

Abstract

This article attends to the aural dimensions of Ann Quin’s Three (1966). It argues that just as high modernist texts developed symbiotically with the emergent sound technologies of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, so might Quin’s novel be read for its engagement with the tape recorder which rose to commercial prominence after 1945. Aiming to contextualize Quin’s writing on tape, the article considers the history and prehistory of the medium, as well as its appropriation by Quin’s contemporaries in music, film, and the visual arts. Through the figure of tape, Three finds ways of valuing ambience and materiality, while resisting transactional and suspicious forms of knowledge.

Keywords:

• Ann Quin
• aurality
• aesthetics
• materiality
• tape recorder

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Nonia Williams and an anonymous reader for their feedback on this article, and to Olly Cox, Simone Dawes, Violet Elworthy, Howard Finn, Ceri Holloway, Ben Jureidini, Tori Mangan, and Ned Russell, whose discussions with me about Quin helped me immeasurably as I wrote this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As with the word ‘gramophone’, which was Emile Berliner’s brand-name for his phonograph technology, Pfleumer’s Magnetophon became the proprietary eponym that denotes the tape recorder in a number of languages. This is the case in French, for example: ‘magnétophone’ is the term used throughout Trio, Lola Tranec’s 1970 translation of Quin’s Three.

2 A leader is piece of nonmagnetic medium that is attached to a tape so as to mark its beginning or end, or else a particular location on a recording.

3 I have previously written about mediatory noise in relation to a high modernist text, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (see Guy 2020).