Broadcasting Modernism

8. Annexing the Oracular Voice: Form, Ideology and the BBC

c h a p t e r 8 Annexing the Oracular Voice Form, Ideology, and the BBC Debra Rae Cohen In 1934, as part of a report on the potentialities of broadcasting in South Africa, John Reith, the director-general of the BBC, summoned up the following vision: “As the assegai to the naked hand, as the rifle to the assegai, so and much more is broadcasting, rightly institutionalised, rightly inspired, rightly controlled, to any other instrument or power, in the service of wisdom and beauty and peace” (Into the Wind 205). To unpack this statement, with its implicit assumption of the timeless “wisdom” of an imperialist and symbolically male-gendered modernity, its simultaneous evocations of violence and peace, of beauty and discipline, of bureaucracy and the individual heroism of the divinely inspired, is to recognize the contradictions that by the 1930s had come to define the BBC and thus inform British perceptions about the nature of radio itself. But these contradictions did more than that: the tension between earlier, idealized conceptions of the medium and their autocratic actualization in the BBC helped shape not only 1930s literary responses to radio but also 1930s literary form. Although literary thematizing of the mass media in Britain during this decade has itself been exhaustively chronicled, those critics who take note of the formal influence of broadcasting tend either to conflate its textual traces with those of the cinema or to single out as “radiogenic” only those elements, like montage, that can be construed as subversive of radio’s perceived homo­ genizing and totalizing effects.1 Such formulations tend to efface not only the distinct effects on textual production of the proliferation of sound both 142 programmed and ambient but also the way those particulars changed over time in the distinctive monopolistic British context. This chapter thus argues for a historicized model of the “radiogenic,” positing that the very contradictions and cultural tensions that surrounded the developing image of wireless under the aegis of the BBC had formal literary impact and helped to shape the period’s distinctive generic experiments. If the BBC was, as Reith claimed, immune by nature of its peculiar monopoly status from the imputation of commercially “debasing the currency” of broadcasting (Into the Wind 144), it was all the more vulnerable to being judged by the face on its coinage. From early on it was widely understood that despite the bland, impersonal façade of the BBC—what Churchill called its “pontifical anonymous mugwumpery” (qtd. in Blythe 47)—its product bore the impress of Reith’s own emphatic prejudices. True, Reith’s early public pronouncements, especially his 1924 apologia, Broadcast over Britain, had stressed radio’s democratizing potential, echoing what Head of Talks Hilda Matheson recalled as “the dizzy height of prophecy ” unleashed by the liberatory connotations of “wireless”—in Gillian Beer’s terms, “a conception of the universe newly magical” (Matheson, “Record” 507; Beer 154). Reith’s book ends with a rush of religious mysticism, paying homage to the mysteries of the ether—with which “wireless,” says Reith, “is in particular league” (Broadcast 223)—and conceiving broadcasting metaphorically as but a feeble simulacrum of the “word of power” (224) of an infinite god. This discourse of humility in the face of the divine, though, is both consonant with and designed to legitimate Reith’s self-positioning as Arnoldian apostle and arbiter of culture, “called”—a word he uses repeatedly throughout the book—to give the people not what they want but what they need. Reith’s benign assurance that the power of broadcasting will produce “a more intelligent and enlightened electorate” (113) gives way late in the book to a grander vision: Wireless. . . . ignores the puny and often artificial barriers which have estranged men from their fellows. It will soon take continents in its stride, outstripping the winds; the divisions of oceans, mountain ranges, and deserts will be passed unheeded. It will cast a girdle round the earth with bands that are all the stronger because invisible. (219) Leaving aside the geographic peculiarities of Reith’s purply sententious prose, what’s evident here is the degree to which the democratizing mission has already become, rhetorically, a totalizing one, his promise to make “the Annexing the Oracular Voice 143 nation as one man” already (at least retrospectively) shadowed by the question of just which “one man” he means (qtd. in Scannell and Cardiff 7). In the politically...