Broadcasting Modernism

11. “What They Had Heard Said Written”: Joyce, Pound and the Cross-Correspondence of Radio

c h a p t e r 1 1 Joyce, Pound, and the Cross-Correspondence of Radio Jane Lewty A critic is easily susceptible, as Michael Whitworth notes, to the idea that “everyone” writing during the early twentieth century was utilizing a new science in some way, whether through metaphor, key image, subject matter, or adaptation (211). However, the topic of Broadcasting Modernism is more than a simple historical conjunction; it implies the recasting of texts and writers in order to locate a particular mind-set, that which hears a disembodied voice emanating from a corner of a room, “as queer as any transaction with a ghost in Shakespeare” (Kenner, Mechanic Muse 36) or, as in the searing conclusion to Tillie Olson’s Yonnondio (1934), “the veering transparent meshes of sound, far sound, human and stellar, pulsing, pulsing” (191). Whitworth adds that “the full machine is never apparent” (211), meaning that no author is likely to leave a comprehensive report of, in this case, the growth of wireless and its network[s]; instead, we have the recognition of its uncanniness, a stray broadcast word finding its way into a poem. It becomes necessary to categorize the different “reverberations” of radio: for example, its effect on the structure of written words as seen in Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram “Ocean Letter” (1914), which imprints a view of the modern world in a frieze of undulating lines suggestive of wireless waves. Or the idea proposed by Rudolph Arnheim in 1936 that “no external action has to be directly represented” (178) in a radio “monologue,” thus suggesting a correlation to If I can’t upset this pound of pressed ollaves I can sit up zounds of sounds upon him —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (499) “What They Had Heard Said Written” 199 the stream-of-consciousness technique of Modernist fiction, perhaps best explained by Virginia Woolf, who, in her novel The Waves (1931) sought to “do away with exact place and time” (Writer’s Diary 143). Indeed, the textual incorporation of wireless in Modernist literature may have inspired the very illogicality of Modernist process—this being a topic of vast enquiry, despite the fact that (to adapt Whitworth’s remark) the use of wireless “might have [had] no coherent purpose other than to assert topicality [and] modernity” (211). Conversely, Adelaide Morris’s view that certain inventions “decisively altered the nature of poetry and literature” (“Sound Technologies” 37) is most seductive when approaching the huge compendia of Modernism, Finnegans Wake, The Cantos, The Waste Land, and enquiring as to whether radio is either a leading principle of the text or a vital undercurrent, ebbing and flowing throughout. It is arguable that the condition of Modernism (that which diminishes, recycles, erases, disinters) in some way shadows radio, which contains all of those characteristics. Whenever any “gap” is surmounted, as achieved by the dawning of radio-communications, the girdle around the world, a void is opened up due to the acknowledgment of that void. As John Durham Peters recognizes, it is a constant “fear of inescapable solipsism” which informs the “microdramas” of Modernist literature (16); for instance, one possible reading of The Waste Land is that it functions as a vast “telephone poem,” wherein stray voices emerge from the text as pure utterance and return misunderstood. Figures in Modernist literature are frequently suspended in stasis and unable to communicate; they act as silent broadcasters fruitlessly emitting signals, as shown at the close of Woolf’s Between the Acts, where the characters address one another in thought but dare not literally vocalize their feelings. “I often think,” wrote musician Carlos Chavez in 1927, “that at present the radio is frequently, at best, a voice speaking well, but not understood, or imperfectly understood, or heard inopportunely” (133)—a remark that serves to be both cryptic and exacting. Its premise will resonate in the following discussion of James Joyce and Ezra Pound, who not only wrote in “electrickery with attendance” (Joyce, FW 579)—meaning that they freely incorporated their immediate exposure to the medium—but also that each, in his own differing way, recognized the indeterminate quality of radio, how the vast expanse opened up between transmitter and receiver could affect the smallest of words, spoken or written. “Joyce had never quite known what to make of Pound,” writes Forrest Read (262). Was he Wyndham Lewis’s “revolutionary simpleton” (39) or a 200 Jane Lewty more complex blend of...