Not only is an army marching toward its objective, but forty million Italians are marching in unison with this army. They are united because there is an attempt to commit against them the blackest of all injustices, to rob them of a place in the sun.88
This excerpt is the ideological center of the book, so readily do its rhetorical notes chime with Starkie’s entire presentation of his impressions of modern Italy: everything else in his travelogue functions as an explanatory gloss for these words. It is at this point in the text that the deferred consequences of figuring Mussolini as receiver set become manifest, for Starkie does not witness the dictator speaking from the balcony of the Piazza Venezia in Rome, but listens to him on the radio in Dublin. Where Ireland had once been beyond the “wizard’s magic circle” in the textual realm of bad translations and intervening political “excrescences,” the expansion of medium wave service and the advent of shortwave broadcasting have now broadened the “magic circle,” allowing for the long-distance reception of the sound of the dictator’s voice. Starkie’s account of listening to the broadcast stresses this new possibility: “Sometimes the sound faded and sometimes it blared on my ear, mingled with atmospherics and the sound of cheering. Then I heard the inexorable voice continue.”89 As a description of dynamics, pacing, and tempo, Starkie’s report demonstrates the unimpeded power of rhythmic mastery, the ability to organize affective energy through the domination of sonic content. The immediacy of Mussolini’s “natural vibrato,” his sympathetic handling of latent “moods,” would not seem applicable to long-distance reception; yet this “source of power” is silently incorporated into Starkie’s text by transferring this mystified manual dexterity to the auratic listener. By this writerly sleight of hand, Starkie relocates Mussolini’s tactile virtuosity to the front of the receiver set, where the dial’s interface becomes the counterpart to face-to-face exchange.90 Replacing the “touch of the violinist” with the touch of the dialer, Starkie tunes in the broadcast of the dictator’s voice, but receives it as though listening to a point-to-point transmission. In contrast to broadcasting’s dispersion, this singularized process of transmission and reception, occurring simultaneously millions of times over, is the realization of harmony. As a combination of aural, visual, and tactile practices, this synesthetic event locates Starkie in ideological space less by his choice of station than in mystifying the regulated world of allocated frequencies as the resonating harmony of sympathetic vibrations. While Marshall McLuhan would later infamously characterize radio as a regressive “tribal drum” possessing the “power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber,”91 Starkie presents the medium as a fascist violin, the vast resonator that brings together passion and specialization, wildness and expertise. In doing so, he misrecognizes intellectual liberty for political autonomy, a relationship made concrete in the emblem that appears on the front cover, spine, and title page of The Waveless Plain: a violin wreathed in laurels. To ask whether these are the laurels of learning, poetry, or martial victory is to misunderstand harmony.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, which he spent in Madrid as the British Council representative to Spain, Starkie recanted his support for Mussolini, stating that a fear of communism had caused his admiration for the dictator. Writing in the second volume of an autobiography left unfinished at the time of his death in 1976, he treats this misplaced attention as a condition of auditory overload: “The Abyssinian War monopolised our attention and my ears were deafened by the slogans shouted by militarists and war-mongers. Instead of the Red Star, the Hammer and the Sickle, and the Communist slogans of Red Revolution my ears were deafened by cries of Duce! Duce!”92 When the first volume of this autobiography had appeared in 1963 as Scholars and Gypsies, it covered, all but identically, many of the same events first presented in The Waveless Plain, although it concludes with Starkie’s engagement just before the March on Rome. The signal difference between these texts, however, is Starkie’s replacement of Mussolini with Gabriele D’Annunzio, the “poet-condottiere” whose magnetism and technique would later be appropriated by his less capable rival: “The voice of the poet rose sharper in tone in continual crescendo. He played upon the emotions of the crowd as a violinist upon a Stradivarius. The eyes of the thousands were fixed upon him, as though hypnotized by his power, and his voice, like that of a shanachie, bewitched their ears.”93 As a textual revision, this image hardly constitutes a reconsideration of listening either as a critical faculty or (with the insertion of the seanchaí, the traditional Irish storyteller) as an essential aspect of transmission and reception: indeed, an identical laurel-wreathed violin emblazons Scholars and Gypsies. Representing the revision of conditions that had been realized with particular force during the thirties, its reappearance visualizes an ideal remediation and has implications extending beyond Starkie’s case. Now absent its martial note and figuring only the relations of learning and poetry, this emblem is instead a meeting point of Cold War anticommunism and the postwar normalization of the literary field, a compression effected alongside the canonization of literary modernism.
Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with modernism, the two terms often forming a closed circuit in which the sense of one feeds into and affirms that of the other. Speaking equally to literary modernism’s international sites of production and its later disciplinary institutionalization, this circuit is a remarkably durable feature of the modernist field. Like the practice of close reading, the concept of cosmopolitanism has many varieties and inflections; it has similarly remained foundational through a series of transformations and reconfigurations (including the recent “transnational” turn) of the field itself. Whereas close reading seeks to isolate formal features as a means of discovering unique structures of literary knowledge, cosmopolitanism seeks to isolate the effects of “sustained intercultural exposure” as a way of discovering innovative forms of affiliation.1 Each mode is invested in procedures of isolation. In defining the immediacy of their objects, both depend on the categorical detachment from “parochial” constraints—of biography, local association, and temporal situation, to name three. While there can be eminently good and practical reasons for such procedures, the implications of this categorical detachment are by no means uniquely positive. In perhaps the strongest recent critique of cosmopolitanism, Timothy Brennan brings out the stakes of this linkage through careful deployment of New Critical terminology: “Judgment of cosmopolitanism’s value or desirability... is affected by whose cosmopolitanism or patriotism one is talking about—whose definitions of prejudice, knowledge, or open-mindedness one is referring to. Cosmopolitanism is local while denying its local character. This denial is an intrinsic feature of cosmopolitanism and inherent to its appeal.”2 In a pithy summary of his argument, Janet Lyon in turn amplifies this relation: “The very concept [of cosmopolitanism] marks an uneven playing field, which, a priori, awards hermeneutic power to the formulator.”3 In the present context, this “hermeneutic power” serves as an index to categorical detachment by specifying the normative textualist mode of analysis common to both close reading and cosmopolitanism. By examining semiotic isolation against a field of motivated dissemination, this chapter will seem to have little to do with radiophonic production and reception. Yet its closing pages demonstrate how the mediated relations between hermeneutics and dissemination it considers provided the footing on which the distinction of literary transmission from radio broadcasting was to be staked.
In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova describes the networks of “cosmopolitan intermediaries” who conduct literary exchanges, an account especially useful in grasping the historically slippery relations of modern Irish writing within the field of literary modernism:
[The] power to evaluate and transmute a text into literature... involves two things that are inseparably linked: celebration and annexation. Together they form a perfect example of what might be called Parisianization, or universalization through denial of difference.... As a result, the history of literary celebration amounts to a long series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations that have their
