Blindness, lack, deprivation, radio

Anyone interested in radio drama and other appearances of literature on radio must be at least a little resistant of the idea that radio is most noteworthy for what it withholds. This idea seems to come, on the one hand, from a retrospective comparison with younger media like television and film (in comparison with which, radio seems deprived of one half of the natural package of sound and sight) and, on the other, from the comparison with print, which has a visual bias (in McLuhan's view) that radio dispenses with. We also have the comparison to the stage, which results in the view of radio plays being performed before a "blind" audience.

People counter this idea in a few ways. One is to argue that the medium is not blind; listeners' imaginations are filled with profusions, abundances (even, perhaps, excesses) of visual information inspired by what they hear. Another is to contend that the lack of vision creates its own excess; without the distraction of the written word observed by the eye or without the vision of actors on the stage, the pure beauty and connotative force of words can shine through. A third response is that, yes, there is a certain deprivation inherent in radio drama and related genres; this, however, is a merit of the medium. Unlike the second response, this third line of argument does not necessarily see other positive features emerging from the lack (as in the second response's contention that the sound of words emerges from the lack of sight). Rather, the very lack itself is the focus, the feature that leads to radio's particular force.

It is this third argument that I am interested in now, and it is one that Porter Abbott made recently at the narrative conference in Austin. His argument, briefly, is that the best radio drama succeeds in frustrating listeners' desire to visualize scenes that are presented mimetically. The listener cannot see what is happening, tries to fill this gap imaginatively, but will ultimately be frustrated.

In a future post, very soon, I will attempt to connect this to my thoughts about Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett and their work for radio, which often seems to thrive on this lack. One thing I wonder is how much we can say that this lack is real (many would make the first rebuttal that I cite above--that actually radio is not blind), and how much we should look at an alternative: that the idea of radio's deprivations is what is most important when looking at authors who write for the medium. That is, one key to interpreting their radio writing may be to look at how their notion of what radio withholds functions in their approaches to the medium. In Beckett's writing for radio, the lack of sight is often thematically central. Also in Thomas's writings about Wales--the place is slippery, hard to pin down, hard to visualize. And I would argue that both writers see this lack in something of the way that I have represented the third response above: the lack is radio's greatest merit in allowing writers to address subject matters that are difficult to treat if met head on. Wales, in Thomas's writing, is a non-place that can suddenly be approached as a place in this non-visual medium where the place simultaneously recedes and shows forth in extreme vividness. Similarly Beckett with Foxrock or with the text in Embers or the body in Rough for Radio II.

The Halls of Congress

Just read another entry in the Barnouw book, Radio Drama in Action, which I haven't looked into for a while. This entry was a broadcast of a program called The Halls of Congress, which presented excerpts from congressional debates. Barnouw's introduction remarks that the producer of another prospective program with a similar theme had failed in his attempts to broadcast actual recordings of congressional debates. Members of congress had objected to this proposal on various grounds, including their stated objection to being taken out of context (if radio were to broadcast parts but not all of speeches) and to having their privacy violated (if microphones picked up things that they said in confidence while waiting their turn to speak on the floor). Due to such objections, The Halls of Congress used actors to reenact speeches taken from the Congressional Record. Seems a little old fashioned until you consider the present Supreme Court's refusal to allow sound or image recording.

I'm reminded of Ian Rodger's discussion (in Radio Drama) of the cooperation that blossomed between the BBC's drama and features divisions in the days before easily portable tape-recording equipment. When compiling documentary features based on interviews taken in the field, producers had to use a two-part process involving transcription of interviews, followed by in-studio reenactments by actors. Rodger makes it sound as if the limitation that initiated this process actually ended up providing a great benefit in many ways. The actors, writers, and producers all worked closely together, with the drama-minded folks helping the features staff inject dramatic excitement to the productions. And, of course, the features producers, who were experimenting with how to turn compilations of interviews into something with dramatic interest, were in many ways a step ahead of the drama department in figuring out how to use radio for dramatic purposes.

I bet that programs like The Halls of Congress and the British pre-tape-recording features were more exciting and entertaining than what we have today as a result of tape (and now digital) recording. I think of Nina Totenberg's fine recaps of Supreme Court arguments--she takes the accurately reported words of the justices but condenses and synthesizes their speeches into something that works as a coherent whole. It seems that these earlier dramatized documentaries probably worked similarly.

You can also see in The Halls of Congress an awareness of the need of helping the listener out when translating the transcript of the Congressional Record into a dramatized radio program. There are elements like "voices" that rise up when a break in the transcript (what would be ellipses in print) is introduced. And the narrator is careful to introduce each speaker when he (no women in these 1945 congressional debates) begins to speak, even if he has spoken several times before.

"Novelization" and "radio literature"?

In the introduction to The Dialogic Imagination, a collection of four essays about the novel by Bakhtin, editor Michael Holquist discusses the term "novelization":

"[N]ovel" is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system. Literary systems are comprised of canons, and 'novelization' is fundamentally anticanonical. It will not permit generic monologue. Always it will insist on the dialogue between what a given system will admit as literature and those texts that are otherwise excluded from such a definition of literature. What is more conventionally thought of as the novel is simply the most complex and distilled expression of this impulse. (xxxi)

As Holquist discusses, the novel is not a convention that can be characterized as we would characterize a sonnet, for example: 14 lines with a rhyme scheme expressing the deeply held (often romantic) feelings of an individual speaker. Unlike sonnet, epic, lyric, tragedy, etc., the novel is characterized rather by its incorporation of other literary modes (it can include the dramatic, the epic, and the lyric in a single work) and its refusal to submit to any boundaries. The novel, therefore, presents a "dialogue" among literary "systems."

Novelization, crucially, exposes the conventions that uphold inclusions (what is "admit[ted] as literature") and exclusions. The arbitrary nature of literary forms is thus revealed by the novel.

As I was reading this description of the novel, it felt to me somehow similar to my thoughts about electronic media and their interactions with literature (through adaptations among media and references within one artistic medium to another). Many accounts of these new media--and of the art works and art forms that they make possible--try to establish the legitimacy of their subject matter by claiming that a radio play, for example, or a film is unique and distinct from previous forms. With radio plays, people (like Everett Frost, in the article I'm now reading--"Mediated Drama, Dramatized Media") comment on what radio drama can do that no other art form can do (Frost references the subjective confusion expressed by Kopit's Wings). Attempts are made to form a "canon" of radio plays, which are demonstrably distinct from stage plays.

Like Frost and his ilk, I have been trying to come to some understanding about what is unique about radio plays, what can be said to be their character. I have been going about this, paradoxically, by thinking about the various other genres that influence and constitute the radio play--poetry, stage plays, prose fiction. Until today I have seen radio plays both as unique and as hybrids of all these constituent forms.

But it might be that what is most significant about radio plays is not a distinct character. Rather, the complete opposite may be true: perhaps radio plays (and many other art forms expressed through new(ish) media) are most significant as hybrids and collages of other art forms. They are not unique forms, then, but rather occasions for gathering the other various literary forms together. And perhaps radio plays function something like the Bakhtinian novel: they reflect on and reveal something about other literary genres.

I'm not sure yet how this relationship between radio drama and literature works. But to suggest that there is a significant relationship, akin to the process of "novelization," would fit with claims that I have started to formulate about the role of radio drama in the work of authors. Radio drama, I want to say, acts as a space of exploration for writers whose primary work is in different genres. Dylan Thomas, whose "serious" work is poetry, or Samuel Beckett, whose efforts are mainly directed to the stage and to his prose fiction, use radio drama as a venue for exploring the meaning of literature as such (or of various subdivisions of literature). And perhaps they use radio in this way not simply because it is something separate from their primary literary work but rather because radio drama actually is formally suited to such explorations.

_Five in the Morning_ by Rotozaza

I went this past Friday night to the Salvage Vanguard Theater to see Five in the Morning, a play by the London-based company Rotozaza. The performance was part of the fourth annual Fuse Box Festival in Austin.

Three actors (two women and a man) in bathing suits follow commands given by unseen actors (three different voices, distinct female voices for each female actor, and a male voice commanding the male actor). These commanding voices are amplified, and I suspect that they're pre-recorded. The play seems deliberately to make the audience wonder about this, however. At first the actors pause awkwardly and look confused after the commands are given, as if they have no previous knowledge of what commands they will receive. The impression the actors seem to be aiming for is of regular people thrust into this situation of being compelled to do something against their will (or at least something they are not prepared for). They are asked to do things like assume a static position that reveals "everything about you" (I'm [mis]quoting from memory); or the man and one of the women are asked to figure out how he can take her into his arms and hold her as if she is a ball. It could be very interesting if the show were to change these opening moments for each performance (I say opening moments because later it becomes clear that at least some sections of the show must be rehearsed). But the actors seem a little too studied in their hesitations and embarrassment on hearing certain commands. They are acting as if they are not acting.

A certain amount of awkwardness, then, is part of the act. And this makes it a challenge to evaluate the actors. At first I thought they were not very good--an amateur improv team, I found myself thinking, could do this stuff better than these folks. But one of the effects of the play is an uneasiness with what is going on. There is a clever sequence in which the actors are asked to form a human tower, which works out fine in the first instance when the man and the larger woman are on the bottom, supporting the small actress on top. But the voices then reposition the people so that the small woman is to be on the bottom of a vertical tower (so that the two other actors would need to be on top of her). The small actress's arms shake and become red from the effort of supporting the man (the taller actress never completely mounts the top of this unsteady tower). The actor's body seems to be under some genuine strain, and the audience must become involved at this moment, hoping the actress does not get hurt, even if if knows by this point that the cast has done these moves before.

Another impressive, somewhat earlier, moment is responsible for the audience's awareness of the pre-meditation of this all. The male and one of the female actors fight over a towel while the other female actor does increasingly complex movements involving touching her hand to her knee, chin, shoulder, etc. The commands become successively faster, with less and less time between command and compliance, until voice and corresponding action are nearly simultaneous. The timing is impressive, and the effect is particularly striking since the play has gradually led up to this convergence, earlier making you wonder if the actors know what is coming. When finally actor and voice match up, there is a slight surprise in finding out that the actor can now anticipate what is to be said.

It is an interesting play. The actors were not particularly talented, I thought (the tall woman was probably the best, especially in a scene where she starts walking toward the audience, her voice gradually taking over for the amplified voice that has been feeding her her lines, and challenges the audience by staring straight at them and questioning their role in all of this; the man was probably the weakest, not succeeding very well in a moment when he is supposed to crack under the pressure of following the voice's every command). But the concept was smart, and the various scenes--separated by darkness and a very loud sound of rushing water that sounds as if a microphone had been placed at the bottom of a waterfall--fit together nicely into a whole. The ideas of vulnerable actors, disembodied voices issuing commands, and disconnected scenes taking place in a vaguely distopian post-modern setting (the characters here are in "Aquaworld") are not new, but the young company pulled them off with enthusiastic flair.