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.