The Voice Comes Back

From the nettle, radio, a British listener plucked a strange flower, literature. Speculating on radio's influential future, Novelist Richard Hughes (High Wind in Jamaica) mused in the current Virginia Quarterly Review:

At least once before, a mechanical invention had made a revolution in literature. For before the printing press was invented, the writer reached the majority of his public not through their eyes but through their ears. Poetry was sung or recited; prose books, too, were recited or read aloud. . . . The effect of the printing press on literary style was ... a slow development, culminating only in our own century. Gradually . . . poetry acquired a subtler intricacy as the poet found he need no longer rely on ... immediate aural impact. . . . Prose likewise developed a greater elaboration of structure. . . .

Even then reading aloud died hard, barely a generation ago. . . . With a single oil lamp in the surrounding gloom, only one person could comfortably see to read at a time: in the general glare of electric light that custom too has practically disappeared. Thus the last echoes of heard literature . . . had only just died away when a second revolutionary invention, wireless broadcasting, set the pendulum swinging again in the opposite direction. The Voice had come back. . .

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed. . . . Radio plays have passed from the stage of a casual experiment to ... the most popular of all programmes. . . . But a new art? Bunk! . . It is useless for a radio dramatist today to attempt to write with any subtlety, or to draw characters not out of the stock-type catalogue; the play will be on the air and off again before the cast have a chance to discover what he is at. ... If radio put on a quarter of the number of new plays . . . radio drama might have a chance of growing out of short pants. . . .

I do not believe that there is any need ... for a separate radio literature [but] that the effect of radio on literature generally will be as profound, if almost as slow, as the effect of the printing press.

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