“The Megaphone’s Bellowing and Bodiless Profanity”: If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and the Culture of Cacophony

Abstract

“The Megaphone’s Bellowing and Bodiless Profanity”: If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and the Culture of Cacophony We have radio in the place of God’s voice. —William Faulkner, IfI Forget Thee, Jerusalem (115) I n the riot of metropolitan mass culture and electrical communication that characterizes the early media age (roughly 1910 to 1939) we also find a quickly corresponding articulation ofthe dislocation and disorientation that these new modes of expression had unleashed. To the artists and writers of this period, there was too often a sense of living in the midst of an escalating visual and aural cacophony, a noise that they were quick to point out was engen­ dering a destabilizing effect in both life and art. A warning as to the power and permanence of these effects permeates the poet Vachel Lindsays second treatise on film, The Progress and Poetry ofthe Movies (1925). Here Lindsays recognition of an increasingly nonverbal, visually oriented culture—what he terms the “hi­ eroglyphic mood” (182)—is prescient in its foreboding. Already, this is a world in which “the magazine stand becomes more and more ofa riot ofhieroglyphics, rather than a headquarters ofprinted matter in the old sense, good or bad.” This is a shift not without its risks: as Lindsay warns, “ifwe do not have some kind of continence and direction in this matter of speeded-up hieroglyphics, the brain of Man becomes in this modern hour a circus gone wrong, a Ringling circus, a gigantic spectacle” (183). Lindsay was scarcely alone in his worry as to the effect of the new media forms. The great modernist poets were more proudly definite as to their detri­ mental effects, evident in T. S. Eliots often cited remark in 1922 that “With the decay of the musichall, with the encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie” (qtd. in Rhode 32). W. B. Yeats was characteristically more suc­ cinct but no less dismissive, proclaiming in 1926, “the newspaper is the roar ofthe machine” (313). However, it was not simply a visual onslaught that was appearing as an encroachment upon higher sensibilities but one that was, as the 1930s pro­ gressed, also increasingly aural as well, the escalating din ofradio throughout that decade such that by early 1940 Ezra Pound—previously steadfast in his avoidance ot all modern media—felt compelled to respond: 75 76 Phil Smith If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and the Culture ofCacophony Blasted friends left a goddam radio here yester. Gift. God damn destructive and disper­ sive devil of an invention. But got to be faced. Drammer has got to face it, not only face cinema. Anybody who can survive may strengthen inner life, but a mass of apes and worms will be still further rejuiced to passivity, (qtd. in Heymann 92) So by the time of IfI Forget Thee, Jerusalems publication in 1939 the idea of the world becoming simply too noisy is a contemporaneous rubric, one found in Yeats’s invocation in the same year as to the necessity of solitude and quiet to the contemplative state that artistic activity requires, as he longingly describes Mi­ chelangelo in the act of painting the Sistine Chapel: “Like a long-leggedfly upon the stream I His mind moves upon silence" (“Long-legged Fly” lines 29-30). But the modern cityscape offered no such artists refuge and more recent criticism has confirmed this contemporaneous sense ofbombardment and dislo­ cation. Referencing Georg Simmel’s iconic 1904 essay, “The Metropolis and Men­ tal Life,” Ben Singer further emphasizes the congruence between the metropolis and the modernism ofthe early twentieth century: Modernity implied a phenomenal world—a specifically urban one—that was markedly quicker, more chaotic, fragmented, and disorienting than in previous phases ofhuman culture. Amid the unprecedented turbulence of the big city’s traffic, noise, billboards, street signs, jostling crowds, window displays, and advertisements, the individual faced a new intensity of sensory stimulation. (72-73) The problem ofcourse for artists and writers was not only how to find some quiet in which to work, but also how best to represent or replicate the “new intensity of...