Allan Hepburn

Acoustic modernism: BBC Radio and The Little Girls

Elizabeth Bowen, at the invitation of BBC Radio producers, broadcast talks, features, and short dramatic pieces from the 1940s through the 1960s. Her broadcasting caused her to rethink the relation of sound to information and meaning. Radio thus had a defining influence on her writing of fiction, especially The Little Girls, which is implicated in a complex sound world. Like other novels published at mid-century, this novel emphasizes the acoustic aspects of modernism, particularly the possibilities of overlapping, repetitive, and misheard sounds. Bowen pays particular attention to dialogue and verbal style, where noise confronts language and sound confronts meaning.

The State of the Art: Novelists Thinking the Novel

According to received wisdom, the novel is an art form without rules. Notwithstanding this wisdom, novelists regularly discuss the inner workings of the novel in essays, prefaces, manifestos, interviews, reviews, questionnaires, cahiers, and treatises. Taken together, these diverse statements constitute a form of thinking about the novel. Novels may function without rules, which is to say that they express freedom, yet novels are guided by certain principles of operation that curb freedom. In general terms, novelistic thinking encompasses the proprieties, shape, and substance of the novel. Moreover, novelists transmit their thinking about the novel from generation to generation, but, as in Borges’s garden of forking paths, no right way of understanding novels predominates. Novelistic thinking may shift its exact focus over time, but its object remains the same: the definition of the novel. Novelists do not think about the novel the same way that critics do. When novelists talk about the novel, their utterances are fugitive or pointed. Henry James makes his novelistic intentions quite clear in the prefaces that he wrote to the New York Edition of his works. By contrast, Flaubert merely drops hints about his novelistic aims in letters; his scattered comments do not in themselves constitute a systematic theory of the novel. Whether intentional or casual, such statements contribute to the thinking of the novel. This thinking stands apart from critical theories of the novel, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia or Tzvetan Todorov’s structuralist analysis of morphology in the folk tale. Nor do novelists’ comments add up to a poetics in any exact sense of that term. A poetics, such as Wayne Booth offers in The Rhetoric of Fiction, surveys a corpus systematically and describes its formal mechanisms. By contrast, novelists offer criticism of their own work or the work of other writers. They adjudicate and explain, but they do not advance a coherent set of principles in the manner that theorists do. The business of the novelist is not a universal and incontrovertible theory. Whereas theorists often understand novels transhistorically, novelists’ thinking about the novel develops in tandem with the writing of novels over time. This thinking – supple and ongoing to accommodate changes in novelistic praxis – constitutes its own corpus. Neither one thing nor another, the novel is a way of thinking.