Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

Europe, this stage represents the potential “to-morrow” to Ethiopia’s “to-day.” De Valera had already deliberately echoed Haile Selassie in his tabulation of League members, but this invocation of “to-day” and “to-morrow” was for all intents a direct quotation of the emperor, who had icily muttered in front of the Assembly, “It is us today; it will be you tomorrow.”⁵⁵ With the League’s ultimate failure to confront or counter Italian aggression, and the recognition by most member states of Ethiopia as an Italian colony, the Irish Free State lost what remained of its faith in collective security. It instead began to formulate the policy of neutrality that would soon be enshrined in the 1937 Constitution and strictly practiced during the Second World War.⁵⁶ After the shattering of trust in the League’s ability to safeguard its independence, the only choice left to the Irish Free State was that which was no longer available to Ethiopia: self-preservation.

      Auratic Listener and Fascist Violin

      In his autobiographical travelogue The Waveless Plain, Walter Starkie quotes a remark made to him by an unnamed “Italian friend” in Ethiopia: “Cavour made Italy; Mussolini made the Italians; sanctions united Italy.” Explaining that his “visit to Abyssinia had been made, not so much for the purpose of visiting that strange, Oriental country, as for studying the task achieved by 14 years of Fascist Rome,” Starkie validates his anonymous interlocutor’s epochal sense of the conquest as the final stage in Italian national destiny initiated with the Risorgimento and completed by the fascist revolution.⁵⁷ Rather than break Italian will, League sanctions had occasioned the overcoming of the last impediment to national renewal. To combat sanctions, women donated their wedding rings to the regime and turned to largely vegetarian “Sanctions cooking,” men put aside regional loyalties to enlist in the armed forces, scientists made clothing and flags from a milk-based wool substitute called Lanital: these actions give Starkie “a curious feeling of the continuity of history” and embody a modern vision of “the ancient Rome of the Republic.”⁵⁸ While presented as his firsthand impressions, these spectacles of struggle and renewal are essentially copped, like his unnamed friend’s slogan, straight from the fascist regime’s propaganda campaigns. By never mentioning, for example, that the mass exchange of gold wedding rings for steel was the centerpiece of the Giornata della Fede (Day of Faith) organized on December 18, 1935, or that references to local and regional attachment (including dialect) were banned from the fascist mass media, Starkie can stage these events as both spontaneous and preordained, as the unplanned expressions of collective unanimity.⁵⁹ In presenting Musso­lini’s Italy as the paradigm of self-determined national development, The Waveless Plain is much more than a crass narrativization of administrative dictates, reading instead as a cultural anthropology of fascist charisma. This is most evident in Starkie’s authorial position, particularly when he faces the radio.

      Starkie was born into a distinguished Catholic Anglo-Irish family in County Dublin in 1894, and became a professor in Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1926; one of the students with whom he worked was Samuel Beckett.⁶⁰ Shortly after this appointment, he was made a member of the Abbey Theatre’s board of directors, a position he would hold until 1942. These professional activities were balanced by a lifelong love of music, and Starkie, a trained violinist, maintained an abiding interest in the social role of traditional music in Ireland and on the continent. With its mix of credentialization and passion, professional rationalization and romantic abandonment, Starkie’s scholastic devotion to languages and music formed a foundational productive tension throughout his life. At one level, Starkie was a throwback to the Anglo-Irish antiquarians of the previous century, a man of leisure invested in the cultural preservation of traditional or premodern forms; at another, he was an international cosmopolitan, able to move with ease between Ireland, Britain, the United States, and the continent. As a member of Dublin’s cultural administration, Starkie gravitated toward its dominant, and decidedly right-wing, poles, combining a belief in cultural nationalism with a desire for the importation of continental strands of political authoritarianism. In 1927, he became a founding member of the Centre International d’Études sur le Fascisme, based in Lausanne, Switzerland; and the following year wrote an essay for its inaugural Survey of Fascism on the appropriateness of corporatist social policy for Ireland.⁶¹ While not exactly describing the emergence of the fascist new man, Starkie claimed that corporatist fraternal associations would eliminate the remaining vestiges of colonial servility and free individuals to enter into closer harmony with the national spirit. Yet this process could not be an insular or purely “national” endeavor. Having married an Italian woman, Starkie returned to Italy every summer to visit her family outside Genoa. As described in The Waveless Plain, it is his violin that facilitates mutual understanding between him and Italians, the tunes he plays never failing to draw around him an enthusiastic crowd of passionate listeners. As much as he is prone to attribute this relationship to an innate Italian or Mediterranean sensibility, it is important to recognize these scenes as indicative of the book’s explanation of Mussolini’s Italy. In bringing together a group of listeners who are bound by their recognition of his expert playing, Starkie presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound.

      Although it is not yet possible to specify its radiophonic features, the relationship of sound and social organization is central to The Waveless Plain. During the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie published a handful of admiring articles about Mussolini’s Italy, which represented the dictatorship as an attractive model of modern national renewal for the Irish Free State. In the early phase of the crisis, he argued that League sanctions might induce the regime’s fall, thus removing the strongest barrier to a communist Italy; in its later phase, he contended that international pressure on Italy’s colonial expansion would only drive the nation toward alliance with Hitler.⁶² Published in the Fine Gael–aligned Irish Independent, these articles reflect the contradictory elements at work in Irish right-of-center politics, from pro–British Ascendancy conservatives to extreme Catholic chauvinists to right-revolutionary fellow travelers, all united only in their opposition to de Valera. Flipping the terms of the government’s stance, Starkie characterizes the Covenant as an apparatus “based not on right or justice, but on force,” an instrument designed to serve the status quo by denying national progress.⁶³ While these articles made little headway with Irish readers, the Italian government nevertheless commissioned Starkie to write a book justifying its case.⁶⁴ By the time The Waveless Plain appeared in 1938, it was 504 pages long and hardly delivered the kind of propaganda coup initially envisioned by the Italians, who by this time were no longer interested in vindicating decisions made years earlier. Even with the bungled circumstances of its publication, Starkie’s idiosyncratic travelogue is an important index to the appeal of fascism. In its closing pages, he stares at the Palazzo del Littorio (Palace of the Lictors), the newly built headquarters of the Fascist Party in Rome, finding it “a fitting symbol of the modern idea which must harmonize with its ancient surroundings.”⁶⁵ Throughout the book, it is the realization of this “harmony,” as an orchestration of unity and difference, which commands his attention.

      In order to convey the various notes comp0sing this “harmony,” Starkie outwardly makes little of his professional credentials in the travelogue, instead presenting himself as a worldly amateur. This posture is central to the book’s authorial address, for it establishes a rhetorical position from which to offer observations of Italian society and the international rivalries underpinning the text’s composition.⁶⁶ Although Starkie is not shy about mentioning official negotiations and diplomatic intrigue, these matters are often refracted through images of himself as a distanced and passive consumer of media reports, gotten from either newspapers or radio broadcasts. In this, he demonstrates his removal, even his alienation, from events as they are happening, a condition of simultaneous dispersion and massification created by liberal democratic institutions. His shorthand for this condition is “public opinion.” In contrast to this combination of atomization and aggregation, he narrates international differences through “localized,” face-to-face scenes of conversation, in the participatory exchanges to which his amateur status grants him access. This authorial pose takes two related forms, depending on his interlocutors. When moving within British circles, Starkie plays the role of patient intermediary, explaining to those too caught up in their own prejudices the nuances of Italian society and fascist policy.