Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

with Starkie marveling at the dictator’s unification of theory and practice: he discourses about Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel; he works studiously and tirelessly to overcome historical impediments; he loves architecture. Silently reintroduced, Starkie’s professional credentials enable him to legitimize Mussolini’s program of national development as more than mere policy—as, indeed, a philosophy. The bare-chested drainer of swampland becomes no manual laborer, but the thoughtful architect of national destiny. This scene of face-to-face immediacy transforms Starkie as well: no longer the alienated and distanced consumer of mediated “distortion,” no longer the passionless, desiccated intellectual, he becomes a communicant, at once receiving the dictator’s voice and imparting its “spontaneity” and “tempo” to readers. As a unified “personality,” he becomes an auratic listener.

      In the context of the face-to-face interview, this transformation occurs in the immediacy of Mussolini’s presence. What is therefore especially striking is how Starkie’s sense of the Duce’s commanding personality is narrated through an invocation of radio transmission and reception. Sitting across from Mussolini in the dark room, Starkie seems instead to face a receiver set, its dials glowing as the intervening space fills with the dictator’s voice: “To-day I was hypnotized by his large dark eyes which sparkled when his voice became animated. That voice had still a trace of metallic harshness and the words poured out in jerky, rapid sentences which jabbed at my sluggish mind.... His dark, vivacious eyes seemed to light up his face as he spoke. There was harmony in his face and movement, as though the thoughts in his mind set up an unending rhythm which sent numerous tiny electric currents of luminous strength through his frame.”⁸⁵ As a catalog of keywords (voice, harmony, rhythm) meant to correlate Mussolini’s technique to social organization, this extended figuration of the dictator as radio set is crucial to Starkie’s address to his readers, yet the implications of this writerly sleight of hand are deferred at this point in the text. In keeping with the “waveless” immediacy that characterizes his presentation of fascist Italy, Starkie gives a distinctly tactile and more recognizably aesthetic impression of Mussolini’s authority:

      He possesses the power of adapting himself to other men. He knows their moods, and being a virtuoso he knows how to play upon them, awaken them, and extract their inner thoughts. It is part of his greatness that he feels an intense interest in other men, no matter how humble they may be. His knowledge of life has not been derived from books but from living personalities, both those with whom he can sympathize and those against whom he can sharpen his tusks in battle. I then recalled the early story which he had written describing the wild violinist who raises his public up to an orgy of excitement—a significant story, when we remember that he himself is a violinist. As I looked at his broad white hands with well-padded fingers I said to myself that he had the touch of the violinist, the natural vibrato, which is a source of power when added to his supreme mastery of rhythms.⁸⁶

      Rather than manipulation, with its ideological connotations of lost autonomy and sinister depersonalization, Mussolini’s “hands-on” sympathy releases potential in “other men” that is otherwise latent or unrealized. Always live, this performance of mutual cooperation is made total in the “touch of the violinist,” the manual feel combining “natural vibrato” and rhythmic mastery that draws listeners to the virtuoso by first transforming them into listeners. Whereas fascist propaganda often portrayed Mussolini as a sculptor shaping the unformed masses into a unified people, Starkie offers in this passage an aural equivalent: at once expert amateur and impassioned maestro, Mussolini is the “wild violinist” playing to “his public.” With its natural, powerful resonance, this vibratory sympathy belongs to what Douglas Kahn has called “a vibrational scheme found throughout modernism, whereby communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations, the sympathetic identifications of different vessels, often bridging different perceptual registers and always attempting to elude cultural mediation.”⁸⁷ On a totalized scale, then, Starkie’s depiction of Mussolini as violinist, playing on his people’s sympathies, presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound.

      It is notably in the context of this virtuosity that The Waveless Plain first broaches the re-creation of Rome as an imperial center. Given the unpleasant colloquial associations of fiddling Roman emperors, it is perhaps wise that Starkie focuses his text at this point on the dictator’s radiophonic presence. Having been commissioned to write the book in the heat of the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie uses the East African war to explicate the “numerous tiny electric currents” of Mussolini’s personality, by facing the radio at this decisive moment. In his description of Mussolini’s announcement of the invasion, Starkie quotes three passages from the speech, one of which pointedly echoes his sense of the Duce’s virtuosity:

      Black Shirts of the Revolution! Men and women of all Italy! Italians scattered throughout the world and beyond the seas: listen!... For many months past the wheel of destiny, driven by our calm, determined purpose, has been moving towards the goal: in these hours its rhythm is more rapid and henceforth its course cannot be checked. Not only is an army marching toward its objective, but forty million Italians are marching in unison with this army. They are united because there is an attempt to commit against them the blackest of all injustices, to rob them of a place in the sun.⁸⁸

      This excerpt is the ideological center of the book, so readily do its rhetorical notes chime with Starkie’s entire presentation of his impressions of modern Italy: everything else in his travelogue functions as an explanatory gloss for these words. It is at this point in the text that the deferred consequences of figuring Mussolini as receiver set become manifest, for Starkie does not witness the dictator speaking from the balcony of the Piazza Venezia in Rome, but listens to him on the radio in Dublin. Where Ireland had once been beyond the “wizard’s magic circle” in the textual realm of bad translations and intervening political “excrescences,” the expansion of medium wave service and the advent of shortwave broadcasting have now broadened the “magic circle,” allowing for the long-distance reception of the sound of the dictator’s voice. Starkie’s account of listening to the broadcast stresses this new possibility: “Sometimes the sound faded and sometimes it blared on my ear, mingled with atmospherics and the sound of cheering. Then I heard the inexorable voice continue.”⁸⁹ As a description of dynamics, pacing, and tempo, Starkie’s report demonstrates the unimpeded power of rhythmic mastery, the ability to organize affective energy through the domination of sonic content. The immediacy of Mussolini’s “natural vibrato,” his sympathetic handling of latent “moods,” would not seem applicable to long-distance reception; yet this “source of power” is silently incorporated into Starkie’s text by transferring this mystified manual dexterity to the auratic listener. By this writerly sleight of hand, Starkie relocates Mussolini’s tactile virtuosity to the front of the receiver set, where the dial’s interface becomes the counterpart to face-to-face exchange.⁹⁰ Replacing the “touch of the violinist” with the touch of the dialer, Starkie tunes in the broadcast of the dictator’s voice, but receives it as though listening to a point-to-point transmission. In contrast to broadcasting’s dispersion, this singularized process of transmission and reception, occurring simultaneously millions of times over, is the realization of harmony. As a combination of aural, visual, and tactile practices, this synesthetic event locates Starkie in ideological space less by his choice of station than in mystifying the regulated world of allocated frequencies as the resonating harmony of sympathetic vibrations. While Marshall McLuhan would later infamously characterize radio as a regressive “tribal drum” possessing the “power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber,”⁹¹ Starkie presents the medium as a fascist violin, the vast resonator that brings together passion and specialization, wildness and expertise. In doing so, he misrecognizes intellectual liberty for political autonomy, a relationship made concrete in the emblem that appears on the front cover, spine, and title page of The Waveless Plain: a violin wreathed in laurels. To ask whether these are the laurels of learning, poetry, or martial victory is to misunderstand harmony.

      In the aftermath of the Second World War, which he spent in Madrid as the British Council representative to Spain, Starkie recanted his support for Mussolini, stating that a fear of communism had caused his admiration for the dictator. Writing in the second volume of an autobiography left unfinished