Ieuan franklin
Between Two Worlds: Five Generations
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4.3 Between Two Worlds: Five GenerationsAs producers such as W.R. Rodgers and David Thomson tended to instinctively equate orality with authenticity in their pursuit of oral history and traditional music, they were sensitive to the perceived social impact of the mass medium of radio broadcasting on the oral or residually oral local cultures that they sought to document. They were likewise cognizant of the need to create oral evidence in geographical localities or fields of study where documentary records as such may not have existed at all. On the other hand, despite or because of these sensitivities, it was difficult to avoid the sentimental, paternal or segregationist tendencies of positioning (oral) interviewees as constituents of traditional or pre-literate communities to be made comprehensible to the (literate) radio audiences largely through editorializing, such as expository narration. In this context, we can cite Scannell’s comments about the programme ‘Opping ‘Oliday (broadcast on 15th September 1934 on London Regional), a sound portrait (see Chapter 2.1) of East Enders harvesting the hops in the Kent fields: The programme is about them [the hop pickers] but not for them. They have been taken up as an interesting topic and made to reappear for another audience, another class, and in another context (Scannell 1985: 13). BBC talks and features often tended to exclude the subject(s) of programming in their mode of address, relying instead upon a shared “set of social and cultural dispositions” (Scannell, ibid, p. 13) between broadcaster and audience. Bare Stones of Aran is an example of a programme which obviates this tendency to the extent that it allows the listener a sense of immersion in the life-world of the subject(s). It should also be remembered in this context that BBC producers were to some extent battling vestigial colonial attitudes which interpreted oral cultures as “primitive and childish – charming, perhaps, but certainly incapable of any discriminating engagement with reality” (Bourke 1999: 24). Of course, explication has always been intrinsic to the public medium of radio, which recontextualizes oral speech as it diffuses it, often with pedagogical intent. However, radio features about residually oral cultures by producers such as W. R. Rodgers or Sam Hanna Bell were successful in giving ‘outside’ audiences “a fuller sensory experience of expressive culture in situ” (Spitzer 1992: 87), due in large part to the way in which they approached fieldwork. Such radio producers seemed to regard fieldwork “as an exercise in equality” (Hardy III and Portelli 1999), in the same manner as the contemporary oral historian Allesandro Portelli. The fieldwork process often uncovered local folk songs or traditional music that could then be included as ‘organic’ additions to programmes, and also directly inspired scripted narration, thus providing an understanding of the environment and communicative context in which the actuality was collected. Through reference to and inclusion of the vocabularies and taxonomies of the life-world ‘under study’, local cultures were portrayed through a process of reproduction, and their testimony (in the form of actuality) was given equal weight to (‘high culture’) quotations from poetry and the accounts of folklorists, antiquarians and etymologists (which sometimes featured within the narration). In this way, work such as Rodgers’, Thomson’s and Bell’s sought to correspond both to the emergent interpretations of the documentarian and to the modes of verbal expression that characterised the local culture. This was crucial because, as Bourdieu has observed, intellectuals usually apprehend “the working class condition through schemes of perception and appreciation which are not those that the members of the working class themselves use to apprehend it” (quoted in Charlesworth 2000: 203). As public folklorist and radio producer Nicholas R. Spitzer has observed, The question to ask about a documentary art form is how effectively is the reconstruction of the material matched to the community aesthetics represented – and in the eyes of what audiences? (Spitzer 1992: 86) The listener should therefore be attentive to discord between the ‘community aesthetics’ portrayed through actuality and the intellectual or rhetorical strategies of the programme-maker. A two-part programme broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1967-8 entitled Five Generations is an interesting example of this discord. Produced by the veteran features producer Douglas Cleverdon and scripted and narrated by the journalist and playwright Jeremy Seabrook, it aimed to document the changes wrought on rural Northampton villagers by urbanisation and industrialisation through a mixture of actuality and scripted commentary.129 Although these programmes in some respects provide a useful counter to the romanticism of ‘golden age’ BBC features such as Bare Stones of Aran, they are also characterised by an alarmingly tendentious treatment of oral ‘evidence’. Seabrook asserts through his narration that the villagers interviewed in the programme have been marked by the ‘trauma’ incurred in the transition from a rural to an industrialized environment, and that the ‘archaic’ aspects of their spoken language represent evidence of their inability to adapt. Seabrook’s thesis is very similar to that put forward many decades earlier by George Bourne, the Edwardian chronicler of country life - that with the fragmentation of the tradition life of the village, the villagers have been supplied neither with “the language or with the mental habits necessary for living successfully under the new conditions” (quoted in Rose 2001: 28).130 Seabrook echoes the Edwardian autodidacts who “showed impatience with the many stale saws and clichés that peppered working-class talk…worn to vacuity through over-use” (Roberts, quoted in Rose 2001: 26). After some examples of folk cures and proverbs (some have been recorded and some are recited by the narrator), he castigates the idiomatic speech of his informants in the following terms: Even [their] cadences and inflections have a fixed and frozen quality. Their most casual utterances have become ceremonial and liturgical with constant repetition…saws and maxims as hard and unyielding as mineral…These unvarying verbal reactions in given situations create a world closed to new expression and word patterns and hence closed to new ideas (Seabrook, prod. Cleverdon 1967). Seabrook’s narration here and elsewhere betrays the influence of the linguistic theorist Basil Bernstein, who attempted to demonstrate how the language people use in everyday conversation both reflects and shapes the assumptions and characteristics of a socio-economic grouping.131 The Five Generations programmes are clearly intended to apply Bernstein’s theories of restricted and elaborated codes to samples of tape-recorded speech, perhaps to compensate for the fact that most of Bernstein’s sociological assertions (which subsequently were convincingly discredited in Postman 1970; and Rosen 1974) were rarely based on observation of life as it is lived, much less on participation in it (see Rosen 1974). Some criticisms that can be made of the programmes are also criticisms that were made of Bernstein’s theories – chiefly that they are founded upon a distorted, stereotyped and monolithic concept of the (unskilled) working class and that they fail to address key social and political ramifications of the class system. To return to the theoretical themes of Chapter 1, it can be noted, however, that in some discussions of orality and literacy the purely conceptual elements of Bernstein’s theories about restricted and elaborated codes have re-emerged in the guise of the useful concepts of context-free and context-dependent speech – namely that, in written texts “the meaning is in the text”, whereas with spoken utterances the “meaning is in the context” (Olson 1977a).132 As Tannen has observed, In oral tradition it is not assumed that the expressions contain meaning in themselves, in a way that can be analyzed out. Rather words are a convenient tool to signal already shared social meaning (quoted in Mason 1998: 311). This quote is useful to bear in mind when assessing the failure of the Five Generations programmes to achieve the goal of deriving from the ‘situated vocabularies’ of the recorded interviewees information about the way in which they organize their perceptions of the world. As the programmes provide little sense of the communicative context (shared social meaning) in and to which many of the quoted proverbial phrases and expressions occurred and alluded we are asked to ‘take it on trust’ that they are stultified and useless forms of language. Ironically, these colloquialisms are assessed under the terms of a theory that positions them as utterly context-dependent, yet the programme itself provides very little evidence of the context surrounding them. According to Seabrook’s narration, the vernacular speech of the elderly population is petrified – its context long gone - like pressed wild flowers in a Bible, but the actuality extracts as utilized in the programmes are themselves reifications, frozen within a text (narration) that stifles their ability to communicate the richness and diversity or poverty and monotony of lived experience. Through the perpetuation of the notion of working-class life as surrounded by a language barrier, the programme’s narration ultimately builds this barrier between the listener and the actuality speakers. As a radio broadcast is, in some ways, closer to a spoken utterance than a written or printed text, careful consideration when providing context for actuality is vital. Olson elsewhere asserts that, as oral language is flexible and ‘an all-purpose instrument’, the meanings of sentences conveyed orally must be “negotiated in terms of the social relations, the context, and the prior world knowledge of the participants” (Olson 1977b: 10). Extracts of oral speech may in this sense benefit from contextualization with what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973/2001) termed “thick description”; a thick description of behaviour being one that explains not just the behaviour but also its context, such that the behaviour becomes meaningful to an outsider. This would seem to have been successfully achieved, for example, through the ‘sharing’ of the fieldwork experiences in Bare Stones of Aran. Seabrook clearly attempts to provide thick description as context for the actuality within these two programmes, but his attempts ultimately fail, for several reasons. Firstly, Seabrook, who was brought up in the very same working-class Northamptonshire environment (see Seabrook 2005), is too close to his topic, and has too much ‘emotional investment’ in it to remain impartial. As Thompson has noted about Seabrook’s “depressing” literary studies of the prejudice and narrowness of the urban working classes of Northampton, The Unprivileged and City Close-Up; they are “too much shaped by bitter comment and tendentious interviewing by the author” (Thompson 1988: 90). It is recognized in the field of ethnography that in studying settings that are familiar, it is more difficult for the researcher to suspend one’s preconceptions, whether they derive from social science or from everyday knowledge (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 92). For example, Seabrook describes several interviewees in the following terms: Their whole married lives have been spent on either sides of a barred and black-leaded grate – she making rag-rugs from patches of discarded garments and he biting into onions as if they were apples, and reliving alone the horror of Passchendaele and the Western Front (Seabrook, quoted in Cleverdon 1967). Seabrook’s thick description is coloured by overtones of pity, patronage or derision, and the narration tends to veer haphazardly from an insider’s perspective on the community to a detached cod-anthropological perspective that dehumanizes the interviewees. Food is a recurring theme in their conversations – perhaps the break with familiar ways of life was so great that bodily functions provided them with their only consoling sense of continuity… (Seabrook, prod. Cleverdon, ibid.). They were especially at a loss to express emotion. Any expression of tenderness was alien to them… (Seabrook, prod. Cleverdon 1968). These excerpts highlight the tendency of the narration to conflate the interviewees with the working class people Seabrook remembers from childhood (and hence past and present). Perhaps they are one and the same, but even if this were the case this would still represent a serious breach of the trust and neutrality that should be integral to the oral history process. The programmes demonstrate the worst excesses of editorial control, with Seabrook’s authorial voice crowding out the reminiscences of his interviewees with overbearing sociological flights of fancy, which are in fact not grounded in or systematically related to the actuality.133 As we have seen from the example of Denis Mitchell’s work in Chapter 2, conveying the inner lives and thoughts of a community or constituency through actuality is most successful when there is no underlying agenda during the interviewing process, when there is a minimum of intervention in this process and a minimum of narration in the finished programme to intercede between the listener and the actuality speakers. Unfortunately, the strategy of the Five Generations programme is, conversely, to provoke the interviewees into offering up the ‘evidence’ required, to analyse and objectify the resulting actuality, and to undermine the listener’s interest in or sympathy with the interviewees.134 Download 1.05 Mb. 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