7 - Communications, Modernity and Power

Summary

He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks again.

‘Grand, isn't it? That's the Power – our unknown Power – kicking and fighting to be loose,’ said young Mr. Cashell. ‘There she goes – kick, kick, kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work a sending-machine – waves going into space, you know.’

(‘Wireless’, TD, 227)

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed

(Marinetti, 1909)

KIPLING AND MACHINERY

The excitement of the young radio expert exchanging Morse messages with his opposite number in Poole along the South Coast, the awe at the unknown, immensely powerful force of electricity giving out ‘streams of sparks’ and ‘kicking and fighting to be loose’, the sense of uncharted possibilities – ‘there's nothing we shan't be able to do in ten years’ (TD, 226), all combine to make Kipling's short story ‘Wireless’, one of the earliest literary responses to the new ‘Marconi experiments’ in radio, a proto-modernist text. Kipling was among the first English writers to respond creatively to the revolutionary technologies of the early-twentieth century – radio, cinema, motor cars and air travel. His enthusiasm for communications technology is almost comparable to that of the Futurist Marinetti, whose manifesto announcing a modernist aesthetic of mechanical speed and brilliance that would celebrate ‘the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents … great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds’ could have applied to Kipling's own fables of railway trains and air travel.

Yet ‘Wireless’ is as much a Victorian ghost story as a modernist fable of technology: its central drama is not young Mr Cashell's conquest of space by radio, but the drugged consumptive chemist's assistant John Shaynor unconsciously speaking with the voice of a Keats struggling to write the ‘Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.