Human Voices

"...a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from..."

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices 

The BBC as it is? As it once was? As we'd like it be, or believed it was? It's that note of an 'amateur theatrical company' that nags at me, the sense of the BBC as a quality repertory theatre.

Of course, theatrical rep has gone the way of all things, or at least had to transform itself in order to survive, losing many of it's original qualities, the BBC now feels more like any other corporate institution.

And of course, like any institution, it always had it's faults. It's idealisation was always in the eyes of those of us who beheld it. Something which is only magnified when one is looking back or remembering, as is inevitable when one thinks of those magnificent, 'stagey', multiple camera dramas which are no longer produced (the style relegated to sitcoms and soaps), but which you could still just about grow up on in Britain when I was a child.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that what most struck me when I was reading this was that, like The Golden Child, this is a novel about an institution. It strikes me that there aren't very many novels like that, or that it's possibly even something which the novel finds very difficult to do, because of the need to focus on individuals in any type of story. Where institutions do appear in most narrative fictions, it's either part of the background, against which the individual character is defined and stands out. Or alternatively they are a part of a paranoid reading of the world which is crushing our individuality, whether successfully (e.g. 1984), or not (e.g. every story in which a brave hero fights against the system).

Any yet much of modern life is arguably defined by institutions, both good or bad, public or private, which serve to regulate life in one way or another. In both of these novels we have an ensemble of characters united only by the fact that they work for an institution (British Museum/BBC). Their relation to each other is exactly that of work colleagues, something most adults have some experience of, assuming they've ever had a job. Although individual characters come to dominate the narrative of both novels a various points, the narrative is never really *about* them.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and have missed all the many other works which do this, but I suspect not. There are certainly novels of individual characters' experience of working for institutions (I'm thinking here of something like Michael Bracewell's wonderfully melancholy Perfect Tense, but no doubt there are plenty other examples), but that's not exactly what I'm describing here. In that kind of narrative the individual is still right at the centre. Here it's the institution which occupies the narrative centre, with various individual experiences making up a composite portrait of what that institution is like, and what it means.

I imagine that comedy might be the best way to tell that kind of story. And in addition, that it can't be an easy type of story to write. But then Penelope Fitzgerald was one of our greatest writers.