Speech as a river of electricity

The analogy is Emerson’s, from his essay on poets. I was re-reading it around the time the Fortnightly Review asked me to write something about The King’s Speech, and Emerson’s essay has a passage that is remarkably suited to one of the film’s principal themes: the occasional difficulty of fluid expression. This coincidence led me down several trains of thought that emerged as the article from which I now quote:

The familiarity of speech means we easily overlook how astonishing even its basic mechanics are. Breath swells from our lungs, moving up through the trachea to be shaped by vocal cords, tongue, teeth, jaws and lips and emerge from our mouths as a series of sonic pulses that spread as waves into the world around us. Ears are shaped to receive these vibrations, turn them into electrical signals and transmit them to the brain, where these “rivers of electricity” are unpacked at high speed as sounds, words, and (ideally) sense in other people’s minds.

It is an intricate system that blends physics and biology in a kind of spontaneous everyday alchemy. So much can go wrong, the wonder is that it so often doesn’t. But when we falter, and falter repeatedly, our vulnerable sense of ourselves is undermined. Language is an intimate part of our identity, and for most people it begins with speech and stays centred there. Even when we read, we speak to ourselves. To speak publicly, we must play a role: it is a performance; to do it well, we must be comfortable in the role. To speak like a king, Albert had to feel like one – and he didn’t, at least not at first.

The King’s Speech has been showered with awards, including a Best Picture Oscar, and has received much critical and public acclaim. Not unanimously, of course: its politics and historical authenticity have been soundly challenged. But it’s an enjoyable, effective, and interesting film.

My short essay is called “Radio signals and royal symbols: Language and The King’s Speech”. It’s not a review: more a series of notes on speech, sound, symbols, and the cultural significance of radio at the time George VI’s voice was required to make a declaration of war.

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A note on the Fortnightly Review: first published in 1865, its founder, Anthony Trollope, wanted it to be “impartial and absolutely honest, thoroughly eclectic, opening its columns to all opinions, without any pretensions to editorial consistency or harmony”. It was an editorial experiment; so too is the new series, which is edited by Anthony O’Hear and Denis Boyles.