Future
Communications
Consider, with
reference to both the portrayal of communications and the media, and the way
writers/directors use their own medium.
Cable video, and
similar techniques involving the interaction of television, telephone and home computer
may be with us by the 1990s. Shopping could be done from the home, ordered by
this system and delivered to the door, and one would be able to talk to famous
personalities on television as if they were in the room. Is this desirable?
Increased technology of communication and the media is surely broadening and
liberating, but, ironically, it can also be cocooning and manipulative. Science
fiction writers tend to deal with the latter aspect, and so ‘fiction’ becomes a
complex term to use: where the writers are using fiction to communicate
something about fiction as communication, as well as the notions of fiction and
reality in other forms of communication, such as the media. If the term
‘fiction’ in writing is obfuscating as much as it is defining, then it must be
borne in mind that the failure to communicate is very much part of the issue.
So, pending nuclear
holocaust, the four-wall TV of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 could be with us
by the year 2000. Fahrenheit 451 is set in the more distant future, about 2500,
but technologically, though not philosophically, it is almost here.
‘Well, this is a play
comes on the wall-to-wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this
morning. I sent in some box-tops.’
The script for the
play is performed with one part missing which is to be performed by Mildred
Montag in the home. The object, quite laudably, is to have fun rather than
create great drama. The questions asked of the Helen role in the play are
banal: ‘he says, “Do you agree to that, Helen?” and I say, “I sure do!” Isn’t
that fun, Guy?’
The play is not really
about anything, it exists as participative entertainment, not very stimulating
but on the face of it harmless.
‘What’s the play
about?’
‘I just told you.
There are these people named Bob and Ruth and Helen.’
The lack of content in
itself is not as sinister as the television’s ability to dominate the lives of
‘Mildred Montag’s. She has the sole consuming ambition in life of obtaining a
fourth wall, she is an addict, she lives for the escapism offered by the TV.
‘If we had a fourth
wall, why it’d be just like this room wasn’t ours at all, but all kinds of
exotic people’s rooms.’
The TV dominates
conversation and social groupings, people do not want to talk, if they do, it
is not about the imminent war but about TV.
‘That reminds me’,
said Mildred. ‘Did you see that Clara Dove fir-minute romance last night in
your wall? Well, it was all about this woman who…’
Also the banality of
the TV scripts has an effect on language making conversation as banal and
repetitive.
‘I’m not worried’,
said Mrs Phelps. ‘I’ll let Pete do all the worrying.’ She giggled. ‘I’ll let
old Pete do all the worrying. Not me. I’m not worried.’
But the TV fails to
placate the individuals completely; suicide and murder are quite common. The
portrayal of violence as entertainment leads to its acceptance as a hobby.
Shooting and running people over become commonplace. One would not have thought
the powers that be would allow TV to produce anti-social behaviour. TV is not
portrayed in the book, therefore, as an instrument of propaganda, at least not
until the end with the televised chase of Montag. School children attend TV
class and work training is done by film but Bradbury does not fully exploit the
politically manipulative capabilities of television.
In this scenario books
have been reduced in significance as radio and television developed. They are
mass media reaching a greater number of people than ever before as population
increases exponentially. The literary elite had to be discarded and the mass
catered for by ‘a sort of pudding paste norm’. Not only films, radio programmes
and magazines but also any remaining books have to be geared towards ‘’the gag,
the snap ending’.
‘Classics cut to fit
fifteen minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two minute book column,
winding up at last as a ten or twelve line dictionary résumé.’
Eventually the
cultural input/output, where self-expression is a less operative term, becomes
what Beatty describes as ‘Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom!’ This
progression has been brought about by popular consent, not by an oppressive
government. Controversy and obscurity have been avoided in order to gain the
largest possible market.
‘There was no dictum,
no declaration, no censorship to start with. No! Technology, mass exploitation,
and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.’
When Beatty refers to
minority pressure this is not the pressure to cater for the interests of
cultural minorities, it is the avoidance of offending particular minority
sections of society by controversial or unpleasant portrayals of real people in
their real social context. Instead a bland, anonymous, fantasy type is used to
represent all human beings, and becomes their image of themselves. The argument
against books, as one might expect, is weak and vague, although Beatty, like
Mustapha Mond in Brave New World, is armed to the hilt with more quotations
than a scholar.
‘Beatty rubbed his
chin. A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they
were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555.’
But whereas Mustapha
Mond’s knowledge is counteracted by John, Montag is a singularly weak and
confused individual. Perhaps it is this that makes him easier to identify with as
a character than the forceful, increasingly insane, Savage. Montag does not
quote Shakespeare at every turn, that is left to Beatty.
‘Why don’t you belch
Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob? “There s no terror, Cassius, in your
threats, for I am arm’d so strong in honesty that they pass by me as an idle
wind, which I respect not!”’
Beatty provides
educated disdain but little argument, whilst the ‘videots’ merely break down
and cry at the mere mention of poetry.
‘I’ve always said,
poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and
sickness.’
Unfortunately
Bradbury’s narrative style does not have the power that made Mrs. Phelps sob
uncontrollably. There is a nice touch in the film version where one of the book
people is a Ray Bradbury novel; indeed the book is soundly written, but not
challenging, perhaps because, rather than in spite of, the fact that it is
appealing to conventional and reactionary means of communication. In all
fairness Bradbury is not claiming to be Shakespeare, there are too many clichés of ‘50s, and other,
science fiction, such as the oppressive governmental control and cultural dark
age with its sect of civilised guardians of knowledge. An attempt to write a
Shakespearean epic could only end in parody, a more useful project might be to
parody the conventions of ‘50s science fiction.
‘For a delicious tea
snack, try young harmoniums rolled into tubes and filled with Venusian cottage
cheese.’
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s
The Sirens of Titan can be accused of being trite and vacuous, but therein lies
its strength. The Sirens of Titan is trite and vacuous with tremendous style
and panache.
The sentences are
short.
The paragraphs are
short.
They get to the point.
‘On he came, the
flashes from Chrono’s knife dazzling him.
“Please,” he said.
A rock flew out of the
knife’s dazzle.
Salo ducked.
A hand seized his bony
throat, threw him down.’
This extract is
relatively sophisticated, descriptive and metaphorical. Elsewhere the narrative
takes on a newspaper-like, literal presentation.
‘The war between Mars
and Earth lasted 67 Earthling days.
Every nation on Earth
was attacked.
Earth’s casualties
were 149,315 killed, 446 wounded, 11 captured, and 46,364 missing.
At the end of the war,
every Martian had been killed, wounded, captured, or missing.’
The purpose of this
style seems to be twofold: to increase the reader’s credulity by presenting
things in a factual style, and to increase pace and pleasure in reading by
avoiding overlong and convoluted sentences and paragraphs, the essay writer’s
stock-in-trade, with all their scantily connected clauses and sub-clauses,
often irrelevant and pointless additions of subjects and predicates, and
awkward train of thought, resulting in strained grammar, using commas, where
full stops would be preferable. To this must be added, though not, thankfully,
in the same sentence, the overriding purpose of satirizing the presentation of
pseudo-facts as a viable means of gaining credability, and the style of
language in science fiction.
‘All persons, places,
and events in this book are real. Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily
constructions by the author.’
‘Winston Niles
Rumfoord had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted
chrono-synclastic infundibulum two days out of Mars.’
As well as ‘the
following is a true story’ and the everyday problems of uncharted
chrono-synclastic infundibula, another device is used: the quotation from
fictitious texts with which the reader is supposed to be familiar. Dune by
Frank Herbert, though later, can be taken as representative of this trend.
Again, it seems a technique to suspend disbelief through putting the book in
the context of other books about the ‘historical’ events. Whereas Herbert
utilises this technique for philosophical pearls of wisdom and background
information that cannot be contained in the narrative, Vonnegut provides
pseudo-profundities and whimsical irrelevances.
‘Sometimes I think it
is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By
the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could
be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.’
– WINSTON NILES RUMFOORD
‘I am at a loss to
understand why German batball is not an event, possibly a key event, in the
Olympic Games.’
– WINSTON NILES RUMFOORD
Vonnegut does not
confine himself to starting each chapter with references to ‘exterior’ sources,
he uses the books in the text, and discussing their relative merits and
popularity.
‘The best-selling book
in recent times has been the Winston Niles Rumfoord Authorized Revised Bible.
Next in popularity is that delightful forgery, The Beatrice Rumfoord Galactic
Cookbook. The third most popular…’
Books obviously still
play a part in Vonnegut’s vision of the future, though their literary style may
be somewhat different. There is little discussion of communications in general,
or its manipulative potential, but mention may be made of the methods by which
Rumfoord controlled the Martians, and of Salo’s mission.
‘At the hospital they
even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of
his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier
wouldn’t ever do.’
The Martian army is
controlled by radio antennae, which give orders and even furnishes marching,
“rented a tent”, drum music. Civilians, too, are controlled by this method of
communication turned instrument of control. Salo, the loveable machine from
Tralfamadore, is sent on a mission across the universe with the simple message:
‘Greetings’. His ship breaks down on Titan, and it transpires that the
evolution of mankind has been altered, and some of its finest achievements have
simply been to carry messages about replacement parts between Salo and
Tralfamadore.
‘The Great Wall of
China means in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above: “Be patient. We haven’t
forgotten you.”’
Of course this is a
notion that would appeal to Vonnegut, that the crowning structures of earth’s
civilisations and cultures were commonplace communications of an alien
civilisation; that we are, in effect, somebody else’s words.
Words play an
important role in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Alphaville. In Alphaville certain
words have been eliminated from the language, though, disappointingly, we are
given no new words, or any words that have significantly altered their meaning.
In every room there is a Bible, which turns out to be a dictionary of all
usable words. The dictionary is constantly updated, undesirable concepts being
eliminated, such as conscience and love. Sensuality suffices for love,
conscience is not replaced. The secret agent sent to Alphaville from the Outer
Countries knows these words but unfortunately he does not seem to understand
them. The people of Alphaville also use simple set phrases, indicating a
certain loss of ability in the use of language.
‘I’m fine, don’t
mention it.’
Mind you, such phrases
already exist, and probably always have done. Other phrases are more indicative
of the mentality.
‘Never say “why”, say
“because”.’
The system is based on
causal logic which is already established, further researches are discouraged –
the system must not be questioned, there are public executions for such
“illogicality”. The story is a conventional one of the old values versus the abuse
of technology, though the film takes pains to point out the faults and
paradoxes of the hero’s role. Be that as it may, the hero talks poetry and
ideals while the computer assimilates data and “eliminates” undesirable
elements in Von Braum’s power scheme. Apart from the dramatic use of styles of
language, great use is made of visual contrasts. Light, e=mc², in particular, is used.
Many of the scenes with the agent are dark, perhaps with a single naked bulb,
punctuated by the flash of his camera. The computer, on the other hand, is
often shown as a bright light, making the subtitles impossible to read.
Alphaville is supposed to exist on artificial light, complete with artificial
dawns, but natural light is seen towards the end of the film, around the same time
as the inhabitants are suffocating from lack of artificial light. Yet
artificial light is still seen, and earlier the difference between the north
and south zones are described as where the sun shines and it is summer, and
where it is winter. Perhaps the sun, like their dawn, is artificial. Some of
the scenes towards the end of the film go into negative, it can be associated
with the breakdown of Alphaville but actually starts before Von Braum is shot.
The effect of this use of light relies on the fact that the film is shot in
black and white, at a time, 1965, when it could easily have been made in
colour. It was not an insufficient budget that made Godard avoid elaborate sets
and use cars instead of spaceships. He must have wanted to show that interesting
and dramatic visual effects could be made, and made meaningful, without hours
of old Airfix kit parts fixed on to egg cartons floating about to the strains
of the Blue Danube. Kubrick obviously did not take his advice, 2001 is not
about the economic and concise use of visual effects, and it is certainly not
about the plot, or dialogue, or character development.
Plot, dialogue and
character development is present in The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard,
but, as the title suggests, it is eclipsed by a list of images. These images
are conceived in the manner of experiments to determine the traumas of the
psyche involved in a conceptual World War III.
‘What we are concerned
with now are the implications – in particular, the complex of ideas and events
represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but
the inner identity of such a notion.’
Many of the images are
taken from the media, others from art, others rely on a pun on ‘auto-erotic.’
‘The simulated
newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own
destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the
students were ostensibly engaged.’
War films and
newsreels, and popular political and film personalities who died, like J.F. Kennedy,
Jayne Mansfield, James Dean, or are conceived of as dying, are shown to have a
marked erotic content. The concept is comparable to Burroughs’ ‘orgasm death’
constructed around the effects of hanging. The above examples died in cars and
the association of death and sex is coupled with the sexual imagery and bravado
associated with cars.
‘It is clear that the
car crash is seen as a fertilising rather than a destructive experience, a
liberation of sexual and machine libido, mediating the sexuality of those who
have died with an erotic intensity impossible in any other form.’
Most of these
experiments are conducted using visual media, and the visual arts and
architecture are also emphasised. Thus both commenting on the visual media, for
example the sexual effect of J.F. Kennedy’s televised assassination, and
altering the use of language to increase the visual content. Artists mentioned
are Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Auguste Rodin, Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp,
Douanier Rousseau, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Bacon and Andy
Warhol. Andy Warhol’s silkscreen death images are particularly apt, many of the
others are Surrealists and therefore fit the idea of bringing together
seemingly disparate images by the associations of ‘pure psychic automatism’.
The angles, volumes and forms of Travis and Catherine Austin in the act of love
making.
‘Later, the sexual act
between them became a hasty eucharist of the angular dimensions of the
apartment. In the postures they assumed, in the contours of thigh and thorax,
Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom, and later of
the curvilinear dome of the Festival Hall, the jutting balconies of the London
Hilton, and lastly of the abandoned weapons range.’
Travis’ sensitivity to
the volumes and geometry of the visual environment is translated into
physiological and psychological terms, and of course into verbal terms; the
imbalance and asymmetry he sees, represents in his mind final self-destruction,
setting World War 3 firmly in the present time and space continuum. Sex and
violence is associated through the media (which has since become a catchphrase)
in the presentation of war, cult figures and car advertisements. The
conjunction of the visual and verbal in the media sets off a parallel conjunction
in the book: the reader proceeds from one headed section to another is if from
one picture to the next at an exhibition, entering another room of the gallery
at the end of each chapter.
In Ronald DeFeo’s
Modern Occasions he says, ‘William Burroughs is dim-witted, undisciplined,
incoherent, self-indulgent, dull and totally pointless. In short, trash. If any
Burroughs must be remembered in our literature, I’d rather it be Edgar Rice.’
Leaving the truth or non-truth
of that statement behind, the ability to provoke such criticism is, in itself, an
indication of an interesting writer. Burroughs invites polarised opinions
partly because he is using words against words.
‘In the beginning was
the word and the word was bullshit.’
Burroughs conceives
“the word” as a virus which has invaded the human body and psyche; it is a
living parasitic organism, the word invaded the flesh.
‘The word may once
have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades
and damages the central nervous system.’
If you try halting
your sub-vocal speech and attain inner silence, you will encounter a force that
resists, that force is the word. Words condition all our experience, what we
see is dictated by what we hear described, word begets image. Burroughs
suggests a simple experiment of verification. By using a recorded sound track
played over a different TV film.
‘You will find that
the arbitrary soundtrack seems to be appropriate…people running for a bus in
Piccadilly with a soundtrack of machine-gun fire looks like 1917 Petrograd.’
The media manipulates
word and image, which in turn manipulates the population.
‘It is the presumed
right of all governmental agencies to decide what words and images the citizen
is permitted to see – that is thought control since thought consists largely of
word and image.’
Censorship is the
self-righteous face of this control, but it is merely the negative side of the
positive attempt to “sublimate” people’s individuality to a levelling regime.
‘(Newspapers,
magazines, muttering voices on TV and radio – birth and death and the human
condition – always been that way and always will – Besides you can’t do
anything – Don’t stick your neck out – Don’t get ulcers)’
Burroughs conceives of
his writing as some sort of guerrilla counterattack to the media. If normal
linguistic habits are roads and bridges into the human consciousness, as Tony
Tanner suggests in his City of Words, then Burroughs is trying to sabotage the
lines of communication that the occupying army would otherwise use. Thus,
paradoxically, he uses words against words, and media techniques against the
media.
‘The underground press
serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated
techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote,
rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out
of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to
establishment interest.’
Burroughs is vague on
who “they” are, perhaps “we” would be a more responsible term, but governmental
agencies such as the CIA may plausibly be referred to as “they”. The techniques
of countering “control” involve scrambling news items, interspersing political speeches
with unpleasant noises or images, falsifying events in whole or part, and
reporting events before they happen to make them happen,
‘anyone with a tape
recorder controlling the soundtrack can influence and create events’.
His favourite
techniques seems to be the tape recorder, with spliced tapes or tape cut-ups.
‘Everybody splice
himself in with everybody else. Communication must be total. Only way to stop
it.’
Burroughs objective
seems to be total communication, but that can also mean silence, leaving the
machines to argue everything out. Either way the monopoly is broken. Tape cut-ups
or what L. Lipton calls “phonomontage” is nothing new, but its appliance to
narrative technique, if narrative is the right word, is something of a
breakthrough.
‘Certainly if writing
is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use
the techniques that have been used for some time past in painting, music and
film.’
One of the stories
behind the origin of cut-ups is that Brian Gysin was cutting a mount for a
drawing and sliced through a pile of newspapers. Without doubt though, the
development of cut-ups shows external influence from other media, for example
the Berlin Dadaists’ cutting up of newspapers in their photomontages, having
both visual and verbal “cut-ups”. Burroughs also uses a Fold-in Method.
‘It is done by folding
one text down the middle and laying it on another text and reading across so
that you have half one text and half another’.
He has also
experimented with a newspaper/magazine derived technique where three columns of
narrative are presented side by side, thus transcending the usual page format
with three streams of concurrent narrative. Visual elements are also used. Ah
Pook Is Here is a picture book modelled on the surviving Mayan codices, though
never published as such, and The Book Of Breeething contains visual passages as
well as extolling the virtues of hieroglyphs.
The media are
generally regarded as providing addictive propaganda or “junk” in both senses
of the term, particularly by Bradbury and Burroughs. This is a little unfair
since both writers, but particularly Burroughs, have benefited from media
techniques and style of presentation. It’s influence can be one of banality, as
Vonnegut painfully points out, but the interaction of words and images in the
media is relevant to Godard, Ballard and Burroughs. To Bradbury it remains a
dichotomy; they cannot be combined in any meaningful or artistic way, despite
his rather non-artistic style of writing and his granting of film rights. Certainly,
if Bradbury’s attitude to books is pursued they may be made redundant and new
writers must adopt new techniques.
‘Click? Pic? Look,
Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who,
What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom!’
Bradbury neglects to mention that such a style can be entertaining, like Vonnegut, but it can also be significant – Burroughs uses elements of spy thrillers, science fiction and pornography. Using the language of popular contemporary, and therefore rapidly changing, forms does not automatically negate content. Alphaville is a highly complex film constructed on the clichés of science fiction and spy thrillers. Ballard and Burroughs point out communications and media manipulations but, in order to be modern writers, they cannot ignore it. They face their fear of the media, exploiting it’s immediate, sometimes visual, nature and references, in order to liberate the novel format to provide a viable future communications counterpart of more import.
Bibliography/Filmography
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
The Sirens of Titan –
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Alphaville (Jean-Luc
Goddard)
The Atrocity
Exhibition – JG Ballard
The Ticket That
Exploded – William Burroughs
Ah Pook Is Here and
other texts – William Burroughs
William Burroughs: An
Annotated Bibliography – Michael B Goodman
Brave New World –
Aldous Huxley
Dune – Frank Herbert
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley
Kubrick)
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