Chavín

 

‘The term Chavín has always been over-extended. Since 1919 it has come to mean less and les in an ever-widening circle.’ Kubler’s statement hints at the problem of naming an area of archaeological study. One can name it after the most prominent source of artefacts, in this case Chavín de Huántar, but this tends to create misunderstandings about the nature and extent of the site’s importance.

Some scholars have claimed Chavín art in Ecuador, Bolivia, at Tiahuanco, Argentina, at Barreales, and northern Chile, at Pichalo. More generally it has been used as an umbrella term for the bulk of Peruvian culture between 1400 and 300BC. Rafael Larco Hoyle believes that Chavín culture began with the Cupisnique people on the northern coast between Jequetepeque river and Chicama river and was carried by them to Chavín de Huántar and other highland sites. Julio Tello thought it was brought to the coast by a migration from the Andes. Alan Lapiner proposes that it started in the tropical forests to the east, then developed in the highlands, because the animals which form the Chavín iconography are largely jungle animals. The latter is the only theory which is based on specifically Chavín characteristics – the conventionalised representations of animal deities.

Geographically Peru is a land of complete contrasts. To the west is the Pacific desert coast, which has virtually no rain, though several rivers run through it to the coast. To the east is the spine of Peru, part of the Andean mountain range – altitude in this case is more important than latitude. The range forms the source of all the major rivers running to the coast and are often forested. But further up ice and snow persist throughout the year. The Indians of the Andean highlands have unusually large lungs adapted to the low oxygen content of the air which may be half of that at sea level. To the east of the Anders are the tropical humid lowlands of the upper Amazon jungle. In the lower half of northern Peru the Santa river flows north between parallel mountain chains and then flows into the Pacific at right angles to its upper course. In the east, and parallel to the Santa, is the Marañón river, a tributary of the Amazon. Between Santa and the Marañón, on a small tributary of the upper Marañón (the Mosna) stands Chavín de Huántar.

Although much of central Peru in uncultivable, the snowclad mountains being too high for agriculture or habitation, much of the ancient civilisation, apart from the river mouths on the coast, was in the highlands. The intermontane valleys being relatively fertile and wooded with occasional grassy fields. Agriculture was rapidly becoming the main source of food supply. Consequently fishing, hunting and wild-food foraging were of less importance, except in the coastal sites where the sea yielded ample quantities of marine food, fish, shellfish and marine mammals. About 900-800BC an improved variety of maize had been introduced as the staple food, but beans and gourds continued to be used. Warty squashes, avocados, and manioc or yucca were also cultivated extensively. The theory is that post-harvest leisure time and more efficient and stable means of livelihood enabled the people to develop technology, art, and the higher aspects of culture. This is probably true, but indolence is not necessarily a recipe for development, and nomadic, hunting peoples are well able to produce ‘culture’. However, settled people are more likely to produce lasting, monumental, religious centres entailing the work of several generations.

As well as domestication of plants, animals seem to have been domesticated at this time. Llamas had been brought down from higher altitudes, but not in great numbers, both for meat and for carrying loads such as other crops across mountainous terrain. Domesticated dogs, unknown earlier in Peru, may have been used for herding the llamas. As for technology, drainage and irrigation must have been in a fairly primitive stage since most of the population lived on the edges of the fertile areas at the mouths of rivers. Since not much of the land away from the deltas and course of the rivers could be cultivated without efficient irrigation the population must have been relatively small.

The houses were small, one room, rectangular structures with thatched gable roofs, not generally group in regular street plans. They stood on raised stone-faced platforms, but the walls were generally of mud, made into conical adobe bricks. These were laid with the flat end to the outer surface, the interstices filled with mud and a smooth mud plaster given to the wall faces. Occasionally, where suitable stone was available, the houses were built of stone. In other words it was not a general population’s lack of building knowledge that made the use of sun-dried mud widespread, but merely the exploitation of the most readily available and easily workable material.

The dead were buried in deep graves in the coastal desert. Cupisnique, however, which is one of the richest grave sites, is relatively shallow – 2 ½ to 6 foot (80 centimetres to 2 metres). The people were buried with previously unworn clothes, food, drink, pottery vessels, baskets, mats and other utilitarian objects, as well as jewellery, ornaments and, occasionally, feline theistic symbols. They were fully equipped for safe passage to, and life in, an afterlife. The bodies were interred horizontally, not in bundles, and were not oriented to any particular cardinal or ordinal compass direction. The bones were covered with a red pigment, probably cinnabar, so the bodies could not have been placed in their final, secondary, grave until after the flesh had decayed. The alternative to the theory of an initial, less ceremonious grave, is that the bones were painted when the graves were reopened to receive fresh bodies. The first theory seems more likely despite the problems of hygiene.

Ordinary clothing, at least for the males, was a loincloth and cap, but in the graves a large variety of bone ear ornaments and finger rings, bracelets or wristlets, crowns, stone bead necklaces, feather headdresses and capes have been found. The body, in life, may also have been decorated with paint. Skull deformation, as with other Pre-Columbian societies, was quite common. Tapestry and embroidery were made, as well as plain weaves, a lace-like gauze, and gingham, all embellished with fringes and tassels. The vast majority of the textiles are of cotton. As well as bone, shell and wood ornaments, some of the beads, pendants, rings, combs and so on were made of semi-precious stones. Turquoise, quartz and lapiz lazuli were used, which must have required prolonged work without the use of metal tools. Mirrors were also made, by polishing pyrite and jet. Other utilitarian objects, other than pottery and twined bags or mats of totora reed, tended to be made of stone, bone or wood. Stone was used for hammers, club-heads, projectile points, mortars, pestles, bowls and boxes. Bone and wood, used either separately or in conjunction, was used for spear-throwers. An object of chonta palm wood, found at Ancón, has been claimed to be a bow. If so, it is one of the earliest, but it cannot have been much more than an experiment as spears and spear-throwers were the most common weapon. Clubs and boxes of wood were found, and various awls, spatulas, needles, daggers and spoons.

Some of the earliest American metallurgy belongs to the “Chavín horizon”. Some are pure gold, others mixed, probably unintentionally, with silver and copper. However genuine bimetallic objects have been discovered, one pin has a gold head and a silver shaft. Hammering, embossing, annealing, welding, soldering, strap joining, incising, champlevé and cut-out designs were known, but casting, as such, and the lost wax method had not been developed. The gold was usually painted with coloured pigments. A large range of objects were made, usually decorative, including pendants, tweezers, staff-heads, crowns, ear and nose ornaments, cuffs, pins, gorgets, spoons, beads and many plaques. The designs are usually conventionalised elements of humans and animals, or are totally abstract.

Pottery and its decoration varied with the area and period of manufacture. But many designs were incised, stamped or modelled. Rocker stamping was made by rocking a shell backwards and forwards in the wet clay to produce a series of indentations. This was usually used in conjunction with areas of incised lines to produce contrast. Many of the potsherds from Chavín de Huántar demonstrate this technique. Towards the end of the horizon, from 400BC, ceramic pigments became popular. A type of pottery, found both at Chavín and Cupisnique, was decorated with a silvery-black graphite paint applied to cover zones which were frequently bounded by narrow incisions made when the paste was dry. Also, at this time, on the south coast of Peru beyond Chavín influence, the incised details were coloured after firing with powdered mineral pigments mixed with resins to form a lacquer-like coating.

Quality pottery, from this horizon anyway, is not centred around Chavín de Huántar. It seems to come primarily from the coast rather than the highlands. The Chavín pots are simple shapes, mainly open bowls with thickened rims. Similar potsherds have been found in the lowest levels of the shell-heaps at Ancón and Supe. Utilitarian pottery may have been fairly similar throughout Peru; the reason that the coastal finds, especially at Cupisnique, are superior, is because they were mortuary furniture, designed to be attractive rather than useful. However they are still thick, with heavy walls, and baked at a low temperature producing a red, black or brown colour. Only later in the period do a few vessels of lighter colour appear. The most typical shape, unknown at Chavín, is a stirrup-spouted jar where the form of the spout and the handle are combined in a “stirrup” shape. The body of the pot may be incised with a seemingly abstracted combinations of feline, aviary, serpent and human motifs. Combinations of incised, scored and relief projections may be used. Many of the more figurative pots represent fruit and food forms as well as human or anthropomorphic animal forms. These animals include feline types, a bird of prey type, a serpent, parrots, dogs, coatimundi, llama and deer. The first three of these tend to be more conventionalised and sometimes combined with each other or with anthropomorphic figures. As the representation of these creatures is more abstracted, it is logically to conclude that they are more conceptually abstract and that their role in mortuary furniture is not merely aesthetic. This is corroborated by designs found in temples, particularly at Chavín de Huántar. These forms are closer to the incised pottery designs than the more three-dimensional forms of many of the pots. There seems to be a closer religious link than aesthetic link.

There is nothing in Chavín art to parallel the rather naturalistic treatment of some of the human and more domestic animal forms at Cupisnique. The feline representation was quite influential in Peruvian pottery, most directly in Paracas, indicating a widespread feline cult, of which Chavín, despite the difference in style, is the major example at this time and in this area.

Of the major sites, other than Chavín de Huántar, that are supposed to be thoroughly “Chavín”, there emerges a similar tension between similarities and differences. Cerro Sechín, in the lower Casma valley, is notable for a row of upright slabs, varying in height between 5 ½ and 14 ½ feet (1.6 to 4.4 metres). They consist of a number of incised figures and heads, probably representing warriors and captured sacrifices. The poses, compared to the static Chavín symbolism, are more dynamic and naturalistic, and have been compared to the “dancing figures” at Monte Alban, Mexico. This anomaly is usually explained by making Cerro Sechín a sub-culture of Chavín. A different culture would seem a more satisfactory description. Tello has tried to describe the eyes of the warriors as Chavín feline because they are rectangular. This would probably be insufficient in itself even if Chavín feline eyes were rectangular. Of the buildings at Cerro Sechín, the conical adobes laid point to point, with circular bases forming a pattern of roundels on the wall faces, are characteristic of the Chavín style along the coastal valleys. But it could be argued that building techniques are less sensitive to variation than aesthetic styles, since conical adobes were quite widespread, both preceding and outlasting Chavín. They are still sometimes used today. Moxeke lies about two miles south-east of Sechín. The only vaguely Chavín imagery is in one of the niches containing carved and painted clay figures. It shows four serpents, painted red and blue, dangling from the arms of a human torso.

Punkurí is in the Nepeña valley. Near the bottom of the upper flight of stairs, ascending the terraced platform, is a painted jaguar modelled of clay over a stone core. Kubler argues that this is not Chavín because it is in the round. But over the page from his illustration of Punkurí there is an almost identical jaguar in a reconstruction of Cerro Blanco, which he accepts as Chavín. Although typical Chavín is a two dimensional style, these jaguar heads, unlike the pottery styles, are quite similar to the tenoned heads at Chavín de Huántar. One of the walls behind the stair at Punkurí is incised in a Chavín style. At Cerro Blanco the mud-covered walls were painted with dismembered Chavín elements.

At Kuntur Wasi, near Cajamarca, Chavín-type stone sculptures have been found along with three-dimensional statues of felinised human beings unlike any found at Chavín. In the Mocha Valley Chavín-style clay friezes have recently been found at Huaca de los Reyes by Luis Watanabe and Michael Mosley. At Chongoyape in the Lambayeque Valley three large gold crowns were found, one of which resembles the Raimondi stela. In general, though, it seems that these sites are allied to Chavín de Huántar more by the presence of a similar religious culture than their visual aesthetics. If one were to define Chavín only as an art style, then, somewhat pedantically, one would have to admit only Chavín de Huántar as being thoroughly “Chavín”.

The land available for agriculture in the small valley surrounding Chavín de Huántar is limited and could never have supported a large population; but recently the Peruvian archaeologist Marino Gonzales Moreno has reported ancient occupation debris from the area of the modern village of Chavín. So the temple had a supporting settlement but it is unlikely that the villagers were the sole users or builders. A large labour force must have been used in its construction and the temple was likely to be the focus of their religious observance.

One Spanish chronicler, Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, described it as: ‘a large building of huge stone blocks, very well wrought; it was a guaca, one of the most famous of the heathen sanctuaries, like Rome or Jerusalem with us; the Indians used to come and make their offerings and sacrifices, for the Devil pronounce many oracles from here, and so they repaired here from all over the kingdom.’

It would be surprising if Chavín was such a major centre at the time of the Spanish conquest, but credence can easily be given to the idea that people came from a wide area of Peru to meet, to trade, and to make offerings and to hear priests. The complex contains many rooms and they were almost certainly ceremonial not residential. The sunken courts, platforms, terraces, plazas and buildings seem to be oriented, principally, on an east-west axis though there are no other signs of sun worship or astrological observation. The complex covers 800 square feet (250 square metres) in all, of which the largest building, called the Castillo by the Spanish, covers 245 by 235 feet (75 by 72 metres). They probably considered it square and it conforms to the cardinal axes.

Inside the Castillo are many galleries and chambers set at different levels connected by stairways. They are pierced by numerous vertical and horizontal ventilating shafts leading to holes at the top of the walls. The ground plan presents an unorganised maze of walls, galleries, rooms, stairs and ramps, but they all belong to the basic plan of three superimposed platforms, 15 metres high in total. The walls are extremely thick and took up more cubic space than the rooms and galleries, which are about 6 to 16 feet. There are no external windows or doorways except for the main entrance to the first floor, reached by a stairway of rectangular blocks. The outer walls slope inwards towards the top and are set slightly back in narrow terraces. The roof was covered with earth, which may have provided a foundation for small, rectangular buildings on top. But, even if this were so, the Castillo was not built as platforms to support a temple – the Castillo was the temple.

Niches inside the Castillo, rectangular but of various sizes, could be used for offerings, as could the galleries. In the so-called Gallery of the Offerings several hundred pots containing guinea pig, llama and fish bones as well as marine shells were found. The latter would have to be brought at least 144 kilometres over a route crossing two mountain ranges. Possibly, too, people would be prepared to travel those sort of distances to trade at Chavín. Since, as Lapiner points out, Chavín iconography owes a debt to jungle animals, Chavín may have served as a trading centre between the highlands and the coast to the west and the fringes of the jungle to the east. However there seems little evidence of secular wealth, or secular political power, at Chavín.

No-one is sure if the complex was built in several stages, and if so, what the stages were. It has been said that the three floors of the Castillo were built at three different times. The oldest part may not be the Castillo square but in two adjacent groups of superimposed galleries laid out in the form of a rough cross. In the centre of the lower gallery is the Lanzon facing a small open square. The design of this secondary sunken plaza may echo a design on the head of the Lanzon – it is round, with avenues off it on the cardinal axes. This may be speculation, but not unreasonable speculation, that the different style of the Lanzon, and the presence of a second plaza, may indicate an older ceremonial complex than the Castillo and square plaza. The dating of the complex, then, is uncertain; too many prejudiced assumptions can be made on the basis of sophistication, for example the thick heavy walls and narrow passages devoid of light were probably built at the same time as the efficient ventilation and, elsewhere on site, irrigation.

Along the outer walls was a row of large, projecting, carved heads, inserted by tenons, which encircled the building below a decorated cornice. The heads are all individual human/feline combinations, veering from the most human to the most feline. The cornice displays profile feline and serpent bodies at the south-west and the spread-wing dorsal view of condors at the north-east. The felines have round eyes with the pupil at the top; rectangular mouths with rounded corners and crossed fangs; brow, whiskers and hair in the form of snakes; fur markings as figure of eights with eyes; tails and legs conceived as stylised tongues protruding from extra mouths; bird of prey feet with talons plus a frontal head near the end of the tail. The snakes in the cornice have the same eyes and mouths, including teeth and crossed fangs, and are marked with the circle and dot common to feline pelage. The condors, or bird of prey type, vary, but typical features include profile feline mouths, as well as their beak, and frontal feline teeth at the top of the tail and legs.

In one of the galleries already mentioned stands a carved white granite monolith, 4.53 metres high, known as The Great Image or Lanzon. Lanzón is Spanish for a short, thick dagger with the tapering body conceived as the blade and the slender upper half as the handle. In actuality it represents an anthropomorphic feline with its left arm along its side as part of the body and the right arm raised. Claws are set at the end of the fingers and toes. The thick lips are turned up at the corners, with a single fang in each side of the mouth. Snakes represent eyebrows and hair and a large ornament hangs from each ear. Both the waist and the upper part of the shaft are ornamented with the faces of felines, all of which have the pupils of the eyes looking upwards in relation to their head. Although these profile heads only have upper fangs, they are given the appearance of having crossed fangs by placing the heads in alternate directions and joined at the mouth.

The Tello Obelisk is the most complicated and ambiguous conjunction of feline and other elements at Chavín de Huántar. The overall framework possibly represents a cayman. If, as has been suggested, it represents a feline, the placing of the front paws forward, and back paws backward, may indicate a leaping pose, as it does in one particular gold jaguar plaque. But they could also be interpreted as representing the posture of cayman feet. The strongest evidence, however, for identification as a cayman is the overall shape, particularly of the head, with its row of fangs. If the tail is thought of as a fish tail, that would strengthen the idea of an aquatic deity, but it might equally represent a bird’s tail. There are many other avian, human, serpent and feline designs within the composition – the most notable, possibly, being the so-called spinal column, which has feline cross-fangs.

Facing the plaza is a portal, the south half of which is built of white granite while the north one is made of black limestone. Rowe has therefore termed this the Black and White Portal. On each of the two columns which flank the doorway on this portal is a figure in low relief, with the body, legs and arms of a human, and the head, wings and claws of a bird of prey. The bird elements on the south column have been identified as those of an eagle, while the north is thought to be a hawk. The head, out of keeping with the rest of the body, is shown in profile and tilted upwards. It consists of a slightly feline face with three fangs, and a beak at the front, and serpents on top. Frontal and profile feline heads decorate the whole body, joined by serpents on the wings. Stylised projections at an angle between the legs and the body would, on a conventional representation of a bird of prey, be the legs and where the human legs are placed would be the tail. The meaning has changed, the format remains. The figures on the portal appear to be armed and may well guard the entrance to the temple.

On a gold plaque in the Rafael Larco Herrera Museum in Lima, a figure in the same pose as the Raimondi stela is guarded on the left and right by figures similar to the portal columns, combining bird and human elements. However the Raimondi stela has a large, elaborate headdress, or hair, which separates it from all the other so-called “staff gods”. The figure has a human body in frontal posture and is holding two staffs composed of cayman, feline, serpent and abstract elements. There are claws of both hands and feet. Two serpents hang from either side of the belt. The head is feline, with round eyes with pupils at the top; the brows are not in the form of snakes, though snakes form the hair at the side of the head. The mouth is down-turned, formed as it is by joining two upside down, profile, feline heads with cross-fangs. The headdress fills the better part of the 1.9 metres of rectangular granite slab. It is formed of snakes and abstract elements with occasional teeth and fangs.

Chavín art, then, is usually incised on a flat surface or else the surface is treated as though it were flat. Within the confines of an overall, circumscribed, animal or animal deity shape, many stylised elements of various animals can be combined to define the qualities of the deity. The effect is of static symbols within a symbol, where the mystery of the symbol is reflected by visual ambiguity. Willey determined that Chavín was ‘a matter of line, of composition, of emphasis. It is the curvilinear forms, the massive heads, the intricately disposed small heads, the locked and curved fangs, the claw feet, the prominent nostrils, and the eccentric eyes.’ If we accept Willey’s definition of Chavín as an aesthetic phenomenon, and look for art identical or similar to Chavín de Huántar, we may wonder why Chavín is so important. Certainly there are felines, serpents and birds of prey but surprisingly few unmistakably and directly Chavín-derived works. Similar imagery, but considerable aesthetic and cultural divergence, tends to indicate relative cultural, economic and political independence bound by a common cosmology. Chavín de Huántar was probably an important trading centre, and it may even have had some military power, but it was not the capital of a pre-Incaic empire. Chavín, in its wider definitions, was not a closely controlled, homogenous, culture but a singular artistic expression of a successfully spread religious cult. Cults have priests, and priests have power; but it’s artistic influence on the surrounding region may be analogous to the nuance between command and advice.

Copyright 1981 Adrian Annabel 

Bibliography

Pre-Columbian Art of South America – Alan Lapiner

The Cult of the Feline – (relevant chapter by) Michael Kan

The Ancient Civilisations of Peru – J. Alden Mason

Art and Architecture of Ancient America – George Kubler

Ancient Peruvian Ceramics – Alan R. Sawyer

Peru Before Pizarro – George Bankes

Anthropology and Art – ed. C. Otton (chapter by Gordon Willey)

 

 

Future Communications (from the past)

 

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.

Burroughs’ writing is essentially different from that of Joyce, whereas Joyce would make free associations between words that help us to experience the writer’s consciousness, Burroughs breaks associations between words taking the objective element of chance. The machine splices the data and experience, and we are free to make our own associations, but it is not completely ‘blind prose’ (Burroughs’ term), since we are still given a fairly clear indication of his personal ideas and views.

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.

 Copyright 1978 Adrian Annabel

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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