M. Charrière’s last escape involved his simulating madness in order to get sent to the asylum. One of the devices he adopted was, when the tub of evening soup was brought in, to go over to it and urinate in it. This, he says, ’cast something of a damper on the room,’ which one can well believe. His efforts were successful; he was certified a mental case, and managed thereafter to make off. His final refuge was Venezuela, to whose ‘humble fishermen, intellectuals, soldiers and others’Papillon is dedicated. It is the measure of M.Charrière’s stupendous egotism that the 1939-45 war, which coincided with some of his more striking adventures, by comparison scarcely interested him at all.
Mr O’Brian, not unnaturally, considers Papillon to be a literary masterpiece which has developed a new style of oral prose -a ‘sunlit, rather husky southern voice that you can listen to for hours on end.’ He also considers the book to be ‘a furious protest against a society that can for its own convenience shut human beings up in dim concrete cells with bars only at the top, there to live in total silence upon a starvation diet until they are tamed, driven mad or physically destroyed.’ What the book does not offer is any sort of suggestion as to what should be done about the Papillons of society, assuming that it is considered desirable that any sort of social order and standards of behaviour should be maintained
13
‘In The Beginning Was The Word’
The true purpose of words is to convey meaning, and when this is perfectly achieved -which happens only rarely even in the case of the greatest practitioners - there is a kind of ecstasy. The very humblest and most obscure of scribblers may experience this in some degree when they have managed to string together words so as to produce a collective impact greater than the sum of their separate impacts. Unfortunately, words can also be used to disguise meaning, as musical notes can be untrue and convey discord instead of harmony. There is le mot injust as well as le mot juste.
It is all set forth with great cogency in the famous opening passage of the forth Gospel in which the doctrine of the Logos is expounded. In the beginning, we are told, was the Word; creation itself began, not with a deed, but with a Word, which in due course was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, thereby exemplifying the whole creative process in a nutshell - to put flesh on words so that they may live among us, gracefully and truthfully. This is the true writers charter, valid for all users of words, at whatever level, written or spoken. They have to watch out, though, for the satanic or false Logos whereby the Word dwells among us, graceless and full of falsity. The words we write and speak and think, are as subject to pollution as the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat.
Such word pollution at the present time is particularly strong, and I should say, even more dangerous than other forms of pollution. Polluted air makes us suffocate, polluted water and food make us sick, but polluted words deliver us over to the worst of all fates - to be imprisoned inexorably in fantasy. An iron curtain falls between us and reality. There is hope that the polluted air and water and food may sometime be purified, but once words are polluted they are lost forever, old lexicons are their cemeteries, and turning over the pages is like visiting their graves.
Take, for instance, the word ‘love’, one of the most beautiful there is. Love is a theme running through the highest flights of literature and art and mysticism; the subject, alike, of the incomparable thirteenth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, and of poems like Donne’s The Ecstasy, perhaps the most perfect expression of love between a man and a woman ever to be written. Yet is it not sad to reflect that if I speak of love on any campus between the Berlin Wall and the western seaboard of America, the word will almost certainly be taken as signifying eroticism of one sort or another? In the contemporary estimation, to love is to experience sexual desire, and to make love is to ‘have sex’; Dante is elbowed aside to make room for Dr Kinsey, and the beautiful Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is reduced to the dimensions of Playboy magazine. This is not just a case of distorting a words meaning, but of completely altering it, love and lust being no more interchangeable terms than are hunger and greed. Surely the devil must be a philologist!
Inevitably, the Welfare State, the pattern of our English way of life in recent years, has produced its own rare crop of mot injustes or verbal fraudulence. Since, by definition, the Welfare State is a kingdom of heaven on earth where everyone is happy and no one is wicked, it follows that any deficiencies in people or in institutions must be due to their circumstances, not to any moral or other inadequacy in them. The categories of Good and Evil, therefore, simply do not exist, any more than they did in the Garden of Eden before the fall. There are problems, which can be solved, but no sins which deserve chastisement. Poverty has been abolished, so there are no poor, only under-privileged. If death has not yet been eliminated, soon it will be ;meanwhile, there are terminal cases. As for procreation - where is its sting when there are birth pills to prevent birth and family-planning to prevent families, with remedial abortion to ensure that there are no inexpedient births and remedial euthanasia -called ‘mercy-killing’ - to ensure that no lives are inexpediently protracted? The Welfare State is an earthly paradise constructed out of words bent to the purpose. Will future social historians, I sometimes ask myself, come upon examples of this strange verbiage accidentally preserved like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and try to make sense of it, reaching the conclusion that it must be related to some esoteric cult whose significance is lost in the mists of time?
The same sort of thing has happened to the key words in politics, as George Orwell has so brilliantly demonstrated in two of his essays: Politics and the English Language and The Prevention of Literature and in the passages in Nineteen Eighty-Four dealing with Newspeak and devises like doublethink and blackwhite, whereby the Ministry of Truth carries on the day-to-day manufacture and dissemination of lies, as the corresponding Ministry of Love organises violence and hatred. What Orwell shows with remarkable insight and prescience is that word pollution provides an important adjunct to the establishment and maintenance of authoritarian government, which need not fear subversion when the very words in whose name it takes place -like ‘liberation’, ‘equality’, ‘democracy’ - have been so perverted and falsified that they have lost their true significance and dynamism, being rendered impotent, futile and ultimately ridiculous. By this means, as we have seen, it is perfectly possible to revive slavery in the name of liberation, to institute tyranny in the name of democracy and to enforce privilege in the name of equality - always provided that the requisite words have been suitably processed in advance. Thus we have come to accept People’s Democracies in which people have no rights and play no part in choosing their rulers, to acknowledge liberations enforced at gunpoint that effectively abolish all liberty, and to applaud equality and fraternity in terms of an artificially protracted condition of class-war or soi-disant cultural revolution. So powerful are words, and so sinister the consequences of allowing them to become polluted.
These are instances of the deliberate pollution of words as part of the operation of power-politics in which the capture of key words like ‘freedom’ and ‘self-determination’ and ‘majority rule’ is the equivalent of taking a crucial fortress or commanding height in military warfare. In battles for men’s minds - which is what, ultimately, all wars are about - whoever defines the key words wins.
Word pollution in the context of an ostensibly free society like the countries of Western Europe and the United States, is rather different. In such circumstances meaning can be, as it were, washed away in a great cascade of words- a practice to which demagogues seeking election on a basis of universal franchise commonly resort. Their oratory serves to drown meaning in the same sort of way that in muzak the identity of the component tunes is lost in a drooling flow of inchoate musical sound. In his book Strictly Speaking Ed Newman, himself a wordsmith of experience and repute, gives some choice examples taken f
rom presidential conventions and other demagogic occasions:’ History will record the greatness of his administration. As it is inscribed upon the permanent page, so it is etched in the minds and hearts of a grateful people... Mr Chairman, I proudly rise tonight to confirm a commitment that was wrought in the crucible of another era... Destiny has again marked this man. A man to match our mountains and our plains.’ Even, however, in the field of nomination speeches, normally considered to be impregnably otiose and vacuous, it is possible to trace some shadowy meaning - like poring over the faint markings of an ancient fresco.
It is surely significant that, in his quest for total meaningless, Newman turns, not to politicians in full spate, but to sociologists - specifically Messrs Thomas E. Patterson and Robert D. McLure who made a study of the reaction of voters in the Nixon-McGovern campaign to televised political advertising for the Citizens Research Foundation of Princeton. Their research, Patterson and McLure write, was ‘rooted in a specific psychological theory of attitude organisation and change -the attitude belief model developed by Martin Fishbean.’ In operating this model, they go on, ’measures of the following variables were obtained during each personal interview wave; issue and candidate image attitudes, beliefs about candidate’s issue positions and image characteristics, salience of issues and images, and beliefs about the salience of issues and images to the candidates.’ These words may be said over and over, like a surrealist poem without ever catching the tiniest glimpse of coherent thought or meaning. Sociology has given a new dimension to human incoherence.
The quest for incoherence, very notable in contemporary letters, from Finnigans Wake to the much admired Naked Lunch, is itself a form of word-pollution, and part of the retreat from reality which characterises a civilisation in dissolution. Naturally, this is especially marked in groves of academe, where professors and lecturers gain the favour of students by throwing up an ever denser smokescreen of declamatory words to obscure what are supposed to be their subjects. The great campus pundits of our time all write in strange convoluted sentences, as in this passage, chosen at random from Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: ‘However, if the socially permitted and encouraged release of libido would be that of partial and localised sexuality, it would be tantamount to an actual compression of erotic energy, and this desublimation would be compatible with the growth of unsublimated as well as sublimated forms of aggressiveness...’ When word-pollution reaches such a point as this, that words, far from conveying grace and truth, are just strung together in a pot-pourri of psycho-sociological jargon, becoming a sort of technological mandarin, then surely another Dark Age must be upon us.
To extract meaning from incoherence, order from chaos, harmony from discord -this is what civilisation is about. Meaningful, supple, lucid words are an outward and visible intimation that the secret and invisible civilising process is at work; disorder in words, even more than other forms of disorder, intimates that it has gone into reverse gear. Fiat Nox! replaces Fiat Lux! And the new barbarians shout at their sometime mentors, as Caliban did at Prospero:
‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse’.
14
Lie In The Camera’s Eye
It is now some two decades since I first had the experience of a red-eyed camera closing in on me in a television studio. During these two decades I have spent more time than I care to remember perambulating and holding forth in front of cameras. The impression I formed on that first occasion abides with me still - that the process is essentially fraudulent. I have a pathological distaste for seeing myself on television, but when, for one reason or another, I have to, I am more than ever convinced that the self I see is not me but an image, and the words I speak not mine but an echo. Away filming once, I saw scribbled on a can of film: ’Dawn for dusk.’ Another time, I overheard one of the crew asking: ’Where’s the plastic grass?’ Cinéma verité?
So strong is this impression that I have come to consider the camera the most sinister of all inventions of our time. Why, when there are H-bombs, space-ships and birth pills to choose from, do I plump for the harmless necessary Brownie? Because it is so closely related to the very well-spring of human vanity and narcissism. Purporting not to be able to lie, it falsifies the more convincingly. Making fantasy truth and truth fantasy, it transforms the world into Caliban’s Island, full of sounds and sweet airs, which give delight but hurt not, so that when we wake (if we ever do) we cry to sleep again. Blake, though he lived before the camera, surely foresaw its coming when he wrote:
This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole,
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, not through, the Eye.
Has there ever been a more perfect instrument for seeing with, rather than through the eye, than the camera? And what multitudes of lies it has induced belief in, as it has progressed from bleary daguerreotypes to the latest video product! That strange procession -hand-holding cameraman umbilically linked to sound-recordist, similarly laden, and bearing before him like a phallus a great gun-mike; producer and continuity girl, a large stop-watch dangling from her sweet neck, pacing in unison with the others; the whole cortège treading as delicately as caparisoned horses at a bullfight - may it not prove to be our civilization’s death march?
There is undoubtedly a growing awareness that somehow or other the alleged window on the world provided by television is really a mirror, and often a distorting one at that. Feeling so, people are inclined to hit out in all directions: accusing producers, commentators and cameramen of bias, the controllers of networks of authoritarian tendencies, governments of a censorship itch, subversives of managing to insinuate themselves onto the screen for their own malign purposes, and so on. Though to Vice-President Agnew’s considerable chagrin, it is undoubtedly true that successful television commentators tend to be anarchistic rather than conservative in temperament, my own conviction is that the fault lies predominantly in the camera itself rather than in any of the human agencies. Increasingly, the camera is taking over, to the point that before so very long television production may well, like everything else, be almost wholly automated, with no need for any human participation other than to maintain the machines and programme the computers.
Anyone with experience of making television programmes, of preparing and dubbing commentaries and editing film, will know what I mean. On location, in the studio and the cutting-room, the camera tends more and more to have the last word. I happened, on a tongue-in-the-hollow-tooth principle, to take a look at the second Indian programme in the luckless British Empire series, partly because the subject is one in which I have a particular interest, and partly for the egotistic reason that at one point I was asked to contribute to it, but prudently declined. As far as I could judge, the programme managed to avoid any serious mention of the main factors in the development of British India. It did, however, show a still of Sir Richard Burton, with the information that he translated the Kama Sutra into English. This was followed by an often-used sequence showing priaptic statuary in Hindu temples. A chance to slip in a bit of porn? An anti-Christian missionary jibe? I think not. Just that the footage happened to be to hand. In other words, the camera spoke.
Then out on location. What the camera wants is drama, something to exercise and advertise its own particular expertise. So those pictures from Vietnam of a GI setting fire to a native hut with his cigarette-lighter, or of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot out of hand. They were probably set up, but whether they were or not is as beside the point as whether Jonah really was in the belly of the whale. They were the camera’s truth, and as such, valid. Likewise, one of the most famous pictures of the 1939-45 war, used a thousand times subsequently for documentary purposes, of Hitler doing a little dance of triumph when France fell before his panzers, turns out to be doctored film. The Führer’s actual tread was unremarkable, but in the camera’s
version he will dance on through history forever.
Perhaps the most perfect manifestation of the camera’s omnipotence occurred in Nigeria at the time of the Biafran War. A prisoner was to be executed by a firing squad, and the cameramen turned up in force to film the scene. Just before the command to fire was given, one of them shouted ‘Cut!’ His battery was dead, and needed to be replaced. Until this was done, the execution stood suspended; then, with his battery working again, he shouted ‘Action!’ and - bang! bang! - the prisoner fell to the ground, his death duly recorded for the delectation of millions of viewers now and hereafter.
I happened to be on telly-business in Belfast in the early days of the crisis. The place was stiff with cameras, prowling like hungry wolves. At that time, intimations of IRA activities were hard to find, and rather derisory when found. Returning some months later, how different was the scene! IRA men were two a penny, and shots of them drilling, lying in ambush, pointing automatic weapons and peering along gun-barrels as easy to come by as picture postcards of Beachy Head. I wondered then, and wonder still more now, whether any governments which permits the free, unfettered use of television will ever again be able to put down an insurrection or win a war. If the Indian population had been wired for television as we are and the Americans are, would their enthusiasm for the war against Pakistan have survived close-ups of the orphanage their Air Force bombed in Dacca, and interviews with survivors, to accompanying sound-effects? Would the Israelis have remained as whole-heartedly bellicose if, week after week, they had been fed video pictures of the sufferings of Arab refugees dispossessed of their lands and otherwise afflicted? I doubt it.
Time and Eternity Page 14