Total Recall? [Article]

echomadman · 04-02-2004 7:54pm #1

Good article by Ray Bradbury. Imagine trying to recall your favourite books at some point in the future, ala the book people in farenheit 451. In my opinion the culture of referencing and parodying classics, as evinced by shows like the Simpsons and Family Guy etc, would have already tainted my accurate recollection of the original works, this combined with the sheer amount of bad book -> screen adaptations and indeed changes in social taboos and outlooks would be a serious detriment to the process. Bradbury cites Moby Dick as an example of how this could possibly happen, I think LOTR would be another good example of the big screen version providing iconic scenes in peoples memory that may not have even happened in the original work.

That said, the results could be interesting, if a few people collaborated on a single project the resulting output would be a communal interpretation of the original work.

If nothing else it'll give me something to do in the evenings in the post-apocalyptic future i envisage for myself.

Fifty years ago in The Nation I explained my love of writing science fiction. Some weeks later, a letter arrived, signed in a spidery hand, "B. Berenson, I Tatti, Settignano, Italia." I thought, This can't be Berenson, the great Renaissance art historian, can it? The letter read: Dear Mr. Bradbury: This is the first fan letter I've written in 89 years. Your article on why you write your particular fiction is so fresh and different from the usual heavy machinery of literary essays that I had to write you. If you ever touch Italy, please call. Bernard Berenson.

From this letter grew a friendship in which I gave B.B. a copy of my new novel, "Fahrenheit 451."

In it, the wilderness Book People memorize all the great books, so they are hidden between their ears.

Berenson was so fascinated that at lunch one day at I Totti he said, "Why not a sequel to 'Fahrenheit 451' in which all the great books are remembered by the Wilderness People and are finally reprinted from memory. What then?

"Wouldn't it be," he continued, "that all would be misremembered, none would come forth in their original garb? Wouldn't they be longer, shorter, taller, fatter, disfigured, or more beautiful?

"Instead of angels in the alcove, might they be gargoyles off the roof?"

I was so fired by Berenson's suggestion that I wrote an outline, thinking, Oh God, if only I had the genius to know some of the really great books of history and rewrite them, pretending to be my future Book People, trying to recall the details of an incredible literature.

I never did this.

But coming upon my note and remembering Berenson 50 years later I thought, Why not outline Berenson's idea and urge my readers to follow and do the same?

What if you could pick your favorite? Kipling, Dickens, Wilde, Shaw, Poe. These, memorized and reborn 30 years from today, how would they, unwillingly, change?

Would Usher fall but to rise again? Would Gatsby, shot, do 20 laps around his pool? Would Wuthering Heights' Cathy, at Heathcliff's shout, run in out of the snow?

"War and Peace." With a century of totalitarian dictatorships behind us, wouldn't Tolstoy's concepts, misremembered, be politically rearranged so that various conflicts in Russian society would come to different ends?

Jane Austen's sweet young ladies recalled by a woman's libber. Wouldn't they be realigned as chess-pieces of 19th-century social life as women further up the ladder, full-blown and arrogant?

"The Grapes of Wrath" might be recalled not as a quietly social statement, but as a full-blown socialist revolt lodged in a dilapidated Tin-Lizzy on Route 66.

Or a semi-demi baroque closet occupant, given the task of echoing "Death in Venice" -- mightn't he, 30 years on, imagine the beautiful seaside Tadzio falling into Aschenbach's arms to be toweled dry with laughter in which that Freudian joy might slay the old author?

Or consider a macho dyslectic who dimly discards every third word in Marcel Proust's Parisian landscape to remember his past so ineptly, dwindling to Toulouse Lautrec size instead of all those languorous perambulations.

And "Moby Dick." In full recall, mightn't we be tempted to hurl Fedallah, the parsee, that boring obstruction, into the sea? Which would then allow Ahab to be yanked overboard by the White Whale. At this point it could easily happen that the motion picture, rather than the book, is recalled and Ahab, latched to the White Whale, with his dead hand beckons his crewmen to follow. So the book would be lost and the film remembered.

What a literary parlor game!

List your 10 favorite novels, and, in great detail, outline their plots, then renew your acquaintance with these to find out how you have scarred, beautified, or mutilated those incredible books. What a pastime for all of us in the near future.

And the books lost in the Book People wilderness, which would be easiest to remember? Not the great ones; they are too complex in different ways. But James Bond, easily remembered, could be set free again, shaken but not stirred by time.

Most mysteries would emerge intact, and the great poems. Think of Yeats's "Golden Apples of the Sun" or "Dover Beach" or Emily Dickinson's quatrains or the snow poems of Robert Frost. These, in the tradition of the ancient tellers of tales, would cross time to arrive abundantly fresh and new.

Children's books, also. It would be hard to imagine "The Wizard of Oz" or "Alice in Wonderland" disfigured by inept recall.

The great plays, "Hamlet," Lear, "Othello," and "Richard III," might arrive, somewhat dwarfed, but that incredible language would ring across the centuries.

Mark Twain's ****** Jim, afloat on that raft down the Mississippi with Huck, might still keep his name in spite of the politically correct critics shouting along the shore. It's a good game. I wish I'd written on it 50 years ago when Berenson first made the suggestion to me.

Go find your bliss, name your favorites, and see if your long umbilical memory has been cut or you are still wonderfully tied to the things you loved in libraries a long time ago.

Mr. Bradbury is the author of "Fahrenheit 451," among other books.

— Ray Bradbury
Remembrance of Books Past
Wall Street Journal
2004-02-02

The Beer Baron · 04-02-2004 8:39pm

Of course a lot of stories pre-date modern publishing, pre-date Guttenberg in many cases they predate alphabets or iconographs and often language itself.
Ancient rites and incantations, tribal ceremonies that may tell of an event thousands of years ago. Then there's folk tales, tales passed on orally, either through music, or word or merely acted out.

Look at our own Irish tradition of the seanachie, who of course, always adds something of their own to the piece, much like a jazz musician improvises with a piece of known music, most of the notes are the same, but the structure has altered somewhat, some notes last longer, some shorter.

There are legends, which are almost certainly embellished with each story, there are various creation stories, mythology of Greece, of Egypt, China, Japan, North and South American, Celtic, Norse...and let's not forget the greatest mythology of all- Semetic.

It's certain that the Bible is one of the oldest historic documents. And certainly it has been validated by other sources religious or not, as an Athiest I feel I can look at it objectivly and say that it is also flawed in the same way. Embellishment, exxageration- to improve the story, a story, much like the works of Homer, mythic, epic and filled with events that are out of the ordinary- miracles. So will, in a few hundred or a thousand years, people worship someone from our times as a god? Could they, for example, worship Elvis Presley as the son of god? Hell it worked for the King of Ethiopia didn't it?

I'm certain the printed word will survive for a long time, that's not what all those E-book dotcommers were once saying, although if you go to the US and stop at a traffic light one of them's likely to wash your windscreen. Still, who knows how the people of the future would react to some of our own artistic leftovers. When you look back on the last century, however, you see a century saturated with more popular culture, more heroes and villains, more characters, cartoons, movies, tv shows, pop-stars, celebrities, ads, products, fads, fashions and we, in the developed world, seem to know them all- who doesn't know what Popeye's girl is called? Or Superman's real identity? And still it goes, as we're begin the 2k's we all become like Japan, the maelstrom of rapid product placement, where a fad can last a second and be gone. As connections get faster so does the flow of information

Echo, yer the first to say it- how fast is the intenet? Someone posts a link to Badgers Badgers in irc and tumbleweed blows across cyberspace- something can go from cool to jaded in less that 24 hours- that's something, megamemetic factories growing and incubating trends with the lifespan of an adult gnat. Wait, wait- did I just say cyberspace? Jeez how 1980s!

I think in a hundred years even the most trite literature will be as Shakespeare was to us. The language thick and ancient, the words only known to us because there are people who read the meaning of Shakespearian words in other books about Shakespere. We're the LOL generation, we clip words, we use slang, we cannot spell or punctuate without a paperclip telling us how and when it does it's wrong. Language will become more compact and truncated- almost like an AOL messenger h4x0r version of 1984's Newspeak. words with 3 or more syllables will be unheard of, Shakespeare himself, or indeed 90% of the worlds languages will be as dead as Latin. Perhaps there may only be one language.

Our news is sensationalised, more than ever. Propaganda and brainwashing by the media and marketing is rampant. If we do not see today as it is, if we percieve the world around us falsely then surely our history will follow is into the great gaping black hole of ignorance. Ultimatly, I believe this to be mankind's fate. As those who come after us will only misinterpret things further. And as they look back upon the past our history will be as trivialised, as exxagerated, as embellished, altered, edited and downright fictionalised as the Bible, as Hercules, as Fionn, Odin and Ra since our sucessors cannot tell the difference between Superman and Hitler, Popeye, Henry the 8th, James Bond, Michael Jackson, Michael Knight and Henry Ford. Eventually we will get dumber, we won't travel to the stars but die right here, without even the ability to draw marking on stone.

Had that anything to do with what you posted?
No it didn't.

jerenaugrim · 07-02-2004 7:14am

All the stories are ancient. It is how they are told that changes. Frank Delaney wrote a novel called "Telling the Pictures", which is about the way, in 40s and 50s Ireland, those who could afford to go to the cinema would have to "tell the pictures" in great detail to those who couldn't. I had cousins up the hills who had a video before they had a bathroom. On Sundays, the older neighbours would gather to watch westerns. It was quite a sight to hear them discussing what was going on, and telling the pictures to those who couldn't see the telly(The man with no name is telling the fella in black to get his gun, they're going to sort this out wance and for all...). The main thrust of the story remains, is often improved by the re-telling
Something like Lebor Gabala, The Book of Invasions, was a fusion of the Bible and Celtic origin myths. There are stories that need to be told in Ireland now that aren't being told- updating The Book of Invasions to include recent events, including recent arrivals. (Invasions in the title is meant to refer more to Arrivals, than to anything hostile) So, if anyone wants to collaborate on The Book of arrivals, I'd be up for it...starting with Genesis, diverging into Irish history with Ceasair, and all the way up to the arrival of the new Irish in recent years. All as re-told by a 50-yr-old wino/sentient. And incorporating all the great works of Irish literature as if they were fact (Daibhi O'Bruadair, Rackrent, nationalist poetry, Joyce, Yeats, Kavanagh, Beckett, !) It is how history is written.
Is that anything to do with this thread?:dunno:

simu · 07-02-2004 9:43pm

It's fascinating how stories change throughout the years!

I'm doing research at the moment for a Master's degree in Irish on one particular poem that grew from 30 to 1100 verses in the space of a few centuries!

I wouldn't be as pessimistic as the Beer Baron about the future of literature, though. Of course people in the future will interpret works from this century differently but it's the same for us - we don't experience poetry from the Middle Ages as ppl would have done back then but that dosen't mean we don't get anything out of it.

Every generation has its own classics as well as its own fads but, given modern technology, it will become easier to preserve more cultural products from the present for any future ppl who are interested.

Literacy isn't being debased in our times either - we're just finding new ways of communicating with our new technology. If you think leetspeak is confusing, you should see the elaborate abbreviations used by 18th century Irish ppl in manuscripts to save valuable space!

Sure, there is propaganda and sensationalism in the media but that has always been the case. If anything, it's easier to find different versions of events nowadays given that anybody can set up their own website. It's not always easy to sift truth from lies but this has always been the case as well.

Certainly, Fionn and Odin and all are fictionalised but really, would it be fun reading sagas about mere mortals who were constantly staving off hunger and disease and death as the ppl who came up with these stories must have been? In their own way, these stories give us psychological insight into the preoccupations of ppl of the past that one could not get from say, DNA analysis of skeletons or excavation of ruins.

You mention that there might only be one language in the future and that is actually something that worries me. It would be a shame if we lost our linguistic diversity - I suppose it's up to us all to try to learn more languages and try to make our kids be bilingual or polyglot!

jerenaugrim · 12-02-2004 1:17am

There will never be only one language.

simu · 13-02-2004 4:57am

Originally posted by jerenaugrim
There will never be only one language.

Read this interview with David Crystal - an expert on linguistics. It makes for sobering reading.

Think of Ireland - in the 19th century, most of Munster would have qualified as a Gaeltacht but nowadays Irish is only spoken in small, isolated districts. Irish is a relatively priviliged language in global terms too - we have a writing system, recognition from the State, education through Irish and so on.

I'm not saying the world will certainly end up with only one language but it is a possibility.

jerenaugrim · 13-02-2004 6:13am

Originally posted by simu
Read this interview with David Crystal - an expert on linguistics. It makes for sobering reading.

Think of Ireland - in the 19th century, most of Munster would have qualified as a Gaeltacht but nowadays Irish is only spoken in small, isolated districts. Irish is a relatively priviliged language in global terms too - we have a writing system, recognition from the State, education through Irish and so on.

I'm not saying the world will certainly end up with only one language but it is a possibility.

Fair enough, simu. But I reckon that, while a lot more languages will die out, new ones will evolve. And there's always hope. It's possible to learn Cornish again, there's a Gadhlig revival in Scotland, I think Irish itself is actually starting to regenerate. A handful of languages will come to dominate, but the amount of Irish spoken everyday now is way more than it was even a decade ago.

simu · 13-02-2004 2:34pm

Originally posted by jerenaugrim
Fair enough, simu. But I reckon that, while a lot more languages will die out, new ones will evolve. And there's always hope. It's possible to learn Cornish again, there's a Gadhlig revival in Scotland, I think Irish itself is actually starting to regenerate. A handful of languages will come to dominate, but the amount of Irish spoken everyday now is way more than it was even a decade ago.

True, there is hope but only if people make an effort to keep minority languages alive. As for new languages evolving, that takes a lot of time and is less likely to happen in a world of instant communication, like ours.

Total Recall? [Article]

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