Look Again

I re-read ‘The Big Sleep’ the other day, and enjoyed it very much. I was reminded of a famous plot hole in the novel that came to light when William Faulkner was writing the screenplay.

During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler, who told a friend in a later letter: “They sent me a wire … asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either”. (Wikipedia)

We have all spotted plot holes, or had them pointed out to us. Often, the discoverers of these little slips are triumphant in their ruthless logic, and one can feel childishly deflated that the world of a favorite work makes no sense at all.

Recently, however, I have come to regard the noticing of a plot hole as being a symptom of the general failure of a work, rather than its cause. If a reader (or viewer) is so uninvolved in the emotional life of the characters, and is instead calculating the physics of the piece like a little counting machine, then the creator has lost the battle already.

As humans, we seem perfectly adapted to ignore plot holes, and inconvenient facts generally. Our minds are constantly filling in gaps for us, to the extent that we need to work quite hard to even notice that we are quite blind in the centre of our field of vision. There is not a mother in the world who does not attribute criminal acts on the part of their children to the ‘bad crowd’ they fell in with.

With works of fiction, I think it often goes like this. We are asked of we like or did not like a work of fiction, and asked to give reasons. If we did not like it, we often point out that the plot made no sense, and give examples of this. We mistake the existence of a nonsensical plot with our dissatisfaction with the work overall.

However, few readers of The Lord of the Rings have thrown the book across the room because no-one thought to have an eagle drop the darn thing into Mount Doom from a safe height. If a work appeals to us, we are happy to put up with all kinds of hurdles, in fact we delight in filling in the gaps with little works of fiction of our own. Which is what makes stories so exciting anyway: the creative act of populating the world of our own imagination with characters and situations from another.

Plot hole finders can seem like Oscar Wilde’s cynics: people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But often, what they are really doing is indicating a deeper problem with the story, which has stopped it soaring over such petty turbulence and directly into our inner life.

Mass production has always been used as a swear word, in my experience. If something is described as mass produced, it is implied that it is cheap and nasty, and liable to fall apart at the first opportunity.

The Left, in particular, always seem to have had a problem with it. We are invited to pity the worker who stands on a production line, giving each screw a quarter turn, and who stands in stark contrast with the craftsman who produces a complete product from start to finish, burnished with his sweat and honed from decades of experience. Mass production was seen as soulless, and craftsmanship was seen as granting crafted items with a virtual layer of spiritual polish.

William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement certainly promoted this view. The Bauhaus Movement fought this idea head on, by trying to create beautiful things which were none-the-less, mass produced. Opinion differs as to their success, depending on personal taste, but the idea of mass production being a cheap shortcut has persisted.

The problem I have always had with these arguments is that the supposed victims of mass production – the proletariat – often look like the greatest beneficiaries. If Henry Ford had produced fine, hand-crafted cars, at the rate of one a week, the enormous increase in personal freedom brought about by the motor car, may well have never happened.

But the ultimate mass produced item, in my opinion, is the humble printed book. Before mass production, books had to made by hand. Each one might have been a hand crafted gem of exquisite beauty – but a book is not a gem, it is a machine for storing and transmitting ideas. The more books you have, the better society seems to be.

So, I have never understood the philosophy of limited-edition books. Printing is only a method of mass production – below a certain quantity, in the pre-digital age, it was far easier to employ a calligrapher to hand write copies for you, than to have them printed. Before about 1980, printing one hundred copies of a book was like using an Eighteen-wheel truck to walk down to the bottom of your garden.

Therefore, for me, the most beautiful books are the ones that fulfill the potential that mass production offers. In my case, that can mean Penguin paperbacks from the 1940s and 1950s. They were priced to match a packet of cigarettes, and sold in railway stations, or from mechanical dispensers. That way, new translations of The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, and War & Peace, amongst others, were put into the hands of ordinary people, the supposed victims of mass production, for a very low price.

We keep getting told how publishing in undergoing its greatest transformation since Gutenberg, and perhaps it is. But our tendency to lump the whole history of publishing into one ‘pre-web’ catagory means we can forget how much it changed fairly recently. Publishing was last turned on its head in the 1980s. How it did might have some hints as to how things might develop.

First, the basics. Gutenberg invented movable type in about 1455. That meant that to put letters on pages, someone had to stand in front of a tray of metal characters and put them in place one letter at a time. The finished pages of type were inked, and paper was pressed down to make a finished page. Printing got more sophisticated, but the manually arranging of little lead letters continued pretty much unchanged until about 1900. That’s 450 years, which is a long time, even for turtles.

Then, in 1900, at least two companies, Monotype and Linotype, came up with methods of mechanically automating this process. Someone would type into a typewriter-like keyboard, which would, through a series of mechanical miracles, produce the lead letters, and the rest of the process continued as normal. This method remained the dominant one for about 70 years. Although this was a big change, it was not revolutionary. The mediaeval guild system had morphed seamlessly into trade unionism. Working methods had become custom, which then became ossified into rigid practice.

In the 1960s, two big things happened. Firstly, lithography started to take the place of old-fashioned letterpress printing. Instead of ink-coated metal being pressed onto paper, printing was achieved by taking advantage of the fact that oil and water do not mix. This was done by coating one side of a metal sheet with a photo sensitive layer. You would take a photograph – a big photograph – of a page you wanted to print. Then you would take the sheet of negative film that resulted, place it over the metal sheet, and expose it to ultraviolet light. When this was finished, you had a piece of metal with a faint picture on it. Then you kept the plate wet. Water was repelled by the exposed part of the plate, which meant that ink could stick to it.

This meant that you no longer needed lead type to print anything. In practice, many printers still used old fashioned methods to produce a ‘galley’ of type (a single sheet of paper printed from the lead letters) to make the artwork which would end up being photographed. But, soon, phototypesetting became more attractive.

This way, instead of your typesetting machine producing a lead letter, it would flash a beam of letter-shaped light onto photographic paper, as you typed. The output would be a sheet of photographic paper, or bromide, which could be stuck into place on your page artwork, using sticky wax.

These new methods gave great creative freedom. You could now print pretty much anything you imagined, without having to make a metal model of it first. But everyone from Gutenberg’s first print shop was still in attendance. Typesetting was a specialist job, requiring great skill. A typesetter would start as an Apprentice (and would have to pay for an indenture for the privilege of being given the job), until he became a Journeyman, when he could work elsewhere. After 7 years, he could become a Master. There was no way to short-cut the system.

Enter the Digital age. Which will be in Part 2.

Many of us have heard some version of the famous story at the start of Stephen Hawking’ Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Science is different from the humanities. Science has objective truth, a point where things just are provable, like prime numbers, or the speed of light. But humanities just has more turtles. It took me a long time to get this.

I grew up in South Africa, but in a Western household. So all the books, movies and television shows presented to me as good and authentic had either come from Europe or America. My grandmother used to send my parents the English Sunday papers now and again, and my brother and I used to get British comics like the Beano and the Dandy. Of course, these comics presented a way of life that we found totally alien, and sometimes difficult to understand. Reading them now, the world of the Beano is as invented and unreal as the world of P. G. Wodehouse, but I couldn’t have understood that. I really thought that British kids were rewarded for good deeds by being given enormous Five Pound notes, which they then immediately spent on a slap-up feed of bangers and mash.

I didn’t know what mash was and had no idea why British kids were always hungry. Were they so poor that their parents couldn’t feed them? Did all the teachers really have mortar boards? Apparently not, but why show them then? I couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

Mad Magazine came a bit later, and featured parodies of TV shows and films I had never seen. These also underwent forensic examination. I got really good at teasing out cross-references, and spotting cast members who popped up in other contexts.

There are still movies where I am not sure if I have ever really seen them: perhaps I just read the parody so many times that I think I have. I thought that Star Wars was a musical, because Mad Magazine had the characters singing silly songs. I sometimes meet American people who are surprised to meet a Brit who can talk about Welcome Back Kotter and Laverne & Shirley without ever having seen them.

Eventually, we got an Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I started working through subjects. But, again, I was frustrated. Where to start? All the entries pre-supposed knowledge of other areas. I worked studiously through as much of the Propaedia (“The core of the Propædia is its Outline of Knowledge, which seeks to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge”) as I could. Still, everything stood on top of something else.

Even The Iliad, which was meant to be the last turtle in Western Literature, starts in the middle of a ten year war. How to go back to the original source of the Trojan War? It seems there is no original source.

Then, a bombshell. I saw a film called ‘Quest for Fire’ and my mind was expanded. It tells the story of a group of early humans who lose their fire. They do not have the technology to make their own, so go in search of a source, and have adventures. Simple enough. Except, when they spoke, there were no subtitles. They used a language created especially for the film by Anthony Burgess. And, as you watched, you worked out what they were talking about. You gradually absorbed their vocabulary. And, at the end, when the hero gives a brief speech, you understand him.

Surely there was something in this. Had we reached the end of the turtles?

Perhaps language was the answer. Even the words we speak have no meaning in and of themselves: they are derived from other words, words in older, more authentic languages. Perhaps if I learned Latin, or Ancient Greek, everything would become clearer – I would have foundation to build on. So I did learn Ancient Greek, and found that it also sat on top of older, completely forgotten, languages. And far from being simpler and more direct, was staggeringly complex and oblique.

So, it finally became clear that, culturally, at least, nothing has any meaning on its own. It only makes sense in the context of everything else. You need a dictionary to read a dictionary. There is no beginning to the story. Even one’s one birth is halfway through somebody else’s story. It’s turtles all the way down.