On Frozen Thought Lecture to ISFIT International Student Festival, Trondheim, March 13, 1997 This will be my first ever lecture in English. I hope some of the more frequent users of the English language in here will excuse the clumsiest expressions I will be going to use. I am out of my medium. I am out of my medium in another way, just as dramatic. This forum is spoken, not written. Let´s consider what that means. The minute the echo of my voice dies down in this room, the words I just have spoken are gone. Some of you will be able to remember the essence of what I just said, but to remember the entire speech, word by word, takes a special talent on the level of Mozart, of whom it is said that as a seven-year old he could write down entire symphonies from memory. I can safely assume that not all of you have that gift. This means that outside this room, no one will ever know the full content of what I just said. It is a little bit like sharing a secret. On the other hand, there are certain advantages to sharing a message in this medium. You can hear the tone of my voice, and you can even look at my face, if you find this interesting or enlightening. This is quite a bit like the advantages of television. Some people feel that by watching someone´s face as they speak, they can decide whether that person speaks true or false. Since my usual business is lying, lying in the sense of telling stories I know to be untrue, this forum puts me at a disadvantage. My wife tells me that I can´t lie with a straight face, although I´m not sure that she catches me every time. On paper, however, I can lie like a true master of the art. This is the basis of literature. If my words are captured on paper — I like to think of the printed word as “frozen thought” — they do not necessarily die inside this room. They are no longer limited by time or space. As a matter of fact, there is only a theoretical limit to the extent that these words could be spread around the world, being in English and everything. This is why the invention of writing, some six thousand years ago, caused a revolution in thinking. Frozen thoughts were able to travel in space and time, and were considered valid even though the person that originally formulated them were dead and gone. It should not be surprising that man in earlier ages considered the frozen thought as possessing magic. The ancient Egyptians made wax figures that they inscribed with magical sentences, and buried them to cause magical effects. In our time, I recently read that the new authorities in Afghanistan has outlawed the use of paper bags for garbage disposal. The reason for this is that recycled paper may have been made from writings that once contained quotations from the Qu´ran. Sacred writings, even if erased, should not be thrown in the trash. In our culture, this sense of magic has long since disappeared. This week, the Norwegian book-selling industry starts its annual large-scale sale, and my last novel is among those books offered at great reduction. The copies of my book that are not sold during this spring-cleaning will be destroyed. Hopefully not burnt, but rather recycled into new writings, some of which will be even less sacred than mine. The bitter truth of this matter is that where there is no reader, the printed word has no power, let alone magic. Some voices tell us that we are moving towards a society without readers, or with less readers than before. They usually agree on that the greatest threat to the magic of the printed word is the magic of television. The belief in the magic of television is quite strong in our time. People say that television is such a “strong” medium that not everything that seems perfectly suitable in printed form is suitable on TV. Children might be watching, the audience is bewitched, hypnotised and thereby defenseless and so on. There was recently a long discussion following a TV show, sent in a typical entertainment slot on Friday night, that portrayed members of the American Ku Klux Klan sharing a cake and stating their beliefs without interruption by the journalists responsible. Audiences were seen to be defenseless against this one-sided propaganda. If this isn´t expressing belief in the magic of television, I don´t know what could be. I have never heard stories of people burying videotapes to work magic, but perhaps the modern mind just doesn´t work that way. I have heard people say, however, that if you´re not on TV, you don´t exist. Let´s assume that these prophets may be true, that the printed word is being replaced by the electronically spoken word. We have already seen the letter being replaced by the telephone call, and later by the cellular telephone call, which by some strange law of physics seems to be even less meaningful in content than the stationary telephone call. The introduction of the printed word five hundred years ago undoubtedly led to the so-called age of enlightenment, and later to parliamentary democracy, the abandonment of slavery, general vote and the rise of science in favor of religion, what we sometimes call the Age of Reason. Will a change in our preferred mode of communication lead to an Age of Unreason, an age of manipulation and lies? I just said that it is easier for me to lie in print than in front of an audience, or my wife, but that is not necessarily true of everybody. The solution to this problem, the problem of telling a lie with a straight face and your eyes glued to the television camera, might lie in what the Americans did some seventeen years ago; to elect an actor as president. In Scandinavia we recently had a debate about whether it is a right and moral thing to translate and reissue the writings of Adolf Hitler, notably his manifesto “Mein Kampf”. In a way, this is to miss the point completely. Hitler didn´t succeed because of his writings, which were rather weak and clumsy. Almost nobody read them. He succeeded because of the spoken media, primarily radio, but also in public meetings like this one. In a way we are defenseless when a message is conveyed in this manner, compared to a printed message — we cannot ask “Hey, wait a minute, what was it this guy just said?” and then go back and consider the message at our own pace, read the sentence again and again to discover its true meaning, or lack of logic. It´s gone. But in writing, the stupidity of ”Mein Kampf” is there for everyone to see. Also the seduction, if you are receptable to it. I personally don´t believe that the printed word will be abandoned in any foreseeable future. But something is happening to it that is almost as exciting. The printed word is leaving paper behind, and can not in any logical sense be described as being “printed” anymore. I am talking, of course, about computer networks and the digital storage of frozen thought. This will make the frozen thought even more independent of time and space, will in fact make its physical mass irrelevant. An empty computer disk or CD weighs just as much as one filled with the most profound writing. The concept of burning a book to get rid of an unpleasant idea, a scenario that is just as horrible to us as throwing away paper bags that might have contained writings from the Qur´an is to the fundamentalist government in Afghanistan, will be obsolete. There is no way to burn and get rid of a digital message, once it has been copied and distributed. There is no way of keeping a digital message inside or outside of a country´s borders. And the final exciting thing about the digital message is that it is, at last, a truly democratic medium. Apart from possessing a computer and a phone line, there are almost no expenses involved in having a digital message distributed around the world in seconds. The way I see it, this is a major step towards freedom. Freedom of information is such an empowerment that the most typical trait of dictatorship is trying by all necessary means to limit that freedom. The means that a dictatorship will employ is gaining total control over news media, applying censorship, shutting down publishers and even jailing the most unpleasant writers. Apart from this last step, the most desperate a government can undertake, the means of controlling frozen thought is in the process of being snatched away. It just isn´t possible anymore. This fact is sending both democratic and despotic governments around the world into total panic. From the despotic state´s point of view, the explanation is quite obvious. How about democratic states — why are they in such a panic? In a society that is founded on the principle of freedom of speech, such as the United States, the argument tends toward repeating incantations of magic. People are defenseless. Children might be watching. Last year, the US were close to passing a law that would prohibit not only certain images, but also certain words, from being distributed digitally through computer networks and the Internet. The words were typically related to sexual actions and toilet matters. Children might be watching! You and I may be hardened and cynical enough to be able to digest words like “shit” og “fuck” in a written context, but so is not everyone. And when you really start exploring language and written expression, you find a lot of offensive material. It is not madness to be offended by something you read. Madness is to give yourself the power to obliterate whatever offends you. For instance, last week a couple of well-meaning political activists tried to inform the Norwegian public that they don´t approve of the word “negro”. The word is racist, they say. So is, if I understand these people correctly, the word “jungle”. It should not be called “jungle” anymore, but “tropical forest”. A person who was earlier referred to as a “negro”, should now be spoken of as an “african”. As a writer I suppose I should be delighted by this — proof that written language still has a sense of magic, that if we bury the offending word we also bury the offending sentiment. Well, I am not delighted. Personally, I don´t like it if people say or write that I am fat, and hopefully this will be respected as a general rule. But I can´t possibly imagine a world where the word itself, “fat”, has been inscribed on a wax figure and buried, to be replaced by “gravitationally challenged” or some other form of politically correct mumbo jumbo. Come to think of it, I don´t suppose our activist friends approve of the phrase “mumbo jumbo” either. It sounds like something a “negro” would believe in. I know they mean well, and I personally hate racism, even to the extent that I try not to use the word “negro” myself, at least not in writing. But there is a book everyone should read, as a duty, before they raise their voices about trying to limit the use of words and language. That book is “1984” by George Orwell, in which the author describes a society where language is purified. Purified in the sense that there are no longer words to express dissent. This society has taken one step further from limiting the freedom of speech, it has also taken to engineering language in a way that makes the dissenting statement impossible, and meaningless. This is a truly horrifying book, more horrifying than anything written by Adolf Hitler. I am not saying that we are moving closer to that society. But a recent court case in Norway is still bothering me a lot. This case, to summarize it to our foreign friends, was about the leader of an extremely small, racist political party and a few phrases in their party principles. This political party were planning to go to elections by suggesting a law in which adopted children from a non-European country where supposed to be sterilised, as not to pollute the Norwegian gene pool. The party leader was prosecuted and sentenced to a fine and a suspended prison sentence. I don´t think his ideas are all that great, but that is beyond the matter in hand. He should have been allowed to say it, print it and distribute it. That is a basic human right. In a country that on a great many occasions has reminded the world that the writer Salman Rushdie should be allowed to speak his word about religious matters, thereby offending a lot of people, a court decision of this sort is nothing short of a catastrophe. Worse than that, it shows a double standard, a hypocrisy. A mature and democratic society can not defend its citizens against words on the ground that they are defenseless against those words, that is invoking magic. People are not defenseless. That is my firm conviction. Let´s look at the society that treats its citizens as children, my own. In Norway we have strict restrictions agains advertising to promote tobacco smoking. It is legal for everyone over a certain age to go into a shop and buy cigarettes, but advertising them is strictly forbidden. As a result of this, I am not allowed to smoke cigarettes when I appear on television, even if nobody in the actual room where the program is taped, takes offense. As a matter of fact, I find appearing on television so unpleasant that if I could, I would probably smoke before, during and after. But children might be watching. Clever children might also be able to read my novels, in which people have been known to light up, not only ordinary cigarettes. In a society that treats everyone as defenseless, as children, this would not be allowed. Or we might work out a compromise — it is OK to let this or that character smoke in an early chapter, but only if I portray him dying a painful death from lung cancer later in the story. In this way the moral content of the story would not be compromised. People would go away from the reading knowing that smoking is bad for you. So that is what I have called the power and horror of the printed word: In a story, I could have a character smoke and get away with it. Hell, I could describe how cigarettes actually made this character stronger, more healthy and more intelligent. How they improved his sex life. If I tried this trick on television, I would not get away with it, because the television audience is construed as defenseless, hypnotised by the medium. They would pull in some expert to cite statistics, telling the audience that what I just said was untrue. If they didn´t, everyone would run out and buy cigarettes after watching my appearance. At least that is what society thinks. So the really interesting question is this: Which medium shall set the standard for communication? If the notion that communication is magic, that the audience is mesmerised and defenseless, should filter down from the audiovisual media to the world of writing, we will all get poorer. The result will not only be novels where nobody smokes, as it already is in television shows, but it could also prevent the distribution of radical thought, of provoking new ideas. Not all provoking new ideas are as offending as the suggestion that adopted children should be sterilised, but all new ideas are sure to provoke at least someone, at least the person responsible for the idea that is about to be replaced. Democracy is rule by the majority, but it is not protecting the majority against the views and thoughts of the minority. That is not democracy, that is rule by the mob. In this context, I see the modern media, not all of them electronic, as media controlled by the majority and designed to fill the majority´s needs. If a TV show gets bad ratings, it is taken off the air. If enough people call in and complain about the content, the content will be changed. If someone in a mass medium voices an aggressive sentiment about homosexuality, for instance, pressure groups will threaten to boicott the medium, thereby effectively keeping such sentiments off the air. If I go on air on commercial TV telling people that this or that diaper can´t absorb the tiniest amount of piss, the manufacturer will pull their advertising, thereby effectively keeping my scepticism towards their diapers off the air. And so on and so forth. Mass media will always take the path of least resistance. Which in my opinion is why they are practically useless. Printed media, or should I say non-printed printed media, are in the mean time evolving to a point where they are practically uncontrollable. These are the tools of the minorities, the dissenters, the liars, the charlatans, the people who believe in saying something unpleasant just to watch the reaction, maybe to tell by this reaction the state of permissiveness in the society it describes. I say that´s OK. It´s fine by me. Let´s keep it that way.