Israel, June 2001

Todd Oakley
Fictive compression and decompression: Interpretive strategies for understanding fiction-in-print and fiction-in-film, a case study of The Manchurian Candidate

In their most recent essay on conceptual blending, Fauconnier and Turner (in press) claim that "Every-day conceptual life is based on integrating clashes and compressing vital relations like Identity, Time, Space, Cause-Effect, Change, and Part-Whole" and that meaning making "is fundamentally a matter of continually compressing over such vital relations." To live a life, one must, in effect, live in blended mental spaces that compress some of these basic relations. We might postulate that maintaining alertness, sustaining awareness and taking immediate action depend on compressing many distinct forms of representation into unified scenes.

Individuals compress thought by leaving out significant blocks of information (selective projection). For example, last semester I taught a graduate seminar in semiotics. During one of the classes, I engaged in a "debate" with Saussure on the status of "the arbitrary nature of the sign" and on "the linear nature of the sign" that resulted, as one of my students characterized it, "conjuring up the spirit of Saussure." The debate entailed reading a selected passage from the Course in General Linguistics, responding to it, advancing a counter claim in my own "voice," and then having Saussure rejoin my counterclaim by reading or paraphrasing another section of text. Conducting a debate with Saussure entails compressing time, space, change such that Saussure is speaking to us now and not in 1913 (the date of the lectures), and in Cleveland, Ohio not Geneva, Switzerland, and that he is speaking in English and not French -- compressing the entire chain of events leading to the appearance of the text in English. We also compress thought by scaling. We can scale relations up or down, in or out. For example, when I talk on the telephone, I behave almost exactly as if I were engaging in face-to-face conversation, since I preserve spontaneous gesticulation even though my interlocutor cannot see me. I behave this way, in part, because the technology allows me to scale down the conceived distance between the person on the other end of the line and me to only a few feet, when in reality we are miles apart.

Talking on the telephone and staging an imaginary debate are extremely complex behaviors involving combination, recombination, coordination of many partial mental simulations operating in parallel. But they are both behaviors that are more or less automatic. I did not deliberately plan out every facet of the debate with Saussure ahead of time (though I did choose the quoted passages), and I am only subsidiarily aware of the fact that I gesture and nod while talking on the telephone. These behaviors exhibit what Fauconnier and Turner call "immediate insight," complex assemblies that cannot and should not (usually for good evolutionary reasons) be disassembled by the 'executive agent.' In short, much of what we mentally simulate are unified scenes that accommodate clashes of these relations for purposes of immediate insight and action in a potentially dangerous environment.

However, what is distinctive about of many human activities may be characterized as the decompression (or unpacking) relations of Identity, Time, Space, Cause-Effect, Change, and Part-Whole. One argument for the distinctiveness of fiction is that it exploits (and refines) our ability to compress and decompress these relations. And we continue to compress and decompress these relations because doing so give us an edge in planning, communicating, cooperating, etc.

I offer by way of preface a specific example of literary compression and decompression. Mark Twain lays out his five-year plan for reforming spelling in seven sentences. He proceeds by stating the first new spelling rule in the first sentence and subsequently enacting that new rule as he states the second rule in the second sentence, and so on until he gets to the sixth sentence, where he states the sixth rule as he enacts the fifth. In the final sentence, Twain enacts all five new rules, presenting a new orthographic standard for American English that closely approximates his own rural Missouri accent. Twain scales down an historical time span of five years into the phenomenological time span of reading two paragraphs, and appreciating Twain's wit and art entails decompressing coding time and representational time.

At long last we come to the specific subject of my talk. What we call the work of fiction might be the work of compressing basic conceptual relations into representational formats that allow for further compression and decompression for specific expressive purposes; thus, cognitive theories of meaning construction capable of dealing with works "at the high end of the scale of formal or philosophical complexity" would profit from a study analyzing the compression and decompression strategies involved in the representation of the same story in different modes of representation. Therefore, my talk will focus on Richard Condon's 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate and the 1962 film version directed by John Frankenheimer. More specifically, I will focus on the "brainwashing" scene as presented in the novel and film. This scene is particularly apt because the processes of compression and decompression are woven into the storyline itself; that is, unraveling the mystery of the story depends on Colonel Benjamin Marco decompressing specific relations of Identity, Time, Space, and Change that were so tightly compressed as to create an illusion that hides the fact that Sergeant Raymond Shaw, the principal character, is an unwitting but dangerous assassin working for the Chinese and Soviet governments. In both novel and film, decompression comes in the form of a recurring dream.

This representational continuity of a storyline, however, unfolds via dramatically different presentational conditions. The work of fiction-in-print text offers one set of formal constrains for compressing and decompressing the relations that advance the story, while the work of fiction-in-film offers a very different set of constrains for doing the same, yielding a different artistic product altogether. My goal in this talk is to demonstrate how the processes of compression and decompression helps us understand the cognitive strategies readers and spectators might employ when trying to make sense of what is presented to them.

Reference:
Fauconnier, G. & Turner M. In press. Compression and global insight. Cognitive Linguistics, 10.

Todd Oakley
Assistant Professor and Director of Composition
Department of English
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH 44106-7117

Email: tvo2@po.cwru.edu
Home page

top