The heart of astronaut talk, like the heart of all bureaucratic talk, was a jargon which could be easily converted to computer programming, a language like Fortran or Cobol or Algol." According to Mailer, "Anti-dread formulations were the center of it, as if words like pills were there to suppress emotional symptoms" (25). But for him language should bring one closer to reality, make one more alive to it, and therefore such formulaic, impersonal, often inaccurate speech kills the human and the humane in each of us. Mailer, always sensitive to language, heaps up a series of examples of such deadspeak. One of the astronauts, responding no to a reporter's question, says: "that's not a prerogative we have available to us." He could of course have said, "We can't do it," but in trouble he always talked computerese. The use of "we" was discouraged. "A joint exercise has demonstrated" became the substitution. "Other choices" became "peripheral secondary objectives." "Doing our best" was "obtaining maximum advantage possible." "Confidence" became "very high confidence level.". . . The message had to be locked into a form which could be transmitted by pulse or lack of pulse, one binary digit at a time, one bit, one bug to be installed in each box. You could not break through computerese. (39) Although Mailer remains fully aware of the practical justifications of such a narcotizing language that thus assiduously omits all human elements, he also perceives at what cost it protects the speaker and listener from worrisome possibilities.

One of the most terrifying consequences of such deadening language appears to him when he encounters the sublimities of the space ship within a mammoth structure, the world's largest, and then perceives that the men who can create such incredible machines no longer possess the language to make others understand what they have done. Indeed, the names they choose for their creations always produce bathos. Having found himself moved by the immense size of the space ship and then recognizing, in something like a religious conversion, that the future has arrived, Mailer wonders:

Yet all the signs leading to the Vehicle Assembly Building said VAB. VAB -- it could be the name of a drink or a deodorant, or it could be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB. Nothing fit anything any longer. The art of communication had become the mechanical function, and the machine was the work of art. What a fall for the ego of the artist. What a climb to capture the language again! (55-56)

Here Mailer brings together many of his central concerns throughout this volume. To begin with, he points out that a new practical, practicing religion, as Ruskin and Carlyle put it, is in the works, and its monuments are not cathedrals but gigantic creations of modern technology. These changes represent fundamental shifts in the nature of man and society that puzzle one -- and demand interpretation: They provide the interpretive cruxes, the material of the sage. Finally, much that demands interpretation concerns the essential problem of language, which appears to have become corrupted, or at least so changed that it no longer connects us with reality.

Although the technique of definition appears in all forms of argumentation, it plays a particularly important role in the writings of the sage, in part because it blends so effectively with his other approaches, such as attacks upon the audience, and in part because it provides a ready means of demonstrating the audience's need for the sage and his message. Such acts of definition imply that the audience, whether because of its own faults or because of those of others, lacks a language adequate to its needs. Above all, it lacks a language adequate to reality. The sage's definitions imply that he has one and will share it.

Last modified 2000