Why can't Hal communicate? His thoughts, while kind of all over the place, are basically coherent. He's aware that he can't make himself understood, but is powerless to do anything about it - (see the bottom of page 9, "I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.") Shortly after this when he tries to speak, he says, "I cannot make myself understood. I am speaking slowly and distinctly. 'Call it something I ate.'"
Right after that line, 'call it something I ate,' the scene shifts from the college interview to Hal as a 5 year-old eating a large patch of mold, causing his mom to (understandably) freak out.
The description of the noises Hal makes when trying to speak are pretty interesting: 'subanimalistic', 'like a drowning goat', 'a vision of hell', 'only marginally mammalian.' Again, the question is why? Why can't Hal make himself understood?
A random bit from the first section:
- on page 12 Hal mentions 'I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist.' I had never heard of Gabor, his wikipedia page includes the following:
Gabor's research focused on electron inputs and outputs, which led him to the invention of re-holography.[3] The basic idea was that for perfect optical imaging, the total of all the information has to be used; not only the amplitude, as in usual optical imaging, but also the phase. In this manner a complete holo-spatial picture can be obtained.[3] Gabor published his theories of re-holography in a series of papers between 1946 and 1951.[3]
Gabor also researched how human beings communicate and hear; the result of his investigations was the theory of granular synthesis, although Greek composer Iannis Xenakis claimed that he was actually the first inventor of this synthesis technique. [1] Xenakis was the first to explicate a compositional theory for grains of sound. He began by adopting the following lemma: "All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time."
Why does Hal think Gabor's the anti-christ?
That's interesting about Gabor, I never knew that. My first thought about the anti-christ remark is that it has something to do with Hal's father. I don't know if I can say more without spoiling some plot points, but I would bet that the visual aspect of Gabor's research matters more here.
ReplyDeleteWhich, as one popular theory about Hal goes, is all tied up in how he ends up not being able to communicate.
jesus, this is tricky to do without revealing anything......
Wow, good catch, it never occured to me to look that up.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that Himself did a lot of research in the area of ocular physics during his life; it's going to come up this week, and it's just character background info. Could Gabor have been a professional rival? Former partner who froze Himself out of credit/prize money for a co-doscovery?
i figured it was that gabor's research made possible himself's greatest (worst?) work. and that's why hal would be so pissed about gabor, that he had a hand in unleashing that....
ReplyDeleteAlso possible that Hal delved into Gabor's granular synthesis thing, realized that Gabor was correct (that 'All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time.') and Hal was somehow able to break each sound down to its component part, but then wasn't able to put it back together again. Hence when he tried to talk, the sounds were all fucked up and rearranged into a subanimalistic noise. Probably a stretch, but . .
ReplyDelete