Free A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt Page B

with a white collar—a rose-pink shirt with a black and white optical tie with little boxes whose perspective was unstable, and could be read many ways. His glasses now had large, heavy, squarish rims. His dark hair was longer. He was slightly too plump for this style, but not unpleasing, she remembered.
    The television, Wilkie said, very seriously, was going to change everyone’s consciousness. In large ways and small. The large ways were more obvious. It was already clear to everyone who mattered that the politics of the future would be conducted in these small boxes. “You have to learn to
charm
people when your face is a few inches across and you’re talking into the intimacy of their fish and chips, or their fondling their girl-friend’s breasts, or shoving mush down their yowling infant ...” Rhetoric would go, must go, was going. If you were going to sway the masses you must be able to do it one by one “sight unseen” as the lovely phrase has it. “It will look more honest and
be
more insidious and dishonest,” said Wilkie.
    And then, television was going to change the larger world. Television was making the Vietnam war impossible for the Americans. It was revealing the images of napalm there, of starvation elsewhere on the earth. McLuhan’s “global village” was one way of putting it. He preferred to think it had shrunk the earth. You’ll notice, he said, as we go on, we’ll talk more and more about “the planet” because from out there in space it seems small, a unity, lonely up there with its colours, the swirls of blue, and ochre, and green.
    Frederica said she’d already noticed that contemporary novels tended to mention the fact of the box flickering away in the corner of the room, with its grey other-life, soldiers and tanks or other sinks in other kitchens. She said she thought it might take the place of the hearth in nineteenth-century fiction, the coals where Dickens’s characters saw the generation of fantastic images, the warmth around which stories were read aloud, or told, or lived.
    â€œYou are still thinking in terms of novels,” said Wilkie. “But yes, that’s just, that’s very just. I was thinking also of Plato’s Cave, with the fire and the shadows.”
    â€œNovels won’t go away.”
    â€œThat remains to be seen.”
    â€œWe
need
images made of language.”
    â€œIndeed. But we are entering an age when language becomes subordinate to images. At the moment, what passes for the art of the television is bastard forms of other art-forms. Puppet-shows for kids, kitchen-sink drama squashed into three piece suites, cramped epic
films,
talking heads reciting poems after midnight.
    â€œNow we have colour—remember the colour,” Wilkie adjured Frederica, his black and white tie following the contour of his small belly under the rich rosy shirt—“they will think of showing films about paintings and films about films, but they should be making works of art designed to be seen in small boxes with the light constructed in pixels, magenta, green, cyan blue. And the subject-matter of that art should be everything that can be thought about in coloured images, from politicians’ lips to craters on the moon, from blood-corpuscles under the microscope and the slow growth of embryos to the unfolding of flowers and the seeding of forests, and all this can be woven together, as the technology advances, into one great living tapestry. Also, it can and must be
about itself,
which is suggested by your idea of flickering grey hearths in the corner of real rooms. It can show how it changes the way we see the world. It can analyse the way we respond to stimuli—whether babies seeing faces, or gannets seeing beaks, or people on sofas being induced to want—
now
—ripple ice-cream with chocolate coating. It can always show and, if it chooses, always simultaneously think. What