The Limits of Language and the Never Ending Connections of "Night Train"

Quentin Tarantino has made quite a few movies in which he mashes genre. One in particular is his World War II themed, spaghetti western, revenge flick Inglorious Basterds.  A group of American soldiers, compiled of Jewish men, are sent into German occupied areas so that they can kill Nazis.  In one scene, Brad Pitt's character is discussing an assassination plot with Diane Kruger's character and language becomes an important attribute.  Undoubtedly, this is Tarantino's way of poking fun at Americans because we presumably do not know nearly as many languages as others.  However, this also highlights a very important aspect of language.  Pitt's character must infiltrate a theater by playing the role of an Italian, but he only knows basic Italian with an incredibly bad accent.  Kruger's character is multilingual and mocking Pitt, while the scene itself is stressing the importance of language and communication.  I find it interesting that the limitation of Pitt's character is his lack of language, the inability to understand another person.  Language and connectivity are something that David Mitchell clearly places importance on in his hyperlink novel Ghostwritten.  As Rita Barnard accurately describes, "Ghostwritten forcefully reminds its readers that the world is a multilingual place; it invites them, through the overarching metaphor of ghostwriting, to adopt a kind of drifting or spectral relation to language, a relation that estranges English while reducing the alienness of other tongues" (213).  By placing this importance on language and connectivity, which by the hyperlink form alone lends itself to what Barnard argues as a cosmopolitan text, Mitchell is making a statement as to how different perceived connections and actual connections are.

As many have pointed out in their posts this week, this novel's connections between these characters left a lot of people wanting more.  These small connections that we all hunted for while reading didn't have the same satisfying effect as the final throws of Hotel World, like Julie mentioned, or as Nikki pointed out, there were characters that we wished we knew more about.  For this I agree, but what I found most interesting about these subtleties is how little the actual connection to another person or even another place was necessary for me to shoot back to that character.  This allowed the book to become very visceral for me.  While the book is giving me very little to connect to, I find myself making connection is a rapid fire, natural manner.  For instance, the zookeeper says at one moment when discussing a fireball that he/she set off in Texas that "china teacups rattled," implying of course that there were people using china teacups, not that the teacups in China shook, this immediately made me think of the "Holy Mountain" chapter.  The zookeeper offered the most interesting connections in my mind. 

 The zookeeper acts as a "god" perspective and the language of the zookeeper is technical so it naturally separates Bat both intellectually, as Bat is very colloquial, but spatially because the zookeepers descriptions imply that he/she is sitting on a satellite.  This calls to mind the vastness that is our planet.  As Barnard points out, this section is the most shifting in regards to time and even space.  Although the entire chapter takes place inside a radio studio, it is through the zookeeper that the global movement takes place.  I find it fascinating that the action in this chapter takes place only through language.  Of course, a novel only offers language for action to take place in, but there is descriptive movement that allows the readers to imagine actual movement, while in the "Night Train" section, the implied movement is implied again through the zookeeper because Bat remains in the studio.  This separates the reader further from action, or distills action further, implying that the connections between people spatially is what distills the "closeness" that people feel emotionally.  

The zookeepers first conversation with Bat is qualified by a phone call from Mrs. Rey, the writer..  Mrs. Rey tells Bat, "The human world is made of stories, not people.  The people the stories use tell themselves are not to be blamed.  You are holding one of the pages where these stories tell themselves, Bat" (378).  Mrs. Rey is telling Bat to allow the connections between people to happen, receive the calls that may be insane or unreliable because those stories are connecting people and are told in the language of connection and are organic happenings.  It is in this language, the art of story telling that connections take place, and Bat even accredits Mrs. Rey for the reason he stays on the line with the zookeeper, allowing the connections to be made.  During the second conversation with the zookeeper, language is addressed in a very sidelined comment when Bat says, "No doubt you speak Italian?" and the zookeeper replies, "Languages are a necessary part of my work" (390).  Language is a tool that the zookeeper uses, and as a perfectly logical "artificial intelligence," the zookeeper understands the pragmatic uses of language, while Mrs. Rey is clearly stating the idealistic uses of language: to transmit not only information as the zookeeper would do, but to also express ideology and sentiment with all the flourishes of human emotion.  

It is in this section, "Night Train," that the technological age meets an arcane source of entertainment, the radio talk show.  Mitchell chose a DJ of a late night talk show to host the artificial intelligence that is capable of destroying and saving the world.  Language acts as both an inhibitor of our abilities to connect, as Tarantino pokes fun at, or a tool of connectivity.  As the radio program comes in contact with this artificial intelligence, Bat receives cosmopolitanization from within while the zookeeper gets localization from without, as Barnard would say.