While it is a truism that anyone who tries to write stories must engage in the arduous process of organising words and sentences, it is also the case that for some authors language becomes more central, as it famously does in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books. For Roald Dahl, too, I would argue, the shape, sound and possibilities of language are abiding concerns, often becoming part of the subject matter or plot. The title story of Dahl’s teenage collection,
The Great Automatic Grammatizator, and Other Stories
, is a key example.
Here, the protagonist, Adolph Knipe, feeds a primitive computer a range of themes, plots, writing styles, vocabulary and proper names in order to have it generate stories. After initial success Knipe seeks to monopolise the market by having other writers sign a contract agreeing not to write any more but, in return for a lifetime’s pay, to let the agency produce stories under their names. But this third-person story, written in the narrative past, has a Dahlesque ‘twist’ towards the end:
This last year … it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.
Does this surprise you?
I doubt it.