Chapter 39 Telephone

He came to the phone in the outer hall. "Honey," he said. "Mr. Last? Here is your message, from Mrs. Brenda." "Okay, get me Mrs. Brenda." "She can't talk to you herself. Let me bring you a message. She said she couldn't be with you tonight, and she was sorry. She was very tired and went home to bed." "Tell her I want to talk to her." "I'm afraid not. She's asleep. She's tired." "She's tired. Is she in bed?" "yes." "I don't care, I want to talk to her." "Goodbye," said the voice.

"Old man got tricked," Beaver said as he hung up the phone. "Oh! I'm so sorry for him. But who told him to rush here without saying hello? You should teach him a lesson, and don't make surprise attacks in the future." "Does he do this often?" "Not really." the phone is ringing. "Do you think it will be him? Let me pick it up." "I want Mrs. Brenda on the phone." "Tony, honey, it's me, Brenda." "Some fucking fool said I can't talk to you." "I left a message in the dining-room. How was your evening?"

Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934) The telephone is so ubiquitous in modern life that people are so familiar with it that it's easy to forget how unnatural it was for people of yore to have a conversation without seeing each other or having direct contact.In a normal conversation, the two parties are together face to face, adding meaning to the conversation through facial expressions and body language.Sometimes it is possible to communicate simply through non-verbal behaviors such as shrugging shoulders, squeezing hands, frowning, etc.Until the recent invention of videophones (which were still in their infancy), callers did not have access to the communication channels described above.Also, since the parties on the call cannot see each other, it is easy to cheat, leading to confusion, misunderstanding and alienation between the two parties on the call.

Evelyn Waugh belongs to the same generation of novelists as Henry Green, Christopher, Ashwood, Ivy Compton-Burnet, and others who were interested in the expressiveness of dialogue in their novels.Their novels create an effect I call "surfacing" (see Section 25 for details).The characters in the novel show or expose their inner world through their speech, or flog themselves.The narrator of the story, on the other hand, keeps a distance, making no psychoanalytic or moral commentary.It is no surprise, then, that Evelyn Waugh became the first British novelist to recognize the importance of the telephone in modern life and the comic and dramatic effects it could bring.A chapter in his second novel, "Filthy Carcasses," consists entirely of two phone calls between the hero and heroine, with no commentary or even a sign of dialogue.During the conversation we learn that the relationship between the two of them has broken down, and the heroine solemnly announces that she is married to the hero's best friend.The language used by the author is clichéd and formulaic.They kept saying "yes, ok". "Got it, got it" when in fact, nothing was "good" and neither of them knew each other nor could they see each other.The result is both hilarious and pathetic.The passage quoted above from "A Handful of Dust" is similar to this.

Tired of her husband and life in that horrible mansion, Brenda Last hooks up with a penniless young playboy John Beaver, falsely claiming she needs to be in London a lot Take an economics class.One day, Tony came to town unexpectedly and found her out to dinner.Disappointed, he passed the time at the club accompanied by old friend Jock Grant Menzies.Then there was a call to hear a message from Brenda. Since the two parties in the call did not meet each other, the first effect of the ensuing conversation was comic: Tony greeted affectionately with a "dear", but received a formal answer from an unknown third party .Tony didn't seem to realize that this man was just passing the microphone, so he insisted on talking to his wife with that willful energy.In addition to the comic effect, it is also full of sympathy and pity.Because Tony, who is lonely and unbearable, really longs to communicate with his wife who is not around, but his wife has been avoiding him and betraying him, and Tony is still kept in the dark about this.The reader may infer from the line "she ... went to sleep" that this third person is calling from where Brenda eats.But we found out that it was Beaver who was talking, and he was with Brenda, maybe fooling around in bed, but Tony didn't know anything about it. "'The old man got tricked,' said Beaver as he hung up the phone." Despite its apparent simplicity, the line was flawless and perfect.It is not until the end that the reader learns the fact that Tony is being tricked from the words, which makes the effect more prominent.Words that would have been tender and kind on other occasions mean contempt here.

contempt, indifference and loss of conscience.Brenda does get "tired" of Tony, but flips the moral upside down with a flick of the tongue.The implication is that this is all Tony's fault, "Who told him to rush here without saying hello?".This is also the starting point or motivation that the novel repeatedly wants to express. The phone rang again, and Tony asked to speak to Brenda again. "Tony, honey, it's me, Brenda." Here comedy and betrayal are cleverly combined: Tony misunderstands again, and Brenda's insincere "dear" once again exposes her betrayal .Tony lives at the club, calls Brenda late at night in a room too small to live with Brenda, insists on speaking to Brenda, which in itself is illogical, because if someone answers the phone, then That person should be Brenda.Delirious with alcohol, he confuses this conversation with a call he just had with "some fucking fool."And that idiot's call was supposed to be from where Brenda was staying.Of course, this "misunderstanding" cannot continue.Brenda quickly realized the danger, so she lied again: "I left a message at the dining place."

There is some truth in saying that all dialogue in a novel is like a conversation on a telephone.This is because, unlike a play, the dialogue takes place without the two parties actually face to face.Indeed, the dialogues in the novel lack some ideographic functions because they cannot mark the phonetic language.Some novelists try to make up for it with words, such as "'No,' he whispered, his voice a little hoarse", "'Yes! ' she exclaimed happily." But Waugh chose to let specific language To comment on the speech and behavior of the characters in the novel, let readers read these dialogues silently in their hearts, and make judgments on the vanity, cruelty and sympathetic self contained in them.

When the author was writing this article, a new book was published, which is a model of "telephone novel".The title of this novel is "The Voice" and the author is an American named Nicholson Becker.He has written three novels before, which are "minimalist and abstract works of art", which opened up a generation of novel creation. The UK edition of The Voice describes it on the cover as "a novel about sex over the phone", and it's fitting.The whole novel consists of one long telephone conversation.All the writing is in the form of dialogue except for the conversation mark.The conversation takes place between a man and a woman on both sides of the North American ocean, whose only link is an adult communication hotline.They communicated with each other in detail about their sexual orientation, fantasies and sexual experiences, and finally both parties achieved orgasm at the same time through masturbation.The unnaturalness of using the telephone as a means of communication, especially as a tool for sexual stimulation and orgasm, is due to the omission of the most important part of normal sexual behavior, namely, physical contact and sexual intercourse. Penis insertion.However, some would argue that the sex on the phone highlights that masturbation is a perversion.It should come as no surprise, then, that The Voice has become a controversial novel, eliciting diametrically opposed reactions.Is it a pornographic novel that caters to the market, or is it a powerful indictment of the boring sex life in the age of AIDS, or is it a passionate tribute to the way humans can find pleasure without side effects through cooperation?In the form of dialogue, the author completely shifts the responsibility of answering this question to the readers. Of course, the responsibility of the question itself should be borne by the author.