Don’t Put That Fish in My Ear

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Blog 4

An agreement is struck every time I pick up a book. I am saying that I will try to read the text as it was meant to be read, and if I fail in this agreement I won’t enjoy the text as much as I could. This is me accepting my readerly role. I made this agreement when I picked up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (THGTTG), I said I would try to be this narrator’s addressee.

Following what I just said, there are two roles present in every book, right? The narrator and the addressee. But, during our discussions in class we looked deeper and said there are actually three roles present in every text, the narrator, the addressee, and the reader reading the narrator address the addressee.

 

“I like the cover,” he said. “‘Don’t Panic.’ It’s the first helpful or intelligent thing anybody’s said to me all day” (47).

To peel apart each of these roles in THGTTG, we first have to look back to our previous discussion on the book’s dominant Network of Controlling Values. As unique human beings we bring to the text our own dominant network of controlling values that may run counter to the ones my group and I found in THGTTG, as James Seitz argues “Readers who are unable, for whatever reasons, to assume the values of the implied author will find the text less satisfactory than they would otherwise” (142). (In this example the implied author is our narrator). In other words, readers who can not step into the role of the addressee and experience the text with this assumed set of controlling values, the reader will not have an enjoyable experience with the text. To enjoy a text, such as THGTTG, a reader must submit to the dominant controlling values and try to read the text for what it is, not what we want it to be. In Blog 1 we decided as a group that the values were as follows:

 

Controlling Values

Context:  If you are reluctant to adapt to the changing world, you will not survive.

Purpose: If you adapt to the changing world around you, you will survive.

Opposing Controlling Values

Purpose: If you stick to your comfort zone, you stay true to yourself.

Context: If you step out of your comfort zone, you may go against your values.

Moving forward using these values we must ask ourselves some key questions. What kind of narrator would believe these values, what kind of addressee would believe these values, and what kind of reader would I have to become to believe these values?

In Blog 3 Jordan Coughlin wrote, “maybe there is some greater force at play that wants/needs Arthur and his comrades to update the THGTTG and accomplish all that they do along the way.” Meaning, could the narrator be some higher, more advanced being, telling the ridiculous story of Arthur Dent and company to “a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (12) in hopes that the guide be updated to better serve its hitchhikers trying “to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day” (12)? Or could the narrator be an old, humorous hitchhiker that succumbed to the many pitfalls of an outdated guide and the addressee a captive guide researcher?

The reader would then need to fill the role of the addressee, who would most likely be eating up the ridiculous, improbable story of Arthur, with every aside being a possible new entry in the guide.

But what sort of values would this reading imply the reader adopt? Would it be the values my group and I found, or a different set? As Seitz pointed out, “rather, we ‘try on’ readings, envision the text through the eyes of various masks, all the while attempting to forecast what it proposes, ‘what it all adds up to’” (152). In other words, with this mask of old hitchhiker and guide researcher, the reader would want to know what it all means by reading with this frame, and would it end with a fulfilling culmination of events or the number 42? To this addressee, it wouldn’t matter. All they would want would be more information for the guide, the more outrageous and colorful the better.

I think that the narrator is actually something more, advanced. It plays its role of third-person omniscient with a kind of finesse that imbues it with a sense of character and personality. It also addresses certain events as if it has a large readership. At one point it says “Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now” (121). Many people have speculated it said, implying that somehow many people have knowledge of this event in the same way the reader has knowledge of it. Also, curiously enough, who thinks it’s curious? Here the narrator acts as its own character with opinions on the events of the story.

I suspect that the narrator is a newer, inuitiver, version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Also, I like to believe that, like the Earth, it was designed by the one that came before it. I can almost feel the words, “A [guide] whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate – and yet I will design it for you,” (163) in a voice similar to our narrator on the last page of the old guide. Why else would the narrator feel it important to fill the story with so many asides that feel like guide updates?

On pages 19 and 20 in our updated guide there is a comparative entry discussing alcohol which ends with, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than the Encyclopedia Galactia” (20). Note the italics in the quote. The whole section is in italics while talking about the two books, except for the book’s titles. To me this is the new Guide talking about how it’s better than the other book. This self-awareness is like Marvin’s prototype mind. To me, it’s almost like Marvin is a system that comes before this new kind of Guide.

To further this idea, I think this new type of Guide is improbable, like the Improbability Drive. Why would the guide have such a detailed story of a homeless Earthling? Well, it’s a huge improbability, that is also somehow helpful. Arthur’s story surrounds:

[T]he Answer!”

“The Answer?” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to what?”

“Life!” urged Fook.

“The Universe!” said Lunkwill.

“Everything!” they said in chorus, (152).

And also:

“The Ultimate Question?” (162).

The Ultimate Answer turning out to be less helpful than the Ultimate Question would have been but, I think that the stories ultimate usefulness may not yet be apparent to the reader. But it will be, when most improbable.

So, if the narrator is the new guide, who could be the addressee. Is the addressee a hitchhiker, new to jaunting through the galaxy, or, could they be an experienced vet reacquainting themselves with the Guide? Whoever they are specifically, I believe them to be someone who wants more knowledge about the vast universe, someone who stuck out their thumb while lying in the mud, and this new Guide appeared to them, towel included, ready to show them the galaxy.

So what does this mean for us, the fabled reader of the narrator addressing the addressee? The improbability of the whole story is what seems to win out in the end, and Arthur is left, homeless and adrift, but never alone. I think that we are like Arthur, swept up on this wacky, nonsensical journey. We can give ourselves over to the zany events because it is so far removed from daily life. No government official would lie in the mud in the place of someone else just because he’s already committed to waiting around all day, no one would seriously take poetry as a form of punishment (it would be a discomfort at most), and no one would really believe that mice are the most intelligent interdimensional beings on the planet. We can either take a fish in the ear and hear what’s being said, or be deaf. The story drags the reader along because it is so out there, hitchhiking among the stars.

 

Not yet!