SECTION NINE

“From my experience, it just doesn’t seem to make sense”

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

“set itself, as usual, for seven-thirty”

In line to its previous routine at the beginning of section four, the clock radio goes off at its designated time.

Another thing of note is that because of its sticking to its literal time held duty, this indicates that the radio was not just using the battery to imitate the birds, recite commercials, and play music, it had to be using it since they began their travels due to its own lack of back-up batteries.

“awake well before the hour”

Their sleep is easily disturbed by the newness of their surroundings.

“strung like miniature power lines”

Here we are looking at nature the way electric appliances would see it.

The protagonist of Voices of the Kill perceives a similar wilderness in his own electronic way.

In his 1998 essay The Third World and Other Alien Nations Disch wrote the following:

“For what can any of us suppose about what is unknown to us, except by reference to the nearest thing it might resemble.”(102)

“mushrooms”

In the Family outline Disch wrote:

“The toaster toasts mushrooms.”(103)

The imagery of mushrooms also appears in Voices of the Kill, A Troll of Surewould Forest, This Little Pig Had None and the poems The Mushroom’s Salon and minor poets are human too.

“frosted light bulbs”

Again, an appliance’s view of nature.

Disch wrote of his short story Et in Arcadia Ego, a story where a crew of explorers lands on the titular planet experiencing its flora, fauna and culture, this:

“[N]ever again did I attempt that theme [after writing The Chthonian Smell “in lieu of a term paper, to Maurice Baudin, Jr., with whom I was taking an evening course, ‘The Novella,’ at NYU”] which more than any other defines sf—the exploration of another world, the encounter with alien forms of life. I prided myself that I understood what such tales were about better than anyone who was actually writing them. Indeed, the chief obstacle in the way of my creating my own avatar was that I had so many and such various theories. First, such stories were about sex. (What stories aren’t?) Then, about the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. Then, though less necessarily, about man’s relationship to machines and to himself considered as a machine: related to this theme was a curious lack of affect that usually seemed to obtain between the crew members on these expeditions. If I couldn’t write the story that I glimpsed through all this theoretical foliage, I was content that no one else had been able to either.”(104)

“As, of course, it must be—to a degree. The demand for a totally transformed environment, pushed to its limit, would require a writer to invent a new language for each story he writes. But the sense of such a shift having taken place can be suggested, and when it is, the result is that touch of strange that is the raison d’ etre for sf.”(105)

It was after he was inspired to write Et in Arcadia Ego he came to a new conclusion:

“’A pastoral!’ I thought. ‘That’s what all those stories always are—pastorals!’”(106)

Considering Disch’s observation, The Brave Little Toaster would classify, the greater middle part of the tale at least, as a pastoral of sorts.

“a real fox”

The imagery of the fox appears occasionally in Disch’s fiction such as Concepts, The Burial Society, and This Little Pig Had None.

“wanted to go off after it”

In On Wings of Song the protagonist ponders on the hobby of fox hunting and comes to this conclusion:

“But the fox, he saw now, was only a pretext, an excuse for the hunters to go galloping off across their demesne, leaping walls and hedges, indifferent to boundaries of every kind, because the land belonged to them so far as they could ride and sing out ‘Tally-ho!’”(107)

“The blanket grew quite upset”

Here again the blanket is emotionally vocal in its objections.

“appreciate the blanket’s point of view”

As established right from the subtitle, considering the perspective of others, it is directly mentioned here.

All across the creative writings of Disch, this theme comes up over and over again, sometimes very subtly and other times stated outright by the narrator or one of the characters. The main characters in The Birds and The Shirt’s Tale, The Short’s Story carry out the theme in the latter way as Toaster does.

“they continued on their way”

Strangely, we never get the Hoover’s opinion on the matter.

“a squirrel”

The squirrel is an animal that must of held some significance for Disch for he refers to them often in his works. They are included in his short stories Descending, This Little Pig Had None, and the poem Nightmare on Elm Street, even going so far as to title a short story The Squirrel Cage and even dedicated a poem to one in the aptly titled The Squirrel.

They also make appearances in three of his Supernatural Minnesota books; The M.D., The Sub, and The Priest.

“I’m Harold”

Harold certainly heralded himself to the appliances.

“And this fair creature”

And here he heralds again.

“Marjorie”

Disch also used this name in his short story The Vengeance of Hera, or Monogamy Triumphant, coincidentally published the same year as Toaster.

“We don’t have names”

Here another parallel to the Alice books appears, appropriately enough, in reverse to Looking-Glass. In the third chapter of that story Alice deals with the concept of names, even entering a wood in which those who live and go in it have none.

Looking to Disch’s other works, the subject of names comes up in Concepts, when the protagonist asks for the last name of who she’s talking to he replies that he hasn’t had one since he got divorced. In Voices of the Kill when the two primary characters meet, one of them asks for the other’s name. When the other gawks at her, she replies “‘How can we talk to each other if I don’t know your name?’”(108)

“which of you are men and which are women”

It’s as if the squirrels were humans asking a group of aliens of their nature and how it compares to their own. Culture shock (pun not intended) is inevitable.

In an introduction he wrote for his short story Concepts, Disch reflected on his rare forays into stories relating to third kind encounters as “analogs for our experience of other people’s intractable oddness, which can be a source of amusement or of paranoid frenzy, according to the author’s temperament. But to treat aliens in this way is usually a form of camouflage, obscuring rather than emphasizing one’s meanings.”(109)

Also, here is yet another parallel to both Alice books, where animals can speak and get into arguments as to how things work in their respective worlds.

“can’t alter a universal law”

Harold and Marjorie can’t consider life being any different from, as the appliances felt in their cottage, “their countrified ways.” Then again, from the squirrels’ perspective, the appliances are just as alien to them as the wilderness is to the appliances.

A character in Disch’s short story The New Me gives the protagonist a similar amount of intellectual room for differing points of view despite their friendliness.

“appliances didn’t eat anything”

In the biological way, no. The closest thing they “eat” would obviously be energy in the form of electricity.

“I don’t know any jokes”

Here is an instance of an appliance’s lack of imagination as Disch described, brought up in notes for section five back in part one.

“‘Oh, I do,’ said the radio”

The radio, being directly connected to human culture, would know jokes.

As one character says in The Priest, “‘You want to break down barriers, you tell jokes.’”(110)

This notion of trading jokes as a social connection is also utilized in The Word of God.

“The squirrels”

Interestingly, in the 1987 Hayakawa edition, Azuma depicts Harold and Marjorie as chipmunks though he had them as squirrels in his illustrations for the December 1981 S-F publication.

“Which are the men and which are the women”

With Harold still stuck on this question it implies that he imagined the “three Poles” in the joke as appliances since he would have no idea what a Pole, being Polish, or what the country of Poland, even is.

“not fair to Poles”

In a letter dated March 26, 1987, then President of the Polish American Congress Frank Milewski wrote to Doubleday raising concerns over the preceding joke where he stated the following:

“Considering that any type of humorous anecdote would have been sufficient to accomplish the author’s objective of introducing a joke into this part of the story, we cannot help wondering why he went out of his way to select something which insults a specific minority group. It would be totally inappropriate, we firmly believe, to describe any class of people in such a derogatory manner.

“What is so distressing to us is the fact that this is a book for children. At this early age, they are actively developing impressions and attitudes about other people which will become an integral part of their character and will be carried into adulthood. To needlessly insert an ethnic joke completely extraneous to a children’s story not only does a disservice to your youthful readers but promotes an acceptance of contempt for others.”

Further on he wrote: “Among the members of our organization are persons who were in Poland at the time of the German occupation. In discussing your book with us, they could not help becoming upset with the way Mr. Disch degrades our ethnic group to his young readers. It stirred bitter memories of how the Nazis considered Jews and Slavic people like the Poles as sub-human ‘untermenschen’ and treated them accordingly.

“This was the way the Hitler Youth organizations indoctrinated their members. The eventual transition from ridicule and scorn of others to hatred and violence was not difficult. It seems strange that Mr. Disch now resurrects an alien philosophy based on the concept of inferior peoples which was thought to have perished in a Berlin bunker along with its originator.”(111)

Disch responded the following April 17th assuring that the joke was not intended as a genuine slur against the Polish but as an instructional lesson to children on such a subject of prejudice. In further explanation he wrote:

“You suggest that any joke at all would accomplish the same purpose, but if you consider that THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER is about a group of ‘living’ electrical appliances, a joke about the wrong use of a light bulb is precisely calculated to appeal to an appliance’s sense of humor. What is funny in the image of the ladder being turned around instead of the light bulb is quite distinct from imputing such a mistake to Poles, and the radio points this out itself: ‘Of course, it’s not fair to Poles.’ It also shows in asking the squirrels whether they are Polish that it knows its joke may offend someone who is Polish.

“It is precisely because THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER is a book intended for children that making such a didactic point is appropriate and valuable. Adults may be presumed to understand what is offensive and unfair in ethnic slurs, as they may be presumed to know that more overt acts of intolerance are wrong. But children need to have such things spelled out. Not in a scolding tone, however, since such a tone is liable to produce exactly the opposite result to the one intended. We live, alas, in a world in which a paperback publisher can bring out a series like TRULY TASTELESS JOKES, etc., and expect it to be a bestseller. I suspect it would be a very sheltered child indeed who had not already heard the joke that the radio relates in my book. One must regret that such jokes have the currency they do, but the way to combat their effect is surely not to deny their existence or extent, nor yet to deny the mechanical part of the humor, but rather to make it clear that ethnic slurs, even in the seemingly innocent form of humor, can be unfair and hurtful.

As to the speculations in the later part of your letter suggesting that my book may be the first step down the road to another Berlin bunker, you must allow me to demur. My own horror of the totalitarian impulse in all its guises will be familiar to any reader of my work.”(112)

As an aside to the subject of denouncing discrimination, in Disch’s earlier short story, Genetic Coda, the protagonist, who is effectively under life-long house arrest for circumstances of his genetics, at one point works on a novel in which he describes discrimination as a damaging element to society, especially to “the lives of their undeserving victims.”(113)

“they are funny jokes”

Though the appliances didn’t laugh at the joke themselves.

“the radio corrected”

In the original 1980 publication there were thirteen errors that appeared in relation to the pronouns applied to the appliances. Eight of them were corrected in the 1986 version. Even Disch, as seen in his correspondence with Goldthwaite in section one, relapsed into calling the toaster “he”.

Commenting on pronoun use, or misuse, occurs in both Genetic Coda and The Proteus Sails Again.

A parallel moment also occurs in the Wonderland, specifically chapter seven, when Alice complains of wasting time, it, on unanswerable riddles, she gets corrected:

“‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Mad Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.’”(114)

“the joke about the three squirrels in the snow”

Given the implied tone of the joke, it would be unprintable in a story intended for younger readers.

The theme of dirty jokes occurs in both The Priest and The Sub and one around the subject of murder appears in The Silver Pillow.

Speaking of unprintable, the subject of censorship comes around in section thirteen in part four.

“especially the old Hoover”

It, more than the others, would wholly detest dirt of any kind as it has had more than ever in its life not only because of its designed purpose but since taking on this journey to deal with all things dirty.

“Gender”

Disch wrote often commenting on, or playing with, gender in poems such as He, She, and It, One’s Gender Problems, and, confusingly, two different poems that share the same title: Pronouns. His short stories also consider the theme such as in Voices of the Kill, A Small Case of Mood Poisoning; Must Be Something I Hate, and The Voyage of the Proteus. His novels Clara Reeve, The M.D. and The Sub also ruminate on this theme.

In My Life as a Child he wrote of gender, specifically on their roles in childhood and his personal experiences with them:

“I also persuaded Linda Olsen, who lived across the street, to let me play with her dolls, a pleasure denied to most boys once they’re past the age for teddy bears. I think it’s a dumb rule that says that boys shouldn’t play with dolls...”(115)

One character in The Priest describes a friend of his as “the only middle-aged man he’d ever known who still went shopping for his Barbie doll.”(116)

“Marjorie laughed loyally”

She must have heard this joke enough times to not spontaneously laugh at it but to do so in support of Harold.

“none of the appliances cracked a smile”

With Disch’s initial idea of how they should appear mentioned back in section seven, how would the squirrels even know if they did?