Word: automaton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is the case with all fascist communities?Nazi or Communist?where man's value is always determined by social needs. People may be reduced to serfs or elevated to demigods: man may be turned into an automaton, obeying orders and doing his work without thinking. A man's humanity is inevitably lost as he ceases to be an individual worthy of the Responsibility and the vocation entrusted to him by God. The holy torch which he was created to bear and to use in lighting the way both for his fellow men and for posterity is extinguished...
...traveling show of mechanical marvels. His treasures included an automated trumpet player, a device called the panharmonicon that could duplicate the sound of a 40-piece orchestra (playing Beethoven) and an elaborate diorama showing the burning of Moscow. But Maelzel's star attraction was a hoax: a chess automaton nicknamed the Turk that took on all comers-and was every bit as talented as the human player cleverly concealed within it. That role was filled by William Schlumberger, an Alsatian hunchback who, until hitching up with Maelzel, was the second best chess player...
...witty, terse dialogue. One masterful confrontation occurs in Celeste's apartment, when she tries to seduce Leo (or rather, to encourage him to seduce her) with the help of wine and her pocket Freud. Berger shows the calculations and machinations of his characters. If Leo acts like a sexual automaton (he places his hand on Celeste's leg; she asks sharply, "What is that?"), Celeste reacts coldly with banal psychology in her analysis of Leo's childhood. Employing a more experimental approach, Berger tries his hand at Joyce an stream of consciousness in the sexual encounter between Todd and Lynnette...
...would get to the end of the show. Sometimes I didn't know which way I was facing." Adds Howard: "I couldn't sleep or eat. I found it hard to focus my mind on what I was doing onstage. I became a zombie, an automaton." But, says Howard, the endless changes that were made in the show were only "like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...
Although Pasqualini is finally transformed into a dedicated, right-thinking worker and prisoner, it is evident from his alert recognition of the method involved, even as the change is taking place in him, that he has not become an automaton. The mode of thought expected of him has been clarified; he feels supported and supportive--even more so when the French government rebuffs his written appeals. On a very basic level, his assimilation represents the kind of adjustment generally expected of its members by any social system...