The Great Automatic Grammatizator: Appropriateness of the Title
Question : Describe how appropriate is the title of the story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”.
Answer: At the first sight, the title “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” seems to be quite strange and unique so is to arouse curiosity of the readers. But as the story progresses the significance and appropriateness of the title is revealed. The title refers to the machine which is a main character of the story. The machine is the first of its kind, hence it is “Great” and a “wonder” – “an engine” built along the lines of electric computer with the ability to arrange the words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Only by pressing certain required buttons, it can produce any kind of story or articles, on any subject or style, on as many characters as the writer wants. Thus it is able to produce story automatically and in bulk.
The term “Grammatizator” in the title is made up of the combination of two words – grammar and computer. Hence Roald Dahl used the title for a unique computer which uses the rules of grammar to produce stories or articles in large number. Although this “delicious idea” seems to be so “impracticable” but in this story Adolph Knipe makes it a “practical possibility”.
The title is quite suggestive as the machine plays a character in the story. The inventor of the machine is a genius engineer Adolph Knipe, who “had no heart in being an electrical engineer”, but he wants “to be a writer”. He has written “hundreds” of stories in his spare time, in last ten years, but not a single story is ever bought and published in any magazine while the market is full of the “sloppy boring stuff” of the other successful writers.
All these circumstances made Knipe angry and revengeful. He wanted to monopolize the literary circle and commercialise it and ruin all his “enemies”. He persuades Mr. Bohlen to collaborate with him for it is a profitable and “big business”. Within a week, Mr. Bohlen is “completely sold on the idea”. In the next six months Knipe using his engineering skills, built the great automatic grammatizator “ready for action”.
The conflict arises when human greed for money and power dominates the artistic creativity. Knipe proposes the use of the machine as a way to earn money. With the advancement of the machine, Knipe also becomes more powerful. He sets a literary agency for publication and starts buying all the authors by offering them money. He made them sign the contract for money and nearly half of all the novels produced in English language carry Knipe’s name as the author.
Roald Dahl’s story is a comment on the literary circumstances of the times when people start giving more importance to quantity over quality in literature. Dahl efficiently uses visual and auditory imagery, irony and satire to set the tone for the story and prepare the reader for this moral story about the consequences of domination of profit making over the human urge of creativity and artistic integrity.
Literature is a subjective process, it is a combination of human emotions, creativity, experience and originality. While Knipe calls this “the creative urge” bunk.
The title also suggestive the dehumanising power of technology and mechanisation in modern society and dangers of monopolies.
The ending of the story brings a twist in it and adds a moral message. The narrator here speaks as a young struggling author
“Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve”.
The strength author prefers to see his children dying with hunger to selling his service and inner self for money. In a way it teaches a lesson to all those who treat literature like other commercial goods. The title thus is meaningful and suggestive.