A dystopian Tísner

Males Herbes reissues L'enquesta del Canal 4 by Avel·lí Artís-Gener, the dystopian novel with which Tísner won the Sant Jordi prize in 1972. It is a colossal work, narrated by dozens of voices of workers from a television station that decides to measure the level of employee satisfaction through interviews recorded by eight pollsters. The channel's building, a flameless colossus, is a symbol of the hierarchy that we can associate with the Franco regime, which prevailed at the time, or with any other totalitarianism.

We soon discover that among the Canal workers are members of a clandestine group called the Trajecte , who often don't know each other until they react to the word trajecte with the password: "Fins a la Consecució." The Canal's government is collective, like a Politburo, and the most purist employees are the Acèrrims . Amidst the transcribed oral tradition of the interviewees, we find small, bold paragraphs inserted in the margin that narrate an action whose meaning is fully revealed on the last page. This oral tradition, read today, stands out for Tísner's extraordinarily rich Catalan, capable of introducing llurs , sorges , or tocom into the employees' everyday speech, or of making them argue about whether vivacitat and vivor are synonyms, through the difference between their antonyms: vivacitat-esmorteïment and vivor-estultícia .

Television seen as a means to “stupidify the silent majority”

The novel progresses with a certain slowness that contrasts with the state of collective madness in the television studios. Tísner had worked, primarily as a set designer, in Mexican television, so he knew the medium from a pioneering era and reflected critically on the new television language: "The greatest paradox is the fact that the audience shares our language without needing to consciously understand it, something that is only partially possible in ordinary linguistic communication." Television, which was analog fifty-three years ago, is seen as ephemeral, incapable of fixing memory, with incipient computer science and bizarre machines that today we would associate with AI.

The Canal's analogy with a totalitarian regime lies in its function of "riotous acculturation" and the medium's capacity to "stupidify the silent majority."

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