Abstract

What is the nature of mind control? Does it exist? Sure, mind-altering drugs and hypnosis offer limited types of this control, but could media play a similar role? What role does media play in the structuring of our consciousness? This novella follows a consciousness that has become unmoored and loops through the world, its experience shaped by the media it previously had consumed and enjoyed. The main character, Lionel Grene, finds himself unable to escape the plot of a paranoid espionage novel that he has created.
Set in mid-1990s Ontario, Lionel
struggles to comprehend his situation, spiralling through the experience of the conspiracy filled plot of his spy novel. This plot is based in the true World War II history of Durham Region, Ontario. Places like Camp-X, Defence Industries Limited, and Camp 30 were real places. However, in Grene’s conditioned imagination, they become dens of plotting and manipulation. Then again, this might be historical fact too. Drawing on the novels of Thomas Pynchon as inspiration, a key aspect of this project is Grene’s slipping from fabulation (writing a novel) into confabulation (a memory error causing him to take himself as the protagonist of that novel). But beyond that, the project also interrogates the idea of media as subconscious programming.