Theory and Practice

At one point, after coming across a reference to the difference between langue and parole in China Miéville’s Embassytown, I said to my husband, “This guy must have some kind of background in language theory or the philosophy of language, because he’s throwing around jargon like a grad student.”  The next day I googled him, and it turns out I was right, or at least partially so.  Miéville has a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and published a book based on his dissertation, a Marxist analysis of international law, in 2005.  As a good Marxist scholar, I’m sure he’s read Volosinov and Bakhtin, among others, and he seems steeped in theory of all kinds, so I think my original guess was a fair one.

The problem is that the theory that often makes for fascinating and revolutionary scholarly work also makes terrible fiction if not handled carefully.  That’s not to say that there are not masterful works of fiction that also address complex theoretical issues through form, structure, narrative, dialogue, plot, and other means.  But it takes a special touch to pull this off and still make the work entertaining and beautiful.  David Mitchell serves as one example of a great writer who addresses larger theoretical and formal issues through intricately constructed, aesthetically gorgeous fictions.  His Cloud Atlas is probably the most ambitious work of fiction ever written in this vein, the theory quite literally entwined with the narrative.

Mieville’s Embassytown is not as successful, to be judicious.  Oddly for a book with a plot this convoluted, it’s mostly boring.  Without attempting to summarize the entire twisty story, suffice it to say that it centers on an alien planet where humanoid  creatures live as the guests and trading partners of the native alien life form, which communicates in a unique, non-signifying, doubled language.  That is to say, they have two mouths out of which they speak simultaneously, but everything they speak must have a real-world referent: there is no abstraction, no metaphorization, and, most importantly, no lying.  Ultimately, the most interesting part of the novel, which comprises about the last quarter of the book, centers on the question of lying as the key to signifying language that allows for a plasticity of thought necessary for survival.  Even here, though, the text descends into Derridean obfuscation: “Similes are a way out.  A route from reference to signifying.  Just a route, though.  But we can push them down it….To where the literal becomes….something else.  If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else.  We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”  Huh?

China Mieville

Miéville’s work is usually classified as science fiction or fantasy, and he’s won a lot of awards in these genres.  I haven’t read anything else of his, so his other books might be of much better quality, but unfortunately it seems to me that the awards belie much lower standards in what we call “genre” fiction than “literary” fiction.  (Incidentally, if Miéville is a good Marxist scholar, he would probably deny the validity of the distinction.)  There are some other contemporary writers who, in recent years, have tried hard to blur the boundaries between these categories with much more success.  One need only think of Michael Chabon’s work (especially The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) or, again, of David Mitchell to know that literary fiction can be genre fiction, and vice versa, or maybe that those categories are just not particularly useful.  The problem with a book like Embassytown is that, in an apparent attempt to create a theoretical, literary work of science fiction it only reinforces the categories it seems intent on breaking down, reminding its readers with every plodding sentence that there is something better out there.

Looking Back (or Down)

Rereading a book you loved as a child is a little like visiting your old elementary school as an adult: the lockers weren’t always that short, were they?  Everything that once seemed huge and mystifying and tremendous looks, well, small.  It hasn’t changed, though – you have.  So I began rereading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game with some trepidation.  I remembered, vaguely, that I once thought it was brilliant, that it changed the way I thought about the power and potential of words.  I feared that reading it as an adult might make me feel like I was standing in a familiar hallway looking down at the top of a locker I once looked up at.

It turns out that The Westing Game is not the brilliant literate mystery I once thought it was, at least not to an adult jaded both by years of cultural abuse and misuse of language as well as exposure to magnificent literature.  But it’s still clever enough to hold an adult reader’s interest, its linguistic puzzle still mystifying until the end (since I had forgotten both plot details and resolution).  And although I no longer felt the book unlocked the mysteries of language the way I once did, I found other things to appreciate (and, perhaps, to critique).

What I did not notice as a child was the book’s careful breakdown of racial, ethnic, and social stereotyping, although it seems only partially successful as a challenge to those stereotypes.  First published in 1978, its depiction of an apartment building with white, black, and Asian tenants from both professional and working-class backgrounds must have been somewhat unusual.  And it’s not just a token collection of diverse people and families – the book itself, and its characters, is self-conscious about the unusual group it assembles, and the Westing Game is at least partially designed expressly to bring together people who would never otherwise meet.  It’s also highly conscious of the potential pitfalls of its own approach.  Describing a meeting between the African-American Judge Ford and the pretentious wannabe aristocrat Grace Windsor Wexler, Raskin writes, “Proud of her liberalism, Grace Windsor Wexler stood and leaned over the table to shake the black woman’s hand.  She must be here in some legal capacity, or maybe her mother was a household maid….”  And no one is completely immune from Raskin’s critical eye – even the most seemingly virtuous characters are skewered, their flaws laid bare.

For all that, occasionally the book seems to resort to its own stereotyping either for comic purposes or simply because it tilts slightly into the realm of caricature.  But for the most part it’s a sympathetic, deeply human portrait of a group of people who aren’t much like each other and don’t really want to get to know one another, but when forced to spend time together become real neighbors and friends.  That, it turns out, was the real goal of the Westing Game, which I missed at the time.  Sure, it’s about language and puzzles and solving a mystery, but it’s equally about families, friends, neighbors and the way we see ourselves and each other.  It turns out there was another story sitting on top of the locker the whole time.

Hier ist kein warum: on North Korean threats, language, and politics

Kim Jong-Un of North Korea

Last night I my husband and I were talking about North Korea’s recent threats to attack the United States and South Korea, and I mentioned that I had read that a North Korean official had threatened to turn the U.S. into a “lake of fire.”  I was a little off – the actual quote from The New York Times by Kang Pyo-yong, the vice defense minister of North Korea, is this: “If we push the button [to activate the nuclear weapons], they will blast off and their barrage will turn Washington, the stronghold of American imperialists and the nest of evil, and its followers, into a sea of fire.”  As we spoke, my husband laughed and absently wondered why authoritarian regimes like North Korea always resort to the kind of inflated rhetoric that sounds ridiculous to the outside world. While I quite relish the idea of living in a nest of evil (It sounds so fun! Porn! Drugs! Fattening foods!), I began thinking about the question of language and authoritarianism more seriously.

Manipulation of language for political purposes is not restricted to the realm of totalitarianism, of course, but it is of central importance to the maintenance of any authoritarian regime or regime of terror.  It seems to serve two primary purposes: dehumanization through the devaluation of linguistic meaning, and the establishment of an impenetrable, closed social and cultural space controlled solely by the regime.  George Orwell touched on these ideas in his 1941 speech-turned-essay “Literature and Totalitarianism,” in which he noted the potential for control offered by language and culture.  Of the totalitarian regime, he wrote, “It not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.”

Primo Levi, in his Holocaust memoir Survival in Auschwitz, made this connection between the manipulation and devaluation of language, dehumanization, and demarcation of a new, impenetrable boundary between the world of the regime (in his case, also a literal boundary, marked by barbed wire and electric fencing, between the death camp and freedom) and the outside world.  Upon his initiation into the camp, Levi writes, “Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.”  When a particular human condition is so extreme as to be outside language, language must be bent and twisted to accommodate or describe it.

Perhaps nothing is as clear an example of this abuse of language than the inscription on the gate through which Levi and his fellow prisoners walk each day to work: Arbeit Macht Frei, work makes you free.  This sign has two effects: first, it mocks the prisoners in their utter powerlessness, making a joke of the killing labor they are forced to do; second, and more insidiously, this inside-out claim about work and freedom hollows out meaning, depriving language of its signifying power, further dehumanizing its victims by refusing to acknowledge the reality of slavery and murder to which it mockingly refers.  And if language is, ultimately, the means by which we construct our own identities, express our thoughts and feelings to others, and understand our very selves, its devaluation necessarily contributes to a loss of humanity, not just for those whom the regime enslaves and imprisons, but for everyone.

Rendering language meaningless, the backwards rhetoric of authoritarianism also creates a clear boundary between the world of the regime and everything outside of it.  Levi describes this process through a small detail, noting that after his arm has been tattooed with his number, which is to replace his name, “for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.”  The wristwatch, representative of the order of the civilized world outside the camp, has given way to his number, which itself has replaced his name, literally erasing language and compromising its power to signify meaning.

The rules and mores of the camp are likewise differentiated from those of the civilized world of the wristwatch, as Levi discovers when, thirsty after traveling in a cattle car for more than a day with no water, he tries to break off an icicle outside the window of his new barracks.  A guard snatches it from him.  “‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German.  ‘Hier ist kein warum,’ he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.”  That is the lesson of totalitarianism: there is no why here.  Language has no meaning, so explanation is useless.  The rhetoric of authoritarianism may sound funny, but it’s not a joke. To reduce a country, its people, and perhaps the entire world to a “nest of evil” not only makes it easier to press that button, but it corrupts our understanding of what evil really is.

Even worse, this corruption of language has its parallels in other realms of our culture, far more quotidian and pervasive than the occasional pronouncements of a North Korean dictator.  The other day Rand Paul implied a comparison between Hitler’s rise to power and President Obama’s.  How many times a day do you see an advertisement for something “new” or “must-have”?  To threaten a “sea of fire” may be obvious hyperbole, but how often do we encounter this very kind of hyperbolic language every day?  And to what extent does this corruption of language interfere with our ability to understand and represent our very selves, to, in a sense, remain human?