Edited by Michael Adams.
I wouldn’t want
to jam Zionist anti-Yiddish struggles, radix-happy C17th stabs at
Adamic reference, Esperanto’s antecedent Volapük, Burgess’s Nadsat misfits, nor Beckett’s Worstward Ho weirdo between “Elvish” and
“Klingon” . . . so this collection really ranges wider than is suggested by its
title (although Paul Muldoon is defo
a level 4 drow). It’s a grand ol’ grab-bag,
stuffed with eight essays (incl. introduction) plus eight responses (some
commentaries, some more in the spirit of “yeah that reminds me”, and some li’l’
baby anthologies in themselves) by editor Prof. Michael Adams. As Wil’yam Shex’pir put it “in the original Klingon”
(255-6), “mu’, mu’, mu’” (Khamlet, Act
II, Scene 2).
The approaches are also various – from
the rock-solid academia of Arden R. Smith and Stephen Watt, to the more
bloggerish, Tiggerish musings of James Portnow.
Though Portnow’s style of thought is apt given his essay’s subject –
“From Gargish to |337” (doesn’t Net geekdom have its own ecology of
intellectual legitimacy, partly insulated from that of the academy?) – I have a
niggle with his Saussure paraphrase.
Portnow gives the guru’s principle of arbitrary signification as: “words [ . . . ] have no bearing on the real world; they mean
nothing unless a group of people agree that they do”. Now to me “no bearing on the real world”
suggests confidence in the existence of
an extra‑linguistic reality, and “agree that they do” suggests that languages
can be thought of as contracts which establish how to communicate about
this reality.
But Saussure’s
legacy is largely built on his attack on these connected assumptions – he argued
our worlds are segmented and laden with value through languages and other
complex systems of interdependent signs; individuals “encounter” these systems
as an irresistible fait accompli,
without exits, and which they are powerless – almost powerless – to alter.
Other essays explore the wiggle room
that “almost” affords. E. S. C. Weiner
and Jeremy Marshall delve into Tolkien’s elves, who are “aware of the whole of
their language at every moment” (106) and “will introduce a sound change
throughout the language ‘as a weaver might change a thread from red to blue’”
(106-7). Could reality be improved by improving language? Howard Jackson – I mean Womanward Jilldaughter! – proposes “politically correct” vocabulary
as a real instance of such a project, prone to undermining itself with its “excesses”
(61). Or could some Big Bad invent an über-malevolent
reality? The same essay tackles Orwell’s
notorious Newspeak. Now, Mrs.
Doe-erton didn’t raise no fool – the swift dismissal of linguistic
determinism via elision with metaphysical nominalism is a red (threat!)
herring. What Jackson’s really fishing for is whether linguistic regulation
could ever be a viable instrument for the state
administration of social consciousness. No,
he concludes, quite plausibly. The officials
of Orwell’s authoritarian-totalitarian Party would find it tough to “stand outside the process in order to fashion the language” (63), let
alone calculate how subjugated citizens would “consciously reflect about the
words they use” (61). What
bureaucracy could cope with something so volatile and copious? Too many moles, too few whacks. Jackson even uncovers several places where
Orwell’s usage departs – or mutates – from his own invented norms.
Still, we musn’t be complacent about
centralised linguistic engineering. Newspeak-style
manipulation of social reality may be
a tall order, but states do alter
social reality, often unpredictably, through linguistic-legislative
initiatives. Suzanne Romaine’s superb finale focuses
on revitalised languages – Hebrew, Irish, Cornish, Hawaiian. Revitalisation, it turns out, demands
invention aplenty. Romaine points out
by-the-by that English, French and other languages “whose legitimacy is taken
for granted” (213) have been profoundly shaped by deliberate interventions,
born of “desire for prominent ideological symbols of shared identity, purpose,
and nationhood” (ibid.).
Besides, it’s not just language that is
various and ever-changing. So is state
power – and new forms come constantly into being. Could the elven tongues tell us more about elven
socio-political organisation – and its autarchic, ecologically-responsive vibe
– than all those unpersuasive trappings of patriarchal feudalism? I enjoyed Weiner/Marshall’s bit
about sound symbolism or phonaesthesis
– the notion that certain sounds have “recognizable semantic associations due
to recurrent appearance in words of similar meaning” (103) – and the question of pleasure in the relationship between
sound and sense. To an elf or a
philologist (like Tolkien), such associations could also include superseded
semantic systems, plus the reasons they shifted, vanished – the movements of
peoples; the judgments of the powerful; conflict and assimilation; prosperity; persecution;
disaster; diaspora; division; colonisation; abandonment; war. Aesthetic aversion (such as to a piece of
political correctness as “excess” (q.v.))
and aesthetic pleasure always contain such historical sediment. But for Tolkien’s immortal elves, it is an
information so rich, clear and complete that aesthetic response become
inseparable from judgement as
though in a public forum. Feeling
becomes a mode of reasoning.
Elves aren’t
Party draftsmen (as in “linguistic legislation”), nor engineers (as in
“linguistic engineering”), nor construction workers (as in
“socially-constructed”), but craftsmen and artists, celebrants and
mourners. They don’t redesign their
language, they elfvolve it. Could a RL analogue be imagined? Luckily that’s a tall, pointy-eared
order. Still, picture a state financially
incentivising the general market of cultural production – via Digital Rights Management,
automated statistical textual analyses, clickwrap-contracting and billions of
micro-transactions, via any number of arm’s-length agencies and private sector
partners – to align language use with some desired template. Where authoritarian statecraft falls short of
perfecting totalitarianism, liberal statecraft could conceivably succeed.
(Review originally appeared in Interzone!!!)
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