In the Realm of Fatuous Neologism: Language in Oryx and Crake
Ways of Knowing $ 7 October 2005 $ Dr. Stephen Pender
$ language has been a primary concern with utopian and dystopian fiction since its inception
$ one might think, as I think you have with Dr. Jeff Noonan, of Plato=s Republic and the ways in which he banishes poets for appealing to the emotions, for misrepresenting the gods, for showing heroes in compromise, and for retailing their wares as knowledge rather than representation
$ Plato has trouble with poets C indeed all the imitative, all the mimetic arts C because they trade in images and images, not only because they appeal to the passions but because they are potentially false
$ in English, perhaps Sir Thomas More=s Utopia is most famous C not least for inaugurating a genre, utopian fiction
$ in that text, according to More=s narrator, Raphael Hythloday [which means both purveyor of nonsense and, perhaps, hostile to nonsense], the Utopians are consummate scholars: they learn to read Greek and Latin, and adopt the languages and scholarship of their European visitor with deftness and aplomb
$ and of course George Orwell=s 1984 is a pressing and poignant example of the lengths to which language might be bastardised and bowdlerised to nefarious purpose
$ in fact, in an essay on politics and the English language from 1946, it was Orwell who equated the decay of language with the rise of authoritarianism, particularly fascism
$ he noted that English was in a bad way C as civilisation continued its decline into decadence, he insists, language shares in the general collapse.
$AIt follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the halfconscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes@ [Orwell]
$ quite the contrary, Orwell argues, language is something we shape for our own purposes and thus is changes historically, contextually
$ his point, then, is that language is subject to all sorts of economic and political pulsions, circumstances, stresses, but that language might be saved from such a fate: the slovenliness of our language, he argues, makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts, but Athe process is reversible@
$ in the same essay, he writes:
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don=t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language C and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists C is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one=s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some wornout and useless phrase C some jackboot, Achilles= heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse C into the dustbin where it belongs.
$ I am certain that Atwood knows her Orwell very well, indeed C as all writers should
$ in fact, the intimate relationship between the decadence of language and political quietism, opportunism, or authoritarianism is central to her work, just as it might be central the ways in which modern governments operate [think of any dictatorial regime, like the one at play in the US at the moment ...]
$ let=s turn to Oryx and Crake and see if we can follow Atwood=s rich subtext about language, one that is interwoven with the major events, characters, and indeed setting for the novel and one that tests, puts stress on, Orwell=s insights
$ Snowman is connected with the sea, of course, and with water [that out of which a snowman is made]; for him, language surfaces like flotsam, from the Latin flottare, to float, which means the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on the surface of the sea
$ the sometimes whole, sometimes fragmented cargo of S=s linguistic ballast appears frequently to surface as either solace or irritant
$ we learn about S / J=s fascination with language early on in the novel: J literalises the metaphorical, for example, as with his discussion of his father=s use of the phrase Ahot under the collar@ [21] to describe women: why nothing about the hot collars of men, S asks?
$ again early on, the retrogressively renewed J, as Snowman, has a hot, noon-hour revery in which language, again like flotsam, surfaces:
From nowhere, a word appears: Mezozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can=t reach the word. He can=t attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries in his cherished wordlists drifting off into space. [45-46]
$ somewhat later, after several months outside the compound and desperately hungover, Snowman imagines the following:
Rag ends of language are floating in his head: mephitic [foul-smelling, noxious], metronome, mastitis [inflammation of the breast], metatarsal [bones lying between the ankles and the toes], maudlin. ... What=s happening to his mind? He has a vision of the top of his neck, opening up into his neck like a bathroom drain. Fragments of words are swirling down it, in a grey liquid he realises is his dissolving brain. [181]
$ in fact, as he undergoes his transformation from one in love with the superfluous to one dissolved by it, S is rather frequently subject to the appearance, the surfacing, of nursery rhymes, various kinds of bureaucratic manuals, instructions, lessons, etc.
$ S is both comforted and plagued by language: it wells up and reminds him of a vanishing or vanished world, or it is the solace he seeks in the uncertainty and decay of his surroundings
$ indeed, words seem to bubble up when he is in crisis [391], especially when he witnesses the destruction of humankind: as the end of the species was occurring, sometimes Ahe=d turn off the sound [of the television], whisper words to himself. Succulent. Morphology. Purblind. Quarto. Frass. It had a calming effect@ [410]
Hang on to the words,= he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance [drapery or altar-cloth]. Norn [goddess destiny or an adjective for things Norse]. Serendipity [unexpected discovery by accident]. Pibroch [dirges for the bagpipes]. Lubricious [slippery, smooth, oily, lascivious]. When they=re gone out of his head, these words, they=ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been born. [82]
$ and recall S=s experience with the buxom internet artist, Anna K., for whom he has to thank for the knowledge of words like sere= [dry, thin, withered] and incarnadine= [blush or crimson-coloured] [103]
$ Atwood compares his attention to archaic terms with his attention to the blemish in the joint of the well-shaped bodies of his lovers [121]
$ soon, however, his litany of old words loose their solace:
Then he=d stay up too late, and once in bed he=d stare at the ceiling, telling over his list of obsolete words for the comfort that was in them. Dribble. Aphasia. Breast plough. Enigma. Gat [a channel, a strait]. If Alex the [neologising] parrot were his, they=d be friends, they=d be brothers. He=d teach him more words. Knell. Kern. Alack.
But there was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them. It no longer delighted Jimmy to possess these small collections of letters that other people had forgotten about. It was like having his own baby teeth in a box. [316]
$ nevertheless, their comforts are sporadic; he is still able to sink into words, into feelings, for example in his tryst with Oryx:
Supposing, that is, he could manage to sleep. At night he=d lie awake, berating himself, bemoaning his fate. Berating, bemoaning, useful words. Doldrums. Lovelorn. Leman. Forsaken. Queynt. [375, cf. 381]
$ my point is simple, as is our author=s: in Atwood=s dystopia, dissolutions political, technological, and environmental are signified by the imprecision of language, on the one hand, or the indiscriminate acceptance of neologism, the coining of new words, on the other
$ as an example of the latter, we might take Jimmy=s daring neologisms at the AnooYoo compound CAhe=d come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?@ [303]
$ in fact, he is promoted for his fatuousness, for his lying [300-301]
$ finally, then, it is his own imprecise and devolving practices with language that make him falter and, indeed, fall
$ during his long dissolution at the Compound, just before his final acquiescence in Paradice, we have the following:
He knew he was faltering, trying to keep his footing. Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble. [315]
$ for all the meditations on the uselessness of language [as in his experience at the retrograde Martha Graham academy [203, 228-229], as in his embrace of the superfluous [238]], it is language that marks his evisceration
$ what about the language of the novel itself?
$ Atwood=s own language for the dystopian world reflects her concern with precision and imprecision; her descriptors are rich and resplendent and she is careful to lard her prose, especially later in the book, with archaicisms, the rare and the rarified, even with the exotic [see, for example, 115]
$ and it is Snowman, Astupefied with drink,@ who laid down the laws of the Crake and Oryx [he becomes the myth-maker, the bureaucrat, he hates C the foundation for his lies built when he trumps up the useless products of AnooYoo]:
The Children of Oryx, the Children of Crake. He=d had to think of something. Get your story straight, keep it simple, don=t falter: this use to be the expert advice given by lawyers to criminals in the dock. Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx [animals] hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other full of words. But the egg full of words was hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they=d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched. And that is why the animals can=t talk. [116]
$ this is a brilliant moment in the novel: so much of Snowman=s anxiety about words works its way to the surface in his drunken myth-making: the children of Crake literally consume words, which is quite pointed C we learn early on that the children of Crake cannot read [48]
$ I want to finish with one reference, and it is a reference to the ways in which Paradice is the inverse of paradise: in a book which essentially reverses the creation story, we have a very brief but very resonant reference to Milton=s Paradise Lost
$ there are other intertexts, but this is perhaps the most telling in relation both to language and to the future that the novel seeks to map
$ in the chapter ACrake in Love@ begins with Snowman meditating on Oryx and her eternal present [she is everywhere in his mind, as it were]; the revery ends thus, with the italicised lines signifying Oryx=s voice:
Oh, Jimmy, this is so positive. It makes my happy when you grasp this [all the various Oryx=s are time present]. Paradice is lost, but you have a Pardice within you, happier far. Then that silvery laugh, right in his ear. [370]
$ the satirical take on the end of PL is clear: instructed by the archangel Michael in book 12 of the poem [573ff.], Adam is told that
Thus having learned [the limits of human knowledge], thou hast attained the sum
Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars
Thou knew=st by name, and all the ethereal powers,
All secrets of the deep, all nature=s works,
Or works of God in heaven, air, earth, or sea,
And all the riches of this world enjoy=st,
And all the rule, one empire; only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.
$ in a way, this is Snowman=s struggle: not a Mad Adam, but a new Adam, sorting out naming the world, sorting out language, and sorting out false from true paradise
$ but as the narrator says, apropos S=s past, AThen there=s the future. Sheer vertigo@ [179]