Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

Title: Native Tongue

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin

Publisher: Daw Books Inc. , Donald A. Wollheim, publisher

Publish date: 1984          

ISBN: (Appears to have no ISBN, says ‘Daw Collector’s Book No 589’.)

Book extract

‘Then consider this, please: to make something appear, is called magic, is it not? Well… when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the end of the elbow. Everyone has that surface, in fact, everyone has two of them.

I will name that the “athad” of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind – perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And here are both of your athads, very nice ones.

Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. And I have made the athad appear. From now on. It exists.

Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers… magic is something quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.’

___________________________________________________________________

I picked this up with great eagerness, as the blurb purported it to be a book about a special language for women, created to articulate female preoccupations. Very interested in gender traits as expressed linguistically, I am.

Alas, there is almost nothing about the language in the book. #Disappointment. In fact, until about two thirds of the way through, the women barely speak. Mostly they don’t make an appearance either. HOWEVER, I nevertheless gleaned some thought-provoking insights regarding linguistic gender traits, though perhaps not what the author was intending to convey. Curious?

So, premise outline. The year is about 250 years into the future, women’s rights have disappeared (some paper has ‘proved’ that females are inferior) and are slaves. Humans are colonizing space and need endless interpreters to deal with the humanoid aliens they’re making their fortune from. The population has fallen into two categories, the ‘Linguists’ (the intelligencia) and the rest. The hoi polloi don’t like the linguists. The linguists live in a state of semi-Amish conditions of austerity and constant work, ostensibly to refute notions of them amassing great wealth at the taxpayer’s expense, but as the ruse is not working, I don’t know why they bother. For supposedly fantastic communicators and manipulators, they have a shit PR department.

As a work of fiction, this is definitely not the best. It starts, literally, in the middle of a council meeting. Yes, that’s as bad as it sounds. Backstory is explained endlessly through dialogue. Characters are ridiculous caricatures, with pretty much all men being bad and all women being good (including the one who goes around murdering people). One other reviewer put it that ‘I get this picture of someone sitting at the typewriter bashing it and yelling “all men are bastards” over and over again’, and tbh I kinda see the drift. Add to this the aching lack of any female input in the first two thirds, a plot structure assembled with all the finesse of a lean-to shelter, and the numerous impossibilities and illogicalities, you end up with something quite deeply unsatisfying.

That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have great exchanges, piercing insights, huge passion. It’s hard to see it go to waste.

However, here are some interesting aspects.

• ·         The male Linguists are described as strangely passive-aggressive in interactions with the non-linguist (males), in a manner that exactly mirrors the attitude of the linguist females when confronted with the linguist males. The book appears to be unaware of this.
• ·         Thomas the linguist can point out irrationalities of the bias by non-linguists against linguists, but is apparently completely blind to bias against females and similar nonsensical arguments. The book doesn’t seem to highlight this, as far as I can see.  I did consider whether his family name Chornyak might be a hint that there is some metatextual acknowledgement. The name would signify ‘blinky’, ‘hard of seeing’, or ‘four-eyes’ in its Slavic connotation, so maybe he’s meant not to see the obvious. However I don’t think Elgin did Slavic languages, plus if it’s just an Easter egg for the Slavic linguists it’s non-functional as a dramatic device.
• ·         Females, as aforementioned, rarely speak. When present, they conspicuously listen, or talk in sign language.
• ·         The book is scathing about the proliferation of the Aristotelian notion that the woman is the receptacle and completely subservient/passive. However, the premise of the world-building casts all the Aliens into exactly the same receptive, passive position. Apparently, no Alien ever tries to speak a Terran language. They merely sit behind their screens, osmosing into the brains of the juvenile Linguists. Again, the internal logic of the book seems unaware of this transference of ideology.

Which begs the question, are these all examples of being unable to move beyond the boundaries of what is given as a communication medium, which is precisely what the book is actually arguing? It seems to be acting out its own precepts, unwittingly. How insanely meta can you get?

There is also the curious aspect that the style of diction Elgin uses is distinctly… male. It beats about the bush, is pompous, doesn’t bother to describe the characters in any personal sense. The characters stand about like sticks of wood, spouting whatever they’re saying. Elgin accomplishes one of the most remarkable feats of ‘telling’ I’ve ever seen: watch this passage describing body language.

 ‘Any problems?’
‘No, but I have a question.’
They looked at one another, body-parling. WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS INSUFFERABLE BITCH?’ And one of them said, ‘Well, what is it?’
 

Yes, dear reader, she did it. The author has actually ‘told’ and not shown body language. ALL CAPS does it, apparently.

Now, bear in mind that the urgent, stated premise of the book is that

1) Women have not enough voice
2)      Men have too much of the running of the world, and do it badly
3)      Men don’t notice the subtle things women can

Is it not curious that this book enacts precisely all of those things on its own pages? The writing doesn’t notice the subtle things, or at least it doesn’t describe them. It uses the heavy language of pomp and convolution to garner authority. It doesn’t give its women voices.

These actions are not self-aware. Which makes them piss-poor as an attempt at fiction, but extraordinarily successful as a demonstration in vivo of exactly what it is trying to prove.

Isn’t that intriguing? Now, to the scoring. Honestly, if you’re not too interested in the effect it has, I can’t score it above a two out of five hoofs up. The main downside is the plot and illogicalities, but there are some good exchanges. Your choice.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Publisher: Harper Voyager          

Publish date: 1953

ISBN: 978 0 00 830369 3

Book Quote: 

‘Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation-Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.’

…

‘But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.’

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How can I put it politely? No, I can’t. This ‘novel’ is a hysterical torrent of man-flu sploshed onto a climate of cold-war misogynistic terror. However, I’m glad to have read it, as it has many interesting points. I’m taking antacids now, but it’s a price I’m prepared to pay.

The Good

·         Within the mish-mash of words, there are some nice passages. The stream-of-consciousness, poetic chunks that rely on iteration and resonance, are pleasurable. Say, the passage where Montag is trying to remember a phrase from Matthew (they toil not, neither do they spin) on the underground, when everyone is humming away to a toothpaste ad. Or quite a few passages describing scenery or setting. It’s interesting that in so misogynistic a work, the best sections are those in traditionally ‘feminine’ styles. But more of that anon.

The Bad

Where to start? At the beginning?

- By page 2 we’re choked on the fumes of so many adjectives and bombastic adverbs our heads are spinning and we can scarcely hold onto the book. They’re absolutely out of control.

- To have an experimental writing style is acceptable. To toss anything into the pot all in a novella, without a thought to the overall flow, is not. From adjective overload, to impressionism, to film-script, to monologue, to stream-of-consciousness, and then straight into diatribe shoved into the mouths of puppets. If the style differentiation had some reasoning, it would be acceptable. It hasn’t. That’s just how the words hit the page.

·         - Characterisation is nil. It’s on the level of Pilgrim’s Progress, and indeed the hysteria, self-aggrandising, and self-pity ties the two works together convincingly. OK, you can write an allegory, but don’t pretend it’s a novel in any traditional sense.

 -Plot goes no further than the initial idea of a prosecutor having a change of heart and becoming a transgressor. Which is fine. But then the author obviously doesn’t know how to end it all, so blows stuff up and leaves it all down to a plucky band of Harvard bums to re-build the word. Honestly, a blank page would have been better. As it is, it’s infantile.

The Ugly

The misogyny. Untrammelled. If the women aren’t idle sponging ignorant leeches like Millie and her cronies, they’re equally dismissive constructs like Clarisse or the woman who immolates herself with her books. Both type’s only function is to spur or spurn males. There is not even the hint of a notion that something other than procreation or inspiration may come from a female. When Montag thinks of the book burned, the phrase is that ‘behind each of them is a man’. Nothing to do with women. The unnaturalness of the female spongers is accentuated by their unwillingness or dislike of offspring. The wholesomeness of Clarisse is accentuated by her off-screen family, and her interest in love. There is no other dimension.

OK, so what are we complaining about, when we’ve just said that the entire work is an allegory? None of the other (male) characters are clothed in realistic flesh at all, including the main protagonist. Captain Beatty is a laughable travesty of improbability, and as for Faber, let’s not even go there.

The difference is the lack of agency. Males are allowed agency, females are not. It’s not a thought-out thing, it’s taken for granted. The inspirational agency one could say Clarisse and the self-torching woman have is not independent. It needs a male vehicle to achieve anything. The spongers need male vehicles to keep them in their inactive state. The inactive state itself is highlighted in the anecdote of the memorable grandfather and the hands: the recollection of all the things the hands had made, and now would not, as opposed to Millie’s hands, which are still and create nothing. So we can say that in this novella, the female directly inherits the Aristotelian notions of being an empty vessel for the agency of the male to work on. OK (deep breath), let’s work with that. Not the first and not the last to expound this notion. Where does that lead?

To the interesting part. Their inactivity and lack of agency is both forced onto them, and is made into their culpability. Apart from Clarisse and Millie, none of them have a given name. They are all named after their husbands. There is no option for them to do otherwise than they are doing, yet it is violently held against them. The other males in the general background are presumably all also zombies (when they’re not working, which is seems women don’t), but this is never mentioned. When it’s the zombie population at large, it lacks a sex. When it’s the individual, it’s female.  It’s quite clear that the resentment for the zombification has found a channel: the female form.

But what is even more interesting, is that this is not merely an expression of misogyny. The misogyny is simply the most prominent part of a fundamental flaw in the logic of the notions that purport to underpin the work’s sociological theory. 

The theory is, that the dumbing down (leading to zombification) came from excessive pandering to minorities. The book was published in 1953, and we still hear this notion everywhere. No-one was allowed to be offended, so freedom of speech was silenced. In other words, the minorities should have allowed themselves to be offended. Or should have been made to be open to offence. 

Yet, when it’s the (male, obviously) residual intellectuals, who are now in the minority, they are to rise up. They are inspirational. The women in the book are not a physical but a practical minority, due to their lack of agency. Nope, that minority is still bad. As per before. They need to stay down. There is not one instance of a female remembering one of the ‘books’ in the chain of resistance. It is always ‘a man’, and the term is not being used as a synecdoche for humankind. It is literally male. When the intellectual hobos walk off into the distance, fantasising about how they’re going to build a new world ‘generation after generation’, there are neither females present at the time, nor any thought given to anything feminine whatsoever. It’s an entirely male creative process. The males both force the fire onto the females/minorities, and hold them responsible for the resulting imbalance. And violently fear the state of being a ‘minority’ themselves, and instantly take on the mantle of the oppressed-in-need-of-adulation-and-support at the first opportunity.

There is no recognition in the book of the volta performed in the ideology. The Captain’s ‘minorities’ speech is taken at face value, and there is no tie-back to him being the later-described tyranny of the majority, and therefore out of whack. The reason for the zombification is still squarely on the shoulders of the minorities. The minorities of back then, who are not white intellectual males. The minority now is the right one to rise up.  

Rarely have I read a clearer example of the connection between misogyny and minority oppression, as coupled with fear and abnegation of culpability. In today’s world, where we are waking up to the statistics of how male violence against females is directly linked to attacks on minorities in mob violence and mass shootings, surely this is an important template of thought to bear in mind. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, but nevertheless.

Scoring: for pleasure, one moose-hoof up out of five, but read it nevertheless if you haven’t. It’s an appalling piece, to be visited as one would visit a holocaust museum. 

And can someone explain to me the author's obsession with Marcus Aurelius?