Infofiche

Embassytown by China Miéville is a novel about alienation, its uses and language. It contains one of the most interesting and well thought out fictional languages I've read, and this is the rare novel that is very much about its own fictional language, rather than simply being written in the context of a fictional language. It has similarities in that regard with Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (...also in having a special lineage of translators raised for the task). It's also a fantastic read and I found a few things to say about it (less than usual), which you can read about if you join me below the fold.

Embassytown is a 2011 novel by China Miéville who is a scholar as well as an author. Normally I'd find that a weird distinction to make, but it is incredibly clear in Embassytown that what he has done is encode a set of debates about the philosophy language into his novel. Familiarity with these debates and their sides is useful to understand what the novel is arguing about, but not engaging with the plot or characters. The plot has a fun sensation of feeling like its arguing with itself about something, with the tensions and releases stemming from changing understandings of l(L)anguage. Nonetheless, the novel is never dry and Miéville is able to encode these debates in such an engaging way that I, who had no idea the extent they were present until I went googling, could still have a fantastic science fictional reading experience.

Because I lack a solid grounding in philosophy of language, and the time to make excursionary readings, I'm putting that to one side for this blog post - even though that's what the entire novel is about! I've left links to two [2] papers [3] I found useful in the citations at the bottom of this article, particularly Weakland's which helped me understand some of the philosophy of language going on and who also discusses alienation. So instead of tackling the philosophy, I'm going to be examining how Miéville uses his fictional language in Embassytown to develop character and plot, and how it affects the reader. As well as all of that you should remember that Miéville's fictional languages are absolutely integral to the themes of the novel, but that I simply don't know how to talk about that.

Embassytown is a story about a human settlement in space and their relationships with their planetary cohabitants, the Ariekei. These aliens are difficult to describe, but importantly they have two appendages they use for communication which they do as two voices unified by a single conscious mind - we'll get back to that. This is the first and most basic pairing of the novel, the two voices of the Ariekei - Cut and Turn - and their language. This human settlement on the planet is itself a colony of the Breman empire who appoint a governor, and armed guards, and control trade to and from the planet. This sets up the novel's other main concern of colonialism and settlement.

The fictional language we are concerned with today is called Language (or Ariekei) - it gets the proper noun throughout the novel. It consists of two simultaneous voices; Cut and Turn. Both of these voices have to be uttered by the same consciousness, otherwise the Ariekei don't hear it as language. In the text, each of these voices is transcribed phonetically as the numerator and denominator of a fraction, with a bar dividing them. This stands out from the narration, and the human dialogue, and is also a really nifty way of writing down an alien language. As a fictional language, it's grammar is pretty par for the course and we don't get very many samples since there are lots of translators around. The most common place we see this fraction typography is in the statement of Ariekei names in Language, for which they serve as a constant reminder of the Alien, immersion and all that. Additionally the names are sometimes juxtaposed with the human-given nicknames. To me, there's a similar effect to the Teixcaalanli names in A Memory Called Empire.

As well as standing out on the page, Language does very strange things that no human language does. It does not seem to have signifiers. The words stand for the thoughts themselves, as a sort of "funnel". There are no deictic words or phrases (stuff like "this" and "here" and most significantly, "that"), Ariekei using absolute descriptions at all times (that cake = "the cake between the fork and spoon, not the fork and knife"). Additionally, one cannot lie in Ariekei Language and because Language is thought one cannot think a falsehood either. There's probably several ways to think around this, but the novel doesn't really worry about 'proving' the language is this way and the reader is expected to take the word of the characters who are themselves repeating the assertions of the first-contact linguists of long ago and their own experiences.

The characters and narration does a lot of work in making the reader understand just how alien the Ariekei are. There are two layers for this, one of which is a sincere alienation they feel from their Hosts (as they politely call the Ariekei) and the other is a manufactured alienation in order to preserve the power of the Ambassadors (those select few who have been engineered to speak Language, and who communicate between the communities). The reader has a fun task of distinguishing between these. Ultimately, all alienation benefits the Ambassadors' monopoly on communication. And both are repeatedly stated in the narration, and I think the combination of that with the unusual typography and physical descriptions succeed in alienating the reader from the Ariekei about as much as the characters are.

The issue the plot of Embassytown revolves around is what I'd describe as bringing the Ariekei into our empathy sphere [1] in order to resolve a political conflict. To cut a long novel short, it transpires that the Breman have conspired to introduce their own Ambassador to the planet, with the goal of subjugating the government there, however this new Ambassador's speech contains a fundamental contradiction: the same speech stands for the thoughts of two very different minds. This acts as a drug to the Ariekei and they become violently addicted (other analyses make a lot out of the threat being the signification of non-Language language) and threaten the human settlement in their attempts to a) get a fix and, later b) destroy all the humans and their evil drug-language.

Once Miéville has established the alienation of the Ariekei, creating the appearance of an impenetrable and invincible alien horde, he then has the characters struggle against the threat of their destruction, which requires that the alienation is overcome. This creates tension because we also know how alien they are, and yet also want the Ariekei and humans to not fight, to live in a better peace and fairer system. It is only through learning to communicate without the looming threat of the god-drug that the Absurd army halts, and to do this the narrator, Avice, decides she must teach the Ariekei signifying, I.E. human, language. It is important to note that throughout the novel the Ariekei have been pushing at the boundaries of their own language anyway, through getting people (including Avice, the "girl who was the hurt in the darkness and ate what was given to her") to perform bizarre acts that can serve as concrete similes, and festivals of lies where they hear lies (signifying speech) and try to speak them themselves. Avice is not the only character to have had this idea, and she collaborates with Ariekei already working in this direction to achieve it.

Eventually, in a wonderful scene and the climax of the novel, she does. She teaches her Ariekei friend (Spanish Dancer) to lie and they teach the other Ariekei. The new innovation spreads and the Absurd soon learn that they too can understand this language (it is explained that they had already made the innovation of deictics; "that one", a key step) and communication restarts after the Absurd invent writing. Now the humans understand the Ariekei as politically self-conscious individuals with wants, needs and desires of their own. They can negotiate what their future will be like on equal terms, a future without a need for Ambassadors and in which addiction to the god-drug can be cured by learning this new language or giftwing amputation. The novel ends on this hopeful note, with Avice and Spanish Dancer venturing out amongst the Immer and Spanish Dancer writing their history of the events.

Miéville's use of fictional language is important to the alienation, and encodes the debates about signification that the novel explores, but I don't think he uses it in the same way as many other writers. Other writers would write in the context of their fictional languages, and most of the writers I've examined here do that. Miéville on the other hand, has written very deeply about his fictional language, which makes it a much harder novel for me to analyse because I'm not read in what he is discussing. Nonetheless, I find he is doing things like those other authors with his fictional languages, stuff like using typography to remind us of the alienation, and using it as a method to show the difference between Ariekei and humans via their languages.

This is a novel about alienation, how it serves colonialism, and how important overcoming alienation is. The triumph of the expanding empathy sphere allows the Ariekei and Embassytowners to better negotiate their position in the expanding sphere of Breman influence, and allows sincere empathetic connection and emotion between the species which was before always mediated by the Ambassadors, motivated by their need for resources. Before, there was no time for Ariekei friendship but in this new future of lies and signs, there is.

(Thanks very much for reading everybody. I started university this month, and so I've been very busy indeed. I hope any of my readers are patient if my posts are slighly delayed. Next month, I think I'm finally going to read The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang and discuss it there. Embassytown was an interesting novel to write about because its written in the classic-sf style, and thus is very popular to academics. That means I can reference papers below and draw on the work of other scholars which is not something I get to do very often. Hopefully I can do it with The Story of Your Life next month too.)