Abschlussarbeit

Abschlussarbeit Zur Erlangung des Magister Artium (M.A.) im Fachbereich 10 der Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main Institut für England- und Amerikastudien Thema Newspeak, Nadsat and Láadan – The Evolution of Speech and the Role of Language in 20th Century Dystopian Fiction 1. Gutachterin: Dr. Silvia Mieszkowski 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Frank Schulze-Engler Einreichungsdatum: 23.10.2009 Vorgelegt von: Eike Kühl [email protected] www.eikekuehl.de Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words? - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Frankfurt am Main 2009 Table of Contents i Table of Contents 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1.1 Preliminaries ............................................................................................................ 3 1.2 Language in dystopian research .............................................................................. 7 1.2.1 State of research............................................................................................... 7 1.2.2 Language and dystopia – an overlooked theme? ............................................. 9 1.2.3 Classification and organization of language concerns .................................. 13 2 From the utopian dream to a dystopian nightmare ..................................................... 2.1 The utopian idea .................................................................................................... 17 2.2 The anti-utopian impulse ....................................................................................... 20 2.3 Recurrent themes in dystopian fiction ................................................................... 25 3 Language in dystopia – fictional and contextual issues ............................................... 3.1 ‘The destruction of words’ – language and control ................................................ 28 3.1.1 Language, power and discourse .................................................................... 28 3.1.2 ‘History is bunk’ – mutability and obliteration of the past ........................... 34 3.1.3 Control of literature and writing .................................................................... 47 3.1.4 Language, thought and reality ....................................................................... 54 3.2 Language and resistance ........................................................................................ 72 3.2.1 Freedom in language ..................................................................................... 73 3.2.2 Freedom from language ................................................................................. 84 3.3 Language and social class ..................................................................................... 91 4 Language of dystopia – stylistic and narrative issues .................................................. 4.1 ‘Language speaks’ – language as a protagonist in dystopian fiction .................. 101 4.1.1 Artificial languages ..................................................................................... 103 4.1.2 Para- and intertextuality .............................................................................. 107 4.1.3 Allegories in naming conventions ............................................................... 118 4.2 ‘Words come first’ – extrapolation of contemporary language trends ................ 124 4.3 ‘Beyond control’ – dystopia’s susceptibility to language ................................... 133 5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 139 6 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 144 Appendix Zusammenfassung in deutscher Sprache ...................................................................... 1 Introduction 3 “Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.” - Angela Carter (English novelist, 1940-92) 1. Introduction 1.1 Preliminaries Whenever someone asks me, which book I enjoyed reading the most in my schooldays, I will eventually mention 1984 by George Orwell. At that time, it differed profoundly from the literary canon taught in our school, which mostly included the classic works of Shakespeare and Dickens, Schiller and Mann. Even though they had their own charm, they could hardly catch the attention of an adolescent outside the classroom. With Orwell, the case was slightly different. It read like a science fiction story, but its setting was extraordinarily bleak. It lacked action and memorable characters, but at the same time it abstained from using abstract ideals or well-known stereotypes. Although it was almost half a century old at that time, it felt modern, different, and peculiar. Its plot appeared to be real, too real almost, evoking images of despair that I had only known from historical documentations on TV. In short, it was fascinating – in an uneasy manner. Until now, my fascination with Orwell’s novel has not faded. And apparently, neither has its influence on the genre of dystopian literature. Since its publication in 1949, there has not been another dystopian novel that is often considered a synonym for the whole genre. Not only did 1984 made an impression on the emerging genre of dystopian fiction, it has also gained enormous popularity outside a literary discourse: “Orwellian” for instance has become a label to denote oppressive measures in general, and “Big Brother” has entered our vocabulary as a reference for surveillance and control. Orwell’s depiction of a totalitarian super state, which seeks to ultimately control the minds of its population, has become a cultural paradigm. Although 1984 was not the first proper dystopian novel written in English1, many of its themes, ranging from an oppressive government to 1 Until now, there is no unison considering the question which work should be considered the first dystopia. Novels such as H.G. Well’s The Sleeper Wakes (1899) or Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) are mentioned 1 Introduction 4 surveillance, sexual repression and rebellion have found its way into a vast number of succeeding dystopian works. And then of course there is Newspeak, Orwell’s concept of a language that allows its users to accept that 2+2=5, and which makes any form of dissent essentially impossible. Newspeak arguably emerged from Orwell’s dissatisfaction with the English language at his time, which later led fellow writer Anthony Burgess to describe him as “a word-user who distrusted words”.2 Within the concept of Newspeak, Orwell incorporated the idea that language can be controlled by an authoritative power and used to different ends – a notion, which is not necessarily new. After all, Aristotle already noted in Politics (350 B.C.) that “the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust.”3 Orwell merely adopted this ancient idea and placed it prominently as an integral part of 1984’s power structure. Given the influence of 1984 on general dystopian themes and motifs, one would expect that concerns with language have also found their way into the canon of dystopian literature. And indeed, the corpus of English-speaking dystopian fiction in the last century has produced a rich body of works, in which the use of language plays a significant role. Of course, not all of them adopt Orwell’s concept of Newspeak; in fact, many diverge profoundly from it, but nonetheless, language can be found in various 20th century dystopias. One of these dystopias is Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), which depicts a technologically advanced society, whose language reflects “its mathematical order”.4 In another renowned novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), a process called “hypnopaedia” is used to condition humans in an early stage of development. The plot of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is built around the burning and destruction of books, a recurrent theme in dystopian fiction. In Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), survivors of a nuclear holocaust find scraps of old language that have to been explained according to the rules of a different culture, not unlike as it is the case in Russell Hoban’s at times, but as we will see in chapter 2, there is no clear dividing line between dystopia and the broad field of anti-utopia, which makes the definition of an exact starting point difficult. 2 Roy Harris. 1984. The Misunderstandings of Newspeak. London: Times Literary Supplement 4214, 17. 3 Aristotle. 350 B.C. Politics, Book 1, Part II. The Internet Classics Archive [Online source] 4 Gorman Beauchamp. 1974. “Future Words: Language and the Dystopian Novel”. In: Style 8 (1974), 463. 1 Introduction 5 Riddley Walker (1980). Thomas Berger’s Regiment of Women (1973), on the other hand, explores the ramifications of a sexual rhetoric that precedes some of the issues contained in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), though usually considered science fiction

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