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(The Key To Reality: Language And Thought As A Subject In Science Fiction)

Magisterarbeit, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität

Freiburg im Breisgau, 1986

The work begins by addressing various approaches to science fiction from a linguistic point of view, before defining the author's interest in the relationship between language, cognition and reality in science fiction literature. After acknowledging the general problem of defining the genre, the author outlines three areas in which language is addressed in SF, namely with respect to language's sociological, epistemological and manipulative aspects.

The historical and cultural background is depicted as comprising concerns of language magic, philosophy, natural science and ideal languages. In this context, the relativity theory is introduced, which the author broadly characterises as being the behaviouristic and the functional, i.e. the concept of language pursued by Malinowski and Firth, before discussing the so-called strong version of the Whorf hypothesis.

The accessing of new realities is a general theme of science fiction which comes to the fore in any encounter with extraterrestrials, an anticipated difficulty which the genre chooses to overcome with either "standard" or extreme solutions. From this, the work moves to a detailed discussion of two so-called orthodox examples: C. S. Lewis's Out Of the Silent Planet and Stanislaw Lem's Eden. Each novel - as is also the case in every subsequent novel discussed - is first presented through a plot summary, after which the linguistically relevant aspect of the novel is thematicised and evaluated: the languages of Malacandra and the author's Christian civilisation criticism in the case of Lewis, and the language of Eden and the establishment of communication under the aspect of Lem's social criticism. These are then followed by an example of an extreme solution as presented in the psycholinguistics and language acquisition evident in Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue. Elgin presents a technique known as "interfacing", characterises various alien languages, and assumes a secret female language Láadan. These are interpreted as resting on conservatism, language criticism and linguistic contradictions.

The next section of the work discussed the manipulation of reality as represented in three primary texts.

George Orwell's 1984 uses Newspeak and Doublethink to manipulate reality through lexical semantics and information control. The justification but also the imperfect conception of Newspeak and Doublethink are discussed, together with an evaluation of information and thought control by means of language manipulation.

Lexical semantics and psychological structure are explored in Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17, whereby the form and capabilities of the language Babel-17 are central. This synthetic language, of which only a few but nonetheless informative examples are presented in the novel, is designed so as to be able to take over the higher cognitive processes of the Babel-17 learner, performing, as it were, a cognitive coup d'état. Delany's conception of language is that of a cybernetic system at work within an individual characterised by a computer-model: the synapses represent the hardware and the acquired language functions as the controlling software. The basis of this conception, in turn, is the strong version of the Whorf hypothesis, whereby the words and their rules for syntatic structuring amount to the only available segmentation of external reality: language controls thought absolutely.

The focus of Ian Watson's The Embedding is sentence semantics and language magic. Watson utilises insights from anthropology, language magic, cognitive linguistic psychology and communication theory to construct a subtle narrative which presents a particularly detailed and far-reaching conception of language. Crucial to the novel's argumentation is an awareness of the linguistic approach enshrined within generative transformational grammar. The novel can be seen in several respects - language, location, society, but also personal and cultural motivation - as an embedded layering of respectively superordinate and subordinate structures, so that the text in its entirety serves as a metaphor for the view of language on which it is based. Within the novel, various entities for various reasons wish, in effect, to apply language magic: to manipulate reality it must be understood, and to understand it the reality must be fully described. If an adequate and complete description of reality is to be both achieved and made immanent in the thought process, then a maximisation of the embedding structure of the describing language must be attained. In describing the fictional attempts to do just this, Watson permits himself to lay out a detailed explication of a particular view of the function of language, encompassing linguistic relativity, social politics and the status of the human being. Watson also presents an argument for the existence of universals which must, of necessity, underly all languages, no matter how superficially divergent.

In conclusion, the work draws parallels and elicits differences between the forms of linguistic relativity represented in the six novels discussed, before attempting an evaluation both in terms of literature criticism and linguistics. For literature criticism, the crucial outcome of such analysis is to remind the discipline not merely of the need to understand hitherto well-rehearsed philosophical interpretations of humanity and the universe as perceived by the individual, but also the value and at times indispensability of an awareness of newer scientific and social-scientific approaches in order to exhaustively understand fictional texts. For the linguist, the discussion makes it clear that "thought experiments" can be carried out which utilise techniques and severities which no scientist could or would allow in the real world, and at the same time demonstrates how widely the particular insights and ideas of linguistics may become established in the extra-disciplinary world - which, of course, also amounts to a warning to observe scientific responsibility.

(The dissertation is at present only available in the German language.)