Essay: Language and Other Masks in Utopian Thought

The process of envisioning or implementing a new society is one of complete reformation. Regardless of the nature or content of the reform, the visionary, aspiring leader, or established leader seeks to introduce entirely new concepts and practices into society. Acceptance of new utopians ways requires, as a basic prerequisite, the rejection of old behaviors and paradigms. Often, thinkers choose to modify the past and conceal the reality of the present to facilitate these changes. However, no new world can be built from nothing: the new ways must inevitably be constructed using old conventions. Language is utilized to skew present, past, and future; reality is severely modified to correspond to the revised ideology.

The means to express, disseminate, enact and enforce a reform are all subject to and relegated by, language. Language has always been political on every scale and in every locale, as demonstrated by ubiquitous phenomena in everyday life: in extreme reactions to declarations of official languages, in discussions of legitimacy of different accents, dialects, and tongues, and in tension and violence among speakers of different languages. Utopian thinkers have realized this, and explicitly or implicitly incorporate revisions of language into their doctrines. For some thinkers such as H.G Wells and George Orwell, social reform necessitates comprehensive lingual reform. For others, discreet elements of language are more subtly changed, betraying an attempt to make a dour reality appear less bleak.
Real-world attempts have been made to construct and implement new languages. All proponents of these languages have taken issue with the aspect of language that is subjective or biased. Esperanto, Interlingua, and Ido are the three most common consciously created international auxiliary languages – that is, languages constructed specifically to enable communication between people from different linguistic backgrounds. Their creators saw inherent bigotry and prejudice in various ethnic languages and synthesized new languages in an attempt to eliminate inequalities. Other languages arose to address the particular needs of certain communities. The international scientific vocabulary (ISV) is a compilation of words that are based on dead languages so that they cannot confuse; Simplified English arose to facilitate comprehension of user manuals; Basic English uses simplified grammar and a limited vocabulary to more easily teach English as a second language.

While attempts at artificially creating languages are often born of noble intentions of peace or practicality, they are usually blind to the aesthetic and artistic implications of such limitations. This quickly turns the reality the languages are meant to describe from utopian to dystopian.  H.G Wells in The Shape of Things to Come imagines a language that contains two million words of different lingual origins. He views our contemporary language as "warped by bad habits, cumbered with a tangle of unsound associations, clogged with unresolved complexes; … a fine piece of machinery in a state of dirt and neglect". That a single word may have multiple meanings or multiple connotations was very disturbing to Wells. He proposes a language with no redundancies, which will culminate in "an enormous extension of the research and a far deeper penetration into reality as language, our intellectual hand, is brought to a new level of efficiency." Clinical, scientific productivity is his aim and such a language may well serve such ends. But while a global society based on such a language may indeed be more efficient, its artistic and aesthetic creation would undoubtedly become stagnant. Hamlet's desire to "shuffle off this mortal coil", for instance, would be surely rendered incomprehensible and irrelevant. Indeed, the very existence of art would prevent such a language from taking root. Punning and word games are sustenance to the writer and, save in a world devoid of art, such stiff, precise language could not naturally become common as Wells proposes.

While for Wells new language is an integral part of the vision of a new world, other Utopian thinkers left language largely untouched. Particular elements were changed, and express the gap between reality and its appearance, or the old world and the new. In the children's novel The Giver, Lois Lowry invents a future in which genetically engineered people live in closed, semi-independent communities in which all aspects of individual conduct are closely regulated, from the choice of food and clothing to the choice of spouse and profession. Initially, every aspect of reality appears to be ideally harmonious, as each member of the community is secure in his place within the community and is certain that the best choices are made for him. 

When a member of the community does disturb the meticulous order, he is reprimanded; multiple offenses lead to a "release" from the community, to an unknown locale called "Elsewhere". Jonas, the protagonist, discovers that "release" means "kill"; he realizes that the community routinely executes its members, including infants whose sleeping schedules are not regular, identical twins, and pilots who make navigational errors. A change in the meaning of a single word becomes the center of a complete change of perspective for Jonas: he realizes that the leaders of the community have been misleading him, his friends, and his family for as far back as anyone can remember. His world has been turned upside down and at once his reality becomes terrifying.

Lowry plays upon a single word to illustrate the gap between reality and presumption; Wells modifies an entire language. George Orwell in 1984 tries to have it both ways so that the novel illustrates the tension between the impossibility of an immediate linguistic revolution and the need for such a revolution in a new society. Orwell echoes Wells' supposition that new language (albeit a language with different principles than Wells') must accompany a revolution: "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible" (Appendix). As opposed to Wells, however, who sets the novel in his own time, Orwell's focalizer is a member of the new future society, and must therefore incorporate particulars of the language so as to demonstrate its key role. Here Orwell encounters a problem. Even though characters in 1984 speak both Newspeak and English, the Party's official language, the book itself must be written in English in order to effectively communicate its contents. The telescreen, which is overseen by the Party and we can safely assume uses at least some Newspeak, is represented to the reader only in English: "Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory" and so on. This we can assume to be in part a stylistic choice on Orwell's part, and in part a product of helpless necessity for clarity. While some Newspeak does appear throughout the novel, the language itself is not the most effective propagator of the horrors of Ingsoc and the Party in the novel. Instead, Newspeak is spoken about in English: "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." Here, English is used to imply the horrors of the new society, because the new language simply cannot.

Orwell cannot employ Newspeak to manipulate his readers like the Party will its subjects, but he does, like Lowry, use English wordplay on meaning and nuance (incidentally, exactly what the Party tries to eradicate by implementing Newspeak). "Big Brother" is the term chosen to signify the malevolent government forces, whereas "the Brotherhood" is the name for the underground movement that opposes the Party. The word pair "Big Brother", while intended by the Party to represent confidence and reliability and evoke a fraternal relationship, also clearly contains in it a hierarchy of power: "Big Brother" versus the implied "little brother". The term "brotherhood" on the other hand is entirely egalitarian and not suggestive of a power structure. The two terms are very closely related etymologically and yet differ in their connotation. This makes their juxtaposition all the more powerful, and the doubt that the Brotherhood may not exist all the more heartbreaking.

In addition to their experimentation with language, all three novels portray future societies that have very different views about the past of their society. Futures are invented, pasts are swept under the carpet, and truths become subjectivized and particularized. In their own way, each work raises disconcerting questions about the very meaning of history. 

The Shape of Things to Come includes not one but two notes qualifying and justifying its contents. The first is a note signed by the author that establishes a man named Dr. Raven as a respectable, trustworthy character whose judgment can be trusted. Dr. Raven, of course, is a fictional character. In the note, Wells goes on to present as true the hallucinations of the future Dr. Raven experiences and asserts that some of the prophesied events already did occur. At the end of the book, as well as throughout it, are included additional notes by an editor who is once again Wells feigning an alternate identity. As such, Wells lays forth a fictional account of a dream that claims to be prophetic masquerading as non-fiction with commentary by additional personages who are presented as real but are also fictitious. The convolution is preposterous, and, I believe, intentional as such at least in part. The structure of The Shape of Things to Come closely follows the structure of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a fictional travel account written a hundred years earlier by Poe that also masquerades as nonfiction, and similarly includes a foreword by a would-be real character and an afterword by an editor that was in fact written by Poe. Poe is even mentioned once in The Shape of Things to Come.

In the Introduction, Wells writes: "It is, or at least it professes to be, a Short History of the World for about the next century and a half.  (I can quite understand that the reader will rub his eyes at these words and suspect the printer of some sort of agraphia.)". Wells further writes: "Nowadays every schoolboy knows that the essential and permanent conflict in life is a conflict between the past and the future, between the accomplished past and the forward effort." From these two passages arises a curious implication about the nature of history. Wells proposes, with assertive confidence as to its validity, a comprehensive prediction of the global state of affairs in the 170 years following the time of writing. Although ultimately the book is fiction, one need not search long to encounter predictions about the future that claim absolute validity, in all fields from stock value to technology to politics. Men have great confidence about events that haven't happened; this confidence is even more profound regarding events that have. In the same way that the future is imagined to be a certainty, the image of the past that we have is colored with the confidence of men filling in the blanks about facts they lack. It is easy to see that the tendency of humanity to self-assurance causes history to be inevitably subjective. This subjective nature of history is vividly demonstrated in 1984, in which the Party abandons the attempt at depicting a believable past and instead focuses on a unified present, constantly writing and rewriting history.

The institutionalized study of history can be credited with the attempt to be objective. But what happens when the past is deliberately modified, or when different, contradicting versions of the past exist? In The Giver, Jonas is selected to be trained as the Receiver of his community and is educated by the Giver. As his training progresses, Jonas realizes that what he is learning is the true history of the community – our own contemporary history. For the first time in his life, he is exposed to people of different races; he learns of war, starvation, and overt cruelty. Similarly, in 1984 there is also a juxtaposition of two different possible worlds: Big Brother's reign and the promise of an alternative reality in which the Brotherhood is in power. Big Brother's dominance is portrayed as unequivocally evil, and the Party's attempts at rewriting history to gain absolute control are exaggerated and ludicrous. Its people live in squalor and misery, and it is evident that the alternative of freedom, honesty, and truth is preferable to the individual. Winston enjoys his transgressions against Big Brother and thoughts of the Brotherhood fill him with hope. The methods of the Party are suffocating at best and usually cruel; the Party is a reign of terror and there is very little to be lost in overthrowing such a government.

Jonas, however, alongside the misery also experiences extreme beauty, in the form of color and music – the members of the community, it seems, have been engineered to be tone-deaf and colorblind. Jonas is sworn to secrecy; he realizes that the truth he knows is vastly different from that of the rest of the community, even its leaders, who just assume that affairs have always been the way they are at present. The burden of knowledge resides with just two people, the Giver, and the Receiver, and the rest are perfectly happy with their severely modified version of the truth. In fact, when a mistake happens and some memories of the past become available to the entire community, havoc ensues and people suffer. Many, it is implied, would have been better off forever ignorant of the true nature of their world. Ethical and moral questions immediately arise regarding individual rights and the common good. If people are content in their ignorance of the past and of reality, should they be made aware of it regardless of the risk of havoc, disorder, and potentially many more casualties? Is the promise of freedom, emotion, and choice worth the potential misery of inequality, violence, and poverty?

Image by Renhai Ii