“I’ve got this book I want you
to read,” a friend said to me during a femography meet. “I think you’d be
really into it. It’s about language, and… stuff. It’s science fiction. But it’s
really interesting.”
So after the meet, we went to
her house and got the book. We ended up hanging out most of the afternoon. I
was thrilled, because I’d known her for ages and wanted to be good friends with
her but never made that leap.
Giving someone a book because
it made you think of them, out of the blue, is a pretty special friendship
indicator, I think. I felt honoured. So I put the book on my bedside table and
after reading three pages from it that night I didn’t touch it for months.
To be fair, occasionally I would
read a paragraph from it, before I put it down again. There were always at
least three books piled on top of poor Embassytown.
The book starts in the middle of a party the reader has no context for, in a
world that is not explained, and characters that simply appear without
introduction. I desperately wanted to read the book, and find out what it was
that made my friend think of me. And, you know, I wanted to enjoy the book as
well. But it was tough-going.
Finally, when I was moving to Arnhem Land with only 15 kilos of baggage allowance, I
had the impetus to actually read the book. I took it as the only fiction book,
so I would be forced to read it. Even so, it took me two and a half months to
finish it.
Until around page 50, where
there was a massive revelation, I still didn’t understand the story. After that
the revelations came in waves as the story picked up pace and the stakes were
raised, incrementally but significantly.
I can understand why my friend
didn’t tell me too much about the novel. I also don’t want to give much away
because it was so hard to earn the revelations and yet so worth it when I did,
so I don’t want to take the potential pleasure from you.
This makes it hard to review
the book. So I’m going to give you a SPOILER WARNING.
Embassytown, the place that
provides the title, is a colony town on the outskirts of a wide-ranging
country, comparable to Great
Britain, except on a galaxy sort of scale.
The story revolves around human (or as they call them, “terre”) relations with
the indigenous creatures of the land Embassytown is based in, who are called
Hosts, or Ariekei. (As I’m living in Arnhem Land
and interacting with Indigenous people encountering colonialism on a daily
basis, this was pretty interesting to me.)
Individual Terre can’t
communicate with the Hosts because they speak with two voices and they only say
what is truth.
Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are,
but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through
which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that
word, can be seen. (62)
If I [record] a word in Language, and play it to an
Ariekes, I understand it, but to them
it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning
lives. It needs a mind behind it. (62-63)
Through this interesting
premise, Melville is able to explore the idea of truth and fiction. Arieke, the
indigenous people, are not able to lie, because to lie would be akin to
believing something that you didn’t think was true. It’s a paradox. They can
use simile but not metaphor. They say “I am like the girl who ate what was
given to her” but not “I am the girl who ate what was given to her”.
Something that comes across is
that sometimes you have to “lie”, that is say something that is not factually
correct, in order to tell a deeper truth. Whenever we talk about big concepts,
we stray from straight fact and reach for metaphor. For an example of this, I
use an excerpt from the recently reviewed Julie and Julia:
I believe that calves’ liver is the single sexiest food
that there is… The reason people despise liver is that to eat it you must
submit to it – just like you must submit to a really stratospheric fuck.
Remember when you were nineteen and you went at it like it was a sporting event?
Well, liver is the opposite of that. With liver you’ve got to will yourself to
slow down. You’ve got to give yourself over to everything that’s a little
repulsive, a little scary, a little too
much about it. When you buy it from the butcher, when you cook it in a pan,
when you eat it, slowly, you ever can get away from the feral fleshiness of it.
Liver forces you to access taste buds you didn’t know you had, and it’s hard to
open yourself to it.
I think this speaks for itself.
(Someone will probably argue this is a simile
but I think it blurs the line).
The truth in lies idea also
reminded me of a line from this video, by John
Green: “Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed, and
when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For
me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying
memories into something true.”
John Green says it better than
I can, but what he’s saying is what fiction is like. Fiction is telling a story
that didn’t happen in order to convey truth.
The other most interesting part
of the story comes right at the end, so if you’ve coped with the spoilers so
far but you don’t want the end of the story ruined, BACK OUT NOW BIG SPOILER COME BACK WHEN
YOU’VE READ IT (Highlight to read).
At the end of the book the
Arieke have to learn to “lie” in order to save their lives and their world.
They have to recognise that terre are sentient beings who can communicate. They
have to split the signifier and the signified: “What they spoke now weren’t
things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no
longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed” (365).
This is an incredibly painful
process. They are essentially destroying their mind and their worldview and
rebuilding it. “No wonder it made them sick. They were like new vampires,
retaining memories while they sloughed off lives. They’d never be cured. They
went quiet one by one, and not because their crisis ended. They were in a new
world. It was the world we live in” (366).
This reminds me of my daily
life. People I see every day still remember a time when there were no settlers,
when colonialism did not touch them, at least not directly. The process of colonisation
is ongoing, and it is sometimes painful. Reading this description of the Hosts’
minds being destroyed and remade instantly made me think of people here trying
to adapt to a balanda (white person) way of life. I don’t think it’s impossible
to live in both cultures and be considered a success according to both
world-views, but it is very difficult. I think the destroying and remaking of
the mind is a very powerful… wait for it…
Metaphor!
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