Science Fiction and American Culture » October 16th: Babel-17 (Parts I & II)

October 16th: Babel-17 (Parts I & II)

Plan for the Day

  • Last bit on Zone One
    • Who’s the narrator?
  • Ancient Greece and Language Fun
  • Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17

Last Bit on Zone One

After last class, Jade pointed something out about the narrator of Zone One. Most of us (including my reading) read the narrator as omniscient one. However, midway through “Saturday,” the narrator comments on Mark Spitz’s role as if this were a movie, listing some horror tropes, and writes,

I know it sounds crazy, but they came from the radioactive anthill, the sorority girls were dead when I got here, the prehistoric sea creature is your perp….
By his sights, the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before.

Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Anchor, 2011, p. 166.

Perhaps “I know it sounds crazy…” is an internal monologue Mark Spitz is having that the narrator tells us and doesn’t challenge the omniscient narrator reading. It’s likely that Mark Spitz is actually a straggler going through the motions of clearing blocks. At the very end, we read, “On to the next human settlement, and the one after that” (p. 322). It’s possible the narrator is recounting Mark’s three-day adventure with all the memories that flood into his mind. Just something to consider.

Platonic Forms

Obviously, we English professors spend too much time thinking about words and their uses and their histories and the multiple meanings (polysemy). If we all just agreed on what words meant, we’d be much better off, right? At least some words have single, unambiguous meanings like rights, freedoms, democracy…

I think it’s worth going back–way back–to Plato for this discussion. You’ve no doubt heard of a “platonic relationship,” but are you aware of the platonic forms? Plato believed (or simply argued…more on this in another semester) there were perfect representations of things and ideas. Keep in mind that Plato (via Socrates) believes in absolute truth and that perfect types exist. However, it’s hard to know if Plato believed we could ever reach a full understanding of perfection or good. It seems that we can get close if we’re really devoted to philosophy.

“Plato sought a cure for the ills of society not in politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers.”

Hamilton, Walter. Trans. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII. Radice, Betty. Ed. New York: Penguin, 1973: 1.

More from Hamilton’s “Introduction” (p. 17):

  • Platonic “Forms, of which shifting phenomena of the sensible world are imperfect imitations or copies…The Forms are in fact universals given the status of independent and absolute entities.”
  • “…there exists a Form for every class of things which can be embraced under a common name, beauty, for example, or triangle or horse.”
  • “The Forms, arranged in a hierarchy at the head of which stands the Form of Good, constitute the only true objects of knowledge….the business of the philosopher is to make use of the reminders of them furnished by a sensible world as a starting-point in [their] pilgrimage back from the changing world of sense and opinion to the eternal world of reality and truth.” (italics mine)

Notice the capitalized words: Forms and Good. Any comments?

Jacques Derrida’s Language Fun

I think the following terms need to be defined, so we’re all (somewhat) on the same page. This discussion is our introduction to Derrida, but his influence will be felt for quite some time:

  • Phenomenology: the study of the structure of experience; reflection of consciousness.
  • Existentialism: the idea that human (individual) existence comes from experience, that of the individual.
  • Structuralism: studying culture as a system made up of identifiable connections that are all related to a grand structure, an overarching paradigm.
  • Post-Structuralism: well, this is structuralism “deconstructed.”
  • Liguistic terms
    • grammatology: writing doesn’t reproduce speech (the window pane theory); instead, everything to do with writing constructs/affects meaning.
    • phoneme: basic (smallest) unit in a language that builds words. (think phonetic…do re mi)
    • grapheme: words, punctuation, numbers–they don’t carry meaning themselves
  • Absolutist/Monolithic Critiques
    • logocentrism: the Western assumption that “the word” is the superior conveyor of meaning, one that has an identifiable in an ideal form.
    • différance:
      1) “the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other” (p. 27)
      2) “reference to a present reality [or meaning] [is] always deferred” (p. 29)
    • trace: Because the meaning of a sign is generated from the difference it has from other signs, especially the other half of its binary pairs, the sign itself contains a trace of what it does not mean.
    • transcendental signified: the first cause or zero point–absolute origin.

You can watch the School of Life video on Jacques Derrida if you’re interested in his ideas.

More Context for Derrida

Below are some quotes from Cy Knoblauch’s (Knoblauch is a retired professor from this Department) that will also help with aspects of Derrida:

  • p. 95: logocentrism: “the reliance on fixed a priori transcendental meanings”
    • phonocentrism: “the priority given to sounds and speech over writing in explaining the generation of meaning”
    • “…privileging speech relies on the untenable idea that there is direct access to truth and stable meaning.”
  • p. 96: différance–difference and deferral
  • p. 97: archewriting: “Writing is always already part of the outside of texts. Texts form the outside of texts. Texts are constitutive of their outsides.”
  • p. 98: “Deconstruction seeks to expose the….unacknowledged assumptions” of texts, which “include those places where a text’s rhetorical strategies work against the logic of its own assumptions”
  • p. 101: “…since words do not refer to essences, identity is not a fixed universal ‘thing’ but a description in language”

Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (Parts I & II)

With all that fun words-grammar-meaning stuff in our minds, let’s figure out Delany’s novel. First, let’s get some questions out:

  • Who is Rydra Wong, and what is “special” about her?
  • The epigraphs in front of the parts (I-IV) of the book come from Marilyn Hacker, Delany’s wife (1961-1980).
  • Corporate and Discorporate…what’s going on there?

You can’t judge a book by its cover (although is is a great cover+book), but you can read quite a bit from covers. Take a look at these Babel-17 covers:

Disability Studies and Science Fiction

Although this area is outside my major research agendas, you can’t miss the way characters with disabilities are portrayed in speculative fiction. They are often magical or, in the case of Rydra Wong, telepathic. Delany’s text uses outdated terms for what is now referred to as neurodiversity, neuroatypical, and neurodivergent. Characters overcoming conditions or the disability = magic trope are a major theme in YA speculative fiction, and I have some thoughts on why, but I’m curious in your thoughts. For a more academic discussion, check out Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) is the journal of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS).

Part I Key Lines

In the beginning, Rydra Wong visits her therapist after the General asks her to help out. The therapist, Dr. Markus T’mwarba, goes by the name “Mocky,” and I can’t help but think that’s intentional, but maybe it’s because I’m thinking of Hunger Games and the mockingjay. Anyway, here are some quotes to consider:

  • p. 20: “Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn’t even realize I was just saying other people’s ideas. I thought they were my own.”
  • pp. 22-23: Mocky says, “What you’re describing is muscle-reading, which can be pretty accurate, especially if you know the logical area the person’s thoughts are centered on.”
    • I assume this means reading body language.
  • p. 25: “Mocky, when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe.”
  • p. 31: Cosmetisurgery–“…a man, ebony-skinned, with red and green jewels set into his chest, face arms, and thighs.”
  • Danil D. Appleby, Customs Officer
    • p. 33: “But why the devil do they do that to themselves? They’re all so weird.”
  • p. 41: Brass wrestling a female dragon
    • Calli clams, “She’s nagging him to death.”
  • p. 47: Triples and discorporate. Think of corpus or “body” here as opposed to business corporations.
  • p. 55: “Transport people are used to dying and getting called back.”
  • p. 73: Brass comments on the new technologies for travel, but, when they don’t work, we’re stuck because we don’t remember the old ways.
    • Think about GPS vs maps…
  • p. 84: Baron von Dorco–“…without the Invasion, something for the Alliance to focus its energies upon, our society would disintegrate.”
    • What about the Baroness and how she occupies her time?

Works Cited

Hamilton, Walter. Trans. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII. Edited by Betty Radice. Penguin, 1973.

Knoblauch, Cy. Discursive Ideologies: Reading Western Rhetoric. Utah State UP, 2014.