Underwater, No One Can Hear You Perform Linguistic Constructions

Joan Slonczewski's A Door into the Ocean takes Feminist Uptopian Literature to new depths. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) Having as a major setting a planet (moon) completely covered with water, A Door into the Ocean offers a counter-balance to the well-worn Science Fiction convention of settings of barren moons, rugged craggy landscapes and deserts. (Slonczweski mentions her intent to respond to the desert setting of Herbert's Dune, but must have had no knowledge of Lewis' 1943 Perelandra, which featured an ocean world with floating, fluid land.)

Such a subversion of setting serves well for subversions/interrogations of other conventions in areas such as gender, sexuality, politics, power, and materialism. In her own study guide, http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/books/adoor_art/adoor_study.htm, Slonczewski points out that conventional binaries, such as the conventional view of male/female, can be problematized (deconstructed) by use of language. (It is interesting to note that it is through language that such constructs are reified to begin with.) (I know that sentence ends in a preposition, but I like saying "to begin with" every now and then.)

In her online study guide, Slonczewski ways that "The deconstruction of polarities is mediated in part by the unique language of the Sharers which conflates subject and object. " Indeed, in Door, the language usage does serve to decenter, if not deconstruct, certain ideas ensconced in a current cultural dictionary. Terms like lovesharer, learnsharing, hitsharing, worksharing, share (a walk, a day), unspeak, all serve to make common ideas "new" by nature of de-familiarizing them. In this way, the regularity and ubiquity of common terms lose at least some power to instantiate commonly held ideas.

But language, (especially if it is a tool of the "master,") meets some limitation in its ability to deconstruct. I share a few here, based on Slonczewski's comments on her site...

1. "Sharers literally cannot imagine one human being forcing another to behave against her will. Their own system of governance does not even allow for such. "

But, I want to make someone do something against their will!
No, you can't do that! Be respectful of others.
I don't want to be respectful of others!
You must do it whether you want to or not!

Even though there may be a new sheriff in town - the new language/ideas still amount to a "sheriff" nonetheless. Imagining achieving compliance on the premise that no one can force others to comply is... well, words, again, fail.

2. "The Sharers use this power, enabled by their superior genetic technologies, to maintain their way of life. Their own nonviolent politics overcomes the oppressor."

Describing a Utopian society where egalitarian values preempt contests for supremacy is admirable - but not an easy task. What does it mean to say that the sharers have "Superior" genetic technologies? This seems far from an egalitarian appraisal. But maybe they mean that sharers are equal - but simply better than the Valans. Ouch. Once again, we run into something that smells remarkably similar to what Burke calls "congregation by segregation."
And nonviolent politics "Overcomes"? Isn't that sorta like "beating" the oppressors? Or "winning the war" against the oppressors? Yep, language is a funny thing, huh?

I think that language fails in cases like these because there is a certain unspoken (though I don't contend that it is unspeakable,) missing concept. In Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism, the chapter on "Dwelling" offers an insight into how this mis(non)understanding might occur. Garrard contrasts two views of how the Biblical mandate to "have dominion over" the earth might inform (or disinform) a comprehensive worldview of the environment. He then offers Jeanne Kay's argument that "both positions misread nature's role in the Bible... the Bible is neither anthropocentric nor ecocentric, but theocentric in a way and to a degree difficult for the modern reader to fully accept."

• The unspoken idea.
• The unmitigated binaries of the extant terministic screen.
• The use of language to bridge the gap it, in part, created.

All these elements are involved in such fiction that seeks to challenge what is seen as an oppressive hegemony. (OK, granted, it is usually the Nixon or Reagan or Bush administration, but theoretically, it could be something else...)



(Garrard is pretty hard on Heidegger, pelting the Nazi with berries (Berry) and burgers (Berger). But, alas, this will have to wait for another reflection.)