THE MURDER OF LANGUAGE

Today, the 22^nd November 2013, 50^th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, is the anniversary likewise of Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis:  the latter commemorated with a stone in Westminster Abbey.

      A more natural trio is Huxley, Lewis and Orwell: for all three wrote dystopias, and Orwell’s and Lewis’ both involve the destruction of language.

     Orwell’s Newspeak - successful to a degree that Political Correctness can still only dream of - is designed, by linguistic reductionism, to make certain thoughts unsayable, and ultimately unthinkable.  Hence the glorious “doubleplus ungood”. 

     Lewis’ That Hideous Strength is an allusion to Sir David Lindsay’s description of the Tower of Babel.  During the banquet at Belbury, headquarters of the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments, speech disintegrates into such nonsense as, “the madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised.”  Reason?  As the resuscitated Merlin puts it (in Latin, and here translated):  “’They that have despised the word  of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.’”

   Only fiction?  To read the selected postmodern samples of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense is to feel that the fictional curse has taken on the horror of actuality.   

            Thus Baudrillard:  “It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object, within and without, question and answer, event and image…”

     Here’s Deleuze and Gauttari.  “…an external framing or exoreference. For these protolimits, outside all coordinates, initially generate speed abscissas on which axes will be set up that can be coordinated.”

     With this sort of stuff, you could slide in Lewis’, “'We shall not until we can secure the erebation of all prostundiary initems.’” and hardly notice a disparity.