The Treachery Of Language

Rene Magritte "The Treachery Of Images 1928

Marc Nash/Google Images "The Treachery Of Language" 2018

Magritte's painting has the caption "this is not a pipe". In doing so he is admonishing/advising the viewer that it is not an actual pipe, merely the representation of one in painting. Yet there is a further distancing layer than that even, in that it is a painting of the image or the symbol of what we mean by the word 'pipe'.

Marc Nash's version is that whatever the treachery held by imagery, there is further treachery upon treachery, when you introduce language into the picture. 

Firstly let's not overlook that without Magritte's caption painted on the canvas, the painting would have far less meaning to transmit. This painting without its words, would be a fairly contextless painting of a pipe. It is only the injection of language through its caption that transmits Magritte's meaning, as it sets up the resonance through the paradox it presents. 

But Nash points out language is equally treacherous. The word 'pipe' does not conjure up a singular, universal image. Magritte's pipe burns the solid state of tobacco and produces gas in the form of smoke. Nash points to a whole host of pipes who don't deal in solid states at all, but channel the passage of fluids and in some cases, like a car exhaust pipe, gases too. 

Apart from a sprinkling of onomatopoeic words, few of which are employed as object nouns (most are sonorous verbs or objectless exclamation nouns such as 'boom'), the sound of a word bears no relationship to its meaning. It is this disjunction that makes language treacherous. Without the visual image Magritte provides, we would have no idea if 'this is not a pipe' refers to something not being a smoker's pipe, or a hosepipe, some duct piping, a drainpipe,  an oil pipeline, a sewer, the outside of the Pompidou Centre, or a pipe bomb. 

Magritte relies on language to contextualise his painting, but in doing so undermines it at a stroke. It is language whose treachery far outstrips that of images. Images and their referent symbols are nothing without the labelling of words grouping them together as 'universals'. Yet it is that very universalising that reduces much of the essence of things, grouping together broad categories of objects which have significant differences one from another. Can you smoke a sewer pipe? You can light it and it would likely explode from the gases passing through. A literal approach to the word sewer pipe would be fatal in such a case. Can you pass water through a smoker's pipe? Well only if it was one of those comedy bubble-blowing pipes perhaps. And the ingenuity of the crack smoker, who forges a crack pipe out of anything that resembles a piece of tubing, merges the two 'universal' meanings of the word 'pipe' into a single function. 

Now Magritte's work has led to self-reflection on the image within the art world, but there has been far less investigation in fiction of the treachery of language; of the dissociation between the sound of a word and its meaning. Consider how we acquire language - as a child language is modelled for us by adults and the child imitates those sounds. Over time the child starts cohering those sounds to associate them with specific words which further will be constructed together into sentences. By age 2 they will have a grasp of pronouns, by 3 they are able to construct sentences and by four understand directions for them to respond to. It is only when they start nursery school that they begin to be taught how to read write and spell these words they have already mastered vocally. They learn to spell by wrote or by reading and picking up spellings, because there is no logical relationship between sound and meaning. 

This is one of the themes I explore in my novel released in 10 days. 

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Reality And Fiction

The novel was once a radical art form. It represented a slow turning away from sacred and transcendent literature and placed the human subjectivity of the author at the steering wheel. Though religion didn't immediately lose its influence within literature, no longer did authors have to re-present traditional themes, forms and symbology. They were free to choose what they wrote about and didn't have to refer to previous conventions and traditions if they opted not to.

Cervantes and Sterne celebrated this with their gorgeous insinuations as to the unreliability of their narrators. Could fiction be lying to us, making things up and stuff? What could mendacious literature be for then? Did it seek to reflect the real world? Was it intended to provide an interpretation of the world? How does any of that play with the fact that it is a work of fiction, an imagining of an author's mind, no matter how much 'based on truth'? How did the subjectivity of its single author's imagination square with imparting anything universal to a readership?

In painting similar development occurred. Western art was in thrall to theology, with prescriptions, proscriptions and a ready made symbolic palette to refer to. Within these limitations however, artists advanced their art by discovering perspective and how to play with light and colour, so that religious icons were supplanted by the sumptuous canvases of Giotto and Titian. It may have been revolutionary to move the Madonna and Child away from the very centre of the painting, but it was still utterly rooted in religious iconography and imagery.

It was the various modernist movements in art, Impressionism, Cubism and the like, which took the religious shackles off the image in painting as artists went in pursuit of 'truth'; that is the essential real nature of objects, be it landscapes, still lifes or figurative art. These were inquiries into the truth of objects through exploring the way we 'see' things. But the revolutions didn't stop there as art freed itself from the figurative, passing through abstraction and into conceptual forms that eschewed canvas and paint entirely. Art became self-aware, not just of light, colour and perspective, but of its very fictions too.
It reached its apotheosis perhaps with Magritte's painting -



It expressed a key realisation: a picture of a pipe was not the same as a pipe itself. A picture of a pipe was actually a symbol, an image of what we know and recognise as a pipe. It cannot represent or reflect the ceramic/wood ensemble that constitutes the object that is the pipe, for this is a two-dimensional representation only of its image. Art had so freed itself from depicting and portraying, that it had shrunk its own horizons into fairly arid considerations of the image (Pop Art, much conceptual art for example). The image itself had been supplanted by the sign. What something stood for. Art became aware of its limitations and its fictional nature, almost completely cut off from trying to portray the real.

The novel has not had nearly as many revolutions and paradigm shifts as visual art. Yet it should have arrived at the same place in terms of becoming conscious of itself as fiction. In fact, fiction ought to have a competitive advantage in all things fictional, seeing as it's even in its very name! Magritte's painting wouldn't work without the tension set up by the words "This is not a pipe".

There are some hard and fast realities about the novel, or any artwork, that make them have some actual substance in the world. A print book is an object, while even an e-reader data file exists on some level. Books take up space on libraries and shelves and if they remain in print after the author is long dead, then they could definitely be said to have contributed to the lasting store of human knowledge and ideas. So as a material entity, any book forms part of reality. But of course we are really talking about the contents within. The body of the written word.

Novels are stories rather than truths about the real world, though there can be points where they catalyse truth in the form of the emotional reaction of the reader. And through all its seismic changes, painting being a visual artform has always placed at its centre an inquiry into ways of seeing and the nature of perception. What's the literary equivalent of visual art's primary inquiry? Well it has to be language, since that is literature's only real tool. The author may have a palette with plot, character, imagery, setting and the like on it, but all are solely rendered through words.

So any novel ought to be aware of its relation to language. How words work to build up images, voices, narratives. But also how all of these are at one remove from reality, since the fictional building, tree or person is only constructed through words rather than brick, wood or flesh. A tale involving a pipe is not an actual pipe, only a representation of one through story.

And it becomes more complex, for the word PIPE has a myriad of meanings all differing from one another; a smoking pipe. Some plumbing pipe or duct. A blowpipe. A sewer. A gas pipe(line). A hose pipe. An organ pipe, or other musical pipes. The anatomical windpipe. Various tubular formations that channel things through them, such as in volcanos or in geology. And that's without any of the meanings of the word when employed as a verb.

Magritte's painting would not have worked so well if the image was of a bit of copper tubing. It relies on the primacy our brains give to the word 'pipe' to associate it with the act of tobacco smoking. Words have inbuilt hierarchies of meaning, they have etymological roots rooted in historical realities. Anglo-Saxon words, Norman french words, Latin, Greek, Arabic and all the imports from colonies ruled by English speaking imperial powers. There are reasons why certain classes of anglo-Saxon words survived into the language, while others didn't, supplanted by Norman-French ones. There is the Latin from the original Roman invasion, Latin from Christian liturgy, Latin and Greek from the slowly developing scientific orthodoxy and classification. It is organic, constantly shifting and evolving. It is loaded with value judgements and assumptions, even if these are not apparent. The choice of Latin and Greek was often to convey the sense of the word being scholarly and not really accessible to the common man. The legal system is replete with such abstruse words. It's a very distorting medium that both muddies interpretations of the real world even as it purports to classify and sequence it by grouping things into classes. So not only does language construct an author's representation of any human world he cares to compose, language is also already at one remove from everyday reality as its descriptive medium. The author may write of a smoker's pipe, but in real life the concept of a pipe is already a shorthand and a convention couched in language.

In the early 21st Century, we are actually at an advantage where fiction is concerned. We have become so saturated by media, by images and data bombarding us, it is often the case that thoughts and ideas and even feelings that emerge from within us, may not have actually originated with us. Advertising may have implanted an idea, or you may have read something but forgotten you ever had read it and now credit that the idea was your own. This is the world of the hyperreal, where everything is constructed through media, sign and symbol and nothing is definitively real. Or if it is, we certainly can't tell the difference, because it has all become conflated. Now imagine constructing your fictions out of that? You already start from the world of the fictional. You are reflecting the unreality of constructed reality back on itself. In this way, fiction may just help us in our ways of seeing and conceptualising reality and to consider the part language plays in moderating and defining our reality back to us. Fiction isn't real, but it can help interrogate the world around us to see what may equally not be as real and unconstructed, unfabricated by various assumptions, connections and abbreviations. Novels can't solve the conundrum of reality, but it can help us get beneath the surface of appearances

This is not to say all fictions have to engage with writing about the manufacture and prefabrication of the hyperreal. But if writing contemporary fiction you ought probably to be aware of it. Add to that a consciousness of how language operates to obfuscate as much as illuminate and the power bases and relationships it has stemmed from. Although part of the liberation from religion and supernatural explanations of the world came from a greater understanding of cause and effect, ironically we still don't understand much, such as the workings of the human brain, about the nature of the cosmos, the blind drive of genes to reproduce themselves. The contemporary author who seeks to explore our world should really start from a position of acknowledging the limits of his understanding and that the world, or parts of it at least, go in and out of focus like a mirage as he seeks to grasp hold of it.

If the author accordingly is dialoguing with this mirage in his fiction, then it will also entail the reader does the same. The author and reader constantly dialogue together through the book,  as the levels of its 'reality' shift and mutate, as the language and perspectives on offer are constantly being redefined between the two of them.

This is unlike the vast majority of books which lead the reader passively through a constructed story. No matter how much the reader's imagination is engaged in following the author's carefully laid out trail, the book does not change in its essence. It does not take on a life of its own outside of the story being read. There may be twists and unexpected turns, but how much is the reader determining these? These beautifully crafted, self-confident yarns leave no room for doubt, even if the ending is left open or ambiguous. It is done so artfully. The implication behind such crafted stories is that the world is and has to be exactly as is portrayed in the book and by this I don't mean the real world, merely the world described in the book. The author is in absolute control of the world he builds, creates every detail and knows even the workings of things not referenced in the book at all.

Nowhere is there room for fictional scepticism to be chipping in. That although say a city or a planet is described, the reflexivness of the writing pulls against that surety at the same time (one example where the author does this is Stanislau Lem's "Solaris". Kafka's work though more mundane in setting also had this pull-me, push-you dynamic). Instead the world of the yarn book is established by the author to facilitate the plot. It can't heave loose threads that might unravel it. It must be hermetically sealed within the world of the novel, narrators can't be picking holes in it unless it's a "Matrix" type scenario being written about. The world is great or terrible and the hero reacts accordingly, but the world is unquestionable and unbreakable even if the hero manages to effect some sort of regime change within it. We cannot be so certain about the workings of our own world. Fiction perhaps ought to reflect that tremulous doubt in our own minds in its presentations. Authors who start from a postion of confessing their own relative ignorance about the nature of reality, will produce very different novels from those who either feel they have an excellent grip on the nature of reality, or deny any need to bother trying to comprehend it.

Meta-Fiction considered in 1512 words (or 1510 if you don't include the title)

Bertolt Brecht and other playwrights aimed to break down the fourth wall of theatre that was the audience's perspective of events on stage. He didn't want them to suspend their disbelief and get sucked into the drama as 'real'. Rather he wanted them to retain their critical faculties at all time and be fully aware that what they were watching was a representation and to be able to reflect on its issues accordingly, remaining detached and analytical.

Rene Magritte's painting "The Treachery Of Images" depicting a smoker's pipe with the caption "This isn't a pipe" also challenged the viewer's way of seeing. Not only was this not the object we call a pipe, given that it was a painting of it, but the concept of 'pipe' is a lexigraphical unit applied to signify the symbol of what we understand to stand for all pipes (the word itself could also stand for some plumbing or a blow-dart delivery system). For Magritte, any symbolisation be it in paint or word, could neither approach nor appropriate the essence of a material object.

Literature's take on trying to change its audience's way of seeing it, is meta-fiction. Of course like any label, it does not represent a homogeneous group of authors all typing away with the theory tucked into their belts, but more the various and diverse outpourings of writers ploughing their individual furrows, banded together as a group by external commentators.

I think there is great value in exploring the nature of fiction itself, just what it the nature of the interaction between reader and author foisting a made up story them. On a personal level, I'm less struck by books about books, or revealing the process by which authors write those books, or that they appear in them as one of the characters or a commentator, or even writing about someone reading a book. These do not seem to me to get to the heart of the issue of fiction. These are little more than a hall of reflecting (and distorting) mirrors. Rather than stripping the veil of what fiction is doing, they seem to me to add a further level of obfuscation.

To me, an inquiry into fiction much stem from literature's primary tool: language. As with Magritte, the illusional nature of all literature starts with language purporting to be able to carry meaning. Story is structured through words. Character is fleshed out in words. It is these words that more directly should be held up to reflective scrutiny, rather than the secondary armatures of story and character.

Clearly on one level words do convey meaning, else how would an author be able to communicate and be understood by a reader? "That fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude" as Proust describes reading. But words are approximations. As above, the word 'pipe' has several meanings for different material objects lumped together through the single word label. Individual words further have several shades of meaning tincturing the interpretation. "Fast" can have two contradictory readings, being either swiftness, or held fast and therefore immobile. This is exacerbated when you put words together, sometimes in unexpected ways. I recently peer reviewed a piece which had the phrase "leering ugly host of reasons", all the words individually being correctly utilised and yet together, the effect takes an unintended direction, as once you employ 'leering', it pushes the sense of the word 'host' away from a multitude or army and more towards a person acting hospitably.

Words are slippery, imprecise. It amazes me that they ever manage to convey meaning at all, but accounts for why there are a myriad of misreadings and misunderstandings in any conversation between two people, unless they are blessed by a sort of telepathy born from long practice and exposure to one other. (The old married couple). Nor are words neutral, since any reader brings their preconceptions with them to any book. Neither are they random. They have origins, they stem from etymological roots. Some words have stayed true to these origins, others have diverged wildly from them, yet still they may retain a faint echo of their original meaning. "Presently" formerly meant immediately, now it means in a little while or soon. But the undertow still sounds the word 'present' in our heads. This is the resonance I want to tap into in my interrogation of just what fiction is.

To me, as with Brecht, I want the book to interact with the reader. By this I don't just mean for them to trace the plot, or have various emotional responses and even catharsis by the novel's end. I want my book to engage in a dialogue with the reader while they progress through it. I write in a conversational tone, chatty even. However, the words I use may not be conversational themselves. It is merely how direct is the voice of the book in addressing the reader, seeking to engage them as if the narrator was in the room (or more pertinently whispering inside their head). The voice at different stages of the narrative wheedles, browbeats, bats its lashes, apologises, reasons, negotiates in a whole gamut of entreaties. But the conscious choice of language, of heightened metaphor, (which is not how anyone 'speaks' in reality) plunging between high language and low vernacular sometimes within the same sentence, all of this is intended to pull the reader up to the fact that this is fiction. I'm addressing the reader, I may even be telling them a story, but what I'm telling them and how, demands constant reflection and assessment by the reader as to what level it is pitched at. What level of reality is the book operating on? A fictional one of course. Buttressed by words that don't do quite what they claim - they are unable to bear up 'reality' to any decent scrutiny and I aim to show them up in their false claims, within a fiction I openly acknowledge as fictitious. The words may bear my story up in that it communicates itself to the reader, but my story is a self-confessed fiction and tugs on the reader's sleeve constantly to remember this. From such a reflexive position, then the reader may go on to weigh up how my fictional world bears in relationship to the world he takes as 'real'.

In my novel "A,B&E" a woman is sat at various beach bars, spinning tales in return for free drinks from her audience. She is a Scheherazade figure, in that she has opened up with her life being in danger from her gangster husband; telling tales to eke out a subsistence in this hiding place where she has no other means. ("1001 Nights" might even be considered a very early meta-fictional work in its narrative structure of passing on the baton of story-tellers within it). But is this framing fact of her life being under threat even true? What impact does that have on each and every one of her tales? What is fact and what is fantasy, in her mind (and be osmosis in the reader's mind?) Yet this is more than just an issue of whether she is an unreliable narrator or not. This is about how all knowledge is transmitted to us in our contemporary culture, trying to separate out fact from fiction, the culturally produced from the individually experienced. Our personal relationship to the language we employ and how much of that is pre-structured for us. Ultimately it is about how we construct our own identity.

She is ostensibly recounting her life story in pint size gobbets (cocktails actually) and her audience isn't specified, so she is ultimately addressing the reader. She has a highfalutin vocabulary, she is a Classics scholar, she uses Greek myths to allude to her own situation. She uses them archly. She is essaying to manipulate the audience. As much as she uses high end words, she also dives down into the vulgate, especially when remarking on her fellow British tourists around her in this holiday resort on Corfu. But as seemingly confident about language as she appears, she also butchers it and misuses it. Just like Shakespeare's yeoman characters who are mastered by language rather than mastering it, she too is tripped up because language will not be pinned down to exactitude. No matter her proficiencies with words, she too will come a cropper at some unseen juncture. The same could possibly be said about the author who gives her these words? Is he 100% in control of the meaning of his material? I'm going to let the readers adjudge that for themselves, because that is part of the fictional game. Did the author intend that? Is my reading of this correct?

Why am I telling you a tale in the form of a novel? I want to humbly entreat you with some insights on the world. By constantly reminding you that this is fiction, I would hope to also underscore that this is only my opinion on these matters. I'd love to hear yours.