Writing As Metaphor

In my new novel, one of the main metaphors is that of writing. But it is not a book about an author or the act of writing itself, I always feel that is rather self-indulgent. It is more about the role that language plays and how it works (and more significantly how it transmutes) when written down. 

In the late 1990s, all over the globe there was the race to decode the human genome. To set down the language of every one of the 20,000 genes (out of the 3 billion we possess) that constructs and formulates us. Despite the complexity of the DNA molecule, there are only four chemical bases that bond with one another to form genes. This being chemistry, these four bases have conferred a letter abbreviation to stand for them, so the DNA ‘alphabet’ contains just four letters, ‘A,G,C &T’. 

Yet from such a small palette, a myriad of chains of these four letters spells out the complexity of DNA, genes and ultimately us. Our bodies and our consciousness. The human genome is one of the 3 voices of my novel. Being inanimate (at least in the pre-protein expression state), the genome cannot speak for itself, but in the novel it uses our computers it is hooked up to, in order to berate, challenge and bait us; we may have a 26 letter alphabet with which to express every complex idea and invention we’ve ever had as a species, but we get nowhere near approaching the intricate complexity of the DNA molecule and its mere quartet of characters. To the genome, it is as if the alphabets are reversed, we humans only have 4 letters to work with, while it leaves us in its wake with a full complement of 26 characters to permutate meaning from.

The genome wryly comments that its mechanism is the polar opposite from Medieval Monks and Jewish scribes transliterating perfect copies of liturgical texts; one error in transcription and the whole volume is junked, whereas the genome relies on misprints in order to foster variance and mutation to drive evolution. The modern age has come upon the genome with the human desire to ensure there are no errata in its transcribed language and if there are, they can be corrected through science. It is no longer sufficient to operate at the level of the word and the sentence. Now there is a need to drill down to the letters that form the words, as the very DNA of the words themselves. 

Online in the virtual world, you are also dealing with code. With hyper-text and binary computer code that also combine to project personas and people and ideas and well, everything. Just like with genes, hypertext can code non-sequentially, unlike our plodding written syntax of predicate, verb, object noun. The second voice of the novel ‘exists’ incontestably online, but it is entirely unclear whether that equates to a real person in actual life. It is a persona that only announces itself through the electronic written word, yet it appears to present feelings, opinions and have dreams. But can this language be trusted? And it seems to fail to obey the laws of time as it evanesces and disappears from view, only to reappear elsewhere, like the Cheshire Cat. 

The third voice is a mother who confides into her journal in order to retain some vestige of adult conversation, having been surrounded all day by two young daughters. But the pages of her journal are out of chronological order. The development of her daughters which proceeds in a fairly fixed sequence controlled by their genes, is fractured in the non-linear reportage of her writing. Where she lives in sectarian Northern Ireland, murals, colours and the visual image out-trumps the written word. In trying to shield her daughters from the violence, she is trying to assert the primacy of the written over the visual.

But all three are unconsciously writing part of one of the others. The online voice is threatening to use the open source data about the human genome, to undertake some radical genetic engineering of her own. Which is possibly why her compound is currently under siege from the authorities, an event followed online by the mother far away in Ulster. And she herself is battling with the stages of maturation pre-programmed in her daughters by their genomic programme, trying to support their development, including helping them to learn to write. 

So this is a book about language and writing, but it is not about writers. It is about a pre-coded language, working away at the unconscious level. And it is when this writing goes wrong, when there are errata, it can produce dire consequences. A mutation changes the replicated code within a gene and can lead to a debilitating genetic condition. The mother is stymied in trying to trace the development of her second child, when the journal reporting that of her first child is shuffled out of order. While the online written broadcasts to help save fellow souls, has attracted the wrong sort of attention and has lead to a siege that is likely to end catastrophically, pursued by men with three-lettered acronyms stencilled on the back of their flak jackets. Men whose lives are entirely ordered and prescribed by their three-lettered alphabets such as FBI, ATF, DEA. Her online posts are attacked by viruses and digital interdiction that unravels the very letters of her typed words. 

We are all written, yet none of us are characters in a work of fiction. 

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Shortlisted for the Not The Booker Prize

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Palimpsests

Perhaps parchment was relatively expensive to come by, or just too much of a labour to prepare to receive ink, so it was often 'recycled'. Rubbed clean of the former writing and written over again to present the new text. But there would remain a trace through the impression of the nib or stylus. And in time this hidden text could be revealed, much as when you take a pencil and shade the top page in a notepad to show what was written on the preceding page now since torn out. This is a fairly regular scene in detective and spy fictions or dramas on TV.

The written palimpsest is similar to pentimento in oil painting. Artists frequently recycled their canvases, much for the same reasons of economy as scribes and writers. Though often the buried versions beneath the paint reveal the artist's sketches and drafts of the same image that gets its final rendering in the finished product. With palimpsests, the aim is to purge the original content in order to put across the new message. This functions in much the same way that Christianity annexed pagan festival days to plant its own celebrations on, in full knowledge that populations were used to marking such holy days. They merely changed the narrative. 

Whatever the economic drive for overwriting previous words, the mechanism does have an element of colonialism about it. Of banishing, or censoring the previous voice. This can be most clearly seen in the Archimedes Palimpsest (yes, he of "eureka" in the bath renown), where an ancient Greek treatise on Mathematics and Geography was overwritten by Christian monks with their own liturgical text and the original work thought lost to mankind forever, until new technology brought it back into light. Think of it as one of the banned books locked away in the secret library from Umberto Eco's "The Name Of The Rose". 

However with our technological abilities allowing us access to the words underneath, we can also see elements of rebellion in the palimpsest. In the Novgorod Codex the same writer is responsible for countless texts written over one another, in which he conceals some fairly heretical interpretation of the Gospels buried deep within. But they're there, embedded and preserved. 

And how do we bring these hidden texts to light? Through use of wavelengths of light not accessible to the naked human eye; ultraviolet; infrared and X-Ray. (see my blog post on the limitations of the human senses to come). The man charged with deciphering the Novgorod Codex is pursuing a methodology rather similar to that employed by scientists decoding the human genome. He has to ignore and move on from chunks of text that remain indecipherable because they are so degraded and diffused into the wood, or so closely packed together (the original scribe eschewed spaces between words), so he is reconstructing possible words only by dismissing other permissible letter combinations as 'meaningless jumble'. The scientists trying to nail down the human genome are having to sift through some 3 billion genes to just isolate the active genes responsible for programming life, (currently pegged at around 20,000), therefore they are dismissing the rest as junk or pseudo DNA, posited to be without function. Yet as with the letters that can't be read in the Codex, they're there for a reason. They may not be junk, they could feasibly contain the dead ends of genetic mutation which therefore can reveal to us own own evolutionary history. Or they could track how our bodies changed on a genetic level to defeat diseases that we are now unaware even existed. Or they can act discreetly, as spacers for those genes that do have a function. There are endless possible explanations lying way beyond our grasp.

So thus the palimpsest. A fascinating phenomenon, usually emerging from humble housekeeping calculations of economy. But it offers a powerful metaphor, that of overwriting, of burying what comes before, of rebellion and revelation between the cracks. Now imagine that in human terms. Not one, not two, but three voices - each unknown to one another - yet each overwriting and influencing the behaviour and fate of the others. And that is one of the essences of my new novel "Three Dreams In The Key Of G". 

                           

 

In Peace Agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past.

In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women- only the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security.

In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.

Mother, Crone and Creatrix, all under siege, unknowingly inform and influence one another. 

                                      

 The writing will be revealed 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK