Pre-linguistic cognition: "Silverfish" by Rone Shavers

Disclaimer: I went to graduate school with Rone, so this isn't a completely unbiased analysis of the novella in question. Still, my policy with authors who are friends is to read the work and then only review/analyze the work if I liked it. If I don't, I just shut up about it and never tell the author I read it. I've actually done this before. Only once have I given a positive review of something when I didn't mean it because I knew the author, and that was for a very old person who had asked me to review the book and I just didn't see the harm and couldn't say no. 

A college professor began a class once by asking a question: Can you think without language? I mulled it over for a bit. There are certainly times I think using a very abbreviated linguistic system. Often, I'll be chewing on some problem, and it leads me to an argument I've had in my head before. My brain will then simply quickly register the results of the previous conversation I had in my brain about that subject without recalling the entire process that led me to that conclusion. This is one of the reasons people have such a hard time arguing for conclusions they reached a long time ago. They've been using an interior shorthand for a long time, one that simply remembers having come to a conclusion about something without all the steps that got them there. Often, I register this simply by remembering where I was when I came to the conclusion. There's no language in it, or at least there doesn't seem to be. 

You can see this, too, in a more dramatic fashion, when you have to make a series of quick decisions about something, like when you are driving a car or playing a sport. I don't just mean that there are instinctive functions we do that don't require language to accomplish, because after the split-second in which you make your decision and carry it out, sometimes, you find you are able to give a long explanation of why you did it, one that is so long, it's actually impossible you could have thought all of it while carrying out the action, but it actually does seem like all the things you are saying were really involved in the decision: "I wasn't sure if he saw me, and the guy behind me was coming kind of fast, but I thought that if I blew my horn, the guy merging might get scared and whip his car too fast back in the other direction and cause an accident, so instead of either braking or blowing the horn, I just changed lanes fast, because I'd seen in my mirror the other lane was empty." That's too many words to have thought in half a second, but it seems, somehow, as if that is really the rationale behind your decision. 

The answer I gave at the time in that class was that animals seem to think without using words, as far as we can tell, so yes, it must be possible to think without language.

Language and Langaj

Of course, my answer was only right if "language" means words. If language refers instead, though, to any system of conveying information, then it's quite possible no living thing thinks without using it. Internally, organs communicate with one another, and even cells can pass information of sorts within themselves. What's true at microscopic levels is also true at macroscopic ones. There are massive, eco-system-wide communications systems, such as when the roots of trees "talk" to one another across an entire forest. 

My bias toward thinking of language as equivalent to words is easy to understand. I'm a translator, so when I think of translating from one language to another, I mean take some words and replace them with other words that mean something similar to people in another linguistic system. Even the word "language" comes from the word for "tongue," meaning people have long had a bias toward thinking of language as the words one makes. 

Rone Shavers' Silverfish, though, tries to first break us down from our assumptions about "language" meaning words and then to build us up again. He begins with a prologue from the Yoruba trickster goddess Eshu, who invites the reader to "play language" with her. Her hope is to "break the brain" of the reader, as an epigraph by Vera Henross has it. "Confusion is good: It's the first step to understanding what's beyond what you already know." The novel equates "language" to "langaj," the esoteric, incantory utterances used in Hoodoo rituals, where language itself actually makes things happen. Unlocking language will also "make things happen" in the novel.

Once past the epigraph, though, we find Eshu to be a somewhat merciful goddess, because while the story bends the reader's brain, it doesn't quite break it. It's possible to rebuild a fairly coherent narrative from the broken pieces of the story.

A one-paragraph synopsis

Stories where the author really doesn't give a damn about being kind to the reader are almost impossible to summarize easily, but Silverfish isn't like this. The novel is set in a future "corporatocracy," one in which those with means use those without them as part of a mercenary army-for-hire to keep the stock market high and natural resources flowing. This world was brought about in part by the invention of "angels," a new and improved form of cyborg (although that term is considered passé in the future) with a mission to root out insurrection from "primitves" who aren't on board with the brave new world. Angels were invented by someone named Beagel. Beagel went rogue on his corporate sponsors, though, and created a way to stop the angels, that way being the voracious tech-eating silverfish of the title. The poor are eternally trapped by their corporate overlords, promised an opportunity to climb up by their bootstraps, but in reality having almost no way out of the poverty that dooms them to do the bidding of the masters. The main action in the novel consists of Beagel hijacking an angel and reprogramming it to undo the corporate-run world. 

Beyond the synopsis: how language is a shield from harm

Beagel notes, while re-programming the angel, that the apocalypse has already happened. It happened when people lost the ability to use metaphor and had to resort instead to hyperbole. This is something of an Orwellian understanding of the future, the idea that the powers that be, whether they are Big Brother or the Corporate Code of Civilized Nations, mostly control us through weakening the power of language. Because language is a sea we swim in without being aware we're surrounded by it, it's difficult for us to realize when we're being manipulated through it. We assume language is neutral, just there to communicate ideas which are themselves good or bad, but in fact, we are being manipulated all the time through the language we take for granted. The medium is the message. The contemporary fight over what facts even are is a good example of this. Maybe our current age is actually a good step in civilization's advance, because our brains are all being broken, hopefully to be remade better.  

The angel's brain, at least, is broken and remade. She is able to join in a giant meta-language, a system of systems or language of languages, which allows her, in turn, to then begin to reprogram humans. She convinces Clayton, the only human other than Beagel we get to know to any extent, to invest all his social credits into learning language. It will bankrupt him, but because of a convoluted series of rules I don't think we're meant to look that deeply into, Clayton will be able to go live with the "primitives." Society will send angels to kill him, but, because he has unlocked the angel's meta-language (and, if he's a really good student, the language of the silverfish as well), he will be able to survive. 

The brain-breaking only took 93 pages! 

One of the remarkable things about the novella is how much ground it covers in such a short space. The overall feeling I got from living in Shavers' dystopia was much like the one I had after reading Nick Harkaway's Gnomon, but Gnomon took well over 700 pages to do it. Shavers partly accomplishes a lot in a short time by letting form indicate function. ("The teleology of a work is expressed by its form" is the first thought we hear the angel have.) Shavers eschews quotation marks for dialogue, a long-time characteristic of his work. The novel doesn't feel bound to carry forward the customs of the past, which frees it to find its own manner of signifying. 

There is a good deal of what might be thought of as stream-of-consciousness as the angel "spools" through infinite thoughts, but that stream-of-consciousness isn't, as is often the case, terribly jarring. The trickster goddess was merciful enough to provide textual clues, such as brackets, braces, parentheses, and italics. 

There were a few places where I wished the characters, Beagel in particular, would do more interpreting of thinkers or concepts they mentioned rather than just referring to them and letting the reference do the work for him. And I honestly didn't realize some things the description of the book on Amazon told me about the book until I read the description after reading the novella. For example, I didn't know there was an "Incorporated States of America" in the story. If it's mentioned, it's a very fleeting reference, and one that's not returned to. I also didn't grasp the extent to which language itself was the means of control until the end. Although Beagel said as much, it was only a part of a larger philosophical discourse he had with the angel, and it didn't strike me at the time as the central issue of the novella. Beagel claimed that nobody could use metaphor anymore, but Clayton's ability to use phrases like "above my paygrade" indicates he could, in fact, use metaphorical language. (What is "above my paygrade" but an allusion to an imaginary ladder of responsibility? Decisions aren't literally "above" or "below" anyone. That's abstract language, which means the realm of metaphor.) 

But as I've said many times, I prefer something flawed that had high ambitions to a technically perfect attempt to do nothing. I like what Shavers called in his dedication a "beautiful mess." Shavers was swinging for the fences in this novella, and a missed swing here or there is just the price you pay for seeing him connect beautifully on occasion.