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El feminismo en las reescrituras de Angela Carter

Why are you repeating? What is that? Learning?

Absorbing? […] First she repeats, then she catches
up. […]I think the more we talk, the more she learns.
[…] If she’s copying us, then maybe the next stage is
becoming us. […] It repeats, then it synchronises, then
it goes on to the next stage.
– The voice is the thing.
– And she’s the voice.
– ‘Midnight.’ Doctor Who. BBC, UK. 14 June
2008. Television.

Language is an interesting paradox. It is both the means of communication between humans as

well as something completely foreign. It is meant to unify people, but it actually manages to

divide them, not only by there being a variety of languages from country to country, but also

within the same tongue. For instance, an American may not understand the word ‘peckish,’ any

more than an English person may not understand what a ‘realtor’ is.

Writers delve in words, and therefore it is no wonder that there are some of them who

explore the theme of language, either directly or indirectly. John Banville dedicates several

sentences to the artificiality of language from the beginning of his novel Doctor Copernicus, and

his concern regarding this is remarkable throughout his text. Banville’s prose is meticulous,

careful, detailed and full of artistry, which is both very similar and the complete opposite to the

writing we find in Emma Donoghue’s Room. Since Room is narrated –rather effectively– by a

five-year-old boy, the use of language in the text is far simpler than in Doctor Copernicus.

However, that does not mean it is less meticulous, careful or detailed in its own way.

At first, language in Room seems to be mostly concerned with faithfully portraying the

way a child would speak, only lending a voice to an adult –Jack’s mother– indirectly by means of

the epigraph. In Doctor Copernicus, it is focused mainly on creating something very close to

poetic prose to expose the artificiality and arbitrariness of language. Yet, despite the myriad of
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intentional grammatical errors in Room, Emma Donoghue’s and John Banville’s novels share a

medullar concern with language and its relationship –simultaneously distant and close– with

human beings and how we interact amongst each other.

John Banville fires up his novel with the core thesis of Doctor Copernicus:

‘At first it had no name. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing. It was his friend. […]

[T]hey were wholly familiar, almost a part of himself, while it, steadfast and aloof,

belonged to the mysterious outside […]. It was a part of the world, and yet it was his

friend. […] They were nice words. He had known them a long time before he knew what

they meant. They did not mean themselves, they were nothing in themselves. […]

Everything had a name, but although every name was nothing without the thing named,

the thing cared nothing for its name, had no need of a name, and was itself only. […] And

then there were the names that signified no substantial thing […], yet when she spoke that

name that named nothing, some impalpable but real thing within him responded as if to a

summons, as if it had heard its name spoken.’ (Banville 3-4)

In the first two pages, the main character’s relationship to and perception of language when he

was a young boy is clearly established and developed, to culminate with the moment when he

embraces the use of language as a given: ‘He soon forgot about these enigmatic matters, and

learned to talk as others talked, full of conviction, unquestioningly’ (Banville 4). In Room this

acquisition of knowledge with age is phrased differently, and not as evidently based on language:

‘When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything’

(Donoghue 102). Nevertheless, somewhere around the middle of Jack’s narrative, language

becomes an issue to be addressed.

Young Copernicus and Jack are two characters who have a lot in common with each

other. They are both children who cannot really communicate with their peers. Nicholas’ interest
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for ‘the thing itself,’ for understanding and grasping it, is what drives his desire to understand the

universe and create a scientific theory that adheres to his perception of the world. This evolved

interest is lost on Jack. Still, the young narrator is thrust violently into that same world that

Nicholas tried to explain and decipher in Doctor Copernicus, and is forced to stare at the thing

itself right in the face. This learning process that is supposed to happen naturally for human

beings is a dramatic impact for Jack, since all he knows is a miniature representation of the

world. In Room, this distance is represented and explored through the use of language.

Ferdinand de Saussure is the first linguist to define a system that portrays language as an

arbitrary artifice, and I believe that Room is a perfect example of this. Although Doctor

Copernicus labouriously explores the subject with lengthy digressions on the subject –as the first

quote from Banville’s novel shows– Jack’s interactions with the other characters’ in Room’s

diegetic universe manages to represent it without ever stating such an interest on it. The game

‘Parrot’ is one of the most evident mentions of language in Room, ‘“One game of Parrot, that’s

good for vocabulary”’ (Donoghue 34) and it establishes one of Jack’s main characteristics, which

is that he’s got ‘“[…] remarkably accelerated literacy”’ (Donoghue 182). However, despite this

literacy and the very advanced vocabulary the child narrator displays, he is at first unable to

establish a functional dialogue with other characters who aren’t his mother.

According to Saussure, language is a system of signs, which are themselves a relationship

between a signifier and a signified. The fact that language is a system implies that it is an

arbitrary artifice and therefore it is not intrinsic to human beings, and so, it creates alienation with

it. In Room, this alienation is represented by means of the few first conversations between Jack

and the people outside Room or, more accurately, through his failure at communicating with

them (Donoghue 141-154). After long conversations between Jack and his mother, after reading

for a few hundred pages the well-formed thoughts –albeit with grammatical errors– of the
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narrator, it seems strange that he cannot form the necessary words to communicate the urgency of

his mother’s situation. However, I believe it is a clear representation of Saussure’s idea that

language is artificial, analytical and not natural. Room seems to prove Saussure’s semiotic theory,

for, if language were a universal, natural, inherent occurrence, Jack could communicate with any

other human being in the same way as he communicated with his mother. Nevertheless, that is

not the case.

Jack’s mother creates a whole universe inside a room, leading her son to believe that

everything that was real fit inside that limited space. In the same way, the two inhabitants of

Room created a language of their own, represented in the novel by small details such as ‘word

sandwiches’ (Donoghue 13). That simple game of words is what allows Jack to establish an

initial bond between him and his grandmother, when she makes a word sandwich herself to create

the term ‘Steppa’ (Donoghue 214). If the relationship between signifier and signified were

universal, Jack wouldn’t have had to visualise Officer Oh as his mother, or hear his Ma in his

head, in order to communicate with her:

Officer Oh says something I don’t hear. Then about a dress. She says it twice.

I talk as loud as I can but not looking. ‘I don’t have a dress.’

‘No? Where do you sleep at night?’

‘In Wardrobe.’

‘In a wardrobe?’

Try, Ma’s saying in my head, but Old Nick’s beside her, he’s the maddest ever and—

‘Did you say, in a wardrobe?’

‘You’ve got three dresses,’ I say. ‘I mean Ma. One is pink and one is green with stripes

and one is brown but you—she prefers jeans.’

‘Your ma, is that what you said?’ asks Officer Oh. ‘Is that who’s got the dresses?’
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Nodding’s easier.

‘Where’s your ma tonight?’

‘In Room.’

‘In a room, OK,’ she says. ‘Which room?’

‘Room.’ (Donoghue 145-146)

Now, although the private language that Jack and his mother share is formed by the same words

used by human beings in the outside, the boy’s perception of the world is too foreign, and this

warps the meaning of signs in his mind.

Also in the previous exchange between the policewoman and the boy, the limitations in

his vocabulary when it comes to everyday words normal for a five-year-old are made evident.

The fact that Jack does not know –let alone understand– the word ‘address’ exemplifies that he

grew up without the knowledge of private property (living quarters included) or any other

concept that he couldn’t come by in the confines of Room. Once again, language becomes

represented by the plot in Emma Donoghue’s novel and Jack’s inability to understand privacy,

not even when it comes to genitals.

When she takes Bronwyn’s underwear down it’s not like Penis, or Ma’s vagina, it’s a fat

little piece of body folded in the middle with no fur. I put my finger on it and press, it’s

squishy.

Deana bangs my hand away.

I can’t stop screaming.

‘Calm down, Jack. Did I—is your hand hurt?’

There’s all blood coming out of my wrist.

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‘I’m sorry,’ says Deana, ‘I’m so sorry, it must have been my ring.’ She stares at her ring

with the gold bits. ‘But listen, we don’t touch each other’s private parts, that is not OK.

OK?’

I don’t know private parts. (245-246)

Jack’s only window into the outer world is the television in Room, which is a

fictionalisation of the reality of Room’s diegetic universe. In that sense, Jack cannot understand

the language of the world outside Room, since he doesn’t understand the world itself, for all he

knows is a fictional representation of it. Thus, without knowing ‘the thing itself,’ the meaning of

the sign –and therefore, of the signifier and the signified– is different in the boy’s mind and it’s

actually lost when it comes to communicating with people who are not his mother.

As I’ve stated before, both Banville and Donoghue explore the matter of language and our

relationship with it in Doctor Copernicus and Room, respectively. They both do it very

differently: the first, by tackling very clearly the subject from the very first paragraph of his

novel, and the second through an underlying layer in the entirety of her text. Both Nicholas

Copernicus and Jack are faced with the same question, ‘[…] Then what was this thing that

remained?’ (Banville 6), and although the bonsai boy isn’t aware of it, the reader gains that inside

knowledge through Jack’s narrative.

If language is, as I’ve said, a paradox in itself, it should shorten the distance between

human beings, when in reality it creates a wedge between us. The fact that two writers choose to

base their novels to expand on that paradox is even more interesting than the fact that the way we

use to communicate is unnatural and artificial. When words are used to express how useless

words are by means of a poetic narrative –in Banville’s case– or a very down-to earth narrative –

in Donoghue’s novel– it portrays, more efficiently maybe than long treaties on the matter, how

apart we are from language.

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Doctor Copernicus places the reader on the mind-set of language as an extrinsic appendix

to human existence. Room, however takes it a step further. It deconstructs human nature,

everyday life and the way we relate to other humans and to life itself so deeply that the resulting

effect is estrangement from everything that we consider inherent to human existence. In short,

Emma Donoghue’s interest in language is expressed much like all the very adult themes

portrayed in the novel: through the eyes of an innocent child, and we are to make sense of it as

best we can.

Bibliography

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December 2015.
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Donoghue, Emma. Room. New York: Little, Brown and Company, September 2010. Print.

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