I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.
– Gandalf the Grey
But Biggs and I were going to go to Tosche station to pick up some power converters!
– Luke Skywalker
I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow
– The Third Doctor
There’s a distinctly sci-fi/fantasy way of writing which I think a lot of people probably see as either filler or scene-setting, but I think there’s far more to it than that, when it’s done well. There are, of course, infinite examples of it being done badly, usually using the phrase ‘some kind of’ or ‘sort of’ something or other, which is neither informative nor aesthetically pleasing.
Whatever it is, exactly, I don’t think there’s not a precise term for the mode of writing, which I’ve given some samples of in the epigraph. In sci-fi it’s sometimes called technobabble (or ‘treknobabble’ when talking specifically about Star Trek), but that obviously doesn’t cover The Lord of the Rings or the other examples I’m going to get into. I don’t think ‘babble’ is an appropriate phrase for it, anyway, because I do think it serves a specific purpose, whereas ‘babble’ suggests randomness. Other terms like ‘jargon’ aren’t quite right, either, because jargon is subjective: meaningless to laypeople but meaningful to experts. With this type of writing, we usually know something of what is meant, but the precise detail is elusive.
I think a new coinage is needed. I suggest technoglossia, from the Greek techne, ‘art’, and glossia, ‘language’, hence, ‘a language of art’. As I’m going to show, technoglossia is language where meaning is irreducibly carried at the level of the phrase.
Like so much else, it was JRR Tolkien who introduced technoglossia to SFF writing. The fantastic thing about Gandalf’s speech at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm is that it seems to be absolutely freighted with meaning but it’s almost impossible to parse, even though only two of the words (Anor and Udûn) come from his invented languages. It seems to all be about different types of fire, but why should fire prevent other fire from passing? Who or what are Anor and Udûn? Why is only one of the fires – the ‘Secret’ one – given a capital F?
Tolkien has answers to all of this, naturally, but anything that requires you to look stuff up on a fansite can safely be said to be metatextual. More to the point, even when you do know what Anor and Udûn are (sort of) and what the Secret Fire might be, you still don’t really know much about what Gandalf means. ‘Anor’ turns out to be Sindarin (or Quenya?) for ‘sun’ and Udûn means ‘Hell’ or refers to a region of Mordor but presumably here it’s the former . Does knowing that Gandalf wields the sun’s flame or that the Balrog is a hellfire demon tell us much? Not really. For example, is the Secret Fire different from the flame of Anor/the sun? Can you serve one without wielding the other? It’s still unclear.
However, knowing the purported meaning does tell us something about why Tolkien wrote these lines in this way: they sound better with the Elvish words, which work better rhythmically: using Anor and Udûn brings the speech closer to iambic pentameter. The first two clauses reflect each other nicely, and then we get a great echo on ‘flame of Anor’/’flame of Udun’, contrasting the two flames. We don’t know what they are precisely, but we know they’re opposed and, most importantly, we know whose side we’re on.
There’s a definite hint here that, much like Jules in the final scene of Pulp Fiction, Gandalf just needed some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before he popped a cop in his ass. (Or did he expect the Balrog to go, ‘Oh yeah, good point. I’ll head home, then’?) In fact, in Pulp Fiction, Jules even notes that the content of what he’s saying isn’t important and allows of several possible interpretations. Certainly in the minds of whoever makes and buys t-shirts and posters with film quotes on them, the first interpretation, that it’s just cool, remains the prevailing one.
If you don’t have a Bible handy, you can look up Ezekiel 25:17 online and check whether Jules is really quoting it (he isn’t). For both Tolkien and Tarantino, what’s relevant is not the words themselves but their aesthetic value. Both are examples of what Tolkien called a ‘cellar door’: words or phrases with an aesthetic beauty that has nothing to do with their actual meaning. The reason this is technoglossia, though, is that ‘cellar doors’ are beautiful whenever and however they’re used, and independent of their meaning, but technoglossia serves a particular purpose.
Obviously the flipside of the existence of cellardoors is that there are some sounds that are just ugly. With apologies to the Gretchens and Ferguses of the world, I honestly though both those names were made up for fictional characters who the audience were supposed to dislike. There’s no earthly reason anyone would choose to attach those sounds to a baby. Sorry. I’m also not a huge fan of my name, if it helps. Slightly perversely, I do think it suits me, but did I have any choice but to be a weird nerd after I was lumbered with the name Frank Podmore? Imagine if I was a bodybuilder or something. It would just be crazy. No one would believe me. You read the name Frank Podmore and you just know that’s a guy with strong opinions about Balrogs (which do not have wings).
Anyway.
Treknobabble is a subtype, usually used to dig Star Trek writers out of plotholes caused by the laws of physics. Transporters obviously can’t work because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Not a problem: the Enterprise has a Heisenberg compensator! (I love this.) Here, treknobabble, and the associated imaginary technology, does the job that ‘fate’ does in fantasy fiction, by making sense of things that make no sense. Treknobabble is usually not chosen for its aesthetic quality, though naturally some of it is better than others. Reportedly, some Trek writers specialised in writing it and would be called on to add something appropriate when required. Similarly, some actors were especialy good at delivering it. The aesthetics of certain phrases I think partly explains why Star Trek‘s writers are notably fond of some phrases, almost to the point of their becoming snowclones. ‘Subspace/space-time anomalies’, for example, crop up so often that they’re no longer anomalous. Much like the possibly related ‘subspace/space-time phenomenon’, these sound best with an American accent.
We can see this effect happening with other technobabble, too. I don’t think neutron flows exist outside of Doctor Who but, if they do, you couldn’t reverse their polarity because neutrons don’t have one – hence the name. But aesthetically speaking, you couldn’t ‘reverse the polarity of the proton flow’ or the ‘electron flow’ because, ironically or not, neither alternative flows. Here, the Third Doctor gives us a sentence which is not only meaningless but defies a basic principle of the laws of physics. It doesn’t matter because it sounds right.
This foregrounding of aesthetic over meaning exists outside of SFF too. Sigur Rós often sing in ‘Hopelandic’, which the press often wrongly refer to as an invented language. It’s actually just a collection of speechlike sounds, an auditory equivalent of asemic writing. We can’t call Gandalf or the Doctor’s entires in this blog ‘asemic’, because they have meaning, but it at least gets us closer. There are also millions of fans of opera who enjoy music sung in languages they don’t speak. I’m not a big opera fan myself. Someone once gave me a spare ticket to see Carmen and I quite enjoyed it but I genuinely had to look it up just now to find out what language it’s in (French). Like most people who have ever listened to Carmen, I enjoyed the whole thing, including the words, on a purely aesthetic level, much as Sigur Rós fans enjoy their songs in Hopelandic (and Icelandic, for the overwhelming majority of us who don’t speak it).
In Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode reports asking a Shakesperean actor what they did when confronted with speeches they didn’t understand. The answer: they tried to deliver it as though they did understand it. Trek‘s actors did much the same thing. Again, it’s fair to say that a lot of Shakespeare goes entirely over the heads of contemporary audiences, yet we still flock to hear it performed.
Another parallel is in Finnegans Wake, another work that hacks often describe as being written in an invented language. In fact, it is recognisably English, often in a Hiberno-English dialect, in most of its grammar and vocabulary. For example, I just let the book fall open at random and landed on the passage famous for giving the langauge the word ‘quark’:
— Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark
Finnegans Wake, p. 383
Clearly, this isn’t a ‘made-up language’. Apart from ‘quark’, there’s no entirely made-up word here. The syntax is Hiberno-English and the only other oddity is ‘Muster’ (a real word) where we might expect ‘Mister’ or ‘Master’. What we don’t have for most of the Wake is the kind of clear meaning that we normally expect. It’s nonetheless a lot more like technobabble than it is like Hopelandic.
The other oddity of the Wake is that James Joyce insisted that it all had meaning, but most readers struggle to discern it and, even among those who feel they understand it, there’s not much agreement as to ‘the’ meaning (whether ‘actual’ or ‘original’ or ‘intended’). Whether this makes it a novel or something else entirely is an open question. One interpretation is that it was intended to foreground aesthetic beauty over meaning, in which case it has something in common with Tolkien’s use of invented language in LotR (particularly the elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin). It’s possibly not a coincidence that both work best when read aloud.
This might be a more controversial claim, but technoglossia also occurs outside of SFF and postmodernism. For example, we all know the word ‘tightfisted’ meaning ‘stingy’. It seems to refer to the way a miser might hang on to their cash or wallet: with a tight fist. So far so good. But look how Charles Dickens, from whom we derive the word, uses it in A Christmas Carol:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!
(my italics)
Scrooge doesn’t have a tight fist. He is a tight fist. This is more complex metaphor, but there’s more to it than that. What does this idea actually mean? Or, rather, how does it mean what it means?
Let’s break it down: I have some idea what a grindstone is, though I’ve never seen one. Based on what I know, it sounds like having a tight fist would be a good practice, approved by all health and safety officers, since I don’t want to drop what I’m grinding. But clearly Dickens isn’t complimenting Scrooge’s grinding technique. If Dickens had simply said, ‘He was (or had) a tight fisted hand’, it wouldn’t mean much at all. Nor if he said he was ‘a fist (or hand) at the grindstone’. Much like Gandalf’s speech to the Balrog, the meaning here is both obvious and hard to parse: take away any element and it falls apart completely. The phrase needs every word to convey the meaning, but when we break it down, the meaning seems to slip away from us. Maybe we’re not being tightfisted enough?
This is technoglossia. Neither Dickens, nor Tolkien, nor the various writers of Doctor Who and Star Trek are babbling when they use language this way. Nor is it exclusive to SFF, as we’ve seen with Dickens. It’s a mode unto itself, one which conveys a primary meaning at the level of the phrase, a meaning which, crucially, cannot be found only through analysing the meanings of the component words. SFF uses it perhaps more than other genres, though it can also be found in, e.g., CSI‘s descriptions of how forensics works (‘Enhance!’). It may appear more often in SFF partly because of Tolkien’s influence and partly because, when you’re imagining a new world it may come naturally to you to also bend the language a bit, even when you’re not also inventing one. I expect you can find technoglossia in all kinds of writing, though, because, as we’ve seen with Dickens, it’s a uniquely powerful way of conveying an idea.
Frank Podmore 