Reading Babel-17 (1966): Summer of Samuel, No. 3
There are two things about Babel-17 that I want to talk about. I want to explore the text’s theory of language and its impact on our cognition, and what it would mean if the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is true. But first, I want to talk about furries. The two are connected, I promise. Let’s dive in.
Babel-17 follows Rydra Wong, an interstellarlly famous poet (yes! you read all three of those words right), known for creating some of the most definitive works of poetry in the galaxy. She is approached by the government, currently in the midst of an interstellar war, due to her former reputation as a cryptographer. She is enlisted to decode Babel-17, a code that the government has picked up in the moments before several damaging acts of destruction and sabotage. Rydra is tasked with putting together a crew, piloting a ship, and deciphering the code. We follow her as she picks up a crew and travel throughout the galaxy, tracking down incidents of sabatogue in order to collect more information about Babel-17. Rydra quickly discovers that Babel-17 is not, in fact, a code, but an entire language. As a poet and linguist, she begins to decipher and translate the language, while she travels from site of anticipated attack to site of anticipated attack. As she travels, witnessing explosions and assassinations, she translates more and more of Babel-17. As she learns the language, she finds herself thinking more and more in the language. She also discovers that someone aboard her ship is sabotaging her. Eventually, she translates the language completely and in doing so discovers that the language functions like a computer virus. As a person learns it, their mind is fundamentally altered and they begin to sabotage the government and, in Rydra’s case, themselves. She is the traitor, unknowingly programmed by Babel-17 to sabotage her own efforts.
The story is set in a fascinating and strange world; like many Delany stories, the norms and customs of human behavior have radically expanded and shifted as we’ve tendrilled our way out into the galaxy. The single most interesting part of this galactic society, to me, was the wide proliferation and normalization of extreme cosmetic surgery. So extreme, that many people have turned themselves into creatures, often mythic, that barely resemble humans. Rydra recruits someone described as a griffin, which she meets at an underground fighting ring where they fight and defeat a similarly surgically-changed dragon. Of course, I say these surgeries are extreme, but they’re not viewed as very extreme in the world of Babel-17. The creatures are treated fully as human. They’re conscious and verbal and behave otherwise as humans (save for some small animal-like gestures and quirks), and those around them treat them as part of the diverse tapestry of human shapes.
I rarely judge science fiction by its predictive qualities, but this inclusion strikes me as remarkably prescient. I think Delany really tapped into a challenging human social desire when he imagined these cosmetically altered creatures. As tech increases our ability to change our forms and bodies continues to grow, our desire to push at the limits of our own forms and functions expands with that. This is happening already, and we can already see a push towards more animalistic embodiments in parts of the furry community.
While furries, generally, are most accurately understood as a fan community much like superhero or sci-fi fandom (less than 30% of furries even own a fur suit, for example), there are a subset of furries called furry lifestylers. Furry lifestylers, who make up a (by all accounts) small portion of the furry community, are defined as those that bring their love of furry behavior and interest into all or a large percentage of their lives (not just forums, artwork, and conventions). Furthermore, there are those (both within and without the furry community) who rather than identity as fans or enjoyers of a furry lifestyle, actually identify as part-or-fully animal, and are often referred to as therians or otherkin. Fascinatingly, research presented in 2019 shows there is a measurable psychological difference in people’s subjective and objective relationships to and with humanity and the human body between non-furries and furries. Fascinatingly, there is a further sub-difference between therian and non-therian furries.
The study investigated a psychological phenomenon known as proprioceptive drift, as well as participants’ attitudes and thoughts towards humanity and human bodies (especially their own body). Researchers used the “rubber hand test,” a psychological test where a study participant’s hand is placed in an occluder box, which hides their hand from view, and a rubber hand is then placed visibly and congruently in view. Participants were initially asked to estimate where they thought their hand (occluded from view) ended, while looking at the rubber hand. Experimenters then took identical paint brushes and lightly brushed both the rubber hand and the occluded hand simultaneously, brushing in the same direction on the same part of both hands. Participants then were asked again to estimate where they thought their occluded hand ended. According to the study, “proprioceptive drift is the tendency for participants to perceive the location of their real hand as closer to the rubber hand than it actually is.” This effect is measured by comparing the participants’ pre-brush estimation of the end of their hand, with their post-brush estimation. A high drift would mean that the participant’s estimation of their hand’s location (and therefore their embodied conception of their hand) extended out farther, towards the rubber hand. They also asked a number of subjective questions to participants about their relationship and view of the rubber hand, and then had them complete several additional surveys about how they viewed and valued humanity, their relationship to humanity, and their relationship with their own body.
The researchers concluded that furries, as a whole, were much less likely to identify with the human rubber hand than non-furries both proprioceptively and during the subjective questionnaire, and had a lesser view of humaniti’s value. The researchers suggested explanation for this difference was that furries were less likely to identify with the human prosthetic hand than the general population. Furthermore, this difference was even more pronounced when comparing non-therian furries with therian furries. Therian furries valued humanity less and had marginally less proprioceptive drift than non-therian furries. There were several limitations to the study (which can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Non-Therian-Furries-vs-Therian-Furries_tbl2_334372443) including a small sample size, but the results still point to a real embodied difference in how furries vs. non-furries view their own body, identity, and humanity.
Our instinct may be to flinch or wince when we consider the prospect of therian furries or otherkins getting cosmetic surgeries so they can embody the non-human aspects of their identities, but Delany, writing in 1966, presents just that situation with almost no judgment. It’s a part of the world, a part of the culture, and it isn’t viewed as exceptionally strange. I may have dedicated more time to writing about it in this essay than the actual novel spends on it. Part of that is because I got very interested in the research paper I mentioned above, but I think it’s a good example of how cutting-edge Delany’s writing can be. A casual world-building element portrays a fundamental truth: Human identities are extraordinarily fluid and diverse, and the more possibilities there are, either through technology or social acceptance, to play with, explore, and embody those identity differences, the more people will.
As a cultural whole, especially in this moment, we are far from the open-minded acceptance of identity and identity play that is portrayed in Babel-17. The world of Babel-17 doesn’t portray a peaceful utopia, either. There’s an interstellar war raging, for one. I think Delany’s portrayal of this acceptance is less prescriptive than it is descriptive (there those two words are again, which I write a lot about in my Einstein Intersection mico-essay-thingy). People will want to expand the limits of what it means to be human and what their bodies and identities are. They will want to, and will increasingly be able to, match their body with their self-image and identity. If the small study above is any indication, there are also real differences in how people who identify as part-animal view themselves and their bodies. Why bother fighting it? Why, even, make all that big a deal out of it? Why not let people look and feel how they’d like to without making it, for lack of a better word, such a fucking big deal? These are some of my favorite questions that Delany novels ask about difference and strangeness.
The final question, for me, is how we get to a place as a society where our minds do accept difference as fluidly and eagerly as the world of Babel-17 accepted cosmetic surgery that transforms people’s bodies into animalistic mythic creatures. How do we expand our minds and escape cognitive biases and traps? Well, Babel-17 provides one possible answer to that question: language itself.
In my discussion of Delany’s novel Nova, I wrote that it’s rather cliche to say that every writer is always, to some extent, writing about writing. Well, I’m afraid Babel-17 really is all about, if not writing, then language, and the way language shapes our minds.
The book centers on the translation of the language Babel-17. As our hero, Rydra studies and translates, it begins to have noticeable effects and changes on Rydra’s mind. She finds herself thinking through problems in Babel-17, because it provides her a clarity she does not find while thinking in her native tongue. The language allows her to solve problems and think through issues she wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
The text, in a delightfully Delany-esque fashion, begins to formally represent this change in a scene where chunks of text are inserted alongside the main text, reflecting Rydra’s thoughts that are distinct from the thoughts and narrative of the main text.
A page of Babel-17, which demonstrates the insertions of text mentioned above.
These insertions, as well as Rydra’s increasing desire to think in Babel-17 hint at the novel’s final reveal. Babel-17 is not just a language, but a virus designed to infect the mind through language. While learning Babel-17, Rydra has been dissociating and sabotaging her own ship. As her knowledge of the language grows, the frequency and success of these sabotage efforts grow as well, until Rydra is eventually lost entirely to the language’s programming (for a little while, at least).
Language, in Babel-17, is so powerful that it can infect a mind and change it. It’s a powerful concept, one that Ted Chiang explores in his novella “Story of Your Life,” later adapted into the film Arrival. In Chiang’s novella, Heptapod-B changes Dr. Louise Bank’s mind enough to begin giving her glimpses of the future.
This idea, that language can fundamentally shape and reshape our cognitive processes is a science fictional extrapolation of the concept referred to as linguistic relativity, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Modern linguistic understanding of this hypothesis is that the “strong” interpretation of linguistic relativity, that language fully determines what and how we think is likely false, but there is still evidence that language does exert an influence on what and how we think. So the extent to which language can shape our minds may stop very well short of seeing the future, or infecting us like a computer virus. But still, one can dream (or write!) about what it might mean if it were true. The real point is that language does impact how we think, so it can impact how we think about difference and boundary-pushing explorations.
In Babel-17, Delany conceives a world where the language we speak is so powerful that it can fully reprogram our alliances, our morality, and our sense of self.
Which brings me back to the original questions I posed about how we begin to create a world without the instinctive flinch and bias we have when people push against our conceived boundaries of what people should be like. If language can poison us, then it certainly can also heal and improve us. The way we talk about difference can shape or at least influence how we think about difference. I’m left thinking that if we can build a vocabulary and grammar of inclusion, acceptance, and curiosity (and so many people already have throughout all of human history), and we commit ourselves to learning that language well, we can, perhaps, shape our willingness to include, accept and discover.
This is what much of Delany’s work does for me, as I read it, and internalize the language he uses to describe and define wildly imaginative social settings. I find myself open to new possibilities and my imagination grows more capable of curiosity rather than judgment as its first instinct. I think I am better for it. If Delany’s writing is at all like the fiction language of Babel-17, it’s not a virus; it’s a system upgrade.
