Language Choice, Verisimilitude, and Readability, or Forward into the Past

(Originally posted over on Genre Benders on November 19)

On this 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address I think we should discuss the use of language. Most school children in the US are (or were) required to memorize Lincoln’s memorial words to dedicate the Union Cemetery at Gettysburg. “History will little note or remember” my arse. But when was the last time you’ve ever heard anybody speak or write like that. The supportive clauses, the language, all of it. Nobody does that. And at the time the Address was criticized for its baseness, its commonality (not to mention its brevity). This is close to how people actually spoke then. If someone were to give such a speech now, with all those comma spliced clauses, they’d be laughed at or at the very least thought to be way too pretentious to pay attention to.

When King James I sat his clerks and scribes down in 1604 Hampton Court Conference to make a new English translation of the Bible, he instructed them, among other things, to use archaic language structures. The KJV was meant not so much to supplant the Bishop’s Bible as it was to correct some misbegotten Puritanical values that crept into that version, so it needed to impart by the language used an established weight and authority of history and precedent. That is, it was meant to zoom the parishioners of the Church of England into believing its translation over others because it sounded older. Nifty trick if you can pull it off, which he did.

Obviously some of the translation had to be “modern” (to the 17th Century) or most of the people being preached to would be lost in those archaic structures and words. In modern times we tend to perceive a wall behind which exist the Shakespeares, Chaucers, Venerable Bede’s and whomever originally wrote down the epic of Beowulf, and that they’re all alike. But each shows how much English as a written language has changed.

Strangely enough, H.P. Lovecraft did the same thing. Writing in the early 20th Century he specifically and with intent wrote using structures not common since the late 19th Century. When I first started reading him I classified his writing as late Victorian Romance, which was Lovecraft’s intent. Through his choice of language structure and words, we meant to evoke that weight and feel of a past time, even though what he was writing about (a Godless world ruled by fear and science) wouldn’t have been acceptable to the general populace of that earlier time. He also encourage those writing works in his world to also write using those constructs. All in an attempt to transport the reader to a poorly remembered past and invoke nostalgia and importance in his stories. And again, he couldn’t do it completely (even though it had only been 50-20 years) because of how far the English language had evolved. He had to include contemporary words and concepts so his readers wouldn’t be completely lost.

Susanna Clarke revised this in Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and some of her other stories. She intentionally chose victorian romance (read as contemporary fiction of the Victorian Era) structures to evoke a mood and nostalgia in her readers. Her story actually takes place in an earlier era (an alternative England under George III and a Napolian Europe ). So not only did she have to update some of the word choices and structures, she is using a language construct that was contemporary at least 50 years after her story’s time period. But it works, doesn’t it? At least to our ears and eyes.

Can it work for you? I’m not so sure. There are strong currents in both SF and Fantasy circles to make the works more accessible, which means using current structures and word choices. Plus, in Fantasy at least, you risk being labeled as following Susanna Clarke or being to close to Tolkien unless you update the language. For SF there is the revival of Space Opera which has seen a (slight) nod to 70s sensibilities, but the genre has moved quickly beyond that (IMHO). But if you do try it, it doesn’t hurt to know the history of those who have travelled that road before to see how they updated the usages to make their stories work for their audiences.