Worlding Communication: The Foregrounding of Novel Communication Barriers in Literature

Sammanfattning: Novel communication barriers, innovative obstacles to mutual understanding that deviate from the norms of the actual world, are a recurring yet understudied presence in aesthetic worlds of all kinds. Some examples of this are Dana’s twentieth-century way of speaking that travels back in time with her in Kindred, or Americans under Japanese occupation struggling to speak through cultural and linguistic barriers in an alternate historical timeline in The Man in the High Castle, or the unique obstructions to communication in the alien encounters of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness or Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life.” In certain works, communication barriers carry such a novel character and occupy such a prominent place in the narrative that they call out for interpretation at a metadiegetic level. In previous scholarship, linguistic inventiveness has been studied primarily for the ways it speaks to science fiction genre distinctions. This essay aims to reveal how the recurrence of this foregrounded literary mechanism points to a transcultural and transhistorical tendency that goes beyond science fiction. With the aim of proving its usefulness in world literature studies, the goal is to analyze the presence of the novel barrier in seven different texts and how it projects a certain theory of the world. Using Darko Suvin’s concept of the novum and Eric Hayot’s metadiegetic structures I argue that novel communication barriers have in their nature a foregrounding effect that projects a kind of worldedness that accounts for the way communication is conceptualized and experienced. Using Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communication to substantiate this worldedness, I demonstrate how the motivation toward rational consensus on truth claims behind each act of communication has a world-creating effect which is articulated by the novel communication barrier in these texts.