THE EMBEDDING- IAN WATSON

A combination of linguistics and sci fi is the mode of ‘‘The embedding’’. Three plot lines converge in the novel. The first concerns Chris Sole, who is training disabled , brain damaged children on an embedded language with its own set of referents and associations, enhancing their brain capacity with PSF (Protein synthesis facilitator ) which quickens the brain’s absorption .The second plot line concerns pierre ,in the amazonian jungle in Brazil, with the xemahoa tribe whose leader Bruxo, partakes of the drug maka-i . The xemahoa are an incestuous tribe, whose way of life is about to be imperilled and obliterated with a dam built in santarem which would flood the inhabitants comprising the xemahoa. Pierre as an anthropologist, with the aid of kayapi( the illegitimate son of bruxo, born outside of the tribe to another woman ), tries to plumb the linguistic embedding of the xemahoa, under the influence of maka- i . Under the influence of maka-i Bruxo and tribe transition to a complex linguistic register that transcends two dimensional interface of self and reality via language and tunnels into a cosmic pantheism in which the mythos of the xemahoa is embedded in their fables and creation stories and accesses a perceptual expansiveness that touches on the core of existence. But this embedding is perforce incommunicable and inarticulable by western rationality. The third plot strand concerns the alien species sp’thra’ , meaning signal traders , with their emissary Ph’theri, who seek to plumb the fulcrum of the universe, including its unperceived, other dimension of reality, by encoding brains in a computerized framework and plugging into its linguistic trappings . Intertwined with this quest is a wish to reunite with the change speakers , variable entities , capable of altering reality with shifting value signals . Their shape shifting across parallel realities presumably indicating a wholeness irrevocably severed from the sp’thra who want to reclaim that squandered totality. There is also the political dimension of brazilian oligarchs and vested interests hand in glove with america, and revolutionaries and anarchists who seek to bomb the dam. What accelerates the plot is the presence of sp’thra, and its promise of exchanging space travelling information with earth in exchange of six human brains and the embedded language of the xemahoa. The project is botched and the crisis engineered to implicate aliens and obtain political control of the narrative as the nuking of the dam by its very builders (the americans ) backfires.

The sapir whorf hypothesis posits the structuring of language impacts the way its speakers perceive and understand the world while the universal grammar of chomsky postulates a common universal structure that solders all languages. What ‘‘The embedding’ does is subject both ideas to scepticism. If chris sole’s subjects/children imbibe an embedded language with its sequelae and widening associative tangents then it is more a structural superposing of a linguistic prototype of the nature of language in/as itself. The protein enhances retentiveness but cannot determine the experiential component of language which is as much sensory, somatoform and tactile. Vidya, the child under the jurisdiction of Chris undergoes an overload that is unassimilable and uncontainable, inducing shock, violence and a turning inside out as untranslatable content what is unstoppable as incursion. The xemahoa, espcially bruxo, under the influence of maka-i , commune through dance, ritual , hieratic tribalistic forms of communion that broadens and renders capacious the embedded nature of their origin stories in a circuitous patterning in which the form of their myths commingle with a cosmic heightened attunement to creation in inexpressible ways but conveyed and relayed by a divination that is supra temporal and supra rational. But bruxo is consumed by this vision as he becomes emaciated and careworn with each ingestion of maka-i while the woman he keeps in a hut to bear a child, by keeping her fed on doses of maka-i during the gestation period births a severely deformed child and she dies after a crude cesaerean . While the sp’thra try to codify and crystallize futilely a center of the perceptual lens of consciousness that is not reducible to a schematic streamlined format that can be broached . If language , in its own evolutionary modulations and mutations , shapes consciousness then it can only reinforce a prefixed, established mode of experience and understanding overdetermined by what is contained in/by language. It perforce imposes a limit to reality, a limit that is a survival mechanism in that it delimits the ascertainable and enables negotiating the vastness of reality . To work with/through language to adumbrate what is outside of language and thereby knowable reality is not encompassable in ‘‘the embedding’’. Vidya transmits his overabundance of overload to chris who can only collapse in the immensity of ‘‘too much reality’’. The xemahoa , due to their traditionalism and inbreeding , replicate the motifs of their formative stories , drawing sustenance from nature and the animal kingdom to substantiate and supplement, through indirection and fabulism , the interplay of linguistic limitations and the ineffability of consciousness, exacerbated in its dialectical interlocking through maka-i. This leads bruxo to misapprehend the retreating flood to the benefices of maka-i instead of the machinations of american chicanery. My surmise is that the novel is sceptical about language as the operative framework (while conceding its inevitability and necessity ) with which to tackle experience, reality and consciousness. All three plot lines converge on the search for something immanent, or discoverable, be it through scientific experimentation or hallucinatory states bordering on mysticism or alien technology using neuroscience to get beneath the plurality of modalities of language/languages as signifier to some indwelling unifying ubiquity of the apperceptive that factors in the multi dimensionality of reality. All three systems flounder because the encasing language does forecloses and corralls the object /phenomenon while assuming a proliferative heterogeneity of/on its own . The embedding may be recursive rules with ever widening spirals that simulate a diversity outstripping the form of the referent but inhabit a closed system no less . The moment realities that inundate consciousness pell mell are unspooled they induce disorientation, breakdown or a state of transfixed indecipherability that is too much to coexist with and harmonize. Wittgenstein’s injunction of silence in the face of unspeakable illimitability is a subterranean refrain in the novel. Interestingly all the states of immersiveness in three dimensional reality the novel hints at are described schematically, deploying a familiarized motif that theorizes an experience in the very midst of its experiencing, reverting to the abstraction of the conceptual to express the perceptual. And that ironically is yet another embedding. I interpret the embedding as a sceptical novel, healthily so, about both the limits of speculative linguistic theories and the nature of human graspability of reality. I don’t find the novel, as the martin amis blurb fulsomely says, taking one to the very brink of profundity or revelation. The xemahoa have an embedding that is pantheistic, with an organic interpenetration with the natural world and organic matter that is not extractive or opportunistic but even that citadel cannot outdistance the dimension enframing their inarticulable experientiality . ‘‘The embedding ‘‘ raises many questions still relevant today in our linguistically oversaturated traffic with reality amplified by technology.