Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Summer is here, and I am finally applying what powers of focus I have toward finishing my first revision of the first draft of my first novel, The Ghost of Canard University. It has been just about a year since I began working on this story in earnest, and I would certainly be further along if those powers of focus were a little more focus-ful, but we are where we are and this is where we’re starting from.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife Ariele asked me a question about one of my principle characters, Sybil Johnson. Sybil is a college student and an aspiring poet and author, and within the science fiction context of Canard University she is also possessed of psychic abilities. She is what I call an obligate telepathic receiver: she is aware of all of the conscious and unconscious thoughts of every person around her, within a range that extends somewhat further than the average person’s non-telepathic hearing, and she is unable to block the “sound” of these thoughts. Ariele’s question was one that I had (surprisingly) not given much thought to: is Sybil able to understand the thoughts of people who do not speak or “think” in English?

As the author, of course, I can make the answer to that question whatever I want it to be. What is important to me, however, is justifying that answer in the characterization of Sybil and the logic of the world. Whether she can understand the thoughts of non-English speakers or not, it has to be consistent with the experience of her life as I have described it in the book (otherwise I will feel compelled to rewrite much more of the book than I want to). Ideally, it should also be consistent with the general science of thought and language, at least to the extent that I understand it. Most important, however, is what I understand about her.

Sybil got her name last summer when I began writing this story in earnest, but the idea of her goes back twenty years or so, when I first began thinking about the kind of novel I would like to write. Her identity as a young red-haired female psychic in an academic setting makes her similarity to Jean Grey of the X-Men undeniable, but aspects of her personality and life experience are inspired by many other characters; there is no shortage of mind readers in fiction. The challenge in writing her is not just in depicting her internal experiences, but in showing how they have formed her into the particular person she is: not just the mind reader of the story, but a real individual who incidentally reads minds.

I will note that Sybil prefers to describe what she does as hearing or listening rather than reading, as reading implies an act of volition that she is not making. She is a lover of literature, and for her “reading” is an act of comprehending the words an author chooses to share, and only those words. She doesn’t regard the minds of others as open books, but as beacons of sound, or as radio stations broadcasting on a dedicated frequency to a receiver between her ears that never turns off. If I call it mind reading, then it’s only because of conventionality and the suspicion that it may be a distinction without a difference, but to her the difference is real, with important implications for her self-image.

One of the consequences of her powers that is central to her story is that it is extremely difficult to lie her, or to keep secrets from her. Not only can she hear the truth of what you really believe, but she can hear all of your intentions to distort or conceal. She knows if those intentions are founded in kindness or malice or indifference, and this matters to her, but either way she cannot be deceived if she is able to hear your thoughts and your words at the same time. For this reason, many people who otherwise care very much for her prefer to communicate via telephone or writing.

At the time of Canard University, Sybil is twenty one years old, and has been living away from her parents since she was sixteen. She supports herself with freelance writing and scholarships, and spends much (but not all) of her time at home with her pet parakeet (whose uncomplicated thoughts she finds reassuring) and a succession of roommates who usually try to stay away from home as often as possible. This is partly because of her natural shyness and the exhaustion of being around so many people in such an intimate way, but it is also because of a general prejudice against the psychic minority that exists in the context of the story. Ironically, most of the people classified as “psychic” in this world have abilities that are weak or inconsequential; Sybil is a very rare instance of seeming justification for the paranoia many have about the privacy of their thoughts or the independence of their will. Government task forces exist to monitor “psychs” and document their abilities and associations, while Sybil and others like her receive them with all of the warmth you might expect.

Sybil accepts her isolation with grace, but she is lonely, and she has difficulty with building relationships. For her, trust is empirical: people she trusts are people whose friendly words and actions are in accord with their thoughts. For every other person in her life, this is akin to being placed under a microscope. Their sense of being constantly evaluated and judged alienates them from her, and naturally she is keenly aware of their resentment, which has at times made her nearly as judgmental as they imagine her to be. On the other hand, her constant exposure to the darkest thoughts of others—guilty secrets, destructive impulses, greed, revenge— has given her a healthy appreciation for the good intentions of people who sometimes fall short. She loves people, or at least the idea of people; she does not expect them to be perfect, but she is struck all the harder by their imperfections.

This is Sybil’s personal context; the question is, how does this context bear on the question of language? Is she capable of functioning as a sort of universal translator of thoughts, or does the intrusion of words in unfamiliar languages add an extra layer of oppressive discomfort to her interactions with the wider world? Which interpretation better suits her character, and can I justify it with any remotely scientific logic?

My sense is that it is more important that Sybil hears and understands the people of her world than that she is overwhelmed by them. Hearing thoughts does not make her catatonic or insensible; it is a natural, innate capacity of her mind that she has had two decades to grow into. The idea that she would be discomfited by adding foreign languages into the mix does not fit with the themes I have set down for her, and it does not seem consistent with her love of language and literature. Therefore, I imagine (and as the author, thus I make it so) that she could understand the thoughts of a non-English speaker, whether she knew that speaker’s language or not.

The connection between thought and language is both obvious and mysterious. Many people perceive their conscious thoughts as an internal monologue, a stream of words in their native language, which provides the necessary vocabulary for the consideration of various concepts, concrete or abstract. The strong version of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the way people think is determined by language, or that certain kinds of thoughts are only possible when thinking in one language or another. Weaker versions suppose that our perceptions are merely influenced by language, in the way that French speakers supposedly perceive bridges as masculine or German speakers perceive them as feminine on account of the differing grammatical gender of the word in those languages. A contrary view is that thought itself is completely independent of language, which is only the medium of thought’s outward expression, and that values and experiences are much more important in creating differences in perception or in shaping the contours of thought.

I obviously don’t know which of these views is “correct,” or whether it is even possible for one of them to be fully correct in principle, but my understanding of the information available to me is that the truth lies closer to the non-deterministic side of things. Sybil may perceive the thoughts of others as the sound of their internal monologue (and this is how it is presented in the text of my book), but this is only her perception of their thoughts, which is similar to, yet distinct from, her perception of her own thoughts. What she is is actually perceiving is not necessarily linguistic in nature.

Things may be trickier for her if the person she is listening to is actually thinking about words, or about how to express an idea in words, and the words themselves are unfamiliar to her. It would also not necessarily help her to understand the spoken language itself, although if her understanding of the thoughts underlying the speech were sound enough she might not necessarily need to. It is possible that she could understand a person’s thoughts more clearly in a language that was more similar to English, and have varying degrees of minor trouble with other languages. Ultimately, what makes sense to me is that Sybil should have an accurate knowledge of a nearby person’s present opinions, intentions, and preoccupations, regardless of what languages she knows or what languages they speak. If the mental “sound” she perceives is thought and not language, then “I want to drink cold water” should sound more or less the same to her as “yo quiero tomar agua fría.”

This kind of insight into a character may seem esoteric, especially from outside of the loosely science fiction framework of Canard University. However, while Sybil’s personality does not begin and end with her psychic abilities, and while the language issue does not really come up in the plot, I find it helpful to try and see the world through her eyes and hear it through her “ears.” Some part of my success will rest in how well eventual readers will find they can do the same.