Literally – the much misused word of the moment

It’s like literally so misoverused. But whereas Jamie Redknapp gets the word nonsensically wrong, writers such as James Joyce knew exactly what they were doing with it

Jamie Redknapp … ‘That cross to Rooney was literally on a plate.’ Photograph: Nick Harvey/WireImage

 

I was sitting in a cafe – one of those generic pain au raisin and latte joints, with an earnest singer-songwriter soundtrack to boot – when a kid to my left piped up: “My school gym is like literally 500 years old.” His friends nodded with conviction. They understood. They felt the appalling deprivation of it all. A 500-year-old cross-trainer just isn’t any good to anybody. But I wasn’t going to underestimate my table-neighbour just yet. I couldn’t give up on him like that. After all, I appreciated the subtle contradiction of that “like”, poised on the edge of potential simile, and that bold, indicative “literally”, ready-armoured for its grapple with hard fact. But then, a couple of sentences further into their criss-crossing conversation, he said: “I’m literally gutted that I failed my English mock.” Ah, well, yes, quite. The country is literally going to the dogs.

Actually, I rather enjoy it when people force a “literally” where the antithetical and more pretentious “figuratively” would do – would, in fact, be more literal. But I have my limits. If you literally spray me with your false statements, do I not drown? If you literally press it upon me that the impossible has indeed happened, do I not recoil? However, one needs to be careful in diagnosing such linguistic ills. Nobody likes the queasy pedant creeping up with cold fingers, ready to clip our wings. (He tends to sit on his own in the corner of generic pain au raisin, skinny latte joints where they play singer-songwriter tunes.) It is an unfashionable and unendearing role.

But as Anthony Burgess once said, the poet and the pedant are as one, and grammar is glamour. So let’s be poetical. Let’s indulge ourselves in some glamour. It is tiresome to merely point out the ridiculousness of a statement such as “that cross to Rooney was literally on a plate” (Jamie Redknapp) or “Barca literally passed Arsenal to death” (Jamie Redknapp) or “he had to cut back inside on to his left, because he literally hasn’t got a right foot” (Jamie Redknapp). It is even more boring to then counter this with a pained attempt at sarcasm such as “did he smash the china?”, “someone should call the police” or “wow, a uniped footballer” (Unglamorous Pedant). It is far more interesting and glamorous to question what we are doing when we say “he walks into the room and he’s literally like a hurricane” (Chantelle Houghton) or when, over a contemplative cuppa perhaps, we merely observe that “centre forwards have the ability to make time stand still. And when Chopra got the ball, it literally did just that” (Jamie Redknapp). What, for instance, might these phrases have to say about our relationship to reality?

I’m no socio-linguist or cognitive-scientist, but I do like to float some hypotheses: maybe we’re a generation that is scared of commitment, linguistically deferring reality with our false literallys and our compulsive “likes” and “sort ofs” and “kind of things” that make everything seem only tentative and approximate; maybe our literallys are geared for emphasis, betraying a touching desire to be taken seriously or a cry for attention; maybe our misuse reveals a deeper insecurity about what in fact is real; maybe it reflects a sheer disregard for proportion or accuracy; or maybe it arises from a subconscious need for universality in a confusing age of spiralling subjectivities and relativistic hopscotch, longing to pin down objective truths in even the most fantastical of scenarios …

Of course, we might just be lazy and imprecise users of language. But what happens when James Joyce uses “literally” incorrectly, as when he says that “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” or tells us that to Leopold Bloom’s mind the Gloria in Mozart’s Twelfth Mass is “the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat”. Is James’s “literally” any better than Jamie’s?

I would suggest that a writer must have good reason for misusing the word. After all, literally also means “to the letter” and “of literature” (deriving from the Latin for “letter”: littera), so we should expect a degree of exactitude and particularity from a man of letters such as Joyce. And he more than delivers, misusing his literallys to grant us a deeper insight into the workings of his characters’ minds. Just to take the second example from above, Joyce is not only able to tell us something about the dynamic interaction between Bloom’s thirst for “higher” knowledge and his bourgeois background, but, more intimately, he is able to embody Bloom’s capacity for empathy – Bloom can harmonise high and low, just as he can align the literal and the figurative.

Salman Rushdie is another serial “literaliser”. He never tires of taking phrases that sound like classic hyperbole (“I am literally disintegrating”, “he began, literally, to fade” in Midnight’s Children) and making them, well, literal. In doing so he creates fantastic otherwise worlds, where the angle of vision has been slightly adjusted so that we might see things anew.

The point is that these writers are actually being highly precise in their misuses. Here is a particular favourite of mine: “The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” This is the sublime Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift. The thoughts are partially ironised – they belong to the novel’s narrator, who is struggling to summarise a range of impenetrable philosophical works – but nevertheless contain immense truth and beauty. However, it is by working through and beyond that initial intervening “literally” that he gets to the pure metaphor of the last sentence. And it is in that last sentence that we hit the heights of genius.

Writers such as Bellow, Joyce and Rushdie remind us of the fundamentally comic nature of life. That’s not comic as in “ha ha” comedy (there’s little to laugh about in those Bellow lines), but something more essential – a mood perhaps, maybe even a quality of vision. It has to do with life’s potential for adjustability and transformation; with a reality of shifting proportions, surprising angles, creative awrynesses. The comic world is above all an inclusive world. It is also opposite to the tragic view of a harsh and prohibitive world, where the literal – the objective truth – is inflexible and unassailable.

Clive James once called a sense of humour “common sense dancing”. I think that this is profound. If it is so, then misuses of literally are common sense raving: we know that the fans behind the goalpost haven’t literally gone insane (Jamie Redknapp) and that Messi doesn’t literally send people out of the stadium (Jamie Redknapp). The writers, however, are the ones who recognise our powerful need for the literal and figurative. They convey our longing for some kind of sympathy between the figurative expressions of our imaginations (clumsy and beautiful as they are) and the empirical truth of the literal world that we seek to describe. The writers show us that if the world is a mirror of thoughts, no straightforwardly literal statement will ever be enough to help us see it more clearly.

• Noughties by Ben Masters is published by Hamish Hamilton on February 2 at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2012/jan/29/literally-a-much-misused-word

Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale

It has been banned in schools, made into a film and an opera, and the title has become a shorthand for repressive regimes against women

Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both.

The Handmaid’s Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women’s bodies and reproductive functions: “Like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Here comes The Handmaid’s Tale” have become familiar phrases. It has been expelled from high schools, and has inspired odd website blogs discussing its descriptions of the repression of women as if they were recipes. People – not only women – have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from The Handmaid’s Tale tattooed on them, “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” and “Are there any questions?” being the most frequent. The book has had several dramatic incarnations, a film (with screenplay by Harold Pinter and direction by Volker Schlöndorff) and an opera (by Poul Ruders) among them. Revellers dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe’en and also for protest marches – these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness. Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? I did not anticipate any of this when I was writing the book.

I began this book almost 30 years ago, in the spring of 1984, while living in West Berlin – still encircled, at that time, by the Berlin Wall. The book was not called The Handmaid’s Tale at first – it was called Offred – but I note in my journal that its name changed on 3 January 1985, when almost 150 pages had been written.

That’s about all I can note, however. In my journal there are the usual writerly whines, such as: “I am working my way back into writing after too long away – I lose my nerve, or think instead of the horrors of publication and what I will be accused of in reviews.” There are entries concerning the weather; rain and thunder come in for special mentions. I chronicle the finding of puffballs, always a source of glee; dinner parties, with lists of those who attended and what was cooked; illnesses, my own and those of others; and the deaths of friends. There are books read, speeches given, trips made. There are page counts; I had a habit of writing down the pages completed as a way of urging myself on. But there are no reflections at all about the actual composition or subject matter of the book itself. Perhaps that was because I thought I knew where it was going, and felt no need to interrogate myself.

I recall that I was writing by hand, then transcribing with the aid of a typewriter, then scribbling on the typed pages, then giving these to a professional typist: personal computers were in their infancy in 1985. I see that I left Berlin in June 1984, returned to Canada, wrote through the fall, then spent four months in early 1985 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I held an MFA chair. I finished the book there; the first person to read it was a fellow writer, Valerie Martin, who was also there at that time. I recall her saying: “I think you’ve got something here.” She herself remembers more enthusiasm.

From 12 September 1984 to June 1985 all is blank in my journal – there is nothing at all set down, not even a puffball – though by my page-count entries it seems I was writing at white-hot speed. On 10 June there is a cryptic entry: “Finished editing Handmaid’s Tale last week.” The page proofs had been read by 19 August. The book appeared in Canada in the fall of 1985 to baffled and sometimes anxious reviews – could it happen here? – but there is no journal commentary on these by me. On 16 November I find another writerly whine: “I feel sucked hollow.” To which I added: “But functional.”

The book came out in the UK in February 1986, and in the United States at the same time. In the UK, which had had its Oliver Cromwell moment some centuries ago and was in no mood to repeat it, the reaction was along the lines of, “Jolly good yarn”. In the US, however – and despite a dismissive review in the New York Times by Mary McCarthy – it was more likely to be: “How long have we got?”

Stories about the future always have a “what-if” premise, and The Handmaid’s Tale has several. For instance: if you wanted to seize power in the US, abolish liberal democracy and set up a dictatorship, how would you go about it? What would be your cover story? It would not resemble any form of communism or socialism: those would be too unpopular. It might use the name of democracy as an excuse for abolishing liberal democracy: that’s not out of the question, though I didn’t consider it possible in 1985.

Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already. Thus China replaced a state bureaucracy with a similar state bureaucracy under a different name, the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.

 

Like any theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New. Since ruling classes always make sure they get the best and rarest of desirable goods and services, and as it is one of the axioms of the novel that fertility in the industrialised west has come under threat, the rare and desirable would include fertile women – always on the human wish list, one way or another – and reproductive control. Who shall have babies, who shall claim and raise those babies, who shall be blamed if anything goes wrong with those babies? These are questions with which human beings have busied themselves for a long time.

There would be resistance to such a regime, and an underground, and even an underground railroad. In retrospect, and in view of 21st-century technologies available for spywork and social control, these seem a little too easy. Surely the Gilead command would have moved to eliminate the Quakers, as their 17th-century Puritan forebears had done.

I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the “Christian” tradition, itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the church’s behaviour and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organisation would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)

The Handmaid’s Tale has often been called a “feminist dystopia”, but that term is not strictly accurate. In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women. It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife.

The Handmaids themselves are a pariah caste within the pyramid: treasured for what they may be able to provide – their fertility – but untouchables otherwise. To possess one is, however, a mark of high status, just as many slaves or a large retinue of servants always has been. Since the regime operates under the guise of a strict Puritanism, these women are not considered a harem, intended to provide delight as well as children. They are functional rather than decorative.

Three things that had long been of interest to me came together during the writing of the book. The first was my interest in dystopian literature, an interest that began with my adolescent reading of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and continued through my period of graduate work at Harvard in the early 1960s. (Once you’ve been intrigued by a literary form, you always have a secret yen to write an example of it yourself.) The second was my study of 17th and 18th-century America, again at Harvard, which was of particular interest to me since many of my own ancestors had lived in those times and in that place. The third was my fascination with dictatorships and how they function, not unusual in a person who was born in 1939, three months after the outbreak of the second world war.

Like the American revolution and the French revolution, like the three major dictatorships of the 20th century – I say “major” because there have been more, Cambodia and Romania among them – and like the New England Puritan regime before it, Gilead has utopian idealism flowing through its veins, coupled with a high-minded principle, its ever-present shadow, sublegal opportunism, and the propensity of the powerful to indulge in behind-the-scenes sensual delights forbidden to everyone else. But such locked-door escapades must remain hidden, for the regime floats as its raison d’être the notion that it is improving the conditions of life, both physical and moral; and like all such regimes, it depends on its true believers.

I was perhaps too optimistic to end the Handmaid’s story with an outright failure. Even Nineteen Eighty-Four, that darkest of literary visions, does not end with a boot stamping on a human face for ever, or with a broken Winston Smith feeling a drunken love for Big Brother, but with an essay about the regime written in the past tense and in standard English. Similarly, I allowed my Handmaid a possible escape, via Maine and Canada; and I also permitted an epilogue, from the perspective of which both the Handmaid and the world she lived in have receded into history. When asked whether The Handmaid’s Tale is about to “come true”, I remind myself that there are two futures in the book, and that if the first one comes true, the second one may do so also.

Margaret Atwood - guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012

The Handmaid’s Tale is reissued this month by the Folio Society

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – in pictures

“We turn the corner onto a main street, where there’s more traffic. Cars go by, black most of them, some grey and brown. There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, they’re called.”

‘As we wait in our double line, the door opens and two more women come in, both in the red dresses and white wings of the Handmaids. One of them is vastly pregnant; her belly, under her loose garment, swells triumphantly. There is a shifting in the room, a murmur, an escape of breath; despite ourselves we turn our heads, blatantly, to see better; our fingers itch to touch her. She’s a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her. She’s a flag on a hilltop, showing us what can still be done: we too can be saved.”

“My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated. Did I really wear bathing suits, at the beach? I did, without a thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display, could be seen. Shameful, immodest.“

“We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs those were called. I would like to put them in my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acidic on the tongue, delicious.”

“I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men are not just going to go away, I said. You couldn’t just ignore them.”

“We line up to get processed through the checkpoint, standing in our twos and twos, like a private girls’ school that went for a walk and stayed out too long. Years and years too long, so that everything has become overgrown, legs, bodies, dresses all together. As if enchanted. A fairy tale, I’d like to believe. Instead we are checked through, in our twos, and continue walking.”

 

“‘There,’ I say, and he turns around. I feel stupid; I want to see myself in a mirror. ‘Charming,’ he says. ‘Now for the face.’ All he has is lipstick, old and runny and smelling of artificial grapes, and some eyeliner and mascara. No eye shadow, no blusher. For a moment I think I won’t remember how to do any of this, and my first try with the eyeliner leaves me with a smudged black lid, as if I’d been in a fight; but I wipe it off with the vegetable-oil hand lotion and try again.”

A new Folio Society edition of Atwood’s landmark dystopian novel is accompanied by striking illustrations from Anna and Elena Balbusso. Here are a selection

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2012/jan/23/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-in-pictures