Linguist No. 3: Yvor Baloyne, in the novel His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem (1968)
Today’s fictional linguist has a job similar to that of Louise Banks in the film Arrival, the linguist who kicked off this series – he has to figure out what aliens are saying. But in the world created by Stanislaw Lem, the aliens aren’t visible, and decoding what they’re telling us requires a whole team of scientists, mathematicians, and linguists.
Like Solaris, Lem’s best-known novel internationally, His Master’s Voice (which purports to be a memoir written by one of the participants in the eponymous project, the mathematician Peter Hogarth) takes as its central theme the problem of communication with alien entities. But instead of a giant planetary brain that probes your subconscious and materializes your thoughts, we have something far more abstract: a “letter from the stars” in the form of a neutrino transmission. Decoding this “letter” is the central task of the scientific team.
That’s where Yvor Baloyne comes in. His role is a double one – he is a linguist working on the project, but he is also an administrator, responsible for dealing with the government bodies overseeing the project. The action takes place in a sort of fake, abstract America (the lack of realistic detail makes me think that Lem had never visited the United States before he wrote the novel). The scientific team is gathered somewhere in the Nevada desert, but the atmosphere of the novel is very cloistered; we rarely leave the offices, laboratories and research institutions.
Lem does not endow his linguist with an air of implausibility like the one that surrounds Louise Banks. In part, this is because we don’t find out very much about him. Lem does not specify Baloyne as an expert on any particular language or group of languages. In fact, we never discover the actual extent of Baloyne’s linguistic expertise, or how he became so prominent in his field. The Hollywood approach of having him suddenly whip out his knowledge of Chinese and save the world is absent here.
However, we do learn that “he believed that as a philologist and humanist he would never need mathematics; concerned with things of the spirit, he placed knowledge of man over knowledge of nature. But then he became involved in linguistics as in an illicit love affair; he began to wrestle with the currently raging fashions of structuralism and developed a taste, however reluctantly, for mathematics.” Thus, he has entered into the territory of theoretical and structural linguistics, which gives him some points in common with the scientists he works with.
Indeed, in addition to his administrative function, Yvor Baloyne’s role in the novel is largely defined by his status as a humanist interacting with scientists. One might surmise that his linguistic facility gives him an advantage when interacting with slippery politicians and penny-pinching bureaucrats – a facility that the scientists and mathematicians don’t necessarily have.
However, his personality, as filtered through Hogarth’s description, is definitely not that of a “people person.” He is described as “a butterball and painfully timid.” His massive study with its wall of books and enormous furniture (“you could have drowned a calf in his cocktail pitcher”) is a kind of fortress of solitude, where he can hide away from the world. Because of his timidity, he speaks “in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of somebody playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles.” As a result, it is impossible to know “when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words.”
Among other things, His Master’s Voice deals with the question of déformation professionnelle, as all the scientists and specialists working on the project consider the central problem through the prism of their own specializations. Hogarth states that “friction between the humanists and the natural scientists of the Project was the order of the day,” but the hard scientists also manifest sharp disagreements among themselves, based on which fields they represent. The modern bureaucratic state, which sponsors the project, also comes in for dissection, as the scientists grope with its demands and strictures, which strike them as ignorant and oafish.
“We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf,” says Hogarth on the last page. The implication is that, not only is communication between humans and space aliens impossible, communication between humans and humans is pretty much impossible too (“I was never able to conquer the distance between persons”). The linguist Baloyne, with his inability to say anything straight, is a fine exemplar of that.