about language and The Giver

I promised myself that I'd go to bed early tonight, so I'm making this brief -- but doesn't it always seem like when you snuggle up ready for sleep, you get some idea in your head that refuses to shut up? Always inconvenient, my swimming dialogues of thought.

Anyway.  On Friday I saw "The Giver" and was delighted because it was 1) fantastic and 2) an adaptation of one of my favorite books and 3) another dystopian story that is gaining attention (like much of YA fiction). I love the way dystopian lit always reveals our complexities as humans, our flaws and our inabilities to be perfect.  It is a humbling genre, and many of my favorite books fall under it.

In the story, the characters live in communities where everything is whittled down to simplicity, where color is nonexistent, where superfluous goods are not allowed, and differences are altogether eradicated.

I've got a lot of thoughts in a lot of different directions about that world, but something that struck me as new in the story as I was watching it on screen was the conflict of language it reveals.

One phrase used often by characters in the world of "The Giver" is "precision of language".  Citizens are encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings with the right words, as though everything necessary to feel or communicate can be expressed by language.  Even though they have Feelings Time every night over dinner, the world they live in is not sentimental, vulnerable, or emotional.  For all the exact language, for all the emphasis on words, there is a lack of expression.

Towards the end of the film. after Fiona (the main love interest) has her eyes opened to the flaws of her society, she tries to express feelings of affection which she has experienced. She tries at first to use her language to describe it, and ultimately she confesses that she can't.  "It was beautiful" she says, and "it was more".  The greatness of her discovery couldn't fit the bounds of words; words just began to scrape the surface.

What's most humbling in these thoughts is that even in our most beautiful pursuits, which, to me, writing truly is, we can never fully grasp at the grandness that exists beyond the world we see and touch.  There is so much more, and we can't place it into structured bounds. Language is too precise to fit a world that is anything but.

Freedom is so much more, pain is so much more, love is so much more than what we can confine into poems or stories or songs.  Yes, these bits of art are valuable for where they lead us, for how they draw out ourselves from a numbing depth of ordinary life.  But they are always veiled, they are never completely up against the heights for which they reach.

And as a writer, I am challenged to think that my pursuit of language might be ridiculous.  But isn't living always?  Isn't it always funny, when we think we can understand it all or match the beauty of what we didn't initially create?  Often I'm reminded of the verse that says "for now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face".

I think about the world of "The Giver" and the world that we live in, and it seems that the answer to the conflict is to keep bumping up against beauty with our words - to keep writing, to be a bit foolish in the chase, but to marvel at the reflection of eternity, a someday-reality we're racing towards.