Imagine a world in which all words have disappeared. A world in which all meaning was erased. Every border has fallen.
In this new reality, there’s a naming committee charged with delivering words to help people make sense of things again – put the world back together, in a sense. Because, as anyone can tell you, there’s nothing more dangerous than an unnamed thing.
This is the world readers delve into when they pick up the ethereal new novel “The Naming Song” by award-winning author Jedediah Berry.
Berry spoke to the Texas Standard about his new book, which is one of several on the shortlist to be featured at the Texas Book Festival this month.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This is such a fascinating book. I have to ask if there was some event in the here and now that got you thinking about recreating this kind of wordless world?
Jedediah Berry: A few things came together at the same time. So much of my work often starts with just an image of some kind that pops into my head. And in this case, I had this image of a young woman on an old steam train in this sort of desolate landscape surrounded by monsters and old factories.
And I just started building from there, like, how did this world come to be? What happened here? And I decided, well, she is delivering something. She’s delivering a word. And if that happened, that meant the words went away. And now someone has to bring them back.
And so there was that side of it. And the other side of it was just thinking a lot about language, thinking about how language can both connect us and sometimes drive us apart.
This “she” that you’re referring to is known as The Courier in the book. Did I miss her name, or did you just choose not to give her one?
You didn’t miss anything. She does not have a name. Her father chose not to name her. And in this world, that is a very, in fact, dangerous thing. She is important in the work that she does, but she is also kind of feared by her contemporaries because she herself is nameless, and nameless things have a tendency to bring the unexpected.
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I want to understand her role here, because she is serving an important function in this new reality. She is, in a sense, delivering the word, if you will. She’s spreading these new words around the countryside.
She is a courier of the Names Committee. There are people in the Names Committee who figure out what is missing a word. And then they write it down, but they’re unable to speak it until a courier like her goes out into the world and actually finds one of these things and delivers it.
So the book actually opens with her delivering the word echo, because echo is one of the words that was lost. And so she shouts the word echo into a canyon, and it echoes at that. Everyone in the world has that word available to them again.
This is a world of fantasy, although not the kind of fantasy that I think a lot of fantasy readers would expect. I mean, there are monsters and beasts in this world as well.
There are monsters. There are beasts. They are ghosts. I became really interested in the idea of what would happen if language went away and all of our expected borders kind of fell apart. What would move over those borders?
So monsters get out of people’s dreams, for example. And when people die, then their ghosts are present and they just kind of persist. And so I had a lot of fun just making this very strange world, but also hopefully really grounding it in the familiar.
So there are all these crazy creatures wandering around, but at the same time, we’re following someone who is trying to find a lost member of her family and just trying to get through her day.
I’m so glad that you mentioned that, because despite the otherworldliness of all of this, there are still aspects of the story that resonate. And I’m wondering if those just came kind of out of the ether, if you will.
For a lot of the time during which I was writing this book, I was living in a big house with a bunch of writers and artists and musicians, and I kind of drew from that a lot because a lot of the characters in this book, they live together actually on a steam engine train.
And so I wanted to kind of get into this odd community of these people who are trying to rebuild the world essentially through art and through writing and through music.
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But it seems at the same time you’re making a statement about the power of language. Without giving anything away, what would you say are some of the lessons, perhaps things you picked up on, in the course of writing this book – lessons that perhaps speak to today?
I started to think a lot about words as borders. There are ways that we define things and then understand the world. But they can also set our thinking down sometimes.
And so a lot of what this book is about is actually the absence of words: what things are not named, what things are kind of beyond the reach of language. And those things deserve our attention as well, I think.
And sometimes a lack of a border is maybe more important than a border being present.
This is written in the third person, and I wonder how hard it was for you to write in a world where there were no words?
It was a really big challenge that I set myself, to not let my narrator use any words that do not yet exist in the world. And words are being delivered over the course of the book. And so the diction is expanding as I go.
But it was challenging. And in fact, it took me a very long time to write this book. I was on this for over a decade.
And that was a very big part of it, was to create this language and the sense of playfulness on the page that would make as much use as possible with as few words as possible, but that really also became the engine that kind of drove the writing. So it was challenging, but it was the challenge that I needed.
