tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170682027322091019.post7196286746424248498..comments2024-03-26T12:50:21.872+00:00Comments on This Way Up: Up-words - A Very British Science FictionJohn Connorshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16168072529186067346noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170682027322091019.post-91988118457133746752012-02-04T11:28:13.178+00:002012-02-04T11:28:13.178+00:00When I did my first fanzine article (back in the l...When I did my first fanzine article (back in the late 20th Century) I drew on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to argue that Doctor Who is essentially 'dialogical', and most of my examples were drawn from Robert Holmes' work.<br /><br />Holmes doesn't just draw on generic conventions such as plots or iconography, he draws on their particular <i>languages</i>.<br /><br />No two speakers use precisely the same language: even among English speakers we have our own regional, ethnic and class dialects, or sociolects, and our own ideolects peculiar to ourselves - and in different contexts we draw on different registers, or speech genres, appropriate to the occasion.<br /><br />All these languages embed particular assumptions, worldviews or ideologies of the speaker, and dialogue is largely a struggle over the meaning of words.<br /><br />What Holmes does better than any other Doctor Who writer, and most other TV writers for that matter, is present us with characters who have their own idiolects and who therefore represent particular worldviews.<br /><br /><i>Carnival of Monsters</i> is an obvious example. Despite the fact that Vorg and Shirna are using translation devices there are many ideolects existing side by side (or in 'polyphony', a term Bakhtin cribbed from music): there's the gutteral language of the Functionaries, incomprehensible to the other characters (and to the viewers), accompanied by wild gesticulation; the drab, formal and contractionless language of the Officials, Kalik and Orum ('Reluctantly, one agrees); the upper-class English of the passengers of the SS Bernice complete with its sense of Imperialistic entitlement (‘Oh, dash it all – the fellow is a Sahib, you know!’); and the informal and expressive language of the showfolk, Vorg and Shirna, which even parodies itself when Shirna mocks Vorg's earlier assurances ('Top of the bill, he says! Received like a Princess, he says.').<br /><br />On top of that the characters even shift registers from time to time: the Doctor aping the Major Daley ('Topping day, what? Well, twenty-three skidoo, must get on, eh? Pip, pip!’), and then there's that marvelous Parlare/Polari exchange from Vorg ('Parlare the Carny? Varda the bonapalone? Niente dinari here, y’jils?’) - this being the historical cant of various 'outsiders', criminals, homosexuals, Punch & Judy 'Professors' (Glitz also uses some Polari in Trial of a Time Lord).<br /><br />So, a script which already includes different ideolects is further complicated by parody, by shifting registers, and by language largely incomprehensible to other groups.<br /><br /><i>Talons of Weng-Chiang</i> does the same with Cockney, stage Chinese, police malapropisms, theatrical alliteration, musical lyrics, etc. The cumulative effect is that Holmes' work brings into question the very idea of neutral language by showing that meaning varies according to the speaker.<br /><br />He's not shoving a particular worldview down our necks: he's presenting several side by side. That, I think, marks him out as a major writer, an <i>artist</i> comparable to Potter or Kneale.Davehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05067043447235214549noreply@blogger.com