The Library at Mount Char

Ideas about language and its relationship with thought and consciousness shape much of the premise and thematic frameworks of The Library at Mount Char. Carolyn, the protagonist, studies the catalog of language, and the librarians speak an invented language known as Pelapi. Author Scott Hawkins suffuses the narrative with made-up words whose meanings are profoundly important to character arc and theme development. The term uzan-iya, for example, describes the moment when an innocent heart first contemplates committing murder, symbolizing an initial moral corruption. The significance of language in the text revolves around the ways humans relate to each other and how a breakdown in these relational connections can harm society.

Hawkins’s exploration of language and abstract concepts like understanding, communicating, and thinking was inspired by natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence that aims to bridge the gap between human language and machines. He learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that the structures of one’s language influence or even determine how one thinks and perceives the world. 

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is named after two of its earliest advocates, Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir proposed an early version of the hypothesis in 1929:

The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached (Curzan, Anne, and Michael P. Adams. How English Works. Pearson Education, 2014).

Sapir and Whorf elaborated to suggest that reality, in the context of an individual’s perception, is a construct influenced by experience, language, and thought. However, they didn’t see this as refuting an objective material world that exists outside human minds.

In 1997, Jerry Gill outlined three other theories about the correlation between language and thought that constitute a spectrum of possible ways to conceptualize the relationship. On one end, objectivism asserts there is an objective reality that humans can access, and language merely describes that reality. On the opposite end, linguistic determinism holds that thought is determined by the categories available in one’s language. In between the two extremes, linguistic relativity claims that differences in language influence thought, but do not determine or restrict it.

Many studies have shown evidence that people can think in ways beyond their known language, thus disproving linguistic determinism. Infants demonstrate a robust conceptual life even before they acquire language. That conceptual life does shift later, illustrating that language does shape, in part, what people are most likely to notice about their environment. Additionally, how people categorize and understand the world reflects the linguistic categories and metaphors that structure their particular language. In other words, scientific evidence suggests that the theory of linguistic relativity is the most accurate. Language shapes perceived reality, but to what extent is unclear and potentially unknowable. Popular nonfiction books about language and its relationship with human thought and culture include The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990), by Bill Bryson, and Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (2019), by Gretchen McCulloch.

These concepts are threaded throughout The Library at Mount Char, particularly in the characters’ inability to communicate with each other. In the novel, Steve tells Carolyn, “I can’t get through to you. […] I’ve said it every way I know how, and it’s like you don’t even hear me” (334). Though she understands English perfectly well, Hawkins recognizes the presence of a language barrier, one caused by a response to trauma. When Steve later says Carolyn’s heart coal is the only way to get through to her, he means that he can only reach her on an emotional level. In this context, emotion is portrayed as a separate language that is not mutually intelligible with English or any other spoken language. Only by understanding the two-way street between Carolyn’s experiences and emotions, and by connecting to her pain, anger, and love, can Steve bridge the metaphoric abyss that has come between them. With their difficulty communicating, Hawkins explores the limits of language and highlights the disconnect that can be caused by a disparity between language and emotion.