Friday Imaginary Review: “Teach Yoursef Tempolang!”
Adrienne Haudgarten, Teach Yourself Tempolang! (Ruse Press 2021), pp. 277 £18.99
In Pale Fire, Nabokov wrote a novel that took the form of a long poem and its annotations. It is, by general acclamation, one of the Russian’s master’s greatest novels. Which is to say, it is not constrained by the gimmick — cruel word, I know, but you know what I mean — of its form. There are other books of the same kind: not metafictions exactly, although they often include metafictional aspects. I’m thinking of things like Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars, which takes the form of a cyclopedia of its fictional people; or Christopher Priest’s Islanders, which is a novel written in the style of gazetteer of Priest’s ‘dream archipelago’.
Taking its place among that distinguished company is Haudgarten’s Teach Yourself Tempolang, a time-travel novel in the form of one of those teach-yourself-a-foreign-language books. She adheres, perhaps a little over-closely, to precisely that format: we have an introduction explaining the historical circumstance of the language, linked as it is not to any geographical or ethnic area, but to time itself. Then we get a sections on basic nouns, and their various conjugations, with usage notes; then a much longer section of verbs — there are only three verbs in Tempolang, but each has several hundred cases, including seventeen separate kinds of subjunctive — and the a chapter on qualifiers: myriad adjectives, two adverbs (‘quickly’ and ‘slowly’) with a few special cases. The closest Tempolang has to a verb ‘to be’ is hhAyth ‘closer to, but not identical with the English “becoming” or the German Werden.’ The chapter on connectives is a single short sentence (‘all words in Tempolang are, in a sense, connectives, though there are no precise equivalents to such English terms as and or but.’) There are chapters on translation, which is to say, on the extreme difficulty of translating from any mundane language into Tempolang, and the much greater difficulty of translating the other way. BY the time we reach the chapters on syntax, and ‘complexity’ the novelistic aspect of the project has, slowly but cannily, come to occupy more and more of the work.
In this respect Haudgarten follows her more famous forebears: which is to say, she understands that her readers are not actually interested in the minutiae of her invented language, but might be interested in a set of characters and a novelistic narrative. We discover (without giving too much away) that time is not a quasi-spatial dimension, as Einstein proposed, but a language; and that the way to travel in time is not to build a machine after the manner of a plane or car for time (rather than space) but to become fluent in that language. The greater the fluency, the easier it is to move pastward and futureward in time. More, we learn that the author of the is an adept in Tempolang who has her- or himself (it is unclear until the end) spoken their way back to our past and put out this book, encapsulating time-travel wisdom by way of communicating it to our age. There are reasons why they have been driven to this necessity, antagonists from their own time-period, or perhaps from a different one, attempting to stop them, and by the time we reach the final third of the novel there’s a good deal of action and narrative shenanigans. The conclusion is satisfying. No spoilers, but a hint: Tempolang really does have a lot of subjunctive cases.
It a long slog reaching this point though. Grammars are pretty unappealing formats, and though Haudgarten works hard to leaven the blocks of inflected noun and declined verbs this is only partially successful. The acid-test with a novel like this is whether the experimental format contributes in some substantive manner to the story being told, or whether it is just — cruel word, I know, but one that kept occurring to me as I read this novel — a gimmick.
