A Brief Look into Arrival and Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life

Arrival, an adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "The Story of Your Life", understands the essence of science fiction- which is not about some disturbing alien beings or a predatory 'other', but something that reflects humanity and speculate what it is capable of through foreign beings or a fictional, advanced world- often attracting audience through an exciting, fantastical premise before delving into the philosophical quotients of life and existence.

 

 On reading the Story of Your Life, the one thing that is quite evident at the outset is how the narrative swings back and forth in time. The present flashes forward to future and the future crawls back to the past. But it's only when we reach a certain point in the story that it begins to set in how there is no order to it, no particular linearity. There's no sense of time, no linear order of past, present, and future. So what at first seems like walking backward and forward is actually walking along certain instances of time. The protagonist- Louise- not merely looks back at her past but also at her future. In a sense, what's to happen has already happened. There's no future, which means there's no past either.  

It is reminiscent of the way Lidia Yuknavitch talks about memories in her memoir The Chronology of Water- how her memories come to her in bits and flashes of time, without order and linearity. It amazes me how such differing books belonging to such differing genres can essentially impart the same message underneath. I suppose stories often behave like that, little strands of theirs reaching out and connecting to each other under the constructs of genre and subject matter, differing and imitating each other simultaneously. And after all, aren't we all trying to distort time through stories? Aren't we all trying to break this linearity of life?

"I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common. 

All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me - there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory - but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear." 

- Lydia Yuknavitch, "The Chronology of Water"

 

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Ted Chiang drew his inspiration from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which essentially states that language determines the framework for our thoughts. The alien creatures in Arrival- 'Heptapods'- perceive time non-linearly because their language is non-linear. 

Edward Sapir, an American linguist and anthropologist, asserts, "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a larger extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group... we see and hear and otherwise experience very largely we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretations." 

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language...the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds," says Whorf.

 

Whorf's claim was partly based on his analysis of the Native American language Hopi. Hopi people see the world as essentially a process- objects and events are not concrete and countable, time is not segmented into fixed categories and measured in units of minutes, hours, and days. Instead, the Hopi appeared to focus on change and process itself. There is no word in the Hopi language that refer directly to what we call time. 

For Whorf this absence of time as the decisive entity was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained their certain behavioral patterns.

Nevertheless, Whorf's claim was contested by several critics, including Chomsky and Pinker, for its lack of clarity and his inability to provide a concrete proof of his speculations. According to Pinker, the idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of "conventional absurdity". "It is of course truism to say that language helps us to articulate our thoughts, ideas, and images. But the amount of mental activity that takes place independent of language must be substantial and significant."

Science Fiction as a Probe into the Human Nature

Ted Chiang's stories tend to be deceptively simple, both in terms of prose and plot. There are no overarching build-ups, no twists, no jaw-dropping revelations. And it is this simplicity that allows him the space to posit big philosophical questions, to explore the what-ifs, the probable and improbable.

 

Chiang employs science fiction as a means of self-reflection, making the reader aware of the human condition and consequently the limitations of it, the fragility of it. A story about communication with an alien race is also a story about how we communicate with each other. A story analyzing an alien language can only do so while analyzing our own. It forces us to look inwards into ourselves to make sense of the foreign entity. Ultimately, the 'other' establishes itself through a careful exploration of the familiar. 

In "The Story of Your Life", understanding the Heptapod's language- which is non-linear- forces the protagonist Louise to come to terms with the inevitability of her own future, of how little control she has over the course of her life. The present, past, and future exits on the same plane. What has to happen has already happened. History and future distorts and dissolves into each other. It strips her off from the illusion of free will. But what kind of life would that be where one would just act out a set of predetermined choices they knew they would take? Is it even worth living? For Louise it is. Every fixed action in present becomes urgent, becomes right even when it leads to suffering in her future.

Ted Chiang believes in a deterministic universe. "What is it that you want from free will that you are not getting?", he asks and leaves the question for his readers to answer.

Motherhood in The Story of Your Life and Arrival

" I remember what it'll be like watching you when you are a day old. Your father will have gone for a quick visit to the hospital cafeteria, and you'll be lying in your bassinet, and I'll be leaning over you.

So soon after the delivery, I will still be feeling like a wrung-out towel. You will seem incongruously tiny, given how enormous I felt during the pregnancy; I could swear there was room for someone much larger and more robust than you in there. Your hands and feet will be long and thin, not chubby yet. Your face will still be all red and pinched, puffy eyelids squeezed shut, the gnomelike phase that precedes the cherubic.

I'll run a finger over your belly, marveling at the uncanny softness of your skin, wondering if silk would abrade your body like burlap. Then you'll writhe, twisting your body while poking out your legs one at a time, and I'll recognize the gesture as one I had felt you do inside me, many times. So that's what it looks like.
 I'll feel elated at this evidence of a unique mother-child bond, this certitude that you're the one I carried. Even if I had never laid eyes on you before, I'd be able to pick you out from a sea of babies: Not that one. No, not her either. Wait, that one over there.

Yes, that's her. She's mine."

- Ted Chiang, "The Story of Your Life"

 

Something that the movie Arrival manages to do well is how it captures the magnitude of the loss of a child. The sense of grief is just sharp enough to be palpable, the melancholic undertones and the scene transitions complete with the visuals and background piano music gives give the feel of an elegy. It's what the story fails to make you feel. Chiang's characters are awfully dry and impassive; there is hardly any emotional pull. But it's something he is aware of and not very concerned about. "I do want there to be a depth of human feeling in my work, but that's not my primary goal as a writer," he says. "My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the consequences of certain ideas."