Wordless World

In the Valley of Kings: Stories
by Terrence Holt
2009, W.W. Norton & Company



Terrence Holt is a doctor as well as a writer. Additionally, he has apparently taught literature (one of his students was last year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz whose Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a really great book).

I'm not sure what it is that I find so appealing about the mixture of medicine and fiction, but after reading the above facts in the Sunday New York Times Book Review I was compelled to check this book out.

In the Valley of Kings is comprised of eight curiously powerful short stories, only one of which is concerned with the practice of medicine (unlike Chris Adrian, another writer/doctor whose work is stronger tied to the emergency rooms and pediatric wards that doubtlessly fill his day). The stories, instead focus in most cases on science fiction which was a surprising discovery as the book progressed.

Holt's stories are stripped down to the barest elements of fiction: there is a rudimentary plot, at least (and in some cases no more than) one character and a bewitchingly mysterious and often times transformative setting.

The one story that centers around medicine is the story of a plague that strikes the world in which to gaze upon or utter a particular word is doom oneself to die (bringing to mind The Ring with its killer videotape plotline). This story, which appears first in the collection, sets appropriately the primary theme that seems to course throughout the book: the conflict between existence and literature.

Or, to put it more accurately, the inability of language to truly capture the essential quandary of existence. To what extent does a word, such as the deadly word of the initial story, bear any relation to the object it represents? At one point does the signifier become the signified? Holt's inquiries into this matter do not take the form of dense semiotic exploration but rather delicately present men who are variously deprived of and dependent on language to make sense of their lives.


Each of these stories is written in 1st person perspective and, with perhaps only one exception, the narrators are specifically the scribes of their stories and make mention of the tools with and method by which they record their tales. "Eurydike", for example, is narrated on a spaceship computer by a crazed astronaut who updates his story as it progresses. Another, "In the Valley of Kings", is written on parchment in blood.

Most of the characters in these stories are men removed to some extent from society. One story features a couple in an apocalyptic landscape populated more by the bodies of suicides than living people. One features an archaeologist making his way alone through a tomb. Two stories take place on a spaceship where the narrator is the sole occupant.

This element of isolation is key in bringing the theme of language in contrast to existence to life. The characters must be alone so as to more fully ponder their existence. Language as a means to communicate (i.e. with other people) is not of concern here; Holt writes about language as a means to express (in this case, to express the fundamentals of consciousness and to justify ourselves with the natural world).

In the aforementioned story "Eurydike", a character is recovering throughout the narrative from some sort of accident which has deprived him of the ability to attach words to the objects around him. He flounders for the correct vocabulary and is amazed how each new word he recovers demystifies the object for which the word was sought.

The character struggles to make sense of his environment despite his inadequate vocabulary. And yet the world continues to exist around him. His failure to attach a verbalized sign for objects does not preclude their existence.

In "In the Valley of Kings" an academic struggles to make sense of hieroglyphics, attempting to intuit meaning from symbols fruitlessly. Holt's narrator describes his inability to read a scroll.

"There are many terms I don't recognize. This is not uncommon in hieroglyphics: many signs were invented as needed. But in this scroll the normal alphabet is gone - the abstract determinative is entirely absent, and I am not certain if what I read is code or gibberish."

Clearly, the glyphs do mean something, and the narrator is intrigued by their ambiguity. He wonders if it is possible that some mystical process is invoked by the words; the power of the words is unknown because their meaning is. He is obsessed by this possibility and he forges through the tomb waiting to discover the power of the glyphs and what otherworldly concepts they might give name to.

Later in the novella, it is suggested that our relationship with language is one defined by a similar madness to categorize and explain the world. The academic is told by an expert in hieroglyphics,

"They never stopped, you see. You must know something of that yourself. They never stopped adding in. Any time they thought of anything new, they simply reached into the air and added on another glyph. It's worse than chaos... It's infinity."

Holt's subject, then, is the relation between the world we live in and the fervor with which we create language we use to define the world, to make sense of it. The way we depend on language for that definition.

Ultimately, though, we are no better than his astronaut characters, left without the luxury of language or familiar, easy meanings, to contemplate the vastness of the universe outside our space shuttles (for which, appropriately, there are few adequate words) and within our souls (for which, like the Egyptians, there are perhaps too many).

It is fitting that the collection ends with a story called "Apocalypse" and a character whose living is made as an editor of a science magazine. The editor fails to establish a connection between the written word, in this case the journalism regarding climate change, with the physical world he inhabits, the climate itself. He tries to express this disjunction with, ironically, the written word. He writes:

"[P]art of me always believed that the world written up in journals was imaginary...This world - the one we live in - was real, and there could be no connection"

And later he remarks,

"[As I write] this paragraph[,] the words clatter emptily about the page."

The natural world exists despite the terms we call it by. We ourselves exist, as Dan Chaon wrote in Await Your Reply, despite the names we call ourselves by.

Humans struggle to amass the vocabulary required to capture the complexity of existence, to formulate the questions that nag our souls, to name the world around us and make it more finite. But the world perseveres despite our floundering attempts to do so, as do our souls.

Language, it would turn out, is a pale facsimile of existence. Or so it would seem, anyway, until Terrence Holt so eloquently, painstakingly explores that quandary through (what else?) the written word.