Context

A consideration of the relationship between language and eugenics makes sense when one recalls that the disciplines of linguistics and eugenics had been comfortable bedfellows in European thought for several decades by the time Huxley published Brave New World in 1932 and Myles na gCopaleen published An Béal Bocht in 1941.⁴ In his study of the relationship between linguistic and racial ‘sciences’ in the Third Reich, Christopher Hutton describes the bidirectional influence between linguistics and theories of race:

Linguistics is both the parent and the child of race theory. It is the parent, in the sense that nineteenth century physical anthropologists took their lead from linguistics and linguistic categories. It is the child, in the sense that linguistics has reclaimed its role as the premier science in the classification of human diversity, elaborating a ‘characterology’ or ‘typology’ of the world’s languages, and therefore of the world’s ethnic groups.⁵

This relationship is indeed evident considering how we still conceptualise language. Genealogy metaphors are pervasive in the schema of language: we speak of language ‘families,’ ‘mother tongues,’ word and family ‘roots.’ Borrowings between languages are described as ‘degenerating’ or ‘corrupting’ languages and dialects. Such discourse finds parallels in eugenics, which fears racial ‘degeneration,’ expresses anxiety about impurity through ‘mixing,’ and calls to ‘preserve the purity’ of the national body. Linguists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sometimes used Darwinian metaphors to discuss languages that ‘compete,’ ‘adapt,’ ‘mutate,’ or ‘die’—discourse that is used today to discuss ‘extinct’ or ‘at-risk’ languages. In this way, metadiscourse (that is, language about language) reveals the proximity of the disciplines of linguistics and eugenics (otherwise known as ‘race science’ or ‘scientific racism’) during this period.

Even further, these Darwinist metaphors, present from the inception of linguistics as a modern discipline, also naturalise our ways of thinking about race. As Thomas Bonfiglio summarises,

The inclusion of language in the discourse of race is made possible by the racializing of language, by grafting onto language the folkish notions of consanguinity and inheritance that make racism itself possible in the first place. Crucial to this matrix are the concepts of ‘native language’ and ‘mother tongue,’ especially as they inform the representation of nation and national language.⁶

An early example of this is the following statement by the ethnologist and philologist R. G. Latham, who considered ‘descent’ to be the defining quality of language change, just as it is in natural history: ‘similarity of grammatical structure, and glossarial identity are recognised as elements of classification only so far as they are evidence of such community of origin.’⁷ There are other concrete examples of how intertwined the studies of language and race were. For example, nineteenth-century French surgeon and physical anthropologist Paul Broca is commonly known in the discipline of linguistics for locating a ‘language center’ in the frontal lobe. However, as Margaret Thomas argues, Broca also devoted much work to classifying races and arguing for polygenism (a theory that proposes separate origins of human ‘races’), claiming that this frontal language area was larger and more developed in groups that he preferred racially.⁸ It follows that he believed in ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races on the basis of language ‘ability.’ Another example of linguistic thought enabling racist and eugenic practices is the invention of the ‘Aryan’ language. This category arose, Hutton argues,

from the set of observed parallels or affinities between certain European and Asian languages. This led scholars to postulate an Aryan or Indo-European language family, derived from an original source (later termed, proto-Indo-European), which came to be associated with a community of speakers, a homeland, material culture, and spiritual world view. This model formed the basis for a diverse set of ideological correlates that can be termed Aryanism. […] Philology was able to lay bare the vital forms that historical contingency had wholly or in part obscured. Most importantly, it could tell ‘us’ who we really were, by showing our pristine origin.⁹

The consequences of inventing a ‘pure’ original group of speakers, from which other races ‘deviate’ are obvious. The Nazis subsequently seized upon Aryan as a racial group: ‘Nazi ideologues and their ilk regarded the speakers of the original tongue—Proto-Indo-European—as constituting the Aryan race, supposedly superior specimens of humankind.’¹⁰

This brief contextual discussion about aspects of the study of language as a modern discipline has thus far demonstrated that language not only reflects prejudices but engenders and perpetuates them. But while this background discussion lays the foundation for considering how linguistics and eugenics interact as part of a significant arm of biopolitics, of course one must also look to the specific contexts for both Huxley and O’Nolan to ground any work on language and eugenic practices in their novels.

Aldous Huxley’s interest in, and involvement with, eugenics is well documented. It is first relevant to note that he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his enthusiastic support for Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is also relevant to note that Aldous’s brother, Julian Huxley, was a prominent eugenicist: he served as vice-president (1937–44) and president (1959–62) of the British Eugenics Society, and moreover presented a 1937 film (by the Eugenics Society) entitled Heredity in Man, actively advocating for eugenics a couple of years before Hitler ordered the mass ‘euthanasia’ of disabled people in Germany.¹¹ Aldous, for his part, seems to have taken an interest in the linguistic purism movement, as evidenced by two works by William Barnes in his library, An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878) and An Outline of Rede-Craft (1880).¹² In a letter to the librarian and literary critic Lawrence C. Powell, Huxley refers to these ‘fantastic’ texts that ‘illustrate his [Barnes’s] theory that words of Latin or Greek origin were wicked and that everything in English could be expressed in words of Teutonic origin.’¹³ For instance, Barnes proposes the term ‘foresay’ instead of ‘introduction’ and ‘speech-craft’ for grammar. The purist movement, with its origins in the controversy over ‘inkhorn terms’ in the sixteenth century, purports to redress a sense of alienation felt by speakers towards their own language. Barnes turns this ideology towards pedagogic purposes:

I have tried to teach English by English, and so have given English words for most of the lore-words (scientific terms), as I believe they would be more readily and more clearly understood, and, since we can better keep in mind what we do than what we do not understand, they would be better remembered.¹⁴

Of course, there is no evidence to suggest that Huxley ever engaged with the English language purism movement as a writer. However, he was concerned with the question of creating a harmonious society in the wake of unprecedented violence and war, and (as my subsequent analysis will show) likely saw language as one tool of achieving this. Huxley was also interested in the idea of eugenics as a potential tool to achieve a balanced society. His most thorough treatment of the topic is an early opinion piece, ‘A Note on Eugenics’ (1929), in which he examines the question of ‘social degeneration’ (that is, ‘the multiplication of inferior types at the expense of the superior’)¹⁵ and the eugenicist response. The comments made in this essay prefigure some of the key themes of Brave New World, particularly the idea that in a eugenised society ‘superior’ individuals would experience great distress at not being able to fulfil their potential, given that societies still need people to do menial tasks in order to function. Huxley’s conclusion anticipates the World State:

States function as smoothly as they do, because the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.¹⁶

Later opinion pieces such as ‘What is Happening to Our Population?’ (1934) and ‘The Next 25 Years’ (1935) show a continued interest in this topic. In ‘What is Happening to Our Population?’ Huxley poses the following question:

Population is not stable, but varies both in quality and quantity. In Great Britain, for example, there are now more than twice as many people as there were at the beginning of last century; and this quantitative change has been accompanied by qualitative changes, some for the better, some distinctly for the worse.

What have been, and what are likely to be, the effects of such changes upon the destinies of peoples and of individuals? How do they affect national prestige and personal happiness? And, in the event of their influence being undesirable, what are the possible remedies?¹⁷

He then goes on to discuss how population increase, combined with a decline in ‘quality,’ adversely affects housing, sanitation, education, and personal/social wellbeing. The following year, in ‘The Next 25 Years,’ Huxley predicts that increased life expectancy will place a great burden on society, and the ‘increase in the numbers of the feeble-minded’ will continue ‘with progressive rapidity.’ He adds: ‘In the early ’fifties one person out of every ninety-two was a half-wit. In something like a panic, Parliament passed a series of laws embodying all the principles of negative eugenics.’¹⁸ In these extracts we can see that Huxley was responding to what he felt were the significant issues plaguing his generation. While this is discomforting to twenty-first-century sensibilities, it highlights that eugenics was not considered an extreme political position, as it is today. Rather, it was explored as a possible solution to these perceived social issues across the political spectrum. In the early twentieth century, progressive liberals, Fabians, and social democrats could endorse eugenics as an instrument of rational social planning, public health, and ‘national efficiency,’ while conservatives and nationalists embraced it as a way to defend the strength, purity, and competitiveness of the nation. Both sides saw themselves as acting in the public interest under the banner of science.¹⁹

To move to the second author considered by this essay, our current understanding is that O’Nolan never flirted with eugenics as a political position to the extent that Huxley did, although At Swim-Two-Birds might well be considered a text that is preoccupied with eugenics as a field. The novel depicts authors as ‘psycho-eugenists’²⁰ and evaluates their literary efforts on the grounds of the quality of the characters they produce.²¹ In this special issue of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies Maebh Long discusses an early typescript of At Swim-Two-Birds which directly depicts the use of selective breeding to produce a perfect Irish specimen with emerald green skin. However, as summarised by John Conlan, there is a more established body of work that characterises O’Nolan as a ‘writer of Irish biopolitics.’²² Biopower and biopolitics are formulations of Michel Foucault, used to describe a power that focuses on the body as a site of biological processes: ‘propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.’ Foucault describes how the supervision of these processes is ‘effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.’²³

In examining the writing of O’Nolan in the context of his career as a civil servant and his concern with the ambiguities and complexities of Irish law, Conlan demonstrates his persistent interest in the ‘interplay between local government and state (in)justice.’²⁴ Particularly relevant to the present discussion, Long has explored the concepts of biopower and ‘bare life’ in An Béal Bocht. ‘Bare life’ is a concept devised by Giorgio Agamben, building upon the homo sacer (sacred man), who exists excluded from human and divine law and whom one can kill with no consequence. Bare life describes a ‘life unworthy of being lived’ and ‘a mode of political subjectification by dint of objectification.’²⁵ Long contextualises this within the Irish famine, which was enabled by ‘the resolute perpetuation of the usual [colonial] treatment of Ireland,’ identifying that the population of Corca Dorcha are rendered bare life by a famine that does not go away.²⁶ Long describes the isolation of the inhabitants of Corca Dorcha as a biopolitical statement about the ‘purity’ of the Irish people and language:

The Gaeltacht [is treated as if it] is a site of an inferior people, but an inferior people who prove the racial purity of the Irish not by being removed, but by being that purity itself. They are not the excluded impure that prove by comparison the purity of the general populace, but the excluded pure that prove by association the purity of the general populace. They are bare life because they are antiquated, inferior relics of the past, but that past proves the ‘Irishness’ of a rapidly changing country.²⁷

While we cannot say that O’Nolan involved himself with questions of eugenics as much as Huxley did, his engagement with issues of language is far better established. A recent example is Flore Coulouma’s book-length study on Flann O’Brien and the Linguistic Turn. Her work examines O’Nolan in the context of the emergence of the philosophy of language, demonstrating how his work parallels the developing understanding of language’s logical contradictions as a system, its performative or locutionary nature, and its embeddedness in social contexts underway during the Linguistic Turn in twentieth-century philosophy. Coulouma notes how ‘O’Brien’s linguistically minded fiction betrays a strikingly accurate intuition of the philosophy of language of his time.’²⁸

While Coulouma stops short of claiming that these philosophers of language had a direct influence on O’Nolan, we do know that he was steeped in the systematic study of spoken language via his immersion in the mainstream linguistics of his time, as taught to and practised by the Celticists at University College Dublin: Osborne Bergin, Daniel Anthony Binchy, and Richard Irvine Best. O’Nolan completed an MA in Irish studies at the point at which the literary study of Old and Middle Irish was not distinctive from a linguistic discipline. It is moreover relevant to note that in one way or another, O’Nolan’s entire maternal and paternal family was involved in the language question and studied Irish. Some relatives, like his uncles Gearóid and Fergus, were themselves accomplished linguists in Latin and Greek as well as in Irish.²⁹

Given the context informing Huxley and O’Nolan, there is much to gain from comparing An Béal Bocht and Brave New World specifically. Indeed, both novels can be shown to respond to the topics discussed here. An Béal Bocht satirises the ideological rigidity of early to mid-twentieth-century Irish language policy, particularly the state’s romanticisation of the Gaeltacht and its instrumental use of Irish as a symbol of national authenticity. Written in the context of compulsory Irish education, revivalist orthodoxy, and cultural protectionism, the novel exposes how policy-driven idealisation produced artificial linguistic performance and communities held in artificial and enforced stasis. The novel thus reframes language revival not as organic cultural recovery, but as bureaucratic myth-making that risks turning Irish into a hollow ideological artefact rather than a lived social practice. Our other novel, Brave New World, emerges from interwar anxieties about the power of language to condition thought and behaviour, particularly through propaganda, advertising, and the rise of mass communication. Written against the backdrop of early twentieth-century eugenics movements in Britain and the United States, the novel extrapolates contemporary faith in biological engineering, selective breeding, and social planning into a fully systematised dystopia. Huxley links linguistic conditioning and reproductive control to show how scientific rationality, when unmoored from ethical restraint, can normalise hierarchy, conformity, and dehumanisation.

Manifestations of language

This section will discuss how language manifests in the worlds of Huxley and O’Nolan, and what this says about the biopolitical and eugenic impetus of language attitudes and policy. While Brave New World opens with the Orwellian mandate of ‘COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY,’ Huxley portrays a world of coercion and control not through force but through comfort and pleasure.³⁰ A core feature of this world is the constant and pervasive noise of jingoistic language. Indeed, language is so dense in this world that it almost feels like an actor itself. Along the lines of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the linguistic ecology of readily available words and phrases is constantly seen to organise thoughts, attitudes, and desires. One important part of this organisation is the use of social category labels and ethnonyms to describe groups of people (‘Alphas,’ ‘Betas’ through to ‘Epsilons’ in Brave New World, and ‘Jams O’Donnell’ and ‘Gael’ in An Béal Bocht).

This section will argue that not only do such labels determine caste in Brave New World, they produce alienation in characters who cannot perform the role designated by the social category assigned to them. This is particularly true for characters who are alien to the dominant world order, namely Linda and John Savage. These characters are troubled both by their inability to perform what is required by their label (‘mother’) and by the discord between public and private labels (‘the Savage’ and ‘John’). I argue that these referents place a eugenic pressure on Linda and John that effectively quells the threat that they pose to the World State. For An Béal Bocht, I wish to explore the ethnonym of ‘Gael’ and the label ‘Jams O’Donnell.’ I posit that the enforced poverty of the ‘Gael’ is the implication of linguistic purity, while the label ‘Jams O’Donnell’ is used to reflect how language is used in the school and prison systems to level variation within the oppressed population.

Both novels explicitly invoke the use of social category labels and ethnonyms to apply to a collective of people. This was a long-standing technique of the discipline of linguistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, linking a language to a people and, subsequently, to a race. It is also a mainstay of eugenics (one need only think of phrenological terms such as ‘the criminal’ or racial terms like ‘the Jew’ in Nazi Germany). The effect of ethnonyms is to erase differences between individuals in the target group and thus either deny humanity or promote an inherent superiority. As explored in this section, social category labels can simultaneously define an individual person while cutting off possibilities for their individual self-expression. Expressed in eugenic terms, the effect of category labels is to promote certain qualities while suppressing others.

In Brave New World, society is organised by genetically engineered individuals (such as they may be described), ranging from the superior Alphas to the inferior Epsilons, each designed to occupy (and be satisfied with) a specific station in the social order. While Alphas and Betas are genetic individuals, the lower castes of Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are mass-produced using the Bokanovsky process: ‘Crowds of lower-caste workers were queued up […] eight hundred Gamma, Delta and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a dozen faces and statures between them.’³¹ Here, the ethnonyms of ‘Gamma, Delta and Epsilon’ are made to apply to a mass of people; one sign applies to a multiple body. The effect of this linguistic levelling is clearly dehumanising. However, at the other end of the rigid social caste system, Alpha character Bernard Marx is also shown as a victim of his elevated social category label, being a shorter, slimmer man:

Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him painfully of this physical inadequacy. […] Each time he found himself looking on the level, instead of downward, into a Delta’s face, he felt humiliated. Would the creature treat him with the respect due to his caste?³²

In Huxley’s World State, attitudes are shaped by language, meaning that individuals are viewed as category-first. An Alpha must be revered because they are an Alpha, and ‘nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons’ are similarly reviled.³³ We are made to confront this when Henry and Lenina fly over Slough crematorium:

‘What a marvellous switchback!’ Lenina laughed delightedly.

But Henry’s tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. ‘Do you know what that switchback was?’ he said. ‘It was some human being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it was—a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon.’³⁴

We see that in death labels don’t distinguish the body as they did in life. Thus, the ethnonyms and social category labels that define and organise the social life of the World State are significantly reduced in importance.

Another effect of this linguistic determinism is that when there is no readily available label, one cannot manifest the role. This is evident in the character of Linda, who battles against the taboo of the word ‘mother’ throughout the novel. As babies are grown in laboratories rather than organically conceived and birthed, familial terms such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ acquire a taboo. Throughout the novel, Linda is shown as struggling against this taboo, despite an obvious kinship with John. In the following extract, for example, John tried to comfort Linda, who responds violently:

‘Little idiot!’ she shouted; and then, suddenly, she began to slap him. Slap, slap…

‘Linda,’ he cried out. ‘Oh, mother, don’t!’

‘I’m not your mother. I won’t be your mother.’

‘But, Linda. Oh!’ She slapped him on the cheek.

‘Turned into a savage,’ she shouted. ‘Having young ones like an animal.’³⁵

The character of John provides an extended character study, especially in the light of the eugenic effect of these levelling linguistic labels. Having been brought out of the reserves with Linda, ‘the Savage’ becomes John’s public brand. This is how he is referred to by Bernard, his entrusted guardian, several times throughout the novel as he documents John’s actions. For instance, ‘“The Savage,” wrote Bernard in his report to Mustapha Mond, “shows surprisingly little astonishment at, or awe of, civilized inventions. This is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he has heard them talked about by the woman Linda, his m—”.’³⁶ However, this term ‘Savage’ comes to be used as the subject in sentences concerning John’s inner thoughts, ‘“O brave new world.” By some malice of his memory the Savage found himself repeating Miranda’s words.’³⁷ Despite this, the word ‘John’ is also used in subject and object positions: ‘John learnt’; ‘He took John’s arm.’³⁸ This is an interesting reflection of John’s interior and exterior self, which stands in contrast to the World State orthodoxy, where there is no place for the private self. Young people are actively encouraged away from ‘solitary amusements’ for distraction, because ‘every one belongs to every one else.’³⁹ Indeed, Bernard is regarded as an oddity because ‘he spends most of his time by himself—alone.’⁴⁰ Against this backdrop, John experiences the weight of his public brand beginning to intrude on his inner self perception. This is simultaneously shown by and caused by the shift in referent between ‘John’ and ‘the Savage.’ This movement calls into question his socialisation in the dominant society that he finds himself in. Moreover, the deictic shift of referent produces both an instability that renders him unknowable within the social apparatus of the World State, and an alienating effect from his own speech/origins. Consider the following extract: ‘“Ai yaa tákwa!” It was only in Zuñi that the Savage could adequately express what he felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. “Háni!” he added as an after-thought.’⁴¹ John is only able to express his feelings in his own Zuñi language. But the subject of the sentence is ‘the Savage’ rather than his given name. This deictic instability reflects (perhaps even produces) emotional instability arising from identity crisis and alienation.

Brave New World depicts a society structured by linguistic and biological categorisation, where caste labels (Alpha to Epsilon) function as ethnonyms that collapse individuality, rendering people interchangeable and dehumanised, even as they constrain those at the top of the hierarchy, such as Bernard Marx. Huxley shows that language shapes perception and social relations so thoroughly that identity becomes category-first, exposing the arbitrariness of these labels in moments like death and revealing how the absence or tabooing of certain terms (such as ‘mother’) makes particular social roles and relationships almost unthinkable. This linguistic determinism culminates in John’s divided identity, where the unstable shift between ‘John’ and ‘the Savage’ reflects and produces alienation, demonstrating how public labels invade the private self in a society that denies interiority altogether.

There are obvious comparisons to this levelling and alienating use of social category labels in Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht. We see a clear example in the ethnonym ‘Gael,’ which is routinely invoked as a term that equates to misfortune. Take, for example, the following exchange between Bonaparte and his grandfather, the Old-Fellow:

• - This is no life for a human being, son!

• - Are you certain that the Gaels are people? said I.

• - They’ve that reputation anyway, little noble, said he, but no confirmation of it has ever been received. We’re not horses nor hens; seals nor ghosts; and, in spite of all that, it’s unbelievable that we’re humans—but all that is only an opinion.⁴²

This extract demonstrates the levelling effect of labels, which, much like the Deltas and Epsilons in Brave New World, reduce the perceived individuality of a group of people (here, the Gaels), rendering them almost animal-like, akin to the very animals they reside with.

Radvan Markus sets out how the ‘Gael’ ethnonym responds to the politicised image of the pastoral, ‘noble poor’ Irish speakers, an image projected by the city-dwelling Irish-language revivalists of O’Nolan’s day. He writes: ‘O’Nolan put forward an argument concerning the Gaeltacht speakers—while English offered them a path to modernity, Irish, due to its limited use, curtailed their economic opportunities and kept them in “the prison of a language.”’⁴³ Indeed, the preface to the first edition of An Béal Bocht states explicitly that this ‘little report on the people who inhabit the remote Gaeltacht’ benefits both ‘the language itself’ and ‘those studying it.’⁴⁴ Thus, the Gaels are characterised as custodians of the Irish language,⁴⁵ and their lives are to the benefit of the language and those who study it. These are two powers holding the subject, the Gaels, to account: language and linguists. For Irish to be seen as ‘pure,’ it is necessary that the Gaelic population is kept ‘unspoiled’ in order to preserve the language. In practice, for the Gaels this means poverty and entrenched social status. The diminished rank of the Irish speakers is necessary to keep the language alive for the more economically prosperous English-speaking population. ‘Gael’ as a label is equated to poverty and misfortune in a way that parodies the language-revivalists at the time, but also holds the Gaels in the novel in their place, segregated and degraded custodians of Irish.

Another label that is used in the text as a biopolitical tool is ‘Jams O’Donnell.’ The following quotation is taken from when the narrator, Bonaparte, returns from his first day of school, having been beaten by the schoolmaster for stating his Irish name and instead being given the name Jams O’Donnell. Bonaparte’s mother says:

don’t you understand that it’s Gaels that live in this side of the country and that they can’t escape from fate? It was always said and written that every Gaelic youngster is hit on his first school day because he doesn’t understand English and the foreign form of his name and that no one has any respect for him because he’s Gaelic to the marrow. There’s no other business going on in school that day but punishment and revenge and the same fooling about Jams O’Donnell. Alas! I don’t think that there’ll ever be any good settlement for the Gaels but only hardship for them always. The Old-Grey-Fellow was also hit one day of his life and called Jams O’Donnell as well.⁴⁶

Here we see that the label of ‘Jams O’Donnell’ is a violently enforced name transferred from the Anglophone schoolmaster to every Gaelic boy. But this name, while levelling individual identities in the manner discussed above, also acts beyond dehumanising the individuals subjected to it. Within the biopolitics of the novel, it functions as a eugenicist tool that erases patrilineal lines of lineage in An Béal Bocht. We see this come to a conclusion when Bonaparte meets a man who may or may not be his father in prison.

I spoke to him quietly in English.

- Phwat is yer nam?

He spoke voice-brokenly and aimlessly.

- Jams O’Donnell!! said he.

Wonder and joy swept over me as flashes of lightning out of the celestial sky. I lost my voice and I nearly lost me senses again.

My father! my own father!! My own little father!!! My kinsman, my progenitor, my friend!!!! We devoured one another with our eyes eagerly and I offered him my hand.

- The name and surname that’s on me, said I, is also Jams O’Donnell. You’re my father and it’s clear that you’ve come out of the jug.⁴⁷

From the two extracts above, we note that the Jams O’Donnell label is an apparatus of systems of power and control over the Gaels: school and prison. The enforced renaming of Bonaparte in school and his eventual incarceration as Jams O’Donnell reflects the ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline that also characterises eugenicist practices of Europeans in their subjugation of native Americans, Canadians, and Australians.⁴⁸

Returning to O’Nolan’s concept of Irish as ‘the prison of a language,’⁴⁹ in An Béal Bocht language resembles a concentration camp. Describing language as a prison, Markus takes the episode of the feis, where the President asserts: ‘I myself have spoken not a word except Gaelic since the day I was born—just like you—and every sentence I’ve ever uttered has been on the subject of Gaelic. […] There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics.’⁵⁰ Markus illustrates that, in An Béal Bocht, the Irish language is thus the subject of itself: ‘it is thus unable to communicate external reality, so cannot assist the novel’s characters to escape their dismal fate.’⁵¹ Language instead traps the inhabitants of Corca Dorcha in a cyclic recursion loop where characters are doomed to repeat the actions and suffer the trials of their ancestors ad infinitum. The meeting of the Jams O’Donnells exemplifies this pattern: the son being sent to prison just as his ‘father’ is being released.

The use of the social category labels ‘Gael’ and ‘Jams O’Donnell’ shows the negative face of eugenics in action in An Béal Bocht. As a ‘Gael,’ and thus inherently unfortunate, Bonaparte himself is portrayed as such a physically and mentally weak specimen of a person that he, and the circumstances he lives in, is unable to provide an environment for his child to survive. As a Jams O’Donnell, our narrator’s identity is erased and is that of every other Gaelic man, such that when he enters prison at the end of the book, perpetuating the criminalisation of the Gaels, we cannot be certain that the man he believes to be his father is actually so. Language here is a significant factor in the biopolitical machine that traps the Gaels in an ethnic and pure linguistic state, while also severing and obscuring genetic/familial ties, thereby acting as a eugenic tool.

Technologies of language

This section addresses the linguistic and scientific methods used in the novels and the technologies that enable them. As set out in the context for this article, racist assumptions and practices were routinely carried out under the guise of ‘science.’ Linguistics was by no means exempt from this. In this section I will address the technologies of hypnopaedia in Brave New World and transcription in An Béal Bocht. I will describe how conditioning via hypnopaedia and ‘words without reason’ implants irrational but durable beliefs that sustain caste hierarchy and social stability even when individuals, like Lenina, recognise the mechanisms behind them. At the same time, Brave New World suggests that this regime contains its own undoing, since the same education that produces a superior specimen in Helmholtz enables him to develop a piercing, poetic use of words that threatens the eugenic order from within. For An Béal Bocht, I posit that the novel exposes transcription and linguistic ‘science’ as biopolitical and as linguistically eugenic technologies that fix, extract, and dehumanise Irish speakers by transforming living oral culture into collectible, authoritative data. Through the gramophone episode and the fatal Gaelic feis, Myles satirises the drive to distil and preserve ‘pure’ Irish, showing how linguistic preservation and nationalism become coercive practices that imprison speakers in enforced authenticity at the cost of their humanity.

In Brave New World, Huxley describes a World State that uses various technologies to genetically curate and socially control its population. One notable example of this is the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms. We encounter an episode in the novel in which Delta babies are administered electric shocks and shrill alarms are sounded while they are being exposed to flowers and books:

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks—already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. ‘They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers.’⁵²

Language, such as can be found in books, is viewed as inappropriate (perhaps even dangerous) for Delta children, which is why nascent interest in reading needs to be conditioned out of them. However, elsewhere in the novel, language itself is a powerful tool in the arsenal of eugenics and eugenic conditioning.

Hypnopaedia in Brave New World is the practice of playing children recorded lessons as they sleep. This is described as an instrument not of intellectual education, but of moral indoctrination. The sleep lessons include topics such as ‘Elementary Class Consciousness’ and ‘Elementary Sex.’⁵³ Crucially to this moral education, it ‘ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.’⁵⁴ Hypnopaedia and words specifically are identified as a crucial element of the World State’s programme of social control, alongside the ‘flowers and electric shocks’: ‘But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.’⁵⁵ The emphasis on words without reason calls to mind the fideist tradition of philosophy, which holds that reason is not necessary (or in some cases is inappropriate) for faith. It is worth pointing out that Huxley was influenced by the philosopher William James, whose lecture ‘The Will to Believe’ defended (in some cases) adopting a belief without evidence of its being true.⁵⁶ Further to this, it can be argued that irrational beliefs are more steadfastly held than those based on logic, which can be reasoned with.

There is evidence for this in Brave New World. Discussing the caste system with Bernard, who reminds her that ‘all men are physico-chemically equal,’ Lenina recalls her own hypnopaedia. She remembers waking up and hearing the ‘soft, soft voice’ and her ‘shock of fear and surprise’ before being soothed back to sleep by the ‘influence of those endless repetitions.’⁵⁷ She responds to this memory by affirming the words of the hypnopaedia:

‘I suppose Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons,’ she said aloud.

‘Of course they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned. Besides, we start with a different heredity.’

‘I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,’ said Lenina, with conviction.⁵⁸

Lenina’s awareness of the apparatus of her conditioning doesn’t diminish her feelings towards the convictions she has because of it. This calls to mind Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of ideology: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.’⁵⁹ This means that while one may be aware of the incentives and machinations behind ideologies, one may still act as if those ideologies are true. Lenina remembers a time when she became aware of the technologies of social conditioning that cultivated her very belief system. But this does not break her conviction, which is indeed reiterated when she says, ‘I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon.’ This moment represents very well Žižek’s formulation of ideology—she knows what has happened and is nonetheless continuing to participate in it. Why might this be so? The key seems to be in the ‘words without reason.’ Indeed, the culture curated and distributed by the World State contains its own critique, which destabilises and obscures its logic. Take, for example, in a world where sexual monogamy is prohibited, the monogamously coded lyrics to the song Bernard and Lenina dance to together, ‘Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted! Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?’⁶⁰

The way in which language itself is spoken about in Brave New World reflects how intrinsically it is linked to technology. The superior Alpha character Helmholtz describes the act of writing in the following way:

I’m pretty good at inventing phrases—you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopædically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. […] I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.⁶¹

Helmholtz’s metadiscourse recruits the language of technology (X-rays) to produce an effect that can be described as violent. The choice of X-rays specifically is significant, as this technology is used elsewhere in the book as part of the Bokanovsky Process, which arrests the development of embryos to produce the lower-caste Deltas and Epsilons. Thus, X-rays are a central instrument in eugenics, ‘one of the major instruments of social stability!’⁶² However, in the extract quoted above, X-rays are used as a metaphor for Helmholtz’s burgeoning power through his new-found ability to write poetry. Indeed, taking this argument one step further, this extract shows how the eugenics advanced by the World State contains its own undoing. Helmholtz is such a superior specimen that he is able to enjoy independent thought and create poetry, although he doesn’t possess the word ‘poetry’ to describe what he is doing. Thus, it is his ‘words like X-rays’ (in other words, poetry) that threaten the scientific and technological world order.

Turning to An Béal Bocht, I have already noted that the preface to the first edition introduces the text with a sense of scientific detachment from the Irish-speaking people. The preface apportions blame for language death to its speakers; the inhabitants of Corca Dorcha are the observed subjects, trapped into enforced poverty by their language and by the linguists who study it. In this section I will look at the technologies of transcription that further penalise the Gaels in An Béal Bocht.

My comments on transcription and recording (the rendering of oral sound as a physical and permanent record) will be grounded in remarks from Coulouma, who states that

For O’Brien, the problematic relation between oral and written language points to a diglossic rapport between incompatible modes of discourse, and largely echoes the opposition between English, the colonialist’s written language of authority, and Irish, the national symbol of a near stamped-out oral civilization.⁶³

Coulouma furthermore comments that in Cruiskeen Lawn, Myles demonstrates an interest in the contrast between ‘the urban Plain People and the rural Gaeltacht’ and the ‘self-consciously printed articles and the mythically boundless memory of illiterate Irish speakers.’⁶⁴ She invokes de Certeau’s work on the authoritarian power of the written word ‘to keep the past’ over the ‘primitive fable’ which does not enjoy the power of this fixity.⁶⁵ Coulouma summarises that ‘O’Brien acknowledges this traditional view only to subvert its underlying Darwinian inference that oral societies must bow to the ruthlessly civilizing authority of the written word.’⁶⁶

While of course Irish and English were both oral and written languages for centuries, the central issue remains who was able (or permitted) to read and write, and who could not. O’Nolan himself was concerned about this very question, as can be seen in his unpublished essay ‘The Pathology of Revivalism’:

the herding of the Catholic Irish-speaking masses to live in great poverty in a bookless ghetto could have no other result than to fortify their tongue, though only as a spoken tongue, and indeed bring to pass the miracle of a whole civilisation preserved orally, with tales and poetry in the people’s memories and their wisdom transfixed in proverbs.⁶⁷

The discourse of (post)colonialism, invoked by Coulouma, warrants brief discussion. To what extent is An Béal Bocht a novel about a colonial British or postcolonial Irish world? While the novel is set at the time of British rule, O’Nolan, writing after this time, continually draws a comparison between British oppression and the isolation brought about by the Irish Free State’s policy to restore Irish as the national language. A useful context for this position can be found in Harris’s treatment of ‘The Pathology of Revivalism,’ in which O’Nolan posits that the separatist movement ‘adopts language revival as a substitute solution to the real problem of economic and political independence.’⁶⁸ Tobias W. Harris outlines how the supporters of the revivalist movement engaged in an idealisation of Gaelic culture and links this to Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the relationship between fascism and aesthetics (for example, in the glorification of war by the Italian futurists as an aesthetic gesture).⁶⁹ He states that ‘This notion, that the subordination of politics and polities to the aesthetic must inevitably consume itself in bloodshed and annihilation, is exactly the thinking which leads O’Nolan to connect his pathology of the Gaels to the experience of culture in contemporary European fascism.’⁷⁰ Indeed, Harris emphasises that in O’Nolan’s view, promoting a monolingual Irish culture was not only implausible, but ‘such insularity threatened the vitality and continued existence of the Gaeltacht.’⁷¹ This forms the backdrop for considering the (post)colonial context of An Béal Bocht. Despite being set in a period of British colonial control, with the apparatus of British colonial power on display, An Béal Bocht also satirises the Irish Free State policy that ensnared Irish speakers by an idealised aesthetic falsehood at the expense of addressing the real poverty that characterised their situation. Thus, O’Nolan draws the uncomfortable comparison between British colonialism and the Irish Free State.

This current section primarily concerns the ossifying of fleeting oral speech into permanent formats of writing and recording. We can furthermore relate this to Bernard Stiegler’s work on ‘technics,’ a term encompassing all artificial supports and tools, including language, writing, machines and digital networks.⁷² Drawing on Derrida and Plato’s Phaedrus, Stiegler distinguishes anamnesis (living, internal recollection) from hypomnesis (external, technical aids to memory).⁷³ He additionally calls the long history of externalising and discretising ‘memory grammatisation’: processes that break continuous flows (speech, gesture, practices) into repeatable, storable units such as letters, notation, or digital code. This process risks weakening internal memory by allowing people to outsource recollection to external marks. I argue that the mechanical transcription of sound participates in this process by transforming spoken/oral culture into the written/recorded format, thereby forming part of the (post)colonial apparatus that deprives the oppressed subject of their ability to remember.

I want to address the practice of transcription in An Béal Bocht in the context of its close proximity to eugenicist practice, focusing on the episode where Bonaparte’s grandfather dresses up a piglet to look like a child in order to deceive an English inspector who has come to see how many children speak English. The inspector arrives, on behalf of the English government, at the house in order to enforce linguistic conformity.⁷⁴ In eugenic terms, his physical weakness of stature is ironic given that he is tasked with enforcing his own language as the dominant and preferred means of communication, in contrast to the ‘thieving Gaelic.’ The grandfather dresses up some piglets in human clothes in order to pass them off as Gaelic children. This feels like a further comment on the dehumanisation of the Gaels under English scrutiny, as alluded to earlier: ‘We’re not horses nor hens; seals nor ghosts; and, in spite of all that, it’s unbelievable that we’re humans.’⁷⁵

After the inspector leaves, the piglet runs away to a pub. Mistaken as a ‘drunken human, a poor old man, drenched and wet, drunk to the full of his skin and creeping instead of walking upright because of the drunkenness,’ the pig fills the room with ‘a great flow of talk […] rapid, complicated, stern speech.’⁷⁶ Sat inside the house is a ‘gentleman from Dublin travelling through the country.’⁷⁷ This man possesses a gramophone:

this instrument was capable of memorizing all it heard if anyone narrated stories or old lore to it; it could also spew out all it had heard whenever one desired it. It was a wonderful instrument and frightened many people in the area and struck others dumb; it is doubtful whether its like will ever be there again.⁷⁸

Upon hearing the pig, the man scrambles to record its utterances on his gramophone, believing them to be a superior specimen of ‘well-nigh unintelligible’ Irish.⁷⁹ The man with the gramophone is described as ‘overjoyed that the machine was absorbing it,’ and he subsequently travels to Berlin where he is ‘highly praised for the lore which he had stored away in the hearing-machine that night.’⁸⁰ Long contextualises the image of the pig grunting in ‘Gaelic’ in biopolitical terms:

An inhuman language, it is spoken by those indistinguishable from animals. If these people who speak Irish resemble pigs, and the language they speak confused with the grunting of pigs, how can it truly be a language at all, but simply the sounds, spoken by one on the border between animal and human? And how then can Irish and the Irish speaker ever be given the full rights of bios, legally, politically and socially? The Irish become animals under the law, bare life proving the full rights of the other.⁸¹

The use of the gramophone and the reference to Berlin connect this figure to either Wilhelm Doegen or his research assistant Karl Tempel, who came to Ireland at the invitation of the Irish government in 1928 for the purpose of making recordings of Irish speech in the Gaeltacht and in areas of the country where Irish had suffered decline. It was during this visit that Seán Ó Conaglaigh from County Donegal made his speech, quoted at the top of this article.⁸²

Doegen was a linguist and phonetician who was born in Berlin and who studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin and subsequently in Oxford with Henry Sweet, the prominent linguist, philologist, and Anglo-Saxonist. He founded the Berlin Lautarchiv (Berlin Sound Archive) in 1920, and his archive contains recordings of prisoners captured during the First World War with the aim of preserving folk songs and dialects from a range of regions.⁸³ As a result of their war camp environment, such recordings are likely to have been made under duress and coercion, and would be considered ethically unacceptable by today’s standards. Doegen’s method also makes clear the relationship between linguistics and eugenics. Margaret Olin outlines how Doegen made use of photographs, palatograms, and skull measurements:

Doegen had conducted phonographic recordings of prisoners in the camps as part of a large, government sponsored interdisciplinary undertaking, involving a distinguished group of anthropologists and linguists, ‘to use prisoners of war undergoing an involuntary residence in Germany for phonetic speech recordings.’ In the preface [to his book], Doegen discussed the genesis of the project. Along with recordings, he wrote, skull measurements and X-rays were sometimes taken, and a dentist, Doegen’s brother, took an image of the upper surface of the vocal tract (a palatogramm) of some prisoners in order ‘to study the unusual sounds of exotic tribes at their place of origin.’⁸⁴

During the war, Doegen visited seventy prisoner of war camps, and recorded more than 250 languages and dialects—asking the speakers to recite the Parable of the Prodigal Son alongside other conversational material. It is worth noting that R. M. Smyllie, a patron of O’Nolan, was himself interned at Ruhleben Camp, and it is not impossible to suppose (indeed, it is likely) that Doegen made recordings there, as thirty-five recordings of Irish speakers remain in his collection from this period.

In 1926 the Irish government invited Doegen to record Irish speakers from areas of the country where the language was perceived to be in decline. Further recordings were made by Doegen’s assistant Karl Tempel in 1930 and 1931, overseen by Doegen. The project thus straddles Doegen’s Berlin institutional role and Irish language-planning concern. For Doegen, it expanded his collections of recordings; for the Irish government, it served both scholarly and nation-building agendas by documenting ‘authentic’ native speech of Irish speakers across the island.

References to singing and capturing ‘pure’ Irish also call to mind the Gaelic feis in the subsequent chapter. Harris refers to this as ‘a festival of self-entitled language revivalists,’ whose only gift to the enfeebled Corcadorchans is ‘a language that is totally insular.’⁸⁵ Indeed, in attendance at the feis are urban people from Dublin and Galway. During the feis, the Gaels elect a committee to oversee a festival in celebration of Irish language and culture. This festival is the scene of orations, a competition to see who can speak the most Irish, and a ‘Long Dance,’ which claim the lives of some of the Gaels present: ‘Even though death snatched many fine people from us, the events of the feis went on sturdily and steadily, we were ashamed to be considered not strongly in favour of Gaelic while the President’s eye was upon us.’⁸⁶ This quotation paints a rather chilling picture of a concentration camp of enforced celebration, under the watchful eye of the committee. This creates a dark satire of excessive cultural nationalism—an event where people literally dance themselves to death in order to prove how ‘truly Gaelic’ they are. In his podcast, Radio Myles, Harris makes the comparison between the ‘disturbing image of people dancing’ and ‘forced prolonged dances carried out on Jews by Nazis in Central and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.’⁸⁷ Harris emphasizes that the passage is unsettling because of the way it blends horror with comedy; the deaths are described in an absurd, grotesque way that fits the author’s style of ‘comic tone that unsettles rather than comforts.’

The spectacle of the Irish-speaking competition in particular reveals the link between linguistics and eugenics. The participants of this daylong verbal endurance race must discourse for as long as possible: ‘Early in the day they commenced speaking Gaelic with all their might and without interruption in the stream of talking, while they discoursed only about Gaelic.’⁸⁸ Combined with the gentleman with the gramophone, the speaking competition reflects a eugenic impetus to distil the ‘best’ of a linguistic sample and promote/propagate it. But, in this linguistic concentration camp, this comes at the expense of the Gaels, who are imprisoned by the idea of a ‘perfect’ Irish.

Conclusion

Reading Brave New World and An Béal Bocht together makes visible what is easy to miss when the novels are kept in their critical silos. In both novels, language is not a neutral medium that simply reflects social reality. Rather, it is a biopolitical technology of governance that names, sorts, disciplines, and reproduces subjects. By appraising both the language of ethno/caste categorisation and linguistic technologies, this essay has revealed how knowledge-making about language can align with the same classificatory and typological impulses that underwrote race science. In so doing, the present work has revealed that language clearly colludes with the wider eugenic impulse to standardise human life.

In Huxley’s World State, caste labels and tabooed kinship terms demonstrate how linguistic form can determine thought, narrowing the range of the imaginable until hierarchy feels natural. The State’s hypnopaedic programme of conditioning depends on ‘words without reason,’ which strengthens curated dogma into illogically held beliefs. Huxley’s sleep-teaching literalises the mechanisation of ideology. Here, language is eugenic not only because it accompanies biological engineering, but because it completes it—locking engineered bodies into engineered desires. In Corca Dorcha, in comparison, the ‘Gael’ and ‘Jams O’Donnell’ labels show how language policy and institutions (that is, schools, prisons, and the bureaucratic gaze) can operate as negative selection, enforcing poverty and stasis and erasing lineage under the banner of linguistic authenticity. The mention of the gramophone moreover satirises the capture of oral life into extractable data, exposing how ‘scientific’ collection can be inseparable from coercion, spectacle, and the prestige economy of metropolitan scholarship. If Huxley dramatises linguistic conditioning as mass production, Myles na gCopaleen dramatises linguistic authenticity as mass captivity.

What this argument makes clear is that language is considered in both novels to be an essential arm of biopolitics. While Huxley is usually read through eugenics and biopolitics; O’Nolan is usually read through language revival policy and satire. Considering these novels concurrently demonstrates how language is central to the eugenic apparatus in both the World State and Corca Dorcha. People are sorted, made legible, and are sometimes annihilated through labels (Alpha/Epsilon; Gael/Jams O’Donnell); the requirement to perform ‘Gaelicness’ traps speakers in a bureaucratic myth of purity which serves to keep them impoverished; technologies of verbal indoctrination (‘words without reason’) produce conformity; and technologies of linguistic recording and transcription serve to categorise individuals under a (post) colonial power and confect a ‘perfect’ version of the language. Taken together, this comparison strengthens the claim that linguistics is a central part of the apparatus of biopolitics and eugenics.

Returning, finally, to Seán Ó Conaglaigh’s lament before the gramophone, we can now hear its ambiguity more sharply. It is a mourning for decline, but also a record of the asymmetry between the one who speaks and the one who archives; between living speech and its conversion into collectible permanence. What these novels insist upon (and what this essay has sought to make explicit) is that linguistics has never been simply descriptive, and that language planning has never been a morally neutral act of cultural care. Both can become instruments of selection, discipline, and containment. To read Huxley and O’Nolan through linguistic biopolitics, then, is not only to illuminate their dystopia and satire, but to recognise an ethical demand to refuse the seductions of purity, to distrust typologies that harden into hierarchies, and to treat language not as a breedable essence, but as a lived, plural, and contested social practice.

Competing Interests

The author was one of the guest editors of this issue but was not involved in the blind peer-review or acceptance process.