skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Ron Goulart's novel, When the waker sleeps (1975), starts with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947, no relation, as far as I know) "The progress of civilization is not wholly a uniform drift towards better things." In the novel Goulart demonstrates the truth of this in his anarchic way, through the experiences of a group of people who wake up every fifty years, to experience, briefly, the world as it is at the time. Goulart's images of the future of our civilisation are bizarre, unexpected, anarchic. Artwork for the book is by Michael Whelan, later the first living artist elevated to the SF Hall of Fame.
Ron Goulart (left) re-entered my consciousness last year (2018) when I bought a copy of his novel The Wicked Cyborg, published by Daw Books Inc in 1978. This was an impulse purchase, in the nice Russian Hill Bookshop in Polk Street, San Francisco. I was looking for something else.
Goulart is a prolific author of almost 200 books including many under a variety of pseudonyms. In the 1970s I mainly read his science fiction. In fact, over the last years of decluttering, a small collection of books by Ron Goulart has survived. I still have (including the new book) fifteen of his SF novels.
Goulart is 86 now, and has written a lot. When one thinks of words, as one does in this blog, no-one has invented more of them than Ron Goulart. It is one of his trademark devices. Some of his themes are prescient - the fallibility of technology, its ubiquity in our lives, the fragmentation of America, the transformation of the artefacts we use, environmental decay, and more. The current interest in the internet of things was preceded by Goulart's often hilarious portrayal of automated devices; they are often on the fritz, as Goulart referred to a malfunctioning robot machine.
Malfunctioning is also a characteristic of the United States in some of Goulart's works, starting with After things fell apart (1970). The United States, in Goulart's imagining, has been superseded by a plethora of new political entities, such as the Frisco Enclave, in Goulart's inventive but still relevant political satires.
Goulart makes up new words. His works provide the language for an eccentrically dystopian world, an often cheerful world of the ersatz and the new, words like neowood, the airfloat bed, naugahyde (an actual product), plazpaper, pixphone, landmobile, pros (prosthetic limb), syntin box (synthetic tin), Nondenominational Gift Day ("it used to be called Christmas"), hypogun, leisuresuit, stungun, pseudoplateglass, plyoball, simwickerchair, syncaf, jamsub (on soytoast), syntin sling chair, and pixwalz (or pixwalls).
One thing to observe is that most of the neologisms are runtogethers. I discussed these in a post twelve years ago.
You can obtain Goulart's books still. The best way to do this is to go to the extremely comprehensive list from Fantastic Fiction, and this also includes links to places which sell copies of these books - mostly Amazon.
I was watching the television news last week, and was intrigued to hear Professor Rosalind Croucher, the head of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), use the word invisibilised. The ALRC is conducting an enquiry into elder abuse, and has just issued a discussion paper on the topic, according to the ABC News.
Professor Croucher was being interviewed in connection with a news item about aged people being robbed by their children and other loved ones. "People describe powers of attorney as a licence to steal," she said in the interview.
In the course of her comments, Professor Croucher used the term invisibilised, which appears to be a nice verbing of the adjective invisible.
But it isn't a neologism. It has been used for some years in a clinical context. Heaslip & Ryden, in their book Understanding Vulnerability, include a section on invisibilisation which refers to invisibilising of vulnerable people in care. Like this
"Ahmed is on a cardiac ward awaiting an angiogram. Each day the hurses/carers come along to make his bed. Ahmed is asked to sit out on the chair beside the bed, whilst the health carers make the bed. They engage in a discussion about their own lives and what they did the night before. At no point is Ahmed invited to join the conversationnor is there any eye contact with him to suggest he might be involved. The health carers complete the bed and move on to the next bed, with a cursory nod to indicate Ahmed can sit back on his bed."
And the French verb, invisibiliser, meaning to render invisible, has been used since the mid-19th century, with much the same meaning. In English, according to the NGRAM, it has been used only since 1980.
So a word with a specialised niche meaning has been given a wider currency. The rapid rate of growth in use seems likely to continue, unless people stop invisibilising old, ill and other vulnerable people.
