dad, who the fuck are Darmok and Jalad?

and where the fuck is Tanagra

I’ve been brewing up a longer essay, but here’s a quickie for now. Academic and scifi writer Adam Roberts has a guest post up on Critical Star Trek Studies about the famous Next Generation episode “Darmok,” in which he responds to arguments made by humanities professor Alan Jacobs, who is himself responding to the philosopher Ian Bogost. If you haven’t watched “Darmok,” you’re probably curious why so many academics are gaga for this one particular Star Trek episode. It’s not just because they’re nerds (though obviously they’re nerds): “Darmok” raises some fascinating philosophical and linguistic questions.

Here’s a quick summary of “Darmok.” The Enterprise meets wrinkly-faced aliens (“that’s every episode!”) okay FINE, but the Tamarians are special. The universal translator—a wonderful plot convenience—can’t fully render Tamarian speech, because they communicate entirely in memes. These memes reference a series of linked literary-historical epics, something like the Iliad/Odyssey, the Mahabharata/Ramayana, the Nordic sagas, etc. And so the Tamarians speak in allusions such as “Shaka, when the walls fell,” or “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” The crew of the Enterprise find themselves baffled, and the Tamarians are baffled that they’re baffled, because obviously the situation in question is just "like “Shaka, when the walls fell” in both emotional and practical terms, and how are these Federation aliens so stupid and ignorant that they don’t understand?

At the end, the two sides learn to communicate. Picard and Dathon, the Tamarian captain, are trapped alone and imperiled on the planet El-Adrel IV, where Picard manages to explain part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Dathon understands, at least in part; and he puts together that he and Picard are like the characters in Gilgamesh, and a bit like his own stories. He says at one point: “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.”

So it’s a lovely episode, and the Tamarian language is a cool idea…but how could a genuine meme-language exist? This is the source of the academic debate, and you can go to the guys for their (very interesting) arguments. Philosopher Ian Bogost says the Tamarians have an allegorical language; professor Alan Jacobs says it’s an allusive one (I think Jacobs is right). Jacobs also says that, as fun as it is, the Tamarian language fundamentally doesn’t work: it lacks verbs, it has too few descriptive words. He’s especially troubled by the moment when Picard is able to communicate: (“The dying Dathon does seem to be moved by Picard’s narration of Gilgamesh’s story … but I can’t figure out how to imagine a culture that can receive narratives but not fully describe them.”) Adam Roberts suggests that the Tamarians could have a kind of ideogrammatic language with tons of words, like written Chinese, which allows them to describe whatever they need. Sure, why not?

I have my own idea, one which I think solves the problem of how Dathon is able to grasp the epic of Gilgamesh, and also solves a somewhat more important question which I’m not sure has been asked:¹ how could a meme language be passed down from generation to generation?

Both Jacobs and Roberts bring up Lord of the Rings as the originator of a kind of meme language: when we say “Gollum, at the Cracks of Doom” or “Frodo and Sam at the cracks of Doom,”² most people grasp the emotional and physical import immediately. Not everyone in the world has seen the LotR movies or read the books, but Tolkien has new converts every day, such as Kierra Lewis on Instagram who just posted a joyous, tearful reaction to seeing the films for the first time. But meme languages are only born from a critical mass of people who know the original story. The source epic had to be communicated to them first, so that they could fall in love with it and sob like Lewis did: “There was a me before Lord of the Rings and a me after.”

Dathon cares about Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, passionately. His parents couldn’t have taught him the memes out of context. “Who the fuck is Darmok?” says grumpy, rebellious teenage Dathon. “Where is Tanagra?”³ I’m assuming a good bit about an alien culture here, but it’s difficult to imagine that a meme language could exist torn from its referents. Dathon knows this story. All the Tamarians do. In the episode, they’re able to argue whether a moment is more like Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, or like Rai and Jiri at Lungha. But how could they learn their legends in the first place, if they only speak in memes?

Easy. They have two languages. The secondary language is the one we know, the one the Tamarians use to communicate on a daily basis and with outsiders: the language of the meme, the reference, the allusion. The first is the primal, sacred language: the words of the story.⁴ I imagine (we’re in midrash mode, okay?) the primal language is oral, not written. The Tamarians gather together and hear the great epics, told in the the full vocabulary of the sacred language, the special (and possibly ancient) connecting words that are never used for any other purpose.⁵ That’s how they know what happened at Tanagra, why Rai and Jiri were at Lungha, what it meant for Shaka when the walls fell. That’s how Dathon could understand the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story distantly like his stories, enough to let him understand what Picard was saying. A purely meme language, passed down through generations, would be torn from its referents: it would become stale and purely abstract. But a living language of myth and history would make perfect sense to its memers and referencers, who breath it out in secondary speech, in daily allusion.

When you live with someone long enough, you probably speak in memes a good percentage of the time—referencing TV shows or books or funny things that happened. My husband and I use “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” as a meta-reference for how often we reference things. The word “meme” has been sullied by Richard Dawkins’ later reputation and the stupidity of the internet, but the act of having a shared language—literary, historical, silly⁶—is just ordinary human (or alien) expression. It’s a voice of love.⁷

1. Full disclosure: I’m not an expert in Tamarian language studies.

2. I feel like Roberts, whose post came second, is riffing in an uncreative way off Jacobs here, and yes I prosecute all Tolkien-related crimes!!!

3. I’m playing around here—as far as we know, the Tamarian language forbids the use of questions and the is/are verb. A rebellious teenage Dathon would probably say something more like “Darmok??? Tanagra???”

4. The existence of two languages—one a secret, profound language of story—is the Ursula Le Guin-style explanation; ergo, it’s true.

5. If the Tamarians know a full-vocabulary language, why can’t they understand the crew of the Enterprise? Because it’s still an epic language. They use it for the full poetic context surrounding “Shaka, when the walls fell,” not for “Hello and welcome to the Enterprise.”

6. This is our household’s dumbest meme, and no I will not explain it.

7. There’s still an open question as to how the Tamarians address all situations, including practical ones such as “hand me the ¾-inch socket wrench”—this is why Roberts suggested the ideogrammatic-style word hoard. Another explanation is that the Tamarian literary-historical epics are simply that rich and varied. They may also have a technique for making up words for new technologies as needed, as many languages do. (Folded referents upon referents, maybe?)