The Decline of Language
WOLFF, GEOFFREY A.
WRITERS & WRITING The Decline of Language By Geoffrey A. Wolff When the verb "to pacify" means to kill, burn and lay waste; when scores of cartoonists and news analysts earn their daily bread...
...The two words are just right...
...Counting the frequency of their use in a given tongue is only a beginning, and Steiner is forced to be tentative...
...Steiner's second book (after Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) was The Death of Tragedy, at the end of which he held out hope for the energy of new dramatic forms...
...It is clear from many of his random phrases and untracked thoughts that Steiner is coming to some kind of decision about a possible political life...
...Genese de I'Odyssee (Germain...
...Geoffrey A. Wolff, a previous contributor to these pages, is the book editor of the Washington Post...
...Steiner seems to ask...
...How can one react to the gentle cadence of "pacify...
...Steiner loves books, discourse, exchange, articulation...
...It is, of course, very hard to be specific about the culpability of language in the process of its own dismemberment, since words are shifty...
...When the words in the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem...
...In "The Retreat from the Word" and elsewhere he describes the fact that the word is no longer the primary agent of creative and controlling imaginings...
...His critical authority and erudition are so obvious that the first words in this collection surprise us: "When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow...
...Further, as Steiner correctly notes, Leavis writes badly: "His refusal of elegance is the expression of a deep, underlying Puritanism...
...Two examples suggest the nature of his probe...
...Where it is not mere commonplace, our usage grows more and more specialized...
...He frequently cites Wittgenstein's admonition in the Traclatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent...
...The political present appears implicitly in everything he writes, but he guards himself carefully against drawing its contours...
...The critic leeches on fiction and poetry, on history and politics, yet if he uses his hosts properly, if he names names that have gone too long unnamed, his accomplishment can be as radical and central as the novelist's or the poet's...
...Its immediacy and its means, he tells us, are diminished...
...but being secondhand, the modes of our communication do not achieve community...
...One of the essays in Language and Silence is an appreciation and critique of F. R. Leavis...
...The point is that we want Steiner to tell us everything he knows...
...Geology...
...But how, and in what politically active form...
...One of Steiner's most controversial essays, notorious in Germany since it appeared in 1959, contains the passage: "The German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism...
...Now and again that "lyric surge of argument" takes charge and brushes aside encounters that should interrupt him, concerns that should demand his attention...
...Steiner is a Jew, and considers himself heir to the Central European humanism that perished in the gas ovens of Belsen and Auschwitz and Treblinka...
...The word, as a word, is a vehicle only...
...If I am often out of touch with my own generation, if that which haunts me and controls my habits of feeling strikes many of those I should be intimate and working with in my present world as remotely sinister and artificial, it is because the black mystery of what happened in Europe is to me indivisible from my own identity...
...Not one Congressman has been elected on a true anti-war platform...
...It is also disturbing, particularly in view of the great comprehensiveness of his interests, that Steiner gives so little attention to contemporary fiction...
...One wants to know of Steiner, as Steiner wants to know of Georg Lukacs, what has he learned from the movies...
...He himself suggests as much when he speaks briefly of the prose of Conrad, Nabokov and Durrell: "Their prose has the quality of marvel and surprise which comes with personal discovery...
...It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German...
...Genocide...
...At the conclusion of the same essay Steiner, who never fails to exploit the "flash of phrase" and "lyric surge of argument," judges Leavis' accomplishment with a telling and significant reservation: "If some doubt persists, it is simply because criticism must be, by Leavis' own definition, both central and humane...
...It has become almost a Steiner signature to remark that a man might??indeed often has??read Goethe hours after he committed murder...
...Yet with very few exceptions the volume is a single book rather than a collection of various occasional pieces...
...His is no special interest: He engages linguistics, history, poetics, politics and criticism without embarrassment or humility...
...Story-telling is a lost art: We assign to our most significant creations either a dependence on raw fact or an abstract mark of identification...
...Museums and libraries lay within screaming distance of concentration camps...
...Geometry...
...Unlike most current novelists, they use words as if they had lain buried in some treasure-trove...
...He is provincial and defensive and his judgments have typically been the product of cutting away everything that is not central to his interest...
...Perhaps his capacity to hold us in the net of his prose is connected to the fact that English is not his first language...
...He studied at the University of Chicago and Harvard, then took his doctorate in English at Balliol College, Oxford, and is now a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge...
...We communicate...
...Steiner is nothing if not humane...
...He asks the question of himself constantly in these pages, but at the same time he obviously delights in his profession...
...More than any critic, with the possible exception of Edmund Wilson, he has the means and motivation to speak to us across various disciplines in various languages...
...It is wonderfully generous, as it should be, and in no way condescending, yet every sentence reminds us that Leavis and Steiner are at the antipodes...
...Genet, Jean...
...The mass jargon of the modern city is stranger to the names of stones and flowers, as it is stranger to the making of its bread...
...Entirely comfortable in French, German and Eng lish, he also makes good use of Greek and Latin in Language and Silence...
...Are we passing out of an historical era of verbal primacy??out of the classic period of literate expression—into a phase of decayed language, of 'post-linguistic' forms, and perhaps of partial silence...
...The order of the concerns is significant...
...The question is urgent and urgently needs to be answered by Steiner, for he has posed a horrifying alternative in Language and Silence: "It is better for the poet to mutilate his own tongue than to dignify the inhuman either with his gift or uncaring...
...His obsession leads him to a terrifying question, which he does not pretend to be able to answer: What evidence is there, how do we really know, that the "humanities humanize...
...It is not surprising, then, that Steiner does not find much in modern fiction that is relevant or enlightening...
...Precisely because I was not there, because an accident of good fortune struck my name from the roll...
...George Steiner's Language and Silence (Atheneum, 426 pp., $8.00) is a frightening book...
...The critic??and here again he differs from the writer??is not a man to stay in his own garden...
...If we cannot act politically, or only very slightly, what then can we do personally now, in our professional and private lives...
...It comprises 31 essays written between 1958-66 about novelists, poets, translators, concentration camps, education, Marxism, pornography, esthetics and culture...
...In his preface he summarizes the questions he will consider: "What are the relations of language to the murderous falsehoods it has been made to articulate and hallow in certain totalitarian regimes...
...To do this he makes language subject as well as object, holding it responsible for what happens to us...
...And he notes the regression in English from "central intelligence" as used by Henry James to the present application in "Central Intelligence Agency...
...George III...
...The first precept: "The mark of good criticism is that it opens more books than it closes...
...We feel with anguish that we know better, that an elite of conscience and insight must be heard...
...But in another sense I am a survivor, and not intact...
...Or to the great load of vulgarity, imprecision, and greed it is charged with in a mass-consumer democracy...
...And in the majority of cases, abstract expressionism and non-objective art communicate nothing whatever...
...Nothing, not one thing, bores him, and whether or not the two facts are related, he is incapable of writing a lustreless or flat or stale sentence...
...Its parts are locked together by pain for the loss of something valuable and irretrievable, by the conviction that men have abdicated privacy and community, and the tongue to utter a sense of the best in both conditions, since the beginning of World War II...
...Steiner serves his axiom with single-minded good faith...
...Is it possible that art, dissembling horror, shields us from apprehending the reality of horror...
...In a tone hectic with crisis, it regards Western culture from the edge of catastrophe...
...it has no place in literature," Steiner observes...
...Not all metaphors, however, are derived from a cataclysm...
...How will language, in the traditional sense of a general idiom of effective relations, react to the increasingly urgent, comprehensive claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notations...
...The word stands mute or attempts to shout at us in a kind of inhuman gibberish...
...Geneva Bible...
...Steiner notes, in various digressions on mass culture and a longish look at Marshall McLuhan, that the reservoir of words which signify is rapidly emptying...
...Precisely because it is the signature of his humanity, because it is that which makes of man a being of striving unrest, the word should have no natural life, no neutral sanctuary, in the places and season of bestiality...
...One would welcome hearing what he has learned from them??from Harold Pinter, let us say, since 1961...
...They reveal his dilemma: not quite one of the survivors and not quite wholly survived...
...He asks how the word "spritzen" can "recover a sane meaning after having signified to millions the 'spurting' of Jewish blood from knife points...
...To use a word George Steiner likes, language has been "diminished...
...Poetry, too, increasingly tends toward silence or naked gesture...
...One wonders if he still lives comfortably with the assertion: "Much of Jackson Pollack is vivid wallpaper...
...We are committed to the full rights and power of that expression...
...The author reveals little interest in comedy, either as a genre or an impulse...
...The empty places in Steiner's dialogue are those that most disturb...
...but he does locate some signals suggesting that language and its current uses are uneasy partners, bound in mistrust and dismay...
...Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery...
...Silence is an alternative...
...But this is to cavil...
...Steiner does not decide, for a decision would be hopeless and arrogant...
...Chauvinism has cried havoc in politics...
...There are essays, to be sure, on Durrell and Golding and Grass, but it is difficult to see how a book examing art and language can completely ignore John Barth and only glance at Nabokov...
...His attacks on its centrality are nearly always general...
...When Steiner speaks of the encroachment of abstraction he speaks of its effect on the conductors and vessels of high culture, of the effect of splintered sensibilities on poetry, music and painting...
...How can we speak of the modern world except to name its parts and number them...
...when scores of cartoonists and news analysts earn their daily bread translating the gnarled imprecisions uttered by our political leaders into something like communicable English??in such a season there is every reason to assume that language has lost its cutting edge...
...The mark of his hate, clear on every page he writes, is stamped on the parochial and the glib, on anything that seals off and soothes the mind...
...Does language make humanity possible, or is it simply the barometer of humanity at a given moment...
...That terror and his relation to it persistently surface throughout the essays, however remote their memory should be...
...And this brings us to the last section of Language and Silence, called "Marxism and Literature...
...But this survivor's Jewishness is of a very special sort...
...Steiner's work contains a high seriousness, in the sense that Arnold used the phrase...
...Recently, in a letter to Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books, Steiner wrote of the confusion of life lived in the face of current political reality: "The present Administration and Congress do appear to represent the duly expressed views of a majority of our fellow-citizens...
...He is a Jew, born in Paris after his parents fled Vienna and schooled in France until coming to America in 1940...
...Who would be a critic if he could be a writer...
...He refers to the nouveau roman, but only to name the genre, not to discuss it...
...He is neither orthodox in his faith nor can he accept the premises of Zionism...
...I did not stand in the public square with the other children, those I had grown up with...
...One was struck, listening to the President's recent State of the Union address, by the number of words that have lost their bite...
...Here is a short list taken at random from his excellent 31-page index: Ge Indians...
...Steiner is wonderfully inclusive in the range of his response...
...His family got out just before the holocaust began: "So I happened not to be there when the names were called out...
...His publishers announce his next book will be "very personal," part fiction and part political essay...
...Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance...
...In his achievement the centrality is manifest...
...It is about a great deal more than literature, and because it is so inclusive, one wonders why it is so singularly apocalyptic...
...Leavis detests the kind of 'fine' writing which by flash of phrase or lyric surge of argument obscures thinness of meaning or unsoundness of logic...
...Among these are pieces on Kafka, Mann, Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, Schoen-berg's Moses and Aaron, Trotsky, Sylvia Plath, Claude Levi-Strauss, Lukacs and Merimee...
...He explains why in a remarkable and atypically personal essay called "A Kind of Survivor," in which he looks at his title at the top of a blank piece of paper and begins, "Not literally...
...He distrusts as spurious frivolity all that would embroider on the naked march of thought...
...The trouble is that Steiner describes a crisis of community and art's measure as a civilizing agent...
...By his speech shall you know the man and the condition of his humanity...
...Steiner fears for the future of words and has uncovered terrible wounds that have been inflicted upon them, first by the Nazis, then by mass-culture and finally by rival modes of communication...
...He has chosen exile, elected to remain a guest in another's house because for him "nationalism is the venom of our age...
...Or see my father and mother disappear when the train doors were torn open...
...Language, and humanity too, have been blunted by the careless, brutal, summary and arrogant use they have received from the easy virtue of mass culture and the cruel coarseness of political expedience...
...the humanity has often been tragically absent...
...Where sound can be discovered it is antic, nervous and raw-throated, vehemently declaring its own futility: "The strident absurdities of horror and science fiction, the license of present erotic fantasy are an attempt, ultimately self-negating, to 'outbid' reality, to bribe sensibilities numbed by the power of the audio-visual truth...
...His colleague is inward and involuted, "spiky," Steiner calls him...
Vol. 50 • April 1967 • No. 8
