Language and Human Redemption
BRICKNER, RICHARD P.
Language and Human Redemption Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution By George Steiner A theneum. 210 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Richard P. Brickner Author, "The...
...It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts...
...The proliferation of languages has been one of the most evident and intractable barriers to human collaboration and economic progress...
...So does Chomsky's theory of the in-nateness of transformational ability (the ability to arrange and rearrange grammatical forms...
...A 'happening,' an aleatory piece of music, an artifact made only to be destroyed, are strategic denials of the future tense, even as the derision of precedent, the unsaying of history or a contemptuous indifference toward it, are a refusal of a past...
...L. L. Zamenhof...
...It must be hoped that this developing "trademark" will not be used by prospective readers as a signal to throw up their hands in a fearful reverence that makes taking hold of his new book impossible...
...But Steiner has good reasons, more than I've cited, for his fear of Babel and his support of the multilingual man on the way to full-fledged esperantism...
...Spero," Latin for "hope," was the pen name for Esperanto's inventor, Dr...
...The trinary set, past-present-future, the subject-object function, the metaphysics and psychology of the first-person pronoun, the conventions of linguistic repeatability and variation on which we found our techniques of remembrance and, hence, our culture—all these codify an image of the human person which is now under attack...
...It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language...
...We are, Steiner passionately states, not taking such care today: "I wonder whether the primacy of language as we have known it in human civilization, as well as many of the dominant syntactical features of language, are not the embodiment of a particular view of man's identity and death...
...Though Steiner's always respectful disagreements with Chomsky are profound at some crucial points, he is grateful to the "Transformationalist" theoretician...
...The point is that the process is reversible...
...Steiner attempts the redemption of exiles and language in an essay called "Tongues of Men," where he finds valuable Noam Chomsky's demonstration that "the unbounded variety of sentences human beings grasp and make use of at every occasion in their lives can be derived from a limited set of formal counters and from a body of rules, also presumably limited, for the manipulation and rearrangement of these counters...
...All men being thus organized," as Steiner interprets Chomsky, "there exists between them the bond of universal grammar and the concomitant possibility of translation from any one language into all other languages...
...One may argue that man's more than 4,000 languages keep him relatively safer...
...If Steiner's villains are hedonistic nihilists, a category that includes some modern dictators, his heroes are men who have conquered various kinds of refugeeism by adaptation to an alien language, often several—for example, Nabokov, Borges, Beckett...
...The courageous "new esperantists" offer Steiner hope...
...Steiner longs for universality because the Tower of Babel haunts him...
...It is reassuring to have among us a language moralist, a trustworthy evangelist of the same devotion as the George Orwell who, in "Politics and the English Language," wrote: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks...
...In Steiner and Orwell both, the point is the salvation of humanity's humanity...
...Steiner's idea of universality does not evaporate, like some statesman's plea for brotherhood...
...His deep explorations and rangy expositions of the problems of 20th-century language could not be more important...
...For Steiner is a movingly involved narrator and analyst of intellectual history...
...with instantaneous universal understanding we might have too much of the wrong, or not enough of the right, thing to say...
...Reviewed by Richard P. Brickner Author, "The Broken Year" and a forthcoming novel, "Bringing Down the House" GEORGE STEINER, Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, has a reputation for formidable erudition...
...In the grammar of the freak-out and the wrecker, it is always today...
...There is a wish when there is not a hope that if and when human beings are made more conscious of their unique apparatus for verbal and literary communication, they will have more regard for what they say and how they say it, they will take better care of their treasure, of themselves, of their fellows...
...and it leads only to a rich lucidity...
...Extraterritorial signifies one of Steiner's leading preoccupations in these 10 essays of 1968-70: the contemporary writer linguistically "unhoused," or what he calls "the new 'esperantists.' " Literary exile is not a new subject, but it becomes new in his studies of Nabokov (and his "Nabokese"), Borges (an exile from sight), Beckett, Celine (perhaps an exile from reality), and in his discussions of contemporary linguistic culture altogether (the possibility of man exiled from language...
...His information—varied, wide and deep—is at the total service of a singularly intense and humaDe concern for language, literature, speech, mankind...
...One may argue that linguistic differentiation is a value, if not a need or a teleological force...
Vol. 54 • August 1971 • No. 16
