Pop Goes the Word

...Should all this depress you as much as it does me, take heart...

...Peter Brook progresses from a Tempest performed as if in a gymnasium to A Midsummer Night's Dream set in some sort of hospital ward, and then exalts himself to a real mountain top in Persia with Orghast, a quasi-play written for him in a newly coined language, so that the fewest possible people can see it, and none quite understand it...

...It is possible, too, that the nonscientific mind's inability to grasp the new languages of science has something to do with our disenchantment with words?a wound given to our intellectual self-esteem [that] introduces into the life of mind a significant element of dubiety and alienation," as Lionel Trilling has formulated it-but I doubt if the typical avant-gardist is much concerned with his incomprehension of the language of higher mathematics, given the equanimity with which he faces his inarticulateness in his mother tongue...

...To this, too, it now owes its premature datedness...

...As a specimen of an academic's yearning to be with-it, I adduce Richard Poirier's essay "Learning from the Beatles," abounding in statements like: "It could be said that [the Beatles] guess what Beckett and Borges know, but without any loss of simple enthusiasm or innocent expectation, and without any patronization of those who do not know...

...I could document this in various ways, but let me concentrate on one: the decay of language...

...Give my son light" is datta ma ladda lugh, and "return to earth" is bak opp eorda...

...The most patent ones are the rebellion against the father, boredom with the existing order of things, the need to distinguish oneself in a different direction...

...Although rules can be amended to absorb new inventions and discoveries, or to introduce more logic, clarity and, perhaps, simplicity (this last item is debatable), they are nonetheless necessary to facilitate comprehension and, coincidentally, to distinguish the person who cares about language from the one who is careless, the law-abiding from the lawless...

...If Lennon and Dylan are what passes for language, can we blame that "master of dramatic dialogue," Samuel Beckett, if, in the words of A. Alvarez, he "has worked steadily to reduce his plays to the condition of silence...

...A Jerzy Grotowski or an Andre Gregory rides roughshod over the words of a text, using them as mere pretexts to show off his own ingenuity, his own putative creativity...

...or out of a surfeit with art (real or feigned), as with Jacques Vache and Dada...

...Leaving aside the improbability of our exploitative and exploitable society's overlooking such good commercial talents, and the question of what sort of poetry resides in Baez' and Dylan's bodies (no worse, I guess, than in their minds), one wonders if Reich is aware that he is palely echoing Gray's famous line about the "mute inglorious Milton...

...As an example of the other fallacy, the currying of favor with backward, laggardly, or simply mindless students in class, let me refer you to the anthology Grandfather Rock by David Morse, who, we are told, "has worked as a photographer, political cartoonist, and high-school English teacher...

...What are the deeper causes of this reduction of the word...

...That Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" is made up of simplistic hate for middle-aged straw men and couched in language as remote from poetic imagination as from the simple decencies of grammar, is glossed by Morse as follows: "Remember this was 1963 and nobody was laying down any very heavy raps in music, at least as far as white kids could tell...

...For culture, like it or not, has always been fostered and furthered by the few...

...It is in this manner that poetry and drama are being taught in our schools today...

...One more cause for the decline of language as mirrored in the theater should be mentioned: the coming to the fore of the director-superstar, who, unable to write plays, nevertheless wants to take authorial credit for a production...

...is that language constantly develops...

...True, good language tends to derive from good breeding, and the good speaker usually comes from a so-called good background...

...Well, yes...

...Or not quite, because even Poirier feels obliged to evade the responsibility of calling them poets by resorting to the devious circumlocution "generous spirits and greatest performers...

...There are two extreme ways of considering the word: as a magical potency that can make one supreme among men-the way of Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and, to a lesser extent, Mallarme...

...Jean-Jacques Bernard's Martine was revived by the Comedie Francaise in 1934, a dozen years after its premiere...

...More significantly, let us turn to theater...

...Twelve years were the life-span of the benevolent murmurs, the not yet anti-intellectual silences of Martine...

...This kind of radical action may be urged upon him, more than in any past age, by his daily exposure to the hectoring of idiotic verbiage from television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and advertising...

...For what has competed most devastatingly for the attention of younger audiences is not television or movies or sports events or whatever, but rock...

...Its debacle may have begun with the coming of structural linguistics, based on the very democratic notion that language belongs to everybody, that it is a living thing daily modified by its users, that dictionaries and grammar must be descriptive rather than prescriptive-that English (or American) is what people are saying, not what they are instructed to say...

...Hence correct usage becomes, in a democracy, equated with social superiority and snobbery...

...When the taste of the masses-the popular, or pop-becomes the norm, culture perishes...

...Democracy may be a social blessing...

...But the brute fact is that the word has been reduced by our avant-garde theater to a secondary role at best-and to a nonspeaking part at worst...

...At best, the rules of language are like the law: They can be amended by experts occasionally...

...Thus, with regard to Charles Lamb's "The Old Familiar Faces," Morse apologizes for "the annoyance of Lamb's refrains, and irritation with a mind that lives so deeply [sic] in the past," which the readers cannot help feeling, yet which, once gotten over, reveal the poem as not unlike the scenario of a Fellini movie, and having the same tensions as the Beatles' "In My Life...

...Can you correctly identify urgith plehatron...

...This is a perfect example of muddled and muddling thought, the sort that can grind out phrases as studiously opaque as "any other kind of placement within living endeavor" when it tries to justify its modish, youth-cult anti-intellectualism, or simply its fears of growing old...

...That language today is gravely endangered all along the line is easily demonstrable...

...Take the recent upsurge of a pseudo-art like rock music, where the word is drowned out with noise and imbecility...

...whether they constituted an entire city state, more or less, or were some sort of elite powerful enough to dictate to the rest...

...But Shakespeare was ungrammatical because he wrote in an age when grammar was still uncodified...

...It is, alas, in the last-named capacity that he must have devised his anthology, which juxtaposes poems by Eric Clapton and Homer, Leonard Cohen and Matthew Arnold, Bob Dylan and Shelley, the Beatles and Yeats, Jimi Hendrix and Shakespeare, among others, to demonstrate the unbroken chain of great poetic tradition linking the classics and rock...

...Again, the case presented in behalf of these and other solecisms, cat-achreses, barbarisms, etc...

...It went from the more modest format of the discotheque to the giant, all-embracing rock concert, combining in places like Woodstock and Alta-mont-but also in public stadiums and school auditoriums across the country-the salient features of the Theater of Dionysus and the Circus Maximus...

...That is, as the road to domination or the road to dissolution...

...Those would seem to be powerful arguments-in a democracy...

...Besides, great writers may invent new words, or play games with old ones, or make fun of grammatical prissiness-consider Joyce, Cum-mings, Wallace Stevens-without in the least endangering the status of rules, to which they themselves always revert...

...When a language accepts the variations played on it by illiterates-when, in other words, it is allowed to grow all over the place-the result is not development but tumor or elephantiasis...

...They have sold out, I say, and pandered to the worst manifestations of contemporary barbarism: rock music and the words that go with it...

...Both the "idea" expressed by the Beatles and its form of expression are as banal and commonplace as they come, yet if we substitute "classical" for "platitudinous," and "an apprehension of artistic placement" for "a firm grip on the obvious," we have turned the Beatles into artists...

...The essay, included in The Performing Self, ends as follows: " 'And the time will come,' it is promised in one of their songs, 'when you will see we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.' As an apprehension of artistic, and perhaps of any other kind of placement within living endeavor, this classical idea is allowable only to the most generous spirits and the greatest performers...

...Behind the general decline of language, I discern most alarmingly a kind of trahison des clercs, or, more precisely, des instituteurs...

...I could talk about Dada until the Vaches come home, or expatiate about the achievement of Jarry with more matter and less Artaud...

...If the word could still lord it in the works of playwrights as recent as Giraudoux, Garcia Lorca, Brecht and Tennessee Williams, the fledgling playwright is apt to think that the only way to assert himself is to overthrow it...

...When Yale professors warn against such losses to our culture, even our gains will only be further losses...

...This converts the unsavory old practice of smuggling in trash in the pockets of masterpieces ("selling the many on the few," E. E. Cummings called it), into the still more dismal new practice of smuggling in masterpieces in the pockets of trash...

...The critic Andrew Porter was enraptured, gushing over "sounds winch carry an emotional and dramatic sense even when the listeners don't know the precise meaning...

...But do rules really kill a language...

...Not dissimilarly, Charles A. Reich, in The Greening of America, bemoaned those victims of society, the "Joan Baez [and] Bob Dylan, working in a bank or a filling station, until their minds and bodies have forgotten the poetry that once was in them...

...Both sound like Esperanto a la Yorkshire...

...This is more relevant to a discussion of language than might be immediately apparent...

...If not, I'll translate: It means the death of the theater...

...or from ignorance and impotence confronted with the intellectual and imaginative demands of art, as with so many of today's know-nothing theatrical figures...

...The malignant silences of Pinter and the hysterical grunts of Grotowski may take longer to fall out of fashion, but fall out, believe me, they will...

...Even elsewhere, no one would like to argue that the spoken language is a dead thing, that English is as passe as Aramaic or Old Norse...

...As George Steiner, a critic I generally do not much admire, has for once, I think, put it correctly: "There can be no doubt that the access to economic and political power of the semi-educated has brought with it a drastic reduction in the wealth and dignity of speech...

...There can be equally little doubt that the coming to artistic and theatrical prominence of the semi-educated has decreased the theater's vocabulary...

...otherwise they had better be honored, for the alternative is chaos...

...ignorance of the law is never a valid excuse...

...But what a difference in what is being regretted...

...The word, also known as logos and set down with a stylus, is the father of logic and the mother of style: It has given birth to both philosophy and literature, the very things the nonintellectual ignores and the anti-intellectual rebels against...

...Does English grow, say, by allowing 10 different pronunciations of the same word, by accepting the spelling "to-nite," by admitting "the reason is because" or "hopefully he will survive" to the ranks of good usage...

...The implication is clear: In their intuitive, spontaneous and more demotic way, the Beatles are as good as Borges and Beckett, and possibly, for being more immediate and accessible, better...

...Educational opportunities for learning the rules are available to all...

...it is, in most cases, a cultural curse...

...And since what happens on the little stage of dumb actors merely reflects what occurs on this great stage of fools on which we live, the theatrical abasement of the word mirrors the general assault on language...

...just look at all those marvelous things in Shakespeare that, by the Procrustean rules of pedants, would be proscribed as ungrammatical...

...It is our teachers who have sold out, either in their existential yearning to be with-it, to be included in the wonderfully orgiastic, turned-on Disneyland of the young, or in their overeager reaching out in the classroom for the attention and tolerance of students...

...They are entitled even to their bona fide grammatical errors, which none of us can avoid entirely...

...For when an art that is by definition largely verbal becomes deverbalized, it and we are in serious trouble...

...Orghast, the language, minted by Ted Hughes, renders "whirling dust-clouds" as flota falluttu, "fire" as gheost, "sun" as orghast, "star" as glittalugh...

...There is no need to recapitulate the steps by which the word in our theater has come to be ever more ridiculed, kicked around, spat, sat and shat upon, and finally gagged, muzzled and struck dumb-or simply beaten to death...

...Allow me to perform a similar experiment...

...Thereafter, the comparison with Shelley seems perfectly in order: a white kid who, in 1819, was laying down somewhat heavier raps...

...The rebellion may take place in the name of mysticism, as it did with Artaud and his disciples...

...Yet, surely, only an imbecile would assume all people to be equal in all ways, and believe in a social system or situation that would equalize human beings down to the last detail...

...had he written by the rules, his genius would not have suffered...

...Reviewing the revival, Colette wrote in part: "Martine is a murmur, and knows but one excess, that of discretion, to which it owed its vogue...

...If the superior use of language, then, makes for a kind of social distinction-if "isn't" is considered not just correct but also polite and refined, and "ain't" is not considered any of those-so be it: Better than a class distinction based on wealth, birth, religion, or what have you is one based on devotion to our fundamental and supreme form of communication and intellectual expression...

...or as pure sound, noise, the melting-pot of ego in a mystical, and sometimes also musical, communion with the All-the way of most avant-garde movements...

...The word dies of permissiveness as well as hostility toward it, of misuse as well as disuse...

...One could understand sensuously rather than rationally," he continued, and added that when, back in England, he cried out urgith, his listeners unhesitatingly supplied the correct meaning: death...

...Yet the ultimate, rock-bottom reason for turning against the word is always some form of non- or anti-intellec-tualism...