Is Language Dying?

LANGUAGE AND SILENCE by George Steiner. 426 pages. Afheneum. $8.

"A man can learn half a dozen professions by reading Zola," says George Steiner. And a man can learn the ground rules to half a dozen academic disciplines by reading Steiner--including the art of how to package 31 essays into an $8 bundle.

Steiner is one of the few critics today who can make such a package a bargain at almost any price. Born in Paris of Austrian parents and educated in France and the U.S., he is at 38 director of English studies at Cambridge's Churchill College and currently Schweitzer Visiting Professor at N.Y.U. He is also the No. 1 candidate for Edmund Wilson's critical mantle.

He has all the qualifications and more: astonishing erudition, an edgy style, the wound of Jewishness and a bow of courage. He speaks four languages. He began publishing with two commanding achievements: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) and The Death of Tragedy (1961). Now he has found the absolute essential for a critic: a commanding idea. That idea is the breakdown of language. As he puts it, the "syntheses of understanding which made common speech possible no longer work." Today, Steiner notes, vast domains of meaning are ruled by nonverbal languages such as mathematics or symbolic logic; those who live beyond the veil of science and its mathematical languages inhabit only an "animate fiction."

Dry Springs. The landmarks in modern literature, Steiner says, are works that have pushed language over the precipice of its past--Joyce's Ulysses, the poetry of Mallarme and Rilke. Painting, too, is language, but the modern practitioners are in total rebellion against the "verbal" or meaningful in art. Franz Kline's Chief is a tornado of paint, and nothing can be said about it that is "pertinent to the habits of linguistic sense." Contemporary music also flies from exterior meanings. Language today can deal only with the surfaces of experience. "The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part," says Steiner, "is silence. The space-time continuum of relativity, the atomic structure of all matter, the wave-particle state of energy are no longer accessible through the word. Reality now begins outside verbal language."

The traditional springs of language have gone dry. Fiction, Steiner reports, is alive and hiding--in the land of fact. As Thomas Hardy noticed, "Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened." Hence the screaming horrors, outrageous sex fantasies, nightmares of loneliness now faking it as novels. Fiction is either surrendering its majesties to non-fiction or hybridizing with the new languages of symbolic communication. John Hersey's finest book, his seven novels notwithstanding, is still Hiroshima. Truman Capote freezes a murderous poetry into In Cold Blood. Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us and Lewis Mumford's The City in History inherit the grace and freedom of the novel.

Potential of Silence. Significantly, some of the books Steiner admires most draw on other "grammars of perception"--structures taken from music, philosophy or mathematics. Thus Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil (1945), articulates itself as a string quartet. Elias Canetti's Auto-da-fe (1946) is a mock-heroic piece of analytical logic. Such works--and Steiner might have added Uwe Johnson's Speculations About Jakob and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire to his list--declare their own form. They modify "our sense of how meaning may be communicated." Always they carry "a potential of silence, the recognized possibility that literature may be insufficient."

For Steiner, the ax first fell on language and severed it from meaning during the Walpurgisnacht of Nazism. Hitler turned the tongue of Goethe and Heine into a jargon of horror, the bureaucratese of hell. In a terrifying foretaste of George Orwell's Newspeak, "mass murder" translated as "final solution." Steiner asks: "How should the word spritzen [to gush forth] recover a sane meaning after having signified to millions the spurting of Jewish blood from knife points?" And the Nazis' downfall did not halt the world pollution of language. The most totalitarian state in Europe calls itself the German Democratic Republic. Nor is the free world necessarily immune. In the U.S., Shakespeare and the Bible are abbreviated into comic book balloons, and a study of radioactive fallout is titled Operation Sunshine.

New Gods. Sometimes it seems that Steiner overrates the importance of language; but to him the word is the very essence of humanity. He welds philosophy, politics, economics into the ancient Grecian form of criticism--not literary criticism but man criticism. It makes him both exhilarating and frustrating. Sometimes he has to be read backward, into other books and sources. Still, Steiner must know that language is not really dying. The fact of his book denies it. But like religion, language is in search of new gods, prophets or sorcerers. It must have writers who can make the art as "new and outrageous as the morning sun." It also needs physicians like Steiner to diagnose its ills.

Discovering limits, crimes and silences in language is not new. Sixty years ago, Alfred Korzybski, father of general semantics, was subscripting his imaginary animals "cow1, cow2, cow3" to order reality and demonstrate the abstraction of language. Marshall McLuhan (whom Steiner admires) prophesies an Eden of new nonverbal mes sages for the tube-fed generation. But there is much that is new in George Steiner's work, for he has made himself the devil's advocate in the house of literary intellect--and for this he deserves awesome respect. Perhaps the best defense is still a strong offense.

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