Babel Revisited

By * Me/v/n Maddocks

EXTRATERRITORIAL by George Steiner. 210 pages. Afheneum. $7.95.

Nobody but Critic George Steiner could write in all seriousness of "the erotic relations between speaker and speech." To him, language is fundamentally the language of love: man wooing meaning, down to the coyest nuance, the most maidenly scruple. Like a Kinsey of linguistics, Steiner submits his report on the current state of the word-id in these ten brilliant, slightly obsessed essays, successors to his most recent collection, Language and Silence (1967), and forerunners to a promised full-scale study of multilingualism.

How goes the affair between man and the 3,000 to 4,000 languages he has invented? As a lover, as well as a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, Steiner knows rape when he sees it, and he sees it. The Nazis abused German almost to death, he argued in Language and Silence. In Extraterritorial, he warns that a more current threat, "the drift and boredom of semiliteracy" --man's marriage of convenience to his words, threatens to crush the life out of all civilized languages.

Poets Unhoused. The certainties of language, like so many other certainties today, Steiner suggests, have become a privilege of the past. The Tower of Babel is once again an appropriate metaphor: "Increasingly, every act of communication between human beings takes on the shape of an act of translation." Our cultural anti-heroes are "poets unhoused and wanderers across language," contends Steiner, who is a cosmopolite himself, born in Paris of Austrian parents and educated in the United States as well as England.

A trio of compulsive polyglots, Samuel Beckett (equally fluent in English and French), Vladimir Nabokov (a writer in Russian, English, French and possibly German) and Jorge Luis Borges (whose first work at seven was an English summary of Greek myths) are the men whom Steiner judges to be "the three figures of probable genius in contemporary fiction." Joyce teaching at his Berlitz school he takes as the prototypical modern artist, master of the "lost center." a practitioner of the "literature of exile."

According to Steiner's precise scenario, the "language crisis" began between 1900 and 1925. He even knows where: Central Europe. In Vienna, Ludwig Wittgenstein, bumping against the limits of language, desperately described philosophy as "speech therapy" and then proceeded to prove that it was. In Prague, Franz Kafka made art out of what Steiner calls "the resistance of language to truth." In their different ways, Steiner suggests, both men were signaling a loss of faith--the sudden awareness of a credibility gap between meanings and the words used to express them.

The crisis was aggravated by 20th century history. In public life, totalitarianism has corrupted language by its tendency, as Steiner puts it, to "unspeak the actual past" while conjugating its verbs only in the "depersonalized present" and "Utopian future." In private life, Steiner claims, people have come to speak more and say less. He cites studies of urban phone calls that indicate "a drastic diminution and standardization of vocabulary and syntax." He observes that "quiet is becoming the prerogative of a sheltered elite or the cage of the desolate."

Semantic Dimension. Like all crisis-mongers, Steiner is a bit of a snob about his crisis. On the problems of language and their solution he rather melodramatically makes man's future cliff-hang: "The next dimension of psychology, the step that may at last take us beyond a primitive mind/body empiricism, could well be semantic." He even crowds his way into the biological revolution: "It may be that human speech is in some way a counterpart to that decoding and translation of the neurochemical idiom which defines and perpetuates our biological existence."

Also, like all lovers, he is less disturbed by those who neglect his beloved than by his rivals in attendance. The man who brings out the best, and the worst, in Steiner is the most prestigious specialist in linguistics today, Noam Chomsky. Steiner, with romance in his heart and the ultimate language of poetry on his lips, approaches linguistics on his knees. Chomsky, full of crisp talk about "data handling" and "feedback," confronts language in a white smock--the scientist of semantics. "Is there, in fact, a 'linguistic science'?" Steiner asks, arguing that the new scientific dogmatism about speech ignores the "mystery" of language.

Chomsky's linguistics may reduce language to formulas of mathematical probability. But Steiner errs in the opposite direction, turning language into a mystique. He expects nothing less than eventual salvation from the word, and that expectation warms, even while it slightly distorts his book. He advises critic?, that they will miss the meaning of modern literature if they fail to investigate linguistics. But what he himself seems to be seeking through language is something more--the meaning of life.

"Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is," the philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote. In this sense Steiner is a curious but stimulating blend of visionary rationalism who obviously shares the dream he attributes to Borges: "No living thing or sound but contains a cipher of all."

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