28 April 1999, 3024 wordds
When literary critics praise the beauty of an author's prose style, they are making a political statement rather than an aesthetic judgment. And when critics write in a highly technical manner, their motive is not to be erudite but to impress the chicks (or guys.)
I shall prove these wild statements in a little while, but I must preface the proof with a seemingly obvious assertion: that the purpose of language is to communicate. I say "seemingly" because, although this is such a basic and incontrovertible fact, centuries of often absurd controversy have nonetheless dogged the analysis of language. From the dawn of Western civilization, we have been presented with remarkable claims like: language determines how we think and what we think about; language controls rather than denotes; and language is an illusion and a creator of illusions.
It is natural that people who deal with language professionally - writers and critics and academics - should think that language has more power than it actually does. One sees similar attitudes from everyone in respect to their own fields, whether it be priest or politician, engineer or economist, housewife or harlot. What I want to debunk in this essay is the idea that language has some independent value, a belief which leads to curious literary praises like Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott describing V.S. Naipaul as "the master of the sentence."
The belief that words have some transcendental power is probably as old as language itself. In primitive societies, people often have a secret name which, if learned by another, they believe gives that person power over them. Priestly castes preserve power at least partly through a special language, which explains the long retention of Latin in Mass by the Catholic Church. Technocrats and professors do the same thing. Plato also believed that all nouns represented perfect Forms which existed on some Heavenly plane.
Unfortunately, even in modern Western societies, intellectuals still get distracted by these superstitions about language. Such distractions often result in an emphasis on trivial shadows when there are important issues to be dealt with. Thus, literary critics write thousands of words in a single paper analyzing the prose style of an author, almost as though style is more important than substance. The critic's function of explaining the ideas in the novel thus becomes sidelined. Not, mind you, that authors are blameless: many writers are more concerned with how to say something than to actually say it. As Sartre put it: "One can chatter in five words as well as in five lines. All that is needed is to prefer the expression to the ideas."
In his essay Imaginary Homelands , Salman Rushdie gives this account of a conference on writing: "Various novelists, myself included, were talking earnestly of such matters as the need for new ways of describing the world. Then the playwright Howard Brenton suggested that this might be a somewhat limited aim: does literature seek to do no more than describe? Flustered, all the novelists at once began talking about politics." Rushdie goes on to claim that "...description is itself a political act" and that "re-describing a world is a necessary first step towards changing it."
The philosopher Bertrand Russell was very dismissive of such concepts: "Philosophers and bookish people generally live a life dominated by words and tend to forget that it is the essential function of words to have a connection with facts, which are in general non-linguistic," he wrote. When Rushdie talks about changing the world through description, he is buying into the notion that language is primarily a cause, rather than an effect. To do so, however, is to begin tackling a problem from the wrong end, like a driver who pushes the needle on his fuel gauge up to F so he won't run out of gas.
It is true that language can influence thought, but writers and critics have a vested interest in believing language can actually control thought and in getting others to believe this, too. But the idea just doesn't fly, and the evidence for its lack of altitude comes from a relatively new concept in linguistics called "mentalese." I say new, but Leibniz actually suggested the possibility of "a kind of alphabet of human thoughts" three centuries ago. He was on the right track because, by studying languages comparatively, 20th-century linguists have found that location in space and force are two fundamental metaphors of all languages. According to Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works , "a handful of concepts about places, paths, motion, agency and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words in English and every other language that has ever been studied...Mentalese is the mind's lingua franca , the traffic of information among the mind's mental modules that allows us to describe what we see, imagine what is described to us, carry out instructions and so on."
In other words, the issue of a particular language or language form (like a dialect) somehow constraining or controlling your thoughts simply does not arise, unless your brain is somehow biologically different from that of other language users. But many intellectuals hold the view that different languages determine cultural traits: that a German thinks differently from a Frenchman, say, because of the way their languages differ (especially in terms of idiom). This, of course, is completely absurd. One reason such a counter-intuitive notion has no wings is because the relationship between words and meanings in all languages is entirely arbitrary. The grammarians Anna Maria Si Sciullo and Edwin Williams coined the term "listeme," the unit of a memorized list, to refer to the sense of "word." The term combines "morpheme," the unit of morphology, and "phoneme," the unit of sound. So a "word", as they define it, becomes more than a "syntactic atom", which is its usual definition.
In respect to idioms, Pinker in another of his books, The Language Instinct , notes, "There is no way to predict the meaning of kick the bucket, buy the farm, spill the beans, bite the bullet, screw the pooch, give up the ghost, hit the fan, or go bananas from the meanings of their components using the usual rules of heads and role-players....The meanings of these phrase-sized units have to be memorized as listemes, just as if they were simple word-sized units, and so they are really 'words' in this second sense."
He also makes the telling point that, "The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications....[But] think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have the feeling, there has to be a 'what we mean to say' that is different from 'what we said.'"
Now all this is not to say that words do not influence thought to some extent. Marvin Minsky, author of the seminal work The Society of Mind , says, "If we're to understand how language works, we must discard the usual view that words 'denote' or 'represent' or 'designate'; instead, their function is to 'control'...Once we assume language and thought are separate, we're lost in trying to piece together what was never separate in the first place." This might seem to contradict Pinker's view, but only partially, for Minsky also asserts that "Words themselves can't be the substance of our thoughts. They have no meaning by themselves...we must never forget that thinking-in-words reveals only a fragment of the mind's activity." In other words - pardon the pun - control through language is purely an internal issue for any individual human being. No one can control another person solely through words. Some matching non-linguistic condition - a fact - must be in place for the words to have effect. Adolf Hitler may have been a charismatic, even mesmerising, speaker. But without unemployment, inflation, general malaise, and about fifteen centuries of Christian prejudice against Jews, he could not have started the Holocaust.
The latest scientific research strongly suggests that it is language which actually prevents the human mind from being a tabula rasa . All normal human beings seem to be born with innate language concepts. As one consequence, all languages are adequate languages, save pidgins. Pidgins are formed when speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity or desire to learn each other's languages. Yet even pidgins become full-fledged languages after one generation, which is the strongest evidence of the existence of Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Indeed, the linguist Derek Bickerton, who did most of his early work in the Caribbean, has presented evidence that in many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full language instantly, once a group of children is exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. The children create grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a new and quite expressive language, which is called a creole.
There is therefore no such animal as an inferior or fundamentally different language. But I needn't even quote expert opinions to prove my assertion: just listen too people having animated discussions anywhere in the world in any language - bars, supermarkets, stadiums, concerts, and even universities - and you will find them expressing themselves adequately, and even eloquently. These people are all experts in language use for, as Chomsky points out, "a person is not generally aware of the rules that govern sentence interpretation in the language that he knows...(and, by definition, knows perfectly.)"
Of course, it would be idle to deny that some people are better speakers and better writers than others. The elements which constitute such superiority can be dealt with elsewhere. The key point I want to make now is that all normal human beings are perfectly competent in using language. Yet, to hear some intellectuals on language use, you'd think that human beings were all becoming retarded Trappist monks. I have read suggestions that an inability to match verb and noun or use "will" and "would" correctly are clear signs of cultural and mental degeneration. And even those persons who are experts in creoles hold similar views: linguistics professor Denis Solomon has actually suggested that my own native dialect may be reverting to a pidgin - a phenomenon which, as far as I'm aware, has never happened anywhere on the planet.
In any case, I doubt that such monumental consequences can flow from such trivial instances. As far as intellectual deterioration goes, there are crucial differences between the written and the spoken word - a growing number of errors in the former may reflect flaws in the education system, without necessarily reflecting deterioration in thinking. And, even in this respect, one linguist has compiled a list showing that by far the greatest number of grammatical errors occur in learned academic proceedings rather than in ordinary conversation. What really lies behind these assertions is pure intellectual snobbery.
Now this kind of thing is not good for any society, especially in an information age when the persons using language most forcefully are often politicians and religious zealots, who apparently believe that language was invented in order to contradict facts. "When you tell lies/Language dies" writes the St. Lucian poet Jane King and, if this is so, languages in most nations must be in intensive care already. The blatant lies told by politicians leave one breathless both for sheer effrontery and sheer stupidity. Yet, contrary to popular belief, language does not lend itself easily to lies. Where people believe untruths, it is often because they are motivated to believe untruths, whereas disinterested observers can usually see through duplicity just by analyzing the form in which assertions are couched. This is what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote, "Language itself prevents every logical mistake."
In this issue of effective language use, intellectuals have a crucial role to play. Academics like the biologist Richard Dawkins, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker perform an important task because they use a popular medium and write in a lively and logical style. However, these gentlemen are all exceptions to the rule, that rule being that intellectuals do not generally enjoy great respect in any society, save perhaps France. However, intellectuals have only themselves to blame for this. (In fact, I am not at all sure that intellectuals should enjoy great respect: in societies where this has been the norm, political extremes have often resulted.) Even so, it is precisely in the political arena that intellectuals need to make their voices heard. Critics have a particular advantage, since literature lends itself easily to social and political commentary. Arnold Bennett, Gustave Flaubert, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling all used literary criticism as a vehicle for sociopolitical analysis. But as long as intellectuals favour jargon over clear discourse, they will remain disconnected from the popular consciousness.
Unfortunately, jargon is the stock-in-trade of most academics. Their liking for obscure and convoluted language stems from mental laziness (it takes much more effort to express oneself clearly than in jargon) and intellectual cowardice (it is harder to be criticized if people don't understand you.) But its main root is simple ego: displaying erudition by using big words. Indeed, there is no significant difference between a professor using polysyllables and a bodybuilder flexing his muscles. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, has hypothesized that 95 percent of the learned vocabulary which human beings don't use (an adult human has a vocabulary of about 100,000 words but ordinarily uses only about five thousand) is for courtship purposes i.e. to display intelligence. Trouble is, most academics tend to overcompensate.
Now clarity in even five thousand words gives an obvious advantage in courtship. Good communication helps you get a mate and, according to many modern women, keep her as well. It also helps you attain status, for even in twentieth century "meritocracies", networking is still the key to progress. All this helps explain the advantage which accrues to the professional writer or speaker. It is, first and foremost, a sexual advantage (or, more accurately, an attempt to gain sexual advantage.) This is more obvious if we consider the oral tradition, rather than the written one. In the 1980s, the psychologist David Buss conducted a survey of over 10,000 people in 37 different cultures to find out what men and women looked for in their mates. The two top qualities were the same in every culture: kindness and intelligence. Obviously, then, there is no better device for conveying these qualities than eloquence: the ability to talk well reflects both social skill and mental acuity. But eloquence per se cannot be transferred wholesale to the written word: intelligence travels, but not kindness. Thus, we return to the priestly castes: what better way to convey intelligence in writing than by writing in such a manner that you are hard to understand?
Now you can't blame anyone for wanting to be sexually attractive, especially literary critics who often have no other advantages. But, because elitism (in the sense of status) is also an element of sexual competition, clarity of style is further weighed against. Additionally, a dense prose style usually has a sociopolitical purpose, not a purely literary one (the irony is that such styles are usually praised for "purity of prose.") Such a purpose may be to baffle the rubes in Preoria, but more often it is to get a chair at a university, since writing deathless prose doesn't pay the bills. But choosing these options is to undermine the basis of language: effective communication.
Obscure prose has two specifically negative consequences: it encourages unclear thinking and it automatically creates a gulf between experts and laypersons, even when such laypersons are educated and intelligent. This last is especially pernicious. Bennett once opined that "the democratization of art...is surely the duty of the minority to undertake." I would argue that the same holds true, and is even more important, in respect to the democratization of academic culture. But the only society where this seems to be happening is the United States, where books by the intellectuals named above become bestsellers. The kind of books they have written could not have become popular unless the authors used clear and concise prose. But academics are generally content to remain within their safe little ivory towers and, after economists and sociologists, literary critics have done the most to promote hard-to-read prose. In so doing, they have damaged the very culture of reading which they are supposed to promote.
Once a reading culture exists in any particular society, writers can wield influence over thought. But the foundation stone must be good, clear writing. Nor does it really matter what form the writing is in. In my country, Trinidadians read newspapers rather than books, so in a population of 1.3 million there are four daily newspapers, three weeklies, one bi-weekly, and three periodicals, all commercially viable. In Japan, people read comic-books, so the Japanese have turned manga into high art, educational texts, as well as light entertainment and pornography. The democratization of intellectualism must be developed through the forms a culture already favours: film, newspapers, magazines, music, talkshows, plays, stand-up comedy or even books. But, no matter what avenue we use, Wittgenstein's assertion - "Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly" - is good advice in any tongue.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chomsky, N. - Chomsky: Selected Readings (eds. J.P.B. Allen and Paul Van Buren), Oxford University Press, 1971.
Miller, G. - "Sexual selection and the mind", Edge Magazine, (Internet)1998.
Minsky, M. - The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Pinker, S. - The Language Instinct, HarperPerennial, 1994.
- How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton & Co, 1997.
Rushdie, S. - Imaginary Homelands, Granta Books, 1991.
Russell, B. - My Philosophical Development, Unwin Books, 1959.
Wittgenstein, L. - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (trans. C.K. Ogden, Hypertext ), 1998.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh