The writer in question is George Steiner. You can find out more about him by following this link. Rather than rehearsing that description, here are three extended quotes from Language and Silence, which I happen to have in front of me. The collection After Babel is more relevant still, but I don't have a copy to hand.
- From Humane Literacy
When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoyevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow. All great writing stems from le dur désir de durer, the harsh contrivance of spirit against death, the hope to overreach time by force of creation. 'Brightness falls from the air'; five words and a trick of darkening sound. But they have outworn three centuries. Who would choose to be a literary critic if he could set verse to sing, or compose, out of his own mortal being, a vital fiction, a character that will endure. Most men have their dusty survivance in old telephone directories (it is a mercy that these are kept at the British Museum): there is in the literal fact of their existence, less of life's truth and harvest than in Falstaff or Mme de Guermantes. To have imagined these. (Language & Silence: 21)
- From The Retreat from the Word
The Apostle tells us that in the beginning was the Word. He gives us no assurance as to the the end.
It is appropriate that he should have used the Greek language to express the Hellenistic conception of the Logos, for it is to the fact of its Greco-Judaic inheritance that Western civilization owes its essentially verbal character. We take this character for granted. It is the root and bark of our experience and we cannot readily transpose our imaginings outside of it. We live inside the act of discourse. But we should not imagine that a verbal matrix is the only one in which the articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies such as the icon or the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is difficult to speak of these, for how should speech justly convey the shape and vitality of silence? But I can cite examples of what I mean...
...The tools of mathematical analysis transformed chemistry and physics from alchemy to the predictive sciences they now are. By virtue of mathematics, the stars move out of mythology into the astronomer's table. And as mathematics settles into the marrow of a science, the concepts of that science, its habits of invention and understanding, become steadily less reducible to those of common language.
It is arrogant, if not responsible, to invoke such basic notions in our present model of the universe as quanta, the indeterminacy principle, the relativity constant of the lack of parity in so-called weak interactions of atomic particles, if one cannot do so in the language appropriate to them — that is to say, in mathematical terms. Without it, such words are phantasms to deck out the pretence of philosophers or journalists. Because physics has had to borrow from the vulgate, some of these words seem to retain a generalized meaning; they give a semblance of metaphor. But this is an illusion. When a critic seeks to apply the indeterminacy principle to his discussion of action painting, or of the use of improvization in certain contemporary music [or of Minimalist syntax? NGD], he is not relating two spheres of experience; he is merely talking nonsense**...
- From To Civilize our Gentlemen
...[T]he student of literature now has access to and responsibility towards a very rich terrain, intermediate between the arts and science, a terrain bordering equally on poetry, on sociology, on psychology, on logic, and even on mathematics. I mean the domain of linguistics and of the theory of communication.
Its expansion in the post-war period is one of the most exciting chapters of modern intellectual history. The entire nature of language is being re-thought and re-examined as it has not been since Plato and Leibniz. The questions being asked about the relations between verbal means and sensory perception, about the ways in which syntax mirrors or controls the reality-concept of a given culture, about the history of linguistic forms as a record of ethnic consciousness — these questions go to the very heart of our poetic and critical concern. The precise analysis of verbal resources and grammatical changes, which may soon be feasible by means of computers — these may have a bearing on literary history and interpretation. We are within reach of knowing the rate at which new words new words enter a language. We can discern graphic contours and statistical patterns relating linguistic phenomena to economic, sociological changes. Our whole sense of the medium is being re-evaluated.
Let me give only two examples which are familiar to any student of modern linguistics. There is a Latin American Indian language, indeed there are a number, in which the future — the notion of that which is yet to happen — is set at the back of the speaker. The past, which he can see, because it has already happened, lies all before him. He backs into the future unknown; memory moves forward, hope backwards. This is the exact reversal of the primary co-ordinates by which we ourselves organize our feelings in root metaphors. How does such a reversal affect literature or, in a larger sense, to what extent is syntax the ever renewed cause of our modes of sensibility and verbal concept? Or take the well-known instance of the astounding range of terms — I believe it is in the region of one hundred — by which the gauchos of the Argentine discriminate between the shadings of a horse's hide. Do these terms in some manner precede the perception of the actual nuance of colour, or does that perception, sharpened by professional need, cause the invention of new words? Either hypothesis throw rich light on the processes of poetic invention and on the essential fact that translation means the meshing of two different world images, of two different patterns of human life (Language & Silence: 86-87)
Of course, there is much to disagree with in Steiner's writing. Take, for example, his easy acceptance of what might be called 'the Whorfian fallacy': his discussion of the colour terms of Argentinian gauchos immediately calls to mind the old saw about the Eskimos having a hundred words for snow (see Geoff Pullum's corrective The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). It is also true that much of Steiner's writing reflects a near obsessive concern with the Holocaust and with Germany and the German language. As understandable as this may be, given his personal history and the immediate post-war period that informed his criticism, this concern overshadows many of his insights, at times to the point of obscurity. In spite of all this, though, one cannot help but be respectful of the scholarship, engaged by the writing, and impressed by the humanism. To read more, click on the links below, or borrow the books from your university library.
*Ill-translated by dict.cc as 'along the lines of'. One of the great things about Steiner's writing, but perhaps also a reason why he is less read than he deserves to be, is that he freely mixes French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek terms and quotations into his English writing, without pandering glosses or translations: in other words, he assumes that his reader is an educated European. Unfortunately, as he himself is painfully aware, this is simply not true, the complacent—often willful—ignorance of foreign languages among even highly educated people being one of the most unattractive features of middle-class British and American chauvinism.
**In a footnote, Steiner comes close to retracting this last comment. On balance, my own judgement is that the original assertion was correct: most analogies to physics and mathematics—in formal linguistics, at least— are more pretentious than insightful.
No comments:
Post a Comment