George Steiner closes After Babel, “in which the problem of Babel and of the nature of language is so insistently examined‚” with the statement that the Kabbalah “knows of a day of redemption on which translation will no longer be necessary. All human tongues will have re-entered the translucent immediacy of that primal, lost speech shared by God and Adam…. But the Kabbalah also knows of a more esoteric possibility. It records the conjecture, no doubt heretical, that there shall come a day when translation is not only unnecessary but inconceivable. Words will rebel against man. They will shake off the servitude of meaning. They will ‘become only themselves, and as dead stones in our mouths.’ In either case, men and women will have been freed forever from the burden and the splendour of the ruin at Babel. But which, one wonders, will be the greater silence?”
UST AS MUCH as the word, silence is a creature of the alphabet: the pause between word and word, the silent contemplation of the text, the silence of meditative thought, are all forms of alphabetical silence. Even in our silence we are lettered men, at home on the island of history in the alphabetic domain. Most of us have, at best, only an inkling of the silence before words; and many of us have gone the opposite way, converting silence into something mechanical, into the no that separates beep from beep.
Genesis I:6–7 tells of the beginning of silence, silence before it became the stuff of history: When He hammered out the first gold foil (a word usually translated as the “firmament”), He separated the roaring waters below from the thundering waters above. With a three inch shard, or a glittering foil, silence began as an interstice, keeping the voices of Heaven and those of the Abyss apart. Silence was the first creature on the Earth. “Earth” grew from it. And that is the silence out of which, later, history took shape, as human voices made it vibrate.
This silence has vanished from the burnt-out world of Orwell’s cipher. The “zero” that separates beeps has replaced it. And this one-zero-one, not silence, is the stuff from which the interface between Winston and Julia is made. After the self-betrayal of Room 101, these two post-humans are not only beyond words, they are also beyond “silence,” and equally beyond the ability to refer to their co-presence with the personal pronoun “we.” They have turned into an interactive assembly of two. The new Adam and Eve are the critters of a computer.
The conversation we had begun on the history of the spelled-out word ended for us as the search for the history of both “silence” and the “we.” At each stage the “alphabetization of silence” precedes that of speech. Its genesis is the first character of the beta-bet, the Aleph.
The power of the silence that precedes utterance is described by an eighteenth-century rabbi, Mendel Torum of Rymanov, who asks what the Children of Israel could have actually heard, and what they in fact did hear, when they received the Ten Commandments. Some rabbis maintained that all the Commandments were spoken directly to the Children in the Divine Voice. Others said that the Israelites heard only the first two Commandments—“I am the Lord thy God” and “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”—before being overwhelmed, no longer able to endure the Divine Voice, obliged to receive the remaining Commandments through Moses.
Mendel believed that not even the first two Commandments were delivered to the Children, but only silence. They heard only the aleph, the Hebrew character with which the first Commandment begins, the aleph of the word ani or anokhi: “I.” Gershom Scholem comments on this theory: “The consonant aleph represents nothing more than the position taken by the larynx when a word begins with a vowel. Thus the aleph may be said to denote the source of all articulate sound.” The aleph, then, the first character in the Hebrew phonetic system, itself stands for no sound, but instead commands the mouth to open, fixing the position of the lips for the next sound. The Kabbalists regard the aleph as the spiritual root of all the other characters, and out of that opening of the mouth, that utter silence, springs all human intercourse. Thus, as Scholem tells us, Rabbi Mendel transforms the revelation on Mount Sinai into an event pregnant with infinite meaning, but devoid of any specific meaning.
In Semitic script, silence cannot be recorded. No rabbi would ask his students to spell out a word; he wants them to know what the root looks like. Only the alphabet can conjure up silence and situate it on the page. First silence creeps between the letters and makes it feasible to spell instead of to read. Then Roman monks in charge of teaching Latin to the Irish put interstices between words. Sentences are literally anatomized, disjointed into their individual words. Silence, recorded as an interval, does for language what the knife will do for the anatomist. It creates books made up of words rather than lines. Utterances, which the ear hears as a whole, are disarticulated into lemas, just as physicians in the late Middle Ages dismember bodies to make their organs visible. Like a knife, silence, when it is made visible, creates a text that is suited for the eye. And this is a precondition to grasp the text at one glance—to contemplate it in silence rather than to hear it at the rhythm of speech. Just as the “text” of the thirteenth century emerges from the visual perception of the order among parts of speech, some centuries later the modern organism will come into existence as the (conceptual) result of the physiological order between the path of a dissected organism.
Having pushed itself between parts of speech, silence now removes the ear from the page. It first created “words,” now it creates a new kind of standoffish reader. This new reader looks at the page on the desk in the same attitude in which he looks at his own conscience during the confession that the Fourth Lateran Council exacts every year. The autobiographer engages in self-inquisition: He scrupulously tortures his conscience to give up its stubborn silence. Centuries later even the subconscious has to be brought to light on the couch. All by himself, this modern individual delves into a text written in the past by another, or sets out on the ever more lonely journey into the text that the past has left beneath the surface of his conscious self.
The alphabetization of silence has brought about the new loneliness of the “I,” and of an analytic we. We is now one line in a text brought into being by communication. Not the silence before words but the absence of messages in a chaos of noises precedes the establishment of an interactive pattern. The pretextual we of orality, the “ethnic” we that has been transcended through conscience, has disappeared from reality. We know that the history of silence is reflected in the transition from the ethnic to the analytic we.
The we that we have used emphatically in this book is morphologically an English plural. Semantically, however, it is close to a dual, for which English, some time during the Anglo-Saxon period, has lost a special form. Other Indo-Germanic languages—for instance, the Slavonic ones—have preserved this form. And, like thought and the word, like narration and the lie, we has a history.
The we on which we want to reflect is not the dual of these two authors, but the personal pronoun, with which he who speaks refers to the first person in the plural. Now, what is that first person? The answer is rather easy when we deal with person in the singular: “I,” the first person, speaks to “you,” the second person. In doing so, I tell you something about a third, who neither is speaking nor is being addressed. By addressing a person whom I designate “you,” I make that person at that moment unique to me—and distinguish that “you” from any third: person or thing. Thus, you is almost as unique as I. Even abuse will not detract from the power intrinsic to the spoken you to establish this exquisite bond. Some people who have been tortured report that not pain, but the address of the policeman has broken them. In exact opposition to the tightly bound you, the third person has enormous scope. The third person includes whatever the first chooses to tell the second about. Every you contains the germ of a response—not so her, him, or it.
The first person usually does not call itself by its name. The first person uses a pro-noun, a word used instead of a name or noun. All languages have such a pronoun by which the speaker refers to himself, though the coloring implied—the gesture associated with the utterance—is different here and there. In Armenian or Iroquoian, the I is like an arrow by which the speaker points at him-or herself; in other languages, the I gives more the impression of a retreat, an act of assuming distance.
Etymologically, the I can be brazen, as it is in English, but it can just as well be hazy, as in Japanese, in which I is watakusi domo, which best translates: Yours Faithfully. But semantically both forms—the direct one and the euphemism—are equally clear self-references by the speaker. Proud or humble, aggressive or meek, depending on status, age, mood, or custom, the pronoun for the first person singular is unequivocal as no other term: It says, “He Who Speaks.”
This univocal precision of the I is a condition for the formation of plurals. In fact, with almost the same directness with which all languages oppose the addressing I with a you who is addressed, they also provide some kind of we. Quite arguably, the opposition of I and we is a more fundamental category than the opposition of singular and plural. For the English speaker, it seems natural that the existence of a third person singular—the he-she-it—requires that there be a third person plural—a they. But this is just not so in all languages. The Turk feels nothing natural in learning the English plural. His noun designates a form of existence, primarily a quality and only then a thing that can be counted. The noun in Turkish turns into an object, in our sense, only when it is qualified by a term indicating enumeration. For the Turk the important difference lies between “dwelling space” and two, five, or even one “house.” When he speaks to someone about something, he stresses the difference between essentials and that which can be numbered—not as we do: number one as opposed to any other number. Even in Turkish, however, the difference between the I and the we is clear. No language seems to lack a pronoun that says, “I and….”
Yet, this “I and …” can contrast in many ways with the I. This is true even morphologically: The opposition of two different roots—“ego/no; I/we; ich/wir; ja/mi”—is by no means universal. On every continent there are languages in which the plural of I is I’s. From Southeast Asia to the Far East to Finland, to Alaska and to the Great Plains, there are people who have a morphological plural for the I, and often they use it next to another pronoun, derived from a different root. Languages with such a morphologically double we art very common, and frequently the two words are semantically distinct. There may be one pronoun that says, “I, you, and possibly others,” and another that says, “I and others, but not you.” A language as simple as Malay creates insuperable difficulties for some English speakers, because they cannot get used to this duplicity in the we. Kwakiutl seems to have still another we, one that excludes you because it stresses our tribe’s cohesion—including its dead members.
The simplest way for the English speaker to get a sense of this semantic proliferation within the first person plural is to look at Neo-Melanesian, as Pidgin English is now proudly called. Pidgin is a “creole” language: its syntax has remained Malayo-Polynesian but most of its words are English. Mi, that’s me; you, that’s you; yu-pela, that’s you and your fellow; mi-pela, that’s me and my fellow, my peer—me and those like me, in contrast with yu-pela, you and those like you. Yumi, that’s you and me, used when the speaker includes you-others, but wants to stress his tie to you, to keep distance from the fellows. Otherwise, he could just say what comes easiest: yumipela, you people with me and my fellows, all together. But, of course, he could also just pick you, me, and one other, and say yu-mi-tripela, and exclude any others who happen to be within earshot.
Various languages even draw a time dimension into their we. Some Bantu tongues (the N’kosa for example) distinguish between the we that has already come into being, and the we that is hoped for. It can be argued that the Mongols and the Ewe in Dahomey can place the dimension of hope into the pronoun. They seem to have distinct ways of expressing we that depend on you having a chance to be our clansman, or being informed that we will not accept you as an in-law. The thou can thus become a budding we.
As we wrote this book we were aware of the semantic poverty of our pronoun. The modern we tells nothing about the intention of those who are the collective subject. Only in Spanish, men and women still remain distinct as nosotros y no sotras, but when men speak, they feel free to include women in nosotros. The modern we says nothing about our limits: If we are some, many, or innumerable. Our we reveals nothing to the person we address—if he is a part of us, expected to join us, recognized as a third person, seen as a stranger. And, finally, most importantly, our we is unable to state if each one ought to be taken as the subject of the sentence; or if we are all of us together: We form a subject.
This plastic we does not tell you who we are. This is the we of propaganda, which can create any subject and demand that the person addressed identify with it; which says “you ought to be one of us”; and which is used by the missionary, the humanist, and the salesman. This impoverished, borderless we enables us to say that we (today) feel, think, and do certain things. A voracious we, it incorporates the speaker—even against his will. Publicity presupposes this kind of we. This we allows the user to dispense with us, to manage us. It is the we of the normal, of those who fit.
As the two of us wrote this book, the literary we constantly silenced us, a deafening silence that makes it impossible for the reader to know anything about the writer. Using this contemporary we, the speaker engages in semantic violence, incorporating groups, whose way of formulating the we is heterogeneous to that of the observer, and thus driving them into silence.
We are not fools enough to propose, even as a joke, to return to ethnic silence, the silent co-presence before words, language, and text came into being. We are children of the book. But in our sadness we are silly enough to long for the one silent space that remains open in our examined lives, and that is the silence of friendship.*
* For a definition of friendship, see the epigraph to this book.