AFTERWORD

THIS book has applied poetics, literary criticism, and the history of cultural forms to aspects of natural language. Its focus through-out has been on the act of translation. Translation is fully implicit in the most rudimentary communication. It is explicit in the coexistence and mutual contact of the thousands of languages spoken on the earth. Between the utterance and interpretation of meaning through verbal sign systems on the one hand, and the extreme multiplicity and variety of human tongues on the other, lies the domain of language as a whole. I have argued that these two ends of the spectrum—elementary acts of speech and the paradox of Babel—are closely related, and that any coherent linguistics must take both into account.

Only the professional linguist and logician are competent to assess fully the results achieved by formal and meta-mathematical analyses of language. Of these transformational generative grammars are currently the most prestigious, but by no means the only embodiment. This study has testified to the intellectual fascination of contemporary technical linguistics, and to the fact that the formal approach has helped to bring the investigation of language into a central position in philosophy, psychology, and logic. At the same time, I have expressed the conviction that models such as that put forward by Chomsky drastically schematize their material, and that diey neglect, often to the point of distortion, the social, cultural, historical determinants of human speech. 1By divorcing itself from that intimate collaboration with poetics which animates the work of Roman Jakobson, of the Moscow and Prague language-circles, and of I. A. Richards, formal linguistics has taken an abstract, often trivialized view of the relations between language and mind, between language and social process, between word and culture.

This reductionism has been most dramatic in regard to the issue of linguistic diversity and of the nature of universals. When I began this book the question of Babel, and the history of that question in religious, philosophic, and anthropological thought were hardly respectable among ‘scientific’ linguists. Now, only four years later, one of the foremost comparative linguists concludes that

the discovery of putative universals in linguistic structure does not erase the differences. Indeed, the more one emphasizes universals, in association with a self-developing, powerful faculty of language within persons themselves, the more mysterious actual languages become. Why are there more than one, or two, or three? If the internal faculty of language is so constraining, must not social, historical, adaptive forces have been even more constraining, to produce the specific plenitude of language actually found? For Chinookan is not Sahaptin is not Klamath is not Takelma is not Coos is not Siuslaw is not Tsimshian is not Wintu is not Maidu is not Yokuts is not Costanoan The many differences do not disappear, and the likenesses, indeed are far from all Chomskyan universals…. Most of language begins where abstract universals leave off.¹

This last point is decisive, and I have underlined it throughout my argument. Whether attempts at a comprehensive anatomy of language by formal and logical means are more than an intellectual exercise, often illuminating on the level of the ideal, remains a moot question.1 This study has sought to show that other approaches may have much to contribute.

In particular, I have put forward the hypothesis that the proliferation of mutually incomprehensible tongues stems from an absolutely fundamental impulse in language itself. I believe that the communication of information, of ostensive and verifiable ‘facts,’ constitutes only one part, and perhaps a secondary part, of human discourse. The potentials of fiction, of counterfactuality, of undecidable futurity profoundly characterize both the origins and nature of speech. They differentiate it ontologically from the many signal systems available to the animal world. They determine the unique, often ambiguous tenor of human consciousness and make the relations of that consciousness to ‘reality’ creative. Through language, so much of which is focused inward to our private selves, we reject the empirical inevitability of the world. Through language, we construct what I have called ‘alternities of being.’ To the extent that every individual speaker uses an idiolect, the problem of Babel is quite simply, that of human individuation. But different tongues give to the mechanism of ‘alternity’ a dynamic, transferable enactment. They realize needs of privacy and territoriality vital to our identity. To a greater or lesser degree, every language offers its own reading of life. To move between languages, to translate, even within restrictions of totality, is to experience the almost bewildering bias of the human spirit towards freedom. If we were lodged inside a single ‘language-skin’ or amid very few languages, the inevitability of our organic subjection to death might well prove more suffocating than it is.

There is no greater virtuoso of strangulation than Beckett, no master of language less confident of the liberating power of the word. Hamm says in Endgame:

I once knew a madman who thought that the end of the world had come. He was a painter—and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. He alone had been spared. Forgotten. It appears the case is … was not so … so unusual.

Beckett translates himself, or perhaps interleaves as he composes:

J’ai connu un fou qui croyait que la fin du monde etait arrivee. II faisait de la peinture. Je l’aimais bien. J’allais le voir, a l’asile. Je le prenais par la main et la trainais devant la fenetre. Mais regarde! La! Tout ce blé qui lèvel Et la! Regarde! Les voiles des sardiniers! Toute cette beaute! II m’arrachait sa main et retournait dans son coin. Epouvante. II n’avait vu que des cendres. Lui seul avait ete epargne. Oublie. II parait que le cas n’est… n’était pas si… si rare.

The transfer is flawless (except for that enigmatic addition or omission, depending on which text came first, of the engraver). Yet the differences in cadence, in tone, in association are considerable. The English slopes to a dying fall via long 0 sounds; the French spirals to a final nervous pitch. Set the two passages side by side, and a curious effect follows. Their claustral bleakness remains, but the measure of distance between them is sufficient to create a sense of liberation, of almost irresponsible alternative. ‘That rising corn’ and ‘ce ble qui lève’ speak of worlds different enough to allow the mind both space and wonder.

The Kabbalah, in which the problem of Babel and of the nature of language is so insistently examined, 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. We have seen the continuation of this vision in theories of linguistic monogenesis and universal grammar. 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?

1 In recent papers, Chomsky himself has been modifying his standard theory. He now allows that rules of semantic interpretation must operate on surface structures as well as deep structures. He’is also prepared to shift key morphological phenomena from the grammatical model, whose power may have been exaggerated, to the lexicon. Developed further, both these modifications would bring trans formational generative grammars nearer to sociolinguistic and contrastive approaches.

² IDell Hymes, ‘Speech and Language: On the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Speakers’ (Daedalus, issued as the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, CII, 1973), p. 63.

¹ For the most recent attempt to apply formal logic to vagueness, context dependence, metaphor, and polysemy in natural language, cf. M. J. Cresswell, Logics and Languages (London, 1973). Nothing in this acute treatment seems to overcome Wittgenstein’s admonition against the derivation of systematic logic from ordinary language or Tarski’s theorem that ‘there can be no general criterion of truth for sufficiently rich languages’—all natural languages being ‘sufficiendy rich’.