Books: Is Language Dying?

LANGUAGE AND SILENCE by George Steiner. 426 pages. Afheneum. $8.

"A man can learn half a dozen professions by reading Zola," says George Steiner. And a man can learn the ground rules to half a dozen academic disciplines by reading Steiner—including the art of how to package 31 essays into an $8 bundle.

Steiner is one of the few critics today who can make such a package a bargain at almost any price. Born in Paris of Austrian parents and educated in France and the U.S., he is at 38 director of English studies at Cambridge's Churchill College and currently Schweitzer Visiting Professor at N.Y.U. He is also the No. 1 candidate for Edmund Wilson's critical mantle.

He has all the qualifications and more: astonishing erudition, an edgy style, the wound of Jewishness and a bow of courage. He speaks four languages. He began publishing with two commanding achievements: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) and The Death of Tragedy (1961). Now he has found the absolute essential for a critic: a commanding idea. That idea is the breakdown of language. As he puts it, the "syntheses of understanding which made common speech possible no longer work." Today, Steiner notes, vast domains of meaning are ruled by nonverbal languages such as mathematics or symbolic logic; those who live beyond the veil of science and its mathematical languages inhabit only an "animate fiction."

Dry Springs. The landmarks in modern literature, Steiner says, are works that have pushed language over the precipice of its past—Joyce's Ulysses, the poetry of Mallarmé and Rilke. Painting, too, is language, but the modern practitioners are in total rebellion against the "verbal" or meaningful in art. Franz Kline's Chief is a tornado of paint, and nothing can be said about it that is "pertinent to the habits of linguistic sense." Contemporary music also flies from exterior meanings. Language today can deal only with the surfaces of experience. "The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part," says Steiner, "is silence. The space-time continuum of relativity, the atomic structure of all matter, the wave-particle state of energy are no longer accessible through the word. Reality now begins outside verbal language."

The traditional springs of language have gone dry. Fiction, Steiner reports, is alive and hiding—in the land of fact. As Thomas Hardy noticed, "Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened." Hence the screaming horrors, outrageous sex fantasies, nightmares of loneliness now faking it as novels. Fiction is either surrendering its majesties to non-fiction or hybridizing with the new languages of symbolic communication. John Hersey's finest book, his seven novels notwithstanding, is still Hiroshima. Truman Capote freezes a murderous poetry into In Cold Blood. Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us and Lewis Mumford's The City in History inherit the grace and freedom of the novel.