The Language Instinct
English 140 – Marco Abel
Alex Jenkins
Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that �[there is] no way of using language to get between language and the world.� The validity of this statement is called into question in numerous contemporary films, songs, and for current purposes, books. Scholars have offered many different responses, some of them developing with one another what David Foster Wallace coined to be a �seamy lexicographical underbelly.� An investigation of several contemporary works by various authors can provide the scholar concerned with language with an excellent starting point. The shorter works that will be discussed in the following pages are: Susan Daitch�s �Killer Whales,� which discusses the language of animals, Rick Moody�s �The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner,� which meditates on the importance of the bible to the history and development of language, and David Foster Wallace�s essay �Tense Present�Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage,� whose major theme is clear from the title. Three novels that discuss similar themes are: David Markson�s Wittgenstein�s Mistress, which ruminates on the nature of language riddles and philosophy, Kathy Acker�s Don Quixote, which discusses the relationship between language and gender, and Patricia Duncker�s Hallucinating Foucault, which is a straightforward novel that may solve Wittgenstein�s riddle by asking if it�s really a necessary question to ask. But I�m getting ahead of myself. It will be easiest to see a certain developing trend if a semblance of chronology, at least with regard to thematics can be followed.
Thus, the clearest starting point is Rick Moody�s �The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner.� The title character, Bob Paisner�s view of language is apparent from the introduction:
�I use the K.J., or Authorized Version, where the these are these, and the thous are thous. Ever since I was a kid I used it, ever since the sixties, ever since St. Luke�s Parish in Manchester, N.H. You don�t get the same kind of line in the Revised Standard Version. You don�t find �I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which will come, the Almighty.� (1:8)�
Mr. Paisner has an intense reverence for language in the classical sense�that which is older is consequently closer to Jesus, and consequently more holy. Language is, if nothing else, aesthetically pleasing. Language is poetry and language is art. In Bob Paisner�s world, the only �seamy underbelly� of American academia is too little appreciation for this type of language. As the story follows the style of a term paper, Paisner must constantly justify what he is saying. He does this accordingly in saying, �All books, as a result, refer back to the bible and to the truth contained in it, just as all writing refers back to divine creation, and, by extension, all critical papers ought to be contained in this concordance too.� On a plot level, it seems Paisner is obsessed with the confusion between words and what they mean with regard to the world, exactly Wittgenstein�s question. One can see this through Paisner�s description of a girl he meets:
�She was the angel of the seventh seal. She was Mary and Mary Magdalene, she was my mom before my mom got sick, but that�s not all, she was like Christ, she was Francis or Gandhi or Thomas Merton, she was the grinch after his heart got bigger, she was Patti Smith after the broken neck��
Not only does he begin using his fallback, the holy language, but when even this fails, he goes on simply trying to find the perfect metaphor, word, or name, for not only this girl, but what he feels for her at this meeting.
Is this what Wittgenstein was after? Perhaps Markson�s book can offer a response. The book relies heavily on riddles of language, as Wittgenstein himself often did. For example:
�I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach.
Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house.
One is prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not much left of it.�
This riddle addresses a question that plagues theoretical linguists�how do we derive meanings of words within the lexicon? Does house imply [+still standing] as a lexical characteristic? A similar question with a similar answer but more complicated implications is the following:
�Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint.
What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One�s language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.�
Not only does the question arise of whether storm implies [+real], but also that of whether art is another step away from spoken language. Point being, if a word is once removed from its meaning, does art remove it twice and therefore make it almost wholly unrelated to its original meaning? It seems the answer that can be derived from the book is that riddles that provoke thought are the simplest way to reach truth through the separated medium of written language. So while there may indeed be no way of using language to get between language and the world, there may be a way of using language to get to the world.
David Foster Wallace, however, seems appalled that a language philosopher such as Wittgenstein would even consider looking at language from a standpoint beyond grammaticality. He uses the term �descriptivist,� another name for the school of language thought pioneered by Wittgenstein, as an academic slur. He says that the problem with seeing language beyond the grammatical function of communication is analogous to the following:
�Try, for instance, to imagine an �authoritative� ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do�Maybe now the analogy between usage and ethics is clearer. Just because people sometimes lie, cheat on their taxes, or scream at their kids, this doesn�t mean that they think these things are good. The whole point of norms is to help us evaluate our actions (including utterances) according to what we as a community have decided our real interests and purposes are.�
The problem with this line of thinking is that Wallace assumes that the goal of descriptivism is to replace prescriptivism. Contemporaries of Wittgenstein, however, and theoretical linguists like Noam Chomsky would argue that the disciplines have different goals. The clearest explanation is that the goal of prescriptivism is to dictate correctness, the goal of descriptivism is to discover artistic truth, and the goal of theoretical linguistics is to decipher what is universal about the language mechanism through extensive cross-linguistic analysis. Why should these three seemingly unrelated disciplines have so much trouble getting along with one another? Wallace is not making this up, of course. As he points out, the notion of descriptivism has proven dangerous to society:
��everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write descriptively�via �freewriting,� brainstorming,� �journaling,� a view of writing as self-exploratory and �expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology.�
What a linguist ought to say to this is that the fact is indicative of these junior high teachers� lack of knowledge about grammar, as the goal of descriptivism seems to have little or nothing to do with freewriting or self-discovery�in fact it is precisely the opposite. The goal of descriptivism in Wittgenstein�s world, at any rate, seems to have to do not necessarily with breaching the gap between language and the world, but at least acknowledging that it is there, and working to get from language to the world, and to truth. And from a linguistic standpoint, there are descriptive methods of teaching that do teach prescriptive rules. For example, rather than explaining that a sentence fragment is ill formed because it lacks a certain part of speech or predicate, the descriptive echo question rule can apply. A sentence is a fragment if you cannot form an echo question, isn�t it? At any rate, the point is that language has become political, and people have taken a certain personal stance on their level of prescriptivism�which seems to serve only to get us further away from using language productively.
Another major area of linguistic research of recent memory is that of animal speech. In Susan Daitch�s �Killer Whales,� the main character is one such researcher. Near the beginning of the story, she narrates the following:
�Some things aren�t as different as people like to claim. When I was a kid I used to think of language as an odd job lot of words, random and haphazard, you find a string to do the work, to effect meaning. Then the metaphor evolved again. Words were like a school of jellyfish with thousands tentacles streaming below the surface, and some of those tentacles were attached or stuck together below the waves: the seemingly unconnected jellyfish were really Siamese Twins if you looked closely. The connections might be syllables or synonyms...I don�t think I was innocently looking for natural linguistic connections�I deliberately tied tentacles together, ignoring my own stung fingers.�
This seems to narrate the natural learning process of the aware child concerned with language. In a way this very descriptive view is more natural than grammar rules. But Daitch�s character does not presume that this is innocent. While asking questions of language, however, may be natural, trying in any way to find a definitive answer may indeed be crazy. The quest for truth can be a fall from grace when one grows obsessed with something so vast and unknowable as the nature of language, especially that of Killer Whales. She says, �Now I look at words as isolated catatonic patients in a state hospital whose funds have been cut off. It is a scene of bankruptcy where there is no longer any relationship between sound and meaning�[the orderlies] speak of morphine in morphemes, if possible�� Here again, the problem is not that morphemes or synonyms are inherently evil, but it is precisely the intent to describe them that raises problems.
Kathy Acker, however, would not say that there is a problem with people trying to know language, but the problem is women trying to know language. She points out,
�Traditionally, the human world has been divided into men and women. Women�re the cause of human suffering. For women are so intelligent, they don�t want anything to do with love. Men have tried to get rid of their suffering by altering this: first, by changing women; second, when this didn�t work because women are stubborn creatures, by simply lying, by saying that women live only for men�s love. An alteration of language, rather than of material, usually changes material conditions��
Later she subtitles one of her chapters, �BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS THAT WEREN�T HERS.� So language is knowable enough it seems, but only for those who created it, i.e. men. Kathy Acker tries desperately to use the male language in Don Quixote, but time and again is frustrated by the unwillingness of maleness to take her over. Not only is language impossible to know, but as language forms literature, literature also developed as male, and now Acker and her character are completely incapable of finding the one crazy idea that they have, which is to love. One can only love, in Acker�s world by being crazy, and one can only be crazy when one cannot find love. So it seems Acker rejects the notion that language is a problem for man, as in the mankind �without gender,� but rather, that language is a problem when one is aware of it and its power.
��It�s because,� the Leftist, who always had to explain the world to everyone, �when you were a child, you read too many books, instead of suffering like normal children. The horse is not responsible for your abortion. Literature is. You have to become normal and part of this community.��
Normalcy may or may not be overrated, but it certainly seems an unattainable goal, once one is aware that is indeed her goal. Normalcy can only be achieved through language, and since language is male, normalcy can only be achieved by becoming partly male, which certainly holds true within the fictional world of Don Quixote.
So when so much of literature becomes impossible for everyone and anyone, with and without viewpoints or opinions, what is the point? Can anybody �reclaim� literature as an art form without the defeatist notions laid forth within these texts? It seems Patricia Duncker does just that in Hallucinating Foucault. As Paul Michel ironically states, �The critics praise my classical style. I am part of a tradition. It is what I say that disturbs them, and that too is rendered palatable by the undisturbed elegance of classical French prose. You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.� This seems to be true. Patricia Duncker addresses contemporary questions of authorship, gender, and language, she just feels no need to leave the conventions of language and the conventions of the novel in order to do so. Another ironic statement, this time made by the anonymous narrator is, �[Paul Michel]�s English was flawless and without any trace of an accent. I found this most peculiar as French intonation almost always betrays native speakers.� Clearly, Paul Michel and the narrator are very attuned to the fact that they are speaking a language. But this does not inspire them to wish to change it, as it might for Don Quixote or Bon Paisner. As Paul Michel points out, perhaps Duncker�s defense of the novel, �Fiction, [Paul Michel] said, was beautiful, unauthentic and useless, a profoundly unnatural art, designed purely for pleasure�Paul Michel was definitely against nature. To be unnatural, he argued, was to be civilized, to stake one�s claim to an intellectual self-consciousness which was the only foundation for making art.� This may be true. Whether or not language is flawed seems wholly unimportant here. As long as the language at hand can produce beautiful literature, there seems to be no problem. And that, I feel, is the point of Duncker�s book.
Throughout these works, many different plausible answers have been proposed to Wittgenstein�s original riddle. And his statement seems to hold true throughout them all, to various degrees of importance. However, what is of ultimate importance here is that the novel lives, and it most certainly does, especially in works by authors such as Patricia Duncker. Literature may indeed be �wholly useless,� but it is certainly worth studying, as long as one maintains his awareness of the limitations of the medium.
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