In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  The powerful do not speak, because speaking means opening yourself up and putting yourself on the same level as the person you are speaking to. A true dialogue – the idea of the dialogue – presupposes complete equality. In reality, conversations, particularly short ones, often reflect social relations. One person may express superiority in his delivery, while the other person may talk back in a manner that either accepts or rejects that claimed superiority. A supplicant will approach his patron with deference in the hope of obtaining his request, and the patron may answer in a manner that enhances his reputation for magnanimity, as he wrestles between his need not to give too much away and his need to feel the power of his generosity. Ultimately, you arrive at the command, where one person asserts his complete control over the other, and expects little more than a “yes, sir” in response. But real sustained conversation requires equality, and that is where we express our characters most fully and accept the humanity of others. Speaking is therefore both a subversive act and a collective means of testing and developing our thoughts. The further up the social hierarchy a person is, the fewer the people with whom he can engage in dialogue without subverting his own position. This factor, which could be defined as the isolation of power, is a product of the need for the powerful to present an image that reflects and justifies the power they hold. If Bakhtin was right in claiming that carnival was a social reversal in which the “barriers of caste, property, profession and age” were temporarily removed, then it must have been as much of a release for the powerful as it was for the powerless.

  Speaking involves us exposing ourselves. It means putting our arguments in the public domain. As all our arguments are necessarily flawed, because it is never entirely possible to take into account all the various shifting realities that could affect them, we are leaving ourselves open to valid counterarguments and in some cases to ridicule. It takes courage to speak, and even greater courage to speak out against the flow of conformity. Because the powerless are more generous in their assessments of their fellow human beings, they judge the silently powerful to be intelligent but unwilling to engage in dialogue with their intellectual inferiors, perhaps even out of a sense of propriety or a desire not to embarrass their underlings with a show of powerful thought. For the most part, they are wrong: the silence of the powerful generally hides the vacuousness of the strong. The powerful, on the other hand, are much less charitable. For them, both the silence and the garrulousness of the weak are a sign of bestiality, stupidity and even imbecility. They too are mostly wrong. They are more acquainted with the silence of the weak, as that silence can be a sign of justifiable fear or prudence, and a desire not to engage in a battle in which all the social weapons are held by one side only. In every case, silence has an air of menace, because it keeps everyone else in a state of ignorance as to the nature that hides behind that silence.

  An old Tuscan saying states that “Every fool is a sage when he keeps his mouth shut” (“Ogni pazzo e savio quando tace”). Many a professor defeats a dangerously bright undergraduate not by superior arguments and experience but by staring silently and fixedly over a pair of half-glasses. The ferment of the youth’s ideas is no match for the calm certainty and emptiness of the professor’s hubris.

  There is one case in which the powerful speak and the powerless remain silent, and that is in the formal setting of an address by a powerful figure to the crowd. The powerful always believe those beneath them to be a crowd; that is why they call them a mass. By becoming a mass, individuals abdicate all individuality and act as the caricature that the powerful want them to be. The crowd is featureless, but attains a degree of power, however temporary, precisely because it is a crowd and has abdicated all individual responsibility. For this reason the powerful deign to address the crowd with respect, while they would treat each of its individual members with disdain.

  Silence has mystery, and mystery has power. This is reason enough for not speaking about oneself to those of inferior rank. Again popular wisdom provides a clear awareness of this reality: “familiarity breeds contempt” and “no man is a hero to his valet (or wife)”. The latter expression applies the former one to a social reality. A “hero” is generally a man and of a certain class, and therefore exercises power in relation to his sex and his class. These sayings, perhaps unconsciously, express an important truth: power is an act and the powerful are actors, and thus anyone who is constantly backstage will be unable to find the performance convincing. The proximity of servants was one of the most terrible sufferings of the rich until the eighteenth century when architecture and technological advances made it possible to put some distance between the smell of the rich and the smell of the poor.

  Language and the lack of language (or in other words, loquaciousness and taciturnity) are therefore tools to hide ourselves from the world. We create a mask with them, and then with varying degrees of success we conceal our real self behind it. We only reveal ourselves, not always through language, to those we feel close to. It is not simply a matter of power, although it is also that, because we are more likely to reveal ourselves to those we consider to be similar to ourselves. In the simplified sociological reality of our own times, these barriers are beginning to disappear, and we speak of personal matters more indiscriminately, sometimes to the point of indulging in a deaf and deafening self-obsession.

  The contrast between silence and talkativeness does not merely concern power and the lack of it; it also concerns the type of society in which the language community lives. A feudal monarchy talked in a different way from a mercantile republic, and a modern capitalist state talks in a different way from a socialist or a pre-capitalist state. The Italian republics that came under pressure from the great European monarchies in the sixteenth century despised the servile language of the latter. Of course they had class too, and this was reflected in their speech, but they did not address people as vossignoria (your lordship), nor did they say, le bacio le mani (“I kiss your hands”). A more profound distinction can be found in the rise of the bourgeoisie (if I may use so dated a term), because this class preferred a more direct approach to language, and the English language was at the forefront of this change. The bourgeoisie (and let’s be clear that I am talking primarily about a class that believed in hard work and engaged in trade or a trade) tended in very general terms to think in linear and utilitarian terms. Speech, like most things, had to justify its existence and therefore became less elaborate. The structure of language shifted in relative terms from hypotaxis to parataxis (from complex forms such as subordinate clauses, appositional clauses, reversals of word order, etc. to simple forms, ultimately a concatenation of main clauses joined by the most commonly used conjunctions “and” and “but”), and the structure of argumentation shifted from the examination of the peripheral arguments working towards the principal argument or thesis, to the examination of the principal argument or thesis to which peripheral arguments could be added as a kind of optional backup. These trends have not been reversed in consumer society, in spite of increased leisure; they have progressed even further and spread to all sections of society.

  Modernity has thus involved an increase in silence or rather human taciturnity because, overall, society has become much noisier as the speaker with a larynx has been replaced by the speaker with a transducer. While a typical public space would once have been full of the noise of the human voice, it is now often the case that the electronically produced human voice makes conversation impossible. What has not been destroyed by the clockwatching of industrialisation and Taylorism has been drowned out by muzak and broadcasting – the monotonous rhythm of recycled music and the mindless chatter suited to everyone and therefore nobody. The great Bosnian writer, Ivo Andric´, believed that the advent of the radio in the first decade of the twentieth century would destroy the pleasure of conversation and the ability to make one’s own entertainment. This Nobel Prize-winner lived until 1975 and would therefore have known how prescient were the words in his masterpiece, Th
e Bridge over the Drina. Since his death, however, it has become possible to plug one’s brain into a Walkman, i-pod or MP3, which presumably not only impedes conversation but also blots out the dialogues we have in our brains. But thankfully the West is not all the world (and within the West there are significant variations). One sociolinguist tells us with slightly suspect certitude that the most garrulous linguistic group in the world is the Roti tribe of East Timor.1 Until the Indonesian bombs rained down on them with the connivance of some western powers, they must have been a lucky people indeed, and they must have had leisure to have gained so prized a laurel.

  The swing from hypotaxis to parataxis and from garrulousness to taciturnity is not however new, but it is more extreme than in the past. Plato was basically arguing for a rejection of rhetoric or excessive rhetoric.2 His thinking was linear and plain, and this added to its force. His language must have been particularly potent when all around people were using something more elaborate. None of these forms are preferable in absolute; they only become preferable within a social context. Machiavelli used an extremely powerful direct and paratactical language, typical of republican Florence. It was a language that was destined to disappear, and has never fully returned. However, these forms of language can do different things. Parataxis has the advantage of being able to present a very clear logical sequence, but hypotaxis has the advantage of being able to run different logical sequences, sometimes contradictory ones, at the same time.

  Language is not simply about logic and reason; it is also a means to act directly upon another’s emotions and, if successful, to take possession of their brains and manipulate them. Just as animals in a pack strut, threaten and entice, so their human relations do the same with an added weapon in their armoury: language. When someone speaks, they are also a physical presence (male or female, young or old, attractive or ugly, prosperous or impoverished, threatening or meek). The voice, too, has or lacks persuasive elements. It can be smooth and assured or it can be tremulous and uncertain. Anyone with experience of the world should know that the speaker with the latter kind of voice is generally more reliable than the former, and yet our instinct is always to trust the former. Even the most unscrupulous manipulators of the former are themselves likely to be victims of their own wiles, such is the power of this instinct.

  Spoken language is therefore created and interpreted within a context that includes many non-verbal elements. Listeners will vary in their ability to filter out the false logic, the sophistry and even the cruder weapons of menace and flattery, but no one is entirely immune to these manifest persuaders. Written language is, in this sense, pure language. It is deprived of the writer’s presence and is recreated from the page by the reader’s will. Readers might imagine the author’s voice (or voices) and recreate accent and tone within their heads, but they are in control. Written language is less democratic because, for most of history, access has been restricted to an elite, but it is more democratic because it is less susceptible to manipulation. Clearly, the greater is the percentage of readers within a society, the greater the democratic influence of writing. It could be argued that democracy is impossible or at least worthless without a literate and educated electorate that reads at least fairly regularly.

  I will examine writing more fully in a later chapter, but here we are interested in it solely as pure language coming from a single source without any interruption except the one imposed by the reader’s concentration. The spoken language is adulterated and modulated, as I have suggested throughout this chapter, by pauses and silences. The spoken language is anarchic in its every aspect: words are not naturally distinct phonetically, nor are sentences syntactically. A pause or a break in a sentence can signify a threat or display timidity according to the other somatic signals that accompany it. Writing instils order on the spoken language, whose order is never real but only implicit. Writing strips out not only facial expression, attitude, posture and all the other markers, but also the complex linguistic nuances of tone, pitch, accent and diction. No amount of descriptive adverbs can make up for this loss: “she cried angrily”, “he paused in his utter confusion”, “she sighed wearily”, and so on. But the written word in its poverty survives as a powerful force because of its purity and its density. It has the power to oppress, but more particularly it has the power to subvert. It is pondered garrulousness.

  The two extremes of talkativeness are the ritual conversation and the subversive one. Typical of the first category is talk about the weather, which is clear for all to see, but nevertheless provides a subject about which nobody has to think too much as they go about their business. This is a kind of verbal grooming whereby two or more individuals reestablish cordial relations. Content is of no or minimal importance. The apparently asinine nature of these exchanges conceals their subtlety: nuanced degrees of warmth or coolness mark out the relationship between two animals. Typical of the second category is humour, which has its own internal, sometimes cruel logic. To be witty occasionally means saying or implying things you do not necessarily believe. It can be crude and brutal, and in those cases often little more than a pugnacious assertion of prejudices. But at its best, humour is complex and helps us to see and interpret reality in new ways. Good humour attacks the commonplace, and is therefore inherently subversive.

  Writers and readers are attracted by the purity of language and its rational elements, but they should not forget its many other functions, particularly in its spoken form: language is about structuring power within human society, it is about storing a society’s knowledge, it is about cataloguing and defining ownership in the widest possible sense of the term, it is a form of caressing, it is an enjoyment in itself, it is a musical instrument. Language is almost everything we are: it governs our existence, and the fact that we are now more aware of our closeness to other animals only increases our awe for this almost miraculous facility that in some ways transcends biology and ourselves, and goes in search of reason. Its origins are unknown and possibly unknowable, but speculations on them, however idle, have the merit of clarifying some of the problems.

  Chapter Two

  The birth of language

  Pressure built up within an enormous Mind, as we shall call the wordless entity of concentrated energy and matter that we can never know and still less understand. One day before days of any length existed, It exploded and propelled Its fragments of energy and matter on many different trajectories over distances that make distance incomprehensible. But it was cold – cold and silent – in the endless expansion into nothingness. Exploding stars brought little comfort to the Mind who worried about His existence and changed Himself from neuter to masculine in an effort to feel His being. “I am a set of rules,” He said at last, “a set of physical rules that must be obeyed, but do I exist if no one can understand those rules or even be aware that they might exist?

  “I must allow the random creation of a solar system in which one planet can allow the random collision of amino acids which will allow the random development of animal life which will allow the eventual development of what I really want: an animal that can speak. And if that animal can speak, it will be able to think and from its tiny perspective develop an understanding, a little understanding of my set of rules. But I will play a game with it, so that every time it discovers a rule, that little piece of knowledge will spawn a thousand more perplexities and unsolved riddles, thus keeping it in a constant state of excited ignorance.”

  And so it came to pass. The Mind heard the animals speak, and saw that it was good. They called up to him with many words, “God, Gott, Deus, Dio, Dia, Allah, Yahweh,” and thousands upon thousands of other names. Some believed He was one thing and some another. They fought amongst themselves not only over what the nature of the Mind might really be, but simply over what name to give Him. We cannot say how the Mind responded. If He was full of love, then He would have been saddened that His work had come to this end. If He was full of power, He would have rejoiced that His signs and wonders h
ad multiplied in the land of the talking animals.

  Some divided over a filioque, some divided over the number of fingers they used in an act of deference to the Mind. And the Mind saw that it was not so good. In order to be and absolutely fulfil His essence, the Mind needed to be understood by the little creatures that scurried and chattered on the remote planet He had chosen for them, and yet He now had to admit that language not only leads to better understanding but also to wilful misunderstanding.

  In linguistics there is no “creation” theory that has an equivalent authority to the theory of evolution in biology; there is not even a convincing working hypothesis that gives us some idea of how this wonderful ability came about and how it defines our human nature. Instead we have a fairly wretched parliament of pseudo-scientific dreamers who expatiate earnestly with little reference to the enormity of the speculative task they have undertaken. Sociolinguistics has made considerable progress in recent decades both in recording language as a social phenomenon and in attempting to develop a theory of language and of what languages can and cannot do.1 The problem for those who wish to trace language back to a supposed origin is that language before writing left no trace. The bones and artefacts of early man may survive, but his words were like dried leaves and crumbled to dust under the heavy tread of pre-history when man – “primitive man” – was few in number and subject to his environment rather than master of it. We have no reason to believe that he was more stupid than us or that, once he had fully gained his linguistic tool, he was less articulate. In fact, it may well have been the other way round.