Difficult Essays by George Steiner.

George Steiner. On Difficulty and Other Essays (1972-78) Steiner is one of my heroes: his insights into how we use language have I think not been surpassed. They have certainly helped stimulate modern linguistics, which has widened its focus from the comparison of available texts to include the study of actual speech. Herewith some stray thoughts responding to and prompted by these essays.
     The study of spoken pre-literate languages has produced some unexpected results, such as that not only the lexicon but the grammar of a dialect can change radically within a speaker’s lifetime. (McWhorter, The Power of Babel). Writing slows down the rate of language change. It also, eventually, spawns two forms of the language, written and spoken, each with its own conventions and usages missing from the other.
     Steiner’s critiques of Whorf’s and Chomsky’s stances on the nature of language (Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature) feed into experiments by Pinker and others that have shown that grammatical gender, for example, affects how people feel about the world around them. That supports Whorf’s hypothesis that language shapes our experience. But Bickerton’s researches into pidgins and creoles suggest that pidgins reveal the essential features of all human languages, and the creoles show how languages acquire first the regularities that we label “grammar”, and then the idiosyncrasies that differentiate them, and eventually make them new languages. Those findings support Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is innate.

     Steiner’s stance is that neither Whorfian nor Chomskyian hypotheses can account for actual language. This reminds me of the surprising success of computerised translation, which depends not only on dictionaries, but also on statistical features such as the most likely adjective-noun combinations. “Style” also can be statistically defined, and so can some genres. Combine these ideas with AI pattern-matching systems, and an AI algorithm can write a credible sports news report when given a handful of facts about the game.
     Steiner wrote these essays before ubiquitous personal computers, which limited his speculations and predictions about the future of reading and books (After the Book?). He correctly predicted that audio-books (cassettes) would gain market share, and that hard-cover books would lose out to other formats. What would he make of e-books and texts preserved in the electronic web? I think his judgement would stand. What he calls “deep reading” would continue to decline. The kind of awareness of other texts, past and present, which characterises serious literature, would become the preserve of a literate elite. The rest of us would be semi-literate: able to decode text, but unable (and increasingly unwilling) to take the time to relate texts to each other and to the present moment. Which is exactly what has happened. Since serious literature is historical in its very essence, the awareness of history, especially of its messiness, its ethical ambiguities and contradictions, has also declined. I haven’t read more recent essays by him, so I don’t know whether my speculations about his opinions are accurate.
     I think semi-literacy tends to simplistic literalness, a resistance to and intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to recognise irony or handle metaphor, and a suspicion of any text that assumes familiarity with allusions to the past. The digital world is an eternal present, with yesterday already receding into the mist-obscured ancient past.
     I read several of these essays twice. A book that’s difficult in Steiner’s sense, but well worth the effort. His language is ornate, laced with Latinisms, but so appositely that even unfamiliar words yield their meaning(s) transparently, and enrich the reader's understanding. ****

George Steiner 1929-2020

[British Council]