THE ORIGINS of SPEECH in the Beginning Was Chomsky by Tom Wolfe ESSAY
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MARTIN AMIS ON TRUMP’S BABBLINGS ART SPIEGELMAN ON THE GHOSTS OF WAR HARPER’S MAGAZINE/AUGUST 2016 $6.99 THE ORIGINS OF SPEECH IN THE BEGINNING WAS CHOMSKY BY TOM WOLFE ESSAY THE ORIGINS OF SPEECH In the beginning was Chomsky By Tom Wolfe Nobody in academia had ever witnessed or turn all—or almost all—the pillow heads in the even heard of a performance like this before. In field rock-hard. just a few years, in the early 1950s, a University of Even before receiving his Ph.D., Chomsky was Pennsylvania graduate student— a student, in his invited to lecture at Yale and the University of twenties—had taken over an entire field of study, Chicago. He introduced a radically new theory linguistics, and stood it on its head of language. Language was not and hardened it from a spongy so- something you learned. You were called “social science” into a real born with a built-in “language or- science, a hard science, and put his gan.” It is functioning the moment name on it: Noam Chomsky. you come into the world, just the At the time, Chomsky was still way your heart and your kidneys finishing his doctoral dissertation are already pumping and filtering for Penn, where he had completed and excreting away. his graduate- school course work. To Chomsky, it didn’t matter But at bedtime and in his heart of what a child’s first language was. hearts he was living in Boston as a Whatever it was, every child’s lan- junior member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, guage organ could use the “deep structure,” “uni- and creating a Harvard-level name for himself. versal grammar,” and “language acquisition de- This moment was the high tide of the “scien- vice” he was born with to express what he had to tificalization” that had become fashionable just say, no matter whether it came out of his mouth after World War II. Get hard! Whatever you do, in En glish or Urdu or Naga mese. That was why— make it sound scientific! Get out from under the as Chomsky said repeatedly— children started stigma of studying a “social science”! By now speaking so early in life . and so correctly in “social” meant soft in the brain pan. Sociolo- terms of grammar. They were born with the lan- gists, for example, were willing to do anything guage organ in place and the power ON. By the to avoid the stigma. They tried to observe and age of two, usually, they could speak in whole sen- record hour-by-hour conversations, meetings, tences and generate completely original ones. The correspondence, even routes taken by individu- “organ” . the “deep structure” . the “univer- als, and make the information really hard by sal grammar” . the “device”—as Chomsky ex- converting it into algorithms full of calculus plained it, the system was physical, empirical, symbols that gave it the look of mathematical organic, biological. The power of the language certainty. And they failed totally. Only Chom- organ sent the universal grammar coursing sky, in linguistics, managed to pull it off and through the deep structure’s lingual ducts to Tom Wolfe is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. This is an excerpt from his new book, The Kingdom of Speech, out this month from Little, Brown. Illustrations by Darrel Rees ESSAY 25 provide nutrition for the LAD, which everybody and visage turned a challenger’s power of rea- in the field now knew referred to the “language son to jelly. acquisition device” Chomsky had discovered. Young charismatic figures are not a rare Two years later, in 1957, when he was breed. In new religious movements they have twenty-eight, Chomsky pulled all this togeth- tended to be the rule, not the exception: Jo- er in a book with the opaque title Syntactic seph Smith of the Mormons . Siddhartha Structures—and was on the way to becoming Gautama, the Buddha . Scientology’s David the biggest name in the history of linguistics. Miscavige, a “prodigy” and L. Ron Hubbard’s He drove the discipline indoors and turned it handpicked successor . the Báb, forerunner upside down. There were thousands of lan- of the Baha’i faith . the Jehovah’s Witness- guages on earth, which to earthlings sounded es’ Charles Taze Russell . and Moishe like a hopeless Babel of biblical proportions. Rosen of Jews for Jesus. Likewise in warfare: That was where Chomsky’s soon-to-be-famous Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a seventeen-year-old Martian linguist came in. A Martian linguist enlisted man taking over an infantry company arriving on earth, he often said . often . in the midst of battle . Joan of Arc, a French often . would immediately realize that all peasant girl who becomes an army general and the languages on this planet were the same, the greatest heroine in French history—at the with just some minor local accents. And the age of nineteen . Napoléon Bonaparte, who ONLY WEARILY COULD CHOMSKY ENDURE TRADITIONAL LINGUISTS WHO THOUGHT FIELDWORK WAS ESSENTIAL AND WOUND UP IN PRIMITIVE PLACES, EMERGING FROM THE TALL GRASS ZIPPING THEIR PANTS UP Martian arrived on earth during almost every by the age of twenty-nine had led victories Chomsky talk on language. against French Royalist forces as well as the Only wearily could Chomsky endure tradi- Austrians and the Ottoman Empire . Alex- tional linguists who thought fieldwork was es- ander the Great, who had conquered much of sential and wound up in primitive places, emerg- the Hellenistic world before his thirtieth ing from the tall grass zipping their pants up. birthday . William Wallace, Guardian of They were like the ordinary flycatchers in Dar- Scotland, who at twenty-seven led the Scots win’s day coming back from the middle of no- to victory over the British at the Battle of where with their sacks full of little facts and Stirling Bridge. buzzing about with their beloved multi-language Charismatic leaders radiate more than simple fluency. But what difference did it make, know- confidence. They radiate authority. They don’t ing all those native tongues? Chomsky made it tell jokes or speak ironically, except to clear he was elevating linguistics to the altitude rebuke—as in “Kindly spare me your ‘originali- of Plato’s transcendent eternal universals. They, ty.’ ” Irony, like plain humor, invariably turns not sacks of scattered facts, were the ultimate re- upon some indulgence of human weakness. ality, the only true objects of knowledge. Be- Charismatic figures show only strength. They sides, he didn’t enjoy the outdoors, where “the refuse to buckle under in the face of threats, in- field” was. He was relocating the field to Olym- cluding physical threats. They are usually pus. Not only that, he was giving linguists per- prophets of some new idea or cause. mission to stay air-conditioned. They wouldn’t Chomsky’s idea of the “language organ” creat- have to leave the building at all, ever again ... ed great excitement among young linguists. He no more trekking off to interview boneheads in made the field seem loftier, more tightly struc- stench-humid huts. And here on Olympus, you tured, more scientific, more conceptual, more had plumbing. on a Platonic plane, not just a huge heaped-up Chomsky had a personality and a charisma leaf pile of the data fieldworkers brought in equal to Georges Cuvier’s in France in the from places one never necessarily heard of be- early 1800s. Cuvier orchestrated his belliger- fore . .. linguistics would no longer mean work- ence from sweet reason to outbursts of perfect- ing out in the field among more breeds of Na— ly timed and rhetorically elegant fury. In con- er—indigenous peoples . than one ever trast, nothing about Chomsky’s charisma was dreamed existed. Thanks to Chomsky’s success, elegant. He spoke in a monotone and never linguistics rose from being merely a satellite or- raised his voice, but his eyes lasered any chal- biting around language studies and became the lenger with a look of absolute authority. He main event on the cutting edge.... The number wasn’t debating him, he was enduring him. of full, formed departments of linguistics soared, Something about Chomsky’s unchanging tone as did the numbers of fieldworkers. Fieldwork 26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2016 was no longer a requirement, however, and more words themselves, the specific sounds and how linguists than dared confess it were relieved not they were fitted together, the mechanics of the to have to go into the not-so-great outdoors. greatest single power known to man . How Now all the new, Higher Things in a linguist’s do people do it? . and their eyes opened wide life were to be found indoors, at a desk . look- as if nobody had ever thought of it before. ing at learned journals with cramped type in- What would eventually become thousands of stead of at a bunch of faces in a cloud of gnats. articles and conference papers began chunder- In a rare recorded instance of someone ing forth. confronting him over this business of a language One of the most revealing examples of Chom- organ, Chomsky finessed his way out of it con sky’s power was when Roger Wescott, the linguist brio. The writer John Gliedman asked Chomsky the Question. Was he saying he had found a part of human anatomy that all the anatomists, internists, surgeons, and pathologists in the world had never laid eyes on? It wasn’t a question of laying eyes on it, Chomsky indicated, because the language organ was located inside the brain.