The Kingdom of Speech: Tom Wolfe’s shot at unlocking the mystery of language

Over the festive period, Reaction authors are writing in with their favourite books from 2016 that they feel would make perfect gifts for Christmas or ideal New Year reading.

There are a few things to dislike about The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe’s slim treatise on evolution and the origins language, as well as a few things to distrust. There are, however, far more things that delight in what amounts to a piece of sharp contrarian solipsism from an octogenerian stylist wrapped in ideas as pristinely white  as his famous suit and homburg hat. Make no mistake: this a polemical scuttlebutt of a book, full of history reread for its implied motives and hidden meanings. In many respects it’s far too reductive to be taken seriously but too well written to be ignored. Wolfe remains the patriarch of the New Journalism and that technique of fusing literary style with reportage makes for a book that is as immensely enjoyable as it is at times downright frustrating.

No scientist writes like Wolfe and, more importantly, no science writer comes close to finding the same fulcrum points on language. He is a non-specialist writing about a subject that leaves even specialists admitting their failure. Yet he does so with such swagger that it’s hard not to leave his company bewitched by an argument that ultimately amounts to little more than Wolfe gesticulating towards two centuries of scientists, linguists, and philosophers, and bemoaning their lack of insight into the place of speech in human evolution.

The book begins with that very moment when eight evolutionists announced that ‘they were giving up, throwing in the towel, folding, crapping out when it came to the question of where speech—language—comes from and how it works.’ This frank admission is enough for Wolfe to set about dismantling the edifice of Darwinism.

His pen is scathing, shaping quick character portraits with fluid stokes (Wolfe, incidentally, is a extremely gifted but underappreciated illustrator). His Darwin is hesitant and guilty, too busy puking three times a day to write his great theory of natural selection. He is only forced to do so by Alfred Wallace, a young naturalist, who sends Darwin his manuscript entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”. The paper threatens to scoop Darwin.

This rivalry wraps around the first half of Wolfe’s narrative. We have the older guilt-wracked Darwin, esteemed and well connected, yet trapped in his home, unable to venture out into the field but forced to retreat into his imagination to create his theories. He is starkly different to socially clumsy Wallace forming his theories from a sick bed where is suffering from a malady contracted during his field expeditions.

The physical decay is hardly incidental. This quickly becomes a conceit about human vanities; a familiar story stretched on the frame of Wolfe’s purpose. These are great men who are sometimes shameless, prone to their own bodily weakness, and often raised to heights of greatness to which they do not really belong. This is the true ‘Kingdom of Speech’, where we are all vulnerable to the power, the politics, and the poetry of language. Great men die old, either with their questions unanswered or succumbing to the easy answered offer by spiritualism or religion. What is ‘greatness’, Wolfe seems to ask, when we are all constructs of our language?

‘Only speech gives man the power to dream up religions and gods to animate them…and in six extraordinary cases to change history—for centuries—with words alone, without money or political backing. The names of the six are Jesus, Muhammad (whose military power came only after twenty years of preaching), John Calvin, Marx, Freud—and Darwin. And this, rather than any theory, is what makes Darwin the monumental figure that he is.’

Language, then, isn’t explored here as a subject that will offer up any easy (or even difficult) answers. Rather, Wolfe adopts it as another site where familiar confrontations are played out. As if to make the point, language becomes a key to unlocking the book. The word ‘brainpan’ appears repeatedly and all but gives away Wolfe’s game plan. This is an encomium of the mysteries of the human body. Incapable of explaining language or consciousness, Wolfe materializes the infinitely complex brain in the form of lumps of sodden thoughts, meanings, perceptions and emotions. It’s a sign of Wolfe’s deeper belief that he devotes more time to a case of diarrhoea in a subsidiary character than he does to the nearly five years that Darwin was on HMS Beagle. Thus is human history reduced to spasms and retching. This is less than a meditation on the mind or consciousness than a celebration of ‘brainpans’ everywhere and the fabrications for which he have no rational explanation.

Chief among the brainpans is that which belongs to Noam Chomsky, who here dominates the second half of the book. Chomsky is portrayed (probably quite rightly) as the leader of a latter day cult. Chomsky is bold, arrogant, gifted, but far too confident in declaring, as he did when still in his twenties, that all speech reduces to the ‘universal grammar’ that lies so deep that it’s hidden in all our languages. Somewhat predictably, Wolfe need only find a polar opposite to set up the drama, which he does in the shape of Daniel L. Everett, author of ‘Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle’. In was in the Amazon that Everett discovered the Pirahã people, whose language defies Chomsky’s theories. Wolfe couldn’t be more blatant in drawing his parallel.

‘In the heading of the article was a photograph, reprinted many times since, of Everett submerged up to his neck in the Maici River. […] No linguist could help but contrast that with everybody’s mental picture of Chomsky sitting up high, very high, in an armchair in an air-conditioned office at MIT, spic-and-span…he never looks down, only inward.’

What we actually have here is a book familiar to readers of Wolfe. Everett, the unacknowledged hero of 20th century linguistics, has ‘the right stuff’. He puts his life (and the lives of his family) on the line in the search for the elusive mystery of language. As with Darwin and Wallace, so too with Chomsky and Everett.

Does it make for a compelling argument against Chomsky or nativism (the belief that structures of language are hard wired into the brain)? Not really. It does, however, make for a riveting read – quick enough to consume in an afternoon. There might be better books out there about language and human consciousness but, in a sense, there are none that do a better job of reminding us that we are all prone to making new religions out of the old. It does not so much matter that Wolfe barely touches upon cognitive models, including contemporary (and still quite primitive) computational models of the mind, but instead offers a final chapter in which he voices his delight in realising that language is a tool, perhaps the first tool of human making. As a conclusion it is unconvincing as both science and philosophy. But as an expression of faith from one of our most gifted writers who has always abandoned himself willingly to the kingdom of ideas, mysteries, myths and (more importantly) narrative, it is supremely good.

The Kingdom of Speech. Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Cape, 2016.