Jim Coleman (of Nightingale at Large fame) made the following comment to an earlier post on Ocularcentrism. His insights are too provocative to lay hidden in the folds of this blog:
I wanted to be sure you noticed …the article in the April 16th New Yorker by John Calapinto on the language of the Piraha, a small Brazilian hunter-gatherer tribe living on two small Amazon tributaries.
The piece is mainly about Dan Everett’s linguistic studies of the Piraha language—an exceeding “simple” language—and various linguistic controversies, Chomsky, etc., such as doesn’t a language that shows no use of “recursion,” phrase nesting to build complexity, violate Chomsky’s generalization about a Universal human Grammar that has recursion as its fundamental feature.
But—for you and your Australia—note at the end of the article the insights of Everett’s former wife, also a linguist, also proficient in the Piraha language. She learned most from listing to the women sing to (teach language to) their children. In this speech even words themselves apparently disappear and only tones, lilts, clicks, and a lyric essence remains. And yet the story is told, the children learn. So, she hints at a much more modest and near mystical theory of their language.
You refer to the Aboriginal way of perceiving as a challenge to the hegemony of vision in the ocularcentrism of our culture. I’d guess the Piraha offer a somehow similar (or at least equally radical) challenge to our language-equals-thought assumptions. It is a principle of linguistics (established by the great Vergotsky, I think it is) that all human languages are completely adequate to express everything necessary for those speakers. The Piraha appear to sing stories to children that have no beginning, middle, or end. There is none of the ubiquitous nesting of phrases as in our culture and, in some sense, almost no words. To say the do not have a complete language is like saying the Aboriginal people cannot do art.
This is a provocative subject, if it makes us wonder whether Chomsky might come a cropper in Amazonia. As well as making a superb comparison, Jim references a wonderful article, fully worth staying up late to read.
It reminded me of the mandarin point of view about our own language — Millennial English, still recognizing Shakespeare — becoming lost if it evolved more rapidly to Spanglish, so that the English classics would have less and less relevance. In this “Bladerunner” scenario, the mandarins tried to discern how on earth a person would express himself, failing to understand that, however it might sound to us, the English of 25 or 50 years from now would have one certain feature shared by every other language — it would be sufficient to say what its users needed and wanted to say.
I have been thinking about the parallels that Jim is drawing here for days, and there are still a lot of questions I’m mulling over. Language always sufficient to its users–we can agree. But what about the art and literature of each successive epoch? There’s that added issue of the myth of progress, the fact that there are periods where the literature is inspired and almost viral in its contagion of excellence (Elizabethan drama, for example) and other periods where works of art are weakened by various forces (totalitarian oppression under Franco) Can we say that every epoch has the language it needs and the art it deserves? Is there something to the notion of esprit du temps?
Some of the biggest achievements in art or language in the modern era are way, way off mainstream when they actually happen. Joyce and Proust were not household words in literature when they were actually writing. Modigliani could hardly have been less recognized outside Montparnasse. These artists who are known by name now to people who neither read nor look were then known only to the few who made it their business to know. Most US poets don’t enjoy a wide readership — there would be something wrong if they did: Rod McKuen comes to mind.
Art is different from literature because, unlike reading, it takes almost no time to be current with — back when Damien Hirst was considered by high culture mavens to be an avant-gardist, it took him only a split second to become a household word. When Philip Roth published “Portnoy…” you had to read the whole book — it was considered cheating just to read the forty most appalling pages.
Where am I headed with all this? That our era makes it impossible to discern the difference between influence and notoriety in visual artists, and has marginalized literary artists to the point that the best ones cannot command a fraction of the readership of Proust and Joyce in their day. These are some considerations that prevent the best our era has to offer becoming viral. I’m sure we deserve better than this. Definitely time to remember Stendahl’s dedication of The Chaterhouse of Parma –“To the happy few.”