Belles-lettres in the schools fashioned both speech and the art of punctuation—the sound and the look of nuance. Who spoke well pointed well; who pointed well spoke well. One was the skill of the other. No one now punctuates for nuance—or, rather, whoever punctuates for nuance is “corrected.” Copy editors do not know the whole stippled range of the colon or the semicolon, do not know that “O” is not “oh,” do not know that not all juxtaposed adjectives are coordinate adjectives; and so forth. The degeneration of punctuation and word-by-word literacy is pandemic among English speakers: this includes most poets and novelists. To glimpse a typical original manuscript undoctored by a copy editor is to suffer a shock at the sight of ignorant imprecision; and to examine a densely literate manuscript after it has passed through the leveling hands of a copy editor is again to suffer a shock at the sight of ignorant imprecision.
In 1930 none of this was so. The relentlessly gradual return of aural culture, beginning with the telephone (a farewell to letter-writing), the radio, the motion picture, and the phonograph, speeded up by the television set, the tape recorder, and lately the video recorder, has by now, after half a century’s worth of technology, restored us to the pre-literate status of face-toface speech. And mass literacy itself is the fixity of no more than a century, starting with the advancing reforms following the industrial revolution— reforms introducing, in England, the notion of severely limited leisure to the classes that formerly had labored with no leisure at all. Into that small new recreational space fell what we now call the “nineteenth-century novel,” in both its supreme and its lesser versions. The act of reading—the work, in fact, of the act of reading—appeared to complicate and intensify the most ordinary intelligence. The silent physiological translation of letters into sounds, the leaping eye encoding, the transmigration of blotches on a page into the story of, say, Dorothea Brooke, must surely count among the most intricate of biological and transcendent designs. In 1930 the so-called shopgirl, with her pulp romance, is habitually engaged in this electrifying webwork of eye and mind. In 1980 she reverts, via electronics, to the simple speaking face. And then it is all over, by and large, for mass literacy. High literacy has been the province of an elite class since Sumer; there is nothing novel in having a caste of princely readers. But the culture of mass literacy, in its narrow period from 1830 to 1930, was something else: Gutenberg’s revolution did not take effect in a popular sense—did not properly begin— until the rise of the middle class at the time, approximately, of the English Reform Act of 1832. Addison’s Spectator, with its Latin epigraphs, was read by gentlemen, but Dickens was read by nearly everyone. The almost universal habit of reading for recreation or excitement conferred the greatest complexity on the greatest number, and the thinnest sliver of history expressed it: no more than a single century. It flashed by between aural culture and aural culture, no longer-lived than a lightning bug. The world of the VCR is closer to the pre-literate society of traveling mummers than it is to that of the young Scott Fitzgerald’s readership in 1920.
When James read out “The Question of Our Speech” in 1905, the era of print supremacy was still in force, unquestioned; the typewriter and the electric light had arrived to strengthen it, and the telephone was greeted only as a convenience, not a substitute. The telephone was particularly welcome—not much was lost that ought not to have been lost in the omission of letters agreeing to meet the 8:42 on Tuesday night on the east platform. Since then, the telephone has abetted more serious losses: exchanges between artists and thinkers; documents of family and business relations; quarrels and cabals among politicians; everything that in the past tended to be preserved for biographers and cultural historians. The advent of the computer used as word processor similarly points toward the wiping out of any progressive record of thought; the grain of a life can lie in the illumination of the crossed-out word.
But James, in the remoteness of post-Victorian technology, spoke unshadowed by these threatened disintegrations among the community of the literate; he spoke in the very interior of what seemed then to be a permanently post-aural culture. He read from a manuscript; later that year, Houghton, Mifflin published it together with another lecture, this one far more famous, “The Lesson of Balzac.” We cannot hear his voice on a phonograph record, as we can hear his fellow self-exile T. S. Eliot’s; and this, it might be said, is another kind of loss. If we cherish photographs of Henry James’s extraordinarily striking head with its lantern eyes, we can regret the loss of a filmed interview of the kind that nowadays captures and delivers into the future Norman Mailer and John Updike. The return to an aural culture is, obviously, not all a question of loss; only of the most significant loss of all: the widespread nurture by portable print; print as water, and sometimes wine. It was, in its small heyday (we must now begin to say was), the most glorious work of the eye-linked brain.
And in the heyday of that glorious work, James made a false analysis. In asking for living models, his analysis belonged to the old aural culture, and he did not imagine its risks. In the old aural culture, speech was manner, manner was manners, manners did teach the tone of the civilized world. In the new aural culture, speech remains manner, manner becomes manners, manners go on teaching the tone of the world. The difference is that the new aural culture, based, as James urged, on emulation, is governed from below. Emulation as a principle cannot control its sources. To seize on only two blatancies: the guerrilla toy of the urban underclass, the huge and hugely loud portable radio—the “ghetto blaster”—is adopted by affluent middle-class white adolescents; so is the locution “Hey, man,” which now crosses both class and gender. James worried about the replacement in America of “Yes” by “Yeah” (and further by the comedic “Yep”), but its source was the drawl endemic to the gilt-and-plush parlors of the upper middle class. “Yeah” did not come out of the street; it went into the street. But it is also fairly certain that the “Yeah”-sayers, whatever their place in society, could not have been strong readers, even given the fissure that lies between reading and the style of one’s talk. The more attached one is to the community of readers, the narrower the fissure. In a society where belles-lettres are central to education of the young, what controls speech is the degree of absorption in print. Reading governs speech, governs tone, governs manner and manners and civilization. “It is easier to overlook any question of speech than to trouble about it,” James complained, “but then it is also easier to snort or neigh, to growl or ‘meaow,’ than to articulate and intonate.”
And yet he overlooked the primacy of the high act of reading. No one who, in the age of conscience and work, submitted to “The Lady of the Lake,” or parsed under the aegis of Albert N. Raub, or sent down a bucket into The Etymological Reader, was likely to snort or neigh or emit the cry of the tabby. Agreed, it was a more publicly formal and socially encrusted age than ours, and James was more publicly formal and socially encrusted than many of his contemporaries: he was an old-fashioned gentleman. He had come of age during the Civil War. His clothes were laid out by a manservant. His standard was uncompromising. All the same, he missed how and where his own standard ruled. He failed to discover it in the schoolhouses, to which it had migrated after the attenuation of the old aural culture. To be sure, the school texts, however aspiring, could not promise to the children of the poor, or to the children of the immigrants, or to the children of working men, any hope of a manservant; but they did promise a habit of speech, more mobilizing and organizing, even, than a valet. The key to American speech was under James’s nose. It was at that very moment being turned in a thousand locks. It was opening gate after gate. Those who could read according to an elevated standard could write sufficiently accomplished sentences, and those who could write such sentences could “articulate and intonate.”
“Read, read! Read yourself through all the stages of the masters of the language,” James might have exhorted the graduates. Instead, he told them to seek “contact and communication, a beneficent contagion,” in o
rder to “bring about the happy state—the state of sensibility to tone.” It offended him, he confessed, that there were “forces assembled to make you believe that no form of speech is provably better than another.” Forty years on, Trolander, Davis, and Papp set their own formidable forces against the forces of relativism in enunciation. Like James, they were zealous to impose their own parochialisms. James did not pronounce the r in “mother”; it was, therefore, vulgar to let it be heard. Our Midwestern teachers did pronounce the r; it was, therefore, vulgar not to let it be heard. How, then, one concludes, is any form of speech “provably better than another”? In a relativist era, the forces representing relativism in enunciation have for the moment won the argument, it seems; yet James has had his way all the same. With the exception of the South and parts of the East Coast, there is very nearly a uniform vox Americana. And we have everywhere a uniform “tone.” It is in the streets and in the supermarkets, on the radio and on television; and it is low, low, low. In music, in speech, in manner, the upper has learned to imitate the lower. Cheapened imprecise speech is the triumph of James’s tribute to emulation; it is the only possible legacy that could have come of the principle of emulation.
Then why did James plead for vocal imitation instead of reading? He lived in a sea of reading, at the highest tide of literacy, in the time of the crashing of its billows. He did not dream that the sea would shrink, that it was impermanent, that we would return, through the most refined technologies, to the aural culture. He had had his own dealings with a continuing branch of the aural culture—the theater. He had written for it as if for a body of accomplished readers, and it turned on him with contempt. “Forget not,” he warned in the wake of his humiliation as a playwright, “that you write for the stupid—that is, your maximum of refinement must meet the minimum of intelligence of the audience—the intelligence, in other words, of the biggest ass it may conceivably contain. It is a most unholy trade!” He was judging, in this outcry, all those forms that arrange for the verbal to bypass the eye and enter solely through the ear. The ear is, for subtlety of interpretation, a coarser organ than the eye; it follows that nearly all verbal culture designed for the ear is broader, brighter, larger, louder, simpler, less intimate, more insistent—more theatrical—than any page of any book.
For the population in general, the unholy trades—they are now tremendously in the plural, having proliferated—have rendered reading nearly obsolete, except as a source of data and as a means of record-keeping— “warehousing information.” For this the computer is an admittedly startling advance over Pharaoh’s indefatigably meticulous scribes, notwithstanding the lofty liturgical poetry that adorned the ancient records, offering a tendril of beauty among the granary lists. Pragmatic reading cannot die, of course, but as the experience that feeds Homo ridens, reading is already close to moribund. In the new aural culture of America, intellectuals habitually define “film” as “art” in the most solemn sense, as a counterpart of the literary novel, and ridicule survivors of the age of “movies” as naïfs incapable of making the transition from an old form of popular entertainment to a new form of serious expression meriting a sober equation with written art—as if the issue had anything to do with what is inherently complex in the medium, rather than with what is inherently complex in the recipient of the medium. Undoubtedly any movie is more “complicated” than any book; and also more limited by the apparatus of the “real.” As James noted, the maker of aural culture brings to his medium a “maximum of refinement”—i.e., he does the best he can with what he has to work with; sometimes he is even Shakespeare. But the job of sitting in a theater or in a movie house or at home in front of a television set is not so reciprocally complex as the wheels-within-wheels job of reading almost anything at all (including the comics). Reading is an act of imaginative conversion. That specks on a paper can turn into tale or philosophy is as deep a marvel as alchemy or wizardry. A secret brush construes phantom portraits. In the proscenium or the VCR everything is imagined for one: there is nothing to do but see and hear, and what’s there is what is literally there. When film is “poetic,” it is almost never because of language, but rather because of the resemblance to paintings or engravings—one thinks of the knight on a horse in a field of flowers in Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Where film is most art, it is least a novelty.
The new aural culture is prone to appliance-novelty—a while ago who could have predicted the video recorder or the hand-held miniature television set, and who now knows what variations and inventions lie ahead? At the same time there is a rigidity to the products of the aural culture—like those static Egyptian sculptures, stylistically unaltered for three millennia, that are brilliantly executed but limited in imaginative intent.
In the new aural culture there is no prevalent belles-lettres curriculum to stimulate novel imaginative intent, that “wizard note” of the awakened Enchantress; what there is is replication—not a reverberation or an echo, but a copy. The Back to Basics movement in education, which on the surface looks as if it is calling for revivification of a belles-lettres syllabus, is not so much reactionary as lost in literalism, or trompe l’oeil: another example of the replication impulse of the new aural culture, the culture of theater. Only in a trompe l’oeil society would it occur to anyone to “bring back the old values” through bringing back the McGuffey Reader—a scenic designer’s idea, and still another instance of the muddle encouraged by the notion of “emulation.” The celebration of the McGuffey Reader can happen only in an atmosphere where “film,” a copyist’s medium, is taken as seriously as a book.
A book is not a “medium” at all; it is far spookier than that, one of the few things-in-themselves that we can be sure of, a Platonic form that can inhabit a virtual infinity of experimental incarnations: any idea, any story, any body of poetry, any incantation, in any language. Above all, a book is the riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk—a free fall, a loose splash, a spill. And that is what an aural society, following a time of complex literacy, finally admits to: spill and more spill. James had nothing to complain of: he flourished in a period when whoever read well could speak well; the rest was provincialism—or call it, in kindness, regional exclusiveness. Still, the river of language—to cling to the old metaphor—ran most forcefully when confined to the banks that governed its course. But we who come after the hundred-year hegemony of the ordinary reader, we who see around us, in all these heaps of appliances (each one a plausible “electronic miracle”), the dying heaves of the caste-free passion for letters, should know how profoundly—and possibly how irreversibly—the mummers have claimed us.
Published in Partisan Review, Fiftieth Anniversary Issue, 1984–85
Sholem Alekhem’s Revolution
Yiddish is a direct, spirited, and spiritually alert language that is almost a thousand years old—centuries older than Chaucerian English, and, like the robust speech of Chaucer’s pilgrims, expressively rooted in the quotidian lives of ordinary folk. It is hard to be pretentious or elevated in Yiddish and easy to poke fun. Yiddish is especially handy for satire, cynicism, familiarity, abuse, sentimentality, resignation, for a sense of high irony, and for putting people in their place and events in bitter perspective: all the defensive verbal baggage an involuntarily migratory nation is likely to need en route to the next temporary refuge. In its tenderer mien, Yiddish is also capable of a touching conversational intimacy with a consoling and accessible God. If Yiddish lacks cathedral grandeur, there is anyhow the compensation of coziness, of smallness, of a lovingly close, empathic, and embracing Creator who can be appealed to in the diminutive. Yiddish is a household tongue, and God, like other members of the family, is sweetly informal in it.
Starting in the early medieval period, the Jews of Europe were rarely allowed a chance to feel at home. Consequently Yiddish developed on the move, evolving out of a mixture of various tenth-century urban German dialects (not exclusively Middle High German, a li
nguistic misapprehension only recently superseded), and strengthened in its idiosyncrasies by contributions from French, Italian, Slavic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. (The last, the language of the Talmud and of Jesus, was widely in use in the Near East beginning around 300 b.c.e.) Until the end of the eighteenth century, Yiddish was the overwhelming vernacular of European Jewish communities from Amsterdam to Smolensk, from the Baltic to the Balkans, and as far south as Italy. Driven relentlessly eastward by the international brutality of the Crusaders and by the localized brutality of periodic pogroms, the language suffered successive uprootings and took on new morphological influences. In 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and Ferdinand and Isabella issued their anti-Jewish edict of expulsion, the language of the Spanish Jews—called Judezmo or Ladino—underwent its own upheavals, fleeing the depredations of the Inquisition to Holland, Italy, Turkey, North Africa, and even the New World.
And all the while Yiddish remained a language without a name, or almost so. “Yiddish” means “Jewish,” or what Jews speak—but this term became current only toward the close of the nineteenth century. Before then, the everyday speech of Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., Jews without Spanish or Arabic language connections) was designated “Judeo-German,” which essentially misrepresented it, since it was steadfastly a language in its own right, with its own regionalisms and dialects. To think of Yiddish (as many German-speakers tend to) merely as a fossilized or corrupted old German dialect would oblige us similarly to think of French as a deformed and slurred vestige of an outlying Latin patois deposited on the Rhone by a defunct Roman colony. But “Judeo-German” at least implied a modicum of dignity; at any rate, it was a scholar’s word. The name Jews themselves, intellectuals in particular, habitually clapped on Yiddish was not a name at all; it was, until the miraculous year 1888, an opprobrium: zhargon. Gibberish; prattle; a subtongue, something less than a respectably cultivated language. Yiddish was “jargon” to the intellectuals despite its then eleven million speakers (i.e., before the Nazi decimations), despite the profusion of its press, theater, secular educational systems, religious and political movements, and despite its long (though problematical) history of literary productivity.
Metaphor and Memory Page 18