Babel Tower

  Naomi Lurie says that without grammar no child can unravel the sentences of Milton, or Donne.

  Walter Bishop says most kids will never read Milton or Donne. There is no reason why they should suffer parsing and clause analysis for the sake of the few privileged ones who will. They need to be able to write a job application. To read a government form.

  Guy Croom says that human beings, like it or not, need rules. No community can operate without a few simple rules according to which it conducts its business. He is not in favour of new educational methods which attempt to promote discovery at the expense of learning a few facts. He thinks children are being cheated by being made to discover all sorts of things they could actually simply learn about and then go on to discover more interesting things. Rules facilitate. Rules create order, and without order is no creativity. The poor little children who didn’t know the alphabet are wasting hours looking through their dictionaries at random. There is a pleasure in learning ordered rules which seems now to be despised. He thinks no one can cope with the world who hasn’t internalised a few simple rules of mathematics. He thinks that football and tennis and games of cards would be intensely boring without rules. Anyone who has a child, he says, who has tried to make up a new card game as it went along, and has been subjected to the total boredom of the ad hoc and the random, will know that the need for rules is a deep human need.

  The poet says, “That’s what the Fascists said.” He says, “If you make people learn old poems they hate them. You should let them just find them. You should perhaps prohibit them, outlaw them. Then they’d be hungry for poems.”

  The chairman asks Wijnnobel what he feels about rules.

  Wijnnobel says that he does not think it is helpful to draw an analogy between the rules devised for political or social control of group behaviour and the forms of the structure of language which can be observed and described in all societies. He says, rather carefully, that he believes in the teaching of the forms of language, because if we have no words to describe the structure of our thoughts, we are unable to analyse their nature and their limitations. Nietzsche, he says, claimed that all Western philosophy studies variations on the same problems in recurring circles because all ideas are “unconsciously dominated and directed by simple grammatical functions” which are in the end, Nietzsche also says, physiological. This is not the same as saying that philosophical problems are “only language”: it is a claim that what we can think is a function of our linguistic competence. He himself—unlike some others in the room—is of the opinion that the grammatical forms and structures we use are innate, are part of the structure of our brains informed by our genes, and that the extraordinary subtlety and reach of human intelligence—and its limitations, its recurrent worrying at insoluble “problems”—are a function of this innate order. He also believes that studying this order is hard, and contemplating it is repugnant to many. But if we do not teach words to describe the structure of language, we have no means to consider the structure of thought. This is not a defence, he adds, of the ornate Latinate grammatical exercises now taught, which should be scrapped.

  Magog says he agrees with this, and that the rules of grammar desired by Mr. Croom do indeed often turn into petty rules of social oppression and alienation. He believes that the relations between teachers and children are what is wrong. When he was teaching, he got the confidence of his children, he persuaded them to write more and more truthfully, more and more passionately, about the conflicts in their family life—their hopes and desires—as he has recorded in his book True Life Stories (an ironic reference to the Agony Aunt magazines, as he is sure he has no need to tell this distinguished gathering)—“and the vocabulary and complexity and punch, Mr. Chairman, and punch increased with the truthfulness—”

  “And after,” says Auriol Worth. “After you had stopped teaching these children, whom you had encouraged to speak in this way—to reveal things—I have read your book—afterwards, what happened to them? How long did you stay with them, after you had inspired them to write about abuse and hatred and tension?”

  “I was there for a full two terms. Before I—before I sold my book. They were strengthened by facing their conflicts.”

  “A teacher is not a psychoanalyst.”

  “I have had a lot of flak from people like you, who do nothing much for those in their care—”

  “I teach them, Mr. Magog. I teach them to read, to write, to think. I teach them to look outside themselves. I respect my position. And theirs.”

  “You are simply an authoritarian—”

  “All authority,” says Miss Worth sadly, “nowadays, seems to be wrong.”

  Arthur Beaver says that the present lively exchange of views exemplifies some of the problems he wants to put to the committee about the philosophy of teaching. Martin Buber, he says, claims that the teacher in past times had an accepted authority derived from his culture. He was, in a fine phrase, “the ambassador of history, to this intruder, the child.” And the sickness of this system, which intensified as the cultural authority crumbled and was called in question, was a “will to power” which could become domineering and cruel as it became more uncertainly individual. The contrary fault Buber called “Eros,” the degeneration of authority into an idealised reciprocity and affection, of a professional relationship into a personal one. Which is not sustainable between all teachers and all children, for it depends on honesty and durability, and all teachers do not feel genuine affection for all children, nor do their pseudo-parental relations endure beyond the inevitable parting at the year-end. It is a kind of buddy-buddy relation, which some people believe to be part of child-centred education.

  “I see what you are saying,” says Magog. “But I can assure you I felt real love for every child in my class. Real love.”

  He glares about the table. Alexander believes him. He also knows that there are charismatic teachers who do occasionally inspire by love.

  “For two terms,” says Auriol Worth, acid, headmistressy. “You felt real love for two terms. You translated the love into your written words, and you made their private pains public.”

  “With every care—”

  “I am sure. Every care the reading public and the law could expect.”

  A line of division, a set of terms, are set up. The committee will divide, will see its own divisions, in terms of Eros and Wille zur Macht, the buddy and the boss. Alexander is fascinated.

  After the meeting there is sherry. Alexander moves to the side of Agatha Mond and helps her to hand round glasses. The scientist, Hans Richter, taps Professor Wijnnobel on the shoulder.

  “I liked what you said. About order. About describing thought. If that is what we are doing, this whole undertaking looks quite different. I thought I was just here to see if science teachers could be got to explain themselves a bit better, in better English, and so on. But what you said changes everything. You said something very fine about the limitations of our thought.

  “I am convinced,” he continues calmly, as though he were discussing the structure of salts, “that there are intelligences in the universe of which our own are only a very small sub-set.”

  Gerard Wijnnobel is startled. He has a momentary vision of huge angelic heads, spanning the visible heavens, of an order of serried wings, at once feathered and glassy, at once living forms and geometrically intricate patterns.

  He inclines his great head and strokes his thick moustache.

  “As to that,” he says, “I do not know how we could have any evidence of that. As a two-dimensional paper man could not see or address a three-dimensional clay or flesh man.”

  “But he could intuit his presence. As we intuit the possibility of solutions to problems before we solve them.”

  “Or fail to solve them,” says Wijnnobel.

  “We intuit probable failures, also.”

  “It is certain that we cannot imagine the languages of such intelligences.”

  “I shall apply my own intelligence to
the language we have. It is more interesting than I supposed.”

  “Indeed,” says Wijnnobel.

  VI

  Gerard Wijnnobel sits in his official car and thinks about language. He thinks about order and disorder, about form and chaos. He has thought about these things all his life, always with a sensation of an impossible endeavour. His thought is a raft of parallel planks on a darkly swelling sea, it is a most beautiful cone of light around which is the formless, or maybe only invisible and unmapped, dark. He is Hans Richter’s paper man, floating on his two-dimensional kite on currents of air, of force, he cannot describe or explore.

  He grew up in Leiden, the son of a Protestant theologian, a Calvinist who puzzled, who agonized, daily over the exact relations between virtue, predestination and the words of the one Book. He is not wholly and purely of Dutch Calvinist descent: his mother’s father was half-Jewish, a child of a Talmudic scholar and a Dutch Catholic lady who had come to believe that the Church was guilty of terrible cruelty to the Jews, which had come from a misreading and misuse of the Scriptures. Gerard Wijnnobel’s grandfather, in his turn, had become obsessed with the language of the Book. He had set out on a doomed attempt, part mystical, part historical, part exegetical, to find the traces of the Ur-language, the original speech of God, spoken by Adam in Eden, and indeed by God, the Word Himself, when He called the universe into being out of chaos, simply by naming it. In the days before Babel, before God punished the human race for its presumption in raising its winding structure towards Heaven by dividing its tongues, by setting confusion amongst its speech—in the days before Babel, the occult tradition went, words had been things and things had been words, they had been one, as a man and his shadow perhaps are one, or a man’s mind and his brain. Afterwards, after the fall of the tower, language and the world had not coincided, and the languages of men had become opaque, secret, enfolded in an incomprehensible and unpierceable skin of idiosyncrasies. After the fall of the aspiring tower (almost all mythologies held), the original, divine, single speech had been shattered like a smashed crystal, into seventy-two pieces, or into a number which was a multiple of seventy-two. Various words and letters could be read as splinters of this original sphere—each Hebrew letter, each word, each grammatical form. Kabbalists, Hermetics, Hasidic students of the Torah and the Talmud tried to reconstitute the Old Speech, the Ursprache, from these lost fragments. Gerard Wijnnobel’s grandfather spent his days on the search for this ancient order, occasionally disputing with his grave Calvinist son-in-law over whether or not the Tongues of Flame which descended on the apostles in the upper room at Pentecost had caused them to be able to speak, amongst the unknown tongues in which they babbled, a version, a fragmentary part, of the original Tongue. The fact that Kees Wijnnobel believed that Joachim Steen was doomed to burn in eternal flames after Judgement did not prevent him from finding his linguistic speculations interesting. Kees Wijnnobel was not convinced that the original Tongue had been Hebrew. He thought it was something more natural, more intrinsically part of the nature of things, a tongue in which there were words for lion, lamb, apple, snake, tree, good, evil which wholly contained and corresponded to all their power and meaning. Elephant spoke elephant, earwig spoke earwig.

  The young Gerard Wijnnobel listened and watched. He listened, watched, was revolted, and revolted. The lesson he drew, quite clearly from his father’s Bible commentaries, and more reluctantly—for aesthetic reasons—from the speculations of his grandfather, was that it is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their Hues on nonsense. And not only that, but that perhaps also there was a trap, a quirk, a temptation in the nature of language itself that led people, that induced them, to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense. He discovered Nietzsche, who preached against Christianity and its forms with all the delicious fervour and energy of a Christian hell-fire preacher converted, and Nietzsche said, “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” Theo-logy, the language of God, grammar, the forms of theology.

  Gerard Wijnnobel became a mathematician. He became a mathematician in order to contemplate order and to renounce the mess of language. He worked on the Fibonacci numbers, which describe, among other things, the spiral of the cochlea in the inner ear and the principle that curls the ramshorn, the ammonites, certain snails, certain arrangements of branches around tree trunks. He withdrew into pure form, as though he saw only the relations of quadrilaterals, lengths, and primary colours of Mondrian, when once he had seen the forms of light made and recorded by Vermeer with an image of a rectangular coloured window and the enlightened solid body of a reading, or thinking, or pouring woman.

  Perhaps because he came to England in the war and thus had to speak and teach and ultimately think in another language, which, however well mastered, was not his own, the Wijnnobel of the 1940s and 1950s turned his attention back from the forms of mathematics to the forms of language, to grammar. He became interested in Roman Jakobson’s theories of “distinctive features” of all languages, in Saussure, who saw language as analogous to a chess game in which words were arbitrary signs to which certain formal functions were assigned, and most recently in Noam Chomsky’s claim to have demonstrated that there was a deep universal structure of language, a universal grammar, innate in all human brains, not learned, any more than the beat of the heart or the focus of the eye is learned, not modified by society or experience, but part of human biological identity, capable of constructing the hum and buzz and thought patterns of innumerable tongues. As beavers are born knowing how to make dams, and as spiders are born with the ability to make webs, so human beings are born with the ability to speak and think in grammatical forms. Chomsky’s generative grammar, Chomsky’s transformational descriptions, still in 1964 new and uncompromising, are mathematical in their exactness and depend on the use of algorithms and mathematical structures for their understanding. Gerard Wijnnobel is convinced intellectually that Chomsky is right: that the human brain is born with a capacity to generate and transform language—that this is innate, not absorbed into some empty bucket or inscribed on some tabula rasa, but there in the folds of the cortex, the dendrites and synapses and axons of the neurones in the brain. The theories, both of learning and of language, that preceded this one are more interested in the way the mind is formed and shaped by society, or by learning, or by random events. To believe that linguistic competence is both innate and unalterable, in the present world, smacks of determinism, smacks of predestinarianism, and of more unpleasant things, a suggestion that heredity, not environment, differentiates between men. Many of the men Wijnnobel meets find that suggestion morally repugnant, exactly as he found his father’s ideas repugnant. There is much talk, in his world, of language as either a crystalline, immutable structure, or as order-from-chaos, a flame-like structure that holds its changing shape in the winds of its environment. Aesthetically, Gerard Wijnnobel would like to believe in the flame, in the shifting, variable, changing form. Intellectually, he believes in the crystal. Intuitively, also, he believes in the crystal. Chomsky’s descriptions of the human capacity to construct language fit his own sense of his own uses of it.

  He believes too, that in some distant future the neuroscientists, the geneticists, the students of the matter of the mind, may find out the forms of language in the forest of the dendrites, in the links of the synapses. The genes are aperiodic crystals, dictating, to the matter they control, the structures, the forms, the substances that matter shall become. Somewhere in the future the understanding of their invariable form may lead to the understanding of the web of grammar and its invariable deep structure. Or so Wijnnobel believes. None of this is exactly helpful with the problem of what to teach to small and not-so-small children, with which the committee is engaged.

  VII

  Thomas Poole sends Frederica to see his doctor, a cheerful fat man in Bloomsbury Square. The ménage in the flat, after two months, has taken on some aspects of a marriage. There is equable discussion of shoppi
ng lists, of the feelings and friendships of Lizzie, Simon and Leo, also of books, of the novels on Frederica’s new course, which takes place in a school called Our Lady of the Sorrows, and of ways to dovetail this teaching with the teaching at the Art School. Leo is quiet. He asks sometimes if they will go “back”—he does not say “home”; children can use language with great care. He says, “They will miss me,” and specifies, “Sooty will miss me.” He watches Frederica for signs of intention, and Frederica attempts to convey settled calm, temporary certainty, trust.

  Frederica’s wound is healing badly. It festers, it re-opens, it is the wrong sort of shiny pink, there is pus.

  Thomas Poole puts a hand on Frederica’s shoulder as she leaves.

  “Courage,” he says. “These things take time.”

  Frederica turns her face to him. He will kiss her; it seems natural. Leo appears in a doorway, and Frederica shrinks into herself, briefly putting up a hand to ward off a non-existent blow.

  “I’m sorry,” says Thomas Poole, easily.

  “No need,” says Frederica.

  The fat doctor, whose name is Limass, probes and palpates and dresses the wound. He says, with his cheerful manner, “This is a nasty one, this is a mess, the way it hit you was bad luck.”

  Frederica says, “There is something else.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Something is wrong with my—with my vagina, with all that area. It is very painful. There are what I think you would call pustules. And a sort of crust.”

  She is precise. She is shamed. She is in pain.

  The doctor ceases to smile, does a cursory examination, writes out a chit, and tells her she must attend the Middlesex Hospital clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. Frederica, feeling automatically guilty, because she has gambled sexually in her time and has survived, drops her head.