Anti-Babel

Page 20 American Book Review anti-BaBeL Dinda L. Gorlée eCholalias: on the Forgetting oF language Daniel Heller-Roazen Zone Books http://www.zonebooks.org 288 pages; cloth, $28.95; paper, $21.95 “Let us confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Gen. 11: 7). God’s judgment disturbed our linguistic communication . Quashing the monumental project of the Babel tower builders, the conversations in one language were disarranged and caused the strife of loose words and vague sentences, dooming humanity to oblivion. The builders were scattered far and wide and divided by their separate tongues. The sight and sound of the linguistic confusion made Babel an isolated instance of globalized alienation. The biblical confusio means “forgetting of previous language,” in Daniel Heller-Roazen’s view of his book Echolalias. Today the “disappearing” problems of stopped and hidden speech can pertain to visible and invisible language barriers of all kinds of embarrassment and misunderstanding of the speakers. Echolalias is a structuralist (now poststructuralist ) volume with some deconstructionist undertones. The chapter “The Glimmer Returns” is a return to Ferdinand de Saussure, up to the “new history” of Noam Chomsky—but to solve the ambiguities and disambiguities of language, the Derridean plea for (de)constructive action of word, phrase, and language is not answered in Echolalias. The practical examples, including historical jokes, hidden letters, and funny anecdotes, are argued in twenty-one thought-provoking mini-essays, each building a linguistic punch line showing cases of defective or poor memory and negligence or heedlessness in language .The many examples of this learned volume are mostly derived from classical, medieval, and modern literature in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Latin, French, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Persian, and other languages. In our daily lives, we also survive the linguistic confusio. Our interpreting mind focuses upon producing dialects and ideolects, for public use we fabricate pidgins and creoles, and in the professional sphere, we employ the duties of translators and interpreters. Echolalias is about the anti-Babel events we encounter everywhere and everyplace. Humans seem to forget, in part or totally, our native and foreign languages, as a result of exile, war, emigration , mental illness, and other forms of censure of speech. Communicating with foreigners, learning a second language, or travelling abroad could turn into a bizarre enterprise using instinctive gestures to take the place of unknown words and utterances. Thanks to the anti-Babel, the bottom has fallen out of our unity as one family. We do not belong to a totem clan with a “primitive” folk form of language and culture, but are alone. The Godless anxiety of the nemesis of our tongue calls for an artificial and magical pilgrimage to recuperate the intimate feeling of gathering together with some similarity or continuity in the sense of dissimilarity or discontinuity to form and develop our verbal and textual speech. As the semiotic title suggests, Echolalias echoes the studies of child language by Roman Jakobson, who examined and illustrated what he called the “babble period [when] the child produces the widest variety of sounds (for example, clicks, apalatalized, rounded or pharyngalized consonants, affricates, sibilants, etc.).” Significantly, Jakobson’s essay “Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeinen Lautgesetze” was written during his political exile in Scandinavia in 1939—and in later years, Jakobson emigrated to the US and published the translated article in Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (1971). Jakobson’s personal and professional destiny dominates Heller-Roazen’s speech-related oblivion; see the first chapters “TheApex of Babble” and “Exclamations .” After child language, speech grows for adults into a complex outward problem-solving system for the provincial and globalized environments which we inhabit, where meaning is a communicative and socialized action with a reactive context. Man, as we should recall, is an advanced neuromuscular organism, capable of learning a native language and developing it further. At the same time, man is behavioristically organized by a cultural mind of a stream of images and sensations, and ruled by memory. Jakobson studied how this flash flood of signifying words can be jeopardized by aphasia, schizophrenia, and other person-oriented speech disabilities ; in Echolalias, see the chapters “The Lesser Animal” and “Schizophonetics.” Yet collectively, learning a native language by...