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Interpreting | 2010.08.19

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have | Tony Judt

As a tribute to the remarkable historian Tony Judt, who died last week, we publish one of his final essays

I was raised on words. They tumbled off the kitchen table on to the floor where I sat: grandfather, uncles and refugees flung Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French and what passed for English at one another in a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation. Sententious flotsam from the Edwardian-era Socialist Party of Great Britain hung around our kitchen promoting the True Cause. I spent happy hours listening to central European autodidacts arguing into the night: "Marxismus", "Zionismus", "Socialismus". Talking, it seemed, was the point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense.

In my turn – and to find my place – I too talked. For party pieces I would remember words, perform them, translate them. "Ooh, he\'ll be a lawyer," they\'d say. "He\'ll charm the birds off the trees": something I attempted fruitlessly in parks for a while before applying the admonition in its Cockney usage to no greater effect during my adolescent years. By then I had graduated from the intensity of polyglot exchanges to the cooler elegance of BBC English.

The 50s – when I attended elementary school – were a rule-bound age in the teaching and use of English. We were instructed in the unacceptability of the most minor syntactical transgression. "Good" English was at its peak. Thanks to BBC radio and cinema newsreel there were nationally accepted norms; the authority of class and region determined not just how you said things but the kind of things it was appropriate to say. Accents abounded (my own included), ranked according to respectability: typically a function of social standing and geographical distance from London.

I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay, The Uses of Literacy. A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. From Lucky Jim to Look Back in Anger and kitchen sink dramas, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and "proper" speech were under attack. But the barbarians resorted to the perfected cadences of received English: it never occurred to me, reading them, that to rebel one must dispense with good form.

By the time I reached college words were my thing. As one teacher equivocally observed, I had the talents of a "silver-tongued orator" – combining (as I fondly assured myself) the inherited confidence of the milieu with the critical edge of the outsider. Oxbridge tutorials reward the verbally felicitous student: the neo-Socratic style ("Why did you write this?", "What did you mean by it?") invites the solitary recipient to explain himself at length, while implicitly disadvantaging the shy, reflective undergraduate who would prefer to retreat to the back of a seminar. My self-serving faith in articulacy was reinforced: not merely evidence of intelligence, but intelligence itself.

Did it occur to me that the silence of the teacher in this pedagogical setting was crucial? Certainly silence was something at which I was never adept, whether as student or teacher. Some of my most impressive colleagues have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I have envied them this self-restraint.

Articulacy is regarded as an aggressive talent. But for me its functions were substantively defensive: rhetorical flexibility allows for a feigned closeness – conveying proximity while maintaining distance. That is what actors do – but the world is not really a stage, and there is something artificial in the exercise: one sees it in this US president. I too have marshalled language to fend off intimacy – which perhaps explains a romantic penchant for Protestants and Native Americans, reticent cultures both.

In matters of language, of course, outsiders are frequently deceived: I recall a senior American partner of McKinsey explaining to me that in their early days in England he found it nearly impossible to choose young associates – everyone seemed so articulate, analyses tripping off their pens. How could you tell who was smart and who merely polished?

Words may deceive – mischievous and untrustworthy. I remember being spellbound by the fantasy history of the Soviet Union woven in his Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge by the elderly Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher (The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967). The form so elegantly transcended the content that we accepted the latter on trust: detoxification took a while. Sheer rhetorical facility need not denote originality and depth of content.

All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy became an object of suspicion in the 70s: the retreat from "form" favoured uncritical approbation of mere "self-expression", above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express opinions freely, and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded favours independent thought: "Don\'t worry how you say it, it\'s the ideas that count".

Forty years on from the 60s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unravelling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated – "doing your own thing" took protean form.

Today "natural" expression is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. For many centuries in the western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but it was never a matter of indifference: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

The professionalisation of academic writing – and the grasping of humanists for the security of theory and methodology – favours obscurantism. This has encouraged a counterfeit currency of glib "popular" articulacy, exemplified in history by the ascent of the "television don", whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But while an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today\'s "accessible" writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience\'s consciousness. It is the performer, not the subject, who draws the audience.

Cultural insecurity begets its linguistic doppelganger. The same is true of technical advance. In a world of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the commercial bias of the medium – "I am what I buy" – brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself: "People talk like texts."

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatising language no less than we have privatised so much else. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.

In Politics and the English Language , Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don\'t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously ("It\'s only my opinion …"). Rather than suffering from the onset of " newspeak ", we risk the rise of "nospeak".

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts – the view from inside is as rich as ever – but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate. The vocal muscle, for 60 years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

No longer free to exercise it, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right – and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

This essay will appear in The Memory Chalet, a collection that will be published later this year


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