EXTRATERRITORIAL by George Steiner. 210 pages. Afheneum. $7.95.
Nobody but Critic George Steiner could write in all seriousness of "the erotic relations between speaker and speech." To him, language is fundamentally the language of love: man wooing meaning, down to the coyest nuance, the most maidenly scruple. Like a Kinsey of linguistics, Steiner submits his report on the current state of the word-id in these ten brilliant, slightly obsessed essays, successors to his most recent collection, Language and Silence (1967), and forerunners to a promised full-scale study of multilingualism.
How goes the affair between man and the 3,000 to 4,000 languages he has invented? As a lover, as well as a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, Steiner knows rape when he sees it, and he sees it. The Nazis abused German almost to death, he argued in Language and Silence. In Extraterritorial, he warns that a more current threat, "the drift and boredom of semiliteracy" —man's marriage of convenience to his words, threatens to crush the life out of all civilized languages.
Poets Unhoused. The certainties of language, like so many other certainties today, Steiner suggests, have become a privilege of the past. The Tower of Babel is once again an appropriate metaphor: "Increasingly, every act of communication between human beings takes on the shape of an act of translation." Our cultural anti-heroes are "poets unhoused and wanderers across language," contends Steiner, who is a cosmopolite himself, born in Paris of Austrian parents and educated in the United States as well as England.
A trio of compulsive polyglots, Samuel Beckett (equally fluent in English and French), Vladimir Nabokov (a writer in Russian, English, French and possibly German) and Jorge Luis Borges (whose first work at seven was an English summary of Greek myths) are the men whom Steiner judges to be "the three figures of probable genius in contemporary fiction." Joyce teaching at his Berlitz school he takes as the prototypical modern artist, master of the "lost center." a practitioner of the "literature of exile."
According to Steiner's precise scenario, the "language crisis" began between 1900 and 1925. He even knows where: Central Europe. In Vienna, Ludwig Wittgenstein, bumping against the limits of language, desperately described philosophy as "speech therapy" and then proceeded to prove that it was. In Prague, Franz Kafka made art out of what Steiner calls "the resistance of language to truth." In their different ways, Steiner suggests, both men were signaling a loss of faith—the sudden awareness of a credibility gap between meanings and the words used to express them.