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The crisis was aggravated by 20th century history. In public life, totalitarianism has corrupted language by its tendency, as Steiner puts it, to "unspeak the actual past" while conjugating its verbs only in the "depersonalized present" and "Utopian future." In private life, Steiner claims, people have come to speak more and say less. He cites studies of urban phone calls that indicate "a drastic diminution and standardization of vocabulary and syntax." He observes that "quiet is becoming the prerogative of a sheltered elite or the cage of the desolate."
Semantic Dimension. Like all crisis-mongers, Steiner is a bit of a snob about his crisis. On the problems of language and their solution he rather melodramatically makes man's future cliff-hang: "The next dimension of psychology, the step that may at last take us beyond a primitive mind/body empiricism, could well be semantic." He even crowds his way into the biological revolution: "It may be that human speech is in some way a counterpart to that decoding and translation of the neurochemical idiom which defines and perpetuates our biological existence."
Also, like all lovers, he is less disturbed by those who neglect his beloved than by his rivals in attendance. The man who brings out the best, and the worst, in Steiner is the most prestigious specialist in linguistics today, Noam Chomsky. Steiner, with romance in his heart and the ultimate language of poetry on his lips, approaches linguistics on his knees. Chomsky, full of crisp talk about "data handling" and "feedback," confronts language in a white smock—the scientist of semantics. "Is there, in fact, a 'linguistic science'?" Steiner asks, arguing that the new scientific dogmatism about speech ignores the "mystery" of language.
Chomsky's linguistics may reduce language to formulas of mathematical probability. But Steiner errs in the opposite direction, turning language into a mystique. He expects nothing less than eventual salvation from the word, and that expectation warms, even while it slightly distorts his book. He advises critic?, that they will miss the meaning of modern literature if they fail to investigate linguistics. But what he himself seems to be seeking through language is something more—the meaning of life.
"Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is," the philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote. In this sense Steiner is a curious but stimulating blend of visionary rationalism who obviously shares the dream he attributes to Borges: "No living thing or sound but contains a cipher of all."