BOOK REVIEW : Spotting Favorites in a Literary Zoo

The State of the Language edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels (University of California Press, 531 pages).

Opening this book is like opening the zoo gates to an impatient crowd. Sixty-two writers tumble in, each invited to put down thoughts about some aspect--any aspect--of the English language at the start of our century’s last decade. Naturally they scatter, each to his favorite species, though the insectivorursus (bugbear) seems most popular.

Each to his? Each to her? Each to his/her? Each to their? Predictably, language’s conquests and casualties in the gender wars are a prominent theme. So is the language used to speak or write about AIDS. So are questions of language and race, language and class, language and the nature of reality. Literary reality, that is, and also real reality.

These are the most political topics--language as power--and I will get back to them. But to get to them risks getting swallowed up by them--this is an open zoo--so before doing so, let me give an idea of the range and variety of the collection.

It is the second “State of the Language.” The first was edited 10 years ago by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, English writers and English teachers at, respectively, Boston University and Berkeley. It was a flaming success--we seem as fascinated to know we are speaking English as Moliere’s M. Jourdain was to know he was speaking prose--and this new volume by 60 new writers is the result. Ricks and Michaels are repeaters.

There are pieces, for example, on Australian English and graffiti English and one by Michael Bawtree suggesting that if the English opera tradition is relatively weak, it is in part because Shakespeare and others gave such glory to theater words that they refused subsequently to lie down and let the music upstage them.

There is a piece on the contributions of Variety newspaper to the language: palooka, corny, blockbuster, deejay, among others. There is a piece on swear words by an Oxford don that has this reviewer trying to choose between “jocular ponderousness” and “ponderous jocularity.”

There is a piece on the use of pidgin in advertising in the South Seas. There are Wall Street folk terms for particular stocks: Kellogg is cornflakes; MacDonald’s, we are told, is murderburger, and Simmons Mattress is American playground. I don’t know if I believe this 100%, but I 100% want to.

Some of the pieces wander freely. M.F.K. Fisher writes of a pornography ring at her boarding school and Ted Hughes contributes a poem. An essay on poets’ letters tells us that Anne Sexton, taken aback when a monk she was corresponding with said he was leaving the monastery and wanted to meet her, replied: “I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans . . . “

If words can deceive us into passion, they can also help us out of it. Ricks tells of smashing a window years ago in a marital dispute. A constable, summoned to the scene, was politely sympathetic: “We got a phone call, sir, telling us that someone has gone beresk.” Suddenly, Ricks’ misery lifted. That beresk got him well out of life and back in literature with Shakespeare’s malaprop Dogberry.

On to language as power. Our disputes about ideas and issues tend to become disputes about terminology. Like Humpty Dumpty we want the mastery over words in order to gain mastery over their meaning. As Michaels writes in his foreword, it is not so much a question of using language as of being used by it:

“Until recently, it was considered very good luck to be used by English . . . There are now quite a few Englishes, and formerly colonized people may well prefer to get free of them and be used by their own language.”

David Dabydeen writes convincingly of the need for black writers in England to use their own kind of speech. A literary tradition in which an 18th-Century English poet was able to refer to plantation overseers as Master Swains, and to slaves as assistant planters clearly needs help. He gives a splendid quote from the Creole poet John Agard:

“Dem accuse me of assault/on de Oxford dictionary/imagine a concise peaceful man like me,” he writes.

“I ent serving no jail sentence/I slashing suffix in self-defense/I bashing future wit present tense.”

Bashing the future with the present tense describes him perfectly. Several pieces refer to the terminology of AIDS. One writer notes the controversy over the term “AIDS victims.” “People with AIDS” is preferred by many, as tending less to segregate the sufferers. Others object to this as linguistic cottage cheese.

The feminist movement has provided the liveliest disputes. What does one do about the relative pronoun? The writer who sticks up for . . . his . . . her . . . their . . . his/her . . . convictions is to do what? Half a dozen essayists weigh in, none comfortably.

Margaret Anne Doody is spirited, in any case, when she objects to line-by-line combing-out of church hymnals. Taking out references to king and His risks turning the hymns to mush. Better to omit particularly objectionable stanzas, she argues, than to do so much rewriting that “we are invited to forget that our Christian forefathers and foremothers ever said anything that poses a problem.”