From Poetry to Slang
Linguist, novelist and composer Anthony Burgess contemplates the nature of language and the future of English literature
What accounts for your fascination with language? People regard language as primarily a visual entity, but of course it is not. Yeats said of one of his poems, "I made it out of a mouthful of air." Language is just a mouthful of air, which we shape by instinctively knowing what to do with our tongues and teeth and palates. But there's not much going on there when you come to think of it. The apparatus we use for speech is so limited, and all we have is this air that's coming up from the lungs, flying off into the outer atmosphere. To make what we have made out of this meager endowment is quite interesting.
Even so, people often praise the English language for the wrong reasons. Last year, we saw the Oxford English Dictionary--which is a colossal achievement really--brought out on compact disc, the whole 20 volumes. Well, you admire this. You sit down in wonder. But then you wonder also if you can really cope with its increasing richness. The English language is being augmented every year by about 400 new words. We cannot cope. We are drowning in the plethora. It's far better to possess a small vocabulary that you use properly rather than a big vocabulary with which you're a bit impressionistic. There's a danger for the English language to be known rather inexactly.
History shows how desperately language changes--how the only thing that survives is some rough idea about the form of the word. The word silly is a good example. Back in Anglo-Saxon times, you had saelig. It meant "holy." But it gradually deteriorated, the pejorative element crept in, and the word became lower and lower in its meaning. So "silly" is something you throw away, whereas "holy" is the highest thing there is. When we see Shakespeare on the stage, we think we understand his work, but often we don't. Anthony Hopkins was playing King Lear a short while ago in London, and there came a point when he screamed out against politicians. The audience went, "Mmmm," sympathetically, of course. But politician meant a Jesuit. We're totally out of touch with what Shakespeare actually meant. The meaning of a word is what it means today.
Are you optimistic about the future of the language? I have no particular love of the English language. The literature is what I'm proud of. Literature is a way of using language in such a way that grammar and morphologies do not apply. It is a means of pushing language toward goals that language doesn't dream of. Language is not very exact. It's a very impressionistic medium. It's fairly good at expressing emotional states, but try to describe a building or a street, and you just can't do it. Words are not adequate for an exact visual description. And this is the reason why one goes on writing, in the hope that one of these days you'll master a means of expressing the outside world.
We have to accept (or I do, because I'm old enough to belong to a dying generation of writers) that literature has had it. We have lost interest in language as an imaginative medium, and now we just write to communicate on the most basic possible level. People don't like literature. Let's be honest. Nobody in America that I know would deliberately buy a book--James Joyce, for example--that uses language in a new way. What people want is just something to read that will take them out of themselves. The new view of language will be very much the kids' view. It's just something you throw around. Slang is our substitute for poetry. The danger with slang is that it dies so quickly.
So what's to be done? Most people want to hear about how beautiful the English language is and make a little hobby of it. In my view, unless we do something about phonetics, we're going to lose language totally. We must know how to set down the sounds we're using. I am making a plea for literacy on three fronts. One is our normal literacy, in which we can spell and punctuate and indeed write in a conventional form what we say and hear. Second is a subtly scientific means of writing through the international phonetic alphabet. Music is the third medium in which sound becomes sight. It worries me a great deal that people don't know how to read music and the international phonetic alphabet.
I was brought up as a musician, and my ambition was always to be a great composer, not a writer. Obviously, music is trying to say something, but what it is we don't know. I'm still striving hard to try to find out. Music is obviously desperately important, or we wouldn't have so much of it. I think some of the magic that applies to music probably also applies to language. There's a mystery going on in the human mouth and in the human ear that we'll never, never understand.
A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess, William Morrow & Co. ($25)
This story appears in the October 18, 1993 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.