Nicholas Hudson

I don't know of another book that covers quite the territory this one does--an intellectual history of scholarly attitudes toward speech and writing in Europe from the late Renaissance through the Romantic era. Hudson (disclosure, a prof of mine, and a gentleman, I'll tell you for free) takes us through the seventeenth century's unanimous smugness with its "civilizing art" of writing, taking on terrifying industrial form with the spread of printed books, and painfully weaning itself off the backlooking Renaissance tendency to locate all truth and value in the texts of the past--the great fascination with the hieroglyphics of Egypt and their putative volatile secrets giving way to an oh-so-sophisticated sense that alphabetic writing was more accessible, easier to understand, and just better (see: Warburton), and the emergence of a positivist narrative that reduces the old secrets to merely hieratic, hermetic, cabalistic (God didn't give letters to Adam?), a strategy of control.


Welcome to the 18th century, right? Things are getting complicated. We are travelling all around the world routinely now, and becoming very cognizant of the differences between literate and oral culture; at the same time, we are getting blase about print, and thinking about all the incitement to civil unrest that a spoken orator can't get away with, because he can be held responsible, not like a coffeshop pamphleteer. We are thinking that oration is maybe kind of great, actually, and remembering old Greek rhetorical theory, and starting to have a very early version of nineteenth-century understanding not only of the suprasegmentals that go with oratory--intonation, pitch, timbre, stress--but also of phonetics in general, and everybody is all dropping proto-IPAs and discovering sound changes and inventing philology and looking down on writing as a little pedestrian somehow, compared to the living voice. If you're Rousseau, you're going all "natural philosopher" on us about the Grecian flights of the Hurons in council (I intend to write a paper on the contrary construction of the similarly oral Khoisan "Hottentots" as subhuman turkeygobbletalkers and its connection both to phonotactics--what ARE these clicks?!--and economic exigencies (North America as a new world v. South Africa as merely a New Dutch Countryside with wildebeests &c.--explicit supplantation rhetoric, in other words). If you're Vico, you're saying weirder, more sort of racist shit about the intrinsic savagery of prealphabetic man and the letter as key to civilization, but it goes in the same bin, and a lot of people are saying even more hilarious stuff. Basically it's all complicated and interesting.


And then the Romantics try to close the circle and we're up to "emotion reflected in tranquility" and speech IN writing--the irreducibility of the moment with the advantage of consideration and composition. Good times. And the old progress-based model gives way to one that takes full account of the intertanglement of writing and speech, and that in turn allows all kinds of synchronic othering where it's "these people talk like this and those people talk like that--because of their cultureand physiognomy!" and welcome to the 19th century.


Hudson does a great job bathing us in detail, has a good feel for when to deftly summarize the life's work of a French academician or English eccentric in eighty words and when to go deeper, and there's also this amusing off-the-side-of-his-armchair thing where he Oxbridges on Derrida a little--not in an antitheory way, but in a "logocentrism? Actually, Jacquetually, if you'd bothered to read the history books and not just seen a piece of Warburton that you thought you could connect with your Grammatology thesis because who reads Warburton, you'd've seen that it's actually a bit complicated and contradictory, like all periods of history, and the idea that we've always privileged speech over writing--in what sense?--is simplistic, and still provocative and useful, but some of the stuff that comes out of your mouth--ahem, word processor--just gets a little bit over the top, Mr. Graphoperipherism, cryer of crocodile tears for the word on paper." There's something so reassuring and flash-of-the-old-school-tie about this modelling of critical integrity.… (altro)

I love these exec summary-style area/era surveys, giving you either just enough and not too much or the grounding you need to go deeper. Hudson (who, full disclosure, is a teacher of mine and the nicest, most Byronic hero of an English prof you'll ever hope to meet) sees the great intellectual debates surrounding the nature and origin of language as stemming from Locke's towering Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he talks about words as arbitrary signs to perpetuate thinking and communication, and identifies as a result a deep connection between words and the ability to reason--language as intricately social, essentially civilizational, and deeply human.


This reverberates in all kinds of interesting ways, from Condillac's focus on the utility and agency derived from language, separating in a fundamental way "civilized" oral or literate man from pre-oral savages (and if you think that's very rarefied, you should think or read about the ways it dovetails with the treatment of, e.g., the putatively pre-human !Khoi people in South Africa); Degerando and questions of reflexive awareness/access--our ability to consciously engage with and create outr language separating us from irrationality (presaging in a weird way the 20th century's linguistic turn as well as Bakhtinian ideas about "awesome speech" and its social capital); all kinds of Enlightenment logic problems like if reason requires speech and speech requires reason, which is the chicken and which the egg?; the divine origin of language versus the "cries of fear and desire" theory (Condillac again), and the progressivist, positivist viewpoint it implies; people like Rousseau then serving as ameliorists, saying it's not progress so much as change, from oral to written, melodic to harsh (phonetics!), passionate to clinical; a resultant diachronic model, strongly developed by Herder, who sees intrinsic national difference as creating linguistic difference (backwards shades of Sapir-Whorf, as well as--passionate Persians!--Edward Said) and thus the move to a nineteenth-century nationalist and racist model, and back to a hierarchy if not a mobile one. I would have liked to see more than token attention given to the prescriptivists (the connection between Latin and Sanskrit as "hypergrammared" Classical model languages intrigues me, especially coming as it does alongside the development of historical linguistics identifying the connections of the latter with European languages, and the adoption of the former as an ever-stronger model for English), but anything that can survey a hundred years this deftly and cram this many names in in a cogent and lateral connection-fostering way is useful, useful shit. Article appeared in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. IV.… (altro)