After satirizing everything from "radical chic" to 20th century architecture, Tom Wolfe is now mining the mystery of language and the reputation of the most influential linguist of our time, Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky, in turn, has some thoughts about Wolfe, the celebrated New Journalist and author of such classics as "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "The Right Stuff."
In his new book, "The Kingdom of Speech," Wolfe examines how scholars have attempted to discern the roots of verbal communication. He reviews the debates between Charles Darwin, who likened speech to the "sounds uttered by birds," and other 19th century evolutionists.
He notes how modern understanding centers on Chomsky's revolutionary theory that humans have an innate knowledge of language.
Wolfe duly acknowledges Chomsky's breakthrough, but sees a man so used to dominance in his field that he scorns or evades those who challenge his research. He also suggests his stature as a linguist is tied to his years as an activist and left-wing thinker. He cites Chomsky's 1967 publication "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," a landmark essay in The New York Review of Books that assailed the Vietnam War and accused intellectuals of failing "to speak the truth and to expose lies."
The timing was absolutely perfect, according to Wolfe.
"Chomsky's audacity and his Old World, Eastern European slant on life were things most intellectuals found charming, since by then, 1967, opposition to the war in Vietnam had become something stronger than a passion ... Namely, a fashion, a certification that one had risen above the herd," he writes.
"Chomsky's politics enhanced his reputation as a great linguist, and his reputation as a great linguist enhanced his reputation as a political solon, and his reputation as a political solon inflated his reputation from great linguist to an all-around genius, and the genius inflated the solon into a veritable Voltaire, and the veritable Voltaire inflated the genius of geniuses into a philosophical giant ... Noam Chomsky."
Chomsky, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that that he read an excerpt of the book in Harper's magazine and found "egregious errors." He dismissed Wolfe's portrait of himself and other MIT faculty members as captives of air-conditioned campus buildings, uninterested in field work or new ideas.
He strongly questioned Wolfe's grasp of linguistics. And he objected to Wolfe's suggestion that he was an activist who "arranges to get arrested in the morning so that he can get out in time to make it to New York nightspots to show off his bravery," Chomsky told the AP.
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