The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe - review

The first part describes the apparently simultaneous discovery of the origin of species by natural selection by Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin — Wallace, not Darwin, being the hero of Wolfe’s version of the tale. While sick with malaria in Malaysia, where he was studying the flora and fauna at first-hand — no more than an impoverished “flycatcher” shipping back specimens for the well-to-do safely at home — Wallace wrote a “20-plus-page manuscript entitled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” but chose to send it off not to a scholarly publication but direct to Darwin himself, much mocked here by Wolfe as the epitome of a British gentleman.

Darwin received it in June 1858 and, says Wolfe choicely, “freaked out… In 20 pages this man Wallace had forestalled his life’s work — his entire life’s work!” Wolfe loves italics, exclamations, dashes.

While Wallace remained out of touch in Asia, his paper was read to the Linnean Society in October of that year — preceded by two rival, speedily produced “abstracts” by Darwin (alphabetical priority, you see).

A year later, Darwin published The Origin of Species. So Wallace’s independent formulation of the theory of evolution has ever-after been downgraded (well-known though this story may be).

Wolfe gives the yarn his full treatment, down to onomatopoeic presentation of Darwin’s dyspepsia: “sudden, uncontrollable and every sort of pain in his distended belly and bowels, every known belch, retch, heave, gas-pass, watery rush, and loathsome gush, plus foul wind erupting from one end of his digestive tract and foul sounds eructing grrrrekkk from the other”, he says with relish. As if he was there.

But if evolution was ever to be a total explanation, Darwin had a problem: the existence of language and culture. Wolfe ridicules Darwin’s contention in The Descent of Man (1871) that the early origins of “language, moral sense, abstract thought, art, music, religion, self-consciousness” could be found in animals. He relied too much on observing his own dog, he scoffs.

And then he turns to his real target, bugbear ideologue Noam Chomsky. In the mid-1950s Chomsky, still in his twenties, established dominion over the whole field of linguistics with his theory of a “language organ”, “deep structure” and “universal grammar”. These were “transcendent eternal universals” and required no mucky fieldwork — and 10 years later Chomsky started using his academic authority in radical politics, Wolfe contemptuously records. Chomsky’s empire lasted until 2005 when another “flycatcher” — the key word in the book — brought him down.

A certain Daniel L Everett published an essay called Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã, smashing the universality of Chomsky’s claims. Everett, once a convinced Chomskyian himself, had spent years living with the Pirahã, a small tribe of 300 or so people deep in the Amazon basin, learning their language. They spoke only in the present tense and had little conception of the past or future or numbers or colours. They happily defied the whole idea of universal grammar since theirs so clearly came from their culture, not a pre-existing template.

So Everett, who began his work as a Christian missionary, had wrestled with the beast. He was a flycatcher par excellence. Wolfe is thrilled by him and it is the best thing about his book that he will win Everett himself more readers.

In 2008 Everett published a marvellous memoir of his time among the Pirahã called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, which Wolfe liberally quotes, followed in 2012 by Language: The Cultural Tool (both published here by Profile Books). By 2014 Chomsky and his allies were in retreat, beginning a paper admitting: “The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma.”

Rejoicing that language comes out of human culture after all, Wolfe suddenly decides that speech is best understood as “a mnemonic system — one that has enabled Homo Sapiens to take control of the entire world”, “a veritable nuclear weapon”.

Perhaps this mnemonic explanation is not quite total or sufficient either? Darwin is not so easily dispatched, dyspeptic or not. But Wolfe’s closing paean to words, to “speech, and only speech”, can serve as his ultimate credo as a writer. “Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine,” he declares, these being the last words of what may be his own last book.