Flight from Babel
Standing by Words
by Wendell Berry
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005
(213 pages, $15.00, paperback)
reviewed by Robert Grano
In Standing by Words, first published in 1983 but out of print for over 15 years, Wendell Berry examines the state of language in our culture, finding it wanting in many ways and in many areas. The book contains four short essays on language, marriage, modern poetry, and the relationship between land and community, as well as one collection of “notes” and one long essay, “Poetry and Place,” which takes up almost half of the book.
Accounting Language
The title essay makes the case that language must be “accountable” to itself both internally and externally. Berry explains this by using a pair of economic concepts: “internal accounting,” which considers costs and benefits in reference only to a business itself, and “external accounting,” which considers costs and benefits to the “larger community.” Language must connect and balance both kinds of accounting.
An unbalance towards internal accounting will result in a subjective and meaningless language. The speaker is aware of what he means, but he fails, either wittingly or unwittingly, to communicate it to the reader or hearer. An example is the extremely subjective nature of much modern poetry, which is often so “internal” that the reader has no idea what the poet is trying to say.
Language that is unbalanced towards external accounting results in an overly objective and confusing language. It can be seen in those bureaucratic pronouncements that are so precise and technical that they fail to take the audience’s understanding into consideration at all, or in pronouncements that exhibit an intentional discrepancy between the speaker’s true thoughts and what he is saying.
As an example of this type of discrepancy, Berry gives an account, with quotations, of conversations with members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Three Mile Island crisis of 1979. The bureaucrats seem to dance around the subject—the threat of a meltdown—using vague terms and scientific jargon, but never actually admitting that a meltdown is what they are talking about.
Public figures today seem to tend toward one extreme or the other. Berry wants to see the balance restored by the use of language that is both intelligible and reliable, that is, language that is both clear in meaning and honest in intent.
Valued Hierarchies
In the long essay “Poetry and Place,” Berry looks at various poets, including Dante, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth, to argue for the necessity and goodness of hierarchy:
Robert W. Grano is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a regular book reviewer for All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society. He is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy via the Assemblies of God and the Episcopal Church.
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