The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ Takes Aim at Darwin and Chomsky




Tom Wolfe CreditMark Seliger


“If you are not having a fight with somebody,” Tom Wolfetold The Guardian in 2004, “then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning.”


Mr. Wolfe is famous for his bright-eyed and best-selling books of literary journalism (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” in 1968, “The Right Stuff” in 1979) and for jumbo-size social novels like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) and “A Man in Full” (1998). Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine.


He took aim at Modern art and its enabling theorists in “The Painted Word” (1975) and modern architecture and its critical druids in “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1981). In his essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989) he bird-dogged the American literary establishment for its solipsistic retreat from realism. He referred to three of his antagonists — John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving — in the title of another essay, published in 2000, as “My Three Stooges.”


Mr. Wolfe’s assaults were not meant to be well received by his entrenched opponents, and indeed they were not. He was tagged as an incorrigible philistine and worse. Few took his more combative books and essays altogether seriously, though they sharpened the conversation. Oddly, little of the stirred mud stuck to him. To recall these contretemps is to freshly appreciate Mr. Wolfe’s cameo appearance in “The Simpsons” when, after Homer smears chocolate on the author’s trademark white suit, Mr. Wolfe yanks it off to reveal an identical clean one underneath.


Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists.







Secondarily, this book is a rebuke of the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky, whom Mr. Wolfe refers to as “Noam Charisma.” Rebuke is actually too frivolous a word for the contumely Mr. Wolfe looses in his direction. More precisely, he tars and feathers Mr. Chomsky before sticking a clown nose on his face and rolling him in a baby stroller off a cliff.

Mr. Wolfe does not complain about evolution on religious grounds; in fact, he is an atheist. He begins by declaring the notion of the big bang to be vaguely ridiculous, and likens it to a mythopoetic bedtime story. Everything came from nothing?

Most essentially, Mr. Wolfe employs new research from the controversial anthropologist Daniel Everett to argue that the power of speech — man’s signal attribute — is not the product of evolution at all but rather a tool that man created. “Bango!” Mr. Wolfe writes. “There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal.” He wonders how airtight the theory of evolution can be if it does not account for such a thing. “What is it,” he asks, “that has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled when it comes to speech?”

Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms of sussing out speech, through the combined use of anatomy and physiology and biochemistry. The structures that support language don’t fossilize, so evidence is simply harder to come by. This is not something we will lose sleep over, no matter how much you pogo and spit in the Sid Vicious manner.

Mr. Chomsky, on the other hand, reading “The Kingdom of Speech,” may lose a bit of sleep. Mr. Wolfe chronicles the arguments against two of that linguist’s central theories — the notion that humans are born with an unseen language organ in the brain, and the complicated structural concept of recursion in language — and declares Mr. Chomsky to be bankrupt in nearly every regard, a pretentious man whose ideas set linguistic study back for decades. He narrates disputations of Mr. Chomsky’s work as if they were prizefights: “OOOF! — right into the solar plexus!”

Mr. Wolfe seems especially incensed that as a scholar, Mr. Chomsky privileged mental work over fieldwork, making linguistics an indoor rather than an outdoor pursuit. (In this book’s first section, Mr. Wolfe attacks Charles Darwin on similar grounds, paying almost no attention to the nearly five years Darwin spent aboard the Beagle.) These arguments neatly parallel his brief against American novelists whom, Mr. Wolfe thinks, don’t get out of the house nearly enough.

Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, there is a great deal of funny and acid commentary on social class. About the possibility that Darwin, a wealthy and connected British gentleman, might have plundered some of his ideas about evolution from Alfred Russel Wallace, a social nobody, he writes:

“The British Gentleman was not merely rich, powerful, and refined. He was also a slick operator … smooth … smooth … smooth and then some. It was said that a British Gentleman could steal your underwear, your smalls and skivvies and knickers, and leave you staring straight at him asking if he didn’t think it had turned rather chilly all of a sudden.”

Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, a torrent of language is set free. Sentences spin past like whirligigs, or like Rube Goldberg devices that emit a pellet of information only after bouncing off four increasingly unlikely surfaces.

Mr. Wolfe’s prose here is mostly sure-footed, but there are moments when he seems on the verge of losing it, of falling into fragments of Morse-code nonsense that will put older readers in mind of the insane ellipses-filled columns Larry King once filed for USA Today.

Here is Mr. Wolfe, for example, on the work of eight evolutionists he wishes to mock: “I surfed and Safaried and finally moused upon the only academic I could find who disagreed with the eight failures, a chemist at Rice University … Rice … Rice used to have a big-time football team … the Rice Owls … wonder how they’re doing now? I moused around on the Rice site some more, and uh-oh … not so great last season, the Owls … football … and I surfed to football concussions … exactly as I thought!” The call-waiting system in his cranium, here and elsewhere, has gone haywire.

“The Kingdom of Speech” is meant to be a provocation rather than a dissertation. The sound it makes is that of a lively mind having a very good time, and enjoying the scent of its own cold-brewed napalm in the morning.

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown