In the latest issue of Commentary, WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Andrew Ferguson reviews the latest nonfiction offering from Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech. Here’s an excerpt from the review:
The Kingdom of Speech is popular intellectual history of the most exhilarating kind. Its closest antecedents came along nearly 40 years ago, both of them also by Wolfe. The Painted Word laid waste the world of abstract art, and From Bauhaus to Our House attacked the absurdities of modernist architecture. In all three of these books, Wolfe lampoons the reigning orthodoxy of our intellectual elites—specialists, critics, experts, publicists, academics, nearly everyone who has an interest, professional or rooting, in the status quo, even as they try to persuade the rest of us of notions that we know are crazy. We’re supposed to think that the buildings of Bauhaus are lovely and functional and humane? That nonrepresentational painting is an aesthetic advance over traditional art? As smart as the smart guys and much more amiable, Wolfe has made himself the popularizer of common sense.
Among Wolfe’s many targets in the book are Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, the latter of whom Ferguson calls a “made-to-order figure of fun.”
He trails all the red banners of respectability that amuse Wolfe even as they cow the rest of us. Chomsky is wildly overpraised; Wolfe notes that in a 1986 survey of influential thinkers, “Chomsky came in eighth . . . in very fast company . . . the first seven were Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud.” Chomsky’s dour look and his soul-deep humorlessness are easy to mistake for the gravitas of genius. As a scientist, he is averse to meat-and-potatoes field research, preferring to weave abstract theories of ever greater complexity. He has the careerist’s eerie ability to walk away from disasters of his own making, intellectual or otherwise, with scarcely a scratch and nary a dent to his public reputation, which in any case rests less on his scientific achievement than on his pristinely left-wing politics. His fellow academics revered him for his brave opposition to any assertion of American power in the world, from Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq. With such a character, Wolfe finds himself on well-grooved ground. Chomsky, he writes, “marched in the most publicized demonstration of all, the March on the Pentagon in 1967. He proved he was the real thing. He got himself arrested and wound up in the same cell with Norman Mailer, who was an ‘activist’ of what was known as the Radical Chic variety. A Radical Chic protester got himself arrested in the late morning or early afternoon, in mild weather. He was booked and released in time to make it to the Electric Circus, that year’s New York nightspot of the century, and tell war stories.” That last phrase marks the master’s touch.
Read the whole review here.
