The Kingdom of Speech

by Tom Wolfe

  What he actually meant, it turned out, was, “The world needs just one more article about Dan Everett, and I’m writing it.” Nevins was already at work with two other linguists, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues, on an article so long—31,000 words—that it was the equivalent of well over 110 pages in a dense, scholarly book.139 They fought Everett point by point, no matter how dot-size the point. The aim, obviously, was to carpet bomb, obliterate, every syllable Everett had to say about this miserable little tribe he claimed he had found somewhere in the depths of Brazil’s Amazon basin. It appeared online as “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” by “Andrew Nevins (Harvard), David Pesetsky (MIT), and Cilene Rodrigues (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)”…three linguists from three different universities, Pesetsky pointed out140…hmmm…a bit…disingenuously…because put them all together…they spelled CHOMSKY (MIT). Chomsky had been David Pesetsky’s dissertation supervisor when Pesetsky got his doctoral degree at MIT in 1983.141 Five years later he returned as Chomsky’s junior colleague on the linguistics faculty. Chomsky’s close friend Morris Halle, the MIT linguist who back in 1955 had played a major role in bringing him to MIT in the first place, became the dissertation supervisor to Andrew Nevins. Nevins was an MIT lifer. He had enrolled as a freshman in 1996 and had been there for nine years by the time he received his PhD in 2004142…and married Cilene Rodrigues, a Brazilian linguist who had been a visiting scholar at MIT for several of the past four years. What they wrote, “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” couldn’t have seemed more of a Chomsky production had he put his byline on it.

  The problem was, it had taken the truth squad, namely, Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues, all of 2006 to assemble this prodigious weapon. They planned to submit it to the biggest and most influential linguistics journal, Language, but it could easily take another six or eight months for Language to put it through their meticulous review process. So the trio first decided to publish it online on LingBuzz, a linguistics article-sharing site with a large Chomsky following. Their behemoth doomsday rebuttal appeared there on March 8, 2007—

  —and keeled over thirty-three days later, April 10. On that day, the New Yorker published a ten-thousand-word piece about Everett entitled “The Interpreter: Has a Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our Understanding of Language?” by John Colapinto, with a subhead reading “Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar.” The magazine had sent the writer, Colapinto, down to the Amazon basin with Everett.

  In his opening paragraph Colapinto describes how he and Everett arrived on the Maici in a Cessna floatplane. Up on the riverbank were about thirty Pirahã. They greeted him with what “sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech.” Colapinto’s richest moment came when the linguist W. Tecumseh Fitch arrived. Fitch was a reverent Chomskyite. He had collaborated with Chomsky and Marc Hauser in writing the 2002 article proclaiming Chomsky’s discovery that recursion was the very essence of human language. Fitch wanted to see the Pirahã for himself, and Everett had said come right ahead. Fitch had devised a test by which he somehow—it was all highly esoteric and superscientifical—could detect whether a person was using “context-free grammar” by filming his eye movements while a cartoon monkey moved this way and that on a computer screen, accompanied by simple audio cues. He was absolutely sure the Pirahã would pass the test. “They’re going to get this basic pattern. The Pirahã are humans—humans can do this.”

  Fitch was very open about why he had come all the way from Scotland into the very bowels of the Amazon basin: to prove that, like everybody else, the Pirahã used recursion. At the University of St. Andrews he had left the building a few times to do fieldwork on animal behavior, but never for anything even remotely like this: to study an alien tribe of human beings he had never heard of before…well beyond the boundary line of civilization, law and order, in the rainforests of Brazil’s wild northwest.

  With Everett’s help he set up a site for his experiments, complete with video and audio equipment. The first subject was a muscular Pirahã with a bowl-shaped haircut. He did nothing but look at the floating monkey head. He ignored the audio cues.

  “It didn’t look like he was doing premonitory looking,” i.e., trying to sense what the monkey might do, Fitch said to Everett. “Maybe ask him to point to where he thinks the monkey is going to go.”

  “They don’t point,” Everett said. And they don’t have words for left or right or over there or any other direction. You can’t tell them to go up or down; you have to say something concrete such as “up the river” or “down the river.” So Everett asked the man if the monkey was going upriver or downriver.

  The man said, “Monkeys go to the jungle.”

  Fitch has been described as a tall, patrician man, very much the old Ivy League sort. His full name is William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III. He is a direct descendant of William Tecumseh Sherman, the famous Civil War general.f But now with Everett in the Amazon basin, he was sweating, and his brow was beginning to fold into rivulets between his eyebrows and on either side of his nose. He ran the test again. After several abortive tries, Fitch’s voice took on “a rising note of panic.” “If they fail in the recursion one—it’s not recursion; I’ve got to stop saying that. I mean embedding. Because, I mean, if he can’t get this—”

  In the Amazon basin, the tall patrician is reduced to ejaculations such as “Fuck! If I’d had a joystick for him to hunt the monkey!” He departs, insisting to Colapinto that his experiments have been a success. But when Colapinto asks him in what ways, his diction turns to fog. Fitch reports to Chomsky in due course that he did detect “context-free grammar” in Pirahã…even though you had to listen and watch the monkey closely, as closely as a Nevins or a Cilene Rodrigues would, to pick it up. As for “context-free” syntax, those results were inconclusive.143

  The New Yorker piece made Chomsky furious. It threw him and his followers into full combat mode. He had turned down Colapinto’s request for an interview, apparently to position himself as aloof from his challenger. He and Everett were not on the same plane. But now the whole accursèd world was reading the New Yorker. Dan Everett, the New Yorker called him, Dan, not Daniel L. Everett… in the magazine’s eyes he was an instant folk hero…Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky.

  In the heading of the article was a photograph, reprinted many times since, of Everett submerged up to his neck in the Maici River. Only his smiling face is visible. Right near him but above him is a thirty-five-or-so-year-old Pirahã sitting in a canoe in his gym shorts. It became the image that distinguished Everett from Chomsky. Immersed!—up to his very neck, Everett is…immersed in the lives of a tribe of hitherto unknown na—er—indigenous peoples in the Amazon’s uncivilized northwest. No linguist could help but contrast that with everybody’s mental picture of Chomsky sitting up high, very high, in an armchair in an air-conditioned office at MIT, spic-and-span…he never looks down, only inward. He never leaves the building except to go to the airport to fly to other campuses to receive honorary degrees…more than forty at last count…and remain unmuddied by the Maici or any of the other muck of life down below.

  Not that Everett in any way superseded Chomsky. He was far too roundly resented for that. He was telling academics that they had wasted half a century by subscribing to Chomsky’s doctrine of Universal Grammar. Languages might appear wildly different from one another on the surface, Chomsky had taught, but down deep all shared the same structure and worked the same way. Abandoning that Chomskyan first principle would not come easily.

  That much was perhaps predictable. But by now, the early twenty-first century, the vast majority of people who thought of themselves as intellectuals were atheists. Believers were regarded as something slightly worse than hapless fools. And the lowest breed of believers was the evangelical white Believer. There you had Daniel Everett. True, he had converted from Christianity to
anthropology in the early 1980s—but his not merely evangelical but missionary past was a stain that would never fade away completely…not in academia.

  Even before the term “political correctness” entered the language, linguists and anthropologists were careful not to characterize any—er—indigenous peoples as crude or simpleminded or inferior in any way. Everett was careful and a half. He had come upon the simplest society in the known world. The Pirahã thought only in the present tense. They had a limited language; it had no recursion, which would have enabled it to stretch on endlessly in any direction and into any time frame. They had no artifacts except for those bows and arrows. Everett bent over backwards to keep the Pirahã from sounding the least bit crude or simpleminded. Their language had its limits—but it had a certain profound richness, he said. It was the most difficult language in the world to learn—but such was the price of complexity, he said. Everett expressed nothing but admiration when it came to the Pirahã. But by this time, even giving the vaguest hint that you looked upon some—er—indigenous peoples as stone simple was no longer elitist. The word, by 2007, was “racist.” And racist had become hard tar to remove.

  Racist…out of that came the modern equivalent of the Roman Inquisition’s declaring Galileo “vehemently suspect of heresy” and placing him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life, making it impossible for him to continue his study of the universe. But the Inquisition was at least wide open about what it was doing. In Everett’s case, putting an end to his life’s work was a clandestine operation. Not long after Colapinto’s New Yorker article appeared, Everett was in the United States teaching at Illinois State University when he got a call from a canary with a PhD informing him that a Brazilian government agency known as FUNAI, the Portuguese acronym for the National Indian Foundation, was denying him permission to return to the Pirahã…on the grounds that what he had written about them was…racist. He was dumbfounded.

  Now he was convinced that the truth squad was waging outright war. He began writing a counterattack faster than he had ever written anything in his life. He didn’t know, but wouldn’t have been surprised to learn, that Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues were already at work, converting their online carpet bomb on LingBuzz into a veritable hecatomb to run in Language and snuff out Everett’s heresy once and for all.

  There was no rushing Language’s editors, however. They found the piece too long. By the time the squad rewrote the piece…and Language, never in a hurry, edited it…and the article, bearing the old LingBuzz title, “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” seemed far enough along to make Language’s May 2009 issue144—

  —Everett executed a coup de scoop.

  a Portuguese speakers pronounce an r as a d when it begins an interior syllable.

  b He was. Everett began his academic career in linguistics as a full-fledged Chomsky acolyte. His earliest work aims to apply the Chomskyan model to Pirahã and make excuses for when it didn’t quite fit. It took years for him to realize that his adherence to Chomskyan beliefs was preventing him from deciphering Pirahã.

  c Both the Moody Bible Institute (www.moody.edu) and SIL (www.sil.org) are still in existence.

  d In an interview with the Guardian Everett explains that it took him one year to get the basics and another two years to be able to communicate effectively. (“Daniel Everett: ‘There Is No Such Thing as Universal Grammar,’” by Robert McCrum, March 24, 2012.)

  e The complete list of commenters: Brent Berlin, Marco Antonio Gonçalves, Paul Kay, Stephen Levinson, Andrew Pawley, Alexandre Surrallés, Michael Tomasello, and Anna Wierzbicka.

  f According to Fitch’s curriculum vitae, General Sherman was his great-great-great-grandfather. The general served in the Union army and is best known for his March to the Sea, which cut a sixty-mile-wide strip of wreckage and horror through Georgia to claim Atlanta and Savannah for the North.

  Chapter VI

  The Firewall

  In November of 2008, a full seven months before the truth squad’s scheduled hecatomb time for Everett, he, the scheduled mark, did a stunning thing. He maintained his mad pace and beat them into print—with one of the handful of popular books ever written on linguistics: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, an account of his and his family’s thirty years with the Pirahã.147 It was dead serious in an academic sense. He loaded it with scholarly linguistic and anthropological reports of his findings in the Amazon. He left academics blinking…and nonacademics with eyes wide open, staring. The book broke free of its scholarly binding right away.

  Margaret Mead had her adventures among the Samoans, and Bronislaw Malinowski had his among the Trobriand Islanders. But Everett’s adventures among the Pirahã kept blowing up into situations too deadly to be written off as “adventures.”

  There were more immediate ways to die in the rainforests than anyone who had never lived there could possibly imagine. The constant threat of death gave even Everett’s scholarly observations a grisly edge…especially compared to those of linguists who never left their aerated offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  In the rainforests, mosquitoes transmitting dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and malaria rose up by the cloudful from dusk to dawn, as numerous as the oxygen atoms they flew through, or so it felt. No matter what precautions you took, if you lived there for three months or more, you were guaranteed infection by mosquitoes penetrating your skin with their proboscises’ forty-seven cutting edges, first injecting their saliva to prevent the puncture from clotting and then drinking your blood at their leisure. The saliva causes the itching that follows.

  In 1979, barely a year into the Everetts’ thirty years with the Pirahã, Keren and their older daughter, Shannon, came down with high fevers, the shakes, the chills, the itches, the whole checklist from back when Everett once had typhoid fever. So for five days he treated them with antibiotics from his missionary medicine kit, as instructed. The fevers did not abate. Keren’s temperature rose to the very tip of the thermometer. Their only hope was to head for the hospital at the provincial capital, Porto Velho, the nearest outpost of civilization, four hundred miles inland on another river, the Madeira.

  They set out on the Maici, the entire family—Everett, Keren, Shannon, Kristene, who was four, and Caleb, only two—crammed together in an aluminum canoe Everett had borrowed from a visiting Catholic missionary. All it had was a 6.5-horsepower outboard motor. In a tinny, tiny, tippy canoe overloaded like this, every moment felt like the last moment before capsizing into a jungle river fifty feet deep. Keren was already delirious. She slapped at both Shannon and Everett. It took ten hours to reach the point where they had to cross overland from the Maici to the Madeira. Then, a miracle—the kindness of strangers—four young Brazilians appeared from out of nowhere and put Keren and Shannon in hammocks and hung the hammocks from logs they slung over their shoulders fore and aft and hauled them over to the Madeira.

  A day and a night had gone by. On the Madeira, as muddy as the Mississippi and as wide at the mouth, they caught a ship with three decks, one above the other. It went up and down the river like a public bus. They had a three-day trip ahead of them…with no cabins or any other form of privacy except for a single bathroom on the first deck (for about two hundred passengers on a boat designed for ninety-nine, maximum) and no seats; instead, grossly overcrowded ranks of hammocks bearing a jam-up of people hanging shank to flank from the ceilings with their hummocky hips choking the air…

  By now, Keren and Shannon were both suffering from severe diarrhea in addition to the fever and pain. Fortunately, Everett had brought along a chamber pot. Right there in the midst of the other passengers’ hammock-swaddled bottoms, Keren and Shannon took turns sitting on the pot. Everett wrapped a blanket around each one like a tent with a head popping out at the top. The Brazilians couldn’t keep their eyes off the gringos who were gushing gringo misery out of their hindsides. They were disgusted and riveted. They twisted over sideways in their hammocks so as not to miss a moment of th
e spectacle. The redheaded, red-bearded gringo kept taking the pot of sloshing diarrheic rot through crowds of passengers, constantly bending way down with his reeking pot to pass under the hammocks or standing up with his reeking pot and leaning this way and that to hog-wrestle his way through the midair clutter of human haunches to reach the railing and dump the contents into the Madeira and weave his way back through the crowd with the chamber pot, knowing it would be no time before he had to slosh through them again with a potful of humiliation.

  The spectators talked about them constantly, out loud and in full voice, apparently assuming that the gringos couldn’t understand Portuguese. But Everett could.

  “She’s going to die, isn’t she,” one would cry, nodding toward Keren, who was down from 105 pounds to about 70, if that, and looked like the Red Death with a raging fever. “Of course she is,” another would say. “Malaria does quick work with a skinnybones like that one.”

  Everett would experience a very small, rueful lift of superiority. These smug Brazilians obviously couldn’t recognize typhoid fever when it was right in their faces.

  People could already tell that Keren was dying! One look and they knew that much! Everett implored the captain, a one-armed Brazilian who was also the owner, to go faster, straight to Porto Velho. Skip the stops in between! My wife is dying!

  “Look, comrade,” said the one-armed Brazilian, without so much as a trace of fellow feeling, “if your wife is supposed to die, that’s that. I won’t speed up for you.”

  In what seemed like barely an hour the ship pulled into shore in the middle of nowhere and stopped. No passengers were getting on or off. There was no platform and barely a dock. Unaccountably, the entire crew had slipped on red jerseys, even the one-armed captain. With a whoop they all left the ship and climbed up a steep embankment. They looked like a lot of little ladybugs on the way up. At the top, men in green jerseys awaited them.