by Tom Wolfe
Godalmighty—they were stopping to play soccer!—and obviously they had arranged it well in advance.
Keren, her face a fiery red, slipped in and out of consciousness. It was two hours before the one-armed captain and his crew returned to the ship, still togged out in soccer gear, in high spirits, laughing, making jokes, jolly jolly jolly flirting with pretty girls among the passengers.
An eternity it took, but they finally reached the hospital in Porto Velho.
“My wife and my daughter have typhoid fever,” Everett announced.
The doctor took a good look at Keren and Shannon and said, “Looks like malaria to me.” He took drops of blood from Keren’s and Shannon’s fingers and put them on slides and examined them with a microscope…and began chuckling.
Indignant, Everett said, “What are you laughing at?”
“They have malaria, all right,” he said, “and not just a little.”
He laughed some more, apparently at Everett’s ignorance. What made it even funnier was that Keren’s and Shannon’s bloodstreams had the highest levels of malaria he had ever come across in his whole career, and he treated malaria patients every day hahahaaaa!
Every doctor, every nurse, every AD (Almost a Doctor), told Everett that Shannon might make it, but it was too late for Keren. He had wasted so much time with his own AD diagnosis of typhoid fever, she would never survive.
But after two weeks of intensive care, she did—and would probably recover entirely…in time…which turned out to be six months’ recuperation in her parents’ home. Then she headed right back to the Pirahã and Everett.
Everett tells that story early in the book…then doesn’t hesitate to turn to such matters as experiments on Pirahã numerosity, i.e., linguistic and psychological expression and control of numerical concepts. He weaves these dissertations throughout Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes…and it is hard to come away from the book without feeling they were just as important to him as the story of his life. And they probably were. They gave his saga some very necessary gravity…even as the story became more intense. The most intense was the night of the cachaça madness. This was three years into the Everetts’ life among the Pirahã.
Cachaça is a liquor distilled from sugarcane. Brazilians had warned Everett about cachaça, but he had never actually had to deal with the problem before. Everett and his entire family—Keren, Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb—lived in one of the very few structures that rated the designation house in the Pirahã area of the jungles along the Maici River. It was built atop a four-foot-high platform. In the middle of the house was a storeroom. One night about nine o’clock the whole family was asleep when Everett heard loud talk and laughter on the riverbank. Drunken talk and laughter, if he knew anything about it. So he got up and went down to check it out. A boat such as Brazilian river traders use, a big one, had pulled into shore, and ten or twelve Pirahã were on the deck laughing and carrying on. They fell silent when they saw Everett approaching. There was no visual evidence of anybody drinking. So Everett settled for giving the captain, a Brazilian, a little lecture in Portuguese about how selling alcohol in this part of the Amazon was illegal and punishable by heavy fines and two years in jail. It occurred to him later that he must have sounded terribly officious, since technically he was nothing but a nosy American with a visa, commander of nothing. By the time he went back to bed, the noise had resumed; but he managed to fall asleep, only to be awakened an hour or so later by two men speaking in Pirahã inside a small house the Catholic missionary, by then departed, had built no more than a hundred feet away.
One Pirahã said, “I am not afraid. I kill the Americans. We kill them, the Brazilian gives us a new shotgun. He told me that.”
“You kill them, then?” said the other.
“Yes. They go to sleep. I shoot them.”
A bolt of panic through the solar plexus. Everett can tell they’re merely waiting to work up the nerve or the cachaça blood level to do it. What earthly chance do he and Keren and the three children have? Exactly one, Everett concludes. He leaves the house immediately, as is, in his shorts and flip-flops. God, it’s dark out here, blacker than black, and he didn’t dare bring a flashlight because they might see him coming. Very odd!—no campfires such as the Pirahã keep lit out in front of their huts and lean-tos at night. (He would learn later that all the Pirahã women had put out the fires and fled deep into the jungle the moment they heard the word “cachaça.”) Everett bursts into the drunk Pirahã’s little hideaway next door with a big grin and, in Pirahã, gives them the merriest, liveliest “Hey guys! What’s up!” any walking dead man ever exclaimed to his executioners. Without any pause at all he continues drenching them with the most hyperexuberant happy patter-blather imaginable, as if there had never been any closer comrades on this earth. Oh, the times we’ve had together! The drunk Pirahã stare at him without a word, utterly, boozily stupefied…as he gathers up all the weapons, two shotguns, two machetes, bows and arrows, and leaves chundering still more ebullient, chummy-honey-rummy talk all over them, flashing still more inexplicably ecstatic grins, even warbling bird words so sublimely that the most lyrical nightingale would exhale with hopeless envy—and once out the door and into the dark, cradling the cache of weaponry in his arms, he runs, actually runs, hobbledy, staggerly, stumbly, jackleggedly, back to his own house, where he stashes the cache in the storeroom, save for one shotgun. He removes the gun’s shells. Then he has Keren and the children go into the storeroom and lock it from within. He remains on the platform just outside the door to the house and sits on a bench with the shotgun in his lap. Not even the most schnockered, hopelessly cachaça’d Pirahã can miss it.
He can hear Pirahã running toward him in the dark, ululating devastation. Other voices keep warning them, “Watch out! Dan’s got weapons!”…weapons—plural—as if he’s a one-Crooked-Head army. He’s conscious of an arrow whizzing by, but not aimed at him. They don’t dare shoot arrows at the one-Crooked-Head army. By 4:00 a.m. the Pirahã yahoos have headed down the riverbank, judging by the noise. Everett, exhausted, a nervous wreck, goes into the storeroom with everybody else, collapses asleep—
—thump crash arrggggh more thuds groans agonized grunts…on all sides of the storeroom only one inch away—that being the thickness of the storeroom wall right behind them, right before them, on both sides of them—one inch away—when splat hock jaaaggh thump yaaak groan eeeowww the whole storeroom shakes, shudders, trampolines on the platform…the bastards could break into this little room just like that if they knew we were in here, but now they’re bent only upon beating each other senseless thump crack groan ooof ummmph. Everett has the shotgun with no shells to—what?—scare them with? There are so many Everetts young and old crammed in here, how can he possibly—
Gradually the fighting subsides…the house grows silent…they must have beaten each other into jelly by now…not a sound in the village, either…light visible through the storeroom’s minute joined apertures…Everett dares open the hatchway…broad daylight…everywhere, an unnatural quiet…the whole village has sunk into a cachaça’d hangover.
Everett and Keren go through the house, expecting the worst. It was and it wasn’t. There wasn’t a whole lot of physical damage. Most of the damage the Pirahã had inflicted upon each other’s cachaça’d selves. There were smears of blood everywhere—on the walls, on the beds…pools of blood on the floors…cachaça had turned their happy, laughing selves into blithering maniacs out for blood.
Later on, a ragtag delegation of Pirahã with black eyes, swollen jaws, and fat lips comes to Everett’s house to apologize. They’re friendly, indolent, loose, laid-back, lazy. Soon they will forget they went mad from cachaça: Who remembers “other day” anyway?
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes instantly became a hit and the biggest wallop in the breadbasket Noam Chomsky’s hegemony had ever suffered. Everett didn’t so much attack Chomsky’s theory as dismiss it. He spoke of Chomsky’s “waning influence” and the mounting
evidence that Chomsky was wrong when he called language “innate.” Language had not evolved from…anything. It was an artifact. Just as man had taken natural materials, namely, wood and metal, and combined them to create the ax, he had taken natural sounds and put them together in the form of codes representing objects, actions, and, ultimately, thoughts and calculations—and called the codes words. In Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Everett animates his avant-garde theory with the story of his own thirty years with this, the most primita—er, indigenous—tribe known to exist on earth, the Pirahã…risking death in virtually every conceivable form in the jungle, from malaria to murder to poison to getting swallowed by anacondas.
National Public Radio read great swaths of the book aloud over the their national network and named it one of the best books of the year.148 Reviews in the popular press were uniformly favorable, even glowing…to the point of blinding…as in the Sacramento Book Review: “A genuine and engrossing book that is both sharp and intuitive; it closes around you and reaches inside you, controlling your every thought and movement as you read it.” It is “impossible to forget.”149
Ideally, great wide-eyed romantic acclaim like this should have no effect, except perhaps a negative one, in academia. But when the truth squad’s forty-thousand-word “reassessment” finally came out in Language, in June of 2009, there was no explosion. The Great Rebuttal just lay there, a swollen corpus of objections—cosmic, small-minded, and everything in between. It didn’t make a sound. The success of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes had defused it.
Chomsky and the squad were far from done for, however. They concentrated on the academic press. No academic, in what was still the Age of Chomsky, was likely to write any gushing review of Everett’s scarlet book. Chomsky and the squad were on the qui vive for anyone who stepped out of line. A professor of philosophy at King’s College London, David Papineau, wrote a more or less positive review of Don’t Sleep—only that: “more or less”—and a member of the truth squad, David Pesetsky, put him in his place. Papineau didn’t take this as good-hearted collegial advice. “For people outside of linguistics,” he said, “it’s rather surprising to find this kind of protection of orthodoxy.”150
Three months after Don’t Sleep was published, Chomsky dismissed Everett to the outer darkness with one of his favorite epithets. In an interview with Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s biggest and most influential newspaper, news website, and mobile news service, Chomsky said Everett “has turned into a charlatan.”151 A charlatan is a fraud who specializes in showing off knowledge he doesn’t have. The epithets (“fraud,” “liar,” “charlatan”) were Chomsky’s way of sentencing opponents to Oblivion. From then on Everett wouldn’t rate the effort it would take to denounce him.
Everett had, as it says in the song, let the dogs out. Linguists who had kept their doubts and grumbles to themselves were emboldened to speak out openly.
Michael Tomasello, a psychologist who was codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the scholars who commented on Everett’s 2005 article in Current Anthropology, had been critical of this and that in Chomsky’s theory for several years. But in 2009, after Everett’s book was published, he went all out in a paper entitled “Universal Grammar Is Dead” for the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and confronted Chomsky head-on: “The idea of a biologically evolved, universal grammar with linguistic content is a myth.”152 “Myth” became the new word. Vyvyan Evans of Wales’s Bangor University expanded it into a book, The Language Myth, in 2014. He came right out and rejected Chomsky’s and Steven Pinker’s idea of an innate, natural-born “language instinct.” In a blurb, Michael Fortescue of the University of Copenhagen added, “Evans’ rebuttal of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics provides an excellent antidote to popular textbooks where it is assumed that the Chomskyan approach to linguistic theory…has somehow been vindicated once and for all.”153
Thanks to Everett, linguists were beginning to breathe life into the words of the anti-Chomskyans of the twentieth century who had been written off as cranks or contrarians, such as Larry Trask, a linguist at England’s University of Sussex. In 2003, the year after Chomsky announced his Law of Recursion, Trask said in an interview, “I have no time for Chomskyan theorizing and its associated dogmas of ‘universal grammar.’ This stuff is so much half-baked twaddle, more akin to a religious movement than to a scholarly enterprise. I am confident that our successors will look back on UG as a huge waste of time. I deeply regret the fact that this sludge attracts so much attention outside linguistics, so much so that many non-linguists believe that Chomskyan theory simply is linguistics…and that UG is now an established piece of truth, beyond criticism or discussion. The truth is entirely otherwise.”154
In 2012 Everett published Language: The Cultural Tool, a book spelling out in scholarly detail the linguistic material he had tucked in amid the tales of death-dodging in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes…namely, that speech, language, is not something that had evolved in Homo sapiens, the way the breed’s unique small-motor-skilled hands had…or its next-to-hairless body. Speech is man-made. It is an artifact…and it explains man’s power over all other creatures in a way Evolution all by itself can’t begin to.
Language: The Cultural Tool was Everett’s Origin of Species, his Philosophiae Naturalis…and it wasn’t nearly the success that Don’t Sleep had been. It went light on the autobiographical storytelling…Oh, the book had its moments…Only Everett had it in him to make direct fun of Chomsky…He tells a story about visiting MIT in the early 1990s and going to what was billed as a major Chomsky lecture. “A group of his students were sitting in the back giggling,” says Everett. “When Chomsky mentioned the Martian linguist example, they could barely constrain their chuckles and I saw money changing hands.” After the talk, he asked them what that was all about, and they said they had bets with each other on exactly when in his lecture Chomsky would drop his moldy old Martian linguist on everybody.
Critics such as Tomasello and Vyvyan Evans, as well as Everett, had begun to have their doubts about Chomsky’s UG. Where did that leave the rest of his anatomy of speech? After all, he was very firm in his insistence that it was a physical structure. Somewhere in the brain the language organ was actually pumping the UG through the deep structure so that the LAD, the language acquisition device, could make language, speech, audible, visible, the absolutely real product of Homo sapiens’s central nervous system.
And Chomsky’s reaction? As always, Chomsky proved to be unbeatable when it came to debate. He never let himself be backed into a corner, where he could be forced to have it out with his attackers jowl to howl. He either jumped out ahead of them and up above them or so artfully dodged them that they were left staggering off stride. Tomasello had closed in and just about had him on all this para-anatomy, when suddenly—
—shazzzzammm—Chomsky’s language organ and all its para-anatomy, if that was what it was, disappeared, as if it had never been there in the first place. He never recanted a word. He merely subsumed the same concepts beneath a new and broader body of thought. Gone, too, astonishingly, was recursion. Recursion! In 2002 Chomsky had announced his discovery of recursion and pronounced it the essential element of human speech. But here, in the summer of 2013, when he appeared before the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan…recursion had vanished, too. So where did that leave Everett and his remarks on recursion? Where? Nowhere. Recursion was no longer an issue…and Everett didn’t exist anymore. He was a ghost, a vaporized nonperson. Naturally, the truth squad could no longer see him, either. They couldn’t have cared less about churning up an angry wave for Language: The Cultural Tool to come surfing in on. They didn’t even extend Everett the courtesy of loathing him in print. They left non-him behind with all the rest of history’s roadside trash.
The passage of time did not mollify Chomsky’s opinion of the non-him, Everett, in the slighte
st. In 2016, when I pressed him on the point, Chomsky blew off Everett like a nonentity to the minus-second power.
“It”—Everett’s opinion; he does not refer to Everett by name—
amounts to absolutely nothing, which is why linguists pay no attention to it. He claims, probably incorrectly… it doesn’t matter whether the facts are right or not. I mean, even accepting his claims about the language in question—Pirahã—tells us nothing about these topics. The speakers of this language, Pirahãn speakers, easily learn Portuguese, which has all the properties of normal languages, and they learn it just as easily as any other child does, which means they have the same language capacity as anyone else does. Now, it’s conceivable, though unlikely, that they just don’t bother using that capacity. It’s like finding some kind of bird that could fly freely but just doesn’t bother going up above trees. I mean, it’s conceivable, pretty unlikely but conceivable. And it would tell you nothing about biology.155
As a result, Everett’s new book didn’t begin to kick up the ruckus that Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes had. An entirely new world had been born in linguistics. In effect, Chomsky was announcing—without so much as a quick look back over his shoulder—“Welcome to the Strong Minimalist Thesis, Hierarchically Structured Expression, and Merge.” A regular syllablavalanche had buried the language organ and the body parts that came with it.
Starting in the 1950s, said Chomsky, whose own career had started in the 1950s, “there’s been a huge explosion of inquiry into language.…Far more penetrating work is going on into a vastly greater array of theoretical issues.…Many new topics have been opened. The questions that students are working on today could not even be formulated or even imagined half a century ago or, for that matter, much more recently.…” They are “considering more seriously the most fundamental question about language, namely, what is it.” What is it?! With the help of “the formal sciences,” said Chomsky, we can take on “the most basic property of language, namely, that each language provides an unbounded array” of (Chomsky loved “array”) “hierarchically structured expressions…through some rather obscure system of thought that we know is there but we don’t know much about it.”156
