Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies

The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language

Martin Meisel

This study analyzes the biblical Tower of Babel story, a cautionary tale that accounts for the diversity of languages and peoples. The author pursues its linking of language, architecture, and society as well as its relevance in art and literature over centuries. To come to terms with a perceived disorder in the realm of language, alternative explanations and projects for remediation abound. The disorder and diversity themselves find expression in art, literature, and philosophical reflection and caused the emergence of a historical linguistics. The ambition of the builders—with its social and organizational premise—reemerges in both political and material form as cities, states, and monumental constructions. Utopian aspirations and linguistic claims permeate both revolutionary notions of universality and the romantic essentialism of the nation state. These in turn provoke dystopian critique in literature and film. As Martin Meisel reveals in this study, the wrestle with language in its recalcitrant instability and imperfect social function enters into dialogue with the celebration of its diversity, elasticity, and creativity.

Lexington Books

Pages: 168 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-4985-8837-9 • Hardback • August 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-8838-6 • eBook • August 2019 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Series: Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Russian & Former Soviet Union, History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies

The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language

Hardback

eBook

Summary

This study analyzes the biblical Tower of Babel story, a cautionary tale that accounts for the diversity of languages and peoples. The author pursues its linking of language, architecture, and society as well as its relevance in art and literature over centuries. To come to terms with a perceived disorder in the realm of language, alternative explanations and projects for remediation abound. The disorder and diversity themselves find expression in art, literature, and philosophical reflection and caused the emergence of a historical linguistics. The ambition of the builders—with its social and organizational premise—reemerges in both political and material form as cities, states, and monumental constructions. Utopian aspirations and linguistic claims permeate both revolutionary notions of universality and the romantic essentialism of the nation state. These in turn provoke dystopian critique in literature and film. As Martin Meisel reveals in this study, the wrestle with language in its recalcitrant instability and imperfect social function enters into dialogue with the celebration of its diversity, elasticity, and creativity.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 168 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-4985-8837-9 • Hardback • August 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-8838-6 • eBook • August 2019 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Series: Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Russian & Former Soviet Union, History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Author

Martin Meisel is Brander Matthews Professor Emeritus of dramatic literature at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Second Fall

Part I. Words and Things

Chapter 1: Nimrod's Tower.

Chapter 2: Monody and Polyphony

Chapter 3: The Horizon of Etcetera.

Part II: Building the Future

Chapter 4: The Monument and the Labyrinth

Chapter 5: The Electric City

Chapter 6: Public and Private

Chapter 7: After Babel

Reviews

[A] richly rewarding pendant volume. . . . Babel in Russian’s horizon is modern Russian literature and culture, but its scholarly contribution finally has more to do with the wealth of information it collects and constellates than an argument that begins with Nimrod and ends with A. R. Ammons. The overriding effect of the intricate web of connections Meisel weaves in Babel in Russianis to suggest that the realization of the sublimity the Tower was intended to embody is finally to be found not in the imagined edifice but in its ongoing reception in Western culture.

— Modern Philology

This is a lucid and erudite study of one of the defining myths of western culture. Martin Meisel is a superb guide through the broad and often contradictory implications of the Babel story, and its long history of adaptation and interpretation, culminating in its appearance as a great enabling trope in modernist literature.
— Stephen Orgel, Stanford University

As a follow-up to Chaos Imagined, Martin Meisel explores how language and chaos make and unmake each other. Babel is another coruscating contribution shot through with Meisel's sly humor and extraordinary erudition.
— R. Darren Gobert, Duke University

'Chaos is come again!' predicts Othello. Nothing daunted, Martin Meisel plunges directly into the linguistic and intellectual chaos figured by the Tower of Babel in order to make sense of it. Paradoxically, his account is eminently lucid, illuminated by flashes of wit and pyrotechnic displays of erudition. The breadth of coverage extends from drama to architecture, with an equally impressive range of reference. Cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, this is a masterfully researched, exquisitely written exploration of one of culture’s most slippery concepts.
— Laurence Senelick, Tufts University

This book reaches back into a Biblical past—Babel as origin of “linguistic chaos”—with a theoretical panache that illuminates the present. Because Meisel is supremely well versed in areas ranging from visual art and architecture to literature, theater and cinema, he can mine Shakespeare, Moliere, Bruegel, Joyce, Metropolis, and Blade Runner for gems of lucidity.From “mutual incomprehension,” Meisel finds—or creates—meaning in a manner that is linguistically playful as well as philosophically profound.
— Annette Insdorf, Columbia University

Meisel’s book should be read by everyone who takes the study of language seriously. Against the background of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Meisel examines language as an instrument of order and of chaos at the same time.The author’s remarkable erudition and analysis extend from Sumerian literature to “Blade Runner,” and much in between.
— David Sperling, Hebrew Union College

Meisel takes the biblical account of the divinely forestalled tower of Babel as his point of departure for a suggestive consideration of the resulting “confusion of tongues” as a figure for chaos itself. Drawing on a dazzling array of texts (religious, philosophical, political, narrative, lyric, dramatic, filmic), the author reveals the extent to which the fraught relationship between chaos and order, design and disarray, richness and ruin, energy and fixity has been framed in terms of language—as the rift between word and world, as the non-correspondence of word and word that results from the dispersal of peoples and the proliferation of cultures, the blighted prospects for understanding and cooperation (let alone the construction of towers), and the longing for recognizable equivalents. The upside to all this divergence and difference is the proposition that what’s needed (and possible) is not uniformity but unity, less a matter of being the same than of being in contact.

In Meisel’s learned discussion, what issues from that circumscribed report in Genesis is a cascade of hermeneutic possibilities that proceed from familiar melody to harmony to polyphony to a veritable canon of voices from centuries, genres, lands, and, aptly, languages. The result is a rich meditation on chaos that generates, associates, uncovers, and always, always illuminates. Reading it is a joy.
— Cathy Popkin, Columbia University