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Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns against Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James Berger
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Abstract

We respond in language to catastrophic, or traumatic, shocks to symbolic systems, for which the fall of the Tower of Babel can be seen as a mythic model. One response is an exploration of new uncertainties; another is a fearful rigidity that seeks to return to an imagined Adamic wholeness of language; another is an effort to transcend language altogether. This essay examines two contemporary responses to a perceived “fall” of language—several case studies of Oliver Sacks's and two novels by Don DeLillo—and places them in the context of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences and what I call a “counterlinguistic turn” that is contemporaneous with the linguistic turn and represents developments of some of its key assumptions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 2 , March 2005 , pp. 341 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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