Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages: writing and the Fall
For Rousseau, writing inscribes a defeat—but in a battle already long lost by the time writing makes the scene. As Cad Goddeu or the Battle of the Trees of Welsh folklore symbolized for Robert Graves, for Rousseau early language is the issue of a primordial battle for meaning and freedom. But for Rousseau it is not root and branch, but consonant and vowel that go to war against one another, dividing and corrupting the universal language that all men spoke before the confusion of the tongues.
“Natural sounds” in Rousseau’s reckoning “are inarticulate,” born of the open mouth. In the originary language of Rousseau’s mythology, consonants interpose themselves across this natural soundstream, rendering vocalizations articulate; out of this segmented ululation, words are born. The originary language “would have been sung rather than spoken”; “it would deemphasize grammatical analogy for euphony, number, harmony, and beauty of sounds.”
Before long, however, the consonantal complication of language runs amok. “To the degree that needs multiply,” Rousseau writes, “that affairs become complicated, that light is shed, language changes its character. It becomes more regular and less passionate. It substitutes ideas for feelings. It not longer speaks to the heart but to reason. Language becomes more exact and clearer, but more prolix, duller, and colder.”
Writing for Rousseau emerges from this dynamic, progressive, metastasizing alienation. And with its advent, language ends its long wrestling match with the snake and departs the garden. “Writing, which would seem to crystallize language, is precisely what alters it. It changes not the words but the spirit, substituting exactitude for expressiveness.” And this chilling exactitude is a feedback loop: “The means used to overcome this weakness tend to make written language rather elaborately prolix; and many books written in discourse will enervate the language.”
