Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language. Martin Meisel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xx+148.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBabel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language. Martin Meisel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xx+148.Andrew FrantaAndrew FrantaUniversity of Utah Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt first glance, Martin Meisel’s Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language might appear to follow in the footsteps of George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) or Umberto Eco’s The Search for a Perfect Language (1993). To some extent, of course, it does. All three books begin with the story of the Tower of Babel in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, but just as Eco departs from Steiner, Meisel stakes out his own territory as well. In fact, as he explains in the preface, Babel in Russian is an offshoot of Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science (2016), Meisel’s monumental study of the history of human attempts to understand disorder. While he recognized that language “had a leading part to play” in that story, Meisel did not pursue “language itself … as an entire realm that is itself subject to chaos” (xi). That story, a second-order reflection on the disorder of language, is instead the subject of this richly rewarding pendant volume.Babel in Russian’s primary fields of inquiry are literature and architecture—and, importantly, the complex interplay between the two—but, as its title suggests, the book ranges widely. In historical terms, while early twentieth-century Russian literature and culture serve as the study’s focal point, even a brief synopsis of some of the authors and topics it surveys demonstrates the inadequacy of this description. Meisel begins by considering a series of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century representations of the Tower of Babel (chap. 1), before taking up an array of efforts from antiquity to the twentieth century first to recover an originary language and then to theorize linguistic difference (chap. 2) and literary explorations of linguistic chaos and reconstruction in Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, and Beckett (chap. 3). The second half of the book examines the place of the story of Babel in modern social and political movements (especially postrevolution Russia), the novel and film (Eugene Zamyatin’s We [1924] and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [1927]), and theater (plays by Ionesco, Havel, and Handke). A brief final chapter addresses reflections on the legacy of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges and A. R. Ammons, and a coda reads Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme as a precursor to Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano.A closer look at just one thread of Meisel’s story will perhaps give a clearer sense of Babel in Russian’s historical trajectory and method. In chapter 4, “The Monument and the Labyrinth,” Meisel argues that in the wake of the French Revolution, “the symbolism of the tower as a unifying structure … took on a schizophrenic new life”: “On the one hand it was recruited to the progressive rhetoric, aspiration, and achievement of the secular state. But on the other it could serve to symbolize a newly sacralized and institutionalized disorder, Babylon in all its hubris reborn” (53). Meisel opens his discussion by setting Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20), an unbuilt memorial to the Bolshevik Revolution that was intended to house the Comintern, as a modern instance of the positive side of this opposition and proceeds to trace the inspiration for Tatlin’s tower back to Enlightenment “utopian architecture” (55), emblematized by Etienne Louis Boullée’s Project of a Cenotaph for Newton (1784), as well as the nationalist “sacralizing of the State” that prompted Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), to offer Babel as his first example of “Architectural Works built for National Unification” (57). Juxtaposed against this positive vision is the powerful image of the attacks on the World Trade Center, which, Meisel claims, encapsulate “the negative symbolism of the Tower as embodying the organized chaos of the secular order” (58). “For traditionalists,” he argues, the image of the World Trade Center “presents no ambiguity”; it was the modern instantiation of the overweening desire to set man above God. Meisel has little time for such extremists. He is more interested throughout Babel in Russian in the “various and contradictory” “symbolic possibilities” of Babel than its political or ideological appropriation as an unambiguous sign. He finds this kind of complexity in works ranging from the opening “Vision” of Victor Hugo’s La légende des siècles (1857–59) and an etching of the Tower by Willy Jaekel (1920) to Tatlin’s planned “monument to the future” (63), the writings of the Futurist poet and playwright Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), the radio tower commissioned by Lenin, designed by Vladimir Shukov, and erected on Shabolovka Street in Moscow (1922), and the technofuturism of the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), completing an itinerary that brings the chapter from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to revolutionary Russia.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 Russian is 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. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710609 Views: 199 HistoryPublished online August 12, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.