ABSTRACT
The interplay of power across the field of communications is perhaps best observed through the attempts of various parties to control it. It is to the several communities involved in this process – and to the divers sorts of leverage they seek to exert – that I would like therefore now to turn. As before, I shall not be privileging the print medium above any other. To do so is tempting; in the context of the present argument it is, however, a temptation that should, I believe, be resisted as liable to lead to over-simplification. What we shall find instead, I think, is that in each communicative dispensation – script, say, or print – an eightfold balance of power operates between producers, priests, pundits, politicians, policemen, protestors, publishers and punters. I shall be looking at the influence of the last of these groups – with the public, in fact – in my last chapter. In this and the following one I am concerned with the behaviour of the literary police force, and in particular with three constabularies who do not always recognise one another’s uniforms. These are respectively scholars, editors and censors. The power of the last is well attested, especially in colonial dispensations, and I shall be dealing with it in Chapter 7. In the present chapter I want to urge the possibly paradoxical proposition that scholars and editors have frequently exercised an equally decisive, though possibly a more subtle, influence over the ways in which peoples communicate, especially on paper. Such control, I wish to maintain, is all the more penetrating since, though censors and other legal agencies aim to control entire texts, editors and scholars habitually guard the very gateway to textuality itself, and even exercise some managerial sway over antecedent items such as language and script
Ever since the Tower of Babel, people have been worried about the promiscuity of human speech. In Chapter 4 I offered some tentative figures for
language spread in West Africa, based on two different criteria used by David Dalby (1977): either by counting every language group that recognises itself as separate, or by extending each grouping as far as it went before its speech becomes unintelligible to its neighbours. The first tally was, I noted, larger than the second. Dalby’s criteria have proved useful in the African context. They were not, however, quite original, based as they were on guidelines used in fieldwork undertaken sixty years earlier in South Asia. Between 1903 and 1918, the Irish linguist George Grierson published a seven-volume Linguistic Survey of then-imperial India, appropriately based on locally collected versions of the biblical parable of the prodigal son. It was Grierson who first thought up the two criteria mentioned above. Applying them to the subcontinent as a whole, his figures were 544 as against 179, though these were almost certainly underestimates.
