Tom Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech has started a row that promises to be the literary spat of the season

The arcane study of language has a new literary entrant: the famed New Journalism author Tom Wolfe. Never one to back away from a fight, Wolfe, 85, has picked two disputes in his new book, The Kingdom of Speech – one with Charles Darwin and a second with linguist Noam Chomsky, 87, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Skirmishes broke out over the summer and look set to continue. Wolfe takes on Darwin’s theory of evolution – “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place”. He also assails Chomsky’s central theory that babies are born with a language organ that produces, in effect, a “universal grammar” which could explain why children are able to speak so early.

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Across 200 pages, Wolfe looks to unpick the origins of speech and human evolution, cavorting from Apache cosmology to “gestural theory”, but it’s his personal attack on Chomsky, a man he calls “Noam Charisma” and depicts as an armchair professor too lazy to go out into the field, that has kicked off the season’s first great literary dispute.

“Chomsky had a personality and a charisma equal to Georges Cuvier’s in France in the early 1800s. Cuvier orchestrated his belligerence from sweet reason to outbursts of perfectly timed and rhetorically elegant fury. In contrast, nothing about Chomsky’s charisma was elegant.” A late 60s radical of Chomsky’s description, he writes, “got himself arrested in the late morning or early afternoon, mild weather. He was booked and released in time to make it to the Electric Circus, that year’s New York nightspot of the century, and tell war stories.”

But Chomsky disputed Wolfe’s characterisations. “What he is up to I have no idea,” he told the Observer. “What amazes me is that any of it is taken seriously, since the errors and, in fact, outright falsifications are so transparent. That includes incidentally slanderous lies about my personal life that any reader can tell at once must be fabrications, since he couldn’t possibly know these things even if they were true.”

Wolfe’s excoriation of Chomsky follows a long line of satirical examinations that have followed his famous adventures in New Journalism (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968 and The Right Stuff in 1979) and social novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). In this other realm, he’s taken on modern art in The Painted Word (1975) and modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House (1981).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Darwin was accused by Wolfe of being a “flycatcher”. Photograph: English Heritage/PA

But to take on Chomsky and Darwin, whom Wolfe portrays as a “slick operator … smooth … smooth … smooth and then some”, who stole his ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace and was a mere “flycatcher”, is of a different order.

Wolfe told the Observer that his interest in evolutionary theory stemmed from a speech he gave in Washington in 2006 on Emile Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine published in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

“The more I thought about it, the less Darwin’s doctrine held, up in my opinion,” he said. Evolutionary development of Homo sapiens, in particular, “drifts into periods where there is no evidence”. Those doubts segued into doubts about the origin of language – man’s singular gift – that he believes was not the product of evolution but a man-made tool.

“My contention is that language is not the result of evolution but essentially a verbal trick that was invented by human beings. It’s a memory aid – a mnemonic – that enables human beings to store away a piece of information and compare it to a new piece of information and draw conclusions.” No other species has a similar ability, making it the secret of our dominance as a species and Wolfe writes: “Humans are pretty pathetic physically. If you weigh 150 pounds and you come up against a 150-pound butterfly in battle, you’re done for. It must be 10 feet tall. But, with planning, humans control every animal on Earth. We’re very generous – we even create animal preserves where wild animals can live. But, oh boy, if they cross the line of the reserve, they’re done for.”

Wolfe then moves on to Chomsky. In 1957, when he was 28, Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, a ground-breaking work that laid out his theories of language, including the evolutionary manner of their development.

“The ‘organ’ … the ‘deep structure’ …the ‘universal grammar’ … the ‘device’ — as Chomsky explained it, the system was physical, empirical, organic, biological,” Wolfe writes. “He drove the discipline indoors and turned it upside down.” Even a visiting Martian “would immediately realise that all the languages on this planet were the same, with just some minor local accents”.

Wolfe claims new evidence presented by anthropologist Daniel Everett on the Brazilian Pirahã tribe proved that language was not the product of evolution but a tool that man created.

Not so, countered Chomsky. “The Pirahã speakers learn Portuguese like everyone else, so of course they have the same faculty of language, and therefore his entire argument collapses.

“There’s no new argument. Everett presented his Pirahã data. The matter has been studied carefully by linguists [some of whom Wolfe cites and dismisses without argument], who showed that it appears to be incorrect; also by experimental cognitive scientists who have drawn the same conclusions. But it was evident at once, and has been pointed out repeatedly, that whatever the facts, they don’t bear on universal grammar. So there is nothing to discuss.”

Wolfe is unlikely to reverse his claims. “The first thing one notices,” he said, “is that language organs, universal grammar, the language acquisition device, none of it exists.”

Wolfe said he was careful to not conflate Chomsky’s theories of language with his radical left point of view. He said: “The combination of the scientific stance and the political stance is what made him so famous but, no, I’ve never thought there was a political side to this.”

For his part, Chomsky said he knew little about Wolfe and that the pair had never had any contact until Wolfe requested an interview. But he considered that Wolfe had misunderstood the argument because, in effect, there was no argument.

“Universal grammar, in the modern sense, is the theory of faculty of language (a biological object, like the faculty of vision), not about particular manifestations of it (like my visual system, which differs slightly from yours). If some tribe were to be found where people wear black patches over one eye, it would be of no interest to scientists studying binocular vision.”

He added: “I’m frankly astonished at the publicity this is receiving.”