Read the story here or listen to Rushdie's reading.
Two thoughts in the entire story earn their places as separate paragraphs. No other paragraphs in this short story are built on a single sentence. And, with so many characters and representatives of which to keep account, I read the story five times before wondering who has these thoughts.
Nobody's listening.
Nobody cares.
These are Language's thoughts. These could as easily been the old man's beliefs; he is as lonely and alone for most his life as any character ever given top billing in a drama. However, the old man "grew old before his time" and has no need in the era of disagreement to express either with outrage or complacency something he could have acknowledged decades before when his fire for companionship burned true. The statement is made with finality, as though settled in a court of law, with confidence that it will go unchallenged. How am I to accept that the old man and the city people who travel several miles to the piazza every evening of every day except Sunday when "everyone stays home and eats", the humans who learn how to use language from their birth, are not the story's characters who recognize this assault on their emotional well-being? Does Language possess eyes and ears, a thinking brain, a soul?
Perhaps a reader's first mistake is to assume that Rushdie anthropomorphizes language in this story as a mere attention-getting strategy. If Rushdie as author intends to create Language as a character with whom we can identify only so that we sympathize with her grievances, then Rushdie accomplishes much. However, there is more to Language than her ability to frustrate the reader. We cannot overlook her power. We must not forget from whom Language derives her power, how she thrives or decays, that she is often kept in a punishment-corner like a child who tells her mom "No!", why every culture and ethnicity and community develops a Language. And, more important, how Language shapes us. To suggest that communication of desire and opinion is our sole reason for Language is to become the people who gather in the piazza every day, those who live in its immediate vicinity and those who travel to it, and fall subject to the rules dictated by "the times". To take on the "vanity of certainty" wherein any one person's belief is as valid as another's, as valid as proven fact. To see Language attract a specific type, a narrow band of philosophers and poets who society casts aside "with a dismissive shrug" because all others acquire only the vocabulary needed to state the obvious or debate the least consequential. To convince ourselves that Both-sides argumentation is as relevant as "productive debate", that Language is "clearly happier" as long as she is not subserviented as in the time when every conversation must blossom in agreement and cover up truths.
The USA and other countries are in a similar "time of no" that brings Language to her summation, "Nobody's listening. Nobody cares." We possess nearly unlimited freedom to speak; we demonstrate limitations on that freedom.
Rushdie describes the time during which Language is "languishing in her corner" as a new version of speech deprivation, regulation and restriction. The old man becomes a judge when he finds his voice in the awakening of the "time of no". Then, the old man "becomes trapped in the play" and a religious leader who defines the time when all others seek his voice. Language watches the old man expand his judgements beyond "rightness" as he explores the frontiers of "rectitude". His popularity grows. Language continues to lose her audience. Although from her corner, where she remains available and willing, "youthful and beautiful", Language feels her age and dutifully informs the public that she "may be decaying". Cannot they see that? Are all these people who create loud noises with their arguing every evening in the piazza blind and deaf to the condition of their Language? While they wait in long lines to hear the Old Man's judgements and decrees, do they not recognize that these judgements place greater limits on their Language and have the capability of surrendering them to the dangers of new frontiers forced on them from both outside and inside their communities?
Language is a tool with greater power than we realize. She is available in lean times as well as in prosperous times, when Rules like Matryoshka dolls dictate limitations on expression that in turn limit communication and learning and thereby imperil society's willingness to define the limits of facsimile and resolution, as with the piazza's marble statues. And when Rules vanish for a time, creating (un)limitations on opinion or expertise, on lies or truths. Then at the end of the (Un)Rule time when the great divides are infiltrated by a few like the Old Man who opportunistically find popularity and dictate judgements that in turn trap followers into believing their every word and hold the followers hostage to fewer words and susceptible to "frontier justice".
When Language comes to this conclusion, we die with her. It is not enough to say that we have freedom of speech or that we fight to protect that freedom. No. Language is power. With Language we can describe and explain and argue and defend. We can invite and include and empower. We can grow our critical abilities to judge and reflect and renew.