Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women

Translingual Selves

Natalie Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429619892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors incorporate several languages into their life writing. It compares the work of six contemporary authors who write predominantly in French. It analyses the narrative strategies they develop to incorporate more than one language into their life writing: French and English, French and Creole, or French and German, for example. The book demonstrates how women writers transform languages to invent new linguistic formations and how they create new formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative. It intervenes in current debates over global literature, national literatures and translingual and transnational writing, which constitute major areas of research in literary and cultural studies. It also contributes to debates in linguistics through its theoretical framework of translanguaging. It argues that multilingual authors create new paradigms for life writing and that they question our understanding of categories such as "French literature."

1 Lydie Salvayre

Translanguaging, Testimony and History

French literary prizes hold a revered place in the national culture. Alongside a variety of less prestigious prizes, a small number of highly distinguished prizes garner extensive media attention each year. Tim Unwin identifies them as the “big six”: the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française, the Prix Femina (selected by a jury of women but not necessarily awarded to a woman writer), the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Interallie, the Prix Médicis and, most prestigious of all, the Prix Goncourt (xxii). Awarded annually since 1903, the Goncourt has been bestowed upon writers such as Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, André Malraux and Romain Gary. Importantly, the Goncourt has decorated works by writers for whom French is a second language: Andreï Makine and Jonathan Littell, for example. Prior to 2014, it had never been won by a writer whose prose could be described as multilingual. When Lydie Salvayre won the prize for Pas pleurer, Bernard Pivot announced tellingly, “nous avons d’abord couronné un roman d’une grande qualité littéraire, un livre à l’écriture très originale, même si je regrette qu’il y ait parfois trop d’espagnol” (quoted in Le Nouvel Observateur) [we wanted to award a novel of great literary quality, a very original book, even though there is sometimes too much Spanish in it].

As Pivot underlines in his critique, Spanish is prevalent in Pas pleurer. Benoit Filhol and Mar Jiménez-Cervantes have even taken the time to count the number of incursions of Spanish into the text – 284 (199) – and argue on this basis that “language is the real protagonist of the novel” (208).¹ This is, however, a recent development in Salvayre’s writing. Her numerous published novels correspond far more closely to the tenets of French literary style; so, they would ironically have been more likely contenders for the Goncourt. Equally ironically, Salvayre is a “French writer” through birth but not through mother tongue; she was born in France, but Spanish is her first language. She was born to a Catalan mother and an Andalusian father who fled to the south of France as refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Growing up near Toulouse, Salvayre spoke Spanish at home and began to learn French when she entered primary school. She studied medicine and became a psychiatrist before launching a literary career. Beginning in 1990 with La Déclaration, Salvayre’s work is concerned primarily with psychological portrayals of intimacy, with the workings of memory and with the figure of the writer. Much of her work corresponds to the genre of historical fiction, as her characters contend with the impact of historical events on their present situation or represent the meanderings of memories through their everyday lives. In La Compagnie des spectres (1997), for example, she presents an aging woman who believes she is still living under the Occupation and at the mercy of collaborators, and in Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique (2007), her protagonist is a writer who is employed to sell her soul by writing the biography of a fast-food magnate. As the latter example implies, Salvayre’s writing is characterized by an irreverence; at times comical, at times confronting, her texts frequently depart from French literary conventions. Warren Motte contends that for Salvayre, literature “is a dirty word denoting a set of traditions and practices through which certain species of writers come to comfortable terms with power. She dances around that construct energetically in her fictions, attacking it from a variety of angles, never twice from the same position, relying on that very mobility for her own survival as a writer” (1021). Never before, however, has she danced around the construction of “French literature” by defying its monolingual imperative. Indeed, the 20 texts she authored prior to Pas pleurer all demonstrate a sophisticated, sensitive and poetic approach to the French language and French literary conventions. In this chapter, I offer a reading of Pas pleurer, examining how Salvayre extends her irreverence to the translanguaging that clearly ruffled Pivot.

It is important to note that the translanguaging Salvayre performs in this text is not the only major shift in her writing. Readers with knowledge of Salvayre’s work will be struck by two elements of Pas pleurer: not just the frequent incursions of Spanish into the narrative, but also the turn toward life writing. As we will see, these two shifts coalesce, since the appearance of her native tongue in her turn to self-reflexive writing is not coincidental. In this text, Salvayre personalizes her exploration of history, memory and psychology, writing an autofictional account of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of a first-person narrator named Lidia. Literary critic Joanny Moulin even suggests that the choice to award the Goncourt to Pas pleurer demonstrates that life writing is enjoying unprecedented popularity in France (611). Pas pleurer is a dual narrative, as it intersperses two separate but interweaving strands. The first is narrated by Montse, the narrator’s mother. Montse is 90 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s. She is aware of her failing memory and imminent death, and wishes to recount her recollections in her final days. Much of the text is recounted from Montse’s point of view as she recounts her memories of her glorious summer in 1936 when she was 16 years old. In the other strand are quotations from George Bernanos. Lidia reads Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938), in which the devout Christian Bernanos denounces fascist activity, nationalist violence and the collusion of the Catholic Church in the events of 1936. Juxtaposing the exuberant memories of Montse and the accusatory remonstrations of Bernanos, Salvayre creates a text that, as Marianne Braux identifies, is based upon “d’un côté, un excès de vie, de l’autre, un excès de mort” (70) [an excess of life, on the one hand, and of death on the other]. In Pas pleurer, we read Salvayre reading Bernanos. We also read her interpreting her mother’s speech. Rather than interpreting from one language into another language as discreet units, Salvayre represents the two languages of her mother’s memories. In this chapter, I analyze the ways in which Salvayre incorporates Spanish vocabulary and grammar into her text, creating a multilingual tapestry that borrows lexical items from her two languages. Reading this author’s reflections upon memory, trauma and intimacy through the lens of translanguaging, I argue that she transforms both languages, creating a hybrid grammar that creates a textual space for her to narrate her subjectivity. Her self-narrative thus challenges French literary norms and paradigms of life writing as she creates a new linguistic marker with which to express her hybrid identity.

Language and Irreverence in Pas pleurer

The first of Salvayre’s techniques of translanguaging in this text is the way in which she peppers her narrative with isolated words and expressions in Spanish. A striking example of this is the titles accorded to sections of the text. The narrative is not divided into chapters; there are three numbered, untitled sections that denote major breaks in the storyline. Within these three sections, there are a small number of segments that are each introduced by a title in bold type or in capital letters. Some of these are in French, and others are in Spanish. One example reads simply “¡QUEREMOS VIVIR!” (45) [“WE WANT TO LIVE! ¡QUEREMOS VIVIR!” (47)], which introduces a memory recounted by the mother’s brother, the revolutionary José.² In this example, the Spanish phrase is a quotation from José as he incites revolutionary feeling in the villagers around him. This quotation also introduces a diacritical mark – ¡ – that stands as a visual reminder of the differences between the primary and secondary languages of the text. Interestingly, some of these titles appear in French, such as “IL N’EST DE BON ROUGE QU’UN ROUGE MORT” (18) [“THE ONLY GOOD RED IS A DEAD RED” (19)]. This is again a quotation from a character in the text, whose speech is recounted by Montse in her reminiscences. The text is thus peppered with titles in the two languages with no justification or explanation of the choice of language – and, importantly, with no translation. One particular title exemplifies this. On just the second page of the text, the title “A mis soledades voy/De mis soledades vengo” (12) [“A mis soledades voy/De mis soledades vengo. I go to and from my solitudes” (12)] appears mid-page.³ In this instance, the title signals a change in the narrative; the previous section discussed Bernanos’s engagement with the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish title denotes a shift to the story of the narrator’s mother. The Spanish words of the title are the first two lines of the poem entitled “A mis soledades voy” by the seventeenth-century poet and playwright Lope de Vega. This poem, about solitude, love and humility, is a celebrated text in the Spanish tradition but may not be known to a French reader. Salvayre does not identify the source of the words, gives no justification of its inclusion and provides no translation of it. Some readers will understand the reference and others will not, but Salvayre makes no accommodation for their lack of linguistic or literary knowledge. Moreover, by referring to the Spanish literary tradition within a predominantly French-language text, she highlights the multiple national and linguistic traditions that influence her writing. In this text, the main literary reference from the French tradition is Bernanos, who was writing in the post-war period; the reference to a Spanish writer from the Baroque period suggests that Spanish also has a long and rich history that should not be overlooked.⁴ These titles serve as an early visual reminder of the two languages of which this text consists and of the author’s clear and unapologetic message – delivered on the second page of the prose – that another language will make incursions into the primary language of this text and that the reader will have to accept and develop strategies to deal with this.

One of the main reasons why the reader is forced to acknowledge and work with the two languages is that, as the examples above indicate, Salvayre does not provide French translations of the Spanish titles. In the case of Vega’s poem, this would have been easy to do since this very well-known text in the Spanish literary tradition is readily available in translation. Nevertheless, Salvayre does not include any such translation: no footnote, glossary or parenthesis offers a translation for the non-Spanish speaking reader. Isolated words and expressions in Spanish are to be found throughout Pas pleurer – both in the titles and the prose itself – and these are rarely translated. These isolated incursions of Spanish into the text occur mostly during dialogue and the principal voice who translanguages is Montse, as she recounts her memories of the past. Salvayre calls attention to the importance of the Spanish language to Montse’s story, since her dialogue frequently contains Spanish vocabulary that is rarely translated. This vocabulary often serves to express the emotional charge of Montse’s speech, such as when she exclaims, “mais pour qui il se prend ce cabrón! […] On va lui fermer la gueule à ce burgués!” (19) [“he’ll regret it, the barefaced cabrón! I’ll teach that bourgeois to think twice before opening his mouth again” (19)].⁵ The writer thus accentuates the multilingual background of her characters and the differences between their Spanish and French usage. She even points up the differences between the two languages by pausing to allude to the specificities of Spanish; she writes in relation to the word facha, for example, that “facha est un mot qui, prononcé avec le tcheu espagnol, se lance comme un crachat” (18) [“When the word is pronounced with the Spanish ch, it is accompanied by a spit” (19)] in a phrase that distinguishes the plosive “ch” of the Spanish sound (facha) and the soft “ch” of the French (crachat). The text therefore places a secondary language in a prime position from its outset. By including it in the dialogue, calling attention to it in her prose, and rarely translating it for the non-Spanish speaking reader, Salvayre stages a resistance to the monolingual imperative of French literary style.

Salvayre uses a variety of narrative techniques to explain these words and expressions in Spanish – or not. Sometimes Spanish words appear in italics, and sometimes not; sometimes, they are translated and sometimes not; and sometimes, they are explained in parentheses and sometimes not. In certain cases, she provides French translation in parentheses following the Spanish vocabulary, such as in the phrase “des exactions perpétrées par el terror azul (la terreur bleue, de la couleur de l’uniforme phalangiste)” (110–111) [“the violations carried out by el terror azul (“the blue terror”), the colour of the Falangist uniform” (120)]. As this example demonstrates, Salvayre frequently adds an explanation when the Spanish indicates cultural as well as linguistic knowledge – here, a reference to the uniform of the extreme right nationalist sympathizers, which will likely be unknown to a contemporary French reader. Salvayre occasionally provides historical or cultural information such as this, therefore, but refuses to atone for a lack of knowledge of the Spanish language on the reader’s part. As we will see, many multilingual writers adopt a specific system to convey the words of the second language to the reader, such as footnotes, a glossary or italicized words followed by a translation. Salvayre, however, refuses to adopt any such consistent approach. Applied linguists Patricia Velasco and Ofelia García find that “bilinguals possess only one complex linguistic repertoire […] Bilinguals do not have simply an L1 and an L2, but one linguistic repertoire with features that have been socially assigned to constructions that are considered ‘languages’” (8). Salvayre’s text proclaims that it is perfectly appropriate, expected and normative to have one large lexical resource that consists of two languages, as opposed to two separate resources in different languages, and that literature has the potential to create a textual space to reflect this. She refuses to reduce her linguistic repertoire through the obligation of literary monolingualism and, instead, obliges the reader to take responsibility for translating, where necessary.

This approach, of course, subverts many of the tenets of highly standardized French literary language. Such transgression of literary mores and linguistic regulations form a rebuttal of authorities such as the Académie Française, to which Salvayre alludes. One of her characters comments that French and Spanish literature reflect their people eminently:

l’espagnole faisant la part belle aux choses égrillardes, il suffit de lire El Buscón de Francisco Quevedo, aux côtés duquel son contemporain français a des allures de prof de catéchisme, et la française (littérature) qui, après la fondation de son Académie en 1635, met fin à la gaudriole telle que Rabelais la pratiquait avec génie, car Rabelais était espagnol, camaradas, espagnol en esprit, claro, hermano de Cervantes, claro, et qui plus est, libre-penseur, pour ne pas dire libertaire, A la salud de Rabelais, fait-il en levant son verre (95).

[Spanish literature loves to stress bawdiness, you only have to read El Buscón by Francisco Quevedo to realise this, while French writers of the same period come across as strait-laced teachers of catechism. French literature, after the establishment of a national academy in 1635, put paid to the sort of lewdness beloved by Rabelais, who writes with such genius, because Rabelais, my friends, was actually Spanish in spirit, for sure, claro, a brother to Cervantes, his hermano, and what’s more a free-thinker, if not an Anarchist. So, to Rabelais’ health, all those present shouted, a la salud de Rabelais! (104)]

The isolated words and expressions in Spanish – claro, hermano de Cervantes, a la salud de Rabelais – point to the orality of Salvayre’s text, serving to remind the reader that what she or he is reading is recollections of lived experience: testimonial narrative, of sorts. Furthermore, Salvayre’s irreverent and ironic humor points to the longstanding interaction between languages in French literary history – whether Rabelais was Spanish or not – and positions the Académie as the monolingual straitjacket that restricts them. As we saw in relation to the reference to Lope de Vega above, Salvayre points to earlier times when writers were not delimited by national borders. Figures such as Vega, Cervantes, Quevedo and Rabelais were writing before the advent of the nation state, which is an important construction in the history of monolingualism. Yasemin Yildiz identifies the late eighteenth century as the advent of what she names the “monolingual paradigm” (2). She argues that this paradigm elides the vastness of multilingualism since it has become “a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Lydie Salvayre: Translanguaging, Testimony and History
• 2 French-Vietnamese Translanguaging in the Work of Kim Thúy
• 3 “En Australie, je parle une langue minoritaire”: Catherine Rey’s Franco-Australian Life Writing
• 4 Gisèle Pineau’s Evolving Translanguaging: From Un papillon dans la cité to L’Exil selon Julia to Mes quatre femmes
• 5 Staging Resistance to the Language of the Colonizer: Chantal Spitz’s Translanguaging
• 6 Hélène Cixous’s Franco-German Translanguaging in Une autobiographie allemande
• Conclusion
• Index