Metaphors of Multilingualism

Changing Attitudes towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy

Rainer Guldin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Metaphors of Multilingualism explores changing attitudes towards multilingualism by focusing on shifts both in the choice and in the use of metaphors. Rainer Guldin uses linguistics, philosophy, literature, literary theory and related disciplines to trace the radical redefinition of multilingualism that has taken place over the last decades. This overall change constitutes a paradigmatic shift. However, despite the emergence of the new paradigm, the traditional monolingual point of view is still significantly influencing present-day attitudes towards multilingualism. Consequently, the emergent paradigm has to be studied in close connection with its predecessor.

This book is the first extensive attempt to provide a critical overview of the key metaphors that organize current perceptions of multilingualism. Instead of an exhaustive list of possible metaphors of multilingualism, the emphasis is on three closely interrelated and overlapping clusters that play a central role in both paradigms: organic metaphors of the body, kinship and gender metaphors, as well as spatial metaphors. The examples are taken from different languages, among them French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

This is ground-breaking reading for scholars and researchers in the fields of linguistics, literature, philosophy, media studies, anthropology, history and cultural studies.

Part I

Bodies: speaking in tongues

1 The patched-up face of multilingualism

This chapter focuses on body metaphors of multilingualism in connection with practices of code-switching and code-mixing and retraces the theoretical changes these concepts have gone through over the last decades within the field of linguistics. The chapter also provides a short introductory survey of the conflicting positions with regard to multilingualism that will be discussed in more detail in the course of the book and points to the necessity of finding new metaphors that move beyond the traditional notion of language and the simple opposition of monolingualism and multilingualism.

My starting point is a relatively well-known multilingual passage from Umberto Eco’s international bestseller and debut novel The Name of the Rose published in 1980, which was turned into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud and released in cinemas in 1986. I will use this many-layered and intrinsically ambivalent description of language mixing from a literary text and its use in the context of a film as a backdrop to highlight the contradictory responses code-switching and code-mixing have been eliciting in the past and still are today.

1 A cacophony of vernaculars

In late November 1327, shortly after his arrival in a Benedictine monastery in the Ligurian Apennines, Adson von Melk, who tells the story in retrospect and travels as a novice in the care of the Franciscan William of Baskerville, pays a visit to the local abbey. In the film, the scene, underscored by high-pitched sounds, begins with a close-up of gorgons, harpies, lustily intertwined bodies and devilishly distorted, grotesque faces on the walls and ceilings of a murky vestibule. Out of the darkness emerges the hunchbacked monk Salvatore who limps towards the dismayed novice, grabs him by the cowl and pulls him into the middle of the room. The monk gesticulates wildly and holds a rambling multilingual monologue, noisily clapping his hands and sticking out his huge tongue that resembles that of a wild animal. William of Baskerville, attracted by the noise, joins the two. During his monologue, Salvatore has uttered several times the word penitenziagite – from the Latin poenitentiam agite, repent – that Baskerville identifies as the battle cry of the followers of Fra Dolcino who around 1300 had founded the Lay Movement of the Apostolic Brothers in Northern Italy calling for the annihilation of the Roman Church. Dolcino was declared a heretic by Pope Clement V, taken prisoner, executed and burned after public torture. Salvatore, who is aware of the danger, throws himself at Baskerville’s feet and kisses the hem of his robe. ‘What languages does this person speak?’ asks von Melk of Baskerville as they leave the church. The answer suggests that one cannot speak truly more than one language at a time: ‘All languages and no language at all.’

The film weaves a dense associative web around the short multilingual soliloquy: the dark threatening atmosphere of the cramped space, the hybrid monsters in the vestibule, Salvatore’s lower class origin, his heretic stance, oversized wolf-like tongue and unkempt appearance. He speaks some Latin as well as four other languages – Italian, French, English and German – which makes it easier for the audience to pick up at least a part of the meaning but does not fit at all into the historical and geographical context of the story. “Penitenziagite! Hehehe. Watch out for the draculum coming in futurum to gnaw your anima. La morte è supra nos. Hehehe (he claps his hands) Vous contemplate die Apokalypse neh? La bas, nous avons il diavolo (he positions himself with dangling arms in front of the novice, closes his eyes and noisily sticks out his tongue.) Hehehe (gesturing towards his face). Ugly comme Salvatore, Eh? Eh? (He sticks out his tongue a second time.) My little brother, penitenziagite! Hehehe (talking to William of Baskerville) Ma io, non dico penitenziagite. Ma, mmh come fate, manifestissimo, io no un Dolcinito eretico, ma les hommes must do poenitentia. Ich arm e monco, santi benedetti, santi benedetti. J’embrasse, il diavolo, scusa eh!, scusa eh!” Salvatore who self-mockingly compares himself to the devil has a true sense of humour. His melodramatic speech that at first glance appears to be a wild, anarchic shapeless heap of unrelated linguistic fragments – mainly because of the compactness and shortness of the scene and the extremely high frequency of code-switching – turns out to be a relatively well-ordered straightforward narrative once one has a closer look at it. The monologue emphasizes mortality and human frailty as well as the pressing need of Christians to renounce their sins and turn to God in time.

In the English translation of the novel, the speech operates with a set of languages that is more or less in tune with the historical and geographical context. Salvatore switches between Latin, Provençal and the local vernacular. There are also some Spanish elements and traces of present day Italian that has been playfully re-elaborated by the author. “Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m’es dols e plazer m’es dolors…cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?” (Eco 2014:51)

The rendering of the multilingual passage in the film and the novel is profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, one can focus on the disruptive but liberating dimension. In a lecture Eco gave as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1998, he spoke of the Babel effect of defamiliarization he wanted to achieve by introducing Salvatore’s monologue, creating “a language made up of fragments of a variety of different languages” (Eco 2008:57). Salvatore (in English, the redeemer) who ends up being tortured and burnt at the stake by order of the inquisitor from Rome, can be interpreted as tragic-comic saviour-figure (Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans 2002:10–11) who provocatively and playfully tears down linguistic – and indirectly also geographical, political and social – borders allowing things to get out of control. In this context, code-switching also articulates a utopian dream of social justice.

Besides the already mentioned setting, highlighting obscurity, hybridity and monstrosity, the devilish figure of the monk is presented in terms that emphasize the corporeal dimension. He wears a torn and dirty habit that makes him look like a vagabond. The narrator explains that he later learned about Salvatore’s previous life and the various places he had lived “putting down roots in none of them”. Salvatore “spoke all languages, and no language”. He had invented a language for himself, a personal idiolect that did neither resemble the Adamic language, the happy tongue all humankind spoke in the very beginning, nor one of the languages that arose after the fall of the Babel Tower but the “Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion” (Eco 2014:52).

Bonfiglio points to an observation from Eco’s The Search of the Perfect Language, which allows for a reading of Salvatore’s speech that would confirm the already mentioned utopian dimension of social and political renewal. Eco collates the collapse of the Roman Empire with the fall of the Tower of Babel. From the “cacophony of vernaculars”, the linguistic and political disunity, Europe is reborn as a “mosaic of linguistic orphanages” (2010:65), of languages left to themselves. “Europe first appears as a Babel of new languages. Only afterwards was it a mosaic of nations. Europe was thus born from its vulgar tongues” (Eco 1995:18). Salvatore’s individual linguistic confusion could be interpreted, thus, in collective terms as a promise of a multi-voiced world still to come.

In a certain sense, Salvatore’s fragmented speech cannot be considered a language as it does not follow the simplest of rules, that of the conventional identity between word and object. However, continues the narrator, everybody and even himself seemed to understand him in some way. The narrator’s description of the short multilingual passage is clearly at odds with its meaning that can be easily reconstructed by the reader. Moreover, as I will show in this chapter, the two monologues contradict some of the findings of recent linguistic research that have pointed to structuring effects at work within code-switching processes. Add to this the fact that Eco has reworked and modernized his text in some instances, perhaps in an attempt to create an additional sense of arbitrariness.

2 Faces and snouts

The description of Salvatore’s outer appearance centres on his face. The head is hairless, probably as the result of some kind of skin rash.

… the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils … The nose … only a bone that began between the eyes, but immediately sank back, transforming itself … into two dark holes, broad nostrils thick with hair. The mouth, joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to the left, and between the upper lip, non-existent, and the lower, prominent and fleshy, there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s.

(Eco 2014:50–1)

The narrator who perceives the monk at first as a figure straight from hell, comparable to one of the “hairy and hoofed hybrids” (ibid:52) he has seen in the vestibule, points out that he realized afterwards that Salvatore was after all kind-hearted and good-humoured. This change of attitude matches the narrator’s shifting interpretation of the monk’s fragmented idiom that is explicitly compared to his ill-made asymmetrical face. “His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other people’s faces, or like some precious reliquaries … (if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects.” In the Italian original, this metaphorical link has been further enhanced by an alliteration: favella (speech) and faccia (face). The connection has been lost in the English translation but preserved in the German version: Zunge (tongue) and Züge (features).

In order to capture the nature of Salvatore’s monologue the text makes use of another body metaphor that highlights fragmentation and is explicitly linked to the notion of reliquaries. He was “using the disietica membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past …” (ibid:52). This notion was first used by the Roman poet Horace for the dismembered limbs of a former whole. It is also generally used to describe the patching together of ancient text fragments or parts from ancient or medieval manuscripts.

The use of the metaphor of the face to describe the monk’s multilingual speech is not incidental, but has to be placed within a linguistic tradition of which Eco as a scholar of language theory must have clearly been aware. In chapter sixteen of his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language) (1772), the German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) compares the inimitability of languages to the corporeal distinctiveness of individual faces. Two languages differ from each other like the facial features (Gesichtszüge) of two different persons (2015:104). In chapter eight of Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species) (1836) which deals with the notion of inner form of a language, the Prussian philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) describes the languages of different nations in terms of their individuality. The confusing chaos of innumerable words and rules of a single language, its many scattered features (zerstreute Züge) (Humboldt 1998:173), can be reunited into one single organic whole. This process can be compared to the formation of a human face (menschliche Gesichtsbildung) (ibid:176). In both instances, the metaphor of the face describes languages in terms of inner coherence, symmetry and balance. In Salvatore’s face, on the other hand, the single heterogeneous parts do not really fit together, but seem to be governed by an anarchic centrifugal principle. The use of the metaphor of the human face introduces an anachronism in the description of Salvatore’s code-switching as it projects the modern view of languages as unified wholes back into the Middle Ages.

Through the prism of the narrator’s point of view multilingualism is presented in the novel as diabolical or farcical, a heretical threat to order or a harmless game, that is, something fundamentally transgressive and marginal if not simply abnormal. Particularly telling, in this respect, are Salvatore’s nonhuman attributes, his hybrid, half-human, half-animal aspect, his black sharp dogteeth and oversized tongue that seems to lead a life of its own. The infringement of linguistic boundaries is associated with the trespassing of the very limits of being human.

Taylor-Batty pointed to a connection between Babylonian language mixing and animality in Herder’s (2013:28) and Henry James’s work (ibid:36; Perloff 2004:83). In the opening pages of Fragmente zur deutschen Literatur (Fragments on German Literature) (1766–7), Herder discusses the fusional relationship of national language and national literature that grow on the same soil and flow together like two fraternal rivers (1805:17). However, when the literature of foreign cultures is admixed to the homogeneous body of a national literature this turns into a ghost-like (Gespenst), adventurous figure, a protean being (ein wahrer Proteus) (ibid:18) constantly changing its nature like the sea. If the sea-god Proteus still stands for more positive connotations like versatility, adaptability and flexibility, the other mythological figure he employs suggests outright monstrosity. A language that takes its literature from different climates and regions, continues Herder, comes close to the Babylonian mixing of languages (babylonische Sprachenmischung), it is like a Cerberus which barks out nine different sorts of language from nine mouths (aus neun Rachen neun verschiedene Spracharten … heraustößt). Cerberus is a mythical monstrous dog guarding the gates of the netherworld, with a serpent for a tail, and sometimes with snakes protruding from its body. It is generally represented with three heads. Herder might possibly have admixed here the nine-headed serpentine Hydra – another mythical creature also reputed to be living by the entrance to the underworld – to increase the rhetorical effect. Each of the nine heads of Cerberus barks out pure words in its own language (in reinen und eigenen Worten) (ibid:19). Each head that thinks independently will speak for itself, using its own language to express and give form to its own ideas. Despite the fact that the single body of the hellhound sprouts nine different heads, the different languages he barks out are clearly separated from each other. Each head has so to speak its own snout. These different heads will never be able to grow together, as the language and literature of a single nation, and never form a homogeneous whole, as the singularity of each individual language does not allow for any form of mixing.

Herder’s view of multilingualism as a form of multiple monolingualisms, on which the image of the hellhound is based, can also be found in his Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen (On the Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages) (1764) (Herder 1877). The German mother-tongue comes first, as it articulates the deepest feelings. Each language is the expression of the national character of a nation (Nationalcharakter) (ibid:2). In this sense, Herder also emphasizes the importance of a constant dialogue with other languages, because of their unique contribution to humankind. Besides one’s mother-tongue one should, therefore, cultivate other languages to expand the soul and raise up the mind. Herder attributes to each of them a specific cultural trait: French affluence, Italian taste, English pragmatism and Dutch learning. The various languages bear different fruits of the mind (Früchte des Geistes) that can be harvested. Herder makes use of the word einsammlen, to collect, which is used for the harvesting of fruit or the picking of berries (Piller 2016 and Suphan 1883:347). Languages are countable and collectable items like oranges or apples (chapter eleven).

In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin quotes a comment by the French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) on the work of the French writer and physician François Rabelais (1494–1553) that adds a further dimension to Herder’s understanding of multilingualism as a monstrosity. He describes Rabelais’ work as totally incomprehensible, “a mysterious chimera with the face of a lovely woman and the feet and tail of a serpent or of some other hideous animal, a monstrous jumble of delicate morality and filthy depravation” (Bakhtin 1984:108).

Another instance of the metaphorical connection between multilingualism and animality used in a derogatory sense can be found in The Question of our Speech, a lecture that Henry James gave in 1905 at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. The problem with multilingualism is that the borders of an established national language are swamped and that an invasion of foreign idioms can ultimately lead to its dissolution. James focuses on the role of language in the constitution of a collective national identity and the radical changes the American language went through in the wake of the strong immigration movement that took place around the turn of the century. Five years after James’s speech it was calculated that in the United States more or less one person out of four had learned English as a second language. “There are plenty of influences around us”, argues James, “that make for the confused … the mean, the helpless, that reduce articulation … and so keep it as little distinct as possible from the grunting, the squealing, the barking, or the roaring of animals” (James 1999:46), a “tongueless slobber or snarl or whine” (ibid:76). The linguistic impact of the immigrants on the national language tends to dissolve the “ancestral circle” (ibid:53) of its existing structure. The result is chaotic fluidity, a barbaric babble, a “helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises” (ibid:49). “The forces of looseness are in possession of the field” (ibid:55), dumping their “promiscuous material into the foundations of the American” language (ibid:54).

The examples discussed so far describe the mixing of languages as chaotic babble, and a transgression threatening the very borders between humanity and animality. Multilingual speakers revert to an earlier stage of human history. No coherent unity seems possible. Salvatore’s face is a jarring mess and his speech hopelessly fragmentary. Herder’s two metaphors of Proteus and Cerberus stress instability and dissolution on the one hand, and disagreement and divergence on the other. Finally, James describes the presence of foreign linguistic elements in terms of a disintegration and a return to prehuman forms of expression.

In a completely different vein, Sarkonak and Hodgson discuss an attempt at describing a bilingual hybridity that is both textual and corporeal (Guldin 2011a). In the novel La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Road), the French author Claude Simon (1913–2005) introduces a partially annotated French translation from an Italian original dedicated to the engraving of a young man embracing a female centaur (1960:55–6). At a certain point, the text shifts back to Italian, moving from translation to transcription. The hybrid, half-human, half-animal creature, and “the juxtaposition of French and Italian both in the column of gloss in the left hand margin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: Bodies: speaking in tongues
• PART II: Family ties: infidelity, bigamy and incest
• PART III: Spaces: the seas of plurilingualism
• Conclusion
• References
• Index