Multilingual Literature as World Literature

Jane Hiddleston, Wen-chin Ouyang

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501360107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Multilingual Literature as World Literature examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures. The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research. First, by looking at how engaging with multilingualism as a mode of reading makes visible the multiple pathways of circulation, including as aesthetics or poetics emerging in the literary world when languages come into contact with each other. Second, by exploring how politics and ethics contribute to shaping multilingual texts at a particular time and place, with a focus on the local as a site for the interrogation of global concerns and a call for diversity. Third, by engaging with translation and untranslatability in order to consider the ways in which ideas and concepts elude capture in one language but must be read comparatively across multiple languages. And finally, by proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.

Part I

Multilingualism and modes of reading

1

Writing in the presence of the languages of the world: Language, literature and world in Édouard Glissant’s late theoretical works

Jane Hiddleston

Glissant’s assertion that ‘j’écris en présence de toutes les langues du monde’ (I write in the presence of the languages of the world) is repeated multiple times in his later theoretical essays, in particular in Traité du tout-monde (Treatise on the Totality-World), published in 1997. The statement announces his ongoing commitment to multilingualism and his insistence that language is always defined by Relation, by which he means that our idioms are created out of the dynamic global network of languages and are not necessarily determined by a single linguistic system. Yet if Glissant so insistently celebrates this creative multilingual expression, the dominant language of his prose appears on first glance to be French. He occasionally incorporates creole terms, particularly in his poetry, and often uses the specific lexicon of the local Martinican landscape in all his writing, but his theorization of a creolized, multilingual writing nevertheless for the most part appears to take place in literary French, even if this French is lexically wide-ranging and contains evidence of his engagement with multiple cultures. The notion that the writer writes in the presence of the languages of the world, then, implies something different from a bilingual writing that stages a confrontation between languages by consistently inserting words or sentences from one language into another.

This chapter takes Glissant’s statement as a starting point for a conception of multilingualism in ‘world literature’ that does not rest on the assumption that separate languages can be juxtaposed with one another, but that is constructed out of a more expansive and relational understanding of language usage. Glissant’s assertion notes the presence in his writing of multiple languages ‘dans la nostalgie poignante de leur devenir menacé’ (in the poignant nostalgia of their threatened becoming), and announces a commitment to the preservation of minority languages as a principled response to global linguistic diversity and as a challenge to the repressiveness behind any insistence on linguistic hierarchy or segregation.¹ Yet the statement also announces a deep-seated ethics of writing, an approach to language whereby the writer seeks deliberately to exhibit the contingency of his usage and signals an awareness of the myriad potentially unfamiliar languages that surround and shape his writing. Glissant’s conception of language itself, and of the ‘world’ in which it is immersed, indicates that it is possible to transcend the putative opposition between monolingualism and multilingualism and to understand language and writing in ways that are ultimately both more creative and more ethical. ‘World literature’, from this point of view, would be an arena for performing the creation of idiom from a dynamic world of languages and for continually testing and expanding our assumed linguistic systems.

A number of critics have in recent years attempted to come up with ways of imagining literary creativity so as to reflect the complex activity and interpenetration of languages in ways that provide a starting point for Glissant’s more thoroughgoing theoretical intervention. Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated examines novels that ‘have been written for translation from the start’, that is, novels that stage their own indebtedness to languages other than the one in which they are written.² This might include works written in a second language, for example, or texts that have been translated by their authors, or that are manifestly the product of a translation process at some point. In this sense they are on some level written ‘in the presence of’ other languages, as Glissant would suggest, as these languages are referenced through the staging of the translation process. The difficulty with Walkowitz’s model, however, is that although she insists that her readings demonstrate that ‘anglophone writing operates in many languages, even when it appears to be operating only in English’, her analyses do not particularly exhibit linguistic diversity and experimentalism, and her model still relies on a notion of translation from one language into another.³ The other languages to which her chosen texts refer may be present but they are also latent, and do not necessarily generate linguistic invention.

Other critics have examined more fully the presence of other languages in literary texts by foregrounding not just ‘multilingualism’ in the sense of the juxtaposition of several monolingual systems, but more developed forms of linguistic interpenetration. In In Babel’s Shadow, for example, Brian Lennon denounces the constraints on language usage applied by the publishing industry, and proposes a notion of ‘strong plurilingualism’, that is ‘the interpolation into English of significant quantities of a language or languages other than English’, usually only permitted by small independent publishing houses.⁴ This ‘strong plurilingualism’ is theorized by Lennon as an alternative to ‘multilingualism’ because it describes both the mixing of linguistic systems and, importantly for my reading of Glissant, the presence of combinations of idiom within a single linguistic system. As a further alternative to ‘multilingualism’, moreover, Paul Bandia has examined what he calls the ‘heterolingualism’ of postcolonial literature, choosing this term to reflect the ‘heterogeneity’ of postcolonial society as well as the creative ways in which a range of postcolonial writers challenge the hegemonic language of colonization.⁵ Bandia’s ‘heterolingualism’ is reminiscent of Glissant’s embrace of ‘creolization’, a process rather than a dialect, and one by which hegemonic languages are continually remodelled through their contact with multiple and dynamic local languages or creoles. Bandia shows how works by writers such as the Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma offer a vision of literary heterolingualism, where ‘language mixing and hybridity occur without any regard for linguistic hierarchy, in a context where languages coexist in a rhizomatic relationship’.⁶ Lennon’s ‘plurilingualism’ and Bandia’s ‘heterolingualism’ may, then, offer viable alternatives to ‘multilingualism’ in their more convincing description of non-hierarchical forms of linguistic plurality in literary works.

Édouard Glissant’s highly creative poetic theory, however, is less focused on finding a new ‘lingualism’ and more concerned with the ways in which literary writing might challenge our notions of what a language is and of its activity in the world. Glissant proposes to think of language not in terms of monolingualism and multilingualism but in terms of a form of relational expressivity. Language can be construed, perhaps, not as a defined system but as the infinitely multiple forms of expression we create out of our varying contacts with particular systems, each conceived as more dynamic than the ‘myth’ of monolingualism assumes. Language is comprised of the singular idioms we put together on the basis of our dialogue with other people, cultures, languages and environments. As the critic Celia Britton has shown, the root of Glissant’s linguistic theory as it evolves through his oeuvre is the distinction he makes between ‘langage’ and ‘langue’.⁷ While his thinking is clearly developed out of Saussure’s distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, Glissant nevertheless undermines Saussure’s privileging of identifiable linguistic systems to emphasize how individual inventions of ‘langage’ continually extend and reshape the ‘langue’ or ‘langues’ out of which they emerge. Rather than assuming that language is a signifier of national identity, moreover, Glissant insists instead on the dynamism of ‘langage’ as the trace of the speaker or writer’s contact both with a specific place in the world, and with the multiple other places and cultures that infiltrate that place as well as his or her expression of it: ‘un langage, c’est cela d’abord: la fréquentation insensée de l’organique, des spécifiques d’une langue et, en même temps, son ouverture sévère à la Relation’ (a language is above all the senseless frequenting of the organic, of the specificity of a language, and at the same time its severe opening out to Relation).⁸ A ‘langue’, then, should not be construed as fixed and standardized, but is constantly stretched and altered by the dynamic movement of ‘langages’. Literary writing, moreover, with its creative energy is particularly well placed to drive this movement forward, as Glissant argues in a manner reminiscent of Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic imagination’ in the novel, ‘la langue ne grandit que par le langage, cette frappe du poète, et le langage a besoin de toutes les langues, qui sont l’imaginaire du monde’ (language only grows through individual usages of language, the force of the poet, and individual usages of language need all languages, which are the imaginary of the world).⁹ No longer a question of either monolingualism or multilingualism, literary writing is rather the inventive pursuit of ever new ‘langages’: idioms or forms of expression that test and push the limits of what we conceive as the existing frameworks of ‘langue’.

As Celia Britton has astutely argued, Glissant’s conception of ‘langage’ also implies an ethical stance. His insistence on the importance of inventive ‘langages’ stems in part from an embrace of unintelligibility: my awareness of the opacity of a language I do not understand demonstrates to me the contingency of my own language and counters dangerously reductive and exclusive notions of cultural identity. In this sense Glissant goes beyond Bakhtin in his insistence not only on the multilingual imagination but also on the ethical significance of our encounter with idioms or cultural forms we cannot necessarily assimilate, and that call upon us in turn to co-create in our reading. Glissant’s linguistic theory has, since Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) published in 1981, brought with it a claim for ‘le droit à l’opacité’ (the right to opacity), which implies both respect for unfamiliar forms of expression and a capacity to write or create in ways that might not produce meaning in predictable and established forms. The ‘droit à l’opacité’ challenges the demand for false clarity associated with reductive universalisms and invites a more open, risky but constructive form of complicity, as Glissant asserts: ‘il ne m’est pas nécessaire de “comprendre” qui que ce soit, individu, communauté, peuple, de le “prendre avec moi” au prix de l’étouffer, de le perdre ainsi dans une totalité assommante que je gérerais, pour accepter de vivre avec lui, de bâtir avec lui, de risquer avec lui’ (in order to live, build, and take a risk with an individual, a community, a people, it is not necessary for me to ‘understand’ them, to ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Multilingual literature as world literature
• Part I: Multilingualism and modes of reading
• Part II: A multilingual ecology of world literature and modes of circulation
• Part III: Multilingual comparative reading: Beyond translation and untranslatability
• Part IV: Multilingual poetics of world literature
• Index
• Imprint