The Historical Background
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, industrial growth and increasing democracy influenced languages and the cultures associated with them. Most states adopted an âofficialâ language for formal situations and these languages became identity markers of nationhood. The people who used these âofficialâ languages were those who sought status and social mobility. More and more speakers and writers of âunofficialâ languages became increasingly combative as they realised that their languages and the cultures associated with them were gradually disappearing or being suppressed.
The distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in his study Nations and Nationalism since 1780 that nineteenth-century nationalism reached a peak at the end of the First World War (1914â1918). At this time, numerous new nation states were emerging following the collapse of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The birth of these states ignited hope in the hearts of various minority language writers that their âperipheralâ regions and languages might also gain autonomy and status.
These hopes blossomed when, in January 1918, the United States president Woodrow Wilson produced his plan for a peace treaty, known as the âFourteen Pointsâ, and the victors agreed to comply with some of his objectives to enable minority cultures to become self-governing. His address to Congress on 11 February 1918, in which he responded to the German and Austrian reactions to his âFourteen Pointsâ, encouraged them even more:
Peoples are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to another by an international conference or an understanding between rivals and antagonists. National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. âSelf-determinationâ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of actions which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril. (Wilson 1997)
As new states like the Czech Republic, Poland and Estonia came into being, their languages and literature gained national status and, for the first time in history, a Minorities Section, created by the League of Nations, was founded to protect and monitor minority rights (cf. Smejkal 2010, 19).
However, even as these new states emerged, their future was uncertain. Woodrow Wilson had argued that peace rested on making âan equitable distribution of territories according to the race and the ethnographical character of the people inhabiting those territoriesâ (Wilson 1921, 130). On the other hand, the Principal Allied and Associated Power States in the League of Nations seemed determined to have them âultimately assimilate into the nation at largeâ (Smejkal 2010, 18) and they increasingly ignored minority treaties. Furthermore, even as these new borders were emerging to define new nations, there was another contrary movement taking place: the spread of international socialism which sought to cross barriers.
Trends in literature reflected these developments. The creation of autonomous âsmall nationsâ intensified feelings of nationalism in young European vanguard writers who steered attention towards literatures in minority languages.1 The decision to write in a minority language was, and frequently still is, a statement of cultural politics. Languages are more than texts and texts are more than words: grafted on to them are âideological, ethnological and cultural dimensionsâ (Pavis 1992, 155). Those âdimensionsâ influence language users who, in turn, constantly recolour and reshape the language. The First World War, with its huge impact on society and ideologies, catalysed the influence of those dimensions of ideology, ethnology and culture and provoked new, often startling responses.
In the preceding nineteenth century, many movements had made claims for more cultural autonomy for peoples or nations who spoke a language that was not the officially recognised one. The cultural historian Goffe Jensma observed that, in the Netherlands, from the late nineteenth century until after the war, there was a transition âfrom a largely pseudo oral, popular, and colloquial literature to a more intricate, personalized, highbrow literature ⌠facilitated by broader societal developments, like the growth of the middle classes in civil society and public life, the rise of average educational levels and the subsequent growth of literacyâ (Jensma 2017, 148). This can equally apply to European culture and society. From north to south and east to west, growing literacy had led people to claim their own language and modernise its literature. In the North, for example, rural variations of Norwegian, known as Landsmaal or Nynorsk, gained official recognition in 1885; in the South, in 1908, the Congress of Manastir saw the standardisation of the Albanian alphabet. That same year, in the East, in Czernowitz, then capital of the Austrian province of Bukowina, the first international conference was organised in support of Yiddish; and in the West, in 1893, Ireland established the popular Gaelic League to encourage the use of Irish. In the post-World War One period, these claims intensified.
The following chapters examine four European minority language writers of the post-World War One era:
- Douwe Kalma (1896â1953) from Frisia
- Saunders Lewis (1893â1985) from Wales
- Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892â1978) from Scotland
- Roparz Hemon pseudonym of Louis Paul Nemo, 1900â1978) from Brittany.
All were typical vanguard2 writers of this period. They had passionate ambitions for their languages and literatures and adopted strategies in their work and elsewhere to raise the standard and status of both. All four came from similar regions, in that all were in a peripheral position politically, socially and culturally and dependent on a central government during the interwar years. They published in Frisian, Welsh, Scots and Breton, âuniqueâ minority languages in the sense that they are not majority languages in neighbouring states or anywhere else.3 Works of literary criticism describe all four as leading men of letters who advocated and stimulated the use of their languages as capable of expressing intellectual and cultural values.
Table 1.1 shows the four writers and the details of their combative entrance on the literary scene.
Table 1.1
The four case studies
Language | Frisian | Welsh | Scots | Breton |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Author | Douwe Kalma (1896â1953) | John Saunders Lewis (1893â1985) | Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892â1978) | Roparz Hemon (pseudonym of Louis Paul Nemo, 1900â1978) |
Publication(s) with which the author made a combative entrance on the literary scene | De Jongfryske Biweging (The Young Frisian Movement, 1915) and Fryslân en de Wrâld (Frisia and the World, 1916) | Reviews of Welsh drama in The Cambria Daily Leader, 1919 | Manifesto in The Scottish Chapbook, 1922 | âPremier et Dernier Manifeste de Gwalarn en Langue Françaiseâ (The First and Last Manifesto of Gwalarn in the French Language), 1925 |
The Cultural Background
The appeal to patriotic sentiment made by multinational states in the First World War made their cultural minorities sensitive to issues of allegiance and self-definition: to which nation did one actually belong? This question became increasingly important.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, state nationalism had already begun to encourage the study and evaluation of literatures. To make their languages more prestigious, large and small Northern European nations had engaged in editing old texts, some of them authentic, some not. In doing so, they all hoped to astound the world with âa large-scale foundational text for Northern European literature such as Homer had given to the Mediterraneanâ (Leerssen 2004, 112). In Scotland, for example, James MacPherson published the spurious âPoems of Ossianâ. Following that, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers reconstructed their national past by producing works ranging from âgenuine old vernacular texts to deliberate forgeriesâ (Leerssen 2005, 25â26); a kind of literary antiquarianism. As a result of this interest in the antiquity of languages, the academic study of texts flourished. Interest increased in the examination of literary expressions, including those in lesser well-known languages. Cultural historian Joep Leerssen sees this as a phase in the âcultivation of cultureâ: âthe new interest in demotic, vernacular, non-classical culture, and the intellectual invest...