1 Mother-Tongue as an Issue in Literary Criticism
The aim of this book is to trace the trajectory of the concept of “mother-tongue ” in Japanese literature from the nineteenth century onward and to explore its literary/cultural significances at various stages of history. In so doing I will also be addressing issues such as bilingual literature, émigré literature, diaspor ic literature, and so on, which are closely related to “mother-tongue ,” as they are normally regarded as literatures, in which the use of some foreign languages other than the native language is involved. Ultimately, I aim at conceiving a truly new polylingual poetics that would transcend (or deconstruct) the linguistic differences.
Bo-go (mother-tongue) has been a trendy term in literature and literary criticism in Japan for the past few decades. A number of poets and novelists have been keenly conscious about this issue: Tawada Yôko, Shimada Masahiko ,1 Hideo Levy, Wen Yourou, and Jeffrey Angles, to name a few. Some actually write in a language that is not their “mother-tongue” and others freely incorporate foreign expressions in their works, while still others discuss the concept quite extensively in their essays and critical writings.
Examples of this phenomenon are abundunt worldwide and not restricted to the most recent history of literature. Think of Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov. More contemporary names such as Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Agota Kristof, and Ben Okri also come to our mind.2
These literati have been producing works against the norm, as there is a deep-rooted fixed notion that literary authors should write only in their native languages . Even among the “bilingual” writers3 that I have listed above, such an idea is frequently expressed. For instance, Nabokov states in an “afterword” to Lolita :
None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy … is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses … which the native illusionist … can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. (315)
He was, probably, confident that his own novels in English were excellent pieces of work but, nonetheless, he was convinced that they were inferior to his writings in Russian, which is his “natural idiom” and which he can maneuver to perfection (Russian is “infinitely docile” to him). And that might be why Nabokov , although he was prolific in writing prose in English, composed only a limited number of poems in it. Poetry, it is widely believed, requires a tremendously high level of competence, even more so than in prose writing, and that competence can be achieved only by native speakers .
Of course, it is not that Nabokov is referring to Russian as his “mother-tongue,” but he does speak of it as his “natural idiom” and of himself as a “native illusionist.” A poet is a magician of words, creating an illusion which only the native language can present.
Let us, for now, take “mother-tongue ” and “native language ” to mean the same thing. Part of the reason why Nabokov used (indirectly) the term “native (language)” (in English) in place of “mother-tongue ” may be that the Russian language does not have a literal equivalent of the English “mother-tongue.” Instead of saying “materinskii iazyk (maternal language),” Russians use the word, rodnoi iazyk, a native language, or more literally, “a language by birth.”
2 Mother-Tongue, Native Language, and First Language
Perhaps this is an appropriate point to attempt to eliminate some of the terminological ambiguities. There appear to be in circulation a few vaguely differentiated terms both on the popular and scientific planes: a mother-tongue , a native, and a first (primary) language .
Among these “synonyms,” “mother-tongue ” has the longest history. The earliest example in the OED dates back to 1380, but it explains the sense of the word simply as “one’s native language .” This definition is not even circular as the OED does not list “native language ” as an entry. In contrast, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives a sufficiently explicative definition of “mother-tongue ” as “the language of one’s mother; the language naturally acquired in one’s infancy and childhood; one’s first language .” Here “mother-tongue ” is equated to “first language .”
Thus, it becomes clear that on the popular level mother-tongue , native language , and first language are loosely taken to be synonymous. But even on a scientific level the situation appears to be analogous. For instance, David Crystal’s An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages defines “first language ” as “the language first acquired by a child,” paraphrasing further: “also called the mother-tongue or native language” (138).
For whatever reason, many dictionaries and encyclopedias of linguistics refrain from giving exact or detailed definitions of these supposed key concepts in the science of language. For example, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition does not have an entry for “native language ,” but has instead “native speaker ,” who is defined as “a person who has spoken a certain language since early childhood” (454). If this is the definition of a “native speaker ,” a reader would deduce from it that a “native language ” must mean a “language that has been spoken since early childhood.” We are reminded that this definition partially coincides with that of “mother-tongue ” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: “the language naturally acquired in one’s infancy and childhood.”
Today, however, we are aware that this coincidence is problematic. A “language that has been spoken since early childhood” may not be the language of one’s mother (one can be adopted in childhood and be raised by someone other than one’s mother or one can be raised by one’s father, and so on) or the first language (one may have immigrated to an “alien” linguistic environment and may have been speaking the language of that environ since childhood as the second language). This first language may not be the speaker’s mother-tongue or native language : “It is easy to find examples of cases where the first language learned may not necessarily be the language which one would designate as one’s mother-tongue , or as the best mastered” (Romaine 20). Uriel Weinreich also challenges the connection among the three concepts by introducing the issue of language contact: “Throughout [my preceding] analysis of the forms of linguistic interference conventional terms like ‘mother-tongue ,’ ‘first,’ ‘second,’ or ‘native language ’ were avoided; for, from the structural point of view, the genetic question of which of the two systems in contact was learned first by a given speaker or group of speakers is irrelevant” (74). The loose equation of these three terms: mother-tongue , native language , and first language is, consequently, highly problematic.
Undoubtedly, the question is of a political and ideological nature. The term “mother-tongue ” definitely perpetuates the notion that mothers are (or should be) the primary caretakers of children and the “teachers-initiators” of languages. Interestingly, Dante Alighieri , the first significant proponent of a vernacularization movement, who supposedly introduced the issue of “mother-tongue ” into the literary/linguistic debate for the first time, was actually referring to a nurse, not a mother:
[W]hat we call the vernacular speech is that to which children are accustomed by those who are about them when they first begin to distinguish words; or to put it more shortly, we say that the vernacular speech is that which we acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses. (4)
Dante is definitely speaking about “mother-tongue” in the present-day sense since the issue here is the language first learned in life. In that quality, Dante deserves to be called the initiator of a “mother-tongue ” ideology, although he is actually referring to a nurse.4 Thus, Dante ’s formulation already superbly highlights the problem of the terminology: “mother-tongue ” is not necessarily taught by mothers.
Probably, to avoid the political problem with the term “mother-tongue,” “native language” or, more recently, “primary (first) language” has been preferred in scholarly discourse. These terms, however, are not without problems, either. Returning to the OED, which does not give an entry for “native language”, the reader is required to construct its meaning through the adjective “native.” The first definition of “native” in the OED is “belonging to, or connected with, a person or thing by nature or natural constitution in contrast to what is acquired or superadded.” If this is so, a native language is a tongue bestowed by nature without any process of acquisition. This is in contradiction to the regular linguistic definition of “native language”: any language, native or not, has to be acquired. (In fact, none of the OED’s definitions of “native” appear to correspond to the contemporary linguistic notion of “native language.”) Hartmann and Stork’s Dictionary of Language and Linguistics explains “native language” as “the first language which is normally acquired by a human being in early childhood through interaction with other members of his speech community” (149). Against the spirit of this definition, the term “native language” misleadingly gives an impression that it is bestowed by nature at birth.
Such a conceptual pitfall was already implicit in Dante ’s argumentation. Dante asserts that a “mother-tongue ” (using the ter...