Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction

J. Taylor-Batty

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137367969
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new study argues that modernist literature is characterised by a 'multilingual turn'. Examining the use of different languages in the fiction of a range of writers, including Lawrence, Richardson, Mansfield, Rhys, Joyce and Beckett, Taylor-Batty demonstrates the centrality of linguistic plurality to modernist forms of defamiliarisation.

1

Modernism and Babel

One of the most important articulations of the German-Austrian ‘Sprachkrise’ at the turn of the century, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’, presents the modernist linguistic crisis as a Babelian fall. The story takes the form of a letter from a fictional Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon, explaining his cessation of literary activity. Chandos’s previous state of linguistic and literary transcendence contrasts acutely with his current condition whereby his relationship with language – and, in consequence, the world – is completely ruptured. Everything is viewed with a microscopic closeness which prevents a unified vision of the whole:

Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile, und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen, die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich schwindelt, die sich unaufhaltsam drehen und durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt.¹

[For me, everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.²]

Words are abstracted from one another, he is no longer able to comprehend his writings in Latin, and even his mother tongue succumbs to a process whereby words ‘zerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige Pilze’³ [‘crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi’⁴]. The vertigo induced by this radical linguistic estrangement is acute: no solid position, belief or meaning is now possible, no individual language is adequate:

die Sprache, in welcher nicht nur zu schreiben, sondern auch zu denken mir vielleicht gegeben wäre, weder die lateinische noch die englische noch die italienische und spanische ist, sondern eine Sprache, von deren Worten mir auch nicht eines bekannt ist⁵

[the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me⁶]

The disintegration which Chandos’s letter recounts marks a fall from a faith in a divine transcendental meaning common to all languages, into an acute awareness of a series of individual languages, all arbitrary, all different from each other, and all generating different meanings. For Hofmannsthal, the epoch is defined by multiplicity, indeterminacy, and what he defined as ‘das Gleitende’ [the slipping, the sliding],⁷ a quality that finds its manifestation, in ‘Ein Brief’, in the corresponding multiplicity, indeterminacy and radical arbitrariness of languages.

The story struck a chord with the German philosopher Fritz Mauthner, who wrote to Hofmannsthal in 1902 expressing his admiration for ‘Ein Brief’ and suggesting that it was an ‘echo’ of his own Kritik der Sprache.⁸ Mauthner’s Kritik (1901–2), a three-volume work examining the limits of language, marks the beginning of the linguistic turn that was to dominate twentieth-century philosophy (most famously in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein), and was to form an important influence on Joyce and Beckett.⁹ In Mauthner’s radical language scepticism, language and thought are inseparable (‘Es gibt kein Denken ohne Sprechen, das heißt ohne Worte’¹⁰ [‘There is no thought without speech, that is, without words’]), and language itself is based on the memory of sensory experiences, of what he calls ‘Zufallssinne’ [literally: ‘accidental senses’] that in themselves are inevitably contingent, partial, incomplete.¹¹ As Linda Ben-Zvi explains, for Mauthner ‘no two persons can possibly have the same understanding of words since (1) words stem from individual experiences and (2) they are at best only metaphoric representations of prior sense experiences’.¹² Communication, then, is merely an illusion. Implicitly, linguistic plurality, in highlighting the condition of Babel, merely highlights the condition of language per se. Indeed, Mauthner’s own linguistic turn derives in no small part from his own complex linguistic upbringing as a German-speaking Jew in Bohemia educated in three languages (German, Czech and Hebrew) ‘as if each had been the idiom of his ancestors’.¹³ Hofmannsthal developed an essentially Romantic nationalist conception of language, a perception of the ‘spirit’ of nation underlying the ‘spirit’ of language in literature;¹⁴ Mauthner’s thought, on the other hand, arises in the context of his critique of ethnic nationalism in Central Europe, and reflects a turn away from essentialist conceptions of national language (a turn which, for Emilie Morin, is fundamental to his later influence on Beckett’s anti-nationalism, as we will see in Chapter 5¹⁵).

Mauthner was acutely aware of the paradoxical nature of his philosophical project in the absence of a metalanguage through which the failure of language could be scrutinised. In effect, the only tool at his disposal (language) is precisely that which he wants to critique. As Weiler puts it, the critique ‘will either increase the confusion implicit in language by using it, or else it will eliminate language and then there will remain nothing to criticize and the critique itself will become impossible. […] The ultimate ideal of the critique is silence.’¹⁶ Indeed, the fundamental irony of Hofmannsthal’s story is that Chandos eloquently expresses his difficulty with languages and with translation, and that the story itself does not explicitly highlight or problematise its own supposedly ‘translational’ status as a story in German presenting the letter of an English nobleman. Nevertheless, its linguistic crisis is often read in terms of Hofmannsthal’s own turn away from lyric poetry towards theatrical and musical forms of expression, a shift that reflects Mauthner’s own preference for music as the highest form of art,¹⁷ and which bears curious comparison with Samuel Beckett’s turn to drama later in the century (a turn which coincides with the production of prose works exploring the limits of language, and which would later be followed by experimentation with music in radio plays). But if neither Mauthner nor Hofmannsthal provide solution or redemption for the ‘Sprachkrise’, this is not the case in the modernist period, which sees a renewed interest in artificial international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto,¹⁸ ‘debabelizing’ projects such as C. K. Ogden’s ‘Basic English’, universalist ideals such as those presented in John Cournos’s fictional autobiography Babel,¹⁹ an abundance of translations and innovative translation practices, and myriad manifestos, theories and creative attempts to find new, more expressive, defamiliarised forms of language. It is in this context that, for many modernists, the problem (linguistic plurality, Babel) can also be part of the solution.

In this chapter, I will be examining some key modernist responses to Babel, and will be demonstrating the centrality of linguistic plurality to modernist theories of defamiliarisation. To make use of linguistic plurality in literary forms is not necessarily to celebrate such plurality, however. As we will see in the second part of this chapter, we find a debate in the period between conceptions of multilingualism in literature as, on the one hand, a mode of ‘cosmopolitan’ artifice and, on the other, as somehow ‘natural’ to language. This debate is crystallised in the responses by F. R. Leavis and Eugene Jolas in the 1930s to that literary ‘tower of Babel’, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, early drafts of which had been published under the title Work in Progress. Leavis’s stringent critique of Joyce’s work derives from an essentialist conception of national language and culture that, like the image of the Eiffel Tower as a destructive Tower of Babel, finds its roots in Romantic cultural nationalism; Jolas’s response, on the other hand, celebrates plurality not only as inherent to global linguistic and cultural diversity, but to the diversity that is already inherent within individual languages. For Jolas, as for many other modernist writers and theorists, multilingualism, like the myth of Babel itself, reflects and represents linguistic plurality, but also constitutes a way of countering the modernist crisis of language.

Defamiliarising languages

Linguistic diversity is key to some important modernist theories of defamiliarisation, most notably Stéphane Mallarmé’s late nineteenth-century theorisation of vers libre, and Viktor Shklovsky’s formalist theory of ‘ostranenie’ [‘enstrangement’].²⁰ Mallarmé’s essay, ‘Crise de vers’ (1896), is explicitly founded upon the principle that the diversity of languages and the condition of Babel form the very impetus for poetic creation:

Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité.²¹

[Languages, which are imperfect in so far as they are many, lack the supreme language: because thinking is like writing without instruments, not a whispering but still keeping silent, the immortal word, the diversity of idioms on earth, prevents anyone from proffering the words which otherwise would be at their disposal, each uniquely minted and in themselves revealing the material truth.²²]

Such inevitable linguistic failure is the source not of despair, however; instead, poetry is fuelled by the desire to redeem language by supplementing inadequate words and constructions with ‘superior’ alternatives:

Le souhait d’un terme de splendeur brillant, ou qu’il s’éteigne, inverse; quant à des alternatives lumineuses simples – Seulement, sachons n’existerait pas le vers: lui, philosophiquement rémunère le défaut des langues, complément supérieur.²³

[We desire a word of brilliant splendour or conversely one that fades away; and as for simple, luminous alternatives. … But, we should note, otherwise poetry would not exist: philosophically, it is poetry that makes up for the failure of language, providing an extra extension.²⁴]

That desire is itself further fuelled by the inherent impossibility of such an attempt to transcend linguistic plurality and arbitrariness: poetry will always exist because it will always fail to redeem language. In this sense, Babel is not, as it is for Chandos, the reason for stopping all literary activity, but is instead the reason for poetry’s continuation and survival. Indeed, Mallarmé goes still further, arguing that each individual poet’s voice, by contributing yet another ‘language’ to the multitude, contributes to a collective redemptive ideal and a proliferation of poetic voices which he describes as ‘la multiplicité des cris d’une orchestration, qui reste verbale’.²⁵ Each of these new ‘languages’ thus contributes not to chaos or cacophony but to a collective modernist ‘orchestra’ whereby the different poetic voices and languages, speaking together, attempt to ‘add up’ to a mystical, pre-Babelian language. They will always fail to do so, even collectively, but that in itself leads to a further perpetuation of linguistic and poetic difference. Fragmentation and difference are thus both problem and solution.

The sheer strangeness of Mallarmé’s own French is indicative of the extent to which Babel provides not only the impetus for defamiliarisation, but the means by which such language can be constructed. Mallarmé himself was a life-long teacher of English, a translator, and the author of a study of the English lexicon, Les Mots anglais, which specifically explores (and explicitly values) the richly heterogeneous nature of English, its historical absorption of other languages, and especially Norman French.²⁶ This preoccupation with the polylingual resonances within the English language is to be significant within modernism more generally: it is prominent within the pages of the modernist journal transition, and is mined by Joyce in his own multilingual project, as we will see in Chapter 4. As Jean-Michel Rabaté has demonstrated, for Mallarmé and for his fellow-Symbolist (and teacher of English) Verlaine, English serves a significant additional function: ‘the other language serves, in effect, to make their own tongue look alien. They have to alienate themselves from their “natural” mother-tongues in order to make them fully their own.’²⁷ Mallarmé himself writes that ‘on ne voit presque jamais si sûrement un mot que de dehors, où nous sommes; c’est-à-dire de l’étranger’²⁸ [‘a word is almost never seen so clearly as from the outside, where we are: that is, from abroad’]. To cultivate such self-estrangement through the engagement with another language leads to an increased metalinguistic clarity in relation to one’s own language that also produces a heightened perception of those material (visual as well as aural) qualities of language so important to Mallarmé and Verlaine.²⁹ Moreover, linguistic plurality can itself provide the tools for defamiliarisation, through interlingual effects and compositional processes. Mallarmé’s French, for example, is as strange as it is partly through his use of syntactic and lexical effects imported from English.³⁰ Where languages are actually brought together into a text, whether in explicit multilingualism or via polylingual compositional processes, that effect, as we will see throughout this book, tends to push at the limits of the text’s comprehensibility. And where language is estranged in order to foreground sound, even where such sound is subsequently harnessed for the reconstruction of exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  Modernism and Babel
• 2  Representing Languages in Modernist Fiction
• 3  Writing in Translation: Jean Rhys’s Paris Fiction
• 4  Protean Mutations: James Joyce’s Ulysses
• 5  French (De)composition: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index