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Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction
J. Taylor-Batty
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Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction
J. Taylor-Batty
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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.
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1
Modernism and Babel
One of the most important articulations of the German-Austrian âSprachkriseâ at the turn of the century, Hugo von Hofmannsthalâs âEin Briefâ, 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. Chandosâs previous state of linguistic and literary transcendence contrasts acutely with his current condition whereby his relationship with language â and, in consequence, the world â 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 lieĂ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen, die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muĂ: 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 â 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 âzerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige Pilzeâ3 [âcrumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungiâ4]. 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 wÀre, 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 Chandosâs 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 âdas Gleitendeâ [the slipping, the sliding],7 a quality that finds its manifestation, in âEin Briefâ, 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 âEin Briefâ and suggesting that it was an âechoâ of his own Kritik der Sprache.8 Mauthnerâs Kritik (1901â2), 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 Mauthnerâs radical language scepticism, language and thought are inseparable (âEs gibt kein Denken ohne Sprechen, das heiĂt ohne Worteâ10 [âThere is no thought without speech, that is, without wordsâ]), and language itself is based on the memory of sensory experiences, of what he calls âZufallssinneâ [literally: âaccidental sensesâ] that in themselves are inevitably contingent, partial, incomplete.11 As Linda Ben-Zvi explains, for Mauthner âno 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 experiencesâ.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, Mauthnerâs 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) âas if each had been the idiom of his ancestorsâ.13 Hofmannsthal developed an essentially Romantic nationalist conception of language, a perception of the âspiritâ of nation underlying the âspiritâ of language in literature;14 Mauthnerâs 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 Beckettâs 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 âwill 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. [âŠ] The ultimate ideal of the critique is silence.â16 Indeed, the fundamental irony of Hofmannsthalâs 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 âtranslationalâ status as a story in German presenting the letter of an English nobleman. Nevertheless, its linguistic crisis is often read in terms of Hofmannsthalâs own turn away from lyric poetry towards theatrical and musical forms of expression, a shift that reflects Mauthnerâs own preference for music as the highest form of art,17 and which bears curious comparison with Samuel Beckettâs 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 âSprachkriseâ, this is not the case in the modernist period, which sees a renewed interest in artificial international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto,18 âdebabelizingâ projects such as C. K. Ogdenâs âBasic Englishâ, universalist ideals such as those presented in John Cournosâs 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 âcosmopolitanâ artifice and, on the other, as somehow ânaturalâ to language. This debate is crystallised in the responses by F. R. Leavis and Eugene Jolas in the 1930s to that literary âtower of Babelâ, James Joyceâs Finnegans Wake, early drafts of which had been published under the title Work in Progress. Leavisâs stringent critique of Joyceâs 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; Jolasâs 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 StĂ©phane MallarmĂ©âs late nineteenth-century theorisation of vers libre, and Viktor Shklovskyâs formalist theory of âostranenieâ [âenstrangementâ].20 MallarmĂ©âs essay, âCrise de versâ (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 suprĂȘme: penser Ă©tant Ă©crire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore lâimmortelle parole, la diversitĂ©, sur terre, des idiomes empĂȘche personne de profĂ©rer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-mĂȘme matĂ©riellement la vĂ©ritĂ©.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 âsuperiorâ alternatives:
Le souhait dâun terme de splendeur brillant, ou quâil sâĂ©teigne, inverse; quant Ă des alternatives lumineuses simples â Seulement, sachons nâexisterait pas le vers: lui, philosophiquement rĂ©munĂšre le dĂ©faut des langues, complĂ©ment supĂ©rieur.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 poetryâs continuation and survival. Indeed, MallarmĂ© goes still further, arguing that each individual poetâs voice, by contributing yet another âlanguageâ to the multitude, contributes to a collective redemptive ideal and a proliferation of poetic voices which he describes as âla multiplicitĂ© des cris dâune orchestration, qui reste verbaleâ.25 Each of these new âlanguagesâ thus contributes not to chaos or cacophony but to a collective modernist âorchestraâ whereby the different poetic voices and languages, speaking together, attempt to âadd upâ 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 MallarmĂ©âs 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. MallarmĂ© 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 RabatĂ© has demonstrated, for MallarmĂ© and for his fellow-Symbolist (and teacher of English) Verlaine, English serves a significant additional function: âthe other language serves, in effect, to make their own tongue look alien. They have to alienate themselves from their ânaturalâ mother-tongues in order to make them fully their own.â27 MallarmĂ© himself writes that âon ne voit presque jamais si sĂ»rement un mot que de dehors, oĂč nous sommes; câest-Ă -dire de lâĂ©trangerâ28 [âa word is almost never seen so clearly as from the outside, where we are: that is, from abroadâ]. To cultivate such self-estrangement through the engagement with another language leads to an increased metalinguistic clarity in relation to oneâs own language that also produces a heightened perception of those material (visual as well as aural) qualities of language so important to MallarmĂ© and Verlaine.29 Moreover, linguistic plurality can itself provide the tools for defamiliarisation, through interlingual effects and compositional processes. MallarmĂ©âs 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 textâs 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
- 1Â Â Modernism and Babel
- 2Â Â Representing Languages in Modernist Fiction
- 3Â Â Writing in Translation: Jean Rhysâs Paris Fiction
- 4Â Â Protean Mutations: James Joyceâs Ulysses
- 5Â Â French (De)composition: Samuel Beckettâs Trilogy
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index