In what has become one of the foundational texts of the contemporary study of world literature, Pascale Casanova argues that âwhat is apt to seem most foreign to a work of literature, to its construction, its form, and its aesthetic singularity, is in reality what generates the text itself, what permits its individual character to stand outâ. 1 Taking as central the issue of languages, this study is concerned with the manifold ways in which instances of multilingual contexts and practices of writing give rise to moments of innovation, revolution, beauty and strangeness in the novel throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. The four authors whom I will consider in detailâJoseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris and Junot DĂazâare brought into dialogue by their multilingualism; each of them writes from some personal and political engagement with plural languages, and each explores in their work the possibilities of writing multilingually within a text which is notionally Anglophone. Each in turn thus invites us to consider the limit cases of what Anglophone literature can be, to destabilise the category of Anglophone literature, and thereby commands focus on, and often undermines, the status of English as a âworldâ language.
The four authors whom I consider in this study are also connected in their adoption of prose fiction, and more specifically the novel, as their principal literary form. The novel, which classical accounts posit as having arrived at roughly the same time as the functionally monolingual European nation state, and risen to prominence as those European nations themselves became global imperial powers, is a form whose history is uniquely tied to that of empire. But if the novel is, in part, weighed down by this history, populated with the baggage of empire in various ways both thematic and formal, implicated with global marketplaces and channels of readership that are themselves products of empire, it also contains within itself a unique set of resources with which to work through these problematic associations. The novel, in the memorable intervention of Mikhail Bakhtin, represents an unusual management, engagement with, and deployment of a plurality of voices: in the novel multiple narratives can coexist or compete, and it is in the very nature of the form to deploy a variety of languages. The parameters of the novel form, are of course not static, and the multilingual must also be understood as a dynamic force, one which continues to act upon and to shape the novel as it develops in the century of the decline and demise of empire.
To focus on the issue of multilingualism as it is played out in the novel is also to reimagine the relationship between macro- and micro-level concerns in literary criticism with which recent scholarship in world literature, such as Casanovaâs, has concerned itself. The cultural and state politics of mono- and multilingualism are engaged in constant interplay with the material realities of language praxis, just as recent scholarship in world and global literatures have compelled us to acknowledge, or to conceptualise, the relationship between the individual literary text or canon and the wider reality of the modern capitalist world-system. 2
The theme, and the question, of multilingualism, then, represent a means of negotiating the relationship between the individual text and the wider historical and political realities into which it asserts itself. On the one hand, as I will show, the novel deploys a wide variety of strategies to confront or to incorporate multilingual realities, which in turn necessitates a level of commitment to close reading which certain developments in global literature scholarship have sought instead to retreat from. On the other, those multilingual realities with which literary texts may concern themselves are just that: realities, in the sense that language and the interplay between languages represent, as we will see, a significant component of the lived experience of modernity for individuals who are themselves subjects of the wider transhistorical forces of the nation, the state, the colony and the empire. I would thus align myself in this sense with a âmodel of world literatureâŠconstructed as a means of understanding and appreciating the multiplicity of strategies used by literatures to relate to their political and economic environmentsâ. 3 Reading the multilingual tendencies of the twentieth-century Anglophone novel represents one means by which we can, to borrow from Casanova once more, âovercome the supposedly insuperable antimony between internal criticism, which looks no further than texts themselves in searching for their meaning, and external criticism, which describes the historical conditions under which texts are produced, without, however, accounting for their literary quality and singularityâ. 4
What I share with some of the recent accounts of world literature to which I have already gestured is a sense of the study of international literatures as a problematic in need of a methodological solution (or, more realistically, any number of potentially productive methodological solutions): as Moretti puts the issue in his âConjecturesâ, âworld literature is not an object, itâs a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical methodâ. 5 Multilingualism is, of course, both a textual phenomenon and a global political issue. But it is also the case, as the analysis which follows will intend to show, that my own response to the problem of world literature is one which necessitates continued attention to empire as a force which has shaped the norms of both prose literature and language praxis. What is also common across the new world literature paradigm is a tendency to leave behind vocabularies of the postcolonial, but literary multilingualism is a phenomenon which has been deeply interwoven with the political dynamics of empire; managing language diversity was a pillar of colonial practice, and the process of decolonisation has given rise to extensive reimaginings of the relationship between English as a world language and minority languages able to assert and define themselves anew.
A consideration of multilingualism in the novel in the timeframe I propose must necessarily begin with modernism. The advent in literature in the early decades of the century of a foregrounding of form, a renegotiation of the terms of realism inherited from the nineteenth-century novel and a fragmentation of political, ethical and philosophical commitments bestows a number of concerns which unavoidably mediate the novelâs transition from a time of high empire through the world wars to the decades of decolonisation. Modernismâs shift in attention towards form invites investigation of the mimetic links between writing which embraces fragmentation and often explicitly experiments with the multilingual at the level of the text, and a world wherein the process of decolonisation challenged the political status commanded by European metropolitan languages and those of their colonised subjects. Alongside such formal concerns, the historical boundedness of classical accounts of modernism by the height of the so-called scramble for Africa at one end and the Second World War at the other necessitates a discussion still unfinished as to the engagement in modernist writing with the decline of empire and the accompanying alteration in political and linguistic thought.
Just as the periodical classification of literature is a messy exercise, so too are the geopolitical contexts in which such literature arises. Attempts at literary periodisation such as âmodernistâ and âpostcolonialâ are, of course, necessarily imbued with a wealth of contested political assumptions and assertions as to what they ought to comprise. This pairing of approaches in particular has for some time been divided by a ragged and contested border, and multiple accounts thus exist which explore in different ways the dovetailing of modernist and postcolonial concerns in literature. While some older perspectives tend to see modernism as petering out by the mid-century, and while a certain version of the postcolonial sees it as the literary projects of former colonies gaining independence, the interrelation of these two strands of critical thought has been complicated. With the scepticism shown by Raymond Williams when discussing modernism âas a title for a whole cultural movement and momentâ, having been âretrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of âmodernâ or even âabsolute modernâ between, say, 1890 and 1940â, it is necessary to acknowledge a move beyond accounts of modernism such as Bradbury and McFarlanceâs 1976 collection, which offers a chronology of modernism which ends in 1930. 6 It is thus expedient for my purposes to draw upon a breadth of interventions, from those which rigidly maintain a view of modernism as a Euro-American product, albeit one whose formal parameters were taken up in various ways by writers from colonies and former colonies, through those which see the Euro-American example as just one kind of modernism among many, with postcolonial literature representing the entry into modernity of various other parts of the world, to those which see the arch-canonical modernism itself as a kind of writing of decolonisation.
While the chapters which follow will necessarily draw upon and intervene in these linkages, my purpose here is not primarily to take up a strident position with regard to what these extant frameworks of study ought and ought not to be. I also propose that through the multilingual, we can discern a different chronology, or a framework of reading which works at an angle to some of the established periodisations of twentieth-century literature: a series of writers who treat the novel as an opportunity to engage with histories of multilingualism, and who thus engage throughout the twentieth century with legacies of empire, and who continue to explore and to reinvent the linguistic possibilities of the novel. While we might follow Edward Said in understanding the novel as a form particularly implicated in the European colonial project, we can also discern across the twentieth century a range of linguistic strategies which complicate this history, and which understand that to explore the potential of the novel to account for multilingualism is also necessarily to consider the response it offers to a history of colonialism.
The account of the novel that follows takes into account case studies from the early origins of literary modernism at the peak of empire through to the present day, and consciously cuts across the extant distinctions between modernism and the postcolonial. I advocate strongly for the wide and ongoing relevance of postcolonial concerns in reading both early twentieth-century texts and those which might otherwise fall under the purview of a flourishing and, occasionally, implicitly post-postcolonial model of world literature. I will consider the European writing of the beginning of the century as already engaged in postcolonial work, and I will read the postcolonial novel, particularly that of the Caribbean, as making its own productive contributions to the wider redrawing of the history of empire. In so doing,...