The multilingual author is a strange animal, both typical of the cross-cultural forces of the age and singular in ways that are hard to account for through literary or cultural history. For while the majority of the worldâs speakers may have competence in more than one languageâ literary language tends not to reflect this diversity; however else it may seek to disturb conventional modes of expression, it tends to pragmatically belong to single, majority languages with cultural prestige and a substantial readership. While there are notable multilingual currents in modern literary historyâfrom the implicit âgalicismo mentalâ [âmental gallicismâ] of RubĂ©n DarĂo âs modernismo,1 to the explicit language mixing of surrealist or concrete poetry , to the open bilingualism of contemporary Latino writing in the USAâmany of the most interesting cases of multilingual writing are the very particular product of individual authorial circumstance. From a critical perspective, it is important both to recognise the singularity of multilingual authorship, its typically oblique relationship to the cultural mainstream, and to acknowledge that no writer operates in a cultural or historical vacuum. In the 1970s George Steiner drew attention to this combination of singularity and exemplarity in his study of the âextraterritorialâ authors Nabokov, Borges and Beckett, emphasising their unique voices while recognising the contemporary significance of their literary multilingualism in the broad context of the twentieth centuryâs demographic upheavals. Not only did these writers put in doubt the Romantic âequation of a single pivot of language, of native deep-rootedness, with poetic authorityâ (1972, 6), but they generated a profoundly modern sensibility that spoke for the historical constitution of their century: âIt seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across languageâ (11).
For the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, it is in the interplay of languages that an unpredictable poetics of modernity is woven: âles langues en relation trament la poĂ©tique imprĂ©visible de la modernitĂ©â (1981, 356). The question of how this unpredictable poetics is produced multilingually, of the ways in which multilingual literary expression constitutes a mode of response to modernity , is particularly germane to contexts, such as Spain and Latin America, associated obliquely or latterly with canonical modernism and its linguistic or multilingual turn (Taylor-Batty 2013, 4)â though the question seeks to explore, more broadly, the multilingual as an imaginative articulation of the sociocultural experience of modernity . Multilingualism is particularly suited to such an imaginative articulation because it both highlights the dynamic and cross-cultural forces that characterise the modern era, and radically embodies the heteroglossia that for Mikhail Bakhtin characterises the modern novel. It exemplifies the fracturing of linguistic unity commonly associated with both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, but belongs more broadly to what Karl Marx described as the âuninterrupted disturbanceâ and âeverlasting uncertaintyâ of modernity itself (2012, 38). Multilingualism is in this sense the very speech and syntax of modernity. Yet if modernity is multiple and disjunctive, it is also consistent and all-encompassing, as Marxâs oxymoronic formulations indicate (uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty). Characterised as much by movements of national self-definition as by the global movement of people, by unification as much as dispersal, by the perpetuation of master narratives as much as their unravelling, modernity is typified as much by the âmonoâ as it is by the âmultiâ, and the plurality of multilingualism can therefore run counter to some of modernityâs most powerful forces and currents.
The process of European nation-building that gathered pace in the eighteenth century found one of its natural end-points in what Yasemin Yildiz calls the âmonolingual paradigm â, according to which âindividuals and social formations are imagined to possess one âtrueâ language only, their âmother tongue,â and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nationâ (2011, 3). 2 This is in marked contrast to the âintercomprehensibility and interchangeability of European tongues in the late Middle Agesâ, which the translator David Bellos (2012, 8) illustrates with reference to Christopher Columbus , who may not even have âconceptualized Italian, Castilian or Portuguese as distinct languages [âŠ]â (2012, 8â9).3 Columbus is, in Bellosâs example, an emblem of the polyglot Middle Ages, though he is also a meaningful symbol of Spainâs early modernity and its formation as a nation, his departure for the New World in 1492 coinciding with the end of the Reconquest (the Christian capture of the last Moorish city) and the expulsion of the Jews from Spainâ in a year that, not incidentally, also brought the publication of the first Castilian grammar.4 The historical coincidence of Spainâs formation as a nation with conquest, reconquest , and the codification of its national language might be considered a virtual allegory of modern civilisationâs drive towards both inward consolidation and outward expansion, anticipating Yildiz âs observations about European nation-building and the development of the monolingual paradigm in the eighteenth century. Though, in the present, globalisation might appear to promote a multilingual paradigm, Yildiz argues that our era can more accurately be described as âpostmonolingualâ, the term drawing on other such âpostâ formulations to refer to âa field of tension in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and multilingual practices persist or re-emergeâ (2011, 5). By way of an example, Anjali Pandey notes the âseemingly increasing presence of multilingualism in the domain of English fictionâ, a tendency she dismisses as mere tokenism playing into an awards culture enamoured of the transnational (2016, 1). Such tokenismâ she arguesâ generates a âfamiliarâ hybridity in which âmomentary acts of multilingualism [become] the hallmark of marketable art bound for global consumptionâ (20), âat the very same time that we are witnessing a strengthening of linguistic hierarchiesâforms of linguistic monolingualism in which languages vie for valueâ (10). As Yildiz argues, it is therefore against the monolingual paradigm that multilingualism in the modern era must be read, and it is against the backdrop of multilingualismâs ubiquity and yet apparent invisibility that multilingual authorship needs to be understood.
Studying literary multilingualism therefore presents certain distinct challenges and areas of enquiry, ranging from the methodological to the cultural-historical, but converging around the idea that (non-tokenistic) multilingual literary practices, which emerge from countless configurations of linguistic experience and produce countless configurations of linguistic encounter in the literary text, are highly singular, even as literary multilingualism itself can be thought of as emblematic, or at the very least symptomatic, of the modern age. The five authors whose work is the subject of this bookâRamĂłn del Valle-InclĂĄn , Ernest Hemingway , JosĂ© MarĂa Arguedas , Jorge SemprĂșn and Juan Goytisolo âreflect the eclecticism of literary multilingualism , though their otherwise very disparate literary practice is united here along particular thematic lines. The most salient of these lines is âbarbarismâ, a word whose origins and implications I consider in detail below, but which unites multilingualism and modernity by etymological and onomatopoeic association with the barbarianâs incomprehensible foreign speech (ba-ba, bla-bla, bara-bara). In what follows I introduce the five authors, both sketching out the ways in which barbarism inheres in their work and contextualising it in relation to various modes of the multilingual, before exploring in greater detail the confluence of multilingualism and modernity in the theme of barbarism , and examining the significance of this theme to the relationship between language and modernity in the Spanish-speaking world. The final section explores some of the methodological challenges associated with studying literary multilingualism, taking a cross-sectional approach to the subject that, it is hoped, will frame the author-centred chapters that follow.
Five Authors and Their Work
The names of the five authors studied in this bookâValle-InclĂĄn, Hemingway, Arguedas, SemprĂșn and Goytisoloâwould normally fall on different sides of more traditional dividing lines: they are not of the same nationality; they do not all write in the same language; their writing spans a period of over a hundred years; and their personal and political circumstances vary widely. They all write narrative fiction, though Valle-InclĂĄn is also and perhaps principally a dramatist; and they are all intimately connected with the Spanish-speaking world . But what unites them most is their extended formal and conceptual engagement with multilingualism, in the context of historical transitions and cultural encounters associated with the sociocultural experience of modernity. It was important to my choice of authors that their engagement with multilingualism was a feature of their wider oeuvre; each has a body of work shaped and defined by interaction with other cultures and languages, and by the creative literary articulation of those encounters. Each author can therefore be said to have made a substantial contribution to the development of a modern multilingual literary practice, and it is the contrast between their themes, techniques and contexts, as well as their sometimes surprising overlaps, that informed my selection of their work.
Between them, these five authors cover most of the twentieth century and part of the twenty-first, touching most corners of the Spanish-speaking world and evoking if not embodying the multiple ways in which Spanish co-exists with other languages. In spite of the enormous diversity of theme and approach in their work, two unifying strands come to light: firstly, the use of multilingual techniques to reflect, engage with and otherwise comment on moments of historical change and transition, specifically those associated with modernity and modernisation; and secondly, the use of multilingual techniques to convey both the most barbarous elements of modernity (inarticulacy, incomprehension) and some of its most utopian possibilities (translation) . A concern with the barbarous, with the eruption of the primitive in modernity or with modernityâs construction of the primitive, is, as we shall see, clearly present in the work of these otherwise very different authors. All five authors innovate in a variety of ways on the stylistic and conceptual potential of the interaction between Spanish, French, English, Galician, Quechua and Arabic, in ways that both evoke and exceed the conventional boundaries of modernism. Through metaphors such as the bridge, the threshold and the palimpsest, through an exploration of the boundaries between speech and writing, through the use of semantic play to enlarge and expand meaning, and through the formulation of political and cultural projects in terms of mixing and translation, these authors variously and singularly engage in examining the multilingual dimension of modernity, and the modern dimension of multilingualism . Though they cover a differing range of experience where modernity is concerned, they bring to light certain global themes and eventsâindustrialisation, war, urban experience, totalitarianismâwhile also highlighting historical turning pointsâ events and experiences that have been particularly defining within the Spanish-speaking world : the Reconquest and the conquest; the âdisasterâ of 1898 that brought an end to Spainâs empire; the Spanish Civil War and Republican exile; military dictatorship and its migratory consequences; and the aspiration to modernity, often via Paris, on both sides ...