I wish to address the issues of multilingual writing and of the overcoming of the national language paradigm, as suggested in Focus III. My two main texts will be Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by the Turkish-German-American scholar Yasemin Yildiz, and The Fall of Language in the Age of English by the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura. I will briefly comment on the differences of language politics in German and American literature today, and finish (inshallah!) by indicating the centrality of the issue to Global Studies.
Beyond the Mother Tongue introduces the term “postmonolingual” to describe the work of German-language authors whose writing struggles against and points beyond “the monolingual paradigm” at the heart of the notion of German as a national language. Challenge to the linkage between language and national identity arises from globalization, mass migration, and “the ensuing renegotiation of the place of the nation state” [2]. Postmonolingual practices and attitudes are those that denaturalize the connection between the subject’s language and identity by hybridizing the former or the latter or both. Thus, the five writers Yildiz treats—Kafka, Adorno, Tawada, Özdamar, and Zaimoğlu—might all be described as being not “ethnically” German and as writing a German that in some way calls German linguistic purism into question.[1]
The monolingual paradigm is not one where nobody speaks any foreign languages, but rather where each person has only one native language (or “mother tongue”) that at the same time situates them in their one national community. It is German Romanticism that was historically responsible during the rise of the nation state for the main elements of the monolingual paradigm. Herder, in putting forth the political principle of one nation [or people=Volk], one language, effectively cast languages as discrete organisms, with no blurring of boundaries between them. Schleiermacher articulated the key proposition of the monolingual paradigm as it applies to writing: “every writer can produce original work only in his mother tongue” [qtd 8]. Whatever its truth-value—and there are people who disprove it daily—the proposition links the subject with his nation or people (again, the Volk) naturally rather than conventionally, via the mother’s body, the mother’s milk, the mother’s tongue. Consequently, literature produced by the subject in his mother tongue articulates truths that are not personal but, rather, of a national significance. Hence literary life in Germany, and in Europe in general, has a public common facet that the literary life lacks in the more fragmented society of the US.
I have a few observations of my own to add to Beyond the Mother Tongue. There is no doubt that the monolingual paradigm still deeply resonates in that “nobil patrïa natio, / a la qual,” it may sigh with Farinata, “forse fui troppo molesto.” My wife, whose work as a German Sign Language interpreter frequently runs her up against the auralist prejudices of regular Germans, once said “well, language was the only thing left to them after the war” (she may have been quoting Hannah Arendt). At the same time, Germany having recast itself as a country of immigrants, and now of refugees, German intellectual elites are frantically trying to rewrite their basic national presuppositions, including those of identity. Although coming out of the American university system, Beyond the Mother Tongue participates in the German trend of paying extraordinary attention to German-language writing by immigrants, who in the past few years have seized many of the main literary prizes. Writing in Der Spiegel last May, the literary critic Volker Weidermann indiscriminately clumps authors who arrived as infants (and would elsewhere qualify as “native speakers”), with those who learned German in their late twenties (and would not qualify as “native speakers” in any possible world), to ask, if I understand him right, why these charming people don’t form “eine neue Gruppe 47” to tell us what being German is all about. Even grants bringing foreign writers to the country are privileging second-language writers in other languages. In short, there is now in Germany a national project to decouple the German language from German ethnicity, and it’s done through literature.
The other book I want to comment on is The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura, who, despite spending her teens and twenties in the States, became nonetheless a Japanese novelist. The aspect of the book that concerns us is its perspicacious analysis of the power asymmetry between contemporary literary English and other languages. The current monopoly that English has on the status of what Mizumura calls “universal language,” French and German having lost their bids, means that educated elites all over the world are now overwhelmingly likely to have English as their second language with further languages, if any, merely in addition. Consequently, those who write in English produce work that is significant everywhere, while writers in even major national literatures must contend themselves with only particular significance unless translated. Without the mediation of English, whatever happens in a national language stays in the national language.
For Mizumura, one outcome of the power asymmetry is that the observed of all observers is no observer. While national literatures try to keep abreast of English-language developments, English-language literature displays no reciprocal curiosity: speakers of English need not respond to anyone other than speakers of English. In an ironic twist, literature that is hegemonic in a multilingual world is the only one written by, effectively, monolinguals. Even personally multilingual native speakers of English—such as Benedict Anderson, indebtedness to whose analysis of the role of market forces in the emergence of national languages Mizumura freely admits—share in the “general blindness,” for, as they look out into the world, they see the multilingualism of others rather than their own linguistic hegemony.
For Mizumura, the situation grants writers of national languages a faintly Hegelian advantage over universal-language writers. It is the former who “are the only ones condemned to… know that the English language cannot dictate ‘truths’ and that there are other ‘truths’ in this world that cannot be perceived through the English language” [63]. She understands “imperceptible” truths as those of the particular rather than universal: those that grow out of the material, and irreducibly individual, aspects of language and culture. “When Proust’s maman is replaced by ‘mom’ or ‘mother,’ the very ‘time’ that Proust retrieved is not the same.” We are prone to waive such truths away because they are proper to art rather than science. (Indeed, Mizumura adds, the novel has, in the past century, often cultivated the psychological interiority and linguistic untranslatability of poetry.) Translation cannot convey them across not only because of linguistic but also because of economic contingencies. “The works that are usually translated into English are those that are both thematically and linguistically the easiest to translate.” As a consequence, translations “often only reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language.” A hermeneutic circle thus arises in the act of, and the market for, translation: “that in interpreting the world, only truths that can be perceived in English exist as ‘truths’” [80]. Anyone who has close-read any translation side-by-side with its original will subscribe to Mizumura’s argument, and I will conclude by briefly noting its significance for the discipline of Global Studies.
But first a few words about the language situation in the US as I perceive it. What Yildiz calls postmonolingualism is not at all foregrounded in the US in the way it is foregrounded in Germany. That the English language does not originate in the US, that the US has already absorbed waves upon waves of non-English-speaking immigrants—these are some of the factors that rule out a strong linkage between one’s mother tongue and ethnicity of the kind that is still felt in Germany. Indeed, there is no one American ethnicity. Instead, Americans subscribe to identities where other languages rarely play any role. Rather, American identities tend to tap into the American category of “race,” which is nonlinguistic. (Latinos form an exception to this, and there is indeed a vibrant hybridization of English by Spanish in their literature, for example in the work of Rudolfo Anaya or of the Newyorican Poets.) Still, there seems to be no inner political reason for any decentering of monolingualism to become a pressing issue for the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Furthermore, the growth of creative writing in American universities as an academic and even degree-granting subject (by contrast, Germany has two CW programs, and Russia only one) has converted writers into professors of writing, which by the way lets them reproduce at such rates as would put any undeveloped nation to shame. Become a university “specialist” in the same way as a biologist or a social scientist is, the writer must likewise keep up with the developments in the field. What this means is that American writers—as professors of writing—are condemned to read each other in the same manner as other academics, which leaves them no time to read anything else. The proliferation of specialist readers has compensated for the diminution of non-specialist readers, or at least diminution with respect to the individual share of each writer. (One of the reasons I don’t quite qualify as an American writer is that I can’t keep track of the discipline, because to prepare for my classes, which are not creative writing, I have to read exogamously, mostly dead people and foreigners.) The creative writing system provides another strong inner reason for the monolingualism of American letters.
To conclude, if rather abruptly. The only way Global Studies can be, rather than be called, “global” is if it avoids the monolingualism of the universal language. We must recognize that a “global” text in the edition of Penguin or Oxford World Classics is first and foremost our text, a contemporary English-language text, stripped of the truths of its cultural contexts and linguistic materiality, de-foreignized, converted to answer within our catechism. We must rerender translated texts problematic: in other words, we must approach them postmonolingually. In fact, I would go even further than that and say we must approach them multilingually. We must expose students to originals, when such are available, and we must, as much as possible, teach the originals side-by-side with their translations. We must discuss the textual materiality and the cultural conditions for the coming into being of the originals. We must also introduce anthropological methods into the classroom, in order to at least cursorily deal with some cultural difference. Only if we do those two things will our work be “global.” I will finish by pointing out that many of our students already are multilingual, and that many of them do come from other cultures at least to some extent, despite also their being part of the international global bourgeoisie, which combination must make for a great deal of inner conflict and multiplicity of selfhood. It is time we became as multilingual and multicultural as they.
[1] Postmonolingualism is not to be mistaken for multilingualism, which Yildiz thinks does not yet exist as an ideologically coherent set of practices. Of the above writers, only Yoko Tawada is a professional writer in another language besides German.
Bibliography
Minae Mizumura. The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Columbia UP, 2015.
Volker Wiedermann. Planet Deutschland. Der Spiegel, 22 (2015): 100-04. Online at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-135105176.html .
Yasemin Yildiz. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham UP, 2012.
“The global expansion of immigrant literature.” Deutsche Welle, 21.03.2014. Online at http://www.dw.com/en/the-global-expansion-of-immigrant-literature/a-17510343 .