World Literature and Language Anxiety, 2013

off print from: Joachim Küpper (Ed.) Approaches to World Literature Akademie Verlag Cover picture: Typus orbis terrarum, copper engraving, colored, 1571. akg-images. Cover design: hauser lacour A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliograie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, speciically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. © 2013 Akademie Verlag GmbH www.degruyter.de/akademie Part of De Gruyter Printed in Germany This paper is resistant to aging (DIN/ISO 9706). ISBN 978-3-05-006271-6 eISBN 978-3-05-006495-6 Joachim Küpper Preface ........................................................................................................................ 7 Jérôme David The Four Genealogies of “World Literature”............................................................. 13 Robert J. C. Young World Literature and Language Anxiety.................................................................... 27 Jane O. Newman Auerbach’s Dante: Poetical Theology as a Point of Departure for a Philology of World Literature............................................................................ 39 Ayman A. El-Desouky Beyond Spatiality: Theorising the Local and Untranslatability as Comparative Critical Method ................................................................................ 59 David Damrosch Global Scripts and the Formation of Literary Traditions ........................................... 85 Vilashini Cooppan Codes for World Literature: Network Theory and the Field Imaginary..................... 103 C. Rajendran The Actual and the Imagined: Perspectives and Approaches in Indian Classical Poetics.............................................................................................. 121 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit On Bookstores, Suicides, and the Global Marketplace: East Asia in the Context of World Literature ............................................................. 133 © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. Content Content Mitsuyoshi Numano Shifting Borders in Contemporary Japanese Literature: Toward a Third Vision ............................................................................................. 147 Joachim Küpper Some Remarks on World Literature.......................................................................... 167 Notes on Contributors ............................................................................................... 177 © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 6 World Literature and Language Anxiety The fundamental questions raised by Goethe’s various remarks on Weltliteratur, made over the course of the years 1827–1831, have not changed significantly up until today.1 Goethe’s observations are inextricably bound up with the following issues: (a) Translation, and the new German philosophy of translation developed in previous decades by Herder and Schleiermacher. (b) Contact between nations and cultures, a perception of growing interculturalism that was concomitant with contemporary European global expansion. (c) In Goethe’s different formulations, Weltliteratur is something of a contradictory concept in so far as the idea is presented sometimes as global and sometimes as European (for whom the ancient Greeks serve as the ultimate or originary model). (d) Goethe shows anxiety with respect to the increasing amount of literary production, the sheer volume of which raises the question of its readability, its conceptualization, and its taxonomical organization. (e) The historical moment of language anxiety as the dominance of Latin and French in Europe begins to break up in the face of the rise of vernacular literatures (the term literature being considered here in its older sense2). Today the points in question remain largely the same, but their forms have changed. Contemporary ideas of World Literature are inextricably bound up with: a) Questions of translation, and the rise of Translation Studies. b) The development of multiculturalism, postcolonial literatures, and the resurrection of the concept of World Literature in the context of globalization. 1 2 English translations of Goethe’s remarks on Weltliteratur have been conveniently collected by Alok Yadav, cf. http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/Goethe%20on%20World%20Literature.pdf (retrieved May 27, 2013). Cf. Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2007), pp. 12–13. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. ROBERT J. C. YOUNG Robert J. C. Young c) The effect of globalization and World Literature on Comparative Literature departments which are attempting to globalise a previously largely European concept of World Literature, despite the continued dominance of Euro-American models and academic institutions. d) The theoretical and taxonomical conundrum of how to organize the sheer mass of World Literature—as anthologies and compilations, as distinct national literatures, or through “distant reading.” e) New forms of language anxiety, which are specifically postcolonial but which in certain respects can be compared to the situation described by Goethe in the 1820s. For reasons of space, I will concentrate my remarks on 1 (e) and 2 (e), but before I do so I would like to supplement the entries (c) by remarking that although the conceptual issue remains the same, what has changed between Goethe’s time and ours is the institutional basis for the problem. Goethe does not address the idea of World Literature in institutional terms though he does discuss the publishing media and raise questions about the relations between nation states. Since the later nineteenth century, World Literature and world languages have been mediated institutionally through the formation of university departments of Philology and Comparative Literature. Arguably, Comparative Philology, which is conceptually based on the model of language families, does not have the same taxonomical problem of how to organise its material, and on what basis, as Comparative Literature. While Comparative Literature confined its attention to Europe, with a mission for post-war national reconciliations, the problem was less obvious. Now that its literatures of study have been globalised, the question of how to organise relations between literatures and the individual texts in them has become one of the definitions offered for World Literature itself, to which we can add the postcolonial question highlighted by Aamir Mufti, namely, whose literature, whose world?3 Whose concept of literature? Whose idea of value, of an aesthetic value or something else? Is the relatively recent European idea of literature the same, for example, as the Arabic al-Adab? I I do not wish to pursue these substantial questions further here, but will rather focus on one particular issue, namely the historical moment of language anxiety as the dominance of Latin and French in Europe began to break up in the face of the rise of vernacular literatures. As Pascale Casanova describes it, the rise of the vernacular was part of a power struggle between Rome and nascent Protestantism, which importantly centred on the question of translation, as well as a national struggle for cultural prestige 3 Aamir Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature,” Critical Inquiry 36. 3 (2010), pp. 458–493. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 28 29 in the vernacular between France and Italy.4 Goethe’s later play for German literature brought these two separate elements together, which suggests the possibility that the invention of the idea of World Literature was a product of, or result of, the breakdown of the hegemony of Latin (and French) and the irruption of forms of language anxiety as a result. It is language anxiety, I want to argue, that puts the writer in a particular relation to the world, or marks an awareness of a relation to the world beyond the local, that we might call translational. In time, that translational relation would also come to define the situation of the postcolonial: the corollary of my argument is that postcolonial writing has been resituated in this position in the twentieth century. This means that what is in some sense postcolonial is arguably more worldly than world literature itself, because it is a literature whose relation to the world beyond itself forms an unavoidable part of the creativity of its foundational moment, not something to which it ascends at a later moment when it moves out of its immediate local or national context to become a part of “World Literature.” In this context we might remember that, before the more recent resurgence of the idea of world literature, it was Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak who were emphasising the worldly nature, the worlding, of literature.5 According to Casanova, small literatures are challenged by a problematic relation to world literary space because they lack literary capital. In making this argument, she assimilates the provincial and the colonial, arguing that they are essentially the same: “whether they are former colonials or simply provincials […] they all find themselves faced with the same alternatives and, curiously, discover the same ways out from the same dilemmas.”6 I want to argue that despite the potential similarities between the colonial and the provincial, there are also differences, and one of these comes with respect to language anxiety. Though a small literature may betray an anxiety with respect to dominant literatures as a result of the power relations between their languages, the colonial situation is more complicated and the alternatives are not so simple. The relation to language inevitably also involves a constitutive relation to colonial violence, not merely to a language that has greater cultural prestige. The postcolonial in some sense repeats the founding situation of Goethe which was both provincial in relation to French, the prestige language of the eighteenth century, and, if you include the Napoleonic invasion and the brief and unsuccessful attempt to impose the French language forcibly on Germany, in some respects a postcolonial one. Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, conceived in terms of the circulation of high works of literature, stemmed in part from his desire to increase the prestige of German, and in part from his enthusiasm for translations of texts from other cultures in the era of European global colonial expansion, amongst which English and French translations from the Chinese, as well as Sir William Jones’s translations of the Persian poet, Hafiz, 4 5 6 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters [first edition in French, 1999], trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 45–73. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1986). Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 176. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. World Literature and Language Anxiety Robert J. C. Young and of the Sanskrit play Shakūkuntalā (1789), figured notably.7 At the same time, although Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur expands to take in writers from India, Persia, China, and Serbia, many of his remarks also remain fundamentally European in orientation, and are addressed to the prospect of the accession of Germany and German literature onto the European literary scene. This moment is inextricably linked to the perceived need to refashion the literary register of German through the translation of literary classics into German. According to Friedrich Schleiermacher this would in turn bring about the translation of German itself into a richer European language; following Schleiermacher, Goethe subsequently claimed that as a language German was particularly open to translation at that moment. Such arguments formed part of the project to develop a “high” German for literary purposes, that is German as a language of aesthetic writing, beyond the bureaucratic, mercantile and Lutheran idioms of standard German, a written language that in turn remained distinct from the diversity of spoken Germans.8 The break-up of Latin and the rise of the vernaculars in Europe arose out of a state of affairs that can be compared to the colonial situation, involving the presence of a dominant foreign language imposed by a foreign institution or power (here the Roman Catholic church), which had led to a division between the oral and written usages of local languages, and the prescribed use of a now constructed foreign language for official institutional purposes of writing. The postcolonial debates about languages in the twentieth century follow from the same fundamental situation, and are always situated in some sense from below, in relation to a dominant language imposed as the result of colonial violence from above. In each case, as in Goethe’s German, there is also an assumption, promoted by the colonists and their educational systems, that this local (in the postcolonial case, sometimes predominantly oral language) language does not have the richness or refinement, the cultural and literary capital in Bourdieu/Casanova terms, of a cultivated literary language. Or we have a more complex situation such as in India, where aside from the status of English in relation to vernacular Indian languages, communal politics meant that Hindustani had to be divided and turned into Hindi and then into a literary language that could attempt to rival the more elaborate, literary Urdu. The task of the vernacular writer from a minor literature in the first instance therefore is not only to create a literature, but also a language for that literature. That is also the postcolonial task, a double task that determines the choices that will be made. From the writer’s point of view, this means that he or she will be writing in a language which will always be conditioned by a relation to another, potentially more powerful or cultivated language that exists in a dominant relation to the writer’s own vernacular. One might say that the writer will always be in a situation of being conditioned by an awareness of world literature, but world literature conceived in the first instance as a formation of resourceful, more powerful languages which have been imposed upon the local culture and which the writer has chosen either to utilise or refuse. Postcolonial literature, like Goethe’s 7 8 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 212. Ruth H. Sander, German: Biography of a Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 30 31 German, is paradoxically therefore always more worldly in a way than the established literatures against which it competes, because the language situations that it confronts are the particular result of a very worldly situation, namely colonialism which has forcibly imposed another, alien language as part of its institutional power structure of control and rule. II I want to suggest then that within the overall rubric of World Literature, which by definition includes all literatures ever written since the very beginning of time, there is one characteristic that is specific to postcolonial literatures, and that is language anxiety—which interestingly and perhaps paradoxically can be compared to the situation that produced Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur in the first place. Of course there are many different forms of anxiety, the anxiety of writers, the anxiety of critics, as well as writers’ anxiety about language and their relation to it.9 The postcolonial form of language anxiety rests simply on the question of the writer living in more than one language where the different languages have a colonial power relation to each other. Let me begin by risking a distinction between World and Postcolonial literatures. World Literature comprises all the literatures that have ever been produced, the literature of all humanity. Postcolonial literatures are called postcolonial because they develop in the situation of the aftermath of colonial or imperial rule or its prospect. They are therefore historically and geographically bounded in a specific way, even if the postcolonial is now being pushed back into medieval and classical times—there is much postcoloniality in the history of a world of successive empires. The distinction also operates in relation to the way in which world and postcolonial literatures are read. In general terms, world literature is prized for its aesthetic value while postcolonial literature is valued in the first instance for the degree to which it explores the effects upon subjective and social experience of the historical residues of colonialism, including language itself. This last point, the question of language, is important, for otherwise the literary element might seem to have disappeared altogether, as indeed it sometimes appears to do in weaker or more sociological or anthropological forms of postcolonial analysis. It is language that prevents the postcolonial from being characterised as simply the external to the literary’s internal, in the characterisation of Casanova. For Casanova, the postcolonial is a method of reading, whereas I would argue that it begins as a mode of writing. The postcolonial does not just reduce the literary to the political, as Casanova claims, any more than Goethe does: for post- 9 For one relevant recent discussion that stresses the range of possible different forms of language anxiety in relation to the history of the English language, cf. Tim William Machan, Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. World Literature and Language Anxiety Robert J. C. Young colonial literatures, the questions of language, language choice and translation, are always central, and always political.10 While Casanova criticizes the postcolonial for being political at the expense of the aesthetic, she herself sometimes completely misses the aesthetic dimension in her readings, particularly with respect to language. A perfect example would be the reductive account that she gives of V. S. Naipaul, where her dismissive vignette of him as simply an “assimilated” writer, absorbed into the Anglophone cultural center, entirely overlooks the ways in which Naipaul’s cultural anxieties as a colonial writer feed into the parsimonious nature of his language, a language which richly expresses the ambivalence of the anxieties of his situation. Casanova as a result shows herself oblivious to the rich ironies of the very flatness of Naipaul’s delivery or the complex linguistic work being done in his writing. Nothing in Naipaul works simply at face value. To take a single example, in The Enigma of Arrival (1987) Naipaul notices that when he prepares the compost heaps on the estate, Pitton the gardener substitutes the word “refuge” for “refuse” (as is common in the English West Country): This vegetable graveyard or rubbish dump Pitton described as a “garden refuge,” and a certain amount of ingenuity went into finding or creating these hidden but accessible “refuges.” That was how Pitton used the word: I believe he had two or three such refuges at different places. Refuse, refuge: two separate, unrelated words. But “refuge,” which Pitton used for “refuse,” did in the most remarkable way contain both words. Pitton’s “refuge” not only stood for “refuse,” but had the additional idea or association, not at all inappropriate, of asylum, sanctuary, hiding, almost of hide-and-seek, of things kept decently out of sight and mind.11 For all his interest in local rural English life at the level of minutest detail, Naipaul gives no indication that he understands that Pitton was engaged in composting: nothing could be of greater interest to the true gardener than the mysterious art of composting, by means of which the gardener transforms the rejected garden weeds and trimmings into the fertilising soil that will propel the plants into luxuriant flowering and the vegetables into richly cropping abundance in the years to come. “Graveyard” or “rubbish dump” misses the point entirely, and doubtless creates for Naipaul further enigmas around the character of the eccentric Pitton. But if Naipaul is no gardener, the confluence of the two words allows him to come back again and again to their identification with each other, leading him to develop a powerful and evocative meditation on the ironies of the links between refuge and refuse, with respect to the composting Pitton and other vulnerable workers whom he encounters but also of course to himself, he who has taken refuge, shelter and asylum, in the closed sanctuary of English village life but remains haunted by his status as an unattached colonial subject from Trinidad, haunted by the memory of the colonial English view of Trinidadians as refuse. He cites the received view elsewhere: “‘Generally colonies are peopled by the 10 11 Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (2005), p. 71. Here Casanova unexpectedly lines up with Harold Bloom in his criticism of what he calls the “literature of resentment.” V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival [1987] (London: Picador, 2002), p. 218. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 32 33 refuse of the Mother Country, but Trinidad is peopled by the refuse of the other colonies.’”12 At the same time, the noun refuse can also become the verb refuse, and all the instances in which it is cited involve a refusal or defiance of some sort on the part of the West Country agricultural workers, and in the same way the refusal also works to deny Naipaul’s own status as colonial refuse: “So the past for me—as colonial and writer—was full of shame and mortifications. Yet as a writer I could train myself to face them. Indeed, they became my subjects.”13 It is hard to read Naipaul’s comment without suspecting that perhaps he does understand the principle of composting after all, for his writing enables him to reprocess the shame and mortification of his coloniality into his art. So much for the man who has been easily dismissed as simply an “assimilated” writer. The whole point of Naipaul is the persistent and unending anxiety that comes with the sense that he will never be fully assimilated, a continuing unease that above all erupts in the subtle insinuations of his language. With respect to Casanova’s general argument against the postcolonial as too political and too worldly, one can respond by pointing out that Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur seems surprisingly postcolonial, in certain respects, for it involves above all the provision of a judgment on the domestic from the perspective of the foreign, the judgement on the centre from the periphery or the margin: “world literature develops in the first place when the differences that prevail within one nation are resolved through the understanding and judgment of the rest.”14 Moreover, World Literature is not merely literary, an aesthetic product creating its own world, or literary space, but has a specific “use” or function, as Goethe puts it, beyond itself, that might be termed political, and that is to create intercourse and tolerance between nations. Its literariness, on the other hand, is never in doubt. Whereas world literature is often conceived in terms of a range of particular authors expressing themselves in their own language and literary forms, which we may however read in translation and which may require the mediating role of the critic, the assumption that literature is a form of expression in one’s own language is never simply a given for the postcolonial writer, who very often exists in a state of anxiety with respect to the choice of language in which he or she is going to write. Though the subaltern can speak, the means of expression is not straightforward. It is for this reason that language anxiety is fundamental to postcolonial writing, for a postcolonial writer’s relation to language is always at the same time a relation to colonial history and a defence or defiance against the colonial tendency to “glottophagie,” or language devouring, to invoke Louis-Jean Calvet’s term.15 This anxiety produces a certain kind of literature full of questions about language, and the diversity of languages and cultures on the edges of which it lives. That diversity is not just the diversity of the world overall but the diversity of local experience that produces a literature haunted by the collisions, suppressions, impositions and interactions of languages. We find therefore a specific linguistic texture 12 13 14 15 V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of Eldorado: A History (London: André Deutsch, 1969), p. 285. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. 267. Cf. Goethe, Letter to Sulpiz Boisserée [October 12, 1827]. Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme: petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974). © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. World Literature and Language Anxiety Robert J. C. Young pervading such writing. If world literature consists of literary works that successfully circulate internationally beyond the confines of their own borders by typically wearing their own original cultural context “rather lightly” as David Damrosch has argued, any work of postcolonial literature will always be riven by its own context, since it will be the literature of a culture forcibly internationalised, made worldly, by the impact of foreign cultures and languages from beyond that were imposed on that culture without choice.16 Encounters between languages are never neutral and literature can never escape the cultural conditions of the politics of language. A postcolonial literature will always be actively marked by the presence, or absence, of other dominant or repressed languages that operate within its own specific local environment. The question of language choice will always have to be made, but whatever language he or she chooses, many postcolonial writers nevertheless retain a certain equivocalness in their relation to the particular language in which they write, the more so if this is a major European language such as English or French. The language debates amongst colonial and postcolonial writers, which began in India (for example in the work of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873) who switched from writing in English to Bengali) and Ireland in the nineteenth century, have been well rehearsed, even if surprisingly no one has written their history, and I am not going to elaborate them at length here. I just want to point to two things: first that these debates, usually presented as a question of simple choice, that is a question of internationalism vs. nativism, in fact also represent an anxiety about language choice that tends to develop in a non-European environment which has a number of local or indigenous languages but in which there is also the presence of a dominant European language as a product of colonial rule. This situation does not generally change significantly in the postcolonial period (Vietnamese French would be an interesting test case, while a striking variation would be the Palestinian writer Anton Shammas’s decision to write his novel Arabesques [1986] in a very allusive and layered Hebrew that resonates with the rhythms of Arabic, provocatively inserting a Palestinian voice forever within the domain of Hebrew literature). The most common responses to this colonial or postcolonial dilemma of language choice take three forms: first to use the colonial language but modify it so as to make it more local (African, as with Chinua Achebe, Indian as with Salman Rushdie, Irish, as with James Joyce, or Caribbean, as with Aimé Césaire or Edouard Glissant). The second possibility is to choose to write in a third, different language altogether, as in the case of Samuel Beckett, for whom French represented a neutral language. For others, on the other hand, such as Assia Djebar, French was a problematic language for the same reason that English was for Beckett. So too, Dalit writers in India find English attractive because it is a caste-free language, whereas for earlier writers such as Dutt or Mohandas Gandhi it had to be rejected as a colonial language. Gandhi took the third course, namely the rejection of the colonial language altogether in favour of the local vernacular, a practice that began in the nineteenth century but today is most associated with the name of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Paradoxically perhaps the first and third choices (crudely the use of the colonizer’s or the local language) both have a comparable result, 16 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 139. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 34 35 namely the development of a new written form that conforms to neither original language: the modified European language choice produces a new literary language that has no verbal equivalent, and indeed is often almost unreadable, even if it is supposed to represent the local inflection of the European language: think of Joyce, Erna Brodber, or Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1986) as examples of those who write in English but in a language that is no longer English. While writing in the vernacular, on the other hand, also inevitably produces a new written form, since no one writes as they speak, it sometimes happens that the language employed also increasingly embodies the frozen time-capsule of a language remembered in exile from the past. The net result is a transformed European language internally translated into a different idiom, or the forcing of the non-reader of the non-European language into translation. In different ways, all options push the reader into a translational mode of some kind. The anxiety of language choice always leads on to an anxiety of translation. III Although language choice will always be an issue for writers in a general sense, anxiety about language choice, and a continuing preoccupation with it, is especially characteristic of postcolonial writers. I want to conclude by asking a question for which there is no simple answer, namely, why, unexpectedly, does postcolonial language anxiety seem to be greatest in the Maghreb? It is true that outside its own geographical region, Arabic literature seems to be the literature perhaps least known in all the literatures that make up World Literature today. On the other hand, for those writing in the Maghreb and the Middle East, Arabic literature offers one of the richest historical literatures of the world and certainly has no deficiency of literary cultural capital in Casanova’s terms. The availability of Arabic as a literary language, and its proliferating power as the language of one of the world’s great literatures, might have been expected to produce a situation in which language anxiety would not be an issue for recent North African writers, but in fact the very opposite is the case. In this sense, the “anxiety about language—which can only be an anxiety of language, within language itself,”17 which the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida announced in 1963 in “Force and Signification,” marked him out already as both a “postcolonial” and Maghrebian writer. Derrida, like Joyce, whom he wrote about at length, shared a marked sense of being estranged within his own language, through being estranged from that other language that he never learnt but which should in some sense have been his mother tongue. French remains the language which he speaks but which is not his. As he puts it in Monolingualism of the Other, “You see, never will this 17 Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” in: Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 3. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. World Literature and Language Anxiety Robert J. C. Young language be mine. And, truth to tell, it never was.”18 Derrida, you might even say, was anxious because he did not have a language choice, which, as a Maghrebian, he felt by rights he should have had. The very situation made him anxious, and the whole of his work in a certain sense is based on an anxiety about language. Assia Djebar found herself in a similar situation to Derrida. In her case, she was brought up in Algeria to speak French, but haunted by the forbidden Arabic by which she was surrounded, she was never fully at home in the French which always seems to remain the language of the other: I cohabit with the French language [...] French is my “stepmother” tongue. Which is my longlost mother-tongue, that left me standing and disappeared?... Mother-tongue, either idealized or unloved, neglected and left to fairground barkers and jailers!... Burdened by my inherited taboos, I discover I have no memory of Arabic love-songs. Is it because I was cut off from this impassioned speech that I find the French I use so flat and unprofitable?19 Djebar’s whole work has in a sense been constituted by the disquieting question of language, multilingualism and language choice, and represents one of the most profound analyses of its continuing effects upon the postcolonial writer.20 Of course for Djebar, as for Derrida, there was in practical terms really only one possibility, but this can hardly have been said to reduce the anxiety that she felt about it—indeed it seems to have exacerbated it. What is it that is particular to the Arab region that seems to heighten this situation of language anxiety? This domain brings together the two situations which I began by comparing, namely that of Goethe in the eighteenth century and postcolonial questions of language anxiety of the twentieth. Though the Maghreb, like most Arab lands, has been multiply invaded and colonized, first by the Arabs themselves, then by the Ottomans, then by the British, French, Spanish, Italians and Americans, you might assume that it would avoid issues of postcolonial language anxiety, given the presence of classical and modern standard Arabic across the whole region. The situation in Arabic speaking countries to some degree offers a situation comparable to that of Latin in medieval Europe, or perhaps more closely to the situation in China with respect to Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese (Yue), Min, Xiang, Hakka, Gan, and their many regional varieties, together with Japanese, in which the written form is universally legible while the spoken languages can be distinct enough to be mutually unintelligible to the degree that some could technically be called another language (Italian or to a lesser extent even German would offer comparable cases in Europe). In this situation, the post-Romantic European emphasis on the need for literature to reflect the authenticity of vernacular 18 19 20 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin [1996], trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); cf. Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade [L’amour, la fantasia 1985], trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1993), pp. 213–214; cf. Assia Djebar, “Ecrire dans la langue de l’autre,” in: Assia Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent ... en marge de ma francophonie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), pp. 41–50. Assia Djebar, “Territoires des langues,” in: Lise Gauvin, L’écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1997), pp. 17–34. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 36 37 speech does not obtain in the same way, any more than it did for Europeans who wrote in Latin up until the eighteenth century. For Arabic, this situation was at least in part the result of the way in which printing was introduced after 1821 and exploited by the AlNahda (Revival) movement which developed the written form of modern Arabic. The result today is that, as the writer and translator Abdelfattah Kilito puts it in his provocative book, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (2002): As is well known, written Arabic, unlike spoken Arabic, has undergone only slight and secondary changes throughout its history, so that whoever today can read Nizar Qabbani can read al-‘Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf, and those who can read Salah ‘Abd al-Sabur can read Salih ibn ‘Abd al-Quddus, and whoever reads Midaq Alley can also read The Book of the Misers. This is a strange and amazing phenomenon, rarely encountered in other cultures.21 We might contrast the situation in Turkey, highlighted by Erich Auerbach, where because of the language reforms of the 1920s, few Turks can read books published in Turkish before that date. The perhaps unique position of Arabic can help us to understand why nationalist language politics has not been cathected with the same importance in this part of the world as in South Asia. What this means is that as well as having avoided some of the negative consequences of these language movements (such as the devastating wars prompted in part by language movements in South Asia), literature in Arabic is always already more fundamentally transnational than other literatures, and this has meant that the Arabic speaking world has maintained a rare cultural unity, sustained by the unique link between the language, especially in its written forms, and Islam. Writing offers a historical transnational or indeed prenational language in a way that complicates any assumption that World Literature offers the summation of different national literatures of the world and challenges the standard national vernacular literatures. All these qualities might have been expected to have meant that the fundamental postcolonial question of language choice has not been such an issue for Arab writers. Things, however, are not so simple. First of all there are the two forms of written language, classical and modern, and secondly there is the diglossic situation of the division between literary and spoken Arabic, and the difference between standard Arabic and local dialects. Arabic is in some sense doubly determined, on the one hand by its quasi Latinate status, on the other hand by a typical postcolonial situation. The language question is not absent, particularly for writers in the more multilingual environment of le maghreb pluriel where the possibility of choosing between local languages such as Arabic and Berber, and the colonial languages of French and Spanish, has placed writers such as Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, or Abdelkebir Khatibi in a position comparable to the other classic formulations of the problem of what language a writer in a multilingual, formerly colonial environment should choose to write in.22 In the Maghreb in particular, it is often the idea of writing in French that produces similar problems to 21 22 Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, trans. Wail S. Hassan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 10. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983). © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. World Literature and Language Anxiety Robert J. C. Young those in Africa or India who write in English. On the one hand, we have writers such as the Algerian Rachid Boudjedra who wrote first in French and then in Arabic, both of them in linguistic registers that have proved almost equally too difficult to translate into English. On the other hand, there is Khatibi’s L’Amour bilingue, which suggests the overthrow of dualistic either/or choices by recognizing the simultaneous presence of different languages at the same time, creating a space where co-present languages can meet without merging, in a state of translation in which the writer imperceptibly switches languages, a situation in fact more representative of the state of languages in multilingual environments, where speakers code switch into different languages for the different situations as appropriate.23 One might also note here the additional use of Italian (Kalifa Tillisi), Spanish (Mohamed Sibari, El Caballo [1993]), and in recent years of Englishwhich has proved particularly attractive for diasporic Arab women writers, such as the Jordanian-British author Fadia Faqir, or Leila Aboulela, originally from Sudan, or the British-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif. Perhaps writing in English, in another language altogether, is one way of learning not to be anxious. What complicates further this rich polylingual situation is the question of the relation of modern standard Arabic to vernacular forms of Arabic as well as to dialects and other languages such as Berber. North African writers sometimes say that they often prefer to write in French or English because Modern Standard Arabic, especially in its written form, is a foreign language for them like almost any other, and very distant from local speech forms, as well as from certain areas of human experience, such as intimacy, which, writers argue, it finds impossible to express. This situation is particularly emphasized by women writers, and it is notable that perhaps for this reason many Anglophone Arabic writers are women. Gradually, Arabic is being written in more diverse ways, a process that was first highlighted for the English-speaking world with Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi’s A Life Full of Holes (1964), which was transcribed and translated from Moroccan Arabic or darija by Paul Bowles. Today, one of the effects of the use of social media, blogging etc., associated with the Arab Spring, has been the development of new forms of written Arabic that reflect local vernaculars much more closely and which are radically transforming the hegemony of Modern Standard Arabic in a “new imaginative geography of liberation.”24 So the contemporary situation can perhaps be compared, in certain ways, to the gradual break up of standard Latin in Europe from the sixteenth century to the time of Goethe, in a postcolonial historical environment. Language anxiety in the Maghreb, therefore, seems to result from the presence of all major European languages, with the exception of German, together with the wide range of spoken forms of Arabic, as well as other languages such as Berber, that collide with the special situation of a Modern Standard written Arabic, to produce a situation of on the one hand acute language anxiety, but, on the other hand, as is often the case with anxiety, extraordinary productivity across North Africa and the so-called Middle East. And that energizing dynamic is precisely what makes Arabic literature so uniquely interesting amongst all great literatures of the world today. 23 24 Abdelkebir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1983). Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring. The End of Postcolonialism (London: Zed Books, 2012), p. 226. © Akademie Verlag. This document is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this document for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. 38