In Babel's Shadow

Brian Lennon

Published by University of Minnesota Press

Lennon, Brian.
In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/24458

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 Introduction

Antinomies of Literature
Ich ekelte mich oft vor den Menschen, die fließend ihre Muttersprache
sprachen. Sie machten den Eindruck, daß sie nichts anderes denken und
spüren konnten als das, was ihre Sprache ihnen so schnell und
bereitwillig anbietet.
[I was often disgusted by people who spoke their mother tongues
fluently. They gave the impression that they couldn’t think and feel
anything but what their language so quickly and readily offered them.]
—yoko tawada, “Das Fremde aus der Dose”

Translation is a victory and a threat, a necessity and a violation, a funda-

mental or given of all discourse and an intractable problem for it. Trans-
lation links such antipodes in a paradox animating our notions of what
literature is and can be—and no less so in an age when literature seems less
plainly relevant than ever.
This book took shape at a time when failures of understanding—at
every level—seemed to loom everywhere; indeed, did loom everywhere
(a situation that hasn’t improved). Since then, among other effects that
may or may not have been foreseen, the new direction of U.S. national
political imperatives has revived support for foreign language learning as a
component of human or cultural intelligence—in both the humanistic
and the military strategic or technocratic senses of “intelligence.”1 Across
the political spectrum, lack of competence in languages other than English
is now acknowledged as a serious deficit of educational, economic, and
military resources in the United States—though the conclusions drawn
from this premise vary widely, both practically and politically. Against the
background of realignments precipitated by the events of 2001, including

1
2 Introduction

waves of performative nativism and contempt for humanism and the push-
back of demands for immigrants’ rights, the struggle for a new plurilingual
American intelligence devolves on the politics of plurilingualism in every-
day and literary life. Gloria Anzaldúa’s challenge to North American Anglos
to “meet her halfway” in Spanish is, it seems, finally being taken seriously 2—
at least to the extent that interregnal vogues for translation studies and
global English studies are being imperiled by a drive toward what we might
call “nontranslation studies” and a renewed emphasis (from both right and
left) on idiolectic incommensurability.3
This book joins that shift in focus already underway. At the same time,
it attempts to reflect on this shift critically. One might say that in the criti-
cal study of contemporary literature, the plurilingual spirit of this new
emphasis collides with the monolingual letter of the publication industry
that produces books, our professional research objects. On the one hand,
the reimagination of comparative literature as emanating from Istanbul
rather than Marburg,4 and of an “American literature” originally and anar-
chically multilingual,5 reflects a premium placed on language acquisition
and its stakes in a contemporary critical politics of global culture. And
this is, straightforwardly, a displacement of value reflecting increased self-
consciousness about the cultural and linguistic Anglocentrism of profes-
sional literary-critical discourse itself.6 On the other hand, the commercial
publication of books, dominated by transnational media conglomerates
with Anglophone resource bases and deep investments in export trans-
lation, works in various ways to undermine that interest.7 In the produc-
tion of research objects for scholars of contemporary literature, language
difference, the condition of multiple language acquisition, is displaced by
translative representation of language difference. To the extent that scholars
understand themselves as analysts of already given objects, regarding inter-
vention in the process of literary production as beyond their practical or
desired ability, the premium placed here on language difference is, I will
suggest, insufficiently theorized.

New initiatives galvanized by “9/11” notwithstanding, we might say that

a great deal of critical discourse in both English/U.S. and comparative
literary studies in U.S. institutions retains marks—or bears scars—of the
apparently complacent era preceding the crisis of 2001. Flourishing in
 Introduction 3

an Anglophone gap, as it were, between the vanishing of the old Russian-

speaking adversary and the emergence of a new, Arabic-speaking one—a
gap defined by the euphoric rhetoric of global political, economic, and cul-
tural interconnection—that discourse is marked by immense interest in
translation and its operations and contexts. Even when, as in a great deal
of work in literary studies, the routine complications, outright failures, and
at times utter impossibility of translation are articles of common sense (or
faith!), this immense industry of translation commentary is no less bound
to the concept of the (translated) product: a perfectly natural thing, after
all, for a discourse conducted in, and about, printed books.8
On the one hand, there is a genuine urgency to questions of translation
today, in an era marked by the return (after an all too brief hiatus, perhaps)
to narratives of both spontaneous and organized cultural incommensu-
rability on a world scale. On the other hand, urgent questions do tend to
flatten in the repetitions of discursive recirculation: a currency in which
translation and its metaphorics appear almost virally affluent, since they
are all (incipiently, at least) global in scale, squaring happily—too happily,
perhaps—with the official story of globalization. It seems to me that the
effects of that affluence are reproduced even at the minimal level of pub-
lication, where the texts that we ourselves produce, discoursing on it, are
managed. And this is, then, a determination—or a fate—in which the com-
position, publication, and dissemination of literature, and the composition,
publication, and dissemination of literary criticism itself find themselves
nontrivially enmeshed, in a kind of print-cultural codependence that exerts
on that criticism, in turn, a certain demand for recognition.
It is in trying to frame this book with that recognition that from the
start, I want to emphasize two grounds of my work here. The first is
that the typographic conventions of the authorial–editorial translation
of foreign words, in books published in U.S. English today, are effects of
editorial discipline keyed to that determination, and thus constructions
of reader “markets” implied in that discipline by a very concretely strati-
fied U.S.-Anglo-global publishing industry. As such, it is my argument
here, they are important and substantively supplemental, rather than
merely incidental features of the lives of the literary objects we call books.
While the analytic power of the sociology of taste in the now broadly sed-
imented North American critical legacy of Pierre Bourdieu, for example,
4 Introduction

declines, in my view, as it becomes synoptic, a fundamental insight of

the history and sociology of the book, as a material consumer product
and archival object, is vitally important here. That is the idea that “writing
a book”—more than the writing of a “text,” which it is also—is an imagi-
nation, an anticipation, and a pursuit of publication in an imagined world,
which serves as a line of demarcation for a literary work’s composition
and indeed, in its forms of life. This activity, in turn, comprises an array
of micronegotiations of matters of social position and status, labor, work,
career choice (or lack thereof), imaginations of time and value, and de-
sire, in a matrix linking the formal question of style to that of content pre-
sented to reader–consumers who purchase books produced and marketed
by brokering agents in pursuit of quantifiable profit and growth, who
must serve (sometimes against their will) its minimal exclusive criteria for
publishability.
To reorient ourselves around this (entirely banal) limit of contemporary
literature-in-publication is, I will suggest, to restore a usefully nonfrivolous
legibility to several ostensibly peripheral areas of writing and publication.
One consists of such oft-discounted epiphenomena of book reading (titles,
title pages, dedications, and epigraphs, for example, but also choice and for-
mat of type and page layout) as are catalogued by Gérard Genette under the
rubric “le péritexte éditoriale.”9 Another is the relationship of the publisher’s
public “epitext,” the marketing and promotional documents that support
the book as a consumer product, to the private epitext—documents such
as diaries, letters, and “avant-textes” preserving incomplete, unfinished, or
otherwise nonpublished, nonvisible writing—that precede or follow pub-
lication.10 Still another, of course, is that unpublished writing itself.
The second ground of my argument is that the work of literary critics
and scholars who work with published books (of course, not all do!), and
especially those who, as in my own fields—twentieth-century and con-
temporary North American and world literature—work with published
works of contemporary literature, is bound to and by the book-publishing
industry, an industry that has seen significant change since the 1990s, with
new consequences for the material availability of contemporary and future
literature. To the extent that editorial pressure to write nondifficult English
prose,11 for example, for a “general reader,” shapes a seduction discourse
of availability to reader–consumers,12 I will suggest that it touches the
 Introduction 5

question of incommensurability materialized on the page by literary

plurilingual “code-switching.” Among U.S. students—the last such non-
specialized (if very much captive) readers, perhaps—undergraduate com-
plaints about “difficult” reading in their de jure native tongue might be
understood to be something of a piece with graduate student resistance to
foreign-language requirements, itself reflecting the status quo of the con-
glomerated Anglophone publishing industry’s excessive trade surplus. In
U.S. university literature courses, the teaching mandate of availability nec-
essarily overlaps with the teaching ideal of translatability, the availability of
published books for purchase with the availability of the text to a collec-
tively and contractually (if seldom actually and individually) monolingual
readership. (We can hear this in the plaintive tone of many descriptions for
cross-listed courses in U.S. comparative literature programs, for example,
which promise that notwithstanding their languages of original publica-
tion, all texts will be available and discussed in English.) This collision of
the effacement of language, in the teaching ideal of exhaustive and univer-
sal translatability, with the national language reality, so to speak, of the
university (in the United States, at least), is the paradox of the institution
in which many of us, in the readership for this book, do our work. It is also
a key to the “white economy” (in Paul Mann’s sense of that term) of critical
debate over the existing and possible relations of aesthetics to politics—a
debate that for so many of us, these days, at once sustains and frustrates
that work.13 In the end I suspect, following Derrida on this point, that the
university can incorporate revolutionary ideological content more readily
than it can bear serious challenge to national language and all the “juridico-
political contracts” it guarantees.14
In this book, I attempt to develop an answer to one principally discipli-
nary, and as such, obtusely impractical question. That question, put delib-
erately nonliterally, is this: Why do we speak of, or in, translation when
we might also, or instead, speak of, or in, multiple languages? That is to
ask: in an “increasingly globalized” world,15 in which both overprivileged
and underprivileged individual monolingual and plurilingual speakers of
different languages come into closer and more frequent public and private
discursive contact—a contact the reflection of which the professional
study of culture prides itself on detecting in the emergent—do the pro-
duction, the study, and the reproduction of the study of literature remain
6 Introduction

procedurally translatively monolingual?16 Immense intellectual industry is

focused today on translation, its problems, its contexts, and its theories: a
perfectly fine and natural thing, after all, in such an increasingly economi-
cally and culturally globalized world. The increasing importance of trans-
lation, in that increasingly globalized world, would seem to demand, or at
least to legitimate, translation’s elevation to the status of a discipline in
itself. In the territories of Anglo-American literary studies, the transfor-
mation of Translation Studies from a secondary practice akin to “creative
writing” into a primary scholarly discipline was achieved through “a redis-
covery of the work of the Russian Formalist Circle,” as Susan Bassnett put
it in her foundational Translation Studies (1980), and its embrace of liter-
ature as an object of rigorously pseudo-scientific study.17 Among other
things—a point on which Bassnett is quite clear—this means the compet-
itive disciplinary reimagination of the difference of Benjamin Lee Whorf ’s
“language-worlds” in terms of modelable systemic or polysystemic differ-
ence, difference that is always already “really” relation.18 Whorf as “strong
determinist” is integrated in this way into a science of culture that rewrites
incommensurability as contact, just as Roman Jakobson’s fundamentally
taxonomic approach to poetic language integrates it into literary science as
an eccentric category of (non)translation called “transposition.”19
My intention here is not to disvalue ground-breaking work by Bassnett,
André Lefevere, and other major figures foundational to the discipline of
Translation Studies, work from which I have learned a great deal20—but
merely to remind my reader that Translation Studies conceived itself ini-
tially, at least, and in Lefevere’s and Bassnett’s own earliest modes of advo-
cacy, as a semiotic discipline. Until the work of Lawrence Venuti turned
Anglo-American Translation Studies in a new direction, it appeared little
interested in the insights produced by poststructuralist critiques of struc-
turalism’s problematic scientism, its reincorporation of difference into
relation, and the coding model of translation that accompanied the taxon-
omy of systems. In my own view, this was a significant loss. Among other
things, in transforming translation from a secondary (re)writing practice
into a primary scholarly discipline, Translation Studies erased precisely
the theoretical advantage of that practice: its deixis with respect to theo-
ries of literary theory itself as something other than (or in addition to, or
more than) descriptive science.
 Introduction 7

This doubling down on discipline is a mode of bureaucratic leverage

with benefits, and costs, that are plain. One legacy of Translation Studies
understood as (poly)system science is a model of translation-as-process-
as-product, with the first conjunction, “translation as process,” more or
less fatally underwritten by the second. Where it operates in translation
studies today, this model is manifest in focus on the activity or process of
translation as means, or on the product of translation as end—for exam-
ple, in self-sustaining debate of the translatability and untranslatability of
literary language and/or (or and thus) cultural difference, where transla-
tion as a center of reference, be it positive or negative, goes unquestioned.
Thus taken for granted, translation serves to generate metaphors for per-
petual motion and transfer—between languages, cultures, and particular
forms of knowledge—easily conflated with globalization as the play of free
or autonomous, nonsocial or inhuman market forces. Alternately, it gener-
ates metaphors for stasis, immobility, and resistance to those forces that in
no way question the primacy of their structures of representation.
This complicity of critique in sustaining what it seeks to destroy (or
conserving what it wishes to reform) should force us to examine more
closely the role that institutionally driven careerism plays in publication,
and how the disciplinary strictures of professional academic life, in an
effect that none of us can ever fully escape, essentially coerce innovation.
Again, my intention here is not to disvalue anything in the work of schol-
ars in my own or in related fields of interest, in whose steps this book
can after all, and at best, only follow. Yet it is through the practice of writ-
ing that we scholars create new subgenres (of literature, as of literary and
cultural theory) and establish new fields to contain them, writing up our
creations in a scientized idiom of discovery. My own view is that method-
ological self-reflexivity on this issue should be nonnegotiable for any of
us, and that its integration into critical methodology can only strengthen
its method, in ways that the conventional institutional gloss of that term
still merely hints at.
Globalization, as Djelal Kadir reminds us in just such a self-reflexive
gesture, is not a phenomenon, but an act, with an agent—an act of “world-
ing” or circumscription, of tracing a circle that includes and excludes.21
Plainly, then, scholars, to the extent that they function as agents and not
merely subjects of globalization, are agents of this circumscription as well.
8 Introduction

Or, to put it somewhat less bleakly, which is to point to what can be done:
when scholars understand themselves strictly as (at worst) collectors or
(at best) analysts of empirically presumed objects, rejecting intervention
in literary production itself as beyond their professional range—or failing
to imagine it in the first place—the distinction between the existing or
emergent and the possible—between the past and present and the future—
goes missing.22
Globalization, to put it plainly, is not only, or not always, a form of trans-
lation, which is always and everywhere systemic, a figure of difference in
(always already given) relation. Rather, it is a happy or unhappy figure for
that which escapes understanding—flows, simultaneities, networks, deter-
ritorialization, annihilations of the space and time of representation—and
so also, even often, a mode of incommensurability, of the incommensu-
rable difference of languages, cultures, and forms of knowledge. Though as
Timothy Brennan argues (and as I follow his argument here, in the essay
composing chapter 4), we can, and indeed must understand this incommen-
surability in terms of collision—that is to say as contact, not as complete
autonomy—I think it is worth differentiating weak from strong contact,
including the strong contact of Brennan’s own model of secular “conversion.”
That distinction might be understood to turn on the mercantilized compu-
tational concept of “optimization” I discuss in the essay composing chap-
ter 2, and to enable us meaningfully to distinguish language acquisition as a
practice from translation as (only) one of its practical applications. It is this,
we might say, that gives us the difference between speaking of, or in, trans-
lation, when we might also, or instead, speak of, or in, multiple languages.

Plurilingualism in Translation
Book publishing in the United States today can be divided into three dis-
tinct sectors: trade publishing, based for the most part in New York City
and integrated during the 1990s into multinational media conglomerates;
scholarly publishing, consisting mainly of domestic university presses
(few of which are as strongly supported as they once were by their host
institutions); and “independent” publishing, encompassing everything
from high-visibility regional publishers competing with the trades but not
yet integrated into the New York system (Graywolf Press in Minnesota, for
example) to very small presses tied to specific regional or local literary,
 Introduction 9

intellectual, political, or independent scholarly communities. For almost

anyone working in, working for, or working with publishing (which is to
say anyone who produces books), and for any reasonably discerning
reader, the distinction between trade publishing, on the one hand, and
scholarly and independent publishing, on the other, is plain.23 In most
cases, it is a distinction between radically different levels of (and levels of
access to) economic resources, and thus of particular “classes”—admit-
tedly an abusive term here—of literary writers marked by specific dispo-
sitions of time and work: sometimes, and most plainly, those who can
hope to earn a living from writing alone versus those who cannot. This
distinction also marks a point of transition in an individual literary or
academic writer’s career, with the jump to trade publishing (which either
reflects or produces, depending on how one sees it, a broader readership)
serving as a symbolic form of upward mobility.
Virtually all books published for distribution in the United States
by U.S. trade publishers are published in English, for a readership that by
market mandate is presumed monolingual in English.24 But as the work
of Lawrence Venuti, among others, has consistently emphasized, a large
portion of the market for books published in the United States is extra-
national: that is to say, a market for books published in translation from
English.25 Regarded as a market, this “global” literary readership—a pre-
sumed monolingual Anglophone readership at home, plus a presumed
monolingual non-Anglophone readership abroad—represents two sources
of pressure for editorial standardization: one directed toward readability
for the largest possible Anglophone home readership, and the other toward
translatability for the largest possible multinational readership abroad.26 In
books published in the United States, words and phrases in languages
other than English are obstacles, therefore, not only for the monolingual
Anglophone reader, but also for the translator, whose principal task is
resolving the source English into the target language of a foreign market.
What we might call strong plurilingualism—the interpolation into English
of significant quantities of a language or languages other than English—is
today found exclusively in books published by “independent” publishing
houses not oriented in this way to translation.
One consequence of this is that editorial conventions for managing for-
eign languages can best be observed in an emerging canon of contemporary
10 Introduction

U.S. multiethnic literary memoir and fiction published by the trade divi-
sion of the publishing industry (a development discussed in the essays
composing chapters 4 and 5). And here we can see something of the func-
tional paradox at work in contemporary notions of transnational literature:
a paradox for which I prefer the term antinomy, to emphasize the constitu-
tive or permanent character of contradiction at the ground of publication
itself over its research character as an object of interest in an always already
given field. For the narratives of language acquisition and bi- or pluri-
lingual experience of which so many such multiethnic U.S. literary works
consist must make frequent reference, from within the original English
in which they are published—this, after all, is the story they tell—to a non-
English language or languages: to the language(s) the story they tell has
taken them from. And yet to “speak” in that language or languages—to
interpolate it in significant quantities into their original English—would
be to violate the market mandate of transmission, including transmission
as foreign (re)translation. This is where the editorial apparatus of a trade
publisher exerts itself visibly, and where academic criticism and scholar-
ship of contemporary literature—often and oddly less perceptive, on this
issue, than some book criticism in the popular media—can find itself cir-
cumscribed: “worlded.”27
We might say there are three main conventions for managing languages
other than English in U.S. trade-published books. First, they are contained—
confined to single words, phrases, or brief exchanges of spoken dialogue,
as touches of cultural verisimilitude (or its simulation) that “season” the
text ever so lightly with the foreign without dulling its domestic flavor.
Second, they are tagged (by convention, with italic type) to mark them as
voiced (as breaks in a continuum of subvocalized prose) and to mark them
as “foreign” language. Third, they are translated—usually in direct apposi-
tion, as in “The Mexican said Hola, or hello.” Languages other than English
are administered, so to speak, in an ethnographic or pedagogic mode pre-
suming the lowest common denominator, Anglophone monolingualism.28
Notwithstanding, however, the plurilingual intercultural initiatives of
the Common European Framework for Language Learning and Teaching
and the presence in its midst of a constitutionally plurilingual nation-state
(Switzerland), such domesticating conventions can be observed in litera-
ture published in continental Western Europe, too—even (or especially)
 Introduction 11

in a work widely celebrated for its mixture of languages (such as Turkish

German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, discussed in the
essay composing chapter 5). This, then—and here is the broader frame of
my argument—is hardly an effect of Anglophone (or Anglophile) cultural
barbarism, as some might see it. Rather, it is a structural function of the
nationalized languages of book publishing generally. The national and inter-
national book publication of literature requires, indeed enforces, national
linguistic standardization. Furthermore: it is in no way upset by moderate
challenge to the national standard (in the low-/high-culture erudition of
dialect mimicry, appropriation of argot or specialized jargon, and so on).
Such challenge, often enough, is recoded as innovation—hybridization
or syncretism of the national language—and thus serves to reassert the
standard while expanding its flexibility and powers of incorporation as a
literary standard.29 What the nationalized languages of book publishing
cannot tolerate, on the other hand—and where the line dividing trade from
scholarly and independent presses is drawn—is departure from the national
standard: moving inward, in one direction, toward idiolectic private or
invented language, and outward in the other, toward extranational, public
plurilingualism.
To clarify this distinction, I want now to contrast two examples of
plurilingualism in literature, or more to the point, of plurilingualism in
translation, the antinomy for which I will subsequently attempt to define
some use. One example, we might say, dramatizes the either/or of bilin-
gualism in the United States; the other, what we might call the “all but” of
plurilingualism in continental Europe.

“No publisher in his right mind”

The first comes from Ilan Stavans’s “language memoir” On Borrowed Words:
A Memoir of Language. Published in the original English by Viking in 2001,
this narrative traces its narrator’s crossing from Mexico (and Spanish) to
the United States (and English) by way of Israel (and both Yiddish and
Hebrew). In a scene in the book’s last chapter, a coda, Stavans’s narrator is
sharing breakfast with Richard Rodriguez, the author of Hunger of Mem-
ory, another English-language memoir of plurilingualism, while the two
discuss writing, identity, and language in their lives and work. “What does
the switch from one language to another really entail?” asks “Rodriguez”
12 Introduction

at one point, referring to the narrator’s four primary languages. Here is the
narrator’s answer (partly, as you will see, reported in direct quotation, and
partly narrated):

“My English-language persona is the one that superimposes itself on all pre-
vious others. In it are the seeds of Yiddish and Hebrew, but mostly Spanish.”
I invoke the Yiddish translation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which, in its title
page, read “fartunkeld und farveserd”—translated and improved. . . . “You
know, sometimes I have the feeling I’m not one but two, three, four people.
Is there an original person? An essence? I’m not altogether sure, for without
language I am nobody. Language makes us able to fit into a context. And
what is there to be found in the interstices between contexts? Not silence,
Richard—oh, no. Something far less compelling: pure kitsch.”30

Within this sentence, a phrase in Yiddish, “fartunkeld und farveserd,”

is “translated” by an appositive in English, “translated and improved,” in
apparent obedience to the editorial conventions I described above. Though
it violates these conventions at times, On Borrowed Words for the most part
follows them, minimizing the quantity of Spanish and Yiddish inserted
into the English text, invariably italicizing it, and frequently translating
it (accurately), as in this typical example: “Until my mother said, ‘Shoyn
genug,’ enough is enough, ya es suficiente.”31 In the sentence invoking a
Yiddish translation of Lear, however, the English appositive is a paratrans-
lation, encoding a tropism or a solecism that must remain opaque to the
reader with no knowledge of Yiddish.32 Here the editorial convention is
used against itself, as it were, its very resistance to the act of imagination
forced to demand it.
On Borrowed Words is a fascinating text in part for this doubling, which
at once submits to the artifactual monolingualism demanded of it as a
(trade) book—though not without analyzing that submission at some
length—and subverts it with a “secret” resistance splitting its readership,
as here. An early chapter, “México Lindo,” works through the contrast be-
tween books as objects, or as commodities containing writing, and books
as texts, or sites of writing’s dissemination. One form of the narrator’s self-
conscious experience of books, he tells us, consists (naturally enough) of
reading them; the other—which at times seems more urgent, or is more
 Introduction 13

absorbing—of collecting, transporting, packing or unpacking, arranging,

or (in a scene of the anxiety of influence, focused on Borges) destroying
them. The conflict between these two modes of interaction with books,
which turns on the narrator’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Ich
packe meine Bibliothek aus” (“Unpacking My Library”),33 is a conflict
between private and public forms of experience—the distinction between
which the literary capital of New York, when the narrator finally arrives
there, totally obscures. Abandoning the “portable home” of his library, the
narrator immerses himself in the city’s quotidian—for which he then finds
only analogies for reading suffice (New York, for example, is a “huge book”
of “multilingual poetry”34). In this city, people read books in public: a habit
producing memories of privately imagined (read) experience anchored to
public and vividly real space. To collect books without reading them is,
as Benjamin hinted, to return them to the radical privacy of writing as
lived time—that is to say, as an index to mortality. This subversion of
exchange finds its analogue in reading books in public (in the hypostasized
public of the city), where it reintroduces privacy into the public sphere.
Against this more radical confusion, the narrator concludes, the “local
color” of literary detail—the tourist’s (or nationalist’s) emblematic camel,
as signifier for authentic cultural difference—can never be anything more
than representation.35
As memoir, On Borrowed Words is in fact the story of a second memoir
represented within it—a private or “countermemoir” composed by Bobbe
Bela, the narrator’s grandmother, when she learns that he plans to write a
memoir as such (a memoir for publication: by more or less clear implica-
tion, On Borrowed Words itself). Not least in the illegibility of its repre-
sentation within another text, this memoir also confuses the distinction
between public and private writing. Though “private” (not intended for
publication), Bobbe Bela’s countermemoir is, like On Borrowed Words,
composed in an acquired, rather than in a native language (here, Spanish
rather than Yiddish), in purposeful manipulation of the registers of sym-
bolic power and the boundary dividing the domestic from the public
sphere. This publicity within privacy, addressing itself to the narrator—
and, through him, to his readership as a published author—forces him to
the question of plurilingual verisimilitude, within which there lies a kind
of abyss. To publish a memoir, the narrator reflects, is to transform oneself
14 Introduction

into a fictional character: here, a monoglot. “Shouldn’t [On Borrowed

Words] be written in at least three or four languages? . . . But no publisher
in his right mind would endorse such an endeavor.”36
This “memoir of language” cannot capture the silent and private art of
a divided, multiple, plurilingual self; it can only express it, in vulgar and
public form, as kitsch. In the interstices of multiple language-worlds, we
find not the sacred poetic autonomy of literariness, but the collective and
prosaic equivalence of plurilingualism in translation. The specularity of
the breakfast scene with “Richard Rodriguez” itself—its reanimation of
two author-functions in a species of allegorical dialogue, as between talk-
ing heads or figurines—seems a conscious forcing of generic bad taste
over the high-metafictional mode of the narrator’s Oedipal father, Borges.
Though finally, On Borrowed Words is a concession to the publisher “in his
right mind” (meaning, motivated by profit) rather than a serious challenge
to what that sanity represents, the narrator’s choice of kitsch over silence
here is significant—and meaningfully counterweights that concession.
Rodriguez’s own Hunger of Memory, by contrast, famously constructed
public plurilingualism (understood as both the presumption and the goal
of bilingual education policies) as “sentimentality”—a key term of deri-
sion for the failure or refusal to recognize the border marking the domestic
sphere of family (and the private language of home, with its hierarchies
of tradition and authority) and the public sphere of school (and the level-
ing language of modern democratic citizenship). In its resistance to the
“middle-class pastoral” of 1980s identarian multiculturalism, Hunger of
Memory shares with On Borrowed Words a fascination with the “public pri-
vacy” of writing and its defacements: just as the writer writes not to give
others “voice,” but to distinguish (and obscure) himself against them, the
political representation of “cultural rights” is designed to deny the ethnic
immigrant access to power, by enclosing her in her own cultural idiom.
If, all things considered, and for all its intellectual ferocity, Hunger of Mem-
ory remains unpersuasive (and now clearly mistaken) on one point,37 it
is in regarding the realpolitik of English as the public language of the
United States now and in future (if that were the case, the U.S. Senate would
not have felt the need again to exercise, as it did most recently in March
2008, a national language resolution).38 Here, the kitsch excess of the gaps
between Stavans’s narrator’s language-worlds is the object, not the subject
 Introduction 15

of instruction—a distinction that Hunger of Memory’s subtitle, The Educa-

tion of Richard Rodriguez, signals clearly. Cloaked in respect for cultural
rights, the pastoral sentimentality that Rodriguez diagnoses (entirely cor-
rectly) as a convenient way of denying the immigrant citizenship finds per-
fect expression in the weak plurilingualism of political figures like New
York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and President George W. Bush,
addressing in public the “Latino vote”—yet witness how quickly Bush’s
debatable Spanish proficiency turned controversial during the massive
immigrants’ rights marches of 2006, and had to be denied by the voice
of the White House: one indication that “speaking Spanish in public” is
not the innocence Rodriguez’s narrator makes it out to be.39 Rodriguez’s
narrative’s antinomian “scholarship boy,” at the same time a good student
and a bad student, serves to instruct us in the conflict between private and
public authority; yet the gaze of the silent, “alien” Mexican laborers, in
the scene where he acts as their Spanish–English interpreter,40 is nothing
if not an exteriorization of that conflict, in a way that fundamentally under-
cuts the narrator’s central argument: that intimacy is not a function of
language, which is rooted (or takes root) and cannot be exchanged, but a
function of “community,” which can.41 The ethnic confusion that engulfs
the family—the mother’s “inexplicably” Irish surname, the siblings’ in-
consistency of complexion, the identifications way off the mark that, the
narrator says, “people” keep making42—serves less to illustrate the nar-
rator’s point, which is that anyone willing to distinguish civic from ethnic
life has already, in a sense, become a U.S. American, than to point to the
language (rooted or no) through which they can exist as a communal
group at all.

“Just vital mysteries lost”

My second example of plurilingualism in translation comes from Swiss
British writer–scholar Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1968 novel Between, pub-
lished by Carcanet Press in Manchester, United Kingdom (and like many
of the author’s books, intermittently out of print).43 Unlike On Borrowed
Words (and Hunger of Memory), Between follows few of the standard edito-
rial conventions for writing in multiple languages; in fact, it goes well out of
its way to resist them. In the following passage, the narrator, a simultane-
ous interpreter working the academic and diplomatic circuits of postwar
16 Introduction

Europe, is having her hair dressed during a stay in Istanbul. Glancing at a

shop sign lettered in the Arabo-Persian alphabet abandoned by the Turk-
ish republic in 1928, the narrator asks the Turkish hairdresser in English:
“What does that mean?” The ensuing exchange, which turns on the in-
comprehensibility of the sign to both parties, alternates between or mixes
English, French, Turkish, and German:44

Madame? Up there. Ah. Arabe. Je ne sais pas madame. Just vital mysteries
lost, euphemized into proverbs for the day. I wouldn’t mind if they’d got
stuck in the eighteenth century or the seventeenth but the nineteenth ugh.
Ça va comme ça madame? Oui, merci, teşekkür ederim. Lutfen madame.
Allaha ısmarladık. Güle güle! So go the thankyous the goodbyes the welgo-
home in the smattering of the mouthpiece at twentynine or fortyfive even
and the baby-face stares out of lather under the letters Müjde! . . . Hayranım.
Turkish ladies surely. Hayranım lutfen. Hayranım. Er—la toilette s’il vous
plaît. . . . Merci. Tuvalet. erkek. kadin. Of course kadin. Ka-dın ka-dın
ka-dın. Not hayranım which looked up in the pocket-dictionary says haylaz
faul, hayli viel, hayran verwundert where when and to whose heart did one
do that?45

Written in English, with digression in German and French and dia-

logue in Italian, the pages of Between are liberally seasoned with words or
phrasing in Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Portuguese,
Provençal, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian,46 Slovene, Spanish, and Turkish, in
a field of interlinguistic vertigo lending itself readily to established critical
models of postmodern, postmediated experience. Claire Kramsch has
written recently, for example, of the novel’s “echoic, circular style, where
voices mesh and float into one another without any particular attribu-
tion or sense of ownership,” raising “the crucial question of the identity
and loyalty of the multilingual protagonist.”47 As this assessment (along
with the quotation I offer above) more or less correctly suggests, many
of Between’s pages are radically plurilingual, seeming in some ways to
demand reading fluency in, at the very least, three primary languages. And
indeed, a great deal of the aggressively metonymic (national) language play
of Brooke-Rose’s text would be lost on an Anglophone reader, say, with no
or little usable reading knowledge of French and German.
 Introduction 17

It is important, however, to qualify this assessment, for a close consid-

eration of the text of Between as a book demonstrates that such triple flu-
ency is not truly required. To start with, a significant majority of Between
is written in English—enough of it, in any case, to console a monolingual
Anglophone reader of sufficient negative capability. Secondly, and per-
haps more significantly for any such claim: the pseudoequality of English,
German, and French forms a core to which other languages are clearly
peripheral. Literally emanating from the north and west of Europe, this
plurilingualism is also virtuosic—a display of the traditional literary com-
paratist’s most traditionally mastered skill.
This is not to reject Kramsch’s reading of the novel, which is sensitive
elsewhere to precisely this nuance. It is, however, to remind us that, as I
show in a closer reading of Between in the essay composing chapter 2, no
published text (thus, no book) can fail to declare some “particular attribu-
tion,” however complexly qualified or refracted. It is important, as well, not
to understate the essential volatility of compliance with editorial conven-
tion, or to overstate the case for disobedience. Still, it is worth noting the
very robust challenge posed by Between, published in 1968, to the confla-
tion of reader with consumer now routine in the era of corporate media
conglomeration—as well as its raising of the bar for pragmatism in lan-
guage politics as in book publishing. The difference between Between and
On Borrowed Words is, we might say, a difference of imagination with
respect to the “publisher in his right mind,” and to the reader’s relationship
with that publisher. If, as might be argued on any number of grounds, this
difference cannot be definitive, neither then, it seems to me, can it be made
entirely negligible. It seems to me that we can trace a critical fissure here in
the paradigm forming around what Kramsch, following Alice Kaplan, and
followed by others, calls the “language learning” or “language” memoir: a
new genre of twentieth century (and especially contemporary) autobiog-
raphy, as examples of which both Stavans’s memoir and Brooke-Rose’s
essayistic novel have been identified.48

To mark this fissure, this book proposes a distinction between “strong”

and “weak” plurilingualism in published literature. This is not, I want to be
clear, the qualitative distinction it may seem. Rather, in order to set aside
the unresolvable debate over subversion in “devolved” or decolonized
18 Introduction

English, this is strictly and necessarily a quantitative distinction keyed to

the economic and material limits of contemporary print (book) media, in
two principal ways. First, because the appositive or serial translation of for-
eign words in a text literally doubles them—when performed in obedi-
ence to the editorial conventions discussed above, a redundancy designed
to contain the foreign language by matching and subordinating it to its
English equivalents. Second, because the less such redundancy—the
more a literary work’s plurilingualism becomes effectively parallel, rather
than serial—the more compacted a text’s potential circulation as a book (as
Stavans’s narrator’s “publisher in his right mind” always already knows).49
This distinction has a certain limited use. Let me stress its limits. I am
not primarily concerned, in In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures,
Monolingual States, with plurilingualism in the practice of everyday life,
or in the civic life of officially plurilingual nation-states. Neither am I
concerned with plurilingualism in literature predating the formation of
nation-states, national languages, and markets for book products written
in, or translated into, national languages. Nor, finally, is multinational
plurilingualism, as I discuss it here, to be conflated with the vernacular
origin or the vernacularization of national languages. My concern in this
book, rather, is primarily with literature as and in print, and in the book
publication, in national and international book markets, of writing in mul-
tiple national languages.
This book also proposes a distinction between the idea of a literary “sys-
tem” and that of a literary scene. The paradox of strong plurilingualism—
of a literary work so public it vanishes—says something, I think, about the
optics within which we construct research fields. Functionally speaking,
literature in a world-system, as figured in the work of Franco Moretti, or a
“world structure,” in the work of Pascale Casanova, equates literature with
publication.50 The virtue of such models, I want to be clear, is considerable:
not least in their honorable commitment to what Moretti, following Mar-
garet Cohen, calls the “great unread” of extant, that is, surviving literature.
Among other options, this permits us escape from the revolving binary
of incorporation and resistance, of “inside” and “outside,” within which a
position can be maintained only through exhaustingly unrelenting surveil-
lance. But the vice of such models, I will suggest here, lies in their attach-
ment to the optic of the field: a failure to distinguish, or a lack of interest
 Introduction 19

in distinguishing, writing literature from getting it published. Everyone is

inside in what Casanova, naturalizing market competition, calls—though
perhaps with irony—“the long and merciless war of literature.”51
While such models are useful, in other words, in the contexts to which
those who offer them tend to confine them—that is to say, in the literary
past—they do not help us to imagine potential literature, whose publi-
cation is undecided. This matters to those of us who specialize, as I do, in
contemporary literature and literary culture. Every new trend we signal
with the buzzword “emergent,” we might say, is conditioned by the not yet
or the never-to-be published—and indeed, by the unpublishable, that
invisible shadow on the scene of literature. A scene is only what happens, at
any given moment, to be seen.
Christopher Prendergast saw this early on when, reviewing Casanova’s
work following its original publication in French, he complained that in
the new world republic of literature she imagines, literature seldom gets
credit for being anything but a printed book—that is to say, a historically
extant material object.52 The problem for the literary present, as Prender-
gast signaled clearly in his criticism, is that publication archives a winners’
history of what is today sharply accelerating exclusivity. I will set aside,
for the moment, the scholarly industry of research and recovery that this
generates and justifies, since I am not myself a historian by training. I will
venture the obvious point, however, that our imagination of the future is
often limited by our knowledge of the past, and that by structuring liter-
ary history, models of world literature for the present exclude unfielded,
unrecorded emergence: an exteriority that Immanuel Wallerstein, from
whom the world-system model is adopted, readily grants to annihilated
“antisystemic movements,” and by which he means principally antistatist
movements suppressed by their statist analogues.53 As Wai Chee Dimock
puts it in a recent attempt to address this problem without abandoning the
project entirely: “[T]he literary field is still incomplete, its kinship net-
work only partly actualized, with many new members still to be added.”54
To think literature as circulation is to think it as scene: as publication,
that necessary step onto (or into) a scene. But to think literature as scene,
to “see” it in the optic of circulation, is also to imagine, to form an image of,
literature that isn’t yet there. There is a space here, I am saying, for nonre-
lation. Not the private nonrelation of avant-garde autonomy, moving from
20 Introduction

idiom to nonsense to silence, seeking escape from appropriation. Rather,

a public nonrelation: something like kitsch, as Stavans’s narrator sug-
gests.55 By the same token, the problem here is not to account for, or to
apostrophize, diamantine nodes of the local; the problem, rather, is how to
think strong plurilingualism within our models of the world, the globe, the
planet. Strong plurilingualism, strong as it is, is not “babble,” but pluri-
lingualism in translation, plurilingualism in a public sphere.

In Babel’s Shadow
The narrator of Yoko Tawada’s story-essay “Das Fremde aus der Dose” is
a Japanese migrant to Hamburg who, although able to read and to speak
German, enjoys the company of people who cannot yet read or speak
that language—young children, tourists, migrant workers—and especially
enjoys the company of those who “choose,” as she puts it, not to learn to
read and write.56 Her illiterate friend Sascha, met by chance at a bus stop,
seems to the narrator to accept “jede Art Unlesbarkeit” (“every form of
unreadability”): this is why, presumably, she never asks the narrator the
“othering” questions that curious Germans ask, questions that displace
and irritate the narrator in their request for native information, in forms
both distancing and assimilating: “Stimmt es, daß die Japaner . . . ?” and
“Ist es in Japan auch so, daß . . . ?”
Tawada, who writes in, publishes in, and is translated from both German
and Japanese, is, like others in her position in Germany and elsewhere in
the Euro-Atlantic global literary metropolis,57 acutely aware of the token-
ism lurking in her reception as a “migrant writer,” of the desire to assimilate
the foreign that coexists with genuine native curiosity, of the privilege that
makes her an acceptable Other, and of the economics of book publishing,
which preserves only a tiny fraction of textual culture in the form of lit-
erature, but whose transnational and translational dynamics also require
“canned” foreign literature, literature “aus der Dose.” The narrator of “Das
Fremde aus der Dose” valorizes neither her own cultural hybridization—
for this serves mainly to position her as a representative of Japan on a
German public stage—nor the cultural purity of illiteracy as “alternative,”
to be embraced in symbolic rebellion by those already possessing its priv-
ilege. She prizes her friendship with someone who chooses not to read her,
who is uninterested in reading her, who is comfortable with a face that
 Introduction 21

is not also a text—or a book. Her own position as a nonnative speaker

of German makes her profoundly, physically wary of fluency in any lan-
guage, of the exclusionary exuberance of monolingualism, its inherent
self-celebration; her emphasis, we might say, is on fluency as a kind of eth-
ical weakness, rather than on nonfluency as ethical strength.
Tawada’s narrator’s rejection of fluency, which refuses to positivize non-
fluency, is something of an analogue for my working method in this book.
One of my premises here is that the literary avant-garde marks the sensi-
ble limit of literary studies as such (that is, insofar as it does not become
something else), and so, in a way, its defining historical problem. This is
not, however, to say that I accept the law of enclosure that makes of the
avant-garde’s historicity its permanent obsolescence.58 For the problem
with that history is that the agonistic drive of the avant-garde, its hostility
toward (which coexists with a desire for) distinction, itself ensures that
part of that history cannot be retrieved, that it is gone forever—not ahis-
torical in the sense that it was not lived, in particular lives lived at particular
times, but ahistorical in the sense that history as what is preserved, what
remains visible in the recorded and the researched past, excludes it. The
agon of the avant-garde dramatizes the circumscription of literary research,
faced with the unrecorded passing of so much (indeed, most) life, in a
world most of which has perhaps never yet been—and may not want to
become—literarily modern. So that while the avant-garde is, as Casanova
puts it, “la seule histoire réele de la littérature,”59 providing the resistance
illuminating literary authority and tradition in its historicity, it is by its
very nature a history of secession, of disappearance and self-erasure from
that history, as schematized by literary authority—and thus a discontinu-
ous history, a history riven with gaps. It is not the autonomy of art of which
we scholars speak when we speak of the avant-garde, but the discursive
assertion of that autonomy, in a critical argument that cannot be won (or
lost), since it stands on the unverifiable. The actual autonomy of art is its
radical privacy, its nonpublication, which makes it invisible, unknowable—
the conditions of possibility of which Paul Mann has analyzed in his bril-
liant, and brilliantly tortured, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde.60 While
this autonomy is not, I think, impossible or unreal in the lived present, it
seems crucial to recognize the fundamental understanding driving Mann’s
book, as a material embodiment of his critical thought. This is that the
22 Introduction

actual autonomy of art is unavailable to scholarship, and that in undertak-

ing scholarship one has already, in a sense, made one’s choice.
It is the choice that avant-garde discourse marks as “mainstream,” or
in the vocabulary of rock-and-roll purism, “selling out”—crude terms, per-
haps, but not for that reason meaningless ones, for the compromises of
professional specialization in an institution dedicated to research and con-
servation. The avant-garde, this book presumes, is not historical in the
sense that it is dead, over, impossible; it is historical, rather, in the sense
that its history is all that the scholar can see (and precisely, of course,
what the avant-garde itself often cannot see). What avant-gardists call “the
underground,” that subsurface range from which one at once wants, and
does not want, to be dug out—and through which one may speak of a
“ground” by positioning oneself beneath it—captures the paradoxical co-
dependence of literary language and translation. Translation is an antinomy
of literature, which cannot “live” at all without translation—yet cannot
live entirely in it, either. What we call literature lives, if it lives at all, only in
Babel’s shadow.

Translucinación
Both foreign language learners and translating machines founder on
idiom, that crucial integrant of native-level fluency. In a way, this book
had its start in that insight. In U.S. literary culture, at least, the space of
the avant-garde has been claimed for a long time, now, by a gradually
homogenizing advocacy network for the postmodernist countertradition
of what was once called the New American Poetry (and its historically
diverse descendants). By the time I began the composition of these essays,
the preoccupation with manipulations of English syntax and register in
the autocriticism of such U.S. poetic avant-gardes, with which I had had a
brief but fruitful set of associations, had come to seem to me more and
more idiolectic: radically modernist in its reversal of transcendence from
the signified onto the signifier, and so paradoxically if not unexpectedly
logocentrist, deeply enmeshed in a writing practice whose most sophisti-
cated terms all but excluded nonnative speakers of English, reliant as it was
for its effects on violations of culturally specific language registers (which
have to be recognized in the first place, in order for their violation to be rec-
ognized). In this First Worldist insurgent universe, poets and poet-critics
 Introduction 23

mobilized the vanguardism of “material language” against a domestic

opponent (Anglophone lyric formalism) in an intrasystemic and autotelic
conflict that, for all its symbolic cosmopolitanism, struck me finally as
insistently and somewhat insidiously ethnocentrist, an intellectual coun-
terculture every bit as dedicated to its own visibility as its enemies.
This is to say that if both demotic and technical language are to be
understood, as such critical projects wish it to be, as literary foreign ele-
ments in a native (national) language culture of everyday communication,
it nevertheless follows that literary English, even (or perhaps especially)
avant-garde experimental literary or self-consciously antiliterary English,
belongs to English, is less a stranger to English, than French or Turkish
or Japanese (or most any subnational language), for example, is or ever
can be. David Damrosch has analyzed the paradox by which Finnegans
Wake, by any right a stupendous example of cultural and linguistic cos-
mopolitanism, becomes a national or regional curiosity in its resistance
to translation, to amplified circulation—while Dubliners, on the face of it
far less ambitious in its range of reference, “gains” in translation, and so
opens itself to amplification as world literature.61 Building on this insight,
and inflecting it, one of my most general ambitions in this book—again,
an ambition that is carried or implied, rather than fulfilled—is to put the
contemporary legacies of both Joycean “fascicular” Anglophone literary
modernism and its denigrated or valorized rival, the rhizomorphic Anglo-
phone literary modernism of Gertrude Stein, to the test of world literature
at its Euro-Atlantic limit.62
Let me give as a second example two editorial projects, one in the auto-
curating tradition of the avant-garde and focused on the present and the
future, the other scholarly and looking to the past, using historical archives
to challenge the founding myth of an Anglophone United States. Like Marc
Shell and Werner Sollors’s The Multilingual Anthology of American Litera-
ture, the tenth issue of Chain, an annual edited by U.S. poet-scholars Jena
Osman and Juliana Spahr, mixes examples of plurilingual and monolin-
gual literature written in languages other than English, by visitors to, exiles
from, and onlookers to the United States, with commissioned English
translations of each work.63 In a gesture of which both teams of editors are
fully cognizant, and that they recognize as problematic, the ambitiously
elastic linguistic horizon of each project is simultaneously stretched and
24 Introduction

then snapped back, reconstituted. In both projects—one revising the

monolingual foundations of the federal United States of America, the
other recognizing and problematizing the monolingualism of Anglophone
avant-garde syntactic radicalism—the editors’ discomfort with what they
are doing is clear. “Translucinación,” Osman and Spahr write in their intro-
duction, defining the neologism that gives the issue its title, “is . . . a cross-
cultural encounter loaded with hope and yet always in danger of going
wrong.”64 And Shell observes: “The editors of this multilingual anthol-
ogy, with its pervasive ‘English Plus,’ facing-page, bilingual format, do not
enter the fray in a political vacuum insofar as the very notion of common
language is always fraught with political difficulty. . . . The Multilingual
Anthology of American Literature attempts to recuperate forgotten Ameri-
can languages and literatures and to indicate how much remains to be done.
At the same time, it inevitably recuperates the same movement toward
‘anglicization’ that led to the need for recuperation in the first place.”65
Of course, publication isn’t publication without reading, and in the struc-
turally monolingual literary culture of the United States, one makes the
choice to write in English or else possibly not to write (or if writing, not
to be read) at all. This is simple editorial (and social) convention, which
none of us can ever fully escape. And yet each of these editorial projects
paradoxically requires precisely the monolingualism that it has the poten-
tial, but never the full potency, to overturn, insofar as it must serve it in
a way, in order to challenge it. This is not inconsequential, either. There
are, and have been, alternatives—including policies of nontranslation.66 And
there are alternatives in authorship as well as in editorial policy, examples
of which are suggested (though examples are perhaps ultimately of less
than decisive utility) in the closing essay of this book.

Some antinomies of literature, then. Despite its inversion of avant-garde

autonomy, strong plurilingual literature shares its material fate: publica-
tion only by smaller publishing houses, without the resources to publicize
books or even to keep them in print. If those of us who seek out such
works want to teach them, for example, we will face the problem of how to
teach them only after we have faced the problem of obtaining them, which
is also the problem of “seeing” them, of knowing they are out there at all.
Strong plurilingualism, this book argues, presents the maddening figure of
 Introduction 25

an avant-garde that eludes scholarship, not because it lives in a subcul-

ture that can, with sufficient industry, be disclosed—that is, in a secret
idiom—but because it whirls in orbit out there, in a public space so public
it escapes notice.
Literature is published writing—that’s the first antinomy. In the words
of Alice Kaplan, which serve as both subtext and super-text of the essay
composing chapter 4, the “language memoir,” a memoir of second- (or
third- or fourth-) language acquisition, is the Bildungsroman of a second (or
third, or fourth) self in language. And as Peter Cowley has observed, this
marks the language memoir’s interest in language learning, rather than,
and in important contradistinction from, translation.67 Yet in order to be
published, to move from the process of life writing to the genre “language
memoir,” the memoirist must choose one language among her others.
Unavoidably, literature is plurilingualism in translation—that’s a second
antinomy.
To the extent that such structural contradictions define a zone of “sys-
temic” thought designed precisely to avoid confronting the present as a
historical problem—and that indeed, makes of the very notion of “liter-
ariness” that problem’s deflection—they certainly deserve opposition by a
systemic thought radically open, by contrast, in its heuristic totality. But
the extent to which both such models, in their application to the archives
of textual culture, have always been forced to rely on extant literature
whose both archival and canonical positivity in literary-critical and literary-
historical disciplinary space is guaranteed in advance—and which is always
already, and autocritically, a survivor of whatever opposition its author
and its author’s alienation have posed through and to it—might force us
to pause, perhaps now more than ever, at a time when rival imperial for-
mations are imagined at once as fragments of a “globe,” translative ana-
logues for each other, and as incommensurate alternate worlds. It is less
pathognomic than epistemic, perhaps, that the most exotic interlude of
Brooke-Rose’s Between is set in Turkey, at the last conceivable border of a
cosmopolitical Europe, where every other language used in this work
more or less comfortably dwells. Approaching the Izmir Archaeological
Museum, the bus carrying the narrator of Brooke-Rose’s novel passes, over
and over, a place called Yavaş. Or is it a road sign meaning Slow? Here, as
elsewhere, in scenes of interpellation that fail because the subject is being
26 Introduction

hailed in the wrong language, translation, and its positional reconstitution

of the narrator as a self in language, is meaningfully deferred. The opacity
of Turkish is a running joke here, an othering, symbolically marking the
border of Euro-Atlantic modernity, beyond which its community of im-
perial and subjugated languages breaks down. At the same time, in mark-
ing that border, it recognizes what lies beyond it as distant, differential, and
real, and it is more in these small gestures of deferring translation, perhaps,
than in its larger modal shifts that Between looks (and asks us to look) else-
where. That substitutive, insufficient, and “masocritically” vulnerable ges-
ture is also, and certainly fatally, this book’s own.68