Metaphors of Multilingualism: Changing Attitudes towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy [1 ed.] 1138607509, 9781138607507

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART I: Bodies: speaking in tongues
1. The patched-up face of multilingualism
2. Organic metaphors of language
3. Grotesque body images
4. Body parts: tongues and eyes
5. The embodied plurilingual self
PART II: Family ties: infidelity, bigamy and incest
6. Mother-tongues and linguistic family trees
7. Beyond bilingual bigamy
8. Interlingual predicaments
9. Linguistic promiscuity and incestuous bisexualism
10. Adoptive and stepmother tongues
PART III: Spaces: the seas of plurilingualism
11. Territorializing national languages
12. The centrifugal forces of variation and stratification
13. Continents and archipelagos
14. The ocean of heteroglossia
15. Networks and constellations
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Metaphors of Multilingualism

Metaphors of Multilingualism explores changing attitudes towards multi­ lingualism by focusing on shifts both in the choice and in the use of meta­ phors. Rainer Guldin uses linguistics, philosophy, literature, literary theory and related disciplines to trace the radical redefinition of multilingualism that has taken place over the last decades. This overall change constitutes a para­ digmatic shift. However, despite the emergence of the new paradigm, the traditional monolingual point of view is still significantly influencing presentday attitudes towards multilingualism. Consequently, the emergent paradigm has to be studied in close connection with its predecessor. This book is the first extensive attempt to provide a critical overview of the key metaphors that organize current perceptions of multilingualism. Instead of an exhaustive list of possible metaphors of multilingualism, the emphasis is on three closely interrelated and overlapping clusters that play a central role in both paradigms: organic metaphors of the body, kinship and gender metaphors, as well as spatial metaphors. The examples are taken from different languages, among them French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. This is ground-breaking reading for scholars and researchers in the fields of linguistics, literature, philosophy, media studies, anthropology, history and cultural studies. Rainer Guldin is lecturer for German Culture and Language at the Faculties of Communication Sciences and Economics of the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland). His publications include Vilém Flusser (1920–1991). Ein Leben in der Bodenlosigkeit. Biographie (2017) and Trans­ lation as Metaphor (2016).

Metaphors of Multilingualism Changing Attitudes towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy

Rainer Guldin

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Rainer Guldin The right of Rainer Guldin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Guldin, Rainer, author.

Title: Metaphors of multilingualism : changing attitudes towards language

diversity in literature, linguistics and philosophy / Rainer Guldin.

Description: 1. | New York : Taylor and Francis, 2020. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054409 | ISBN 9781138607507 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781003028277 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Multilingualism--Social aspects. | Bilingualism--Social

aspects. | Second language acquisition--Social aspects. |

Sociolinguistics.

Classification: LCC P115.45 .G85 2020 | DDC 306.44/6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054409

ISBN: 978-1-138-60750-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-02827-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Preface Introduction

vii

1

PART I

Bodies: speaking in tongues

11

1 The patched-up face of multilingualism

13

2 Organic metaphors of language

27

3 Grotesque body images

42

4 Body parts: tongues and eyes

58

5 The embodied plurilingual self

74

PART II

Family ties: infidelity, bigamy and incest 6 Mother-tongues and linguistic family trees

89

91

7 Beyond bilingual bigamy

109

8 Interlingual predicaments

121

9 Linguistic promiscuity and incestuous bisexualism

137

10 Adoptive and stepmother tongues

151

vi

Contents

PART III

Spaces: the seas of plurilingualism

165

11 Territorializing national languages

167

12 The centrifugal forces of variation and stratification

181

13 Continents and archipelagos

197

14 The ocean of heteroglossia

213

15 Networks and constellations

229

Conclusion

247

References Index

255

273

Preface

This book is the result of an interweaving of four intimately related strands of my research on metaphor over the last 20 years. It started out with social and political metaphors of the human body (Guldin 2000; 2002; 2011b), followed by metaphors of multilingual writing and identity (Guldin 2007a; 2007b; 2008; 2011a; 2015), and political metaphors of landscape (Guldin 2012; 2014), and ended with a research study on metaphors of translation (Guldin 2010; 2016; 2019; 2020). Some sections are a re-elaboration and amplification of previously published material. Chapter three (section 5) is loosely based on “Devouring the Other: Cannibalism, Translation and the Construction of Cultural Identity”. In Paschalis Nikolaou and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi (eds.) (2008) Translating Selves. Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures. London and New York: Continuum: 109–122. Chapters seven (section 3), chapter eight (section 2 and 3), and chapter nine (section 3 and 4) are based on selected parts of “I believe that my two tongues love each other cela ne m’étonnerait pas’: Self-Translation and the Construction of Sexual Identity. In TTR, 20(1), 2007: 193–214. Finally, chapter fourteen (section 2) is based on “Translating Space: On Rivers, Seas, Archipelagos and Straits“. In Flusser Studies 14, November 2012. I thank the editors for the possibility to republish parts of these essays in an amended form. I want to thank the students of the University of St. Gallen, where in 2013 and 2015 I held a course on multilingual literature, and the students of the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland) where since 2013 I have been teaching a course on translingual writing. I also want to thank the guest speakers to this course who like my students in St. Gallen and Lugano helped in their own special way to fashion this book: Beat Christen, Zsuzsanna Gahse, Carmine Gino Chiellino, Ilma Rakusa, Thomas Meyer, Franco Biondi, Catalin Dorian Florescu, Yoko Tawada, Francesco Micieli and Matthias Nawrat. Finally, I want to thank Kristina Wischenkamper for her meticulous copy-editing. Vienna and Lugano, November 2019

Introduction

The main aim of this book is to explore changing attitudes towards multi­ lingualism over the last decades by focusing on shifts in the choice and use of metaphors. Symptoms for this still ongoing process, as far as literature is concerned (Forster 1968; Klosty Beaujour 1989; Knauth 1999; Taylor-Batty 2013), reach back to the early twentieth century. The overall change that has been affecting the arts, literature, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, cultural and translation studies, postcolonial studies and the natural sciences constitutes a paradigmatic shift. The “tide is turning”, mul­ tilingualism has become ubiquitous and gained new forms of visibility (Yildiz 2012:3). Its worldwide development has reached a critical point both in terms of quantity and quality. “Virtually every facet of human life depends on multilingual social arrangements and multilingual individuals, directly and indirectly” (Aronin 2017:176). As a consequence of this “new linguistic dis­ pensation”, monolingualism has become “characteristic of only a minority of the world’s population” and language patterns “have changed so significantly that sets of languages, rather than single languages, now perform the essential functions of communication, cognition and identity for individuals and the global community” (Aronin and Singleton 2008:2–4). Within this context, the very notion of language has been subjected to a radical reappraisal. The social and theoretical status of self-contained national languages and exclusive mother-tongues has been questioned and languages that were formerly stigmatised or considered inferior, like creoles and dialects, are now considered idioms in their own right (Aronin 2017). Some of the reasons for this unprecedented change in the perception and significance of multilingualism are the pervasive effects of globalization, global mobility, wide-reaching migratory movements, international travel and tourism, the ensuing number of plurilingual individuals worldwide, the grow­ ing numbers of multilingual writers and artists and the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of everyday life. Although the focus of the book is on the literature of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, literary theory, lin­ guistics, theory of language and philosophy also play a relevant role. Despite the emergence of the new paradigm, the traditional monolingual point of view is still significantly influencing present-day attitudes towards

2

Introduction

multilingualism. Yasemin Yildiz (2012) described this new ambivalent situation as a postmonolingual condition: more often than not multilingualism is still perceived within the theoretical framework of monolingualism. Multilingual speakers, for instance, are seen as multiple monolingual speakers reunited in one and the same person. High-Modern ideologies of language – “metadiscursive regimes” (Bauman and Briggs 2003) – that deny mixing and hybridity as forms of impurity persist within the new globalized context of late global modernity that challenges the foundations of the nation-state and fundamentally questions the notions of national language and mother-tongue (Blommaert, Leppänen and Spotti 2012). Multilingualism has a dangerously destabilizing side to it and is still far from being considered a new norm in its own right. Add to this the new forms of populism and renationalization that have emerged in the last few years on a global scale, and are openly questioning multicultural visions in an attempt to turn back the clock. In this context, language mixing is directly associated with migratory movements and experienced as a threat to the unity and homo­ geneity of national cultures and the identity of native speakers. The monolinguistic bias affects contemporary definitions of multilingualism in many ways. Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal identified three semiotic processes that are central to linguistic ideologies (2000:37–8): iconization, erasure and fractal recursivity. All three are particularly relevant for the processes of metaphorization discussed in this book. Iconization suggests a direct causal, and in some cases a natural relationship between certain linguistic features and specific social groups and their individual members, even if these connections are generally only con­ tingent and conventional. This is the case with the notions of national language, mother-tongue and native speaker (chapters two, six and eleven). The process of erasure renders some persons or sociolinguistic phenomena invisible. Mono­ lingualism and its metaphors obscure and hide phenomena related to multi­ lingualism. Finally, fractal recursivity involves the projection of an opposition onto different levels of meaning. Dichotomic relations between groups and lin­ guistic varieties, for instance, recur at other levels generating a myriad of other associated dichotomies. This view focusing on dualities could be linked to the three main axes in the policing of linguistic normality in times of national languages proposed by Blommaert, Leppänen and Spotti: order versus disorder, purity versus impur­ ity and normality versus abnormality (2012:6–7). The three pairs unequivocally separate mono- (order, purity, and normality) from multilingualism (disorder, impurity, abnormality) (see chapter one). However, as Makoni and Pennycook rightly point out “every pure form can be regarded as a hybrid by a different measure” (2007:25). The three dichotomies were also active in the assessment of colonial contexts where the high number of languages was seen as a form of chaos in need of order. Here, the same purifying cure was applied that had previously been forced upon the more developed European countries. “Assuming … that European languages were identifiable, separable and countable entities, European colonial administrators sought” to map this belief onto the “muddled mass of speech styles … they saw around them” (ibid:12–3).

Introduction

3

Decoupling the Siamese twins In recent debates, the notion of multilingualism has been used in a primarily emancipative way, as a one-sided promise of unfettered, liberating and in some cases even redemptive cultural and political multiplicity and equality. Multi­ lingualism can be considered a positive thing in general and in principle, espe­ cially in view of its metalinguistic potential and the cognitive perspectivism it enables (Klosty Beaujour 1989). However, not all forms of multilingualism are per se productive or empowering and not every multilingual literary text is necessarily better or more creative than its monolingual counterpart. Models that simply replace monolingualism with multilingualism do not go far enough, “as both concepts emerge from the same intellectual context” (Makoni and Pennycook 2012:439). One should not romanticize plurality (Makoni and Pennycook 2007:16), emphasizing exclusively the positive sides of multilingualism, and turn a blind eye to its shortcomings, but focus on the ambivalences of the notion. In fact, the term itself is “less innocent than it appears” (Holquist 2014:7). ‘Multi­ lingualism’, and the earlier ‘bilingualism’, for that matter, are inseparable from the notion of ‘monolingualism’. In this sense, present day multilingualism cannot be treated on its own but must be considered in conjunction with mono­ lingualism and the related notions of mother-tongue, national language and native speaker. These concepts are part of a history that centres in Europe and goes back to the Renaissance, but has reached the rest of the world through consecutive waves of colonization. Like Siamese twins, monolingualism and multilingualism, and the opposition between linguistic singularity (the one) and plurality (the many), have the same origin and share a common terminological history. How can we break free from this seemingly inevitable theoretical con­ nection in order to “unleash the potential heteroglossia of the multilingual, by decoupling it from its dark monistic twin?” (ibid:10) How can we describe mul­ tilingualism as a phenomenon that has to be understood on its own terms – as a sort of new linguistic norm – without referring to its theoretical other? Finally, how can we bypass simplistic idealizing views that equate multilingualism with socio-political and cultural plurality and develop an understanding that stresses both its accomplishments and its drawbacks? Recently, there have been attempts to reach a critical understanding of the complex and ambiguous relationship of multilingualism to monolingualism by a redefinition of monolingualism itself. To break away from the misleading duality of mono- and multilingualism and to avoid uncritical idealizations of multilingualism Makoni and Pennycook provocatively proposed “a return to monolingualism, but a very different monolingualism … that has at its heart an understanding of diversity that goes beyond the pluralism of multilingualism” (2012:444). This idea has been taken up and expanded by David Gramling (2016) who focuses on the problematic side of some contemporary technocra­ tically inspired views of multilingualism that make use of linguistic plurality to enforce a specific socio-political agenda. The language policies of the EU, for

4

Introduction

instance, which are based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) operate as a sort of “modernist linguistic border con­ trol” (Blommaert, Leppänen and Spotti 2012:2). In this new tamed form that Yaseen Noorani (2013) describes as ‘soft multilingualism’ without any hard edges, the multilingual speaker is conceived of as an endlessly flexible and adaptable person whose unfettered mobility ensures the functioning of the new global economy. At the same time, Gramling provocatively points to the undeniable cultural achievements of monolingualism itself. In a similar vein, Barbara Cassin referring to Antoine de Rivarol’s De l’Universalité de la Langue Française (1784), which defined French as the uni­ versal language, calls for a ‘rivarolism of the multiple’ (2016:216), as the capa­ city to creatively exploit and appreciate the uniqueness of national languages without necessarily being entrapped by the nationalist agenda that goes with it. She distinguishes between the Untranslatable with a capital U, which is strictly singular, and untranslatables with a small u and in the plural. The first form of untranslatability is linked to the sacred ontology of national languages, some­ thing to be venerated and protected. In this view, the Untranslatable becomes the very criterion for truth. The second form of untranslatability is the starting point for the Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin 2014) which uses a comparative method that makes linguistic differences pro­ ductive and opens languages to each other. This strategy is also central to most of the authors I will be dealing with in this book. However, in this book, I want to follow another path. Taking the lead from the uncircumventable and irreducible internal and external plurality of lan­ guages (Humboldt 1998; 2002 and Bakhtin 1993; 2006), I would like to suggest interpretative strategies that might help in the process of theoretical decoupling suggested by Holquist. Linguistic monism purporting the existence of isolated individual languages not only blinds us to the fractured nature of single languages, it also resurfaces in definitions of multilingualism as a series of parallel self-contained mono­ lingualisms, a notion that comes into being around 1800, at the same time that language philosophy discovers the beauty and originality of national lan­ guages. Ironically enough, it is the very notion of national languages and their uniqueness that lays the basis for the language awareness and appreciation that pervades the work of many translingual writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (Trabant 2006). By opposing the one to the many, the interpretative focus is primarily on the quantitative aspect and multilingualism is interpreted as an accumulation of different self-contained languages existing next to each other without any significant form of mutual exchange. However, if linguistic plurality, both internal and external, is taken as the norm and not the exception in need of explanation, the theoretical interest can be shifted towards forms of interaction. Instead of simple additive or subtractive plur­ alisation we would have complexification, different contradictory and com­ plementary ways in which languages or linguistic traits meet, collide, interact, mix and merge. The point of view of plurality is not simply discarded but

Introduction

5

remains a relevant criterion as far as bilingualism is not to be equated with other forms of multilingualism like trilingualism or quadrilingualism. In lin­ guistics, the notion of multilingualism has previously been subsumed under that of bilingualism because the significant theoretical distinction was the opposition of the one to the many. In this book, the notion of bilingualism is used as a particular instance of multilingualism, defined as “the acquisition and use of two or more languages” (Aronin and Singleton 2008:2). To distin­ guish a purely quantitative definition of multilingualism from an under­ standing that emphasizes inner layered complexity and reciprocal forms of interaction, Canagarajah and Liyanage (2012) suggest the use of the alter­ native notion of ‘plurilingualism’. This term also points to forms of multi­ lingualism that are not coupled with monolingualism but existed before and outside its sphere of influence. Both premodern and precolonial forms of mul­ tilingualism operate according to a different less dichotomic logic (Makoni and Pennycook 2007:31). The second aspect concerns the different forms metaphors of multilingualism can assume. On the one end of the scale are metaphors that can be interpreted as a direct response to the prevailing monolingual paradigm. While attempting to set themselves off from linguistic monism these insurgent metaphors still remain within its theoretical context, indirectly confirming its existence and pervasive theoretical influence in the very act of rebellion. On the other end of the scale are metaphors that try to describe multilingualism on its own terms. On this con­ tinuum, there are no clear-cut boundaries. Furthermore, the single metaphors may have more than one role, and even assume contradictory meanings. Decoupling the Siamese twins, then, does not only mean to shift the theoretical focus from simple cumulative pluralization to inner complexity but also to open up the discursive terrain to a new set of metaphors that posit linguistic multi­ plicity as an a priori and mutual interference as primordial. Finally, descriptions of multilingualism should avoid easy idealizations that unilaterally associate plurality with a democratic stance and monism with a conservative political agenda (Moore 2015). Multilingualism does not auto­ matically lead to a better, more tolerant society, or automatically open the floodgates of creativity. In the aristocratic world of the Ancien Régime speaking different languages was a widespread if not common phenomenon. Contrary to this, the French Revolution chose the establishment of a single national language as a way of defeating regional and local interests and allowing everyone, independently of their social background, to access a free and democratic society of equals (chapter eleven). In a terminological sense, James Clifford (1999) criticized the simple binarism opposing more fluid forms of cultural allegiance to a strong attachment to one single culture and its unilateral critique as a form of essentialism. Instead of this simple dichot­ omy, he suggests mixed forms that deploy both tradition and modernity, authenticity and hybridity. Emi Otsuji and Alastair Pennycook (2010) devel­ oped an analogous concept with regard to multilingual speakers. The notion of ‘metrolingualism’ no longer opposes monolinguals to multilinguals but

6

Introduction

allows for a whole range of linguistic mixes including both fluidity and fixity, for instance, code-switching accompanied by a strong emotional allegiance to a single language (chapter five). Larissa Aronin describes the new linguistic dispensation of current multi­ lingualism as the coexistence of three different arrangements. Besides multi­ lingualism, the defining, inherent part and the vehicle that plays the most prominent role, there are “manifold bilingual spaces and monolingual niches, which are mostly local” (2017:176). To visualize this new contradictory com­ plexity she uses the image of three interlocking cogwheels of different sizes moving in different directions and at different speeds, a mechanic metaphor that questions the predominantly organic metaphors of the monolingual paradigm.

Outline of the book According to Thomas Kuhn (1979), metaphors lie at the very heart of theory change and the emergence of a new paradigm is generally signalled by the appearance of new metaphor clusters. In line with this, the radical redefinition of the theoretical and socio-political relevance of multilingualism that this book wants to retrace, finds its expression in a new set of interrelated meta­ phors that fundamentally question the monolingual paradigm. Metaphors operate as models (Black 1962; 1979) and conceptualizations (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) that highlight certain features and hide others determining our perception of reality in a fundamental way. Metaphors do not operate on their own but are generally arranged in complex interconnected clusters composed of metaphors originating in different source domains (Guldin 2016). This explains their tenacity and effectiveness in structuring specific views over longer periods. Consequently, an analysis of changing atti­ tudes to multilingualism should not aim for simple compilations of metaphors, but try to sketch an overall picture looking for implicit links between the mono- and the multilingual paradigms, on the one hand, and between the dif­ ferent metaphors that constitute them on the other. Furthermore, different levels of metaphoricity should be explored in view of their interconnection and their shared metaphorization. I will focus mainly on three levels in the con­ ceptualization of mono- and multilingualism: collective and individual iden­ tities, geopolitical territories and textual spaces. These different levels often connect and interact according to recursive processes (Irvine and Gal 2000) that strengthen the argumentative thrust. Instead of an exhaustive list of possible metaphors of multilingualism, the emphasis is on three closely interrelated and overlapping clusters that play a central role in both paradigms: organic metaphors of the body, kinship and gender metaphors, as well as spatial metaphors. I have opted for a narrative sequence that connects the three source domains without, however, wanting to suggest any underlying linearity. The second part addressing kinship and gender metaphors functions as an argumentative relay linking the body to the

Introduction

7

space domain. Chapter eight which is positioned half-way into the book is an attempt to focus on ways in which the three source domains are used con­ comitantly within the work of single authors. Each of the three parts explores different forms of metaphors: metaphors of monolingualism, insurgent metaphors of multilingualism that challenge the monolingual paradigm, metaphors that rewrite the basic assumption of mono­ lingual metaphors, and, finally, metaphors that could be used to describe plur­ ilingualism as the new norm. This specific choice, which retraces the historical development from monolingualism to multilingualism and beyond also deter­ mines the narrative of the single parts. Chapters two, six and eleven are a reconstruction of the metaphorical universe of the monolingual paradigm as it developed in Europe from the fifteenth century onward. The following chapters discuss insurgent metaphors and the final chapters of each part attempt to think beyond the dualism of monolingualism and insurgent multilingualism. In chap­ ter five, the idea of a closed linguistic body is redesigned in plurilingual terms, and in chapters ten and fifteen, the notion of mother-tongue and the mono­ lingual textual space are radically opened up and expanded from within. Natu­ rally enough, there is no clear dividing line between insurgent metaphors and metaphors that attempt to redraw the basic assumptions of metaphors of monolingualism. In some cases, insurgent metaphors allow a possibility to think beyond the restrictions of monolingualism. In the conclusion, I will focus on metaphors that eschew the dualism of mono- and multilingualism gesturing towards new metaphorical possibilities that take multilingualism as a new norm. A radically conceived plurilingualism decoupled from its monistic twin not only shows that even supposedly monolingual texts are finally multilingual (Weiss­ mann 2017), it can also become a new metaphoric source domain for other complex contradictory social and cultural phenomena. This book does not attempt to provide a history of the multilingual litera­ ture of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The choice of multi­ lingual writers, for whom I have opted, depends on their explicit use of metaphors that can be directly linked to the three main metaphorical source domains. The work of some of these authors, furthermore, shows how the different metaphors of multilingualism coexist and interact, each of them addressing a different but related metaphorical level. Yoko Tawada, for instance, uses the metaphor of the tongue (chapter four), questions gender assignments (chapters four and ten) and makes use of the metaphor of the sea (chapter fourteen) and the network (chapter fifteen). In this regard, this book does not try to assemble a historically and geographically exhaustive array of multilingual writers. However, to avoid the danger of a limiting Eurocentric perspective I have incorporated examples from a variety of cultural and geo­ political areas, ranging from Central and South America (chapters three, seven and eight), the Caribbean (chapters thirteen and fourteen), and North Africa (chapter seven), to the Indian Ocean (chapter fourteen), China (chap­ ter three) and Japan (chapter fifteen).

8

Introduction

The second structuring element of the three parts is their parallel narrative. Part one moves from the self-contained linguistic organism of the monolingual paradigm to the independence of single body parts. Part two moves from the close-knit familial structures and gender assignments of national languages and mother-tongues to various forms of transgression. Finally, part three moves from the unitary territories of national languages to their systematic breaking up. The insurgent metaphors of the grotesque body and the indepen­ dent body parts, the different forms of undermining and subverting family ties – infidelity, bigamy, incest – and the spatial metaphors disavowing stability and insularity – centrifugality, permeability of borders, archipelagic fragmen­ tation and the fluidity of the sea – are a critique of the metaphors of the com­ plete body, the stability of family relations and the circumscribed territories of nations and national languages. Where the linguistic ideology of mono­ lingualism saw division and chaos a multilingual perspective detects inner stratification and complexity.

Writing about multilingualism In their introduction to a recent collection of essays on multilingual literature, Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz have called for a decentring view of multilingualism inspired by a “broader transnational turn” that not only questions monolingual models of literary analysis but also the “prevailing lit­ erary-critical paradigms of language diversity that have become … hegemonic” (2018:2–3). One aspect of this situation is the dominant position of AngloAmerican scholarship and the prevalent use of the English language in the field. This is particularly problematic if the issue at stake is multilingualism. How can one write about multilingualism remaining within the confines of a single language? As Brian Lennon points out, despite a flourishing of multilingual texts and the theoretical changes within literary studies the expectations of the readers and the commercial practices of editors all over the world are still prevalently monolingual. The “monolingual editorial conventions of the global literary [and academic] system” (2010:84) require the containment of plurilingualism. Lennon’s wish for a “radically, anarchically plurilingual literature, and the lit­ erary criticism that might follow” (ibid:165) is still a utopian proposition that sadly lags behind every day multilingual code-switching. As Lennon’s own book and his interpretations prove, literary (and scholarly) texts can use dif­ ferent contradictory strategies and move between different positions on a scale between stronger and weaker forms of multilingualism (chapter fifteen). Lennon mostly takes the lead from the authors he discusses. He introduces, for instance, longer passages followed by an English translation or lengthy quota­ tions from plurilingual texts without highlighting or translating any of the nonEnglish words and without even providing any explanation in his commentary. In this book, I have opted for a similar mixed solution. Most Non-English quo­ tations have been translated or paraphrased, but some have been intentionally

Introduction

9

left in their original form without any explanation. I have introduced foreign language elements of different length and shape, sometimes highlighted in italics and sometimes not. To complement the plurality of languages I have also added single elements from different scripts as Yoko Tawada in her German texts or Pierre Garnier and Niikuni Seiichi in their bilingual French–Japanese poems (chapter fifteen). This book owes its existence to the illuminating work of scholars from a variety of fields that write in different languages and because of this all too often sadly do not know each other’s work because of language barriers: Mikhail Bakhtin, Véronique Bragard, Brigitta Busch, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, Suresh Canagarajah, Pascale Casanova, Barbara Cassin, Ottmar Ette, Leo­ nard Forster, Penelope Gardner-Chloros, Indika Liyanage, Sinfree Makoni, Emi Otsuji, Jürgen Trabant, Alastair Pennycook, Naoki Sakai, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Yasemin Yildiz and Juliette Taylor-Batty, to mention only the most important ones. The scholars that are in tune with my own line of research which focuses on metaphorics are Steven G. Kellman who besides his ground-breaking work on translingual writing (1996 and 2000) has published two illuminating essays (2013b and 2018) and the German Romanist Alfons K. Knauth (1991, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016) who for nearly 30 years has been engaging in a systematic metaphoric reading of multilingual literature. I also want to mention the ground-breaking work by Larissa Aronin and David Singleton who have proposed the constitution of a philosophy of multi­ lingualism as a new field of enquiry based on the conceptual study of meta­ phors. As part of this endeavour, Larissa Aronin and Vasilis Politis (2015) have introduced the metaphor of the edge to explore the way multiple languages are deployed in postmodernity (chapter eight). The list of references includes multi- and plurilingual authors and scholars who have written in Arabic, Anatolian and Arabic dialects, Bulgarian, Car­ ibbean Creoles, Chicano English, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and the polyglot language of the Danube Swabians of the Banat, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mauritian Creole, Polish, Portuguese, Provençal, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanglish, Tamil, Turkish, and Yiddish.

Part I

Bodies: speaking in tongues

1

The patched-up face of multilingualism

This chapter focuses on body metaphors of multilingualism in connection with practices of code-switching and code-mixing and retraces the theoretical changes these concepts have gone through over the last decades within the field of linguistics. The chapter also provides a short introductory survey of the conflicting positions with regard to multilingualism that will be discussed in more detail in the course of the book and points to the necessity of finding new metaphors that move beyond the traditional notion of language and the simple opposition of monolingualism and multilingualism. My starting point is a relatively well-known multilingual passage from Umberto Eco’s international bestseller and debut novel The Name of the Rose published in 1980, which was turned into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud and released in cinemas in 1986. I will use this many-layered and intrinsically ambivalent description of language mixing from a literary text and its use in the context of a film as a backdrop to highlight the contradictory responses codeswitching and code-mixing have been eliciting in the past and still are today.

1 A cacophony of vernaculars In late November 1327, shortly after his arrival in a Benedictine monastery in the Ligurian Apennines, Adson von Melk, who tells the story in retrospect and travels as a novice in the care of the Franciscan William of Baskerville, pays a visit to the local abbey. In the film, the scene, underscored by high-pitched sounds, begins with a close-up of gorgons, harpies, lustily intertwined bodies and devilishly distorted, grotesque faces on the walls and ceilings of a murky vestibule. Out of the darkness emerges the hunchbacked monk Salvatore who limps towards the dismayed novice, grabs him by the cowl and pulls him into the middle of the room. The monk gesticulates wildly and holds a rambling multilingual monologue, noisily clapping his hands and sticking out his huge tongue that resembles that of a wild animal. William of Baskerville, attracted by the noise, joins the two. During his monologue, Salvatore has uttered sev­ eral times the word penitenziagite – from the Latin poenitentiam agite, repent – that Baskerville identifies as the battle cry of the followers of Fra Dolcino who around 1300 had founded the Lay Movement of the Apostolic Brothers in

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Northern Italy calling for the annihilation of the Roman Church. Dolcino was declared a heretic by Pope Clement V, taken prisoner, executed and burned after public torture. Salvatore, who is aware of the danger, throws himself at Baskerville’s feet and kisses the hem of his robe. ‘What languages does this person speak?’ asks von Melk of Baskerville as they leave the church. The answer suggests that one cannot speak truly more than one language at a time: ‘All languages and no language at all.’ The film weaves a dense associative web around the short multilingual soliloquy: the dark threatening atmosphere of the cramped space, the hybrid monsters in the vestibule, Salvatore’s lower class origin, his heretic stance, oversized wolf-like tongue and unkempt appearance. He speaks some Latin as well as four other lan­ guages – Italian, French, English and German – which makes it easier for the audience to pick up at least a part of the meaning but does not fit at all into the historical and geographical context of the story. “Penitenziagite! Hehehe. Watch out for the draculum coming in futurum to gnaw your anima. La morte è supra nos. Hehehe (he claps his hands) Vous contemplate die Apokalypse neh? La bas, nous avons il diavolo (he positions himself with dangling arms in front of the novice, closes his eyes and noisily sticks out his tongue.) Hehehe (gesturing towards his face). Ugly comme Salvatore, Eh? Eh? (He sticks out his tongue a second time.) My little brother, penitenziagite! Hehehe (talking to William of Baskerville) Ma io, non dico penitenziagite. Ma, mmh come fate, manifestissimo, io no un Dolcinito eretico, ma les hommes must do poenitentia. Ich arm e monco, santi benedetti, santi benedetti. J’embrasse, il diavolo, scusa eh!, scusa eh!” Salvatore who selfmockingly compares himself to the devil has a true sense of humour. His melo­ dramatic speech that at first glance appears to be a wild, anarchic shapeless heap of unrelated linguistic fragments – mainly because of the compactness and shortness of the scene and the extremely high frequency of code-switching – turns out to be a relatively well-ordered straightforward narrative once one has a closer look at it. The monologue emphasizes mortality and human frailty as well as the pressing need of Christians to renounce their sins and turn to God in time. In the English translation of the novel, the speech operates with a set of lan­ guages that is more or less in tune with the historical and geographical context. Salvatore switches between Latin, Provençal and the local vernacular. There are also some Spanish elements and traces of present day Italian that has been play­ fully re-elaborated by the author. “Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m’es dols e plazer m’es dolors…cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?” (Eco 2014:51) The rendering of the multilingual passage in the film and the novel is pro­ foundly ambivalent. On the one hand, one can focus on the disruptive but lib­ erating dimension. In a lecture Eco gave as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1998, he spoke of the Babel effect of defamiliarization

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he wanted to achieve by introducing Salvatore’s monologue, creating “a lan­ guage made up of fragments of a variety of different languages” (Eco 2008:57). Salvatore (in English, the redeemer) who ends up being tortured and burnt at the stake by order of the inquisitor from Rome, can be interpreted as tragiccomic saviour-figure (Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans 2002:10–11) who provo­ catively and playfully tears down linguistic – and indirectly also geographical, political and social – borders allowing things to get out of control. In this context, code-switching also articulates a utopian dream of social justice. Besides the already mentioned setting, highlighting obscurity, hybridity and monstrosity, the devilish figure of the monk is presented in terms that empha­ size the corporeal dimension. He wears a torn and dirty habit that makes him look like a vagabond. The narrator explains that he later learned about Salva­ tore’s previous life and the various places he had lived “putting down roots in none of them”. Salvatore “spoke all languages, and no language”. He had invented a language for himself, a personal idiolect that did neither resemble the Adamic language, the happy tongue all humankind spoke in the very beginning, nor one of the languages that arose after the fall of the Babel Tower but the “Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion” (Eco 2014:52). Bonfiglio points to an observation from Eco’s The Search of the Perfect Lan­ guage, which allows for a reading of Salvatore’s speech that would confirm the already mentioned utopian dimension of social and political renewal. Eco col­ lates the collapse of the Roman Empire with the fall of the Tower of Babel. From the “cacophony of vernaculars”, the linguistic and political disunity, Europe is reborn as a “mosaic of linguistic orphanages” (2010:65), of languages left to themselves. “Europe first appears as a Babel of new languages. Only afterwards was it a mosaic of nations. Europe was thus born from its vulgar tongues” (Eco 1995:18). Salvatore’s individual linguistic confusion could be interpreted, thus, in collective terms as a promise of a multi-voiced world still to come. In a certain sense, Salvatore’s fragmented speech cannot be considered a language as it does not follow the simplest of rules, that of the conventional identity between word and object. However, continues the narrator, every­ body and even himself seemed to understand him in some way. The narrator’s description of the short multilingual passage is clearly at odds with its mean­ ing that can be easily reconstructed by the reader. Moreover, as I will show in this chapter, the two monologues contradict some of the findings of recent linguistic research that have pointed to structuring effects at work within code-switching processes. Add to this the fact that Eco has reworked and modernized his text in some instances, perhaps in an attempt to create an additional sense of arbitrariness.

2 Faces and snouts The description of Salvatore’s outer appearance centres on his face. The head is hairless, probably as the result of some kind of skin rash.

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The patched-up face of multilingualism … the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils … The nose … only a bone that began between the eyes, but immediately sank back, transforming itself … into two dark holes, broad nostrils thick with hair. The mouth, joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to the left, and between the upper lip, non-existent, and the lower, pro­ minent and fleshy, there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s. (Eco 2014:50–1)

The narrator who perceives the monk at first as a figure straight from hell, comparable to one of the “hairy and hoofed hybrids” (ibid:52) he has seen in the vestibule, points out that he realized afterwards that Salvatore was after all kind-hearted and good-humoured. This change of attitude matches the narra­ tor’s shifting interpretation of the monk’s fragmented idiom that is explicitly compared to his ill-made asymmetrical face. “His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other people’s faces, or like some precious reliquaries … (if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects.” In the Italian original, this metaphorical link has been further enhanced by an alliteration: favella (speech) and faccia (face). The connection has been lost in the English translation but preserved in the German version: Zunge (tongue) and Züge (features). In order to capture the nature of Salvatore’s monologue the text makes use of another body metaphor that highlights fragmentation and is explicitly linked to the notion of reliquaries. He was “using the disietica membra of other sen­ tences, heard some time in the past …” (ibid:52). This notion was first used by the Roman poet Horace for the dismembered limbs of a former whole. It is also generally used to describe the patching together of ancient text fragments or parts from ancient or medieval manuscripts. The use of the metaphor of the face to describe the monk’s multilingual speech is not incidental, but has to be placed within a linguistic tradition of which Eco as a scholar of language theory must have clearly been aware. In chapter sixteen of his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language) (1772), the German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) compares the inimitability of languages to the corporeal distinctiveness of individual faces. Two languages differ from each other like the facial features (Gesichtszüge) of two different persons (2015:104). In chapter eight of Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species) (1836) which deals with the notion of inner form of a language, the Prussian philo­ sopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) describes the lan­ guages of different nations in terms of their individuality. The confusing chaos

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of innumerable words and rules of a single language, its many scattered fea­ tures (zerstreute Züge) (Humboldt 1998:173), can be reunited into one single organic whole. This process can be compared to the formation of a human face (menschliche Gesichtsbildung) (ibid:176). In both instances, the metaphor of the face describes languages in terms of inner coherence, symmetry and balance. In Salvatore’s face, on the other hand, the single heterogeneous parts do not really fit together, but seem to be governed by an anarchic centrifugal principle. The use of the metaphor of the human face introduces an anachron­ ism in the description of Salvatore’s code-switching as it projects the modern view of languages as unified wholes back into the Middle Ages. Through the prism of the narrator’s point of view multilingualism is pre­ sented in the novel as diabolical or farcical, a heretical threat to order or a harmless game, that is, something fundamentally transgressive and marginal if not simply abnormal. Particularly telling, in this respect, are Salvatore’s non­ human attributes, his hybrid, half-human, half-animal aspect, his black sharp dogteeth and oversized tongue that seems to lead a life of its own. The infrin­ gement of linguistic boundaries is associated with the trespassing of the very limits of being human. Taylor-Batty pointed to a connection between Babylonian language mixing and animality in Herder’s (2013:28) and Henry James’s work (ibid:36; Perloff 2004:83). In the opening pages of Fragmente zur deutschen Literatur (Frag­ ments on German Literature) (1766–7), Herder discusses the fusional rela­ tionship of national language and national literature that grow on the same soil and flow together like two fraternal rivers (1805:17). However, when the lit­ erature of foreign cultures is admixed to the homogeneous body of a national literature this turns into a ghost-like (Gespenst), adventurous figure, a protean being (ein wahrer Proteus) (ibid:18) constantly changing its nature like the sea. If the sea-god Proteus still stands for more positive connotations like versatility, adaptability and flexibility, the other mythological figure he employs suggests outright monstrosity. A language that takes its literature from different climates and regions, continues Herder, comes close to the Babylonian mixing of lan­ guages (babylonische Sprachenmischung), it is like a Cerberus which barks out nine different sorts of language from nine mouths (aus neun Rachen neun ver­ schiedene Spracharten … heraustößt). Cerberus is a mythical monstrous dog guarding the gates of the netherworld, with a serpent for a tail, and sometimes with snakes protruding from its body. It is generally represented with three heads. Herder might possibly have admixed here the nine-headed serpentine Hydra – another mythical creature also reputed to be living by the entrance to the underworld – to increase the rhetorical effect. Each of the nine heads of Cerberus barks out pure words in its own language (in reinen und eigenen Worten) (ibid:19). Each head that thinks independently will speak for itself, using its own language to express and give form to its own ideas. Despite the fact that the single body of the hellhound sprouts nine different heads, the dif­ ferent languages he barks out are clearly separated from each other. Each head has so to speak its own snout. These different heads will never be able to grow

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together, as the language and literature of a single nation, and never form a homogeneous whole, as the singularity of each individual language does not allow for any form of mixing. Herder’s view of multilingualism as a form of multiple monolingualisms, on which the image of the hellhound is based, can also be found in his Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen (On the Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages) (1764) (Herder 1877). The German mother-tongue comes first, as it articulates the deepest feelings. Each language is the expression of the national character of a nation (Nationalcharakter) (ibid:2). In this sense, Herder also emphasizes the importance of a constant dialogue with other lan­ guages, because of their unique contribution to humankind. Besides one’s mother-tongue one should, therefore, cultivate other languages to expand the soul and raise up the mind. Herder attributes to each of them a specific cultural trait: French affluence, Italian taste, English pragmatism and Dutch learning. The various languages bear different fruits of the mind (Früchte des Geistes) that can be harvested. Herder makes use of the word einsammlen, to collect, which is used for the harvesting of fruit or the picking of berries (Piller 2016 and Suphan 1883:347). Languages are countable and collectable items like oranges or apples (chapter eleven). In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin quotes a comment by the French philo­ sopher Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) on the work of the French writer and physician François Rabelais (1494–1553) that adds a further dimension to Herder’s understanding of multilingualism as a monstrosity. He describes Rabelais’ work as totally incomprehensible, “a mysterious chimera with the face of a lovely woman and the feet and tail of a serpent or of some other hid­ eous animal, a monstrous jumble of delicate morality and filthy depravation” (Bakhtin 1984:108). Another instance of the metaphorical connection between multilingualism and animality used in a derogatory sense can be found in The Question of our Speech, a lecture that Henry James gave in 1905 at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. The problem with multilingualism is that the borders of an established national language are swamped and that an invasion of foreign idioms can ultimately lead to its dissolution. James focuses on the role of lan­ guage in the constitution of a collective national identity and the radical changes the American language went through in the wake of the strong immi­ gration movement that took place around the turn of the century. Five years after James’s speech it was calculated that in the United States more or less one person out of four had learned English as a second language. “There are plenty of influences around us”, argues James, “that make for the confused … the mean, the helpless, that reduce articulation … and so keep it as little distinct as possible from the grunting, the squealing, the barking, or the roaring of ani­ mals” (James 1999:46), a “tongueless slobber or snarl or whine” (ibid:76). The linguistic impact of the immigrants on the national language tends to dissolve the “ancestral circle” (ibid:53) of its existing structure. The result is chaotic fluidity, a barbaric babble, a “helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises”

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(ibid:49). “The forces of looseness are in possession of the field” (ibid:55), dumping their “promiscuous material into the foundations of the American” language (ibid:54). The examples discussed so far describe the mixing of languages as chaotic babble, and a transgression threatening the very borders between humanity and animality. Multilingual speakers revert to an earlier stage of human history. No coherent unity seems possible. Salvatore’s face is a jarring mess and his speech hopelessly fragmentary. Herder’s two metaphors of Proteus and Cerberus stress instability and dissolution on the one hand, and disagreement and divergence on the other. Finally, James describes the presence of foreign linguistic elements in terms of a disintegration and a return to prehuman forms of expression. In a completely different vein, Sarkonak and Hodgson discuss an attempt at describing a bilingual hybridity that is both textual and corporeal (Guldin 2011a). In the novel La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Road), the French author Claude Simon (1913–2005) introduces a partially annotated French translation from an Italian original dedicated to the engraving of a young man embracing a female centaur (1960:55–6). At a certain point, the text shifts back to Italian, moving from translation to transcription. The hybrid, half-human, half-animal creature, and “the juxtaposition of French and Italian both in the column of gloss in the left hand margin of the text that Simon’s own page seeks to replicate as well as in the prose text itself” make it a “truly hybrid text” (Sarkonak and Hodgson 1993:19–12). The double body of the text thus mirrors both the use of two different languages and two writing strategies. The part that joins the human to the animal, and skin to fur, stands for the porous boundary between translating and transcribing, as well as the fluid frontiers between French and Italian. The eye can easily make out the delicate whiteness of the female skin and its gradual transition into the light chestnut colour of the animal fur, but it starts hesitating when it comes to drawing a clear-cut border between the two. The two parts merge into each other and are, at the same time, distinct from each other. They are, so to speak, grafted onto each other (chapter six). In this particular case, language contact and code-switching are depicted in a highly aesthetic way that emphasizes inner complexity and con­ nectedness and the simultaneous difficulties one incurs when trying to tell the two languages clearly apart. In the following sections, I will retrace the theo­ retical changes code-switching has gone through in the last decades focusing on ways in which these can be used to reinterpret notions of code-mixing and multilingualism presented so far.

3 Changing attitudes towards code-switching and code-mixing First recorded in the early twentieth century, code-switching was scarcely noted by linguists and not investigated systematically until the 1960s and 1970s. It was considered random and illogical, a substandard form of language use, the result of imperfect language learning or due to the incapacity of the speaker to find the right word in a specific language. The switching practice was also

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associated with a lack of respect for authority. One of the first scholars to deal with the phenomenon was the American linguist Uriel Weinreich (1926–67). In Languages in Contact. Findings and Problems first published in 1953, he pre­ sents some of his sources, which define code-switching in terms of super­ ficiality, laziness, moral inferiority, simple opportunism and mercenary relativism. Bilingualism is a handicap for the speaker’s ability to synthesize and endangers the stability of his character. Furthermore, the single languages often enter into conflict with each other (Weinreich 1979:119–20). As recent research has pointed out, code-switching is complex and structured, not grammatically arbitrary, and not necessarily easier than the uninterrupted use of a single language. It is often a compromise strategy in complex situations when addressing people with varying preferences or competences. Language conflict, moreover, is not in itself a problem but can trigger off new insights. Code-switching is not specific to minority groups or immigrant communities but is used by regional minorities and native multilingual groups alike. It is not used more frequently by uneducated people or members of the lower classes. In several cases, it is quite the opposite. Code-switching is not a marginal or iso­ lated practice but a widespread multifaceted phenomenon found in a wide range of situations; it is highly changeable between communities and indivi­ duals and shows considerable internal variation. It can be a “feature of stable bilingualism in communities where speakers speak both languages” (GardnerChloros 2009:20). Add to this that monolinguals also tend to switch between dialects, sociolects, discourse styles and levels of formality. Change in voice quality, for instance, can be used to mark off parenthetical parts. Besides code-switching one also speaks of code-mixing. In linguistics and social psychology, the two terms have been sometimes used with different meaning. In code-switching the two codes retain their monolingual character­ istics, whereas in code-mixing there is convergence between the two. The two phenomena, however, can co-exist or overlap and are difficult to tell apart. Because of this, some scholars use the terms interchangeably. I have also opted for a practice that highlights the fundamental fluidity of the phenomenon. However, both terms are fundamentally problematic insofar as they suggest that language contact takes place between separate language systems. The term codeswitching, furthermore, suggests that language transactions can be viewed as an alternation between self-contained units, similar to the simple flicking of an electric switch. This might be true in some specific instances but does not cover the whole spectrum of possibilities. In code-mixing, passages are mostly fluid, and languages cannot simply be turned on or off at will. Recent psycholinguistic research has shown that multilinguals can never totally switch off their different languages. The different varieties are closely interlinked in the brain and simul­ taneously accessible. Each of the different languages has a specific activation threshold dependent on context and the linguistic competence of the speaker. The Dutch linguist Kees De Bot used a very suggestive metaphor to describe the unpredictability of code-switching and the cohabitation of the different lan­ guages in the brain of a multilingual speaker. “Activation, and in particular

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inhibition [are] like holding down ping-pong balls in a bucket full of water: With your hands you can hold down most of the balls, but occasionally one or two will escape and jump to the surface” (2004:201). From time to time, single words surface involuntarily and insert themselves into a different linguistic context, often taking up the place of a word of another language the speaker has unsuc­ cessfully been looking for. Psycholinguistic research has pointed to the fact that it is misleading to ask for the specific location of single languages within the brain. It is more advi­ sable to look for groupings of features that vary from speaker to speaker. All languages matter, even those that have only been learned partially and are no longer used consciously. Even forgotten languages are still imprinted in the brain. The single switch model suggests that the activation of one language renders all other inactive. Plurilingual speakers, however, can never quite inhi­ bit or block the activation of one of their languages. According to the Swiss psycholinguist François Grosjean (Gardner-Chloros 2009:136–40) bilinguals can function either monolingually, in one mode only, or in two or more modes at a time. These different modes are placed on an activation continuum. Code-switching has many faces that sometimes contradict or exclude each other. Different kinds of code-switching can co-exist in the same community at the same time and diverse types of code-mixing in the same conversation and with entirely dissimilar motivations. Code-mixing can be important as a factor of change but also can contribute to forms of stable bilingualism over longer periods of time; it can function as a mechanism of vitality or be part of situa­ tions of decline, dissolve linguistic borders through borrowing processes or confirm existing barriers between two or more languages. Sociolinguistic rather than potentially universal grammatical factors determine the outcome of lan­ guage contacts. Code-switching provides information about the social identity of the speaker as a member of a different group, his/her linguistic competence and attitude to code-switching, but also about independent factors like prestige or power relations structuring the context in which the interaction takes place. Code-switching and code-mixing cannot always be easily separated from other related areas of language contact like borrowing, language transfer, loan translation, convergence, isolation or pidgins and creoles. The possible out­ comes of language contact often overlap or coexist next to each other. In this regard, Gardner-Chloros speaks of a grey terminological area (ibid:51) where the different linguistic phenomena mix and merge. Differences of degree are more important than categorical diversity. Creolization and code-switching, for instance, are separated by a fine line and often occur together. The normative attitudes towards code-switching are learned rather than spontaneous. Because of this, the wary and often openly unfavourable general view that partially still persists today in society at large finds its echo in the way many speakers view their everyday multilingual practice. Very often, they are not proud of their code-switching but openly disapprove of it and tend to describe their practice as a form of laziness, because they do not bother to look for the right word they need in a specific language, but prefer to mix the

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languages. Their level of self-awareness frequently lags behind their everyday practice and they often express embarrassment and surprise when confronted with the full extent of their multilingual practice. This dissociation between personal use and self-interpretation might be the result of the persisting invi­ sibility of the phenomenon which is still perceived as exceptional despite the growing importance of multilingualism in the wake of globalizing processes. The high amount of possible variations in code-switching has been tradition­ ally regarded by linguists as an inconvenience. Because of the wide range of forms it can adopt and its highly chaotic, unstructured appearance – the “muddy waters” of code-switching (ibid:31) – code-mixing has repeatedly called for simple straightforward definitions that make it neater and tidier than it is. Weinreich’s definition of the “psychological mechanism of switching codes” (Weinreich 1979:72), for instance, reduces the complexity of the phenomenon to a few simple traits. “The ideal bilingual switches from one language to the other according to appropriate changes in the speech situation … but not in an unchanged speech situation, and certainly not within a single sentence” (ibid:73). Contrary to this very limitative view, multilingual speakers often switch lan­ guages without any changes in situation and not only between sentences (intersentential switching) but also within single sentences (intra-sentential switching) and even within single words (intra-word switching). Code-switching can be a symptom of different often even contradictory tendencies from language shift to language maintenance, and from accommodation to divergence. Descriptive models of code-mixing are generally abstractions devised by linguists from the behaviour of plurilingual speakers. All attempts to develop simple general rules (either strictly sociological, psychological or linguistic) must be considered an oversimplification. The fundamental messiness, the many layered complexity and great diversity of code-mixing call for an eclectic multilevel interdisciplinary approach (Gardner-Chloros 2009:7). Besides the notion of syntactical constraints deemed to be of universal nature, a hierarchy of switchability was suggested. The most frequently swit­ ched elements tend to be nouns, due to the fact that reference is established primarily through them. The tidiness suggested by this notion, however, breaks down as soon as the switched elements become longer and more complex. Another influential interpretative model that is particularly interesting with regard to the metaphorical nature of its terminology distinguishes between a base or matrix language and an embedded language (ibid:100–104). The basic assumption is again that bilinguals alternate between two clearly distinguish­ able sets of rules. The underlying matrix language, the language dominantly used – also called the matrix language frame (MLF) – is not necessarily a lan­ guage in itself but a grammatical template or abstract grammatical frame, which is applied to the overall plurilingual sentence. The embedded language from which the switches originate is grafted onto the base. This notion intro­ duces a hierarchical aspect into code-switching by distinguishing between a significant core and a subordinate variation. Linguistic plurality is admitted but cast in a tight interpretative frame made up of a dominant and a secondary

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language. In code-mixing, however, it is often impossible to decide which of the different languages used in a conversation is actually predominant or to assign a single matrix language to the utterance as a whole, especially in the case of longer sentences. The base language, if there is any, keeps changing, and there can be more than one matrix language at a time as several motivational or conversational moments can spark off simultaneously (ibid:46–8). I will come back to the metaphorical dimension of the notions of matrix language, embeddedness and grafting in chapter six.

4 Expanding the paradigm The prevalence of a normative attitude towards code-switching and codemixing that focused on the interaction of separate language systems and emphasized stability, resulted in a reduction of the field of enquiry. A new theoretical focus on fuzziness, fluidity and the individual performance of the speaker has recently led to a reconsideration of the status of languages as selfcontained units and highlighted some aspects that have not received yet the attention they deserve, first of all, conscious rule breaking, playfulness and creativity (Simonton 2008). Bilinguals do not speak one particular language at a time but a medium made up of numerous “internally mixed varieties” (Gardner-Chloros 2009:168) which can be fused into an amalgam. Code-switching and code-mixing not only possess language-like qualities but can be understood as languages in their own right. Individual speakers construct their own systems that do overlap but do not necessarily coincide with official languages. Some linguistic practices of code-mixing consist in the creation of bivalent elements, which can belong to two languages at the same time – for instance, bilingual verbs – and other compromise forms that facilitate transitions between different varieties and make it difficult to determine the actual origin of the switch. Until recently, research has focused primarily on forms of code-switching between two languages only. However, code-switching patterns with speakers of three or more languages tend to differ from each other and require separate consideration. “The fact of switching once”, for instance, “actually creates the possibility of further switching: instead of going back to the variety used before the switch, trilingual speakers often take a different ‘branch’ or ‘exiting’ from it and switch to a third language” (ibid:16–17). Despite a long tradition of code-switching and multilingualism in literature (Gardner-Chloros and Weston 2015), code-mixing has been mainly treated as a spoken genre (Gardner-Chloros 2009:20–21 and 88–90). Because of this, research on written forms of code-switching has remained “at an embryonic stage” (Montes-Alcalá 2001:194). This has changed in the last few years. However, in many cases, conversational code-switching has carried over in the analysis of written texts. Most studies still focus on interactive genres that resemble conversation. In written forms of code-switching the visual and spa­ tial aspect (page layout, typographic differences, script-switching, combination

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of text and image) and the dimension of permanence are of central importance. Contrary to conversational code-switching, the single elements in the textual space do not follow one after the other but are placed next to each other (Sebba, Mahootian and Jonsson 2012). Nevertheless, there is partial overlap between the functions of spoken and written code-mixing (Gardner-Chloros and Weston 2015). Marc Sebba (2012) proposed an analytical framework spe­ cifically designed for multilingual texts to which I will come back in connection with metaphors of the plurilingual text (chapter fifteen). Besides written forms of code-mixing there are multimodal productions to be considered like script-switching (Angermeyer 2012; Schmitz-Emans 2004b and 2014) – which is inherent in the Japanese writing system – or the combi­ nation of text and image. The work of bimodal bilinguals like Vincent van Gogh and Lucien Pissarro – who besides their work as painters mixed Dutch with French and French with English in their personal correspondence – allows for a better understanding of the relationship between bilingualism and individual identity (Gardner-Chloros 2014a). Code-switching could also be considered an instance of a wider ranging switching skill and be used as a metaphor to analyse other forms of switching. This change from a marginal and minor phenomenon in need of explanation to a possible model of interpretation marks a major shift in perception compar­ able to the transformations that have affected multilingualism over the last decades. Code-switching could “be extended to other fields, including visual art, music and choreography”. In these new forms of “multimodal hetero­ glossia” moving across genres and different media, multilingualism becomes the very “stuff of creativity” (Gardner-Chloros 2014b:96). Hioki (2011) ana­ lyses visual bilingualism in connection with cultural collaborations between Japanese painters and European missionaries. She focuses on a pair of folding screens that can be considered bilingual both religiously and aesthetically. Gardner-Chloros (2012) explores possible parallels between works of art and linguistic forms of switching and a recent issue of Critical Multilingualism Studies focuses on the versatile creativity of multilingual writers who are also visual artists (Lvovich and Kellman 2019). Recent research has not only focused on forms of creativity within the arts at large but begun to explore the non-conformist creative side of everyday multi­ lingual interactions throughout the world. This further theoretical expansion touches upon a central aspect of this book to which I will come back in the fol­ lowing chapters: the notion of “language”. Languages “are often treated as if they were discrete, identifiable and internally consistent wholes, and we forget how historically recent and culturally selective such a view is” (Gardner-Chloros 2009:9). Because of this, the concept of code-switching even in its expanded and revised form has been challenged by some researchers. The new notions proposed are an attempt to move beyond the simple opposition of monolingualism and multilingualism and to describe heterogeneous linguistic practices in terms that differ from the idea of switching or mixing discreet units. Jørgensen (2008) uses the concept of ‘polylingual languaging’ for the interactive and communicative

The patched-up face of multilingualism

25

practices of children and adolescents that draw on all linguistic features available to them in order to reach a certain goal. In this context, the level of competence in a specific language is not decisive. Even languages of which one has only a limited knowledge are part of the game. Jørgensen proposes to substitute multilingualism with the notion of ‘polylingualism’ because speakers use specific linguistic fea­ tures rather than languages. Similarly, ‘translanguaging’ – a notion that can be traced back to García (2009) – emphasizes the playful and transgressive side of moving between and beyond different linguistic varieties (Li Wei 2011). In this multilingual social space, speakers can enact their attitudes, beliefs and ideolo­ gies, their lives and personal experiences in an encompassing and meaningful performance. Both languaging and translanguaging move away from the sys­ temic character of languages and accentuate the dynamic aspect of linguistic practices. The speaker takes centre stage. The term ‘metrolingualism’ which moves beyond the common framework of language, is used for creative practices across political, social, cultural and his­ torical borders. Adam Jaworski (2014) describes metrolingualism as a manifes­ tation of heteroglossia (chapter twelve) and uses the two interlinked terms to analyse multimodal forms of art that mix genres and styles. Metrolingualism describes how “people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language; it does not assume connections between language, culture ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction” (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010:246). Contrary to traditional code-switching, metrolingualism is not interested in the way distinct codes are switched or mixed but in how speakers make use of the multilingual resources to which they have access and the way language distinctions and boundaries are constructed by particular language ideologies. Instead of concentrating on multiple discreet languages, metrolingualism, like Jørgensen’s polylingual languaging, focuses on resources, styles and linguistic features, including the competence at word level. The complex new mixed forms, styles and genres generated by urban subjects in late modernity are more polyglot than plurilingual. They consist of “truncated complexes of resources” (Blommaert 2010:106) from a variety of languages and do not necessarily imply the same level of linguistic competence in each of the languages used. The focus is on ‘mobile resources’ rather than ‘immobile lan­ guages’ (ibid:102), on freely assembled heterogeneous features rather than on well-balanced homogeneous faces.

5 Faces and features The metaphor of the human face describes languages as human beings. The single individual traits of a specific language join together to form a sig­ nificant inherently consistent picture. As different persons, languages possess different faces, each with their unique unmistakable character. This relation­ ship is based on a causal, organic connection and tends to erase linguistic

26

The patched-up face of multilingualism

plurality and the existence of inner tensions and contradictions. Furthermore, the focus on a single central meaning is based on a recursive structure. Lan­ guages and the nations they belong to are conceived of as homologous col­ lective personifications that correspond metaphorically to the single native speakers who represent the individual side of this triadic equation. From such a point of view, multilingualism can only be perceived as a monstrous mani­ festation of impurity, abnormality and disorder that imperils the very differ­ ence between the human and the animal. The theoretical changes described in this chapter, recast code-switching and multilingualism in terms of inner complexity and a new order based on plur­ ality and heterogeneity. They move beyond simple dichotomies and question the very notion of language as a self-contained unit. Code-mixing is not the meeting and interacting of single discreet language systems but the coming together of diverse features that cannot ultimately be subsumed to the simpli­ fying logic of a face. If monolingualism defined multilingualism as a patchedup disharmonic and disorderly face, the new understanding of code-mixing disavows the notion of single languages showing that not only multilingualspeech but all languages are made up of heterogeneous features: dialects, sociolects, registers and styles. These traits are not simply disharmonic but an expression of the fundamental heteroglossia of language and the social and cultural conflicts that characterize it. Salvatore’s patched-up face, presents a different but fundamentally ambiva­ lent reading of the metaphor. The image of the face is reinterpreted in contra­ dictory pluralistic terms but at the same time this playful linguistic pluralism is questioned because of its anarchic quality and apparent lack of inner coherence. In view of the interpretation framework provided by polylingual languaging, translanguaging and metrolingualism shifting from discreet lan­ guage systems to the practice of multilingual speakers we might reinterpret Salvatore’s monologue as a playful and transgressive idiolect that makes use of all the linguistic features, styles and resources at his disposal in order to serve his main aim: he wants to frighten and warn the young inexperienced monk but also to entertain and instruct him in the ways of the monastery and the world. Salvatore presents himself self-ironically and self-deprecatory as a person endlessly torn between fear of damnation and the temptations of the flesh who finds peace, security and regular meals only within the walls of a convent. The composite assemblage of words and expressions from different linguistic varieties that emerges in the very act of speaking defies the offhand reductionist view of William of Baskerville and the questionable portrait pro­ vided by the narrator.

2

Organic metaphors of language

In this chapter, as well as in chapters six and eleven, I want to retrace the many layered metaphor-cluster that developed in Europe around the notions of mother-tongue, native speaker and national language from the Renais­ sance to the nineteenth century. This linguistic ideology was exported to the colonies, successfully imposed on the rural and urban populations of Europe and is, in many ways, still effective today. I would like to use this narrative as a backdrop for multilingual metaphors that implicitly or expli­ citly challenged the monolingual view. The three interrelated chapters lead from corporeality to maternity and territoriality. The focus of this chapter is on the organic metaphor of lactation, its association with the cultivation of trees (Bonfiglio 2010:72–105), and the notion of language as an organism. Chapter six deals with kinship metaphors, the nationalist redefinition of the mother–child relationship around 1800, its consequences for the notion of mother-tongue, as well as with the gendering of languages and the genealo­ gic visions inspired by the metaphor of the tree. In chapter eleven, I want to discuss the notions of national territory and national landscape in their relationship to national languages and the concept of the native speaker as someone rooted in the soil of his fatherland. Bonfiglio describes this process as an expanding network that starts out from the nuclear metaphor of the nursery, which fuses “the ideologies of maternality and nativity in the nationalist configuration of language. … This metaphor is a condensation of several images at once: infant nursing, the care of children, and the cultiva­ tion of plants” (ibid:6–7). The main elements of this initial metaphor were reinterpreted and com­ plemented by new elements in the course of the following centuries resulting in an ‘ethnolinguistic nationalism’, which arose with the birth of the modern nation-states around 1800. This process in not a linear teleological and cumu­ lative movement. The initial meaning was redefined several times and the relationship between the nodes of the metaphorical cluster kept shifting due to the introduction of new elements and points of view. The ethnolinguistic assumption aligns “language use and ethnic or cultural group identity in a linear and one-on-one relationship” that defines the modern subject “as monocultural and monolingual” (Blommaert, Leppänen and Spotti 2012:3).

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Organic metaphors of language

This restrictive ethnic definition of language blinds us to the fact that languages do not simply belong to single nations but are part of the cultural heritage of humanity as a whole and are thus accessible to anybody willing to learn them.

1 Lactation and cultivation The metaphor of the mother-tongue can be traced back to the work of Dante Alighieri (Casanova 2008:89–92; Trabant 2006:70–75; Spitzer 1948b; Weisgerber 1948:68–74). In De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) (1304), which is addressed to the upper class that did not breast feed its children, Dante connects the learning of the first language to the intimate corporeal relationship with the wet nurse and contraposes it to the later acquisition of another idiom. The vernacular is naturally learned through imitation and must therefore be considered the first language to be originally used by humankind. It is nobler than Latin, which is learnt through lengthy study. Only a few will ever be able to speak it with complete fluency. Dante’s aim was to emphasize the superiority of the Italian vernacular as a poetic medium. Bonfiglio qualifies his understanding of languages “in terms of metaphors of nativity and maternality” as a “Coper­ nican revolution” (Bonfiglio 2010:73) with long lasting consequences. In Com­ mento de’ miei sonetti, Lorenzo de Medici (1449–92) defended himself for using the Tuscan vernacular by referring to the fact that he was born and fostered in this language the same way that people before him were brought up in Latin or Hebrew, their natural mother-tongues. In Prose della volgar lingua (1525), Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), poet, literary theorist and cardinal, argues that in Rome Latin was experienced as closer than Greek because the people drank it together with the milk of their nurses (Bonfiglio 2010:74–5). As Bonfiglio argues, this discourse hinging on the use of mammary images has to be placed within the broader religious and cultural context of its time. In the late Middle Ages, maternal images of feeding were linked to the figure of Mary the mother of God who was often depicted as nursing the baby Jesus. This amounted to a sanctification of both lactation and nursing which were associated with the Christian notion of grace. Mary’s role as a mother and food provider extended to Jesus and the church. Jesus Christ’s piercing wound in the right side that he had suffered during the crucifixion was often positioned next to the nipple and thus identified with a female breast. Blood and milk were parallel dispensa­ tions, both physical and spiritual, and could be transmuted into one another. As the symbolic bride of Jesus, the church was also seen as a lactating mother. In the course of the following centuries, the religious matrix lost its original importance. The notion of lactation was secularized, reinterpreted in new nationalistic terms, and directly connected to the body of the mother (chapter six). The corporeal metaphor of lactation was reinforced by a territorial meta­ phor linking the vernacular to its original soil. In Dialogo delle lingue (1542), the Italian Renaissance humanist, scholar and dramatist Sperone Speroni (1500–88) makes abundant use of organic metaphors in his discussion of the importance of writing in the vernacular. Speroni combines lactic and domestic

Organic metaphors of language

29

metaphors, breastfeeding, nativity and naturalness. Languages are viewed as “organisms with life expectancies” (Bonfiglio 2010:86). If the Tuscan verna­ cular has reached its happy bloom Latin and Greek have already attained the twilight of old age. While scholars still tend to use dead Latin words, the people are already making use of the new rough living words of the vernacular. Sper­ oni describes the new offshoot of the vernacular as a small branch that has not come to full bloom and has not produced any fruit yet. This is not a con­ sequence of its frail nature but due to the fact that it has not been taken care of appropriately. Wild plants, which are not watered and protected from over­ shadowing brambles but left to age and die, suffer the same fate. If the Romans had been negligent gardeners, this would also have happened to Latin. How­ ever, they transplanted it from a wild to a domestic place, pruned the useless young twigs and grafted new branches taken from Greek in their place. Thanks to their ability, these foreign implants fused with the original stem in such a way that they can no longer be recognized as such, but look completely nat­ ural. After this operation, the tree began to produce abundant flowers and plenty of fruit. The emphasis on organic unity even after an external interven­ tion that amounts to an admixture of foreign linguistic elements can be found in the work of all thinkers that make use of the metaphor of the tree. In this early use of the metaphor, nature and culture interact in a productive way. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, within a nationalistic context and in connection with the theory of evolution, the emphasis will clearly shift from culture to nature, towards a biologistic determinism based on notions of original purity and direct unmixed lineage. In this context, the notion of soil, which in Speroni’s text does not possess any nationalistic con­ notations in the modern sense, will be charged with an explicit geopolitical meaning. Another difference regards the notion of the native speaker. God has given Tuscany its vernacular, this, however, does not imply that only people born in the region are capable of learning the language. According to Speroni, anybody can become proficient in this idiom. The “notion of language profi­ ciency as a birth right is still absent. The ideologies have not yet … acquired meanings of hereditary enracination” (ibid:86). Speroni’s organic metaphors were taken up by the movement of La Pléiade, a group of sixteenth-century French Renaissance poets whose aim was to ele­ vate the French vernacular to the status of a literary language comparable to the classical languages (Casanova 2008:88–9). In their manifesto La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (The Defence and Illustration of the French Language) (1549), one of their members, the French poet and critic Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), advocated the improvement of the French language by borrowing and imitating classical models. He recognized the superiority of Greek and Latin with regard to the French vernacular but like Speroni he attributed this situation to the lack of cultivation and care by French writers and not to intrinsic qualities of the vernacular itself. Du Bellay also introduced a notion that would be of great significance for nationalistic conceptions of language: the unique essence of languages is

30

Organic metaphors of language

untranslatable. “This is a very early instance of the notion of an indefinable quintessence to a language, a je ne sais quoi, which is nonetheless tangible” (Bonfiglio 2010:88). He also makes use of another corporeal metaphor in the discussion of the relationship between the French vernacular and the classical languages that implicitly contradicts his idea of a fundamental untranslat­ ability. Imitating the Greeks is indispensable if one is to enrich one’s own language. The Romans are exemplary in this regard. They devoured the Greek authors and after having thoroughly digested them, they converted their blood into nourishment (Casanova 2008:8). “This clearly goes beyond the simple grafting of one language onto another … and indicates an organic, physical, and corporeal space for the essence of a language. Proper language is located in body and blood … Language is … understood as a kind of organ, which can be transplanted, but not properly translated” (Bonfiglio 2010:89–90). However, after having pillaged classical culture, du Bellay advocates a return to the motherly breast of the French nation.

2 Language as body and organism Ontological metaphors, and one of their most common examples, personifica­ tions, allow to comprehend events, actions, activities, and states by con­ ceptualizing them as objects, substances, or containers. In the case of personifications, physical objects are further specified as persons and attributed human characteristics (Lakoff and Johnson 2003:25–34). All these aspects play a central role in the description of languages prevalent in the West in the modern era. Rulon S. Wells distinguishes three major properties of living things that make them suitable as organic metaphors of language: individuals are subjected to continuous purposeful change, they are a whole, and belong to kinds, which allows for their classification (1987:43–5). Languages have an object-like char­ acter and can therefore be listed and counted. They are containers with clear-cut borders, substances with a recognizable shape and a stable significant core, and individual beings with a character of their own. Herder conceives of national languages as receptacles preserving a people’s thoughts (Benes 2008:44). Organic metaphors emphasize both the diachronic and synchronic dimension: genesis, growth and the different stages of life, as well as the connection and collabora­ tion of the single parts. Contrary to non-organic structures that grow only through a law of attraction and external apposition of new parts, organic bodies evolve from the inside thanks to an inner life force. Besides being individuals, languages are gendered, female in sex and organized in families. There are mother, sister and daughter languages (chapter six). Humboldt’s use of the metaphor of the face discussed in the previous chapter belongs in this tradition. It is related to the notion of physiognomy that was widely discussed and used in different disciplines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Herder whose plan was to develop a generalized physiog­ nomy of nations based on their languages claimed in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind)

Organic metaphors of language

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(1784 and 1791) that the character of a nation was best expressed in its language. The genius of a people revealed itself most appropriately in the physiognomy of its speech. In Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkennt­ nis und Menschenliebe (Physiological Fragments for the Promotion of the Knowledge of Human Nature and Philanthropy) (1775–8), the Swiss writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) argued that individual physiognomies, especially faces, were directly related to the specific character traits of individuals and proposed a series of general types. Humboldt who visited Lavater in Zürich during a trip to Paris expressed doubts with regards to his theoretical assumptions: it was not possible to deduce the character of a human being simply by looking at his face. In 1807, the geo­ grapher, naturalist and explorer Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1767–1835) published Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse (Ideas for a Physiognomy of Plants), in which he developed a physiognomy of plants and landscapes. The term physiognomy referred to the general appear­ ance (Totaleindruck) of an individual plant or a specific landscape and was not based on objective fact in the sense of the natural sciences. Nature was conceived of as something meaningful that had an effect on our feelings. Similarly, Hum­ boldt’s metaphor of the face is not a hard scientific fact but the result of an act of recreation in the imagination of the observer. The metaphor of the organism was effective within language theory from the late eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century. It had a strong impact on linguistics especially in Germany from where the notion spread to the rest of Europe. However, the notion was not used by all linguists and met with some criticism. Organism, from the Greek organon, tool, instrument, was ori­ ginally interpreted in physiological rather than anatomical terms, as a process rather than as a static unit. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, organism and mechanism were not considered opposites but comparable, structured wholes with a functional orientation. The mechanistic model of the state of the Ancien Régime, for instance, was “premised upon the absence of a sharp distinction between the artificial and the naturally living” (Chea 2003:28). Organism was a synonym for organization and system order. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new understanding began to prevail, which inter­ preted the notion of organism increasingly in biological categories opposing it to the artificial nature of mechanisms. The passage from the predominantly mechanistic paradigm of the eighteenth century to an organismic interpreta­ tion of collective existence represented a rupture that played a major role within moral and political philosophy, and strongly impacted the field of comparative linguistics and the notions of mother-tongue and native speaker (Yildiz 2012:8–9). The metaphorical potential of the notion of organism began to shift: the emphasis was now on the autonomous character of organisms and their corresponding capacity for self-development, self-organization, selfrenewal and reproduction. An organism was both cause and effect with regard to itself. It possessed individual character and a form determined by growth. The individual parts that composed it interacted with each other in order to

32

Organic metaphors of language

keep themselves and the system alive. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the substance-oriented conception of organism shifted towards a more relationship-oriented and functional understanding. Organisms were no longer considered ahistorical stable wholes but the result of their specific historical and cultural context. Language was seen as an organism with “an inbuilt drive toward change. It develops and decays because this is what organisms do; decay inevitably fol­ lows the period of maximum strength” (Morpurgo Davies 1987:88). Besides providing an answer to the problem of language change, the metaphor of the organism defines language in terms of a singular recognizable character that sets it apart from others of its kind. Since organisms are bounded systems, the idea of borders with specific functions is primordial. Boundaries protect selfcontained entities and make them recognizable at the same time. They can contribute to the formation of identity or thwart it. The borders of biological organisms are important in connection with metabolic processes. In the case of linguistic organisms, this regards above all the acquisition and integration of foreign linguistic features. A significant example of this metaphor can be found in the introduction to the first volume of Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) written by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1854). The sixth section dedicated to foreignderived words operates with a series of organic metaphors linking the body to the life of plants. All healthy languages possess a natural drive that keeps foreign elements at bay and expels all those that have penetrated its borders or manages to balance them off with domestic elements. If peradventure a foreign word falls into the well of a language it will be processed until it takes on its colour and looks like a domestic element despite its foreign origin. However, in the course of history the opposition to the assimilation of foreign words has waned and this has weakened the general feeling for one’s own language. Words were admitted far too easily and some were even proud to renounce the use of domestic words in favour of foreign ones. It is a duty of language theory to go against this general trend and to draw a clear line between different categories of words. This does not count for words that have already struck roots (wurzel gefaszt) in the soil of the German language (im boden unsrer sprache), grown new shoots (neue sprossen getrieben) and coa­ lesced (verwachsen) with the German speech so that one cannot do without them anymore. The language policy of the Wörterbuch does not encourage language mixing (sprachmengung) but at the same time criticizes intransigent purists (sprachreiniger) (Grimm and Grimm 2019). In Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) (1822), Jacob Grimm con­ ceives of languages as plants and bodies. Even single letters possess a body of their own. He compares inchoative verbs to growing and blooming plants because they describe processes of becoming and transitions into different states. The inflectional endings are linked to other parts of the sentence like limbs and articulations to the rest of the body. The metaphor of the body of language emphasizes above all the functional aspect. Sickness and death are

Organic metaphors of language

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not dealt with in detail as they represent a threat. Languages, however, can grow, change and decay. Originally, languages are innocent and sensual but with time, they tend to become more abstract and spiritual. During this pro­ cess, they lose their harmonious sound. As Grimm writes in the preface, the further we move back in time the stronger becomes the sensual, physical force of a language. The old language is pure and its roots are not worn away. The bodily strength of the old language can be compared to the much sharper sense of sight, hearing and smell of savage populations. In the new language, the blood is heavier and runs slower. Grimm’s body of language is gendered (Benes 2008:138–9). He distinguishes between a more solid male body of consonants (konsonantenleib), which is responsible for the outer appearance of the language (gestalt), and a more fluid female vocalic soul (vokalenseele) that gives a language its colouring (färbung). The body of language has a scaffolding made of bones and muscles (the con­ sonants). Blood flows in its arteries and veins and breath runs through its limbs (the vowels). Languages are invigorated by the presence of different gramma­ tical genders which are a natural part of their setup from the very beginning. Grimm considers the masculine as primordial, active and agile, and the femi­ nine as discreet, receptive and secondary. His dualistic vision of language (Bauman and Briggs 2003:198–203) goes back to Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. Herder describes the grammatical genders as the genitalia of speech (Genitalien der Rede), that is, as means of procreation (2015:49). Substantives and arti­ cles, active and passive verbs are all paired off and joined to each other. The meaning is clearly sexual: the passive feminine and active masculine elements of language are coupled in copulation. Consonants and vowels are part of this sexualized dichotomic logic. Metaphors of procreation not only emphasize the dynamic processual dimension of language but also treat them as individual beings. The hybrid, both male and female vision of the body of language in Herder’s and Grimm’s work and the feminine gendering of languages as entities linked by family ties are part of a metaphorical set-up that also comprises a nationalist dimension. The German philology of the nineteenth century cannot be separated from an endeavour opposing the superiority of the German language to that of other European nations. In Über den deutschen Styl (On German Style) (1785), the German grammarian and philologist Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) describes languages with many consonants as hard. German, like all other northern languages, was originally one of the hardest languages in Europe, because its words generally have more consonants than vowels, and among those the more resistant ones rather than the soft and fluid ones.

3 A common root The metaphor of the organism is intimately linked to that of the tree. Herder described the original language of a nation as a plant (Landesgewächs) that

34

Organic metaphors of language

grows in perfect accordance with its unique geographical and climatic setting (1805:17). The close organic connection between the soil, the weather and the literature of a nation make any mixing of languages from different parts of the world with diverging climates (aus verschiedenen Himmels- und Erdstrichen) (ibid:18) utterly impossible. After the fall of the Babel Tower thousands of languages were created, each of which was in tune with the climate and the customs of the nations they belonged to. The cultures of antiquity are the stem of an original tree and the different nations that came into being after the fall of the Roman Empire its branches. The culture of the eighteenth century represents its light-flooded crown. Languages live through different stages of growth. In the course of this development, the spiritual and intellectual facul­ ties unfold in a plant-like manner. This uplifting evolution (Fortgang) towards the radiant realm of the abstract is complemented by a descending reverse motion towards the sensual and physical. Herder’s view of history is cyclical and contradicts the utopian idea of an endless linear progress typical of the Enlightenment (Trabant 2006:217–29). Herder proceeds on the assumption that despite the existence of different languages there are universal similarities and that their different syntactic structures are basically the same all over the world. This is a major difference with regard to the ensuing tradition of German linguistics that operates with language types each of which possesses its unique morphological and syntactical character. This theoretical shift was initiated by a speech that Sir William Jones (1746– 94) gave on February 2 1786 at the Asian Society. In his lecture, he argued that Latin, Greek, Gothic, Celtic and Old Persian most probably had Sanskrit as a common ancestor. The philological study of Sanskrit as a possible origin of many European languages was linked – especially in the Germany of the nineteenth century – to a general interest in Indian myths, along with romantic notions of an original language localized in a specific geographical homeland and connected with the superior Aryan race. “The arboreal model was crucial for the configuration of language within these ideologies and served to frame language in biological terms” (Bonfiglio 2010:142–3). The German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist and Indologist Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) argued for an understanding of languages based on the central dimension of their inner grammatical structure (Trabant 2006:240–4). This was also to be the main line of genealogic research. The basic assumption was that morphology, especially inflection, formed the core of the language system. This inaugurated a new fundamentally diachro­ nical and structural form of research that was followed up by Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp and August Schleicher and dominated German language studies throughout the nineteenth century. Instead of focusing on the multiplicity of languages, like Humboldt, these thinkers were trying to find and reconstruct the lost unity of German languages. The main focus of Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik (Comparative Grammar) – altogether six volumes published between 1833 and 1852 – was on the physiology of language. The cognitive and

Organic metaphors of language

35

dialogical aspect that were at the very centre of Humboldt’s project were not taken into consideration. In Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) (1808) Schlegel makes abundant use of organic and arboreal meta­ phors (Bonfiglio 2010:142–5). Chapter two deals extensively with the relationship of the different roots between Germanic, Italic, Persian and Greek. Schlegel understands language as a body with an infra- and a superstructure and com­ pares the genealogic method of comparative grammar to that of comparative anatomy. Both disciplines gain new insights from the study of the inner structure of the phenomena they deal with. Jacob Grimm (1822) takes up the same meta­ phor in the preface to his Deutsche Grammatik. Linguistic research operates by dismembering the body of language, by cutting deeply into its flesh and muscles. Its bones and sinews are an invitation for closer and more accurate examination. The cutting knife of analysis is also used for dissecting a single language stem into its different offshoots. The process of dissecting the organism of language con­ firms its thorough functionality as it presupposes that no useless parts will be found (Morpurgo Davies 1987:95). Schlegel differentiates between organic and mechanical languages. Organic languages like Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages are of the higher inflecting type and modify their roots internally. The second type modifies roots through affixation, particles and compounding. Inflected languages grow out of a single living root (lebendige Wurzel) which acts like a germ (Keim) that can expand into an organic web. Its genealogic structure makes it possible to retrace the grammatical gender of a word back to its very beginning. Mechanical lan­ guages, on the other hand, have sterile roots, lack the germ of living development and are more like unstructured heaps of atoms. Arbitrariness and confusion are the stigma of their shallowness. Bonfiglio speaks of a “romantic preoccupation with primordiality and genealogy” (Bonfiglio 2010:145) that calls for a model of interpretation centring on evolution and arboreal metaphors. Friedrich Schlegel’s brother August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), German poet, translator and critic, developed a morphology of three language types – languages with inflection – subdivided into synthetic and analytic languages – languages that use affixes and languages without any grammatical structure. Humboldt also used a tripartite system – inflected, agglutinative and isolating languages – considering the first type superior to the others (Benes 2008:59). Because of their specific method of symbolic designation, inflected languages favoured thought processes. In Humboldt’s view, however, this morphological and syntactical foundation could not be taken as a starting point for a typology of languages (Trabant 2006:244). Humboldt avoided language classifications since he considered each language a unique individual with a character of its own that was created and constantly recreated in the very act of speaking. The German linguist Franz Bopp (1791–1867) (Benes 2008:76–83) was pro­ foundly influenced by Schlegel’s book on the wisdom of India, which stimulated his interest in the sacred language of the Hindus (Trabant 2006:245–8). His main theoretical aim was to find proof that the whole family of the Indo-Germanic

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languages could be retraced to a singular origin. In Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in Comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic Language), pub­ lished in 1816, Bopp introduced a tripartite language typology: the Chinese type with bare roots, without any grammar and organism, the Sanskrit type with its monosyllabic roots that were capable of combination and the Semitic type with internally modifiable disyllabic roots from which to form words. For Bopp the organic quality of a language and its grammatical setup were closely linked. Because of this, the second family was deemed superior to the other two. For Bopp, languages were natural organic bodies (organische Naturkörper) that developed according to certain laws and contained an inner vital principle. Like living organisms languages came into being, developed, aged and gradu­ ally died in the end. In line with Jacob Grimm, Bopp defined earlier linguistic stages as more organic and more complete. In this sense, the Romanic daugh­ ters of Latin possessed a less organic setup than their mother. Lack of organi­ city was seen as a form of unfaithfulness to the origins. Language evolution led the body of language from an unadulterated initial stage – because of its clo­ seness to the original root – to more advanced stages until its death. The organic form was considered the extinct original form. Some languages whose present day setup had remained relatively unspoiled by evolution were called wurzelhaft, as they still possessed the characteristic of being rooted. Wrong or faulty linguistic developments, deviations, anomalies and even erratic excep­ tions were termed inorganic. With the German comparative philologist August Schleicher (1821–68), who was strongly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, the organic discourse on language reached a peak shortly before it was dismissed by the Leipzig group of linguists of the Neogrammarians (Bonfiglio 2010:160–5; Benes 2008:228–35). Contrary to his predecessors, Schleicher does not use the notion of organism in a metaphoric way. Languages have a material existence and lead a life of their own which is completely independent of the will of the individual speakers and the linguistic community. Because of this, they should not be studied from a philological point of view but from the perspective of the natural sciences. In the second chapter of Die Deutsche Sprache (The German Language) (1860), he defines languages as the highest of all natural organisms on the evolutionary scale. Languages make us human and express our most intimate nature. As all other natural organisms they possess a life that unfolds according to specific laws and can be subdivided into genera, species and varieties, that is, in families, dialects and subdialects or patois. As with previous organic views of language and language evolution, Schleicher argues that thanks to processes of ramification and re-ramification the entire Indo-Germanic speech family could be retraced to one single pri­ mitive form. The life of languages can be divided into a first pre-historical stage of growth and a second stage of degeneration that takes place in his­ torical times. Because of this, the birth and development of languages cannot

Organic metaphors of language

37

be studied directly but only through anatomy of the finished language organ­ isms. Due to its holistic quality, any language can be completely reconstructed from a single fragment. Schleicher uses organic terminology on different levels of argumentation: to describe language types, linguistic stages of evolution, single languages and the organic nature of single words (Wortorganismus). Verb roots are the cells of speech and do not contain the organs necessary for verbal and nominal forms. Their function can be compared to that of one celled-organisms which do not possess separate organs for digestion and respiration. Schleicher discusses the genealogic relationship between languages in terms of families, trees and bifurcating branches (chapter six). In Die Deutsche Sprache, he contrasts – like Friedrich Schlegel before him – inflected with isolating lan­ guages by opposing well-balanced organicity to the shapeless accumulation of single components. In inflected languages, the single components of the word fit organically together like the limbs of a body (Glieder eines Organismus). If one is absent the whole is destroyed. The superiority of Indo-European languages is also responsible for their sweeping success. Schleicher interprets the historical relationship between languages in terms of social-Darwinism. And it is again the organic metaphor that provides the winning argument. One of the main attri­ butes of plants is their capacity for continuous growth and expansion in favour­ able environments that provide enough space, as well as sufficient light and nourishment. Because of their natural superiority, their strength and capacity of adaptation Indo-European languages are the actual winners in the millenarian struggle for survival among the many competing languages. This view not only justifies the disappearance of other lesser languages and the subjugation of nonEuropean idioms in the colonies but is also to be seen as a part of German claims to territorial hegemony with regard to the European East, an ideological program that is summed up in the notion of Lebensraum.

4 On the diversity of languages A close reading of Humboldt’s use of organic metaphors in his description of language reveals a series of inner tensions with regard to multilingualism. In this respect, both Bonfiglio’s reading (2010:148–54) pointing to organicistic and nationalistic aspects and Trabant’s (2006:260–9) insistence on Humboldt’s unique theoretical position within German linguistics and role as a pioneer in the study of language diversity are both in themselves correct. Humboldt for­ mulated a theoretical program that was clearly ahead of its time focusing on synchronic aspects of linguistic diversity. His hermeneutics of language inter­ pretation set itself off from the diachronical and structural perspective of German comparative linguistics, which analysed linguistic phenomena in terms of cause and effect. The repercussions of his innovative theoretical approach – a sort of subterranean counter current – were to become apparent only in the course of the twentieth century in the work of Leo Weisgerber, Karl Vossler, Leo Spitzer, Edward Sapir, Franz Boas (chapter six), Ernst Cassirer,

38

Organic metaphors of language

and the Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), whose work on multilingualism I will discuss in more detail in chapters three and twelve. Trabant (1995:58) points to a double legacy: ‘project India’ and ‘project America’. The first project pursued by German comparative linguistics was searching for a primordial unity. It was an attempt to curtail and contain the disturbing multitude of languages by retracing its single origin before the fall of the Tower of Babel. The second project proceeding from Humboldt’s work was animated by the Pentecostal spirit of diversity. In Humboldt’s view (1998 and 2002), the starting point of analysis should always be the coexistence of a variety of languages each of which is intrinsically linked to a nation. One cannot exist and progress without the other. Humboldt does not use the term Nation in the modern European geopolitical sense of ‘nation-state’ alone, but as a synonym for a variety of human collectivities both in time and space: Volk, people, Völkerschaft, ethnic group or tribe, and Gemein­ schaft, community. The original meaning of ‘nation’ is not linked to the idea of territoriality but can be traced back to the Latin nationem, birth, origin, breed, race of people, tribe, that which has been born (natus). Even if the geopolitical sense has gradually become predominant across most European languages (and spread from there to the rest of the world) the earliest examples incline toward a more ethnic understanding of the term. In this sense, a nation is a large group of people with a common ancestry. According to Humboldt, both languages and nations emerge as a whole and have in every moment of their existence everything they need to make them whole. Neither languages nor nations can be traced back to their origin. The very question of their origin should be rejected as it lies out­ side the scope of scientific endeavour. The main question is how the different languages and their relation to nations evolve over time. Each community oper­ ates within the same framework but makes a unique contribution to humanity as a whole. It is the task of comparative language study to fathom the diversity (Mannigfaltigkeit) of language production across space and time. Although the metaphor of the linguistic organism plays an important role in Humboldt’s work it is embedded in a radically different philosophical context that is not based on system analysis but emphasizes the central unpredictable role of individual speakers and their creativity in the production of language (Holquist 2014; Cassin 2016:177–98). Furthermore, language always manifests itself as plurality and diversity. Cassin (2016:178) connects this multilingual a priori of Humboldt’s philosophy of language with his wavering oscillating theoretical stance that always tries to take more than one point of view into consideration. Languages are internally coherent organisms born from the need and the ability of people to communicate with each other. Linguistic changes are a result of language contact but originate above all in the dialogical behaviour of the speakers and the linguistic community to which they belong. This specific aspect links Humboldt’s endeavour to that of the theoreticians of polylingual languaging and metrolingualism discussed in the previous chapter. Humboldt describes languages as organisms mainly because they are living beings that grow, develop, and constantly change. In

Organic metaphors of language

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fact, language in its true form is always and in each moment something tem­ porary. Its meaning is generated by the collectivity of individual speakers who use words in their own personal way. Each tiny difference propagates through language like concentric circles on a body of water. Because of this, only a genetic and a tentative metaphorical approach that is aware of its limitations and shortcomings can lead to a true understanding of its ephemeral shifting character. The general impression of language (Totaleindruck der Sprache) is not given, but the result of the activity of the mind that connects its scattered elements into a mental unity. The idea of simultaneous wholeness and infinite internal variation is central to Humboldt’s understanding of language. At the same time, Humboldt makes use of a series of organic metaphors that allow for a different interpretation of his conception of language. These onto­ logical metaphors stress self-containment and unity at the expense of openness and inner variety and reveal an isomorphism between languages, nations and the individual speakers that can be found throughout Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species) (Humboldt 1998). Languages are inhabited in their innermost by a soul that animates their outer grammatical and lexical bodies and extends to all of their fibres. The individual character, which is ingrown (eingewachsen) (ibid:285) in each lan­ guage, becomes visible in the nation it belongs to. Nations and languages do not come into being separately but always appear and develop together. They are dependent on each other and generate each other. Language has a harmo­ nizing effect on the nation, which in turn imprints its seal on it. The main terms here are Gleichheit and Geichförmigkeit, sameness and homogeneity. The national character of a language is based on the continuity and uniformity of a community of descent (Gemeinschaft der Abstammung) which Humboldt also calls Naturanlage, natural disposition. Language can incorporate foreign ele­ ments and impose a specific national character on people with a different des­ cent. It can even continue to bloom in communities residing in two different nations. In fact, nations can be recognized more easily by their languages than by their customs and practices. From a language, one can easily deduce the character of a nation and an individual speaker. In Humboldt’s view, the fundamental diversity of languages is an invaluable asset as it leads to different worldviews that can enrich each other. Languages can only be truly understood when compared with each other. This notion of a seemingly unrestricted plurality, however, meets in his work with a series of the­ oretical strictures. The main focus is on self-contained languages that are clearly separated from each other and whose relationship is regulated by a hierarchic principle. Stronger languages have developed more consistently – they are the “happy fruit of … the proliferating language instinct (wuchernden Sprach­ triebes)” (ibid:280) – but the weaker ones have strayed from their path. Only inflectional languages bestow true inner cohesiveness to the word. Semitic lan­ guages are not consistent enough in this respect. There are also romanticized

40

Organic metaphors of language

visions of a speaker’s first language: the language of the fathers (vaterländische Sprache) possesses greater strength and intimacy than any foreign idiom. After a long absence from home the sudden magic of its sound – its most individual and unexplainable dimension – fills one with yearning, as if with the domestic domain one could also perceive a part of one’s own true self (ibid:186). Each national language draws an ancestral circle around the people to which it belongs and from which one can exit only by stepping into another circle (ibid:187). The metaphor of the circle, which gathers and draws the individual speakers of a community together, recalls the metaphor of the face. At the same time, this passage is one of the few that explicitly addresses the plurality of languages and the way these relate to each other. Humboldt describes this situation as a series of closed circles lying tightly next to each other. The terri­ tory of the single languages does not overlap. Each person is enclosed in a circle of his/her own. To move into an adjacent circle, that is, to learn another language has the advantage that one gains another point of view on the world (Weltansicht). This, however, is possible only to a certain degree, since one always carries one’s own world and perspective into the foreign language. The success in learning a new language can therefore never be perceived as com­ plete (nicht rein und unvollständig) (ibid:187). In German, a complete success is called ein reiner Erfolg, but here the word rein indirectly also refers to the intensity, vitality and purity of one’s first language, the mother-tongue, to which one is bound both through family and nation. Humboldt, thus, seems to suggest that true bilingualism is impossible (Bonfiglio 2010:151) and that the first language ultimately always holds sway, because of its deep enracination in our body, mind and soul. Humboldt discusses language contact and mixing on several occasions but mainly in connection with the evolution of single languages that tend to grow out of transitory phases by striving towards a new inner homogeneity and coherence. The downfall of Latin, for instance, was accompanied by a series of changes and by the addition of new linguistic blends (Mischungen) introduced by immigrant tribes. From these originated a new living germ that developed into the flourishing organisms of new languages (Humboldt 1998:168). Because of the uniqueness and originality of each language, linguistic crea­ tivity is discussed only within the framework of one national language at a time. Tellingly enough, one of the rare pages focusing on language mixing dis­ cusses the issue from the point of view of instrumentality. For Humboldt, lan­ guages are not instruments that we use to give meaning to things we already know, but the creative organ of thought. Languages have, therefore, a funda­ mentally cognitive significance. It is in this very sense that language diversity becomes important: each language creates a world of its own and allows for a different perspective. A purely instrumental use of language, however, would preclude this. When we use languages as instruments, we unilaterally stress the action to be carried out or the purely material aspect at the expense of the mental dimension. This happens, for instance, when we give someone the order to chop down a tree. Such a reductive use of language, continues Humboldt,

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does fortunately not exist among thinking and feeling people (ibid:293). This point of view, though, does not seem to apply to everyday code-switching. Here the instrumental use clearly prevails. As an example, Humboldt adduces the case of the lingua franca that was used as a means of communication in the ports of the Mediterranean Basin between people with different languages or dialects. Multilingual speakers, thus, seem not to be able to reach the higher levels of intellectual activity because they remain fundamentally attached to the material, instrumental side of language. This is possible only within the context of full-fledged languages, which in Humboldt’s view, however, do not necessarily have to be modern national languages.

3

Grotesque body images

This and the following chapter focus on corporeal metaphors of multi­ lingualism that question organic wholeness and stability, inner homogeneity and policed borders. Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque body of carnival (1984) can be interpreted as an insurgent metaphor of a possible social and linguistic community. It highlights heterogeneity, inner tensions and open, porous bor­ ders and articulates a vision of social change through a subversion of existing power structures. As the symbolic body of the people, the grotesque body of carnival celebrates the lower body stratum and the mixing of cultures and languages. In this context, metaphors of cooking and eating, devouring and digesting play a central role. In the following chapter, the perspective shifts from language as a system to individual speakers and their linguistic practices. On a metaphorical level, this corresponds to single body parts like the tongue and the eyes. Metaphors of the body as a homogeneous self-contained whole generally articulate an organicist vision of the world and tend to be used in an ideologi­ cal fashion. This is also the case with the language metaphors of the organism and the body. Totalizing views often serve a conservative political agenda that stresses unity at the expense of dissonance and conflict, especially in situations of social injustice and inequality. This was also one of the key functions of the body politic, the main metaphor for the state in the West from Plato’s Republic to pre-modern times (Guldin 2000). Each social group is mapped unto a body part or an organ: the ruling classes are generally attributed the upper part of the body (the head, the heart and the chest) and the lower classes the bottom (the belly, the bowels, the legs and the feet). This hierarchic reading of the human body justifies social differ­ ences as immutable, natural or god given. Conflicts are solved by reference to the interdependence of the single parts and the ensuing common interest. The fable of the belly in the version told by the Latin historian Livy is an example of this political agenda. The Roman consul Menenius Agrippa quelled an uprising of the plebs complaining about the idleness of the leading patrician class by telling them a fable about how the different body parts decided not to nourish the stomach anymore. After a certain time, the body became tired and unable to function. The belly, which in this specific instance is associated with

Grotesque body images

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the class in power, did serve a purpose after all that was vital to the whole organism. Since the body politic is above all seen as the reconciliation of the different social classes in the name of a common purpose its borders play a subordinate role. The main focus is on the inner structuring and the interrela­ tion of the single body parts. Danger to the state comes primarily from the inside, from the rebellious unruly members of the lower body stratum. Contrary to national languages that are set off against each other, the body politic of a specific nation is usually not compared to that of another. It is both a collective and an individual, generally ungendered body – often the figure of the king (Kantorowicz 2016) – and represents a universally valid model of political power beyond cultural and linguistic differences, at least in the European tradition. The enabling metaphor of the complete closed body that underlies both the metaphors of the body politic and the metaphor of language as an organism is constantly questioned by metaphors of separation, fragmentation, and dismemberment. These forces of disunion, however, are always grounded in wholeness. Unity and division presuppose each other. In this sense, body-imagery is fundamentally reversible. Dismemberment not only leads to fragmentation, it can also be a form of social and political renewal and give rise to a new revolutionary order of things (Guldin 2002). Finally, body metaphors define closed spaces, which can be described in terms of the relationship between top and bottom, inside and outside, as well as centre and periphery. I will come back to some of these aspects with regard to space metaphors in chapters eleven and twelve.

1 The grotesque polyphonic body of the novel Bakhtin questioned both the tradition of the hierarchical body politic and the organic metaphors of language discussed in the previous chapter. His criticism revolves around the two main interconnected insurgent metaphors of the col­ lective body of carnival and the multi-layered polyphonic space of the modern novel, which can be interpreted as two converging sides of the same phenom­ enon. The two metaphors comment and dialogically complement each other linking a series of aspects that range from social inequality and political power structures to diverging forms of culture and literature. They mix, merge, and in some instances even become metaphors of one another. In much the same way that the grotesque body is dual and intercorporeal, the space of the novel is hybrid and intertextual. Like the novel, the body cannot be conceived of out­ side a web of interrelations of which it is a living part. Both the grotesque body and the novel keep renewing themselves by transgressing their own limits. Both metaphors contradict the monolingual self-containment of national lan­ guages by emphasizing openness, inner heterogeneity and heterarchy, and the existence of a drive that counteracts forces of social and political control tending towards closure, homogeneity, hierarchy and centralization. The grotesque body and the novel are characterized by comparable centrifugal tendencies: the ten­ dency of the single body parts to reach beyond corporeal boundaries and the

44

Grotesque body images

propensity of the heteroglossic voices of the novel to break free from a significant nucleus. Both are open to the penetration of foreign elements from the pluralities surrounding them. A constant osmosis between the inside and the outside ensures that the grotesque body and the novel remain alive avoiding early sclerotization. And finally, both the grotesque body and the novel are permeated with the liber­ ating forces of laughter. They are boundary effacing phenomena in a continuous state of becoming and as such have yet to be completed: there is “no first word (no ideal word), and the final word has not yet been spoken” (Bakhtin 2006:31). With the novel, “epistemology becomes the dominant discipline” (ibid:15). The grotesque body of carnival and the multi-layered space of the novel are a double metaphor for the totality of the world seen as a social and linguistic multiplicity, and as such, they articulate a utopian vision of political plurality and cultural equality. Both are the arena for a constant fight that reaches down from the very top to the lowest level. The grotesque body and the novel are means for displaying otherness, make familiar relations strange and destroy lofty, pure, unmixed literary genres by degradation, contamination, pluraliza­ tion and mixing (Holquist 2002:89–90). Both draw attention to the fact that class-relations are always made and never simply given. ‘Carnivalization’ and ‘novelization’ (Bakhtin 2006:6) are parallel processes dissolving hierarchical unities by mixing higher and lower strata. In the case of the novel, this involves the creation of a stylistic three-dimensionality and a multi-layered conscious­ ness. In the multilingual world of the novel, the corporeal duality of the carni­ val makes its appearance in the form of the ‘double-voiced word’. All of Dostoevsky’s characters have at least two different voices and their doublevoiced discourse is characterized by a ‘dual directionality’ aiming both for the object and the other speaker/listener (Bakhtin 1993:186, 199). In Bakhtin’s vision, the grotesque body of the novel is a totality made up of scattered fragments from a plurality of worlds that are both outside and between all categories, “something like an immense novel, multi-generic, multi-styled … reflecting in all its fullness the heteroglossia and multiple voices of a given cul­ ture, people and epoch” (ibid:60). In the “mighty body of the novel” (ibid:372), in this “mirror of constantly evolving heteroglossia”, the ideological word of monolingualism is reflected as something “aging, dying, ripe for change and renewal” (ibid:60). These parallels between Bakhtin’s vision of the body and his concept of the novel reveal the profound unity of his thinking over the years. The novel is the great book of life celebrating the grotesque body of the world. Both the gro­ tesque body and the novel “militate against monadism, the illusion of closedoff bodies or isolated psyches in bourgeois individualism, and the concept of a pristine, closed-off, static identity and truth wherever it may be found” (Holquist 2002:90). In this regard, his book on the grotesque body images of carnival, Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin 1984), written between the late 1930s and 1940s and first published in Russian in 1968, is related in many ways to his studies on the novel, especially Discourse in the Novel written in 1934–5 (Bakhtin 2006:259–422). The same connection holds true for his book

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on the new polyphonic novels of Dostoevsky, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poe­ tics (Bakhtin 1993), which was originally published in 1929, and reedited as late as 1963 in a revised edition with the significant addition of a new chapter on carnival (Bakhtin 1993:101–80).

2 The dual body of carnival Bakhtin distinguishes between a classical and a grotesque body-canon. He speaks of a ‘new’, ‘modern’ and ‘classical canon’ as related historical imple­ mentations of the same tendency towards closure and homogeneity. The notion of canon is not to be understood in the narrow sense of a set of consciously established rules but in the wider sense of manners employed in the representa­ tion of the human body. Although the two canons are presented in a pure unmixed form, their actual historical manifestations are not immutable and fixed but in constant change, and linked to each other in a contrastive and dialogical way through “struggle, mutual influence, crossing and fusion” (Bakhtin 1984:30). By contrasting the two forms, Bakhtin does not intend to assert the supremacy of one over the other. The classical canon does not come first and is therefore not the norm, from which the grotesque diverges as a kind of second­ ary form. The two need and presuppose each other like the diastolic and systolic pressures of the human heart. The grotesque and the classical are connected to the contending centrifugal and centripetal forces that shape the life of languages. With these, they share a tendency for decentralization and disunification and centralization and unification, respectively. I will come back to this distinction in more detail in chapter twelve. Contrary to the grotesque symbolic and collective body of the people, the body of the new canon – like the organism of a national language – is a single entity, a self-sufficient individuality, in which the single body parts lose their autonomy. It is the body of an isolated individual cut off from the streams of biological and social life, the private body of the bourgeois ego separated from the world and the others. However, the classical body can also be interpreted as a collective entity, and in this sense, it can be linked to the metaphors of the body politic and the organism of language. Even if Bakhtin does not explicitly state this, his use of metaphors, which tends to telescope the social, political, cultural and linguistic dimensions, suggests such a possibility. In this respect, the connection between the grotesque body of carnival and the polyphonic space of the novel outlined before – which shows how the socio-political dimension is tied to the linguistic and cultural domain of a specific society at a specific moment in time – corresponds to the classical body and its two meto­ nymic complements the body politic and the organism of language. Bakhtin compares the two canons by resorting to the contrasting meta­ phors of the tree and the landscape. The new bodily canon … presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual.

46

Grotesque body images That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body trans­ gresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade. The opaque surface and the body’s ‘valleys’ acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed, as well as all the signs of its inner life. (ibid:320)

The metaphor of the grotesque body contradicts both the metaphor of the body politic and the organic conception of national languages. It subverts the hierarchic setup of the body politic, by stressing the importance of the lower bodily stratum, which is traditionally associated with the lower classes, and it questions boundaries insofar as it is not an isolated self-contained body com­ posed of single parts executing their functions, but an unfinished, hybrid body continuously outgrowing its limits. The classical and the grotesque body can be described in terms of chron­ otopes. According to Bakhtin, a chronotope is a time–space configuration that points to the intrinsic connection of temporal and spatial relationships. Like different literary genres or languages, chronotopes coexist, are interwoven or mutually inclusive. They can contradict, oppose or replace one another, and they can envelope or dominate other chronotopes. Relationships between chronotopes and within chronotopes are dialogical in nature (Renfrew 2015:112–28). Both the notions of chronotope and dialogue are fundamental for an understanding of the ways languages interact and influence each other. The chronotope of the grotesque body is based on dual time, which is the result of the fusion of past, present and future. Contrary to the organism of language whose existence, similarly to that of an individual body, is caught between the two distinct events of birth and death, the grotesque body is always situated on a threshold, it is both alive and dead, constantly dying and yet unfinished. To describe this temporal ambivalence Rabelais uses the paradoxical images of pregnant old age and birth-giving death (Bakhtin 1984:405). Like the body politic (Guldin 2011b), Bakhtin’s body of carnival is not explicitly gen­ dered, but constructed as a predominantly male domain. Despite the central role of metaphors of femininity in his description of the grotesque body and the use of metaphors of procreation that privilege the womb, Bakhtin tends to de-fem­ inize his corporeal tropes (Ginsburg 1993:168). If the organism of language described by comparative linguistics is based on a linear notion of time flowing from a singular origin, the grotesque body pre­ supposes a plurality of origins emanating from a cyclic understanding of time. The grotesque body exists in the act of the death of one body and the birth of another. “No longer is there one single body, nor are there as yet two” (ibid:26). This paradoxical structure uniting overdetermination to absence can also be found in the notion of liminality and the spatial metaphors of the threshold and the edge that I will discuss in more detail in chapter eight.

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The dual temporal form of the grotesque body is connected to other forms of duality. Bakhtin emphasizes the double tone of speaking that pervades the carnival (Renfrew 2015:129–44). “The ancient dual tone of speech is the sty­ listic reflection of the ancient dual-bodied image” (Bakhtin 1984:433). The Renaissance is characterized by a dual centrifugal tone engaging in a “tense struggle against the stabilizing tendencies of the official monotone” (ibid:433). Bakhtin also redefines the metaphor of the face in terms of duality. The dual face is a chronotope expressing the fundamental ambivalence of the grotesque body as such. It not only represents the contradictory ‘double-faced’ fullness of life but also the dual tone of the language spoken by the people. The idiom of the fish market in London is “a double faced Janus” (ibid:165). The medieval feast possesses two different faces, an official side turned towards the past and the existing order, and an unofficial side turned towards rebellion and social renewal (ibid:81). The ambivalent images of this world are “dual-bodied, dualfaced, pregnant. They combine in various proportions negation and affirma­ tion, the top and the bottom, abuse and praise” (ibid:409). The metaphor of the face is also used to describe the relationship between different languages. Rabelais’ “two-faced work” (ibid:108) originates in the different languages intersecting during the Renaissance. These languages engage in a silent dialo­ gical interaction, “a dual-tone speech” (ibid:434), in which each language finds itself reflected in the mirror of the other. The literature of the Renaissance and the modern novel were born on the boundaries of two languages. Literary and linguistic life was concentrated on these confines. An intense interorientation, interac­ tion, and mutual clarification of languages took place during that period. The two languages frankly and intensely peered into each other’s faces, and each became more aware of itself, of its potentialities and limitations, in the light of the other. … The line of demarcation between two cul­ tures – the official and the popular – was drawn along the line dividing Latin from the vernacular. The vernacular invaded all the spheres of ideology and expelled Latin … The intersection of the classic and medie­ val forms took place against the background of the modern world, which could fit neither the one nor the other. This world with all that was new threw light upon the face of Cicero’s Latin and disclosed a beautiful but dead face. (emphasis added) (ibid:465–7)

3 A topsy-turvy world The grotesque body of carnival is characterized by a subversion of social and linguistic hierarchies. The emphasis is on bodily apertures and protuberances: the mouth, the anus and the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the pot­ belly, the nose and the tongue. Contrary to Jacob Grimm’s vision of the body of language which highlights self-sufficiency, inner stability and functionality,

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the grotesque body (of language) is traversed by contradictory forces and animated by a spirit of renewal and rebirth that turns everything upside down and inside out. The interactions that take place at the borders are reversible and two-directional. The most important facial features are not the eyes, but the protruding nose and the gaping mouth. The grotesque is interested in that which “prolongs the body and links it to other bodies or to the world out­ side” (ibid:316–7). A special role is attributed to the tongue, which like Sal­ vatore’s, generally hangs out and dangles like that of a dog. All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body – all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. (ibid:317) Through this, the boundaries “between the body and the world are erased, leading to the fusion of the one with the other …” (ibid:310). The image of the grotesque body questions the closed self-sufficient organism of national languages and subverts the hierarchical vision of the body politic. Its parts become independent, transgress their limits, and playfully and provoca­ tively exchange places (Babcock 1978). In this topsy-turvy world, in which hier­ archies are constantly questioned and reshuffled the corporeal and spatial dichotomies of top and bottom, front and back, centre and periphery, inside and outside are continuously combined and recombined. The spinning wheel that conveys the lower body parts to the top and tosses the higher ones into the bodily abyss – one of the central images of the carnival – never comes to a halt. The buttocks take the place of the head and the face, high and low, top and bottom exchange their places. The single body parts can also attempt to detach them­ selves completely from the whole and lead an independent life of their own, redefining “the rest of the body, as something secondary” (Bakhtin 1984:317). Even if the grotesque body keeps outgrowing itself, it never disintegrates com­ pletely. Dismemberment is a dual ambivalent process associated with sickness and death but also with eating and drinking and life itself. The dissected body is placed in the context of “profane culinary dismemberment” (Bakhtin 1984:195) and tied “into one grotesque knot” (ibid:222) with slaughter, disembowelment, roasting, burning, and swallowing. Carnivalistic anatomy differs from the comparative anatomy of comparative linguistics because of its dual nature and because it is metaphorically tied to forms of socio-political protest. In the parodistic story of the dying ass who bequeaths the single parts of his body to the various social and pro­ fessional groups the integrity and authority of the body politic is made fun of. The

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dismemberment “corresponds to the divisions of the social hierarchy: the ass’s head is for the Pope, the ears for the cardinals, the voice for the choir, the feces for the peasants … This is a travesty of the widespread mythical concept of the origin of various social groups from various parts of a god’s body” (ibid:351). The culinary metaphors of dismembering, devouring and digesting belong to the ambivalent world of the lower body stratum. This is both a space with various topographical connotations and an active dual driving force that negates and affirms, destroys and regenerates at the same time. Within the grotesque body, it is the zone of the indecent reproductive genital organs, a liminal space between grave and bosom, death and life. It is also the fulcrum around which the entire system of the universe of Rabelaisian images turns. The lower body stratum is linked to the liberating forces of laughter, which degrade the convictions, and beliefs of the higher reaches of society revealing their hidden ephemeral material side. The differentiation into higher and lower layers of society, along a vertical axis, which corresponds to the two body strata, finds its expression in the separation of literary genres. Bakhtin, who combines a socio-political with a literary perspec­ tive, calls it a ‘hierarchy of genres’ (Bakhtin 1984:64–5). In this way, society, body, the literary world and the different languages spoken within a specific socio­ political context are metaphorically analogous to each other. These four related realities can be described with the help of the three interpretative axes suggested by Blommaert, Leppänen and Spotti (2012). The predominant culture defines the subordinate part of society in terms of disorder, impurity and abnormality. Lan­ guage separation and language mixing have thus to be placed in a much larger socio-cultural and historical context that extends well beyond the world of nations and national languages of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century reaching back into Classical Antiquity. I will come back to the metaphorical connection of style and language segregation and its relevance within the Eur­ opean tradition in chapter twelve. The fixed hierarchic system of genres of classical aesthetics is questioned and subverted by a ‘generic principle’ that will ultimately abolish all separations of genre through novelization and dialogization. Genre is not only a literary phe­ nomenon. It is present and significant in all spheres of speech interaction. The dif­ ferent types of genres, discourses and languages are arranged in a fluid continuum (Renfrew 2015:145–57). Within the hierarchy of genres, the grotesque occupies the lowest place that lies almost outside the realm of the literary. The higher exalted official genres (tragedy and poetry) are characterized by the “sanctimonious ser­ iousness” (Bakhtin 1984:285) of high speculation whereas the lower unofficial genres of grotesque realism (parody, travesty, comedy, mock rhetoric, satire and fable) cultivate laughter and degrade their subject by bringing it down to earth and turning it into flesh. The lower body stratum and the forms of grotesque realism are both characterized by their ambivalence and dual nature, which deny the mono­ tone of the higher genre. The twofold dichotomy postulated by the aesthetics of the higher literary register – linguistic and stylistic purity, as well as adequacy of con­ tent – is playfully inverted by the grotesque aesthetics of the lower literary forms, which aim for thematic contamination couched in a multilingual style.

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The clear-cut division between higher official forms of literature and various grotesque forms of the marketplace was upheld in Classical Antiquity and during the Middle Ages, but gradually disappeared in the late Middle Ages when the lower genres began to penetrate the higher levels of literature. Rabe­ lais’ work testifies to these radical changes that, however, were not of long duration. In the early sixteenth century, the French poets of La Pléiade took up the idea of a hierarchy of genres from Classical Antiquity. In the seventeenth century, characterized by the new political order of absolute monarchy, the aesthetics of Neoclassicism and Descartes’ rationalist philosophy, a full-fledged hierarchy of genres was established. In this new context, the ambivalence of the grotesque was no longer admitted and laughter as an expression of inferior social classes descended to the lowest levels of genre hierarchy. The higher genres were purged of the influences of the grotesque tradition of laughter, which was reduced to simple humour, irony and sarcasm. For classical aesthetics upsetting the dividing lines between bodies and objects, animal and man – or different languages for that matter – can only lead to monstrous mixtures like the extraordinary grotesque creatures that were particularly popular during the Middle Ages and recall Herder’s Cer­ berus and Salvatore’s patched-up face: Some of them are half-human, half-animal: the hippopods with hoofs instead of feet, sirens with fishtails, ‘sinucephalics’ who bark like dogs, satyrs, and onocentaurs [part human and part donkey] … an entire gal­ lery of images with bodies of mixed parts … giants, dwarfs, and pygmies [and] various monsters: the ‘scipedes’ who have only one leg, ‘leumans’ without a head and with a face on the chest, cyclopes with one eye on the forehead, others with eyes on their shoulders or on their backs, creatures with six arms, and others who feed through their noses … (ibid:345) Defamiliarization is one of the main tenets of classical rhetoric but only in an intralinguistic sense. “Words that are conceived of with the help of foreign languages or by mixing languages are perceived as double- and many-tongued monsters (vielzüngige Monster). Foreign words are considered ‘barbaric’ … they violate the imperatives of puritas and perspicuitas …” (Knauth 2009:139).

4 Culinary metaphors Knauth posits a direct link between Bakhtin’s culture of carnival and the phenomenon of language mixing (Sprachmischung) and places it in the sati­ rical tradition of macaronic poetry (Knauth 1991; Forster 1968:14). Bakhtin himself, mentions the picaresque narrative poem Baldo (1517), written by the Italian poet Teofilo Folengo (1491–1544) – one of the major representatives of the macaronic tradition and its “edible metaphors” (Bakhtin 1984:299) – but deems that its influence on Rabelais’s work was minor.

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Macaronic poetry was originally born in Padua and from there spread to Lombardy and Piedmont. Another centre developed in Occitania, around Avignon. The first forms were based on Küchenlatein (latinitas culinaria), also called mock or Dog Latin and latinus grossus, a mixture of Latin and every­ day speech used by the learned urban bureaucracy as a lingua franca to communicate with people without a classical education. In the first phase of macaronic Latin, the parody of the learned language (lingua dotta) and the transgressive lewd intent clearly prevailed. Stylistic and linguistic mistakes in the use of Latin were canonized and the classical hexameter substituted the rhythmic structures of vernacular poetry. Linguistic parody was not achieved by simple juxtaposition of High Latin and low vernacular (volgare), but through a complex interference of two languages and their respective stylistic registers. The vernacular words introduced into Latin were given Latin end­ ings and followed Latin sentence construction. Folengo practically reinvented macaronic poetry both with regard to form and content matter. The scatological imagery of the early phase was super­ seded by gastronomical metaphors. The corporeal context was preserved, the semantic interferences were enhanced, and the role of the classical hexameter was redefined. This led to the development of a kind of macaronic grammar. However, the differences between the higher and lower registers and those between Latin on the one hand, and the vernacular and the local dialects on the other was tempered. These changes also went hand in hand with greater fidelity to the classical and humanistic tradition. Folengo transformed macaronic poetry into a refined form of art on the intersection of three lan­ guages, that is, of three culinary ingredients: Latin, vernacular and macaronic. Because of this, he called himself “Triperuno” (three for one). In the tradition of macaronic poetry, cooking and banquet scenes play a considerable part (Knauth 1991:48–9). In polyglot comedies, congealed lin­ guistic situations are satirized, and single languages masquerade beyond recognition allowing for surprising new possibilities of conceiving their iden­ tity. According to Knauth, the macaronic poets were the first to develop a polyglot notion of style based on burlesque performances. The language of macaronic writing operates with culinary metaphors that focus on the pre­ paration and consumption of food. To trigger macaronic inspiration the Muses, who have previously stuffed themselves with noodles, prepare an abundant plate of pasta to induce the poet to write a multilingual poem. Cooking and writing are metaphorically linked: the mixing of pasta dishes corresponds to the mixing of languages in macaronic literature. The literary inspiration produced by the consumption of the simple food of the lower social classes is to be understood as a direct parody of the refined nectar of the gods, the mystical ambrosia that provides an inspiration of a completely different kind. The word ‘macaronic’ comes from macarones, a dough made of flour, cheese and butter, a thick, coarse and rustic meal, comparable to gnocchi. As Folengo puts it in Liber Macaronices (The Book of Macaronics) (1517), macaronic poems contain nothing but fat, coarseness and gross words (Wenzel

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1994:3). A related culinary metaphor of multilingualism is that of the soup. The single chunks of macaronic language are fished out of a composite lagus suppae (Knauth 2004:82). This playful mixing of styles and languages violating the Classical imperative of purity must be placed in the wider cultural context of sixteenth-century Italy. In 1572, was founded the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, the first language association of its kind in Europe. The academy pursued an elitist archaizing agenda. Its aim was to ensure the purity of language by discarding foreign unwanted elements. Interestingly enough, this was captured in the nutritional metaphor of the miller who was to safeguard the high quality of the flour used for baking by separating the wheat from the bran husks (crusca) (Thomas 1991:20). Related corporeal metaphors that also played a role within the poli­ tical discourse of the time – associating the body politic to the body of language – were that of the physician who cut off diseased limbs of the body of language in order to prevent further infection or facilitated the evacuation of the afflicted bowels by administering an aperient (ibid:22). In the second half of the sixteenth century, the new socio-political situation brought about by Counter Reformation led to renewed attempts to separate the different languages. Macaronic poetry is also cognate with the multimodal genre of the Ensalada (salad, mishmash) (Knauth 1991:49), a polyphonic, secular form of music from the Renaissance. The term goes back to the vocal composition Las Ensaladas de Flecha (1581), by the Catalan musician Mateu Fletxa el Jove (Mateo Flecha the Younger) (1530–1604). The onomatopoeic word ‘mishmash’, confused mixture, hodgepodge, is a duplication of mash (late fifteenth century), to reduce food to a pulpy mass by crushing it. This cooking metaphor is well in tune with Bakhtin’s vision of duality as a powerful, challenging principle cap­ able of fissuring and cracking up the self-contained unity of (national) lan­ guages. Playful multilingualism bursts the monolingual bubble of self-centred worldviews and upsets the ontological security associated with it. Ensaladas bring characters from different countries together, and mix lan­ guages (Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Italian) and dialects with light-hearted, humorous musical compositions, which in turn combine differ­ ent melodies, rhythms and meters in counterpoint (Knauth 2007:4–6). The genre mixes official with popular culture by juxtaposing high and low stylistic registers: lines from popular street songs, proverbs, riddles, nursery rhymes, and Biblical or liturgical Latin phrases. Bakhtin mentions the parodistic macaronic prayers of the “épîtres farcies”, which combine a sacred Latin text with a French translation or paraphrase. The French farce, from Latin farsa, farcire, to fill, to stuff, means both mockery and stuffing, and is, in this sense, also a culinary metaphor. The same description is also used for comic inter­ ludes stuffed into religious plays. These texts are intentionally dialogized and bilingual and aim for a lowering of the lofty ecclesial register. Through car­ nivalization they create “a laughing double” (Bakhtin 2006:75–8). The culinary metaphor of the salad has also been used more recently by the Italian writer and translator Giulia Niccolai (1934–) for her 12 polylingual

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“E.V. Ballads” published in 1975–7, an insalata linguistica Russa in four lan­ guages: Italian, French, German and English (Knauth 1991:49). The meta­ phor of the Russian salad which consists of diced carrots, boiled potatoes, eggs, green peas and sometimes chicken, and ham with a mayonnaise sauce suggests visible heterogeneity through juxtaposition of single discreet elements. Culinary metaphors of multilingualism can be found in many other cultural contexts (Bragard 2008:188–203). In the Indo-Trinidadian culture the mixing of ingredients, the blending of spices and the combination of different culinary traditions is summed up in the notion of massalification – from the Hindi - - मसाला, spice mixing. This dialogue of spices is a culinary metaphor for masala linguistic practices of creolization. The term is also associated with the magical powers of women and belongs to a fundamentally feminine aesthetics. A culinary metaphor based on a notion of cultural and linguistic untran­ slatability is Gómez-Peña’s “menudo chowder” often quoted in post-colonial literature since its first mention in Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (2006:313), but generally without any detailed description of its complex mul­ ticultural implications. Gómez-Peña is a Chicano performance artist, writer and activist who was born in 1955 in Mexico City where he studied Latin American literature and linguistics. He moved to the United States in 1978 where he studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Most of his inter­ disciplinary artistic work deals with intercultural exchanges and the borderline between Mexico and the United States, and more generally between the South and the North. This is also the case with his metaphor of the menudo chowder. Menudo is a traditional Mexican soup made with beef tripe in a broth with a red chili pepper base to which are added hominy, lime, coriander, chopped raw onions and oregano. It is a time-intensive dish to prepare and generally served for family occasions like weddings. There are several regional variations. Chow­ der, on the other hand, is a fish soup or stew made with seafood or clams and vegetables, often with milk or cream added. It is an easy to prepare shipboard dish, brought to North America by the immigrants from France and England. A possible origin of the word could be the French chaudron (cauldron) a large metal pot used for cooking over an open fire. The menudo chowder is, thus, a polycultural polylingual dish combining meat and fish, spicy and bland flavours, a fusion of the Mexican, North American and European cooking tradition, half­ way between the land and the sea, the peasant and the sailor. Gómez-Peña introduces the metaphor of the menudo chowder to question the monocultural metaphor of the melting pot that emerged in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the fusion of different nationalities, ethnicities, cultures and idioms into a homogeneous whole. In the metaphor of the melting pot, the single components are forcefully fused into each other at high temperatures in a process similar to that of a crucible, caul­ dron or blast-furnace. Gómez-Peña’s critique of the melting pot comes in two significant variations. “The bankrupt notion of melting pot has been replaced by a model that is more germane to the times, that of the menudo chowder.

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According to this model the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to float” (Gómez-Peña 1992:74). The second, slightly differ­ ent passage can be found in Dangerous Border Crossers: “I know … the promise of the melting plot (sic) was strictly meant for ‘white’ immigrants. In fact, the melting plot … was more like a menudo chowder, where some stubborn chunks (Asians, Blacks, Latinos & Native Americans) were condemned merely to float” (Gómez-Peña 2000:59). The shift from pot to plot not only conveys a dynamic meaning to the metaphor but also suggests a historical narrative with a hidden dimension. The stubborn chunks are now clearly named unveiling the ideologi­ cal intent and the ethnic bias that animates the metaphor. They prove that not all components can be fully translated and completely assimilated into the same dominant culture/language. In this sense, they ultimately prevent a synthesis into an all-embracing coherent narrative, a “totalizing, transcendent identity” (Bhabha 2006:313). The non-assimilable incommensurable pieces are con­ demned to float but their status remains ambivalent. Their very stubbornness suggests that they are more than just victims. As Bhabha puts it: “Hybrid hyphenations … as the basis for cultural identities … an interstitial future that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the need of the present”. Their refractory rebellious nature, their very untranslatability can become the starting point for new “differential identities” (ibid.). The last example I want to discuss here is from the Caribbean. The historical anthropologist Viranjini Munasinghe (2001:40–1) discusses the use of culinary metaphors in connection with the two contrasting but complementary Trini­ dadian narratives of the tossed salad and the callaloo. The first metaphor stresses the continuity of ancestral diversity within a plural cosmopolitan society, the second focuses on the mixing, blending and homogenizing of dif­ ferent cultural, racial and linguistic ingredients that takes place in creolization. In a tossed salad, each piece of lettuce, tomato or cucumber retains its identity and colour. All ingredients maintain their distinctive flavour despite being mixed with other ingredients. Furthermore, the tossing introduces a moment of chance and unpredictability, which also plays a central role in Glissant’s understanding of creolization (chapter thirteen). Callaloo, on the other hand, is a meatless dish using only salad and vegetable greens that originated in the old world, but has taken root locally. The ingredients are metonymically and metaphorically linked to the different ethnicities, cultures and languages of Trinidad. In the callaloo, which is of West African origin, all ingredients are boiled to a homogeneous mush and finally mashed with the help of a stick. Besides spinach bhaji, pumpkin, ochroes, celery, a bundle of chives, chopped onions, garlic, pimento pepper and Chadon beni – which has a flavour similar to coriander but more pungent – coconut milk is added. The final result is a thick broth of greenish-white colour with a complex but homogeneous taste that can be eaten as a soup or together with white rice. The tossed salad and the callaloo articulate two extremes of the culinary metaphor: agglutination and synthesis. On the one hand, there is a juxtaposi­ tion of heterogeneous linguistic elements that do not dissolve, and do not lose

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their identity or original flavour, and on the other, a combination of elements that change shape and meaning in the process. Both versions, however, imply a notion of incompleteness and the possibility of adding new ingredients at will, as in the metaphor of the expanding network. Metaphors of cooking do not focus on single languages but on individual practice, creativity and the rela­ tionship of different linguistic components. However, food imagery is also linked to inequalities and tensions and often the dimension of social power is not made visible enough. This is not the case with the metaphor of the menudo chowder and its stubborn chunks or with macaronic poetry, which both imply a form of social criticism. In the next section, I will focus on the corporeal metaphors of devouring and digesting starting out with an example that com­ ments and complements Gómez-Peña’s metaphor of the menudo chowder.

5 Devouring and digesting A particularly interesting example of the devouring and digesting metaphor in connection with an organic conception of language can be found in the essay A dúvida (On Doubt) written in the mid-1960s by the Czech-Brazilian writer and philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–91). The intake of new linguistic elements into a given system is described in terms of an amoeba feeding on its sur­ roundings (2014:54–5). Devouring and digesting are portrayed as a quiet slow process of absorption and osmosis. The amoeba sends out a conquering pseu­ dopod, which engulfs the foreign element in a vacuole. The foreign element is now part of the amoeba, even if it has not yet been incorporated into its metabolism. Thereupon, the vacuole begins to transform the new element into amoebic protoplasm in order to absorb it completely. However, some of the foreign elements refuse to become fully integrated into the body of the amoeba and remain undigested. These unassimilable bodies represent a constant chal­ lenge to the unity and homogeneity of the system that tries to break them down further but without any success. By doing this, though, new unsuspected crea­ tive forces are activated. A quartz crystal, writes Flusser, can be encapsulated within a vacuole, but cannot be digested by the amoeba. All contractions of the vacuole are in vain, the crystal will always remain a foreign body within its protoplasm: a mineral version of Gómez-Peña’s stubborn chunks. It would be best to expel the foreign body, were it not that the crystal serves as a stimulant or catalyst for further metabolic processes. Flusser’s organic metaphor of lan­ guage change and growth can be interpreted as a comment on language con­ tact and interaction. The irreducible thorn is an untranslatable element forcing the receiving target-language to make an extra effort of assimilation, cir­ cumventing the foreign substance without eliminating it through total absorp­ tion. Indigestibility and untranslatability question the homogeneous quality of language systems adumbrating the possibility of expanding these systems from the inside thanks to osmotic exchanges with neighbouring languages. Flusser’s metaphor of the amoeba can be read as an illustration of Adorno’s understanding of foreign-derived words. In “On the Use of Foreign Words”

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written in the final years of the Weimar Republic, Adorno highlights their importance in the battle against linguistic purism and organic monolingual conceptions of language. Foreign-derived words are a dangerously upsetting “incursion of freedom” into the self-contained body of language. They shatter man’s “dreary imprisonment in preconceived language” (Adorno 1991a:289) by showing possible flight paths out of the stifling embrace of the mothertongue. Their explosive force resides in their very foreignness, which should not be eschewed or excised but released and made productive. A writer can take advantage of the creative tension arising between a language and a foreign word inserted into it. Foreign-derived words fundamentally question immanent organic conceptions of language. Languages do not possess a life of their own in the strict sense of the word. They do not know birth, growth and death. Like Flusser, Adorno compares foreign-derived words to crystals, because of their artificial, non-organic quality and their transparent beauty. Crystals are “hard”, and “unyielding”, they do not “seamlessly” dissolve into the homo­ geneous flow of the “stream of language”. Because of their untranslatability, they cannot be digested and assimilated into the body of language (ibid:286–8). Flusser developed the metaphor of the amoeba within the context of Brazi­ lian anthropophagy, which was initiated by the modernist writer Oswald de Andrade. In May 1928, Andrade published a ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ in the first number of his Revista de Antropofagia. He used cannibalism as a verbal weapon to replace the image of the passive and submissive Indian with that of the aggressive and rebellious cannibal (Guldin 2008 and Vieira 1994). The Brazilian poet, critic, translator and professor Haroldo de Campos (1929– 2003) took up the metaphor in the essay “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration” (1986), where he defines devoration and masti­ cation as a universal law of a rapidly connecting global network. Global can­ nibalism is a form of syncretism and eclecticism that collapses simple dichotomies between industrialized and underdeveloped countries. As culinary metaphors, the metaphors of devoration and digestion have a long trans-historical and trans-cultural tradition. The French poet Joachim du Bellay, as we have previously seen, made use of the metaphor of devoration to describe the assimilation of Greek culture and literature by the Roman authors as a model for the French appropriation of earlier literary models in the six­ teenth century. Pascale Casanova pointed to a similarity between du Bellay, Brazilian anthropophagy and the notion of translation as devoration in German Romanticism (2008:87). In 1946, The French sociologist and anthro­ pologist Roger Bastide (1898–1974) compared the cultural agenda of the French poets of La Pléiade to the modernist Brazilian anthropophagy of Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma (Casanova 2008:88). Bao Yumiao (2016) points to the use of a similar metaphor in the work of the Chinese literary critic and poet Wu Mi (1894–1978). In his discussion of the relationship between imitation, translation and literary creation, Wu Mi points to a smooth form of transition between imitation and creation. In the essay, “On Correct Methods” (1923), which focuses on literary creation as a form of

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imitating and assimilating masterpieces from other cultural and linguistic tra­ ditions, he distinguishes between three stages: imitation, internalization (ron­ ghua 融化) and creation. The word rong in ronghua means to melt or to fuse. The word hua by itself denotes changes in form or nature, and the word xiao­ hua (消化) to digest. Internalization, thus, means to reach a full understanding through digestion.

4

Body parts: tongues and eyes

The focus of this chapter is on single body parts and their use as metaphors for multilingualism. Leaving the field of the well-organized, hierarchically struc­ tured body allows for a more subjective view of language inspired by practical uses and various forms of creativity. At the same time, as the following exam­ ples will show, single body parts can also represent a unified whole, reintrodu­ cing the notion of a mother-tongue that can be lost or acquired in its entirety. The contrasting and complementary metaphors of the tongue and the eye articulate a twofold vision of multilingualism both as a shifting plural form of speaking and as a new way of looking at the world. If the tongue is centred on the question of articulation and expression, the eye primarily revolves around perception and cognition. Both metaphors can question the static unity of the organic system through mobility and plurality. Tongues are flexible; they can easily twist and turn this way and the other. Furthermore, the tongue can adapt to any kind of language and thus articulate a whole array of diverse sub­ jectivities. On the other hand, eyes allow to shift from one perspective to the other and to move back and forth between diverging points of view. In the eyes of a foreign language, the mother-tongue reveals unexpected dimensions. This technique of critical distancing always works both ways. With each language, one grows a new pair of eyes and can acquire a different understanding of oneself and the world. In the case of the tongue, the transition from one lan­ guage to another is fluid. With the eye, the differences stand out.

1 The unruly member In his postcolonial novel Morenga, the German writer Uwe Timm tells the story of the Herero and Namaqua uprising against the German colonial power that took place in Namibia from 1904 to 1907. The main character, the veterinarian Gottschalk, who witnesses the brutality of the German troops against the indi­ genous population slowly turns toward the other culture and in the end embraces its cause. In this context, the language of the Nama embodies all that which is not liveable within the conservative authoritarian world of Wilhelmine Germany. The changes that the Germans undergo in the foreign culture are described as a re­ education of their tongue. In a number of South-African languages, consonantal

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click-sounds occur, this is also the case with Nama. Compared to German and seen from afar, this characteristic looks like its most exotic attribute. Gottschalk associates the constraints of his upbringing with the German language. To speak Nama the European tongue has to break loose from its constrictions. When he switches from German to Nama, his phlegmatic tongue has to turn into an equestrian that flies effortlessly over ditches and brush fences with a series of small click-clack sounds (Timm 1985:47). Significantly enough, in German, the specific national or regional accent of a person is called Zungenschlag, literally a jab or punch of the tongue. As this example shows, the tongue plays an important role in language change. It links the act of speaking to the body. The semantic field of the metaphor of the tongue covers a wide territory that reaches from the linguistic, to the corporeal, sexual and moral domain. The tongue is an ambivalent, both powerful and vulnerable member, related to eating and speaking that joins the word to the flesh and matter to meaning. It is not only a synecdoche for the body as a whole but also a metonymy for language. As an importer and exporter it is the only muscle capable of two contrary motions, it can pull in both directions at once, advancing and retiring at will. The duplicities of language spring from its duality as both subject and object. The tongue is the very site upon which “anxieties about language, agency and the articulation of selves are powerfully cathected” (Mazzio 1997:68). One can “locate the root of discursive instability in the tongue itself … rendering vulnerable that which is threatening [and] rendering concrete, singular and detachable that which is elu­ sive, abstract, and capable of endless multiplication. The localization of discourse in the organ of speech, in other words, enables … the fantasy of control” (ibid:65). As an autonomous mobile organ of speech operating at the boundaries of the body the tongue possesses a deconstructive, disruptive potential that can alienate it from the interior (the heart) and the body as a whole. The tongue is an unruly member that is always already dismembered threatening the distinc­ tion between the classical and the grotesque body, which is based on the dif­ ference between fixed functional roles and the possibility of exchanging places. Like the belly, the tongue does not seem to know its place. Since it does not have a double, unlike the lips and the eyes, it defies bodily symmetry. Because of its association with the phallus, the other unruly member of the male body capable of transgressing its limits, its loss is often linked to death. This is an aspect that takes up a central position in Elias Canetti’s autobiography, which I will discuss in the following section. Mazzio emphasizes the endlessly protean character of the tongue, which is directly linked to its promiscuous nature, as it dares to have intercourse with any man or woman it likes, that is, to turn this way and that, speaking different languages at will. To have control of language one must first discipline the tongue. The teeth generally take up this castigating function. One can bite one’s tongue when it gets too cheeky. The teeth restrain the tongue and are the rampart that seals the mouth like a wall. The mouth is the prison house of language, a war zone where the slipperiness and duplicity of the tongue and the solidity and steadfastness of the teeth are in perennial combat (ibid:66–7).

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The fundamental ambivalence of the tongue as body part and as a metonymy of language is captured in idiomatic expressions that describe communication intentions in terms of corporeality. If something that you want to say is ‘on the tip of your tongue’, you cannot recall it correctly at the moment, but know that you will be able to remember it presently. Tongues are sharp and can cut like a knife. If you give someone ‘a tongue-lashing’, you speak angrily to that person about something that they have done wrong. If you are ‘tongue-tied’ you are too shy or embarrassed to speak. Finally, to speak with a ‘forked tongue’ and to be ‘two­ tongued’, or ‘double-tongued’ means to be hypocritical, to tell lies or say one thing and mean something else. In Latin Cerberus was called trilinguis, triple­ tongued. Double-tongued means to speak a jumble of languages, or to be bilin­ gual, to speak two languages, from Latin bilinguis. This connection is particularly telling because it draws a direct connection between monolingualism and hon­ esty, on the one hand, and multilingualism and deceitfulness on the other. Within literary theory, the ambivalent motif of the tongue, as body part, sexual organ and language, often appears in the titles of books or essays dealing with multilingualism but most of the time the corporeal metaphor is not addressed in detail. In “‘With a Tongue Forked in Two’: Translingual Arab wri­ ters in Israel”, Michal Tannenbaum discusses the work of the Druze novelist and poet Salman Masalha (1953–) who belongs to an Arab minority in Israel but writes in Hebrew. In one of his poems, Masalha links the forked tongue to a dual identity, one Arabic to keep the memory of his mother alive and the other Hebrew to experience love on a winter’s night (Tannenbaum 2014:108–9). In “Poets of Bifurcated Tongues, or on the Plurilingualism of Canadian-Hungarian Poets”, Katalin Kürtösi focuses on the work of the Hungarian writer György Vitéz who left Hungary for Canada in 1956. Significantly enough, Vitéz uses the metaphor of the “bifurcated tongue” in one of his Hungarian poems as a quote from another text. Kürtösi suggest three different readings of the trope: the necessity of using a foreign tongue in everyday activities while still speaking one’s mother-tongue at home; losing contact with the native tongue; abusing language in the sense given to this trope by the American Indians (1993:116–7). One of the few authors explicitly dealing with the metaphorical implications of the tongue is Georg Lang. His Entwisted Tongues. Comparative Creole Lit­ erature begins with a significant quotation linking the tongue to transgression and highlighting the fact that linguistic prejudices attached to creoles, are not a strictly European phenomenon. “The blacks”, writes the eleventh-century Andalusian Arab geographer and historian Al-Bakri quoted in the beginning, “have mutilated our beautiful language and spoiled its eloquence with their twisted tongues” (Lang 2000:1). Lang who describes his work on the multiplicity and vivacity of creoles as a falling “into the entanglement of tongues” (ibid: vii) points, in the programmatic title of his book, to the ambivalences of the word ‘to twist’ in connection with the tongue and its use in multilingual speech. To twist means to twine, to wring, to spin two or more strands of yarn into a thread, but also to move in a winding fashion, to argue, to dispute. Twisted means both intertwined and perverted, mentally deranged. ‘Entwisted tongues’ are thus

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clearly opposed to ‘twisted tongues’, they do not necessarily deceive, mislead or separate, but connect, enlace and wreathe round. Speaking in multiple tongues generates different, sometimes contrasting perspectives on the world, this can be unsettling and dispersive, but more often than not, the experience of linguistic incommensurateness leads to the discovery of new surprising connections. In German ‘language’ (Sprache) and ‘tongue’ (Zunge) are semantically separated, however, the word Zunge still retains some of the ambivalence of the word in English and the Romance languages. Speaking in tongues is translated as Zungenreden or in Zungen reden and to speak in a foreign language as in einer fremden Zunge reden. Being bilingual implies, thus, having a bifurcated or forked tongue eine gespaltene Zunge. The linguistic separation goes right through the middle of the tongue, Mitten durch die Zunge (Busch and Busch 2008). Alfons Knauth discusses the possibilities of an interlingual rhetoric in terms of a birth of the tongue, a Zungengeburt (2009). Sandra Vlasta proposes a sustained analysis of the motif of the tongue in Dimitré Dinev’s novel Engelszungen (Tongues of Angels) (2016:92–102) which covers a wide range of meanings: the tongue as pre-verbal organ, an organ of speech and non-speak­ ing, a sensual organ, both in sexual and culinary terms, and finally as a part of the body that can be cut out and worn around the neck on a string. In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) by the Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston, a mother slits her child’s lingual frenulum to enable her to become bilingual. In this way, she will be able to speak any language (Vlasta 2016:92). The small membrane that extends from the floor of the mouth to the underside of the tongue is interpreted, here, as a tie anchoring the tongue and stopping it from moving freely in all directions. Another example that highlights the corporeality of the tongue and thereby the physicality of language, in connection with a moment of violence, is Elias Canetti’s autobiographical novel The Tongue Set Free (2011).

2 The rescued tongue In Die gerettete Zunge (The Tongue Set Free) (1977), Elias Canetti (1905–94) describes how German became his new mother-tongue and the medium of his literary creativity. If in the German version of the title the stress lies on the sal­ vation of the organ of speech (Zunge), the title of the English translation (2011) shifts the emphasis towards the notion of freedom. This difference also illustrates the range of meaning attached to the tongue as an organ of speech. In fact, both meanings can be found in the text. Canetti’s book has been recently discussed in view of language learning situations (Kramsch 2004), narrations of multilingual selves (Kramsch 2009), as well as the relationship of language and memory (Spiller 2006). O’Sullivan (2005–6) explores the oedipal themes running through the text and the intricate relationship between father-tongue and mother-tongue. Finally, Kellman explores the metaphors of adultery and infidelity (2013a:40–1). I would like to concentrate, here, on the tongue as a body part and a metaphor for the ambivalences of multilingualism and language acquisition.

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Canetti experiences the tongue as a fundamentally endangered and at the same time frightening organ. This tongue is singular, and as such can only be lost completely or saved for good. He manages to save the new tongue he is given, along with the ability to write, this, however, leads to the disappearance of Bulgarian and Ladino that determined his early life. Canetti describes his way to becoming a writer as a rebirth in a new language. At the age of eight years, his mother gives birth to him a second time into the German language and the universe of literature. German was the language of complicity and intimacy between his parents, the language they spoke in their youth in Vienna and in which they had learnt to love each other. At the same time, it was a language from which Elias was completely excluded as long as his father was alive. Because of this, it developed a magical aura for him that spilled over into his future career as a writer. Canetti grew up in the multilingual context of the Bulgarian town of Ruse (Rustschuk) on the lower Danube. At home, they spoke four languages. In the course of one day, one could hear up to seven or eight languages. Besides the Bulgarians, there were the Turks and the Sephardim, or Hispanic Jews who lived next to each other in their own quarters. There were also Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Gypsies and Russians (Canetti 2011:3). Canetti’s wet nurse was Romanian. His grandfather spoke many languages and loved to boast about his ability to master at least 17 to 19 languages, something he did by ostensibly counting them on his fingers. Yet, he spoke most of them with a comical accent and often in a highly defective way. He read newspapers in Ladino – also called Judaeo-Spanish – published in Spain and written in the Hebrew alphabet the only one he ever learned. He had difficulties speaking German, especially “con­ sonant clusters were hard for his Ladino tongue” (ibid:84). Canetti’s earliest childhood memory revolves around the colour red and the threat of having one’s tongue cut out. His parents spend the summer of 1907 in a guesthouse in Carlsbad, a spa town situated in western Bohemia, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a place of many lan­ guages. Canetti is only two years old. His parents have brought a 15-year-old nanny from Bulgaria to take care of him. The nanny begins a secret affair with a young man she most probably meets on the streets of Carlsbad who ends up living in the room right across the hall. Every morning to frighten and stop Elias from revealing their secret the young man asks him to stick out his tongue. He draws closer, pulls out a jack-knife, and threatens to cut it off. But then, at the very last moment, he pulls back, shuts his knife and puts it away. “The threat with the knife worked, the child quite literally held his tongue for ten years” (ibid:4). Canetti does not specify in which language the young man uttered his threat, but it could possibly have been Bulgarian, because of the nanny. The accent in this scene is not on language but on the tongue as an organ, that can be irremediably lost. It is the very moment when Canetti as an author risks castration, that is, to lose his creative ability once and for all. This first danger for his tongue is amalgamated later on with the painful experience of learning the German language. These two instances are directly related to

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the world of the mother. Both the floor and the staircase of the original scene are red suggesting bloody slaughter. A threatening tongue turns up again in a story the mother tells her son about wolves pursuing them in winter. The red tongues of the wolves were so close that she dreamt about them for years to come. Elias is haunted in his dreams by a giant wolf with a long red tongue leaning over his bed. As mentioned before, the new tongue absorbs the other two languages that Canetti learned in his childhood – Bulgarian and Ladino – through what he calls a “mysterious” form of translation. This holds true especially for Bulgarian, a language that he learnt thanks to the young peasant girls that took care of the household. There were always five to six of them moving around barefoot in the house. Canetti left Ruse at six and never learned Bulgarian in school. Then he forgot the language completely. “All events of those first years were in Ladino and Bulgarian. It wasn’t until much later that most of them were rendered into German within me.” Only especially dramatic experiences retained their “Ladino wording. … Everything else … and especially everything Bulgarian … I carry around in German. I cannot say exactly how this happened. I do not know at what point in time, on what occasion, this or that translated itself. I never probed into the matter” (ibid:10). The new German tongue is thus acquired in exchange for the two previous tongues, which are not integrated into Canetti’s linguistics resources, as is the case with many other multilingual authors, but simply dis­ appear in the process. But there is more to it. Before beginning to study German, Canetti spent a few years in Manchester where he learnt English with his father. So, besides Ladino, Bulgarian and English, German was actually only the fourth, and if one takes also French in consideration, the fifth language he acquired. Kellman (2013a:40–1) points to a central passage of the book where German is directly linked to adultery. During a summer spent in the spa town of Bad Reichenhall in Upper Bavaria, Canetti’s mother engages in a flirtatious relationship with another man. The extramarital liaison takes place in German, the very language of the amorous complicity of Canetti’s parents, from which at that time he was still painfully excluded. This amounts to a double betrayal, and a double infidelity both emotional and linguistic. After his father’s death, his mother starts teaching him German. If the rela­ tionship with his father is based on dialogue and approval, the relationship with his mother hinges on scorn and submission. Canetti’s mother is in a position of authority that she exploits to the full. “She was cruel and she liked doing it …” (ibid:58). She also insists that he learn French to counterbalance the English language, which had been so dear to his father and him. In this way, the father tongue is slowly replaced by a new profoundly ambivalent mother-tongue, “a language which drills itself into him and forces the creation of a new identity” (emphasis added) (O’Sullivan 2005–6:136). The overall process amounts to a forceful tongue implantation. The mother compels him “to achieve something beyond the strength of any child”, determining the “deeper nature” of his German, “a belated mother tongue, implanted (eingep­ flanzt) in true pain (unter wahrhaftigem Schmerz). Followed by a period of

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happiness …” Pain and pleasure are wedded in the process, tying him “indis­ solubly” to the new language and “feeding” from the very beginning his “pro­ pensity for writing”. Very tellingly, Canetti makes use of organic metaphors to describe his rebirth into the new language. On the one hand, Canetti’s mother does not want him to give up all other languages, but on the other, this is what is actually happening thanks to her insistence and cruelty. German becomes Canetti’s first and foremost language, the language of his writing, but also the language of the love for his mother, “and what a love it was!” (Canetti 2011:70 and 2008:69). He becomes an attentive listener, the very ear (das Ohr meines Vaters) his mother lost with the death of her husband. In the German original, this loss is described in terms that are analogous to the threat of castration. It is a terrible cut (furchtbarer Schnitt), that silenced (verstummen) their loving conversations (Canetti 2008:69). By becoming a writer in the German lan­ guage, he realizes his mother’s own secret literary ambitions. “Canetti produces for his mother her own child. … Her own voice speaks through her son” (O’Sullivan 2005–6:139). The metaphor of implantation “blends the cultural space of grafts, implants and artificial inseminations with the natural realm of mother tongues and other native inheritances” (Kramsch 2004). By suggesting the possibility of a late acquisition of a new mother-tongue, Canetti’s narrative ironically confirms the monolingual paradigm in the very act of questioning its uncircumventable uniqueness and originality. Despite this, however, there remains a rift running through Canetti’s emotional link with German. It is neither a domestic nor an unfamiliar language nor is it connected with any fatherland. “… it represents an experience of breaking away … though his choice to use German granted him identity, it was not the same as selecting a national language. German is neither native nor a foreign language, nor even simply the home of the author among languages; rather, it is found somewhere in between” (Spiller 2006:198). In the next section, I will deal with the metaphor of the tongue in the work of three other multilingual writers: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Yoko Tawada and Gloria Anzaldúa. Their use of the metaphor is radically different from that in Canetti’s The Rescued Tongue.

3 Twisted and rebellious tongues In many European languages, the word tongue also means language: in Russian (язык, yazyk), Greek (γλώσσα, glóssa), Italian (lingua), French (langue) and Turk­ ish (dil). In Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Somali, Zulu and many other lan­ guages around the world this does not apply. Another exception is German: language (Sprache) is different from tongue (Zunge). In her collection of short stories Mutterzunge (mother-tongue), Emine Sevgi Özdamar uses this very asym­ metry between German and Turkish as a starting point for an interlingual writing strategy that consists in combining two languages to create a distancing effect. Özdamar was born in 1946 in Malatya (Turkey) and grew up in Istanbul and Bursa. In 1965, she came for the first time to Germany without any knowledge

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of the language. She frequented an acting school in Istanbul and after the establishment of a military dictatorship in Turkey in 1971 left the country for good. In East Berlin, she worked as assistant director at the Volksbühne, which had been founded by Bertolt Brecht. She worked as an actress, wrote plays, poems and short stories. Turkish was the language she spoke first, but through her grandparents she also came in contact with Anatolian dialects. Özdamar’s inner multilingualism is enriched by the influence of Arabic, which the Turkish language reform of 1928 restricted to a purely religious medium (Yildiz 2012:143–68). The compound Mutterzunge is a neologism in German and a literal transla­ tion from the Turkish ana (mother) and dil (tongue). Mother-tongue translates as Muttersprache. The first sentences of the eponymous short story are also based on a literal translation of Turkish sayings. “In my language, tongue means: language (In meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache). Tongue has no bones, where you turn it, turn it will. I was sitting with my twisted tongue (gedrehten Zunge) in this city of Berlin” (Özdamar 2010:7). The absence of an article before the word ‘tongue’, and the differences in sentence structure reinforce the feeling of estrangement the text intends to convey to a German reader. Özdamar’s German is impregnated with the invisible presence of Turkish sayings and grammar structures. The boneless tongue that can twist any way it wants, can be traced back to a Turkish saying that anyone who can master his languages without a problem has a ready tongue (Vlasta 2016:93), but also to a Turkish expression that means ‘speaking without thinking of the consequences’ (dilin kemig˘ i yok), that is, to have a loose tongue (Yildiz 2012:143). This adds a further level of ambivalence to the hybrid character of the bilingual sentence, which oscillates between success and possible failure. The twisted tongue (çevrilmis¸ dil) is a translated tongue, a tongue turned around (ibid:143–4). In Turkish as in Hungarian, to translate is not to get across but to turn something upside down. The boneless, turned around tongue stresses the fundamental corporeality of tongues as languages. Their agility and elasticity seem to question the rigidity and stiffness of a unique mother-tongue. A boneless tongue can find its way around any kind of language. At the same time, the twisted tongue also articu­ lates a sense of inappropriateness and loss on the part of the narrator stranded in a café full of foreigners in a town she hardly knows. Add to this the fact, that a tongue can be twisted (verdreht) but not completely turned around (gedreht) as in the short story. This implies a certain awkwardness if not forcefulness in pro­ cesses of translation, but it also highlights the difficulties of the narrator who is forced to translate herself into a new environment. In her acceptance speech for the Adelbert von Chamisso Award that she received in 1999, Özdamar points to the liberating aspect of language change. She was unhappy in the Turkish language, which had fallen sick because of the military dictatorship and had to turn her tongue into German and suddenly she was happy again. Germany gave her a new tongue in which the Turkish words could heal again as in a sanatorium. In an interview given in the GoetheInstitute in Copenhagen on May 10 2012, she also points to the fact that her

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German words do not have a childhood making it much easier for her to say certain things in this language. Because of her life spent in Turkey some Turk­ ish words are heavy with meaning and call for careful handling because of moral and political reasons. In German, she can have a more carefree lightfooted approach. This flexibility and suppleness of the tongue corresponds to the freedom of the actress in dealing with the different roles she has to play but can give up again at the end of each performance. Yoko Tawada was born in Japan in 1960. In 1979, she came to Germany for the first time, and in 1982 she began studying modern German literature at the University of Hamburg. She writes in both Japanese and German, novels, poems, plays, and literary essays. The relationship of her two writing languages and the way bilingualism allows for detachment and freedom has been explored by Yildiz (2012:109–42). According to Tawada, the main problem with mother-tongues is not so much that they tend to exclude non-native speakers but that they include the native speakers by encircling and confining them within a specific language. Contrary to Humboldt’s vision of national language as a circumscribed place of security and comfort, Tawada defines it as a prison house. “So I was born into Japanese, the way you are thrown into a sack. That is why this language became my outer skin. I, however, swallowed the German language. Since then it sits in my belly” (Tawada 2006:103). Tawada’s collection of short texts Überseezungen (Overseas Tongues) (ibid.) contains three parts each dedicated to a different geographical space suggesting the global plurality of tongues: Euro-Asiatic, South African and North Amer­ ican tongues. The title of the collection explores the physicality and corporeality of the tongue, and its double role as an organ of speech and a body part. The 14 short essays tell stories from the narrator’s endless migratory movement from Germany to Switzerland and France, from Amsterdam to Cape Town, and from Boston to Tokyo and Toronto. The title is a play on words arranged around the metaphor of the tongue, the process of translation and the sea as a borderless multilingual space (chapter fourteen). On the front cover, the middle part of the title is italicized – “Überseezungen” – calling attention to the ambivalence of the composite word, which at first sight wrongly appears as Übersetzungen, transla­ tions. Übersee means overseas. Seezungen are common soles, but literally they are ‘tongues of the sea’, probably because of their flatness and tongue-like shape: small islands floating on the water, half-human and half-animal creatures, hybrids between a fish and a tongue. Translations are movements of the tongue across an intermediate sea. They take place in the interstitial space of the sea and the oral cavity. Tongues do not only articulate sounds but also manipulate food for mastication and are used in the act of swallowing. Conversely, they can be eaten and swallowed like raw or cooked fish. The first essay “Zungentanz” (The Tongue’s Dance) (ibid:9–14) uses the metaphor of the suffering tongue to describe the threat of losing one’s language in a foreign country. As with other texts, a surreal dreamlike atmosphere and a subtle ironic tone pervade the narrative. The first person narrator wakes up to discover that her tongue has swollen to the point where it cannot move

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anymore in the oral cavity and she risks asphyxiation. But then, the tongue shrinks again and withdraws like a dried up sponge into the oesophagus taking her whole head with it. She dreams that her body has turned into a gigantic unbearably moist pink tongue without eyes that wanders naked through the streets. In another story set in Marseille, the narrator’s tongue feels suddenly dried out and becomes rough (ibid:36). In the metaphoric universe of the tongue humidity and dryness signal creativity and, respectively, its curtailment. The narrator of “Zungentanz” feels that her sickness has lodged itself in her tongue. Since her dentist hates tongues, because they disturb him during treat­ ment, she consults a Spracharzt who helps her in the process of learning the new language by re-educating the tongue. She has difficulties reading the new alphabet, so he suggests she chooses one specific word to dominate over the rest of the words of a sentence in order to avoid anarchy in the mouth. But during this training her tongue suddenly starts speaking Japanese. In the text, the three passages – long uninterrupted strings of vowels and consonants – are rendered in the Latin alphabet of the Romaji script, which is used in Japan for personal and foreign names, as well as for foreign words. In the first string, the tongue expresses surprise at the reawakening of its Japanese side for which however it does not feel responsible at all. There are other instances in the book where the tongue as a body part and a metaphor for language plays an important role. Tawada describes the difficulties of learning Afrikaans within the violent con­ text of South African Apartheid. The unexperienced tongues are trained through relentless exercises of style. “The tongue that failed was cut off. But do not worry, each student had several tongues behind his lips” (ibid:89). In her novel Das Bad (The Bath), the narrator passes out and falls into a bottomless valley. What follows is a scene of transformation linking the tongue to the world of water. As she wakes up, her mouth cavity is dry and the tongue is glued to the palate. Then her mouth gets wet until she is able to move her tongue again. Something soft – a sole (Seezunge) – touches her lips, enters her mouth, starts playing with the tongue, and ends up biting and eating it (Tawada 2010a:55). One tongue is thus swallowed up by another, an incorporation and transformation process that recalls the practice of translation. The narrator does not have a preference for soles because of their taste but because the word See­ zunge contains the word Zunge. When she eats it, she feels that another tongue will continue talking for her in case she is at a loss for words. In Tawada’s work the tongue is not only linked to the metaphors of the sea and the water, but also to various forms of metamorphosis and the processes of writing and translation which highlight the fluid borders between languages. To travel makes the tongue humid. When it speaks, the body is transformed (Tawada 2006:117). I will come back to some of these connections in chapters fourteen and fifteen. The tongue also plays a central role in the work of the American scholar and Chicano writer Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). As in Özdamar and Tawada’s work and contrary to Canetti’s monism this tongue is always, double, bi-lin­ gual. Similarly to the other two female authors discussed in this section, Anzaldúa conceives of language as profoundly inscribed in the human body

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not only in our facial expressions and gesturing, which are at the same time highly conventional and very personal, but also in the rhythm, intonation and pitch of our voices, and the specific accents with which we speak the different languages we know. The privileged places to study these connections are the mouth, the lips but above all the tongue. To break out of the inclusion of one’s mother-tongue and to gain consciousness of the habits it determines a retrain­ ing of the tongue is the first necessary step. A freed tongue is the prerequisite of a free spirit. Reconquering the forbidden and silenced Spanish tongue also means to accept that it colours one’s English tongue in a unique way. Anzaldúa describes a situation in which others speak in our place as “a rape of the tongue” (Anzaldúa 2015a:206). Even if she writes both in Spanish and in English she can still feel the rip-off of her native tongue to which she was sub­ jected as a child and young woman. “We women of colour have to stop being modern medusas – throats cut, silenced into a mere hissing” (ibid.). Interest­ ingly enough, the mythological figure of the Medusa is mostly portrayed with a tongue provocatively sticking out. In this sense, the hissing Medusa is a ton­ gueless subjugated creature. In “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers” she discusses this process of liberation within the biblical context of the Pentecost introducing a redemptive utopian dimension of reconciliation that goes well beyond individual rebellion. Coloured women have to cultivate their coloured skins and their “ton­ gues of fire” (Anzaldúa 2015b:164). This rebellion comes from the very margins of society. “We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane” (ibid:163). “How to tame a Wild Tongue”, the fifth chapter of her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, begins with a scene at the dentist’s that recalls Uwe Timm’s re­ educated tongue and the tensions between the teeth and the tongue mentioned before. “‘We are going to have to control your tongue’ … ‘I’ve never seen any­ thing as strong or as stubborn’, he says … ‘how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet. How do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?’” (Anzaldúa 2012:75). To control and subjugate her rebellious tongue that rears up and kicks like a wild horse she is sent to speech classes, to get rid of her accent. “El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua [The innocent-faced Anglo ripped out our tongues]. Wild tongues can’t be tamed they can only be cut out” (ibid:76). In a quote from a poem of the Jewish author, academic and activist Irena Klepfisz (1941–), which signals a broader understanding across time and space, the ability to speak has been forgotten: “our tongues have become dry/the wilderness has/dried out our tongues” (ibid:76). Chicano is not a deficient form of Spanish, a mutilation, but a new hybrid tongue that is neither Spanish nor English but both, “a forked tongue, a var­ iation of two languages” (ibid:77). In a section entitled “Linguistic Terrorism”, Anzaldúa describes her poetry on the border of two languages and two cultures as a “linguistic nightmare” and an aberration. “Deslenguadas. … We are … your linguistic mestizaje … Because we speak with tongues of fire we are cul­ turally crucified” (ibid:80). Deslenguado means foul-mouthed but literally also without a tongue, that is, without the proper single tamed tongue of the

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monolingual speaker. The Pentecostal tongues of fire from the Christian tra­ dition are combined with the bifurcated tongue of the serpent. “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence” (ibid:81).

4 Bilabial If the words tongue, langue and lingua articulate a view of language that is both mono- or multilingual, as in the examples discussed so far, the Hebrew word ‫שׂפה‬, ָ ָ safa (lip, language) introduces a notion of irreducible duality from the very beginning. As the French rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin argues, this plurality is external but also always internal to each language (Cassin 2016:83–4). In his essay, “La belle au bois drogman” whose title carries a double meaning – La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty) and drogman (dragoman, interpreter, translator) – he discusses the significance of translation and multilingualism within the Hebrew language. The root of the Hebrew word for the Jewish people ivri, feminine ivrit, is avar, avor that means to pass from one shore to the other, that is, from one language to the other. In Hebrew, the word for ‘language’ and ‘shore’ is the same. The fluvial ontology of Hebrew culture presupposes that there cannot exist a river with one shore only, and by extension no human being with only one language. To speak means not only to move from the shore of one language to that of another but also to linger inbetween two idioms and two shores. In a more fundamental way, to speak always already implies a process of translation that is not only external to lan­ guages but the very precondition for any language. The same amphibology can be found in the Hebrew word safa, which means both language and lip. As with the word shore, the implication is that a single lip is not sufficient to speak. We need at least two. This way, argues Ouaknin, alluding to the fact that in Hebrew writing the vowels are added when reading the text, the “breath of every word, held back in the consonant and free in the vowel, is always bilin­ gual, because bilabial, and already ‘babble’ (‘babil’) and already subtle intelli­ gence!” (2011–12:25). To speak Hebrew means to speak two languages at the same time, reminding one of the fact that each word is inscribed in the space between two languages, and that the essence of the word is translation. This observation allows for a radical reinterpretation of the fall of the Tower of Babel. Ouaknin proposes a retranslation of the initial biblical verse from Genesis – “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech” (emphasis added) (Genesis 11:1). Traditionally one does not differentiate between the first and the second attribute. In German it is Sprache and Worte, and similarly in French, langue and mots. Playing on the notion of doubleness Ouaknin separates the two different but related aspects, the two lips of lan­ guage. “And the whole world was one language only, one shore only (qu’une seule langue, qu’une seule rive!)” (ibid.). The Tower of Babel does not so much centre on the loss of an original unity and the subsequent multiplication of

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languages but on the dangerous confinement within the space of a single lan­ guage and the refusal to translate and to move to the other shore. To want to live within one language only is the very negation of the Hebrew language and of Jewishness itself. Language(s) must always be thought of in the plural. In this respect, the fall of the Babel Tower both compels the Jews (back) into multilingualism and liberates them from the prison house of monolingualism. Contrary to the singleness of the tongue, the eyes like the lips are always already a pair and thus generate a liberating duality right from the start.

5 The eyes of language In Herta Müller’s view, not only languages but each word possesses eyes that look at the world and can be used to scrutinize each other. Müller was born in 1953 in Nytzikdorf (Romania), a small peasant village in the Banat, a region that is inhabited by a German minority called the Banater Schwaben, a mixed group of German migrants that arrived in Romania in the eighteenth century under the reign of Maria Theresa ruler of the Habsburg dominions. Müller grew up with the local dialect and learnt German in the village school. A form of German, however, that was influenced by dialect because all the teachers came from the region. When she was 15, she moved to Timis¸oara and attended the Nikolaus-Lenau-Lyzeum, a German school in the midst of a predominantly Romanian society. Here she started learning Romanian, which was also the language of Ceaus¸escu’s dictatorship. From 1973 to 1976, she studied German and Romanian Literature at the University of Timis¸oara and worked as a translator from German into Romanian. She refused to collaborate with the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, and migrated to Germany in 1987. In the essay “In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen” (Each Language has Different Eyes), she lists altogether five different languages each of which plays a role in her life and work: the German dialect of the village in which she was raised, the German taught in school, Romanian, as well as the variants of East and West Germany (Müller 2009b:14). Besides a volume of experimental poetry published in Romanian, Müller has written all of her work in German. The other lan­ guages, however, have always exerted their influence (Weissmann 2016). The metaphor of the eye is central to Müller’s work (Leipelt-Tsai 2016). It stands for the continuous control exerted by the secret police, which operates at a distance as the very eye of the dictator. In this paranoiac universe, you can find your eye reflected in that of your neighbour who is spying on you. The victim of observation, however, can turn into an observer to protect her/himself. This leads to what Müller calls Fremder Blick, a foreignizing look that perceives reality as fundamentally questionable. This look cannot create any unity, it divides the viewer from the viewed. As with Özdamar who points out that she has lost her mother-tongue not because of emigration but while still being in Turkey, Müller emphasizes that she came to Germany as a foreigner who had already acquired a foreign look. In both cases, it is the traumatizing experience of dictatorship that alienates the subject from her environment, detaching the language from its

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ancestral territory. The mother-tongue cannot be a homeland anymore. To illustrate this, Müller quotes a sentence from the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun (1923–2011) who left Spain together with his family in 1939 because of the Franco dictatorship. “‘Not language is home (Heimat), but what is said in it.’ … How could Spanish be his home in the Spain of Franco? The contents of the mother-tongue were directed against his life” (Müller 2001). Under a dictator­ ship, the mother-tongue is appropriated and forced to speak in its favour. Cen­ sorship closes the eyes of the words (bindet den Worten die Augen) (ibid.). Müller disapproves of the term Heimat. Both the Dorfheimat of her native village and the Staatsheimat under Ceaus¸escu’s dictatorship were profoundly provincial and xenophobic (Müller 2009b:291). Müller subverts the traditional use of the metaphor of the eye as a mirror of the soul. Eyes can lie. There is an aggressive side to looking. Close observation can destroy the observed by fragmenting it. An idiosyncratic look can lead to loss through distancing but it can also entail a gain by opening up and dissolving a set situation. This also happens when a change of perspective is applied in the comparison of languages. Müller’s use of the metaphor of the eye in the description of languages and their relationship to each other has thus both a deconstructivist and a creative side. In her view, different languages give us dif­ ferent eyes to look at the world but they also look back at us. “Each language looks at the world differently, and has found its entire vocabulary through this distinct view … In each language, there are different eyes in the words (andere Augen in den Wörtern)” (Müller 2001). By giving words eyes, by personifying language, its purely instrumental and representational functions no longer avail. Languages are always there before we learn them, they always precede the sub­ ject. Languages not only look differently at the world but also at each other. In Müller’s view, any mother-tongue is purely accidental, as one is born into it without having the possibility of choice. Despite this it is unalterable and intuitively the measure of all things. It is unconditionally here for us any moment like our own skin (wie die eigene Haut) (Müller 2009b:26). In the language of the village, each word is directly attached to the thing it defines. For most speakers there are no gaps through which one could look and stare into nothingness, as if one would slide out of one’s skin into emptiness (als rutschte man aus seiner Haut ins Leere) (ibid:7). Even if Müller emphasizes the emotional primacy of her German mother-tongue she points to the creative dimension of linguistic pluralism. Despite the predominance of German as her writing language, she uses both the local German dialect and Romanian to introduce a different, conflicting point of view. Overall, one trusts one’s mother-tongue even if it is questioned by a new point of view which shows that it no longer is the only stop on the way to an understanding of reality. As she explains in Die Nacht ist aus Tinte gemacht (The Night is Made of Ink) the use of dialectal forms that were used with a specific intention repeat­ edly prompted her German editors to unnecessary amendments of the text. However, as she cogently argues, each linguistic point of view is right in itself (Müller 2009a:1/16). By exposing the mother-tongue to the eyes of two other

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languages, another more complex view is possible. “The perspective of the mother-tongue has to face that which in a foreign language looks different (das anders Geschaute der fremden Sprache)” (Müller 2001). To describe the way a language looks when seen from the point of view of another, Müller deliber­ ately uses the non-standard expression Geschau which comes from schauen, to look, to behold, but also means countenance, facial expression. This choice is particularly significant as it introduces a foreign linguistic element and makes at the same time a metalinguistic statement. The antiquated dialectal Geschau is a visual metaphor for her idiosyncratic foreignizing look on things. The dialogue between German and Romanian that began in her youth led to a revision of the world she grew up in as a child. Even if in her books she has not written a single sentence in Romanian this language is always close at hand. Of course, Romanian is always co-writing (schreibt immer mit) because it has grown into my gaze (in den Blick hineingewachsen). It does not hurt a mother-tongue when its contingencies become visible in the gaze of other languages (im Geschau anderer Sprachen sichtbar werden). On the con­ trary, it leads … to an unproblematic love. I have never loved my mothertongue because it was the better one but because it was the most intimate. (ibid.) Comparing words from two different languages leads to a two-faced view of reality. The two perspectives merge in the head. In Romanian, the rose is mas­ culine whereas in German it is feminine. Surely a masculine rose looks at you differently than a feminine one (schaut die Rose einen anders an als der Rose). … The feminine and masculine view are fractured … The result is a surprising, astonishingly ambiguous poetry (doppelbödige Poesie). … What is the rose in two languages moving simul­ taneously? She is a woman’s mouth in a man’s face; she is a toe-long woman’s dress, in which a man’s heart is rolled up (in dem eingerollt ein Männerherz sitzt). She is a woman’s glove and male fist in one. … An ambiguous rose always says more about itself and the world than the monolingual rose. (ibid.) To describe a plurilingual view of the world, Müller makes use of corporeal metaphors that combine both genders. The male heart tucked away safely in the female dress and the masculine fist hidden in a woman’s glove invert tradi­ tional gender roles, which tend to attribute the masculine to the public side and the feminine to the private domain. Particularly interesting, especially in view of the metaphor discussed in chapter one, is her description of another hybrid face that bears the marks of both gen­ ders, which results in a twofold perspective. Besides the metaphor of a woman’s mouth in a man’s face, there is also the symbolically more provocative vision of a woman’s nose in a man’s face (Müller 2009b:25). Using interchangeably the

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traditionally receptive female mouth and the male phallic nose as possible attri­ butes of femininity suggests that the playful breaking up of reality operated by language change is also related to a redefinition of simple dualistic notions of gender. In both cases, bilingualism is a male face containing an anomalous female trait. Moreover, this very dissonant femininity introduces a new second point of view from which to reinterpret the masculine character of the face. Müller intentionally avoids specifying which of the two languages is German and which Romanian because the estrangement operated by one language at the expense of another is always reversible.

5

The embodied plurilingual self

This chapter leads back to chapters one and two by reinterpreting metaphors of corporeal unity and wholeness from the point of view of individual speakers and the multiple linguistic resources available to them. The main focus is on the multimodal approach of the language portrait developed by Austrian scholars which goes back to studies on language awareness in primary schools in Vienna and Hamburg in the early 1990s (Busch 2012:8). The idea was to help multilingual speakers – especially migrants and people with a mixed cultural and linguistic background – to discover and come to terms with their plur­ ilinguistic identities. In these examples, which place multilingualism directly within the imaginary borders of the body, the individual becomes the very site of heteroglossia and the linguistic biography of each person an unfinished open-ended journey. The practice of the language portrait has to be viewed within the context of recent theoretical reconsiderations of the notion of lan­ guage. Hans-Jürgen Krumm (2010) and Brigitta Busch (2012) refer to the notions of polylingual languaging, translanguaging and metrolingualism which I discussed briefly at the end of chapter one. These innovative subject-oriented approaches are based on the creativity of the speaker and presuppose an understanding of language(s) that is clearly at odds with the monolingual notions of national language, mother-tongue and native speaker. Furthermore, they can be linked to pre-colonial and pre-modern forms of plurilingualism to which I will turn in the third section of this chapter.

1 The multilingual speaker Hans-Jürgen Krumm who held the chair of German as a foreign language at the University of Vienna until 2010 started collecting multilingual language portraits from the early 1990s on (Krumm and Jenkins 2001:5). The study participants, generally children between the age of 7 and 14, were given coloured pencils and asked to fill in the whole gender-specific body outline or parts of it. The girl had long hair and a skirt, and the boy trousers. For each of their individual languages they had to use a different colour. If they wanted to, they could also add head hair or language shoes (Sprachschuhe). No sugges­ tions were given as to the way this had to be done. Portraits could be given a

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title, and comments added, but neither a written nor a spoken statement was requested. However, the teachers involved in the experiment were asked to use the exercise as an opportunity to have the children talk about their countries of origin and to compare their native tongue with the German language. The idea was to activate language awareness as early as possible. The practice of the Sprachenporträt, as the term itself suggests, not only emphasizes the inner lin­ guistic plurality of each individual speaker, it also allows for a holistic view of these different languages and their interrelationship. Language portraits make it possible for speakers to access their language biography (Sprachbiographie) in new liberating ways, and often for the very first time (Krumm 2010). The language portrait emphasizes the emotional and cognitive dimension of lan­ guage use by individual speakers, but it also shows that languages are funda­ mentally embodied. Languages not only determine facial expressions and gestures, they inhabit our very body. A collection of about 60 different portraits (Krumm and Jenkins 2001) reveals some of the theoretical and methodological ambivalences of the pro­ ject. The colour schemes illustrate, often in very creative ways, the subjective, emotional attachment of the speakers to their languages. At the same time, however, they show the pervading power of language ideologies, especially with regard to the unique importance of mother-tongues and the instrumental understanding of secondary languages. Bilingual speakers tend to define themselves in dichotomic terms by dividing their body outlines from top to bottom, into two separate halves. Krumm (2010:17) mentions a young English teacher of mixed German/Turkish origin living in Vienna who painted her two sides in orange (German) and red (Turkish), probably to express her stronger emotional bond to Turkish, which is the language of both her family and her husband. She coloured her head in orange to suggest that schooling, work as well as thinking were predominantly German. One leg is brown and the other pink, for English and French, respectively. In the collection, there are also examples of mixing in which the two lan­ guages have been applied in horizontal layers (Krumm and Jenkins 2001:12–13). The choice of colours and body parts is generally dictated by the emotional attachment and the existential relevance of the single languages. Monolinguals tend to colour the whole outline in red. In order to designate their mothertongue multilingual children use red for the head and the trunk or place it where the heart is supposed to be. However, there are also cases in which a language one particularly likes or wants to learn is placed in the heart or the head. Sometimes the mother-tongue also inhabits the central region of the stomach. The primary language (the mother-tongue spoken at home) is generally placed in the upper part of the body and the others (the languages taught in school) in the lower and peripheral part. Berna, a seven-year-old girl, painted her body outline to the waist in red for her Turkish mother-tongue, the middle section of the skirt in blue for German and the legs in lilac for English. Another girl from Pakistan, on the other hand, painted her German head red, her English legs blue and the central part along with the arms green for her mother-tongue. Austrian

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children, impressed by the colourful portraits of the other pupils, added local dialects as a third language next to German and English. A boy from Iran added explanations for his choice of colours. He painted his head in a black cloud because German is difficult to learn. The arms are brown because Arabic is spoken in countries were deserts play an important role. The trunk (Farsi) is blue because Iran has beautiful skies and the legs (English) green because it often rains in England. Krumm also studied the linguistic behaviour of groups of young people with mixed origin who meet regularly in the Stadtpark – one of the main parks of Vienna – and defined their hybrid idiom (Parkisch) as a language in its own right, which can no longer be explained in terms of code-switching or code-mixing. Code-oscillation (Code-Oszillation) would be a more adequate term (Krumm 2010:19).

2 The heteroglossic body The research team Spracherleben (Experiencing Language) at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Vienna took up Krumm’s work. The starting point of a biographical approach is the experiencing subject and his/ her multi-layered linguistic repertoire rather than the different languages available in varying degrees of proficiency. The question is “how linguistic variation can serve to construct belonging or difference, and above all, how such constructions can be experienced by speakers as exclusions or inclu­ sions due to language” (Busch 2015:3). Busch distances herself from an understanding of multilingualism that implies the existence of a plurality of individual languages clearly separated from each other and mentions Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. She explicitly criticizes the multi­ culturalist approach chosen by Krumm. The main purpose of the multimodal practice of the language portrait is to explore the linguistic repertoires of the different speakers. Repertoires consist of all linguistic means at a speaker’s disposal and are subject to changes through time. The main methodological assumption is that languages are not bounded entities. “It is up to the participants to define categories, to decide what is considered as a ‘language’ or a ‘code’ and how different linguistic resources are related” (Busch 2012:9). Because of its emphasis on a very broad definition of ‘lan­ guage’, a wide array of idioms ranging from local or regional dialects to different professional languages, subcultural idioms, linguistic registers as well as idiolects becomes visible. The multimodal biographical approach practised in the language portrait not only activates the fantasy and crea­ tivity of the speakers but also helps to deconstruct pre-established notions of languages as countable entities and simple dichotomies between mothertongues and all other languages. These visual representations of individual linguistic repertoires are not objective reconstructions of the subject’s his­ tory of language acquisition. They are modes of meaning making in their own right and the result of a specific interactional situation.

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The empty outline on a white sheet of paper – an ungendered figure with one uplifted arm, legs wide apart and clearly delineated hands and feet – can be interpreted and filled out in different ways. The human body works as a spatial metaphor that organizes perception by highlighting certain aspects and hiding others. The function of the different body parts is mapped onto the languages that are assigned to these areas. The heart is generally attributed to the languages one likes most and the legs to the languages on which one’s very existence is based. Some users respect the delimited territory; others add ears and eyes, or make use of the whole page. Users often work from the inside out, from the middle of the body – the heart or the stomach – to its periphery – arms, legs, hands and feet and in some cases also fingers. In other cases, they conceive of the body in vertical terms using a layering technique or combining different forms of structuring. The use of a body outline elicits corporeal metaphorics in the accompanying narrative. Languages can weigh heavily on one’s shoulder, cause stomach-ache, and get stuck in one’s throat, or inhabit one’s heart of hearts. Single body parts can acquire specific meanings. Migrants tend to place their mother-tongue in their heart, and the subsequent languages in their legs and feet because these helped them in the process of migration. Legs and arms can be used to express a contrastive, twofold form of embodiment and feet denote both mobility and rootedness. The smaller body parts are often assigned to the less prominent languages. Other important aspects are the choice and intensity of the different colours, the form and dimension of the single coloured areas, their positioning within the framework of the body, as well as the presence of empty white areas that call for the acquisition of new languages, and the use of more abstract colours like black, white and grey (Busch 2010:64–5). Busch mentions the example of Peter, a 17 year old student from a bilingual high school in Klagenfurt in the Austrian border region of Carinthia who deliberately avoided colouring the stomach of his body outline in order to signal the presence of an area open for new linguistic experiences and new creative combinations. He also drew a zigzag line on his left forearm indicating the possibility of playful theatrical linguistic and cultural imitations (Busch 2013:40–3). The perception of colours and their metaphorical dimension depend on cultural, historical and social context, as well as on individual experiences and preferences. To illustrate this point Busch quotes a short passage from an interview with the bilingual writer Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, in which he defines his two main writing languages in terms of colour contrast. Gold­ schmidt was born in Hamburg in 1928, but had to flee in 1938 from Nazi Germany together with his family because of his Jewish background. In 1949, he obtained French nationality and converted to Catholicism. He worked in different grammar schools as a teacher of German until 1992. Goldschmidt chose French as his main writing language without, however, abandoning German (Guldin 2007a). “I have two mother-tongues, French and German. These are the corporeal languages of my life (körperliche Lebenssprachen) … German is a green-blue language, a green language; French, on the other hand,

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is an orange one … Just as Rimbaud saw coloured letters. For me, languages have colours. They sit differently in the body (Sie sitzen anders im Körper)” (Goldschmidt 2005:103). A translation conserves the content of the original like a red building being repainted in light blue, or like the same human being with another face (einem anderen Gesicht) (Goldschmidt 2006:9). The language portrait is a blueprint of an individual’s language biography, which is not determined by a single fixed point of departure, but a complex multilingual journey constellated with successes and setbacks. The single lan­ guages and their relationship are subject to revision and change. As Blommaert puts it: repertoires tend to be seen as “indicative of origins, defined within stable and static (‘national’) spaces, and not of biographical trajectories that develop in actual histories and topographies … someone’s linguistic repertoire reflects a life, and not just a birth, and it is a life that is lived in real socio­ cultural, historical and political space” (2010:171). Busch (2012:10–17 and 2013:72–79) discusses a particularly interesting exam­ ple of a language portrait drawn by Pascal, a 50 year old teacher from the bilingual area of Saarland and Lorraine on the border between France and Germany. The region of the Saarland where his mother comes from has fre­ quently changed hands in the last few centuries. It was conquered by the military forces of the French Revolution in 1792 and became part of the French Repub­ lic. After the Napoleonic wars, it was subdivided again, and in 1871, it became part of the new German Empire. After World War I and World War II, France occupied the area. In 1957, it joined the Federal Republic of Germany and since 1971, it has been a member of a multilingual Euroregion created from Saarland, Lorraine, Luxembourg, Rhineland Palatinate, and Wallonia. The same holds true for the Lorraine, which was annexed by France in 1766, conquered by the German Empire in 1871 to become a part of France again in 1919. Shortly after Pascal’s birth, his father, a French soldier stationed in Germany, was transferred to Algeria where he remained for three years. When Pascal met his father again, he failed to recognize him and did not understand his language. The family moved several times between the two countries. In France, his father was blamed for having married a woman from Germany and in Germany, his mother was blamed for having had a relationship with a foreign soldier. In the end, the family settled in France. When Pascal was 18, he had to opt for French or German citizenship. As he wanted to become a teacher, he had to give up his German side. Dual citizenship was not possible. Pascal completely filled his outline adding ears, eyes and a separate hand at the bottom of the picture. In his accompanying narrative he expresses a feeling of being inescapably subjected to “competing discourses involving (two) mutually exclusive national identities” (Busch 2012:10), that is, two incompatible mono­ lingualisms. In this sense, his portrait is also an attempt to break free from cul­ turally and socially imposed linguistic dichotomies. He divided the outline from top to bottom in two halves painting the left side in red (German) and the right in blue (French). This double body can be understood as a representation of his biography lived on the political border of the two countries and as such, it also

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expresses a form of reconciliation. The two halves of the body outline are not exactly identical as the right arm is raised in greeting and the left one slightly bent. German represents the more emotional, private feminine left part of the body and French the more rational public side of his identity. What I wanted to show with this drawing: blue is simply the colour for France, I am simply French. But I am not really as fond of this, despite living there, as I/as my other half, that is, Saarland-German. … And I could almost have become a bi-national, that was my big dream, I wanted to become German-French. … But for the French it was ‘non, vous devez choisir’ (‘No, you have to choose’). That was my biggest frustration up to now. (ibid:10–14) To emphasize the mixed, double nature of his identity he placed a blue French eye in the red German side of the face and a red German eye in his blue French side. This recalls illustrations of the principle of Yin and Yang from Chinese philosophy, expressing the unity of contrary forces, which are complementary and interconnected. In the accompanying text that strongly recalls Herta Müller’s use of the metaphor of the eye, he points to some of the ambivalent aspects implied in this representation oscillating between freedom and control. The two eyes allow for a different but complementary view of reality, which is not strictly monolingual as each eye resides in the other half of the body. Furthermore, the two eyes imply self-control and suggest the omnipresent control of the others. And I am often overcome [by the feeling] that one is never really only – the one or the other. And even if I am now French, in France, I still always have a German EYE. And I not only look at others but also at myself. When I am in Germany now, as today, the feeling comes over me, it is like a reflex, the Frenchman inside me also defends himself somehow. … When I am in one language, I always also have my eye on the other. … Also the others always have their eyes on me. (ibid:11) The duality of the eyes is taken up in the drawing of the mouth: the right, public, French side is painted black and the left more private German side an empty outline with the underlying red colour shining through. “In his draw­ ing”, writes Busch, “Pascal ascribes the role of acting and reacting mainly to the mouth, which along with the eyes he tries to colour in a mirror-inverted way” (ibid:13). Pascal describes this ambivalence in terms of overreacting and keeping one’s mouth shut: “… and your other half would perhaps have seen that differently” (ibid:13–14). The body outline, thus, possesses a double view but also a double mouth. Contrary to the eyes, this set-up is fundamentally asymmetrical. The black French part of the mouth suggests restraint and selfcontrol and the red German part unrestrainedness and self-expression.

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Pascal added two brown ears to his language portrait, which stand for Alsatian and Luxembourgish, two languages he does not speak but can understand. Alsatian German or Elsässerditsch is an Alemannic dialect, like Swiss German, spoken in most of Alsace, a region in the East of France. Like the Saarland, it was under both French and German rule several times over the last few centuries. Luxembourgis, or Letzeburgesch of which there are several varieties, is the national language of Luxembourg and besides French and German one of three administrative languages. The choice of the colour is in itself very revealing as it contains both blue and red, the colours for French and German. The two idioms, which are both spoken in border regions, thus “defy the polarity between French and German. They belong to the … space between, which he yearns for” (ibid:14). This desire for reconciliation pro­ foundly influenced Pascal’s existence. After school, he studied in Alsace and started working as a German teacher. He now lives in France, close to the border with the German Saarland, and is married to a woman whose family comes from Luxembourg. Pascal’s attempt to break free from “the logic of the binary opposition between German and French” (ibid:14), and his identifica­ tion with a hybrid space in-between is addressed in his choice of a different hue of red for the left leg of the body outline. Cherry red stands for Saarländisch, one of the dialectal forms spoken in Saarland, the language of emotion and intimacy of his early childhood spent in the company of his aunts and the lan­ guage in which his mother liked to talk to him. “‘My happiest period’” (ibid:15). This language, which was forbidden in school where he learnt stan­ dard German, is intimately linked to Alsatian and Luxembourgish the other two languages in-between. Finally, he also learnt Italian and English with contrasting emotional involvement. This is reflected in their position within the body outline. Italian has been placed on the inside of the right arm raised in greeting. For Pascal this language is associated with a liberating vacation in Italy, the first in his youth. During this trip, he discovered a possibility of communication outside the narrow limits within which he felt himself caught up, a space outside polarization in which also hands and feet could be used to express oneself. English, on the other hand, which was learnt with some diffi­ culty in school, has been placed on the left and right flank area, to suggest the constricting experience of a black corset (ibid:14). The multi-coloured hand completes the body portrait joining an emotional to an instrumental view of languages. In this hand “the different competing languages are reconciled and function as resources in possible interactions” (ibid:15). Each of the five fingers is given a specific colour. Interestingly enough, the brown colour denoting Alsatian and Luxembourgish is absent, probably because the hand stands for active knowledge whereas these two languages are part of Pascal’s passive linguistic repertoire – the two ears of the body outline. The two main languages are not attributed to the thumb and the index – this role is taken up by English – but to the middle finger (German) and the ring finger (French). Italian is ascribed to the little finger. Italian and Eng­ lish are, thus, placed on the right and left periphery of the hand while German

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and French take up its centre. The two foreign languages learnt at school stand for competing and complementary forms of interaction: on the one hand, the liberating playfulness Pascal associates with the Italian culture and on the other the more pragmatic and realistic attitude suggested by the English index and thumb. A horizontal layering complements the linguistic diversification expressed in the single fingers. The lower part of the hand attached to the wrist – and thus to the rest of the body – is painted in cherry red (Saarländisch). It is followed by a red (German) layer that runs from the black thumb and index area (English) to the left side of the hand and by a blue (French) area connecting the ring finger to the side of the hand. The Italian (green) little finger tops the blue area. If the body outline is primarily organized according to the dual logic of right and left, the hand operates with the opposition of centre and periphery. Saarländisch is the stem from which the different lan­ guages fan out like the branches of a bush. Pascal’s multi-coloured body outline and hand reveal some of the fundamental ambivalences of body metaphors, which are dictated by the very shape of a body and the way it is perceived within a specific tradition, as well as by the prevailing language ideologies. These exert a double form of constraint by highlighting some aspects and erasing others, and by pre-structuring critical response. Pascal “who is caught in a net of discursively constructed language categories and suffers as a result” is also “someone who is striving for empowerment”. Busch distinguishes between three strategies of liberation that are linked to three different language practices. The desire “for a language between the dichotomy French–German (Alsatian, Luxembourgish), for a language beyond this (Italian) and for a language prior to it (the repertoire of early childhood)” (emphasis added) (Busch 2012:15). She describes the last of the three strategies as a pre­ babylonic phantasy (präbabylonische Phantasie) (Busch 2010:68). It is the wish to communicate in a common language, which precedes the Babelic confusion of tongues, and the social pressure associated with language use. In Pascal’s case, it is the language he spoke while living in the Saarland with his mother and aunts during the absence of his French father. Busch mentions the example of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl who spent her holidays with the family in a camping on a Croatian island. Here she met another girl of the same age. She is not sure where her friend came from but remembers how they managed to understand each other all the same thanks to a language invented by the two of them (ibid:67). In a similar vein, in the body outline of the 17 year old student from Klagenfurt the raised hand of the right arm has been painted in lilac for Podjunsko, a Slovenian dialect spoken in a remote valley of Carinthia. As he explains in the accompanying text, he decided to learn this language because his cousin did not understand him: “To stretch out my hand to him” (Busch 2013:43). These fantasies articulate a yearning for universal understanding, for a lan­ guage before languages that evades existing linguistic divisions and can be projected back into a distant past or forward into a future still to come. Pre­ babylonic phantasies are constructed “ex negativo” (ibid:69), that is, from the

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notion that languages can separate and often do exert a normative pressure. Both the second and the third strategy emphasize the need for an area prior and beyond language contact and conflict. In the case of Italian, it is also an explicitly monolingual phantasy that can do without language plurality. The second hybrid strategy that oscillates between two major national languages (German and French) and postulates two lesser mixed dialectal forms (Alsa­ tian and Luxembourgish) could be called a post-pentecostal projection that does not evade plurilingualism but deals with it head-on. In Pascal’s view, these minor dialects are linked to the dialect of his childhood (Saarländisch) and are opposed to the two official languages. The language portraits discussed in the last two sections articulate a use of language that both contradicts and con­ firms the self-containedness of national languages calling for an integrated approach that incorporates monolingual attachment and multilingual diffu­ sion. This specific view is also linked to pre-colonial and pre-modern forms of language diversity to which I will turn in the following section.

3 A plurilingual ethos In an essay on Herta Müller’s plurilingual writing, Dirk Weissmann describes her development as an artist in terms of a journey leading from the experience of a single language via the awareness of a plurality of interacting languages to the creative practice of the individual speaker (2016:191). Müller uses her dif­ ferent languages to question their ascendancy on her thinking and writing and to fuel her creativity, without giving up the first attachment to her German mother-tongue. A strong emotional attachment to one specific language be it the mother-tongue or any other language should not be simply dismissed as a form of essentialism. As the American historian and ethnologist James Clifford argues, it is time “to sidestep the reverse binary position of a prescriptive anti-essentialism … Struggles for integrity and power within and against globalizing systems need to deploy both tradition and modernity, authenticity and hybridity – in com­ plex counterpoints” (1999:178). Clifford sums up his position in a pun: “Routes and roots” (ibid:97). Roots do not necessarily always precede routes as the traditional view would have it. Conversely, multilingualism does not simply supersede and abolish monolingualism. The two intertwined aspects of dwell­ ing and traveling, sedentariness and nomadism, national affiliation and multirooted transnational identity are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other and have therefore to be studied comparatively. Otsuji and Pennycook have put forward a similar argument in their discussion of the notion of metrolingualism. Metrolingualism implies a move away from essentialist, static and conventional ascriptions of language to ethnicity and nation and questions notions of linguistic purity, authenticity and ownership. However, essentialist assumptions can also be found within multilingual ideolo­ gies of hybridity and language mixing. In this sense, simple correspondences between hybrid language uses and hybrid identities have to be fundamentally

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challenged. Furthermore, local forms of monolithic identity and culture are still operative and in some cases can even contribute to the process of becoming dif­ ferent. Because of this, linguistic identities have to be viewed as both fixed and fluid. Fixity and fluidity are neither dichotomous nor the opposite ends of a spectrum, but must be viewed as categories “symbiotically (re)constituting each other” (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010:244). Fixity becomes meaningful only in its interaction with fluidity, and fluidity needs fixity in its disassembling task between cultures, languages and nations. Metrolingualism is a “paradoxical practice and space where fixity, discreteness, fluidity, hybridity, locality and globality coexist and co-constitute each other” (ibid:251). Although metro­ lingualism is the product of modern urban interaction it is not confined to the city alone but can also be found in rural environments and has to be connected to pre-modern and pre-colonial linguistic landscapes. Otsuji and Pennycook stress the constant “push and pull between fixity and fluidity” (ibid:249) in processes of identity constitution and reconstitution. The identity resulting from the tension between the two moments remains unstable and their relationship has to be continually renegotiated. Furthermore, both fixity and fluidity have to be considered in the plural. Linguistic and cultural identities are challenged, compromised, ignored and attested. Metrolingualism is a practice of undoing that challenges language orthodoxy and loyalty and leads to the production of new possibilities, a contradictory practice that can both “mobilise and critique essentialised identity ascriptions” (ibid:249). The case of Osman, an Australian national, born in Australia and in his late twenties exem­ plifies the “intriguing fluidity” (ibid:249) of metrolingualism and throws an interesting light on Pascal’s case and the three interrelated language strategies from the previous section. Osman’s mother is Turkish and his father has an Anglo-Saxon background. He speaks English and understands Turkish but cannot speak it. He feels neither Australian nor Turkish. As an adolescent, he was bullied and physically abused in his neighbourhood, which not only led to depressions but also isolated him from his environment. In search of a place to which he could belong, and in order to distance himself from Australia, he star­ ted studying Asian philosophy and Japanese when he was 15. He can imagine leaving his native country and Turkish-Australian identity for good and moving to Japan. In Osman’s case, fixity is put in the service of fluidity, “his creative attempt to break borders is … supported by his understanding of a fixed rela­ tionship between language and culture/ethnicity” (ibid:250). Pascal also oscil­ lates between fixity and fluidity. The impossibility of constructing a double, both German and French identity (an ambivalent fixity) leads Pascal’s to the search of alternative languages (a many-layered fluidity): the regional dialects in-between, as well as the language of Saarland and the Italian language positioned before, respectively, beyond the unsolvable conflict. These idioms help in different ways to compensate for the initial gap but without, however, offering a final solution. Metrolingualism is also a critique of strategies of pluralisation and notions of linguistic “enumerability and singularity” (Makoni and Pennycook 2007:11) that all too often take “us little further than a pluralised monolingualism”

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(Otsuji and Pennycook 2010:251). Language is not a countable entity but an “emergent property of various social practices” (ibid:248). Instead of an “enu­ merative strategy of counting languages” (ibid:247) and a notion of plurality based on quantity they suggest alternative ways of understanding diversity, not the “pluralising multi (or poly or pluri) but the temporal, spatial and mobile possibilities of the metro” (ibid:252) that are both singular and plural. Metro­ lingualism takes linguistic features as its starting point and does, therefore, not discuss possible relationships between single languages but a wide array of interactions between heteroglossic practices. One way of moving beyond simple enumeration and countability is complexification (ibid:243), which Otsuji and Pennycook oppose to simple enumerative pluralisation. However, plurality and complexity are fundamentally linked to each other. As the writing practice of the multilingual authors discussed in this book shows, complexity is born from plurality by a practice of comparison. This is also one of the central tenets of the concept of plurilingualism that Canagarajah and Liyanage (2012) oppose to multilingualism and use to describe pre-colonial forms of language diversity in the Indian subcontinent. The practice of plurilingualism can also be found in pre-colonial Africa and South America as well as in today’s societies both in the Southern and North­ ern hemisphere. In this sense, plurilingualism – as metrolingualism – has to be seen as a notion contradicting and transcending the dichotomic conceptual pair of monolingualism and multilingualism. Contrary to European multi­ lingualism which tends to be additive (languages are added to each other) or subtractive (one language supplants another), plurilingualism is characterized by mutual influence and interlinguistic exchange. “The directionality of influ­ ence is multilateral” (Canagarajah and Liyanage 2012:50). Languages do not only influence each other but can help each other’s development. In additive multilingualism languages possess separate bodies and identities. In plur­ ilingualism, on the other hand, the different languages are not simply placed next to each other but actively interact with each other. This also holds true for Pascal’s language portrait. Different languages can have different individual and private purposes like the Slovenian dialect Podjunsko that Peter uses only in order to communicate with a childhood friend. Overall language proficiency is not conceptualized singularly and separately for each language but viewed as an “integrated composite” (ibid:50), a continuum in which the users fluidly shuttle from language to language, from linguistic feature to linguistic feature. In their description of South Asia, which draws heavily on the work of the Indian socio-linguist Lachman M. Khubchandani, they discuss composite multi-linguistic identities in terms of language ecology and organicity. Moder­ nist European multilingualism is mostly competitive. It highlights the unique­ ness of linguistic codes and the communities that use them. Plurilingualism, on the other hand, is “complementary” and “amicable”. Languages overlap and interlock in productive ways creating “hybrid and fluid identities” (ibid:52). This leads to a relativist approach to the world and a plurilingual ethos based on mutual respect. Khubchandani contrasts the non-pluralistic “structural”

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and “compartmentalized” European context based on separate affiliations to the plurilinguistic “heterogeneous” but “integrated” Asian societies which are “melded” into a rich “organic whole”. The organic is here synonymous with blurred and liquefied speech boundaries (Khubchandani 1998:9) as well as with a problematic notion of unobstructed plantlike growth. “Variation pervades all nature, including human nature”, writes Khubchandani programmatically in Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos (1997:38). His questionable dichotomic view of Asian and European attitudes to language diversity uni­ laterally highlights the importance of tradition and socio-political intervention within the European context and, at the same time, hides the role of social and human agency in the construction of the plurilinguistic Indian reality. Khub­ chandani does not use the metaphor of the organism for single separate lan­ guages – as German comparatist linguistics – but for the specific setup of different languages in larger geographical areas and smaller cultural regions of the Indian subcontinent.

4 From single organisms to plural body parts The narrative of the first part of this book sets out from an organic under­ standing of language conceived of as a body among other bodies. The bodies of the different national languages exist next to each other like trees whose roots single-mindedly reach back into the past. The uniqueness and self-contained nature of languages is also expressed in the metaphor of the face, which recasts languages as human beings stressing their unmistakable individual character. This vision of separateness can carry over into bilingualism. Goldschmidt describes his two writing languages in terms of contrary but complementary ways to look at the world. French looks West and German East: two vantage points than can never meet and mesh, as the two pair of eyes look away from each other. “French looks left … from the right; German looks from left to right … This is the physical face of languages (Gesicht der Sprachen)” (Gold­ schmidt 2005:103). Goldschmidt’s personification of his writing languages pro­ jects a two-faced Janus-figure made up of two inseparable but independent sides. In a completely different vein, echoing François Grosjean’s warning, that a bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person (1989), Ilan Stavans starts out describing speakers of Spanglish, as “two monolinguals stuck at the head” (Sokol 2004:18). “It is a haunting, beautiful image that makes me think of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – one body, two selves. But is it accurate?” (Stavans 2003:135). To define bilinguals as conjoined twins is mis­ leading, he concludes. A bilingual “has only one mind, which manifests itself through different shades” (Sokol 2004:18). Corporeal metaphors that stress irreconcilable duality imprison the different languages in separate parts of the body. This is also one of the main drawbacks of some of the language por­ traits discussed in this chapter. As Jan Blommaert points out, all generalizing metaphors of this kind ultimately exclude “detail, contradiction and com­ plexity” (2010:18).

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As seen in the previous chapters, corporeal metaphors have been used to articulate a wide array of conflicting points of view with regard to language(s) and have addressed competing and contradictory agendas. Because of this, body metaphors of language still possess a challenging critical potential. The meta­ phor of the face, for instance, positions itself between images of monolingual unity and multilingual pluralisation and fragmentation. Herta Müller suggests another possibility by interpreting her bilingualism in terms of a multilingual composite face that is both masculine and feminine, both coherent and surpris­ ing. The same holds true for the metaphors of the tongue and the eyes which can advocate singularity but also multiplicity. The tongue can represent a unique and irreplaceable language, as in Canetti’s case, or the possibility of an unhampered fluid movement between different languages, as in the work of Tawada and Anzaldúa. Eyes can look away from each other in different directions or allow for radically diverging but interacting perspectives on the world. The paradigmatic shift of attitude described in the previous chapters hinges on three major points. The first point regards the relationship of the corporeal whole to the single body parts. The organicist vision advocated by German comparative linguistics describes languages as self-contained organically struc­ tured and gendered beings that can be subjected to anatomical investigation. The body of language consists of different parts each of which has its specific func­ tion. Bakhtin’s view of the grotesque body radically questions the self-sufficiency of the organicist metaphor of language and shows how the metaphor of the body as a whole can be reinterpreted in terms of duality highlighting the liminal status of all languages. Contrary to the organicist visions of comparative grammar, which describe the life of a language as a series of linear evolutionary stages leading from life to death, Bakhtin’s grotesque body is caught up in a circle, being both alive and dead at the same time. The single body parts are not com­ pletely subordinated to the whole but can develop a life of their own. They are animated by a will to break free and move beyond the limits of the body. Simi­ larly, single linguistic features enjoy a relative autonomy and can migrate across language borders. The grotesque body is unfinished, open to the world and always outgrowing itself. It projects a vision of language that moves beyond the purely structural and systemic allowing for plurality and change. The ideal of linguistic purity implied in the organicist vision of language is abandoned in favour of heterogeneity. The heteroglossic body is made up of different languages and incorporates elements from different linguistic bodies forming a multilingual whole that is subject to constant changes: a composite contradictory face made up of heterogeneous features that suggest a new more complex whole. The cor­ poreal metaphors of the tongue and the eyes eschew the methodological short­ comings of totalizing visions by stressing mobility, flexibility and a plurality of interacting points of view. The transition from the body as a whole to the single body parts is connected to a second relevant aspect: the theoretical shift from language as a system to the active and creative role of the single speakers and the linguistic repertoire to which they have access. Contrary to the organic vision of language, which

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projects a relatively stable functional hierarchy of a unitary linguistic body, the language portraits are an expression of an individual set-up at a specific point in time. Not only do they vary from speaker to speaker, but also articulate a temporary condition, a network that grows and recasts inner connections through the acquisition of new features. According to Jørgensen, polylingual languaging is not the result of a combination of separate languages or of codeswitching from one separate set of linguistic features to another, but the simultaneous use of features taken from different sets. This does not mean that we cannot tell one language from the other …We are forced to realise that it makes sense to talk about language, but not necessarily about a language …The concept of a language is … bound in time and space … and it is not part of our understanding of the human concept of language. Features are, however. Speakers use features and not languages. Features may be ascribed to specific languages … This may be an important quality of a feature, and one which speakers may know and use as they speak. But what a speaker uses is a feature. (2008:165–66) Within the context of polylingual languaging, the complex multilateral directionality of the constantly shifting relationships between single language features takes centre stage. The third aspect concerns the possibilities of body metaphors to describe linguistic borders and language contact. Humboldt conceives of the different national languages in terms of a series of juxtaposed closed circles. This spatial metaphor reproduces the idea of a multiplicity of monolingual bodies next to each other. To leave the circumscribed territory of a body of language is to move into another circle of the same kind. Each of these self-contained spaces possesses a unique irreplaceable linguistic character, as the nine heads of Her­ der’s Cerberus who all speak for themselves and in a language of their own. Bakhtin’s dual grotesque body that is involved in constant processes of exchange with its surroundings fundamentally questions the existence of neat borders between languages. Another corporeal metaphor that stresses fluidity is Simon’s hybrid centaur, which joins animal to human in a smooth transition from skin to fur and back. The organic dimension is complemented by two colours that blend into each other to suggest continuity and a sort of hidden osmosis between the two connected parts. George Steiner used the metaphor of the centaur in his description of translation processes. The translator works between the lines creating an interlingual, a “centaur-idiom” (1998:332). Finally, some of the language portraits show how different colours can be used to suggest a corporeal space open to external influences, in which languages blend into each other creating a complex multi-coloured and multi-layered tapestry. I will come back to colour metaphors in more detail in the conclusion.

Part II

Family ties: infidelity, bigamy and incest

6

Mother-tongues and linguistic family trees

The main focus of this chapter is on the changes that the organic metaphors of lactation and cultivation (chapter two) went through in times of nations and national languages. According to Yildiz (2012:10–14), the monolingual para­ digm associated with the notion of national language is based on a linguistic family romance that defines the speaker’s relationship to her\his mother-tongue in terms of fidelity and betrayal. The notion of a unique mother-tongue directly emanating from the body of the mother sanctions the first language acquired in infancy and childhood as the single and only possible locus of affection. In this sense, one can truly love only one’s own mother-tongue. This specific view impinges on many other related aspects. The profound love for one’s mothertongue is also the emotional basis for the love for one’s country or the beauties of its national landscape. Yildiz’s psychological interpretation of the historical origins of the notion of the mother-tongue has to be integrated and complemented by Bonfiglio’s (2010) analysis of the tree-metaphor that connects gender and body to geneal­ ogy in the name of an organicist vision. Within the comparative linguistics of the nineteenth century, languages are described in female terms and linked to each other by kinship relations. They develop from a single common root and bifurcate like the branches of a tree. The metaphor of the tree connects the three source domains of this book: trees are living organisms akin to bodies, their roots, trunk and branches are used as a model for language evolution and the development of language families, and they are rooted in a specific land­ scape, the nourishing soil of the national territory (chapter eleven).

1 The monolingual paradigm as a linguistic family romance In her seminal socio- and psycholinguistic study of bilingualism first published in 1989, Suzanne Romaine questioned the theoretical inadequacy and alleged transcultural universality of the notion of the mother-tongue. The term, which technically refers to an individual’s first learned or primary language, carries different connotations. In the popular sense, it usually designs the language spoken at home in early childhood, which does not have to be used at present, one of the implications being that the initial monolingual imprint is strong

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enough to persist throughout an individual’s life. The relationship of the speakers to their native language is defined in terms of ownership. Definitions of mother-tongue rely on competence, but also on emotional attachment and identification. In this respect, the mother-tongue is the central language, which the speaker knows best and most identifies with. However, as Romaine argues, the notion is not really necessary and can turn out to be problematic as its meaning may change over time. The concept of the mother-tongue describes mothers as passive repositories of languages which they pass on to their chil­ dren. However, there is ethnographic evidence of patrilineal groups in which the primary tongue is the father’s language. In other cases, the first language learned does not correspond to the mother-tongue. In South Africa, babies often learnt their first language through their Zulu nannies, speaking Zulu before their ‘mother-tongues’ Afrikaans or English (Romaine 1995:20). As we have seen, this was also the original meaning of the term as it was first intro­ duced by Dante in his De vulgari eloquentia (chapter two). The accent shifted, insofar as the intimate bodily relationship with the wet nurse is attributed to the biological mother herself. Linguistic competence in a specific language can vary over time. Migration can lead to a partial loss of one’s mother-tongue and the establishment or acquisition of a new one. One can identify with more than just one language: “Depending on which criterion is involved at a particular stage in the bilin­ gual’s experience with the languages, the language designated as a mother tongue might change. Thus, the notion of mother tongue is a relative one and one’s mother tongue can change over the course of a lifetime” (ibid:22). In view of the complexities of the linguistic setup of the Indian Sub­ continent, Khubchandani questions the simple correspondence between an individual’s unique mother-tongue and the nation to which s/he belongs. The intricacies of language behaviour in the Indian context reveal appar­ ent ambiguities in defining the concept [of] the mother tongue itself … Speech variation in everyday settings is explicated as an instrument of an ongoing definition of relationships. The posture towards, and the image of a mother tongue does not necessarily claim congruity with actual usage, and these, again, are not rigidly identified with specific language territories. (Khubchandani 1998:14–5) In the first part of her editor’s introduction, Juliane Prade (2013:1–9) skilfully elaborates on a few related aspects of the notion of mother-tongue starting out from the title of the collection: (M)Other Tongues: Literary Reflections on a Dif­ ficult Distinction. A mother-tongue is never really completely our own, it always remains partly foreign to us because like any other foreign language it always contains unfamiliar words besides the familiar ones we already know. The concepts of mother-tongue, or father tongue for that matter, are fundamentally misleading because they are neither inevitable, nor exclusive, nor irreplaceable. If drawing clear boundaries between different languages is already problematic, the separation

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between a first privileged tongue and all the following ones is even more difficult. The alternative concept of a ‘first language’ is not a viable solution as it opens up still more questions. Does ‘first’ refer to chronology or use, to speaking, writing, or both? “The more precisely the difference between the mother-tongue and other languages is to be defined, the more this distinction appears to disperse” (ibid:4). Even if definitions of what languages actually are, are necessary, they remain fun­ damentally impossible, “a precise uncertainty” (ibid:1). Processes of language acquisition are not just based on simple acceptance and assimilation of pre-existing structures but inevitably lead to change: “… by the time a child has acquired fluency in its mother-tongue, the latter is no longer the language of the child’s mother or father, and no longer the language the child was taught. … A language becomes a mother tongue by way of altering it … making it an ‘other tongue’” (ibid:6). Furthermore, the supposed unity and homogeneity of languages tends to fall apart as soon as they are scrutinized at close range. Languages are fundamentally plural, made up of speech varieties, dialects, genres and different registers. “Hence, not even one’s own mother tongue, is neither one, nor one’s own language” (ibid:5). One of the main problems with the notion of mother-tongue is that it reduces the rela­ tionship between speakers and their languages to a univocal and unilateral affair. The uniqueness of the biological mother is directly mapped onto a single language as the only possible site of emotion. This obscures the possibility that other languages might also take on an emotional meaning for their speakers. Yildiz describes the mother-tongue as the “affective knot at the centre of the monolingual paradigm” (2012:10). As such, it stands for its supposed organic nature and maternal origin, suggesting corporeal intimacy and natural kinship. Possibly this individual emotional dimension has ensured its survival even in post-national global times. “The affectively charged dimension of the ‘mother tongue’ … accounts for the persistence of the monolingual paradigm and its homologous logic” (ibid:13). The “manufactured proximity” (ibid:12) of language and mother that came about at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century has to be seen within a broader historical and discursive context that includes the redefinition of the notion of family in exclusively biological terms. Bourgeois motherhood was reinterpreted as a site of affective care, a vision that is still pre­ sent in feminist discourse today. “Some feminist critics celebrate the ‘mother tongue’ as bearing residues or traces of the maternal body” or describe the maternal as something that precedes language (ibid:11). In a similar vein, Bon­ figlio questions the contemporary notion of motherese – a kind of universal baby talk – as one of the ideological foundations for the persistence of the notion of the mother-tongue. The powerful icon of the mother–child symbiosis in early language acquisition with its emphasis on lactation and nurturing was the “major conduit for the enracination of the national language” (Bonfiglio 2010:185). The privileged initial communication between mother and child now takes place in a prenatal setting, both as “the primer of language” and “the primal language itself” (ibid:198).

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Proceeding from Sigmund Freud’s notion of family romance as a narrative elaborating on fantasies about origin and identity, Yildiz proposes a double reading of the notion of mother-tongue: on the one hand, a narrative on the origins of the affective ties between a subject and his/her language, based on affect, gender and kinship; on the other, a critical reading of its ideological dimension opening up to contrasting conceptions. A linguistic family romance intimately connects ‘language’, ‘mother’, ‘identity’ and ‘affective power’. It is a “particular fantasy encapsulated in a condensed narrative about linguistic origin giving rise to an ensuing ‘true’ identity”. The notion of mother-tongue “produces a fantasy about the natural, bodily origin of one’s native language and its inalienable familiarity” establishing “kinship and belonging”. This “imagined familial link … seemingly justifies proprietary claims on one’s own language” (Yildiz 2012:46). The interpretative model of the family romance, however, also “offers a blueprint for tracing the emergence of possible alter­ native family romances” (ibid:12). These, as the title of her book suggests, move beyond the mother-tongue, trying to re-narrate and rewrite its storyline. This does not simply mean to write in another, non-native language or in more than one language, but entails moving beyond the very concept of mothertongue, not side-stepping the issue but working through it (ibid:14). In chapter ten, I will deal in more detail with some of these forms of critical rewriting of the concept of the mother-tongue.

2 Muttermund In Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Postmonolingual Condition, Yildiz points to Friedrich Kittler’s detailed account of how around 1800 “the bourgeois mother began to be incorporated into the role of teaching her children to read” and how “the mother’s mouth became the central conduit in the production of proper sounds in the mother tongue” (2012:11–2). In this vision, organic and familial metaphors of language fuse into one. The title of the relevant chapter from Kit­ tler’s Aufschreibesysteme 1800–1900, is “Muttermund” (2003:35–86), an image that strongly resonates with the metaphorical reading of mono- and multi­ lingualism chosen as the structuring narrative of this book connecting the body to the kin-ship domain. Muttermund, the mouth of the uterus, or the cervix, lit­ erally also means the ‘mouth of the mother’ capturing the profound symbolic and physiological implications of the process of creating a native speaker. A child learns her/his first language, while dinking the milk of the mother. Breastfeeding is thus analogous to motherese or baby talk and the learning of the very first sounds of the mother-tongue directly from the mouth of the mother. In Grimm’s Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin of Lan­ guage) (1851), while breastfeeding the baby hears the mild and soft voice of his/ her mother and these words cling to her/his memory before s/he is capable of using her/his own speech organs. From there they will expand in quickly widen­ ing circles connecting her/him with the country of origin, the feminine Heimat and the masculine Vaterland (Bonfiglio 2010:155). This initial process of

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formation, which passes on to the child the instinctive and characteristic sounds of the fatherland (Benes 2008:139), is carried over into the first steps of learning how to read and pronounce the single sounds and words of the mother-tongue (and the mother’s tongue) properly. In this context, the word Muttermund takes on its second meaning. The cervix plays a major role in childbirth. In the same way, the mouth of the mother teaching her child to read by asking him/her to imitate the different sounds of the language gives birth to the future native speaker. Learning how to read in the new language, is qualified in physiological terms, linking the future member of the national language community to the body of his/her mother in a way that a foreign learner will never be able to reproduce. Only the physical and emotional intimacy of the symbiotic mother– child relationship can actually assure the assimilation of the mother-tongue. “The equation system woman = nature = mother” (Kittler 2003:38) on which this conception rests allows to naturalize a national culture and its national lan­ guage inscribing both into the very bodies of the single speakers. Mothers carefully shape the mouth of their children and discipline their lips and tongues, by teaching them to pronounce the different vowels, diphthongs and consonants of their mother-tongue correctly when pointing to the corre­ sponding letters. “Thereby a connection would emerge between the mother’s mouth, the sound and the letter” (Yildiz 2012:12). In this process, the body of the woman was considered a vessel and her mouth a medium through which the sounds would pass. She was not an actor but had to be instructed first by male textbooks how to produce the different sounds correctly. The mothertongue “coming out of the woman’s mouth was [therefore] not just a language that a mother spoke, but rather the result of male ventriloquism” (ibid:12). A woman’s mission was to make men (and women) speak by shaping their organs of speech and to allow for a primordial “Selbsterfahrung der Mundhöhle” (Kittler 2003:44), a self-experience of their oral cavity. The alphabet and the voice of the mother lose their arbitrariness. The single letters are transformed by an inner voice into musical notes and the reading child will not see letters but hear her/his mother’s voice between the lines of the text. The imprint of this learning process was also supposed to correct and ulti­ mately erase any regional dialectal accent. One of the main aims of the meth­ odical exercise of the mouth was the creation of an unpolluted homogeneous national idiom, a “Reinigung der Laute” (ibid:46), a cleansing of the sounds. This generated a double purism: the national language became the unique mother-tongue purified of any external, foreign influences and internal, dia­ lectal inflections. For the first time in history, writes the German educator and reformer Heinrich Stephani (1761–1850) in his Beschreibung meiner einfachen Lesemethode für Mütter (Description of My Simple Reading Method for Mothers) (1807), this technique allows for a removal of regional dialectal “colouring” (Färbung) and the correct pronunciation that a language actually calls for. National languages will gradually supplant all existing vernaculars and a unique untainted form of pronunciation will be established in their place. The German language will finally achieve “the dignity of a standard language”

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(die Würde einer Hochsprache) (Kittler 2003:46). In the end, the different dia­ lects will by necessity converge towards a centre, unite and fuse in the purest and best vernacular available (ibid:48). This view can be traced back to Herder who in Von der Ausbildung der Schüler in Rede und Sprache in Kindern und Jünglingen (On the Education of Students in Speech and Language in Children and Young People) (1796) drew a clear line between national languages and dialects, that coincided with the difference between norm and deviation. As in his description of the dreaded possibility of mixed language use discussed in chapter one, Herder’s dichotomy of national languages and dialects conjures up the difference between the human and the animal. After their birth, human beings can initially only pronounce animal sounds. Some individuals and some populations move beyond this stage but others never overcome it. Their speech sounds like the gobble of turkeys, the honk and hiss of geese or the quacking of ducks. Some highfalutin’ and pompous ora­ tors sound like peacocks and some lackadaisical beaus like canaries. The German vernacular spoken in Thuringia has an unpleasant sound (Herder 1908: 238). The primers that were published in the early sixteenth century during the Reformation period also made use of animal imagery but with a completely different intent. Consonants and combinations of consonants were introduced with reference to animals. A double ‘s’, for instance, was compared to the hiss of a snake. In this way, children learning to read were also initiated to the many different languages spoken by God’s creation (ibid:50). Herder’s verdict also obtains for other varieties of language like sociolects and informal registers. Peasants and townsfolk alike must learn to wean them­ selves from their rustic and uncouth language habits, from the clamouring language of the gutter, as well as abstain from barking, bellowing, croaking and an unorderly mixing of words, so as to speak with reason, decency and gracefulness (ibid:48–9). In Über die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767/68), Herder had expressed the wish that all dialects should be secretly assimilated by the mind to the unity of the mother-tongue (ibid:51). Trabant points to a comparable notion in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia where the establishment of a new literary language is conceived of as a trip from paradise by way of Babel and through the forest of Italian dialects (ytalia silvia) to a new linguistic paradise (2006:62). This forest is an unpleasant place, a dark, impenetrable, scrubby thicket. Dante’s journey recounts the many bar­ barous, savage and dissonant varieties he comes across (ibid:70). His vision, which still focuses on the phonetic side of language, does not perceive yet the cognitive depth that goes with language diversity, a conception that was only developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by philosophers like Humboldt. The constitution of the closed system of the mother-tongue is constantly threatened from the inside by an unwieldy mass of dialects in need of cen­ tralizing disciplinary action. This conflict becomes particularly apparent during transitions when children – or nations, as Herder suggests – start acquiring their (first) language. Speech dissolves into a cacophony of animal

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sounds and a disconnected prattle that metaphorically link the individual and the collective evolutionary stage of language acquisition separating humans from animals to the Babelic babble of multilingualism. The systematic fashioning of a mother-tongue not only generated belonging and inclusion it was also used to exclude all those that did not develop the right kind of relationship to it. First among them were the Jews.

3 The mother-tongue as an anti-Semitic ideology In his ground-breaking and provocative enquiry into the linguistics of the Third Reich, Christopher M. Hutton argues that German Nazism conceptualized the metaphorical connection between the body of the speaker, the organism of the Volk, and the mother-tongue, in the most intimate, fusional terms. “The lan­ guage was imbibed with the mother’s milk, and that socializing moment shaped the child in the image of the language, and fused it into the body of the Volk through an intense emotional bond to the mother. The boundaries of the lan­ guage were the surest boundaries of the Volk …” (Hutton 1999:13). In a world of national languages competing for political and territorial sovereignty only the state could protect and maintain the boundaries of the mother-tongue. The Nazi state intended, thus, “to create a force-field around the innocent and vulnerable mother–child at its core. It had to defend that bond with all its power, for on it depended the psychological, racial and geo­ graphical borders of the Volk, and the triumph of the German people in the life and death struggle of the nations” (ibid.). The feminine world of mother, child and language “could only be protected by a powerful father who represented the fusion of familial and state authority: the ‘mother-tongue’ needed the pro­ tection of the boundaries of the ‘father-land’” (ibid:6). For the German sociologist Georg Schmidt-Rohr (1890–1945) the inheritance of the male ancestors is the female deity of the mother-tongue, “from which radiate lifegiving and life-sustaining forces” (ibid:293). This dense metaphorical cluster linking the individual and the collective body to notions of gender, kinship and space is not a specific invention of German Nazism but pervaded other visions of mother-tongue and national language across Europe, even if not in the same aggressive inhuman way. National Socia­ list scholarship cannot be conveniently demarcated from the rest of linguistics. In this regard, modern linguistics “reflect[s] the politics of European nationalism”. The notions of the native speaker and the mother-tongue have “their roots in nationalistic organicism” (ibid:1) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an ideology that is still alive today. “Linguistics is both the parent and the child of race theory” (ibid:3). Hutton questions the notion of a universal mothertongue. “I do, however, reject the promotion of a mother-tongue ideal as the universally most ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ or ‘valid’ option. But that is emphati­ cally not the same as saying that all mother-tongue discourse is Nazi or fascist. ‘Mother-tonguism’ is a political ideology and needs to be seen in each context against its socio-political and historical background” (ibid:11).

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Hutton discusses the use of the notion of the mother-tongue in the work of the two German linguists Jost Trier (1894–1970) and Leo Weisgerber (1899– 1985). According to Trier, the linguist is a member of the folk community that is defined by its common mother-tongue which embodies “the accumulated wisdom of the German people” (ibid:97). Because of this, he has a special responsibility toward its study that cannot be compared to that of any other language. Interestingly enough, Trier rejected the evolutionary notion devel­ oped towards the end of the nineteenth century that languages are fundamen­ tally plant like organisms since this theory implied a separation between the object of study and the linguist as a speaker of the common mother-tongue. In the collectivistic and anti-individualistic vein of Nazism, Trier argued that “language is not the result of plant-like development”, but “the product of the cultural-spiritual labours of generations, a ‘great power’ that is resistant to the arbitrary interference of individuals” (ibid:98). The Jews could not find a place of their own in the collective body of the Volk represented by the German mother-tongue. As “the evil twin of the Germans” (ibid:5) they did not possess a national territory and hence lacked a healthy relationship to the German language. Other people could be Germanized, but not the Jews because their ethnic imprint and their nomadic unstable mentality prevented it. Assimilated German speaking Jews of the middle-classes were particularly unsettling as they threatened the intimate corporeal bond between the Germans and their mother-tongue. The Jews were a fifth column. More German than the Germans themselves they questioned the direct link between race and mother-tongue. For Hitler race was based in the blood not in language. In his discussion of the ambivalent role of Jews within German culture, he evoked the “horror of assimilation” (ibid:300): Jews spoke most languages and could thus easily pass for authentic Germans even if they were damned to remain Jews. The German Jew who could speak ‘perfect’ German, who wrote literary German, who spoke a German dialect, was a walking proof that the boundary was insecure, that the bounds of language were weak, and that it was possible to pass promiscuously from one language to another: Jews were native speakers of German and were not Germans. (ibid:305) The stereotype of the cosmopolitan, multilingual, untrustworthy Jew was a current motif in the Modernist literature of the time, for instance in the work of the English novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). The racial other­ ness and linguistic placelessness of Jews was generally associated with the Babelic world of the modern metropolis. Rather than being rooted in a certain place and a specific identity Jews were just inventing, performing or adopting an identity that was not truly theirs. The Jews represented disorder, impurity and abnormality. Their lack of a clear nationality and the corresponding absence of a mother-tongue were associated with other related ambiguities

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regarding their uncertain age, their troubling youthfulness, their ambivalent gender, possible sexual deviance, and their bisexual or effeminate appearance. The character of the wandering Jew “is a key multilingual figure, whose cul­ tural cosmopolitanism is reflected not only in a polyglot facility with lan­ guages, but in a tendency to mix those languages” (Taylor-Batty 2013:57). This multilingualism was perceived in clearly negative terms, as a “surface linguistic brilliance”, a “stumbling and repetitive juxtaposition of different languages”, and the dubious and frivolous chatter of a magpie who “uses many languages but is a master of none” (ibid:58). Within Nazi ideology, the relationship between race and language was discussed in controversial terms ranging from the notion that language did reflect physical race, to the idea that a common language was a force capable of uniting a people in the absence of a common race, and, finally, that the mother-tongue as the primary bond between mother and child was the origi­ nal site of socialization connecting language and race. According to Weis­ gerber’s monolingual model, the mother-tongue played a decisive role in the formation of an individual’s cultural identity and allowed for an easy deter­ mination and isolation of a linguistic community as a unity within diversity. As a living linguistic possession it belonged to the people as a whole and its health was crucial for the survival of the linguistic community and its bodily unity (Einheit des Volkskörpers) (Hutton 1999:123). Bilingual speakers were usually hesitant, excessively and destructively critical, lacked creativity and were “deficient in both languages, lacking a profound sense of either” (ibid:122). Language boundaries were the “natural reflection of the diversity of mankind” and the “rootless Weltbürger”, another description for the cos­ mopolitan multilingual Jew, definitely cut a poor figure. In Die volkhaften Kräfte der Muttersprache published in 1939, Weisgerber develops the concept of the Volk in racial terms. To maintain the common will, and the shared mentality, the links of blood over several generations (Blutgebundenheit) are of fundamental importance. This community is not only bound by con­ sanguinity but also by a common homeland. Language, thus, connects a specific world view to race and territory. Weisgerber (1948) promoted the idea that the German people were the only to be named after their mother-tongue, which led him to the conclusion that the very term had been created by Ger­ mans. However, as Spitzer (1948b) pointed out, the origins are to be found in the Romance languages. In the final chapter of the book, Hutton discusses some further aspects that show the questionable side of the notions of mother-tongue and native speaker. As Özdamar and Müller poignantly show, a mother-tongue, despite its alleged organic connection to the body and the mind of the native speaker can always be lost and substituted by another language. “The concept of losing one’s mother­ tongue”, writes Hutton, “points to an irony at the heart of the whole concept” (Hutton 1999:286). If people with another ethnic background start speaking a language that is ‘not their mother-tongue’ reaching a level of proficiency that can be easily compared to that of a native speaker, one must either accept these

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speakers as “co-members of the mother-tongue family” or “the language must be seen to have passed beyond the boundaries of the family, and be spoken by out­ siders and strangers. Neither alternative is particularly palatable” (ibid:298–9). In the first case, one must admit to the fundamental unity of humankind across dif­ ferent languages and cultures. In the second, one must accept that the boundaries of language and identity are profoundly unstable and no longer a reliable criter­ ion on which to build a community. History becomes “mute and impenetrable, an endless and disordered mixing of peoples, landscapes and languages” (ibid:299). I will now turn to the metaphor of the tree and its significance for a definition of language relationships based on kinship.

4 The arborification of vernaculars The notion of mother-tongue directly impinges on the description of languages and their interrelation. Reference to the mother seems to limit all character­ izations of language to family and kinship relationships (Bonfiglio 2010:36). Languages are not only seen as female figures but also linked to each other by kinship relationships that are generally described by matrilineal rather than patrilineal metaphors. There are mother, daughter and sister languages, but no father or brother languages. A possible reason for this choice could be the close metaphorical connection of the female body (and thus of language) to the domestic, the familiar and the realm of the natural, to which Kittler points in his triadic equation system. This specific vision carries over into the tree metaphor, which uses the genealogic model of the family tree to explain the historical development of single languages and their resemblances over time. Roots and mothers are placed at the source, daughters and sisters follow from the same origin like branches and twigs. Bonfiglio attempts to historicize the phenomenon of ethnolinguistic national­ ism by offering a genealogy of the genealogies of language. From this point of view, the tree becomes one of the most powerful metaphors for conceptualizing languages, their history and the way they are related to each other over time. This evolution can be described as a series of subsequent overlapping steps and paral­ lel developments: from the early valorisation of vernaculars and their localization in a specific natural environment (fifteenth to sixteenth century), to the develop­ ment of organic arboreal models of language (from the end of the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century), the subsequent creation of a more abstract discourse (eighteenth century), and their interpretation as biological entities within an organicist and evolutionist frame (nineteenth century) (ibid:120–1). In the fol­ lowing, I will discuss some of the more salient moments of this process. In Diatriba de Europaeorum linguis (Lecture on European Languages) pub­ lished in 1610, the French scholar and religious leader Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) used the term linguas matrices in his description of language groups. From these original primeval languages, dialects as well as other idioms are descended. The term matrix is not used in the sense of mother but as a derivative that indicates a female in a biological sense. For Bonfiglio, this

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represents a nodal point in the development of the notions of language, mother-tongue and native speaker. “Previous images juxtaposed language and lactation and foregrounded the social context of infant-mother and infant-wet nurse relations” (ibid:92). Language was corporealized and granted bodily properties. Scaliger’s notion of linguas matrices places languages for the first time within a genealogical and reproductive context supplementing maternality with procreation. The notion of mother-tongue that was initially only used for a specific single language could now also be employed for a whole family of languages. This new understanding of language was developed by the Swedish philologist Andreas Jäger in his De Lingua Vetustissima Europae Scytho-Cel­ tica et Gothica (On the Oldest Scytho-Celtic and Gothic Language of Europe) (1686). Jäger’s study was infused with vegetal and animal, maternal, organic, familial, genetic and developmental metaphors and anticipated in a way the modern comparative philology of the nineteenth century. Languages are represented as female figures who possess a life of their own and go through various stages leading from childhood to old age and death. Through all these transformations, they remained the same person, with the same body and the same name. The tree metaphor also made its appearance: sister and daughter languages were related both in branches and in root (ibid:94). In the early seventeenth century, a first major escalation of the ideology of the mother-tongue took place. It is the beginning of what Bonfiglio calls “arboreal madness” (ibid:105–121). Nature and the natural soil became repo­ sitories for a cultivation and in some cases even a sanctification of language. The German language theorist Justus Georg Schottel (1612–76), one of the crucial influences in this respect, described the German language as the most untainted and uncontaminated idiom in Europe. An observation that is well in tune with Tacitus’s Germania that played a prominent role in the work of German nationalists of the centuries to come. The Germans and their language had never been subdued by foreign powers. Because of this, their customs remained unspoiled and unmixed and their language stayed closer to the origin than any other European idiom. Schottel described the growth and develop­ ment of languages with the help of arboreal metaphors. The mighty, fertile tree of German language grew high and wide. Its rich roots reached deep into the earth and its branches and twigs sprouted abundantly. The purist linguistic agenda of the German Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (The Fruitbearing Society) founded in 1617 called for monolingual trees (Knauth 2012:128). One of the central metaphors of the German language societies of the seventeenth century of which Schottel was a prominent member was that of the gardener pruning a fruit tree to promote its growth and fertility. Language was a garden, from which all choking weeds had to be carefully removed (Thomas 1991:20–1). In the German comparative linguistics of the nineteenth century, the meta­ phor of the language organism is conjugated with family and tree metaphors. Family bonds link languages to each other. The German Stamm, trunk, stem, tribe, allows for multiple metaphorizations. A Stammbaum is a genealogical tree or pedigree and Abstammung refers to origin and lineage. In Bopp’s

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Vergleichende Grammatik (Comparative Grammar) (1833), the family mem­ bers of the Indo-European language trunk are seen as Stammschwestern, stem sisters but also as Stammgenossen, comrades, from the same pedigree line. German can be directly traced back to Sanskrit and from there to the IndoEuropean Ursprache. Besides German, other daughter languages like Greek and Roman have remained ethnically homogeneous. The metaphor pre­ supposes parallel genealogical lines of descent between a people, a nation and its language, the purity of one avouching for the purity of the other. Like the notion of mother-tongue the arboreal metaphor is linked to antiSemitic theories. According to the French religious historian Ernest Renan (1823–1992) Judaism is rooted in a primitive civilization incapable of true evolution and clearly inferior to Aryan ancestry characterized by the higher complexity of the Indo-European language family. The Semitic branch was already fully formed at birth, remained linguistically simple and did not vary much over time. Renan connects this linguistic invariance to the uniform and unchanging surroundings of the desert where the Jews originally lived as nomadic tribes. The natural dullness and dryness of the landscape generated a linguistic monotony, which resulted in a comparable spiritual form of mind. In this sense, the Hebrew language can be compared to a desiccated branch. Semitic languages are incapable of abstraction, do not know any fecundity of imagination and their monotheism is resistant to a pluralistic outlook. Arboreal metaphorics is not “as innocuous as it seems” as it generally serves “to reinforce notions of language as biological, genetic, and ethnic” (Bonfiglio 2010:206). The metaphor of the family tree is an inappropriate way to represent the development of languages and their relationship, as separate biological spe­ cies cannot exchange their genetic material. Furthermore, languages do not evolve in a linear way from a single origin as linguistic structures are repeatedly mixed and recombined across boundaries. This fundamentally questions all possible claims for purism and fidelity to an original source. The language family tree is parthenogenic, as it traces descent from a single parent, that is, from the mother’s womb. Human genealogy, however, is based on biparental descent. Linda F. Wiener (1987) compared classifications of organic and linguistic systems pointing to the limitations and drawbacks of the organic metaphor of the tree and suggesting theoretical alternatives. Linguistic evolution is only in part hierarchical. Vertical evolution and bifurcation cannot account satisfacto­ rily for processes of language development. Lateral language influence has also to be taken into account. Reticulate evolution or reticulation is based on hor­ izontal networks and webbings. The lateral merging of two ancestor lineages is opposed to the vertically bifurcating tree. The reticulate model in linguistics confronts the organic self-contained national language with the realities of for­ eign incursions and the hybrid nature of languages in general. Languages are always hybrid to some extent, while most organisms produce hybrids only occa­ sionally. Conversely, genealogic relationships are essential to organisms, but not necessary for hybrid formations in language groups. Genealogic affinity is not a prerequisite for interlanguage affinity. While an organism generally requires

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close genetic affinity with another organism to exchange characteristics, even genealogically unrelated languages can borrow from each other. Contrary to a species where inherited characteristics may directly affect an individual, language character depends on a series of social and cultural dimensions. The horizontal reticulate model questions ethnic purity and vertical genealogical narratives of race and ethnicity that insulates one specific language from others. Despite the fact that the lateral reticulate perspective is more productive, the traditional genealogical view is still strong. As Bonfiglio cogently argues, individual lan­ guages are a “dynamic phenomenon at the mercy of a myriad of social, demo­ graphic, economic, political, and psychological influences that problematize a priori the attempts to claim an original point, purist pedigree, or … genetic ownership for any given language … Applied linguistics would do well to jettison the arboreal and matricentric metaphors for language that perpetuate such counterproductive ideologies” (2010:216–7). In the following two sections, I will explore interpretative approaches that explain language contact and evolution in terms of laterality and reciprocity rather than genealogy and vertical bifurcation.

5 Interlingual gradations The German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) developed alternative ways of interpreting the historical and geographical relationship between languages, which were based on contiguity and exchange and fun­ damentally questioned the arboreal genealogy of nineteenth-century linguis­ tics (Bauman and Briggs 2003:255–298). In Race, Language and Culture first published in 1940, he deals among other subjects with the study of American aboriginal languages. His method that focuses on individual speakers and oral sources is fundamentally Humboldtian in nature and a far cry from the study of self-contained language systems and genealogical relationships typical of the comparative linguistics of the nineteenth century with its narrow focus on Indo-European languages. Boas tried to break free from this interpretative model that admitted only one possible origin for a language and excluded Semitic languages. In his opinion, the study of languages is not so much their systematic classification but an attempt to trace the history of the develop­ ment of human speech. From this point of view, linguistic phenomena cannot be studied as a unit. American languages cannot be squeezed into a rigidly genealogical scheme: “we have to recognize that many of the languages have multiple roots” (Boas 1982:225). Not “all languages which show similarities must be considered branches of the same linguistic family”. Languages pos­ sess the tendency “to absorb so many foreign traits that we can no longer speak of a single origin …” (ibid:217). Boas’s critique of European models proceeds from cultural and linguistic peripheries and favours plurality, multi­ ple origins and horizontal imbrication anticipating post-colonialism and the theoretical stance of the creole writers Glissant, Torabully and Condé who developed botanical and arboreal metaphors that criticize notions of purity and verticality (chapter thirteen).

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American aboriginal languages are all more or less closely related suggesting not only continuous ongoing exchanges and morphological assimilations but also the possibility of a complex origin. Boas calls attention to the “multifarious ways in which languages” are interrelated and “seize upon one another” (ibid:207). Even though modern European languages have developed by differ­ entiation, they may also have been fashioned by mutual influences, a possibility that the Indo-European model has not taken into consideration. Notions of lin­ guistic families and genetic relationships operate diachronically with a simple linear time sequence. Boas’ focus on phonetic, semantic and even morphological forms of hybridization is based on synchronicity, spatial contiguity and dis­ tribution over neighbouring areas. Languages tend to overlap and merge with each other. Michel Espagne speaks of a territorial continuity between languages that reveals social constellations as a moment of dynamism and fluidity (Espagne 2002:154–5). New ideas are not simply added but lead to a fusion of heterogeneous elements borrowed from diverse sources. Espagne linked Boas’ language theory, his models of métissage and his scien­ tific career informed by a blend of the Humanities and the natural sciences to his Jewish origin and his experiences with anti-Semitism. His Judaism manifests itself in the way he insists on the fecundity of cultural and linguistic mixing. Boas studied physics and geography in Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel and immigrated into the United States in 1886. In 1889, he became professor of anthropology at Columbia University moving from the natural sciences to the Humanities. In his interpretative models based on cultural and linguistic hybridity, he transposed his own transcultural experiences between two continents onto the American tribes. Interestingly enough, his doctoral thesis from 1881 was on the colour of seawater, a detail that takes on a special significance within the metaphorical frame of this book (see chapter fourteen and the conclusion). According to Ruth Benedict, who accompanied him as a student during their year-long expedition to Baffin Island (1883–4), Boas was mainly interested in the way the local Inuit perceived the colour of water (Espagne 2002:159). Another interpretative approach that questions the evolutionary ideology of comparative linguistics is the wave language model of linguistic change (Fran­ çois 2015:168–70), which was developed by the German linguists Johannes Schmidt (1834–1901) and Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927). According to this view, a new language feature or combination of linguistic features spreads from its origin – the centre of maximum effectiveness – and gradually expands in overlapping diachronic circles, similarly to concentric waves on a surface of water hit by a stone. This metaphor questions Humboldt’s description of the various national languages existing next to each other like closed circles and recalls Vilém Flusser’s interpretation of Pilpul, the Jewish art of the commen­ tary (chapter fifteen). Schuchardt who was also the founder of creole studies, formulated the idea that creole languages as mixed linguistic entities were in no way inferior to other languages. In a short essay on phonetic laws published in 1885, he ques­ tioned the existence of a homogeneous language community (einheitliche

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Sprachgemeinschaft) (1885:15). Continuous language subdivisions (endlose Sprachspaltung), which were the result of individual language use, generated constant language mixing (endlose Sprachmischung), also within more or less uniform ethnic groups (ibid:16). Language mixing is far from exceptional, it is not restricted to ethnically mixed groups, but a common occurrence even within the most homogeneous language communities (ibid:20). The study of creoles leads to a redefinition of the notion of ‘language’ both from a diachronical and synchronical point of view. Like creoles, European languages have come about through centuries of language contact and exchange creating a nearly uninterrupted series of diverse forms of mixing. Not all languages are necessarily creole languages but the processes that lead to the formation of national languages and creole languages are fundamentally com­ parable. A study of creole languages, furthermore, shows the absence of clear­ cut boundaries between languages and highlights the fine nuances between neighbouring idioms which Schuchardt described as gradations (Arndt, Naguschewski and Stockhammer 2007:16). Turning creoles into languages has the advantage of greater recognition and acceptance, but there is also a problematic side to this process. Questions of origin and uniformity are central for European views of language. This holds also true for dialects (Makoni and Pennycook 2012:445). In this sense, creoles should not be normalized by emphasizing their similarities to other languages. They should remain models that help destabilize languages by highlighting their similarities to creole. All languages can be seen as creoles, but not all creoles are also languages (Makoni and Pennycook 2007:12).

6 Grafting and language interaction Scaliger’s notion of linguas matrices opens up a striking metaphorical connec­ tion between the linguistic concept of matrix and the notion of mother-tongue. Matrix clauses are main independent clauses that contrary to embedded or dependent clauses can stand on their own. In code-switching, a matrix lan­ guage is the predominant language in which all others are embedded. The implicit assumption is that the matrix language is generally the mother-tongue, the first and foremost language to which all others are subjected. Matrix comes from the Latin mother, breeding female and by extension womb, source or origin. Embedded from em + bed, to lay as in a bed, to insert or encapsulate, has been originally used as a geological term, in reference to fossils in rocks. The metaphors of the matrix and embeddedness describe relationships between languages in terms of gender and reiterate the idea of mother-tongues and national languages as encircled spaces. Grafting is another frequent organic metaphor in linguistics, code-switching research and translation studies to describe the way languages interact with each other. To graft, to insert a shoot from one tree into another, from Middle English graff, comes from the Old French graif, grafting knife, carving tool, but also stylus or pen, and from the Greek grapheion, stylus, and graphein to

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write. This is probably due to the resemblance of a stylus to the pencil-shaped shoots used in grafting. Embedding and grafting stress different possibilities of language contact. Insertional code-switching involves the embedding of ele­ ments from one language into the morpho-syntactic frame of another. If embedding suggests the insertion of a foreign element into a given linguistic frame, grafting is about the organic joining of two different components. In this horticultural technique, which is remindful of the hybrid figure of the centaur, the tissues of different plants are joined so as to continue their growth together. In the case of embedding, the emphasis is on linguistic juxtaposition without overlap or merging, in the case of grafting the border between languages are seen as porous allowing for reciprocal osmotic exchanges. The metaphor of grafting has a long history reaching back into Antiquity where it was held in high esteem and used to describe both cultural activities in general and aesthetic production (Schmieder 2011). Grafting ensures an enno­ bling and qualitative enhancement and is used to increase fertility. Contrary to hybridity based on the mixing of bloodlines and genetic material, in grafting two independent organisms are joined to each other in a functional unit that does not abolish their difference. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the metaphor was widely used in philosophy, pedagogy and the literary field in con­ nection with translation and the combination of different literary genres. How­ ever, in the last third of the eighteenth century in connection with the social, political and economic changes linked to the rise of national states and lan­ guages, the metaphor underwent a reinterpretation. It was now used in a polemic sense and with a mainly negative connotation stressing heterogeneity and artifi­ ciality. Despite its successful use in agriculture, grafting was used as a metaphor for that which had not grown naturally but added from outside, for unsuccessful relationships and unbridgeable differences. In the early eighteenth century, the notion was also used in the new medical practice of variolation, which was later called vaccination. It was only in the twentieth century that its use was restricted to agriculture and medicine. Despite its success in both fields, the negative con­ notations persisted and even intensified in connection with racist ideologies, social Darwinism and biologistic discourses. Nazism cautioned against the alleged dangers of grafting foreign blood streams onto the German race pollut­ ing its original purity. This dichotomic vision of purity versus impurity spilled over into linguistic discourses on the mother-tongue and the national language. Grafting can be interpreted in terms of subordination. The host plant is rooted in the ground and nourishes the guest with nutrients. However, another more egalitarian reading that focuses on processes of interchange is possible. In La Dissémination, Derrida uses the metaphor of grafting (greffer) for a critique of the fiction of a unique pure origin. Grafting and writing are synonyms. A graft is not applied to the surface or to the interstitial spaces of a previously existing text. Through calculated insemination the two conjoined texts transform and deform each other. They can reject, mutually contaminate or regenerate one another. Each grafted text not only continues to radiate towards the place of its extraction but also affects the new terrain (1972:431). The notion of grafting, thus, abolishes

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the dichotomic difference between matrix and embedded language and any other kind of hierarchic set-up. Grafting triggers off processes of mutual transforma­ tion, deformation and even contamination (see also chapters nine and thirteen). Derrida’s understanding of the grafting metaphor allows for a reinterpretation of the relationship of the different linguistic elements involved. In his view, the two elements do not completely fuse into each other but remain distinct from one another and this is the very basis of their reciprocal transformative power. Sylvia Sasse explored the relationship between hybridization and grafting in Bakhtin’s work. Bakhtin rarely makes use of the notion of hybridity and mainly in connection with his theory of the novel. For language interaction, he generally uses the notions of overlapping, intersection (peresecˇ enie) and crossing (skrešcˇ e­ nie) which do not imply any kind of mixing. In his work on the double-voiced word of the novel, he distinguishes among other things between hybridizations and dialogized interaction of languages. Dialogues differ from hybridizations in that they do not blend or fuse the elements they are made from (Sasse 2011:138). Even though Bakhtin never mentions grafting explicitly he refers to it indirectly in his description of dialogism. In fact, as in dialogized interactions of languages, in grafting processes the two joined elements always retain their character. The notions of hybridity and dialogue/grafting, thus, articulate two contrasting forms of language interaction. On the one hand the double-voiced ambivalent dialogi­ cal forms and on the other the indissoluble fusion of hybridity. Hybridization is a mixture of different languages separated by time or social divisions within the arena of a single utterance. Besides intentional and con­ scious, artistic, forms of hybridization, there is also an unconscious and unin­ tentional form, which is “one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages” (Bakhtin 2006:358). Language-change is achieved by means of mixing languages that coexist “within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of dif­ ferent branches, or different groups of such branches” (ibid:359). Besides lan­ guage contact and interaction, the main generator of linguistic change is the inner heteroglossic plurality of single languages. In Bakhtin’s description, this inner linguistic diversification pervades the whole system down to the smallest units. Unconscious hybridizations are similar to intentional ones but generally single-voiced. Conscious hybridizations, on the other hand, result in doubleaccented and double-voiced constructions that contain two languages, two speech manners, two styles and two utterances which cannot be separated by formal boundaries (ibid:304–5). Conscious hybridizations generate artistic hybrids and by doing this make the unconscious tendency of languages to change and grow through hybridization visible. Literary language is therefore the very means to enact this continuous internal process of hybridization. Sasse describes Bakhtin’s organic vision of language evolution as a critical vitalism akin to Henri Bergson’s neovitalism suggesting the existence of an irrational and unpredictable side to language production (Sasse 2011:149). Language is an organic hybrid, a dual porous body that is not simply given, but keeps changing its appearances without ever reaching completeness. Bakhtin explicitly separates

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hybridization from dialogue, but in his description of conscious hybridization he seems to treat them as similar phenomena. In this sense, he metaphorically recasts hybridization in dialogical terms as a form of grafting in which differ­ ences are not abolished through fusion but kept alive and productive. The metaphor of grafting, which combines nature and culture highlighting the profound theoretical ambivalence of plant metaphorics, echoes Knauth’s reading of the tree and the forest as contradictory and complementary tropes of multilingualism (2012). Knauth opposes the paradigm of the Babel Tower with its pyramidal tree-like verticality to the unruly forest of languages, an image of disorder and horizontality. These two paradigms meet and mesh in the poetic imaginary and keep reappearing within the European tradition. Besides the opposition of the single tree and its chaotic, labyrinthic, forestal counterpart, the tree itself is characterized by a dual structure: on the one hand the trunk, and on the other, its bifurcations and ramifications, as well as its extensive system of roots. Roots, as the trope of the rhizome goes to prove (chapter thirteen), are not only metaphors of a linear genealogic development. The cosmic tree also possesses air roots that reach into the sky and etymologi­ cal roots ultimately show the deep-reaching plurlingualism of all languages. The German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) imagined a preBabelic tree of paradise, a Pentecostal projection of 72 languages arranged in a circle crowned by a corresponding number of tongues of fire. Similarly, Guil­ laume Apollinaire’s literary multilingualism moves beyond a simple opposition between the Babelic and the Pentecostal paradigms (Stierle 1982:70–1).

7

Beyond bilingual bigamy

In this and the following two chapters, I will focus on metaphors of multi­ lingualism that criticize unilateral gender assignments and kinship metaphors emphasizing the uniqueness of the mother-tongue. To think, to speak and to write in different languages, and to constantly move back and forth between them involves division and discord. Bilingual writers, according to their specific social and cultural plight, have described this inner tension and the answers it calls for in most contradictory terms: a painful experience bordering on mad­ ness, a hazardous, but fundamentally creative endeavour or a liberating possi­ bility of breaking up and reconstituting one’s identity. The narrative of this chapter leads from conflict to reconciliation, from adultery and unresolvable duality to fluid bilingual bigamy opening up an interlinguistic space that eschews simple dichotomies. Beyond the seemingly irreconcilable tensions of bi-lingualism lie the promises of tri-lingualism and pluri-lingualism, and beyond bi-gamy beckons poly-gamy (Kellman 2013a:37). I will discuss this transition with the help of the work of the Argentinian writer Ariel Dorfman and the Moroccan author Abdelkébir Khatibi who have found their way out of insecurity and a crippling choice by embracing difference and multiplicity.

1 Choose and lose In the paper “Schizoglossia and the linguistic norm” first published in 1962, Einar Haugen describes schizoglossia as a linguistic malady to which speakers of more than one linguistic variety of their own language are exposed. The problem does not arise from the use of different languages at the same time but from internal forms of multilingualism, like dialects, and often leads to a feel­ ing of linguistic insecurity about one’s mother-tongue. When the individual speaker is uncertain as to what s/he ought to say and write, conflicts may arise leading to self-depreciations and shame. The main symptoms are “acute dis­ comfort in the region of the diaphragm and the vocal cords” as well as a “dis­ proportionate, even an unbalanced interest in the form rather than the substance of language” (1972:441). Haugen discusses the linguistic situation in Norway calling for a less relativistic attitude towards language diversity. Schi­ zoglossia should not be ignored or simply tolerated but a remedy based on

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scientific research should be elaborated providing the security of a common code. Dialects do have their particular charm and aesthetic quality but ulti­ mately hamper communication by calling attention to features that are irrele­ vant to the message. “Every dialect or every language may be equally entitled to exist in a historical sense and equally capable of expressing what its users wish to say. But … the most efficient way of saying or doing something is pre­ cisely promoted by uniformity of code rather than by diversity” (ibid:443–4). Uniformity allows for rapid and unimpeded communication. In this sense, Haugen calls for an eradication of schizoglossia in favour of standardization and normalization. The insecurity and the sense of shame of the individual speakers recalls the attitude of early code-switchers towards their multi­ lingualism discussed in chapter one. The sense of physical discomfort is basi­ cally the result of a social pressure calling for uniformity but might also be healed by bolstering the multilingual identity of the speakers. Schizoglossia, as the term itself suggests, forces a choice on bilingual speak­ ers that implies renouncing one language in favour of a unique form of expression. Some authors have described this predicament in terms of illegi­ timacy and marital relationships fraught with contradictions. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour describes the bilingual writer as someone caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of his two languages, a painful and shameful form of bigamy. When a “bilingual writer has two avowedly legitimate output systems at his disposal … writing in the second language ceases to be a mere ‘fling’ and the horror of bigamy sets in” (Klosty Beaujour 1989:52). Klosty Beaujour (ibid:58–80) discusses the work of Elsa Triolet (1896–1970) who was born in Moscow in a Jewish family and married the French writer Louis Aragon whom she had met in Paris in 1928. She describes Triolet’s atti­ tude to her French-Russian bilingualism as puritanical. “Perhaps if her legit­ imate spouse had been Russian … she would have felt her linguistic bigamy less strongly” (ibid:77). Triolet would not permit herself to code-switch in print. In her later works, as the roman imagé La mise en mots, she solved this tension by integrating images accompanied by handwritten passages in the textual space. One can find, for instance, a segment from Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia’s (1403–82) “Last Judgement” showing two young women with long dresses standing in front of each other, looking at each other, and joyfully holding hands (Triolet 1969:76). Next to it, Triolet has added a short handwritten text in French: it should be easy for bilinguals to translate themselves, but it is not. One looks at oneself in a mirror, and tries to find oneself, but one does not recognize one’s own reflection (ibid.). The image, however, seems to contradict the text and to hold a promise of a future reconciliation and a final meeting of the twin souls in paradise. Another image presents a two-headed female statue. One of the faces is looking at itself in the mirror. The hand written text in the upper left corner refers to the impossibility of resolving the conflict of bilingu­ alism. Not writing in the Russian mother-tongue is and remains an illegitimate act: “Être bilingue, c’est un peu comme être bigame: mais quel est celui que je trompe?” (ibid:84), she asks, pointing out the fundamentally self-contradictory

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dimension of bilingual writing, and its self-destructive, if not self-abusive aspect. Triolet (Klein-Lataud 1996) reasserts the traditional idea of illicitness with regard to the act of bilingual writing establishing the inalienable right of a first marriage, that is, the relationship to a mother-tongue which in her case, ironically enough, is male and defined as the original legitimate sexual partner of the author. A bilingual writer can never really be at peace with her/himself: “Ainsi, moi, je suis bilingue. J’ai un bi-destin. Ou un demi-destin. Un destin traduit” (ibid:8). An unreconciled double personality or two incomplete halves. “On dirait une maladie: je suis atteinte de bilinguisme. Ou encore: je suis bigame. Un crime devant la loi. Des amants, tant qu’on veut: deux maris enregistrés, non. On me regarde de travers: à qui suis-je” (ibid:54). In a similar, but less tormented vein, the Caribbean author Maryse Condé who was born in Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe) describes the relationship to her French writing language as a “liaison dangereuse” (2007). This notion can be traced back to Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ (1741–1803) epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses that casts the aristocratic society of the time in terms of seduction, infidelity and betrayal. Her father had a fetishistic relationship to French and venerated it as if it were a woman. Her own feelings are of a more ambivalent kind, a mixture of emotional attachment and rancour, like those of an adopted child who lives in a bourgeois family but knows all along that her biological mother, that is, creole, is living in poverty. To describe the colonizing power of the language Condé compares it to an endlessly fornicating male figure, “un fornicateur jamais lassé” (ibid:214), bent on impregnating women of the most diverse origins. Ilan Stavans (2002 and 2004) was born in Mexico City in 1961 to a Jewish middle-class family from Eastern Europe. His writing oscillates between Spanish and English, but Yiddish also plays a role. In “My love Affair with Spanglish”, instead of distributing his divided affections on different competing languages he chooses provocatively to love the linguistic hybrid of Spanglish, an amalgam of dialects, pidgins, and creole languages that result from the interaction between Spanish and English. Interestingly enough, he compares Spanglish to Yiddish, with which it shares a series of traits (2003:141–3). “My passion for Spanglish”, he concludes “in no way diminished my devotion to Spanish and English. Indeed, I believe in multiple loves” (ibid:145).

2 Balanced bilingualism Ariel Dorfman’s parents, like those of Ilan Stavans, originally came from Eastern Europe. His father, Adolf Dorfman, was born in Odessa to a well-to­ do Jewish family. In the translingual memoir Heading South, Looking North (1998) which he decided to write in English first – relegating Spanish to the attic of his life, and having it sit at the far corner of his writing table (Dorfman 2004:217n14) – he retraces his life from the point of view of his double alle­ giance to Spanish and English discussing the way he constructed and recon­ structed his identity over the years in and through language. Dorfman’s

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astonishing story begins in Buenos Aires where he was born in 1942. In Feb­ ruary 1945, he contracted pneumonia shortly after arriving in New York and spent several weeks in hospital. This traumatizing experience led him to aban­ don his Spanish language. He swore to himself never to speak the language again. He stayed in the United States until he was 12 years old. During the McCarthy Era, his family had to leave because of political reasons. In 1955, they moved to Santiago in Chile and Dorfman had to get back to Spanish again. He had not spoken the language for ten years but soon enough it started to speak in him and to “infiltrate” his habits, “seeping” into his very con­ sciousness (ibid:213–5). After some time, and in a reversal of his previous resolution, he decided to give up on English for good. In this phase of his life, the two parts of his split personality were trying to ignore each other in fear of a possible “contamination” and “cross-fertilization” denying the “common space they both shared within” him, because this would have meant admitting that he was “irrevocably bilingual” (ibid:216). In conflicting situations, the two languages behaved as if they had caught each other in “flagrante case of lin­ guistic adultery” immediately menacing divorce. He could not “venture one word in either language without” a feeling of betrayal, because his choice of one of them was just “a quick fling” (ibid:207). However, in 1973 after the military coup that toppled the government of Allende and after a second near death experience, this time at the hands of the military, he returned with his family to the United States. Dorfman self-translated his autobiography into Spanish. This second version was published the same year as its English counterpart. The title which was slightly changed, appears to give priority to the North (Kellman 2013b:212): Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte. Un romance en dos lenguas (Heading South, Desiring the North. A Romance in Two Languages). The book consists of two parts – ‘North and South’ and ‘South and North’ – of eight chapters each and an epilogue. A life split in two: “as if the author remains unable to resolve the binary opposition that has defined his life” (ibid:211). Dorfman tried to solve the anxiety of being double by changing his name. Since his father admired Lenin he was originally called Vladimiro, but he decided to change it to Edward (Dorfman 1998:79). However, he ends up choosing his middle name Ariel, inspired by Shakespeare’s Tempest. “Twins, doubles, duality, duplicity, there at the start of my life” (ibid:80), a “hybrid mongrel of language” (Dorfman 1998:269). His “binocular vision” and “verbal ambidexterity” (Kellman 2013b:214), his seesawing between languages that manifests itself as a “linguistic psycho­ machia, a struggle between his two languages for command of his soul” (ibid:213), will eventually reach a fruitful equilibrium in a principle of balanced bilingualism. “Facing both North and South but not belonging entirely to either, he positions himself as a hemispheric go-between” (ibid:220). This transition unfolds as a passage from an initial sense of guilt due to a double betrayal of his two writing languages to an acceptance of a fluid form of bilingualism. From a “perverse and often incessant doubleness”

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(Dorfman 2003:31) to a new sense of hybridity. “Not the victory of one tongue over the other one but rather a cohabitation, my two languages reaching a truce … married to two tongues, inhabited by both English and Spanish in equal measures, in love with them both … the distress of being double and somewhat homeless is overshadowed by the glory of being hybrid and open … a fluid bigamist of language …” (ibid:33). In “Footnotes to a Double Life”, Dorfman (2004) re-enacts his conflict yet again, but this time also on the level of the text-format. The main text and the footnotes are like textual twins fighting for primacy. On the first few pages, the footnotes are predominant and the main text is reduced to a single line. However, towards the end, the two parts reach a kind of spatial balance sug­ gestive of the truce and harmony between the two languages that he reaches in the end. Dorfman describes his first traumatic experience as a two-year-old child in spatial terms, as a transparent wall separating him from his Spanishspeaking parents. In the cold and bare white hospital in New York, he had been quarantined behind a glass partition. His visiting parents, far removed behind the glass wall, uttered words in Spanish he could not hear, as if his mother-tongue had abandoned and betrayed him. He had literally lost touch with his origins. Dorfman describes his bilingualism as a forked, bifurcated tongue, a space split right in the middle where the two languages meet and stage their rivalry. At the very moment he decided to turn his back on Span­ ish he could feel “an infinitude of English at [his] tongue’s end”, “at the edge of his tongue” (Dorfman 2004:217 and 212). Dorfman generally conceives of his two writing languages as female. Triolet speaks of French as a husband or a male lover and Condé describes French both as female and male. This seems to suggest that with the metaphor of bigamy used by multilingual authors the gender difference is more fundamental than a female gendering of language itself. The role of the other language as wife and lover sometimes merge. Spanish “treated me not like a spurned mistress, but rather as a lover who had been patiently awaiting my torrid [sic] return” and “English also knew how to wait for the wayward husband to come home …” (Dorfman 2003:32–3). The metaphoric discourse of bigamy and betrayal does not go without blatant male phantasies of omnipotence. The two languages are at the beck and call of the writer jealously fighting over his attentions: “Like a sweetheart asking if she makes love better than the other one, the wife, the legitimate spouse” (Dorfman 2004:216n13). However, Dorfman also plays with different role assignments. The two traumatic experiences of his life were “the mothers, las madres of his very language. Or maybe the padres, maybe the Spanish words had inseminated an English child in my brain. Whatever the gender …” (ibid:212n7). He describes his situation as that of a child pushed and pulled this way and that by parents that insult each other in languages that he understands all too well but that they both pretend not to understand. In the following passage legitimate and illegitimate love, male and female gender are inverted in a sort of chiasmus. “Tired of being a husband with two squabbling wives or a mistress with two lovers or maybe I was the bed where the two

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vocabularies coupled … choose your metaphor, tu metáfora” (Dorfman 2004:206). Ironically enough, his Spanish mother-tongue was not his mother’s mother-tongue but only a language that she had used to “hijack a different identity from the Yiddish she had first heard” in her Eastern European child­ hood (ibid:210n5). In this sense he is as orphaned in Spanish as he is in English.

3 The bi-langue The novelist, playwright and literary critic Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) was born in the Moroccan port of El Jadida at a time when the country was still a French protectorate. Khatibi belongs to the educated French speaking middle class. He studied sociology at the Sorbonne and after his return to Morocco he worked as a teacher, and writer and was professor at the Uni­ versity of Rabat. His career as a writer and thinker is closely connected to that of Jacques Derrida. They regularly met and exchanged letters. Derrida mentions Khatibi’s Amour bilingue (1983) in his Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (1996:63–5) and Khatibi reacted to his comments in an open letter (Combe 2016) in 2004. Khatibi’s life and work illustrate the question of the power of language(s) in the development of multilingual identities in the context of colonialism. Before discussing Amour bilingue in more detail, I would like to focus on its multilingual cover, which has drawn some scholarly attention (Bensmaïa 1987; Mehrez 1992) and can be read as a spatial metaphor of multilingualism that complements the gender and kinship metaphors. The cover of Amour bilingue consists of alphabetic and Arabic script in two different colours. The title is in bold red letters at the top of the page and the sinuous lines of the black Arabic calligraphy, which are a translation of the French title at the bottom. The dots that are used to distinguish Arabic con­ sonants from each other are in red suggesting the fundamental duality that pervades the whole writing project of Khatibi. The full meaning of the French title can only be understood in its translational relationship to the Arabic title, initiating a “perpetual translation” (Mehrez 1992:135) between the two interdependent languages. The bilingual title page “remains semi-readable for the monolingual, just as the text itself would be, if the reader fails to decode its plurilingual strategies” (ibid.). The two French words of the title are ren­ dered in the Arabic words ‫ ﻋﺸﻖ‬-‘išq (amour, love, passion) and ‫ ﻟِ َﺴﺎﻥ‬- lisan/ lisanayn (bilingue). The Arabic word for love can signify both bodily passion - means both tongue in and the higher stages of mystical experience, and lisan the double sense of organ of speech and language. Bilingue is rendered in the dual form lisanayn indicating French and Arabic, “which are forever simul­ taneously at work in the bilingual postcolonial writer’s mind” (ibid.). Khatibi expressed this fundamental duality in the neologism bi-langue. The bi-langue opens up a space in-between and a constant movement between three different language layers. “… the Moroccan dialect spoken at home, classical Arabic barely mastered at the Koranic schools for Muslim children, and the ‘imposed’ French language of the colonizer learned at the

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French lycée” (ibid:121). In Amour bilingue, this multilingualism is largely invisible, demanding a continuous effort of reflection comparable to that required from readers of the multilingual work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Herta Müller. The Arabic mother-tongue is not understood as a lost, better alternative. French and Arabic are engaged in a constant process of mutual translation. “The mother-tongue is at work in the foreign language. From one language to the other a permanent translation and conversation … take place that are extremely difficult to unravel …” (Khatibi 1985:171). The relation­ ship between the different languages is not governed by a notion of hierarchy: “none of the languages wanted to impose itself, to become the supreme law, to take center stage all the time” (Khatibi 1983:70). The ‘bi-langue’ is not to be seen as a combination or summation of two dif­ ferent languages, in the sense of the term ‘bilingualism’, but something other and new resulting from the constant confrontation between French and Arabic within one single mind. Khatibi calls the new receptive organ that develops in the course of this process a ‘third ear’ (Khatibi 1983:11 and 66). The third ear is the capacity to hear the invisible message between and beyond the lines, even beyond the pages of the book (Bensmaïa 1987:148). Abdallah Memmes speaks in this connection of a third language between French and Arabic. “In Amour bilingue, the pregnancies (gestations) of the bi-langue result in the ‘pluri-langue’ (the opening onto other languages) and another way of thinking (‘pensée­ autre’) which promises to be a happy solution to the paralyzing conflicts of the two languages … a remarkable extension of the notion of identity …, a boundless possibility of freedom and pleasure (une possibilité incommensurable de liberté et de jouissance)” (1994:100–1). Lisanayn also stands for the internal division of Arabic culture into an ortho­ dox learned institutional discourse and a popular and mystical tradition, as well as for the division between the popular culture of Arabic dialects and the classi­ cal Arabic of high culture. In this sense, the Arabic script at the bottom of the page, becomes the secrete key to decode the multiple meanings and nested dua­ lities of the French title, a hidden palimpsest operating between the lines of the French text. In the same way as the French influence is contained in the Arabic - and lisanayn character (the red dots), the multiple duality of the words ‘išq, lisan indicate the plurilangue of the French text that oscillates between physical and spiritual love, popular and high culture, as well as French and Arabic in its dif­ ferent forms. On the last page before the beginning of the book, another mys­ terious calligraphic sign has been placed as a sort of paratext and threshold guardian, a caveat for the reader to heed the presence of the other languages behind the French façade. According to Réda Bensmaïa, the text of Amour bilingue is a fighting arena, a “Kampfplatz” (1987:138) of endless contention between the impossibility to write in French and the impossibility to return to Arabic as a writing language. This leads to an attempt to overcome the dualism of the two languages by creating a new literary and geo-linguistic space where the two languages can meet without merging with each other, and compare their different scripts

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without the reconciliation of an easy osmose, “osmose réconciliative” (ibid:138). Before the publication of Amour bilingue, writing in Maghreb meant choosing one language, shuttling back and forth between the two, or simply giving up writing altogether. Khatibi’s book moves beyond the question if it is better to write in Arabic or French. The writer of the bi-langue is happy to exist in the liminal space opened up by the necessity to write in two languages. The double writing practice (écriture double) is never a source of suffering, anxiety, and never implies a loss of identity. Khatibi does not want to subvert the syntax or semantics of French by a return to Arabic, or to mix the two languages. He wants to stress his double allegiance to two different cultures. In this regard, he avoids any “coquetterie typographique” (ibid:141) and portmanteau words. The text flows smoothly and is discretely opaque only in a few instances. The reader has the impression of a subtle change, of having moved into another language without being able to say how and when. Bensmaïa speaks of an inaudible invisibility and a silent music. The bi-langue makes the French lan­ guage squint (loucher) (ibid:142). This takes place both at the level of content and the two different scripts. The French letters are pulled towards the Arabic calligraphy, by a spatial rift opened in-between. The French title is confronted with the arabesque of its literal translation, but this is only one aspect of the close conflictual correspondence between the two languages and the two scripts. Bensmaïa interprets the name of the French editor, Fata Morgana, as a translation of the author’s name because of its symmetrical position at the bottom of the cover. Both the name of the author and the editor are in the same font. The names correspond to each other the same way that the red French title corresponds to its black and red translation into Arabic. ‘Mor­ gana’ is the name of a fairy, and indicates a mirage, an illusion. A ‘morganatic marriage’ is a wedding between a man of a higher and a woman of an inferior status, with the bridegroom giving his left hand to the bride-to-be. Bensmaïa interprets this as a metaphor for the relationship between Arabic and French in the bi-langue. A male writer marries a foreign language and gives her his left hand in the ceremony of writing. The conjunction of the inferior (langue de rang inférieur) with the superior language (langue de rang supérieure) (ibid:145) results in an androgynous figure of a male author and a female language questioning unambiguous paternity and calling for a new way of reading. To write with one’s left hand also implies that every word gestures towards its double, its right side. The constraint that the writer is imposing on himself consists in wedding two languages and two writing systems that are normally deaf and blind to each other (sourds-aveugles) (ibid:157). The writer’s tongue is bifurcated (sa langue bifide) (Khatibi 1983:54 and 67). The bi-langue is associated with marginal impaired bodies: with strabismus (ibid:53) and braille, the tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired (ibid:31), as well as with stuttering (ibid:74) and limping, without being completely lame (boitiller sans être boiteux) (ibid:99), vacillating from one language to the other (McGuire 2002). Seeing double and askew is also linked to the already mentioned notion of the ‘third ear’. The visual and the

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acoustic metaphor comment and complement each other. The bi-langue gen­ erates “a writing and reading practice that are not simply stereophonic or ste­ reographic, but primarily stroboscopic and strobophonic: a reading or writing practice between the lines, between the sentences, in the margins, the back­ ground etc. …” (Bensmaïa 1987:157). Instead of a simple doubling, we have thus a fragmentation and pluralization of intermittent light flashes and sounds. Khatibi’s Amour bilingue describes the narrator’s relationship to a foreign language in terms of a love affair between a man and a woman. One moment of illicitness and betrayal lies in the fact that this extramarital relationship to a foreign language conflicts with the Arab tradition represented by the tongue of the mother and the language of the aunt. Both his mother and aunt, who was the narrator’s nanny, were illiterate. Originally, his mother wanted a girl. When his aunt had trouble procreating, she decided to adopt him taking up the place of his mother. As with Dorfman, the narrator’s mother-tongue is not the tongue of his mother, it is that of his aunt. This way, the narrator grew up in his own mother-tongue like an adoptive child. This early experience carried over into all subsequent languages. “From adoption to adoption, I had the impres­ sion that I was being born from the language itself” (Khatibi 1983:11). The original diglossia is the very reason and origin of his writing. In this sense, the bi-langue is also a sort of exorcism that abolishes and redefines his origins, and ensures a second birth accompanied by a second bout of obstetric pain (de secondes douleurs obstétricales) (ibid:75). This duality suggests a split-origin within the mother-tongue itself before the encounter with the language of the colonial oppressor, which, in a way, only represents a subsequent division overlaying the initial diglottic situation. Even if Khatibi defines the French writing language as a female lover, he moves beyond any simple dualistic view. He attains this by systematically breaking up the unity of the narrative instances. First of all, there are two narrators, an anonymous external narrator and a first-person narrator that takes his place halfway through the text. The two narrators are two sides of the same person, a double, bilingual being. The other narrative instance involved is a French woman the narrator met abroad, the personified French language itself, or the female side of the narrator fighting with its Arab counterpart within the narrator’s mind. In both cases, thus, we have a doubling accom­ panied by a bridging of the internal and external perspective. As with the two narrators, there is an oscillation that leads from the external to the internal, from the female lover to the writing language: “… un glissement de la femme … à la langue proprement dite …” (Memmes 1994:104). The body of the woman becomes the body of the text. Through their lovemaking, the two lovers discover themselves to be strangers in their respective native languages. The double-voiced text and the body of language it represents are hybrid, ‘métissé’. This double thematic progress, based on the disappearance of the characters behind the languages they stand for, shows that Amour bilingue was intended to be a history without characters, an essayistic narration of the unfolding of a pluri-langue from the gestation of a bi-langue.

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The ambivalent status of the narrative instances achieved by doubling and multiplying abolishes simple gender-determined role-assignments, doing away with the opposition of an internal and external space. This results in a lightfooted swirling dance, a multi-linguistic thought born from the free-floating disembodied instances meeting between languages. The narrator and the female character make love to each other, and their bodies merge like two languages lustfully uniting and mixing, “deux langues en jouissance” (Khatibi 1983:100), like two countries that make love to each other within themselves (ibid:24). “I was revelling in-between two languages, one crossing the other (Je jouissais entre deux langues, l’une traversant l’autre) … an intercontinental orgasm that led us from journey to journey” (ibid:87–8). A strange emotion: “to love pleasure for itself (d’aimer la jouissance pour elle-même). Pleasure of the body of language (jouissance du corps de la langue)” (ibid:23). The sexual transgressions are echoed by linguistic transgressions. Languages taken on their own have no access to the utter joy of a bilingual dialogue and ignore such blissful moments of pleasure (ibid:36). Khatibi links translation to sexual intercourse. Both the narrator and his lover work as simultaneous translators. Once they meet in front of a transla­ tor’s cabin: ‘Do you want us to translate each other mutually?’ he enquires (ibid:57). On this occasion, he holds her in his arms and swallows her in order to impregnate her within himself (ibid:102). Khatibi’s answer to the inescap­ able problem of linguistic and cultural duality and the painful psychological tensions it can cause is the development of a notion of nomadic errantry which enables the bilingual being – lost in endless acts of self-translation and forced to choose between two alternatives, but incapable to do so – to break out of the vicious circle of duality. The multiple ambivalences and indeterminacies mentioned so far also affect the sexual identity of the narrator that is deconstructed and reconstructed in the course of the narrative. Although the narrator is initially presented as a Moroccan male courting a French woman, he is described in several other instances as an androgynous being shuttling back and forth between his male and female sides. This unresolved ambivalence mirrors the fundamental char­ acter of the bi-langue itself. At the same time, his sexual relationship to the French woman is an expression of this inner androgyny. Because of the strongly mystical overtones pervading the whole narrative, it also stands for the androgynous couple achieved in the process. But there is more to it. One day, the narrator fell in love with a woman and changed sex. “Un sexe dans le sexe circoncis, sexe à double langue, comme un serpent”, a sex within a circumsized sex, a sex with a double tongue, like a serpent (ibid:55). From his anus emerged the figure of an invisible god. On this occasion, he was raped by his foreign language, while another part of himself was standing by, ironically detached from it all, without any intention of penetrating the penetrator in turn. What was in fact penetrating him was the pleasure of the body of language, “la jouissance du langage”, his own homosexuality (ibid:55). In this final vision, active and passive, male and female, love of the other and self-love, mother­

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tongue and foreign tongue, body and language are drawn into a swirling movement of reshuffling. Behind the playful breakdown of roles described above, the new freedom of the ‘pluri-langue’ comes into view, a playful trans­ lational bisexualism – a “delightful bisexualism” as Christine Brooke-Rose (1989:68) called it – that suggests a fluid sexual (and linguistic) identity beyond simple gender-dichotomies. “He wandered from country to country, from body to body, from language to language” (Khatibi 1983:30). The writer of the bi­ langue is a mixed being in-between all categories, moving from sex to sex, from gender to gender, and from language to language, without choosing one over the other, but trying to remain suspended in-between the two, in-between all possible sexes. “Non pas bisexuel ou homosexuel, mais androgyne: non pas l’un et l’autre, mais l’autre des deux sexes (des deux langues)”, not bisexual or homosexual, but androgynous: not one and the other, but the other of the two sexes (languages) (Bensmaïa 1987:159).

4 A poly-linguistic matrix George Steiner describes Nabokov’s multilingual life and his multiple recast­ ings of himself in terms of an underlying and secretly structuring “poly­ linguistic matrix” (1969:123), a plural origin that discards the dichotomies of bi-lingualism and the notion of a predominant singular maternal matrix lan­ guage in which a number of other subordinate languages are embedded. This is well in tune with Steiner’s own description of his multiple linguistic origins in After Babel who places his situation in a broad cultural and geographic context. My father was born to the north of Prague and educated in Vienna. My mother’s maiden name, Franzos, points to a possible Alsatian origin, but the nearer background is probably Galician. … I was born in Paris and grew up in Paris and New York. I have no recollection whatever of a first language. So far as I am aware, I possess equal currency in English, French, and German … I experience my first three tongues as perfectly equivalent centres of myself. I speak and write them with indistinguishable ease. … Attempts to locate a ‘first language’ under hypnosis have failed. … My natural condition was polyglot, as is that of children in the Val d’Aosta, in the Basque country, in parts of Flanders, or among speakers of Guarani and Spanish in Paraguay. It was habitual, unnoticed practice for my mother to start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. At home, conversations were interlinguistic not only inside the same sentence or speech segment, but as between speakers. … Even these three ‘mother tongues’ were only a part of the linguistic spectrum in my early life. Strong particles of Czech and Austrian-Yiddish continued active in my father’s idiom. And beyond these … lay Hebrew. This polyglot matrix was far more than a hazard of private condition. It organized, it imprinted on my grasp of personal identity, the formidably complex, resourceful cast of

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The experience of bilingualism can successfully question monolingualism by cracking open its alleged homogeneity and naturalness but as we have seen in this chapter this often leads into irresolvable conflict. Dorfman overcame the irreconcilable opposition between his two languages by shuttling back and forth between them and showering equal affection on both of them. However, his writing strategy remains within a dualistic logic. Khatibi’s bi-langue on the other hand, seen as a third ear or a third language, gestures towards an open field of ultimately limitless plurality. Moving beyond duality by adding a third element implies entering the space of a completely different logic. It is no longer the ‘one’ of monolingualism or the ‘two’ of bilingualism, which more often than not is only a double monolingualism. The ‘three’ leaves the territory of dichotomic thinking. Even if ‘three’ sometimes breaks up into ‘two plus one’ the third element represents a deterritorializing line of flight. If two languages force into an either/or choice, three languages radically redefine the field of possibilities and available choices. It is no coincidence that the notion of bilingualism was used for quite some time in linguistics and other disciplines also for other kinds of multi- or plur­ ilingualism. This has changed in the last few years. Charlotte Hoffmann (2001) argued that trilingualism cannot simply be subsumed under bilingualism. Besides a change in metalinguistic and attitudinal factors, trilinguals have dif­ ferent ways of learning and organizing knowledge, and this is not only a dif­ ference of degree. Trilingualism enhances awareness and increases choices. The concept should however not become a blanket term for all forms of trilingualism or any other form of a multilingualism implying the use of more than three languages. The multilingual authors discussed so far show that any kind of simplifying systematization remains fundamentally problematic in view of the specificity and complexity of single individual cases.

8

Interlingual predicaments

In discourses on mono- and multilingualism, body, kinship, and space metaphors tend to converge, intersect and overlap. These metaphors are generally arranged in multi-faceted clusters whose single components bolster each other, strength­ ening the inner theoretical consistency and the overall argumentation. Because of its central position in the narrative of the book linking corporeal to spatial metaphors of multilingualism, this chapter is an adequate site to reflect more in detail on some specific instances illustrating this point. To emphasize the radical change of attitude involved in a passage from unitary monolingualism to hybrid forms of multilingualism I want to begin with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s description of the dichotomic nature of translation and bilingual writing couched in organic, familial and spatial metaphors, and end with Gloria Anzaldúa’s vision that links her body and hybrid gender to the borderland between Mexico and the US where she grew up. Both authors use the metaphor of the intermediate space to reflect on multilingual writing, but with radically divergent implications. This chapter also explores the contradictory metaphoric complexity of other in-between spaces. Julien Green and Louis Wolfson describe their interlingual predicament with the help of the metaphors of the internal partition wall and the endangered periphery of the body. Steven Kellman (2018) discusses the ambivalent existential condition of multilingual authors from the point of view of liminality, a notion that has been taken up by other scholars of multi­ lingualism (Lvovich 2015). The spatio-temporal concept of liminality echoes Aronin and Politis’s (2015) metaphor of the edge. I will explore the innovative transdisciplinary potential of this newly introduced metaphor in connection with the tropes of the threshold and the gate, which have been recently used in translation studies.

1 “In unerfreulicher Mitte” In his lecture Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (On the Different Methods of Translating) held on June 24, 1813 in the Royal Academy of Sci­ ences in Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) discussed the interlingual predicament of the translator in connection with the unsettling activity of bilin­ gual writers in times of national languages and mother-tongues. As Daniel

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Weidner argues, Schleiermacher’s work originates at a very specific historic and cultural juncture, which witnesses the discovery and valorisation of the unique­ ness and beauty of (national) languages and the concomitant refusal of many­ languagedness when it leads to individuals or societies with multiple linguistic allegiances. Fremdsprachigkeit, the diversity and plurality of languages, and the existence of other speakers and writers, and Andersprachigkeit, the possibility of thinking, speaking and writing in another language than the mother-tongue, thus, tend to exclude each other (2007:236). Because of their uniqueness, lan­ guages risk losing their authenticity and are thus considered even as more sepa­ rated than before. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, German philosophers were at the forefront in developing a view that stressed the impor­ tance of linguistic differences and their systematic study, emphasizing at the same time that “one could properly think, feel and express oneself only in one’s ‘mother-tongue’. This notion of the mother-tongue has been in turn a vital ele­ ment in the imagination and production of the homogeneous nation-state” (Yildiz 2012:7) with the national language acting as a conceptual bridge. The greater recognition of the multiplicity of languages went hand in hand with the notion of languages as countable clearly demarcated entities that were the property of specific groups and their members. The individual and the collective dimension mirror each other: in the same way, that each individual speaker possesses his/her own mother-tongue each nation collectively possesses its own national language. To this conception corresponds the idea that thought and expression, content and form, cannot be separated because their unique rela­ tionship changes from language to language. As Schleiermacher argues, a lan­ guage is not something mechanical and external that can simply be attached like a leather strap or exchanged like a team of horses in front of a carriage (Schleiermacher 1973:60). Not a single word from one language corresponds exactly to that of another language. Each (national) language has a specifically different way of looking at the world and as such is the embodiment of a differ­ ent individual spirit. To try and merge the spirits of different languages into each other is therefore a difficult if not impossible act that leads to the creation of ghosts and doppelgängers (ibid:68). Schleiermacher intends to establish a systematic typology of translation (Berman 2002:230–42). He unfolds his line of argumentation in a series of steps based on irreconcilable dichotomies, fleshed out with a tight system of interconnected metaphors from the three main source domains of this book. This leads to the creation of two separated and opposed metaphor clusters, which do not merge or mix but are placed on opposite conceptual banks. Schleiermacher sets out by distinguishing between spoken and written forms of translation, between interpreting (Dolmetschen) and translation proper (eigentliche Übersetzung). The mechanic business of interpreting (ein mechan­ isches Geschäft) deals with the practical affairs of everyday life. The transla­ tor, on the other hand, deals with the higher manifestations of art and science. Translation is in turn divided into two methods that are strictly kept apart and do not allow for a third reconciling position. The first, superior method

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of the authentic translator brings the reader close to the author of the original by foreignizing the domestic and the second inferior method brings the author close to the reader by domesticating the foreign. In connection with the first method, Schleiermacher discusses two unsatisfactory forms of trans­ lation – paraphrase and imitation – and in his description of the second method, he focuses on two ways of writing in another language than one’s mother-tongue. Each further dichotomy reconfirms the initial dual approach that does not allow for any intermediate composite position. In Schleiermacher’s lecture, the methodology, thus, seems to correspond to his view of linguistic diversity and the interrelation of national languages, which he can only conceive of as separate entities existing next to each other without any overlap or possibility of blending. This recalls Herder’s vision of a nine-headed Cerberus and Humboldt’s spatial metaphor of adjacent circles, an image that also appears in Schleiermacher’s text: a translation should bring writers and readers close to each other without obliging the latter to leave the familiar circle of their mother-tongue (aus dem Kreise seiner Mutterspache heraus zu nöthigen) (1973:47). As a “gendered and affectively charged kinship concept” (Yildiz 2012:6) the mother-tongue suggests a protective nourishing womb surrounding and enveloping the single speaker. Anthony Pym calls attention to the basic binarism of the argumentation and the absence of mediating terms. Schleiermacher’s dichotomic argumentation aims at “silencing the middle terms” (1995:1). No third method of translation besides the two presented is possible as a mixture of the two will fail both the author and the reader (Schleiermacher 1973:47). Sitting on the fence is not allowed. Double allegiances are not contemplated: one has to make up one’s mind and pick sides with regard to one’s fatherland and one’s mother-tongue. This is particularly important in the choice of a writer’s language. Schleierma­ cher’s understanding of translation “works against multilingualism, against the mixing of languages and cultures, and often against the survival of sub­ national dialects” (Pym 1995:14). This either/or structure doing away with any middle ground was also central in the discussion of Jewish integration in Ger­ many in the early nineteenth century. In his discussion of the theoretical drawbacks of the second form of trans­ lation, Schleiermacher broaches the subject of bilingual writing. Is it possible to write authentically and originally (ursprünglich) philosophical and poetic texts in a language that is not one’s native tongue (angeborene Sprache) (Schleiermacher 1973:61)? When a mother-tongue/national language is not yet fully developed as was the case in the early modern times with Romance lan­ guages, another language can temporarily play the role of a “partial mothertongue” (partielle Muttersprache) (ibid:61). Schleiermacher mentions the cases of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who wrote a great part of their work in Latin (Forster 1968:52). Even Frederick II of Prussia preferred to write in French rather than German. However, argues Schleiermacher, even if in these cases the original root of the mother-tongue has nearly entirely “withered

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away” (vertrokknet) and is already completely detached “from the old trunk” (von dem alten Stamme) the decision to write in another language is often dic­ tated by gratuitous and accidental reasons (Schleiermacher 1973:61). But what if a writer is proficient in two different languages? This question leads to another argumentative binarism: if the writer happens to belong to the aristocratic, cosmopolitan courts with their elegantly refined but superficial conversations or to the lower domain of business interactions the damage is not too great. However, if bilingualism reaches the higher levels of philosophi­ cal and poetical diction the consequences are more drastic. The works resulting from such mixing are only a fine mimetic play (feines mimetisches Spiel) and a harmless trick (Kunststükk) taking place in the forecourts (Vorhöfe) of science and art, in marginal areas far away from the centre of a national culture. Such texts are often a tangled mess comparable to intermingled fibres or strands of hair. Schleiermacher uses the word zusammenfilzen, from Filz, felt (ibid:62). In the nineteenth century, the related word verfilzen was also used for an inex­ tricable mass of tree-roots and convoluted genealogic family trees (Grimm and Grimm 2019), a notion that recalls the metaphors of the mangrove and the banyan tree to which I will come in chapter thirteen. To avoid such dangers a writer must belong to one country and one language only so as not to float aimlessly in unpleasant middle-ground (schwebt hal­ tungslos in unerfreulicher Mitte) (Schleiermacher 1973:63). Finally, if someone is as creative in another language as in the mother-tongue, her/his work has to be considered a sacrilegious (frevelhaft) act that goes against tradition, con­ vention and natural law. This writer is a Doppeltgeher, literally someone that follows two different paths like a ghost (Gespenst) – a metaphor also to be found in Herder (chapter one). Someone who quits his mother-tongue for another language is a deserter (Überläufer) (ibid:64). Schleiermacher’s dictum amounts to a complete disavowal of any “possibility of writing in non-native languages or in multiple languages at the same time” (Yildiz 2012:9). Schleiermacher uses the kinship metaphors of the father and mother-tongue in two specific instances: in connection with the dangers a translator might possibly incur when using the first method of translation and towards the end of the text with regard to the drawbacks of the second method. An ideal translator wants to have his mother-tongue perform everywhere “in der volksgemäßesten Schön­ heit” (Schleiermacher 1973:55). André Lefevere translates this passage with “in the most universally appealing beauty” (Schleiermacher 1992:156). However, in the early nineteenth century, volksgemäss carries a strong political meaning: in keeping with, agreeable and conformable to (gemäss) the views and the life of the people (Volk). The superlative volksgemäßeste, thus, clearly stresses the impor­ tance of the national dimension for the mother-tongue whose beauty is at its apex only when it truly and fully expresses the ways of the people. The generative power of a language is intimately linked to the unique character (Eigenthüm­ lichkeit) of a Volk (Schleiermacher 1973:60). The text then turns to the status of the translation: “Wer möchte nicht lieber Kinder erzeugen, die das väterliche Geschlecht rein darstellen, als Blendlinge?“

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(Who would not prefer to beget children who embody the paternal lineage in a pure form, rather than mixed progeny?) (ibid:55). In Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s German Dictionary ‘Blendling’ means among other things half-cast child, bastard and hybrid (zwitter) and is used for humans, animals and plants alike, “wodurch die reine, natürliche art getrübt und gemischt wird” (whereby the pure, natural kind is clouded and mixed) (Grimm and Grimm 2019; see also Pym 1995:10–12). At the same time the related word, blenden, to blind, to dazzle, can be associated with the metaphor of the ghost, and those that follow the double false path (Schleiermacher 1973:64). The emphasis is, thus, on the pro­ blematic if not deleterious effects of mixing and merging different languages. The gender metaphor is supplemented by a corporeal metaphor. A translation should not be ungracious, abrupt (schroff), rigid (steif) or clumsy (unbeholfen), but delicate (leicht) and graceful (anmuthig) remaining as close to the other lan­ guage as the mother-tongue allows for. The mother-tongue can be expected to show a certain suppleness (Biegsamkeit) but should not be forced to perform foreign and unnatural contortions (Verrenkungen). In a similar vein, August Schleicher describes second language learning in Über die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen (On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of Man) (1865) as walking on one’s hands. This can be executed with a certain skill but will never be misunderstood as something natural and can never substitute the natural gait (Bonfiglio 2010:163). The passage quoted above has been widely and controversially discussed in translation studies (Chamberlain 2000; Pym 1995; Venuti 1991). According to Lori Chamberlain, the text has a double focus: the purity of the mother-tongue and the paternity of the text. “The translator, as father, must be true to the mother/language in order to produce legitimate offspring; if he attempts to sire children otherwise, he will produce bastards fit only for the circus.” The mothertongue “is conceived of as natural” and “any tampering with it – any infidelity – is seen as unnatural, impure, monstrous, and immoral”. The natural law “requires monogamous relations in order to maintain the ‘beauty’ of the lan­ guage and in order to insure that the works be genuine or original”. Legitimacy is based above all on “institutional acknowledgment of fatherhood” and less on motherhood (Chamberlain 2000:317). The other relevant passage using kinship metaphors to describe the second method of translation portrays the translator as someone who produces a work as if the author had not written it in the original mother-tongue but in the target language. It is as if the reader received a picture of the author as he would have looked if his mother had begotten (gezeugt) him with another father. In this adulterous interaction of the mother (tongue) of the author with another man, the translation is the illegitimate child. This creates an implicit link to the previous notion of Blendling. In both cases, there is something amiss, if not clearly unnatural. For works of science and art, this would imply that the individual spirit of the author (Geist des Verfassers) becomes the mother and the language of his fatherland (vaterländische Sprache) the corre­ sponding father (der Vater dazu) (Schleiermacher 1973:65). As in the first

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passage, the national dimension of a language is again called upon, but this time in relation to the father. Weidner points to the shift from the first to the second passage and the surprising transformation of a mother-tongue into a father tongue refraining, however, from interpreting it (2007:236). The first and the second passage are related to each other in the form of a chiasm. The second couple is an inversion of the first. The adultery and the reversal of the natural law – positioning the mother in the active and the father in the passive role – outlined in the two examples are a pretty little trick (Kun­ stükklein) that can be relished only if taken as a mere game (nur ein Spiel). If in the first instance we have a rightful father engaging with the rightful mother whose beauty embodies the best of the nation, the second textual instance presents an adulterous father that does not conform to his role. In this sense, Chamberlain’s interpretative focus on the primacy of masculinity with regard to the first passage is confirmed by the second. “The question, ‘Who is the real father of the text?’ seems to motivate these concerns about both the fidelity of the translation and the purity of the language” (Chamberlain 2000:317). This interpretation confirms Yildiz’s notion of the mother-tongue as the result of male ventriloquism. Schleiermacher’s dichotomic vision is bolstered by spatial metaphors that emphasize the primacy of the inside over the outside, of centre over periphery, depth over surface, and the domestic (heimisch) over the foreign (ausländisch). These dichotomies are in turn associated with an opposition between unhampered organic growth and artificial mechanic exercises, as well as with a contrast between natural harmonic body movements and unnatural physical activity. High serious art (Kunst) is opposed to harmless gymnastic exercises (Kunststükk) and trifling games (loses Spiel) like translation to interpreting. To try to separate the spirit of a work from its language is only an elaborate and dainty game (kunstreiches und zierliches Spiel). Comingling proper translation and the lower form of imitation results in an eye-catching and confusing mixture (auffallendes und verwirrendes Gemisch) that has the reader endlessly shuttle back and forth between the domestic and the foreign world of the original like a restless ball (Schleiermacher 1973:66–7). The metaphor of transplanting (verpflanzen) and propagating (fortpflanzen) is used on several occasions. The right kind of translation should not be the result of an intentional mechanical bending but grow freely towards the original (ibid:55). In one specific instance, an organic metaphor is also used to convey a vision of deficiency. Schleiermacher is commenting on the politically suspicious forms of bilingualism, rootlessness and inauthentic love of the fatherland that is widespread among certain cosmopolitans and aristocrats. This generic love does not heed the sacred solemnity of language (der heilige Ernst der Sprache). It is incapable of opening up the depths of life (Tiefe des Daseins) and to con­ serve the true character of the people (Eigenthümlichkeit des Volkes). Thoughts expressed in a language other than the mother-tongue do not grow strongly out of a deep linguistic root (kräftig aus der tiefen Wurzel) but remain superficial and easily detachable like the water-cress (Kresse) that an artificial man (ein künstlicher Mann) has planted on a white cloth without any earth to grow on (ohne alle Erde auf dem weißen Tuche) (ibid:62).

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The notion of ‘Blendling’ in Schleiermacher’s essay, is related to broader concerns of linguistic purism that were particularly rampant in Germany in the early nineteenth century after the Napoleonic wars. The notion of Fremdwort, foreign-derived word, was first used by the nationalist activist and gymnastics educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Fremdwörter were mongrels without gen­ erative power and because of this did not penetrate into the bloodlines. Jahn objected strongly to multilingualism because it led to a wrong tolerance towards the inclusion of words from other languages (Yildiz 2012:73–4). Besides the miller, the gardener and the physician (chapters three and six), another metaphorical personification of linguistic purism is the genealogist obsessed with etymological justifications who checks the bloodlines of each single word to prevent the spread of bastardization and hybridization through the rest of the body of language. In this view, being a legitimate thoroughbred rather than a mongrel is an inherent virtue (Thomas 1991:22–3). If the removal of single foreign-derived words allows for a gradation of purism, the safe­ guarding of the chastity and virginity of a language against the threat of bas­ tardization allows only for a dualist either/or view (ibid:24–39).

2 The inner wall The bilingual writer and poet Elazar Benyoëtz (1937–), who was born in Vienna but emigrated with his parents to Palestine in 1938, summed up his interlingual predicament by combining the metaphorical domains of body and space. He describes himself as the very partition wall (Scheidewand) between German and Hebrew. The two languages do not exchange a single word with each other (Garhammer 2010:63). A comparable situation characterizes the work of the bilingual author Julien Green (Hokenson and Munson 2007:184–9) who decided to live in both languages but to keep them strictly separated. Green was born in Paris of American parents on September 6, 1900. Although strictly speaking his mother-tongue was English, he grew up in a French environment and had problems pronouncing his mother-tongue prop­ erly. Because of this double identity, he was given two different names: at home, he was Julian, and outside Julien (Klein-Lataud 1996:220). Green always per­ ceived his English self – his hidden closeted homosexual side – as a secondary, borrowed identity. The French self, on the other hand, represented the true inner voice, the call to artistry and spiritual life. French ran deeper than Eng­ lish. This priority provided a mental and emotional grounding. After his arri­ val in the United States in 1940, he decided to write a book about France and its cultural heritage. He began in French, but after ten pages decided to begin anew by translating his own sentences into English. “On rereading what I had written I realized that I was writing another book … It was as if, writing in English, I had become another person. … There was so little resemblance … that it might almost be doubted that the same person was the author of these two pieces of work” (Green 1987:174). The bilingual edition of Green’s Le Langage et son double/The Language and its Shadow, published in 1987,

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consists of a series of parallel French and English texts, mainly written between 1940 and 1945. Even though some texts were originally written in French and then translated into English, the main corpus consists of English texts that Green self-translated into French. The translator’s work has to leave no traces, carefully weeding out any possible interference with the source language. “Words being like persons in French and in English have to be treated in a different way in each language” (ibid.). Green uses spatial metaphors to describe the relationship between his two languages and the two sides of his identity. Besides vertical separation, there is also horizontal layering. To switch languages is like looking into an abyss (ibid:333). French and English fight for pre-eminence: in the most intense moments of creativity, the natural English mother-tongue re-emerges and breaks through the French layer: “… dans les moments dramatiques mes pen­ sées profondes se manifestent en anglais. Ma langue maternelle, j’allais écrire naturelle, resurgit” (ibid:167). The two languages run parallel to each other and do not mingle; an invisible concrete wall that has to be made transparent somehow in order to be crossed each time a self-translation takes place sepa­ rates them. Languages are, thus, not communicating vessels but distinct entities that do not mesh (Klosty Beaujour 1989:45–8). “I am more and more inclined to believe that it is almost an impossibility to be absolutely bilingual. … What I mean is that a man may speak half a dozen languages fluently and yet feel at home in only one” (ibid:166). In a French speech to the Royal Belgian Acad­ emy delivered on September 8, 1951 included in Le Langage et son double he adds: “It is questionable whether one is really bilingual when one writes. I would tend to say that one is not. There cannot be a perfect balance between two languages, two ways of feeling, which is not tipped to one side or another (penche d’un côté) by one’s interior being” (ibid:404). The possibility of hybrid texts and the danger of “traces of foreign infiltration” are therefore vehemently condemned. Green uses military metaphors to describe the border-transactions taking place during self-translation: a language has to protect the “weakest points” in its “line of defence”; any true translation must avoid that “the last retrenchments are taken” (ibid:212). His novel Si j’étais vous … (If I were you …) “is an attempt to reconcile sexuality with ideas of identity through the very act of writing” (Armbrecht 2003:260). Fabien, the protagonist of the story, wants to escape himself in order to become more masculine. To achieve this, he slips into someone else’s body. The magic formula that allows him this metamorphosis is his proper name, the two syllables ‘Fa’ and ‘bien’: “ces deux syllabes … vous désignent et d’une certaine façon vous emprisonnent” (ibid:262). The conflict is thus dramatized as a passage from one identity to another made possible by language. Green’s oeuvre, and the novel just mentioned is paradigmatic in this sense, is deter­ mined by his obsession with two opposing forces: body and soul. This conflict or ‘psychomachia’, as Thomas Armbrecht calls it, must be seen as an attempt to come to terms with one’s homosexuality in an era pre-dating gay liberation movements. The act of writing not only documents Green’s negation of his

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homosexual desire – which, as we have seen, is associated with his mother and his mother-tongue – it is the very way that enables him to reject it but also to come to terms with a part of himself that he is not ready to accept and fully embrace. This specific conflict is also unconsciously acted out in Green’s selftranslational activity. Significantly enough, one of his favourite metaphors for self-translation is dressing up in another language, which implies that the true content cannot be conveyed in the new idiom. Throughout his life, Green stressed the moment of absolute partition between the two languages informing his mind, using self-translation as a means to keep them separated. In Le Langage et son double/The Language and its Shadow, a note added to the title bears witness to this schizophrenic split and to the twofold character of the book itself: “Julian Green traduit par Julien Green”. In the course of self-translation, Ju-lian becomes Ju-lien. The separation between the two languages and the two sides of Green’s identity are reduced, thus, to a minimal but decisive, because irreducible phonetic difference. As with Fabien in Si j’étais vous … the name allows a passage from one self to the other. This dif­ ference represents the prison house on which Green’s personality is built, the impenetrable wall keeping the two sides of his sexual and linguistic identity safely apart. Each time a translation takes place the sides of the self are both separated and connected creating a double persona in the process; the essential aspect consists in the self-translational movement itself, which breaks down the wall in order to cross it, but only to make it higher and stronger.

3 Border patrol A comparable highly idiosyncratic use of self-translation can be found in Louis Wolfson’s Le schizo et les langues (1997). Wolfson’s self-translational activity is a constant fight against his hateful English mother-tongue, strictly speaking the language of his mother. The distressing and disturbing English words have to be stopped from entering through eyes and ears by immediate conversion into German, Russian, French or Yiddish. Sometimes an English sentence is translated into a multilingual string. Wolfson’s interlingual pre­ dicament is played out at the level of the body and its threatened borders. Wolfson’s self-translation constructs a double physical and linguistic body without organs that is the very negation of Bakhtin’s grotesque body. The translation protocol he adopts is based on the principle of phonological proximity, as well as on semantic and etymological similarity. Most important are the consonants as they seem to carry all of the hurtful potential of the words penetrating him through all sensorial channels. If the English words do manage to penetrate the defensive system, they rebound and reverberate pain­ fully in his echolalic brain. Straight translation does not convey him any plea­ sure: the deformed English words have to be restored. To accomplish this, single sentences are broken down into words, which are then dismantled, dis­ membered, destroyed and subsequently reconstructed within the vigilant con­ sciousness of the self-translator.

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In Wolfson’s vision, the overall system of bodily orifices has been assigned complex complementary roles, and the metaphorically related processes of hearing/reading and feeding/swallowing/digesting are radically separated from each other. The schizophrenic language student, as he calls himself, tries to stop English words uttered by his mother’s loud voice, from penetrating him, not only by constant translation, but also by putting his fingers into his ears, listening to the radio, muttering sentences or reading texts in other languages, fighting and substituting the flow of spoken English words with the words on the page. Another endangered entrance is the mouth. The systematic blocking out of English words is associated with spells of ravenous feeding. The dangers involved here are the penetration of the filthy larvae of parasites or their eggs when the ingested food happens to touch the lips. On the other hand, there is always the dangerous necessity of having to read the English writing on the packages. Feeding and translating are, thus, described as fundamentally opposed yet complementary activities. The feeding frenzies, which can last several hours are characterized by orgiastic behaviour. Food is randomly swallowed mostly without any chewing. The English words, however, are dis­ membered and picked clean to the bone: “en les désossant pour ainsi dire, en les dépouillant de leur squelette (les consonnes)” (Wolfson 1997:138). Interestingly enough, the narrator insists on his preference for rectal coition administered by a woman, injecting some cleaning liquid into his anus. The female sex, in a sort of inversion, is seen as a “tube de caoutchouc graissé”, a greased rubber tube (ibid:116). The anus must therefore be considered the other side of the mouth. Both orifices are characterized by an obsessive moment of eroticism and loss of self-control. In order to avoid any psychic stress Wolfson aims at turning his self-translational activity into a mechanical routine, an instant reaction, comparable to the automatic transformation of an unstable chemical component. This wish of becoming a machine is mirrored in the description of his feeding frenzies: “une machine mangeant automatiquement”, a machine eating automatically (ibid:49). The sexual identity constructed in the process is based on a strict management of flows leaving and entering the orifices of the body and on a tight translation protocol regulating their exchange. There is a structural parallelism between the lack of unity of the schizophrenic’s dis­ solving identity and the fate of the single words, translated outside any context.

4 Border tongues In the two previous examples, the border between the two languages is sub­ jected to a tight control. Borders, however, are not simply dividing lines, but can also be conceived as intermediate transitional territories with a spatial and temporal depth of their own. In view of this insight, Kellman (2018) dis­ cusses linguistic transition phases between languages in terms of Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, which goes back to the work of the ethno­ grapher and folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957).

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According to van Gennep (1960), rites of passage are composed of three different phases: rites of separation, transition rites and rites of aggregation or incorporation. The middle stage is called a liminal period – from the Latin limen, threshold. The liminal subject is a transitional being and his existential condition profoundly ambivalent. Like ghosts they are neither dead nor alive and as such a threat to order, and “particularly polluting, since they are nei­ ther one thing nor another; or maybe both; or neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere (in terms of any recognized cultural topography), and are at the very least ‘betwixt and between’ all the recognized fixed points in spacetime of structural classification” (Turner 1967:97). The dual nature of the liminal being affects also his/her gender and sexual orientation. “Neophytes are sometimes treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be symbolically assigned characteristics of both sexes, irrespective of their biological sex” (ibid:98). Some­ times they are also seen as “either sexless or bisexual” (ibid:98). Liminality is paradoxically both an empty space and a space of symbolic over-determination, “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (ibid:97). Turner speaks of a “coincidence of opposite processes and notions in a single representation”, which “characterizes the peculiar unity of the liminal: that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both” (ibid:99). Liminality is both ‘unstructured’ and the point of departure for the birth of new forms of social and cultural life. Turner allows for an interpretation of liminality that transcends its anthropological and ethnographic dimension. Rites of passage “may accom­ pany any change from one state to another …” (ibid:94–5). The liminal may also “be aptly described as a stage of reflection” (ibid:105), during which a cultural system lives through a dissociation into its constituent parts followed by a sub­ sequent recombination. “Liminality breaks … the cake of custom” (ibid:106). In this particular sense, liminality is the realm of primitive speculation. Kellman’s use of the notion of liminality to describe the ambivalent plight of bilingual writers is particularly challenging with regard to the monolingual tradition and Schleiermacher’s verdict discussed in the first section of this chapter. The concept of liminality allows rethinking the absence of a single home and the resulting homelessness as a new complex and contradictory form of belonging. A good example in this respect is Pascal (chapter five). Bilinguals and multilinguals are liminal beings in many respects. They permanently inhabit the unstable middle ground where languages overlap and merge. Their status betwixt and between recalls Bakhtin’s dual culture of carnival. Kellman explores different forms of interlinguistic liminality in the work of a series of contemporary translingual authors. Some of their spatial metaphors are a direct comment on Schleiermacher’s either/or position. Jacques Derrida describes his position with regard to French as being neither inside nor outside (ni en lui ni hors de lui) but as a liminal position on its very margin (au bord du français), a line that can, however, not be safely identified (ligne introuvable). In this sense, his (non)belonging cannot be expressed in terms of transition (tra­ versée) or space (lieu) (1996:14). The French-English Canadian writer Nancy

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Huston describes her divided loyalties not as bi-lingual but as being twice midlingual: “Cette sensation de flottement entre l’anglais et le français, sans véritable ancrage dans l’un ou l’autre – de sorte que … loin d’être devenue ‘parfaitement bi-lingue,’ je me sens doublement mi-lingue” (Huston and Sebbar 1986:77). For the Cuban-American writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat a life on the hyphen amounts to a homelessness in two languages (2012:43). The metaphor of the hyphen, argues Kellman, suggests a “precarious perch”. Pérez Firmat “does not calibrate himself exactly ‘mi-lingue’, but tilts more towards North America than Latin America, towards English than Spanish” (Kellman 2018:22). Switching languages can be a liberating experience but to be suspended in the space in-between two languages can turn out to be uncomfortable. The liminal space can also be seen as a no-man’s-land occu­ pying a space that belongs to neither of the two languages. George Steiner (1969) described the site occupied by bilingual writers as extraterritorial but interpreted this as a chance for personal creativity. Kellman quotes the notion of a ‘no man’s langue’ coined by the French writing Romanian poet Ghér­ asim Luca. In this vision, territory, language and organ of speech coincide. The organ of the tongue and the mouth become an interstitial liminal space. Ilan Stavans describes his split, double Spanish and English identity in terms of a doppelgänger, as a personification of the no-man’s-land (Kellman 2018:24). To this, we might add Brooke-Rose’s novel Between that thematises liminality from a series of different points of view both linguistic and spatial (Simon 1996:66) (chapter nine). According to Dorfman, a bilingual writer smuggles foreign syntax across the borders between languages and this under the very noses of the immigration officers. He embarks without fear in the “many intermediate wonderful fullfledged patois that prosper in the spaces between established linguistic systems, the myriad creole zones of confluence and mixture where languages can mingle and experiment and express the fluctuating borders of a hybrid community” (2003:34). Languages migrate constantly borrowing from one another, plun­ dering, pawning and punning words, “stealing them, renting them out, eating them, making love to them and spawning splendidly unrecognizable children”. In this vision, Schleiermacher’s unfortunate Blendling turns into a model for a new humanity, “allowing other tormented bilinguals to feel less alone in their quest for … multiple plastic pluralistic beings …” (ibid:36). Before turning to Gloria Anzaldúa’s vision of multiple liminal hybridity, I will briefly focus on the metaphors of the edge and the gate which are in many ways related to the notions of liminality and threshold.

5 Gate, threshold, edge In an essay on Japanese translations of Paul Celan’s poetry, Tawada (2003c) discusses the gate as a metaphor of translation and language contact that avoids notions of hierarchy, linearity and interiority. In the spatial repre­ sentation of translation, the original is clearly separated from its translation

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and positioned behind it, because it was written before any translation was possible. It precedes the other language both from a temporal and relational point of view. In the metaphor of the gate, on the other hand, the original is not only in front of the translation but comes into being together with it. Original and translation meet face to face at the gate. The origin of the text is not a specific point in time on an arrow-like line advancing into the future but a space in-between on a threshold that is constitutive for all languages. This in-between space is not a closed room but a space under a gate. To translate is not to cross a border, but to wander from one border to another. The trans­ lator stands at a threshold, under a gate, without entering but harking to the words emerging from it. Naoki Sakai took up Tawada’s metaphor of the gate emphasizing its impor­ tance as an attempt to redefine the practice of translation beyond binary notions of interlinguality. “According to Tawada, a translator is somebody who looks into the other side from this side … what creates the primordial demarcation of this side from that side is best summarized by a gate, a construct that marks an opening rather than a divide or border. … The gate is more of a perspective, a passage of light rather than an entrance or a divide. It suggests transitory movement rather than indexing stationary location”. The gate is like a prism, “a system of refraction through which light traverses” (Sakai 2011:2). The meta­ phor of the gate shatters the alleged coherence and self-sufficiency of single lan­ guages staging the essential intermingling of national literatures and languages with one another. The Kangxi radical of ‘the gate’ 門 “invokes an optic because the trope of ‘looking into’ provides an opportunity of seeing beyond an optical illusion or the dominant optic of the national language, the optical illusion of a language forming a spatial enclosure” (ibid:5–6). The notions of the threshold and the gate redefine language contact and interaction in terms that move beyond the duality of interiority and exteriority. In this sense, languages should never be considered on their own, in their self-sufficiency and isolation, but always in relation to other languages. Thresholds are zones made up of other internal thresholds. A translation process could, therefore, be described as two thresholds forming a single one. In translation, one has to remain on the threshold and at the same time move from threshold to threshold, and this in a two-directional sense. Each language is on the threshold of another language and simultaneously its threshold (Guldin 2020). Similarly to the metaphors of the threshold and the gate, the conceptual metaphor of the edge introduced by Aronin and Politis, focuses on inter­ mediate spaces as the very site of language(s). However, their interdisciplinary approach clearly moves beyond linguistics and the humanities by drawing on insights provided by the natural sciences in an attempt to “elucidate the highly abstract, complex, and multidisciplinary phenomenon of current multi­ lingualism” (2015:31). The metaphor of the edge has three main meanings. The first is spatial: edges are borders, boundaries and margins. As thresholds, edges are not only separating lines but have a breadth and width of their own. They are both abrupt and gradual, sharp and blurring. “Edges are paradoxical, for

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although they are transitional phases or entities, they are comparatively stable” (ibid:45). The second meaning refers to the sharpness and harshness of the edge of a blade. Finally, edges are linked to force and effectiveness. Edges are sites of heightened activity and a habitat for greater diversity. “Where edges meet, there is a meeting point for many species of plant and animal life …” (ibid:34). The two authors speak of an “edge effect” (ibid:32) that is tangible, as in the case of coastlines, which are generally places bustling with activity. Edges are transition territories that connect, divide and isolate at the same time, and have an impact on the areas they separate. Like membranes they selectively allow the passage of some elements and stop others, “allowing for one kind of transit, but not for another” (ibid:40). Edges as boundaries can separate very similar areas and impart individuality and uniqueness on two fields that are nearly identical. Alternatively, like the edge of a forest, they can separate areas that are radically different from each other. Multilingualism can be reconceptualised according to the three main mean­ ings of the metaphor of the edge. Multilingualism allows for a competitive edge and for a cognitive advantage. Its edginess and sharpness, however, can become a danger, when ignored or improperly handled. Psycho- and sociolinguistics have already explored these two aspects. However, multilingualism must also be con­ ceived in terms of a border, a margin, and a meeting point of different interacting languages and a site of heightened linguistic activity. According to the authors, this spatial aspect has not yet been sufficiently explored. They suggest, therefore, a first tentative typology of linguistic edges. The four pivotal boundaries of multilingualism are the border between monolingualism and bilingualism, the boundaries between single languages, the phenomenon of interlanguages – the transitional competences of language learners – and multi-competence. Lan­ guage contact works both ways including loanwords, borrowing, as well as the creation of exotic species like pidgins and creoles, or bilingual mixed languages. Interlanguages have characteristics of their own and can lead to edge effects within individual speakers. The edge of interlanguages is a norm, as most lan­ guage learners remain within this relatively stable transition zone on their possi­ ble transit to multi-competence. In the case of multi-competence, the edge effect is particularly sharp when two or more languages meet in the same person. Edges are becoming increasingly “accepted and treated as a norm”, expressing a “trend towards less strict demarcations between phenomena” (ibid:44). This new vision of boundaries as sites of heightened creativity is part of the paradigmatic shift I am trying to reconstruct in this book. “Boundaries are seen differently from the edge area” (ibid:45), allowing for an understanding of languages as borders which divide but connect at the same time.

6 Centaur-idiom The liminal territory described in Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera is a geo­ graphical site, a war and conflict zone, but also a state of mind and a symbolic space of freedom. Two worlds meet and merge at the river, the Rio Grande,

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creating a frontline, an open bleeding wound. “The U.S.-Mexican border is una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture”. The liminal beings inhabiting the area are “the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mon­ grel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over …” (Anzaldúa 2012:25). Liminal spaces are thresholds, in Walter Benjamin’s sense. They are not bound­ aries that separate two distinct realities like the borderlines between two different nation-states or national languages. They articulate a notion of spatiotemporal passage. Thresholds are not borderlines but transition zones: “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle (threshold) is a zone.” (Benjamin 2002). To recognize that boundaries connect the inside to the outside means to transform them into thresholds. In this sense, writing in different lan­ guages is not a crossing over borderlines but an experience of the threshold. Simi­ larly, Anzaldúa differentiates between the borderline and the border zone: a “border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural bound­ ary. It is in a constant state of transition” (Anzaldúa 2012:25). Borderlands are multilingual and heteroglossic areas in which different national languages, dialects and sociolects are spoken: Standard English, Working Class and Slang English, Standard Spanish, Standard Mexican Spanish, North Mexican Spanish Dialect, Chicano Spanish from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, Tex-Mex, Nahuatl and Pachuco (ibid:77). “There, at the juncture of cultures, languages crosspollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born” (ibid:20). This geographical site is directly mapped onto the hybrid body of the writer. “To live in the borderlands means “you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads” (ibid:217). The border wall separating Mexico from the United States “crowned with rolled barbed wire”, runs down the whole length of her body, “staking fence rods” in her flesh, splitting it in two. Her home is a “thin edge of barbed wire”. At the same time, however, her body is the very bridge that links the two cultures across political, social, cultural and linguistic divides. “Yo soy un puente tendido” (Anzaldúa 2012:24–5). “At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank … so that we are on both shores at once ….” (ibid:100). Liminal metaphors of space and body commingle: Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish … my tongue will be illegitimate (emphasis added). (ibid:81)

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Anzaldúa does not suffer because of the rift that splits her personality open, but because she is constantly forced to choose. Being forced to choose between one language and the other is like being told to “be only one or the other” (ibid:41). The territorial, linguistic and corporeal hybridity is complemented by a double gender allegiance and a queer identity: “… half and half, mita’ y mita’, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling …There is something com­ pelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds … But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming to” (ibid:41). Translingualism meets transgender: bilingualism opening up unto a possible multilingualism becomes a metaphor of a different hybrid gender identity. In a similar vein, the Algerian writer Assia Djebar fuses the boundaries between her Arabic mother-tongue and the French of the colonizers with repressive gender divisions and the separate spaces allotted to men and women. In her childhood, she “was equally split between [her] inner partition reflecting a parallel division between the world of cloistered women and the world of men”. Thanks to her father who was teaching French, she managed to escape this dichotomic universe. This transformed the language of the conquerors in a liberating medium and changed it into “the father’s language” (2003:23). Alfred Arteaga coined the notion of ‘heterotext’ as a metaphor for the body and the hybrid nature of the identity of mestizos. Anzaldúa, he writes, “posits homosexuality as an alternative to prescribed heterosexuality and to either/or gender differentiation”, this corresponds to the use of a double, split language (1997:35). Metaphorically speaking the mixing of languages and the mixing of genders corresponds to the mixing of literary genres. In this sense, Borderland/ La Frontera is a literary hybrid, both in content and text structure, and as such, it proposes a hybrid subjectivity. As a heterotext, it is an admixture of genres and languages combining “essay, testimony, and poetry in a dialogue … in a verbal interplay that replicates the interplay of speech acts in the borderlands”. It is a resistance to colonialism, “an act of the tongue, the lesbian, female tongue, and not an act of the phallus” (ibid:36). Arteaga links the book and the Chicano discourse it creates to Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia. A Chicano is an “intercultural heteroglot” (ibid:72).

9

Linguistic promiscuity and incestuous bisexualism

In “Promiscuous Tongues: Erotics of Translingualism and Translation”, Steven Kellman discusses the pervasive nature of the metaphors of perversion, adul­ tery, and sexual betrayal in multilingual writing, self-translation and transla­ tion at large. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, for instance, described translation as a continuous poetic adultery (2013a:36). The ‘and’ in the title of Kellman’s essay is particularly telling as it points to a shared cultural and historical con­ text: “even more than translation, translingualism is imagined through meta­ phors of sexual transgression, as if the act of taking up a foreign tongue is tantamount to degrading one’s mother or one’s spouse” (ibid:39). Both trans­ lation and translingual writing endanger the purity and sanctity of the mothertongue. This subterranean connection confirms the reading of Schleiermacher’s essay on translation in terms of language contact, and language mixing pro­ posed in the previous chapter. The first part of this chapter will explore this common metaphorical ground trying to provide possible explanations. The second part is dedicated to the work of two multilingual writers whose work is intimately linked to notions of translation and self-translation. Both Raymond Federman and Christine Brooke-Rose use different languages in their work and describe this practice in terms of sexual transgression.

1 The adulterous translator As Jean Delisle’s (2017:171–90) collection of metaphors of translation from different centuries and cultural contexts (mainly European) shows, metaphors that define the status of a translation, its relationship to the original, the translation process and the role of the translator in terms of family relations, gender and sexuality are quite frequent: translation is a passionate embrace, it is not just a marriage of convenience but should be based on the love between the translator and the original. Translations must be faithful, but as with women, this is not enough if it is not associated with beauty. The highly ques­ tionable metaphor of les belles infidèles formulated by the Neoclassical French translation theory of the seventeenth century suggests that translations – and women for that matter – cannot be faithful and beautiful at the same time. The translator is also an obstetrician (un accoucheur) who ensures that the child of

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the original comes safely into the world. Translating is a form of seduction (trad-uir – sé-duir). To turn one language into another is to divert (tourner – détourner). No translation comes without desire or pleasure. Similarly, to love play, translation processes are strewn with traps and snares. The use of the dictionary and the study of the intimate texture of the words of the original are similar to lovemaking, they can either enflame or quench desire. When crossing the frontier, the translator will have to declare his daughter as an adoptive child, or silently and surreptitiously smuggle her across. Richard Philcox discusses what he calls the “legalized infidelity or adultery” of translation with regard to Maryse Condé’s novels. “Translation implies fidelity not so much to the original, but to another form. It is the translator’s inter­ textuality that comes into play” (2010:30). Author and translator are like wife and husband. “It is a permanent interaction between two people living in har­ mony, traveling and living together” (ibid:31). In/fidelity is played out on the level of intertextuality, and is always a mixture of both fidelity and unfaithfulness. Philcox emphasizes the closeness and stability of a marital relationship between author and translator without specifying whom of the two is female and whom is male. Kevin West focuses on the erotics of translation and the link between body and language. The tongue is both an organ of speech and an organ of sex. This “complicity between the linguistic and the erotic” (West 2010:2) has led to a per­ vasive metaphorization of both translation and multilingualism. Lori Chamberlain (2000) proposes a critical reading of the gender dimension of the metaphor of translation. She distinguishes between two irreconcilable forms of fidelity: the source-oriented fidelity of a male author-translator to the original female text and the target-oriented fidelity to his own feminine mothertongue. In the first case, the translator must avoid making the new text too beautiful, lest he betray the original. In the second, as the substitute father of the new text to be born through translation, he must be true to his mother-tongue in order to avoid producing illegitimate offspring, protecting, thus, the target-lan­ guage from any vilification. These two coexisting roles can in some cases enter into open antagonism with each other: the call for fidelity to the mother-tongue, for instance, can justify abuse, rape or pillage of the other language and the translated text. In the imaginary triangle of author, text and translator the latter must either usurp the author’s role or appear as a dangerous seducer. In both cases, issues of paternity and the importance of the reputation – that is, the chastity – of a feminized original text are absolutely essential. Another, perhaps even more important aim of this discourse is to assign the danger of infidelity and the questionable role of the seducer to the translational side, to make it practically impossible for the original and its author to be in any way guilty of infidelity. With this in mind, West calls attention to “the dominant, hetero­ sexually inflected source/target language dichotomy” and to forms that subvert the androcentrism of language (West 2010:6). In a series of essays, Rosemary Arrojo (1994, 1999 and 2005) has explored different aspects of the gendering of (self)translation in literature. As she argues, the asymmetrical gender relation implied in translation is closely

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related to the power divide at work in colonial situations. In this view, the translator is not only equated with a woman because of the allegedly repro­ ductive side of his activity, but also with the slave and the subject of coloni­ zation, both forced to live a life in translation, that is, a secondary, imitative existence dominated by the values of the mother-land. In sexual terms: the inaugural narratives of colonial settings tend to stress the vulnerability of the weak feminine exploited nature of the subaltern culture and the com­ plementary maleness and invulnerability of the dominant one. The relation between the two is conceived in terms of rape and violence. Chamberlain discussed this point with reference to George Steiner’s her­ meneuticist model (Steiner 1998:313–16) involving a fourfold process of translation: trust, aggression, incorporation, and enactment of reciprocity. The second and third step, which recalls Flusser’s metaphor of the amoeba, is “incursive and extractive” based on comprehensive “encirclement and inges­ tion” (ibid:312–13), an “overtly aggressive” (Chamberlain 2000:320) act of penetrating and capturing the foreign text. As West points out, Steiner’s model still “remains the key voice in translational erotics” (2010:7).

2 Extramarital escapades and incestuous instances Sexual roles and sexual behaviour are used as metaphors of multilingual prac­ tices and bilingual identities. However, this relationship can also be turned around, and multilingualism be used to denote and comment upon deviant or transgressive sexual behaviour. Steiner, for instance, sees in Oscar Wilde’s use of French in his play Salomé (1981) an “enactment of sexual duality” (1969:121). As already seen in chapter seven, the relationship to different writing lan­ guages can be described in terms of an emotional and erotic attachment to two different rival female figures. Within translingual literature this metaphor has taken up at least three different forms that mix familial tropes “of legitimate and illegitimate couplings” (Klosty Beaujour 1989:109). In the first variant, a male writer is torn between two female wives/lovers. Dorfman describes him­ self as a “grammatical philanderer” (2003:34), “married to two tongues” and “inhabited by both English and Spanish in equal measures”. He is “in love with them both”, especially after “they have called off war for [his] throat” (ibid.). The equal importance of the two languages is presented, here, as a harmonious form of bigamy, in which the two idioms enjoy the same rights, and are, so to speak, both legitimate spouses, even if this, strictly speaking, is not possible. This aspect points to the fact that the fundamental conflict and rivalry is not completely settled once and for all. The second version of the metaphor opposes the legitimate wife to the ille­ gitimate lover(s). In his letters, Nabokov made frequent use of this trope, especially after he began living in the United States and picked up English as his major writing language. On April 29, 1944, he writes Edmund Wilson about the lack of “regular intercourse” (Nabokov 1980:44) with his Russian muse, and on June 3, 1944 he describes her ironically as “ruddy” and “robust”

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(ibid:69). On August 9, 1942, in another letter, Nabokov uses the metaphor of adultery, gendering the triangular relation of a male author to his two female writing-languages. “I have lain with my Russian muse after a long period of adultery and am sending you the big [sic!] poem she bore” (ibid:121 and Klosty Beaujour 1989:97). Legitimate offspring is only possible when the male author has had sexual intercourse with his first lawfully wedded wife. Surprisingly enough, the healthy peasant rustic muse has given him a healthy-looking child. The poems “birthed by his Russian muse were not rachitic or deformed by his [guilt-ridden] frequentation of [the] English” language (ibid:98). The third version opposes the mother (tongue) to the wife adding an oedipal dimension to the switching of languages. It is like leaving the linguistic embrace of one’s own mother-tongue for the caresses of another woman, only that in this case, it is one’s own wife. To remain within the logic of the oedipal model of interpretation: it is as if one had married one’s own mother and transferred one’s childhood emotions onto another female figure who will never be able to emancipate herself completely from this conundrum. In a letter to the young French author Urbain Menging from November 27, 1894, Henry James – who was fluent in French but preferred to write in English – distinguishes between one’s own language (the mother) and the language one decides to use for a career and with whom one sets up household (the wife). This language is well behaved and faithful and does not expect a writer to commit any infidelity (Kellman 2013a:39). Interestingly enough, James uses French (se mettre en ménage) to describe this legal arrangement with the English writing language. As Kellman points out, James is above all against extramarital relations but does not consider the profound oedipal ambivalences involved in the meta­ phor. The Czech-French writer Milan Kundera opted for French as his writing language discarding his mother-tongue. “In James’s terms, Kundera chose his lover over his mother” (ibid:40). Another, even if much less prominent trope, is the metaphor of incest. Asso­ ciating multilingualism to transgressive forms of copulation, Kellman mentions a passage from Dante’s Second Circle of Hell where those overcome by lust pine away (2013a:35–6). Semiramis, queen of Assyria, who is often depicted as an armed Amazon, the legendary Lydian-Babylonian wife of Onnes and Ninus, succeeding the latter to the throne of Assyria, engages in an incestuous rela­ tionship with her son Ninyas. Dante calls her an empress of many tongues (imperadrice di molte favelle) (Inferno, V:54), possibly alluding to the fall of the Babel Tower and the ensuing fragmentation of language arising from it. According to George Steiner, the multitude of different tongues and their interconnection in Nabokov’s The Gift, Lolita or Ada are based on a complex erotic relationship between speaker and speech. “Incest is a trope through which Nabokov dramatizes his abiding devotion to Russian, the dazzling infidelities which exile has forced on him, and the unique intimacy he has achieved with his own writings as begetter, translator and re-translator. Mirrors, incest and a con­ stant meshing of languages are the cognate centres of Nabokov’s art” (Steiner 1969:124). As Klosty Beaujour argues, the “exuberant linguistic promiscuity” at

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work in Nabokov’s novel Ada which tends to mix the clean with the unclean is not only “excessive, but even incestuous” (1989:109). Significantly enough, as we have seen before, Nabokov himself generally uses the metaphor of adultery when speaking explicitly about his bilingual writing practice. Why are metaphors of adultery and sexual transgression so frequent in the fields of translation and multilingual writing when it comes to describe lan­ guage switching? Kellman suggests a transhistorical and transcultural link between eros and logos reaching back to Greek Antiquity that is similar to the one proposed by George Steiner. But this amounts, in my view, to a lim­ ited and limiting Eurocentric view. In fact, most of Kellman’s examples are drawn from a European context. Arguing along the main argumentative lines of this book I would suggest a more historical and cultural interpretation that views multilingualism within the context of the monolingual paradigm – Bonfiglio’s ‘ethnic nationalism’ and Yildiz’s ‘family romance’. In this sense, the metaphors of infidelity and betrayal never operate on an individual level alone but always also imply a collective dimension. To betray one’s mothertongue as a writer also implies betraying one’s nation.

3 “I believe that my two tongues love each other [cela ne m’étonnerais pas]” The bilingual (English and French) writer Raymond Federman (1928–2009) was born into a Jewish family in Montrouge, a commune in the southern Par­ isian suburbs. His father was a polyglot and a surrealist painter. Federman grew up in a bohemian atmosphere, in which many different languages were spoken: Polish, German, Russian French and Yiddish. In a raid on July 16 and 17, 1942, his mother hid him from the Nazi henchmen in a closet on the land­ ing of their apartment. This saved Federman’s life but was a traumatic experi­ ence with far-reaching effects. The closet, where he spent nearly 24 hours sitting in his underwear on a pile of newspapers became both a tomb and a womb. Federman was reborn into a new world and a new language. In his short bilingual text La Voix dans le cabinet de débarras/The Voice in the Closet, published in 1979, he narrates the story of his miraculous survival from Nazipersecution. Federman’s father, mother and two sisters were arrested, and deported to Auschwitz where they were killed. He spent the rest of the war in France working on a farm and in 1947 migrated to the United States where he studied at Columbia University. In this sense, bilingualism was forced on him by tragic existential circumstances. In 1963, he got a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a doctoral dissertation on the bilingual writer Samuel Beckett. He taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara and The State University of New York in Buffalo. As a writer he published poetry, essays and several novels both in English and French. “The name Federman”, he writes in an undated comment published on the Internet in which the joyous playfulness of his multilingualism takes centre stage,

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Promiscuity and incestuous bisexualism is a polylingual pun. Feder is German for feder, and so Federmann would be featherman – der Mensch von Feder. In French, since Federman often speaks to himself in French, feather is plume which, of course, is also pen or porteplume – but that’s too obvious./By a rather roundabout linguistic route [known as the leap-frog technique]/Federman becomes the penman [Homme de Plume for those who know him in French,/Hombre della Pluma for those who know him only in Spanish]. The Penman, a very Joycean name … No, rather, a very Beckettian name, because of the crin­ ging scatological humor that surfaces from this transatlantic leap into the reverse of farness, as Old Sam Beckett once put it. Fart-erman, as some of his friends call him.

Federman’s two alter egos Moinous (me/us: the singular and plural voice of the bilingual author) and Namredef (Federman spelt backwards) indicate the dual, specular nature of his fiction which reproduces the fundamentally bilingual nature of his writing. The narrating voice constantly shifts; it is an ‘I’ that speaks in the plural. If the French nous refers to English and French, the singular English me might refer to either of his writing languages, sug­ gesting at least three possible interacting points of view. The borders between these diverse voices are fluid. The concrete novel Double or Nothing. A Real Fictitious Discourse (1998), which documents a 19-year-old French Jewish immigrant’s arrival in New York in 1947, embodies this dual and at the same time multiple vision of identity and reality in an exemplary way, both in its form and content. The single words become physical objects on the page. The bilingual, English and French, text makes use of italics and bold print throughout. Unconventional visual devices and techniques, as well as graphically disruptive pages complement its complex contradictory nature. As Schmitz-Emans argues, the book was written in the multilingual Macaronic tradition where mixing languages is compared to the preparation of a pasta stew from different ingredients (chapter three). This con­ nection is relevant both on the level of content and form. Noodles are the leit­ motiv and keep appearing on the pages of the book in form of word- and letternoodles as well as pictograms in the form of noodles. The protagonist calculates on long lists the presumptive consumption of noodles and toothpaste tubes. The structure of the text recalls musical compositions. An improvisation technique in jazz that operates with a constant variation of the main subject is called ‘nood­ ling’ (Schmitz-Emans 2004b:151–4). In the autobiographical essay “A Voice within a Voice” based on an inter­ view with Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Federman discusses the status of his two languages. He describes the form of the English language in La Voix dans le cabinet de débarras/The Voice in the Closet as rectangular and the French as square emphasizing at the same time their closeness and difference. Feder­ man speaks of a sense of incompleteness that is very strong when writing poetry but less pressing with novels. If he writes a poem in one language, he feels that he has to write immediately also a version in the other language. A

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poem is only finished if it exists in two versions. The two languages interact and fight with each other. They pull together and pull apart again, encourage and devour one another (Klosty Beaujour 1989:198–9 n56). “I am immediately tempted to write, adapt, transform, transact, transcreate … but certainly not translate … the original into the other language. Even though finished the book feels unfinished if it does not exist in the other language” (Federman 1993:79). The two inner voices he hears in his skull sometimes speak on their own or get mixed up. “A voice within a voice speaks in me, double-talks in me bilingually, in French and in English, separately or, at times, simultaneously. That voice con­ stantly plays hide-and-seek with its shadow. … I am a bilingual being, a doubleheaded mumbler, one could say, and as such also a bicultural being” (ibid:76). This bilingual being does not only have two heads, it is ambidextrous: “I have a vague feeling that the two languages in me fornicate in the same cell. But since you are probing into my ambivalent (my ambidextrous) psyche, I can tell you that I believe I am lefthanded in French and righthanded in English… I was born lefthanded …, but when I broke my left wrist at the age of nine or ten …, I was forced to become righthanded … I am a converted lefty, just as I am a converted Frenchman who became an American” (ibid:77). In Federman’s view, it is not the writer who is bigamous or adulterous, but the languages themselves. These secretly fornicate within and behind his back, and without his explicit consent. This suggests the existence of a dimension that escapes the consciousness and control of the speaker/writer. Psycholinguistics research on code-switching confirms this idea (chapter one). The use of the two languages can vary over time. Federman speaks of pos­ sible “periods of rejection of one language in favor of the other”, or a return to one’s native tongue in later years. “Considering myself just beyond the midcourse of my literary career, I find that I am more comfortable these days writing in English than in French. This does not mean, however, that I have rejected the French language – my native tongue. I have merely placed it (temporarily) in parenthesis” (ibid:78). Comparing himself to Beckett, Federman writes that his two writing lan­ guages, which are in his case the same as Beckett’s, have become interchange­ able and that it is irrelevant in which language a specific text has been written first. The twin-text is not a translation or a substitute for the other. The two texts complement and complete one another. Contrary to Nabokov or Triolet, he does not conceive of a space within his self that keeps the two languages separated from each other. “on the contrary, for me French and English always seem to overlap, to want to merge, to want to come together, to want to embrace one another, to mesh into one another. Or if you prefer, they want to spoil and corrupt another. … French and English in me occasionally compete with one another in some vague region of my brain, more often they play with one another, especially when I put them on paper” (ibid:79). This element of playfulness both in the sense of “game” and “looseness” (ibid:83–4) is central. Federman is not afflicted by his bilingualism but deems it an enrichment. At the same time, contrary to many other French friends and colleagues

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living in the United States he does not “want to preserve the purity of [his] native tongue”, but wants “to corrupt the French” and “the two languages … to corrupt one another” (ibid:83). French and English do not only try to contaminate each other but are both bent on abolishing any kind of original and the very origins of the author. “In the totally bilingual book I would like to write, there would be no original language, no original source, no original text – only two languages that would exist, or rather co-exist outside of their origin, in the space of their own playfulness … the struggle, the love affair, and the playful intercourse of the two languages in me have determined and informed my work over the years” (ibid:84). In his prose-poem “The Bilingualist”, from the collection Six Poems, an undated short text, also published on Federman’s personal website, the rela­ tionship of his two writing languages is described in overtly sexual terms, however, deliberately eschewing any specific kind of gendering. The text stages the co-presence of two different languages who compete with each other at times, but ultimately love one another tenderly and passionately. The situation of the bilingual writer is, thus, light-hearted and creative, and far from tragic. To answer the question I’m always asked [voyons réfléchissons] No I do not feel that there is a space between the two tongues that talk in me [oui peut-être un tout petit espace] On the contrary [plus ou moins si on veut] For me the one and the other seem to overlap [et même coucher ensem­ ble] To want to merge [oui se mettre l’une dans l’autre] To want to come together [jouir ensemble] To want to embrace one another [tendrement] To want to mesh one into the other [n’être qu’une] Or if you prefer [ça m’est égal] They want to spoil and corrupt each other [autant que possi­ ble] I do not feel as some other bilingualists have affirmed that one tongue is vertical in me the other horizontal [pas du tout] If anything my tongues seem to be standing or lying always in the same direction [tou­ jours penchées l’une vers l’autre] Sometimes vertically [de haut en bas] Other times horizontally [d’un côté à l’autre] Depending on their moods or their desires [elles sont très passionnées] Though these two tongues in me occasionally compete with one another in some vague region of my brain [normalement dans la partie supérieure de mon cerveau] More often they play with one another [des jeux très étranges] Especially when I am not looking [quand je dors] I believe that my two tongues love each other [cela ne m’étonnerais pas] And I have on occasions caught them having intercourse behind my back [je les ai vues une fois par hasard] but I cannot tell you which is feminine and which is masculine [on s’en fout] Perhaps they are both androgynous [c’est très possible] In this passage, the idea of fluidity is accentuated by a constant change of lan­ guages and the complete absence of punctuation. However, the use of square brackets enclosing commentaries and asides confers to the French language a secondary role. The English voice sets the tone, from the very beginning and

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the French voice confirms, complements and contradicts. The French voice also highlights the more implicit sensual and bodily aspects whereas the Eng­ lish sounds slightly more rational and discreet. The spatial relationship is defined as an overlap and a reciprocal interpenetration. The little gap possibly separating them is constantly overcome through embraces and bouts of love­ making. Even if the languages are attributed a personality of their own and their relationship is seen in sexual terms, Federman avoids the dualistic sim­ plifications of the meta-narrative preeminent in the field, suggesting that the playful intercourse of the two languages is taking place outside the writer’s conscious control and has a transgressive side to it. Perhaps this has to be understood as a sort of incest taking place between siblings mostly behind the back of their respective parents. In fact, besides the two tongues there are two more voices, the English and the French first person narrators, I/Je, who dis­ tance themselves from their respective tongues and their secret meetings when they are not watching or asleep. Furthermore, if one assumes that the two tongues are already androgynous as the first person narrator tentatively sug­ gests, the number of speakers rises to six altogether adding to the internal complexity of a bilingual mind. The passage from one tongue to the other is abrupt and unpredictable making it ultimately impossible to decide which of the two narrative instances is actually in power, even if, as pointed out earlier, the French voice always echoes the statements of the English one. Federman’s multilingual writing is bent on contaminating the syntactical and semantic texture of the two languages. Instead of preserving their purity he uses them to actively corrupt each other, like two children left alone in a playground, “two lovers (loose lovers)” (ibid:84), seducing each other to forbidden sexual games: two or more interlinked, overlapping and mutually merging identities, cross-fertilizing each other in a series of transaction and transcreation processes.

4 “A Misch-Masch of tender fornication” Christine Brooke-Rose (1923–2012) principally known for her experimental novels, was born in Geneva as the daughter of a British father and a SwissAmerican mother. She grew up in three languages: French, English and German. After the death of her father she moved to Brussels with her mother, and in 1936 to the UK. During the Second World War, she was an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Forces (WAAF), and worked at the Government Code and Cyphers School (GC & CS) in Bletchley Park, where she deci­ phered messages from the German Wehrmacht. After the war, she studied English at Oxford and London graduating in 1954. She then worked as a lit­ erary critic and freelance journalist. In 1968, she separated from her second husband the Polish poet, novelist and translator Jerzy Pietrkiewicz and moved to France. She started working as a Lecturer in Linguistics and English Lit­ erature at the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes. From 1975 to 1988, she was professor of English and American Literature and Literary Theory. She translated Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinth into English.

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In Illiterations, she speaks about her existence as an experimental woman writer. “The ‘double-voiced’ writer (unless he is a man) antagonizes both, she is in the sea between continents. The best way, in my view, for any writer – but especially for a woman – is to slip through all the labels, including that of ‘woman writer’. The price, however, is to belong nowhere” (1989:67). Com­ menting on the fundamental androgyny of creativity she highlights the importance of reciprocity between the genders. “Whatever the case, it would surely be a good thing if more men learned to read as women … Both should read as both, just as both write as both. And one of the ways in which this delightful bisexualism should occur is in a more open and intelligent attitude to experiment of all kinds by women” (ibid:68). This abolition of clear-cut boundaries between the genders is metaphorically connected to the abolition of borders between languages. In the following, I want focus on her multi­ lingual novel Between which operates with sexual metaphors to describe the interrelationship of languages (Brooke-Rose 2002:43–7) The main character of half-German and half-French origin has a life-story situated somewhere on an imaginary frontier between French, German and English. This, together with her job as a simultaneous translator in the world of international conventions, introduces a sense of disorientation in her root­ less nomadic existence. As Brooke-Rose, who wrote the novel without using the verb to be (Simon 1996), pointed out in an interview: I wanted to get the constant sense of movement. She’s always on the go; she never knows where she wakes up. … The other reason was the other sense of the verb ‘to be’, the existential state – she just doesn’t know who she is, she is always translating from one language to another and never quite knows to which language she belongs, and in fact she belongs to three because she’s German, French and married to an Englishman … The other languages are used to show that she doesn’t know every language in the world. They block the text, rather like the ideograms in Pound. Things like ‘exit’ in Polish, people don’t necessarily recognize it. So I am playing with disorientation … And that kind of disorientation is very personal to me. I was brought up in a trilingual family, and we were always making these kinds of jokes. This loss of identity through language was very important. Brooke-Rose is referring, here, to interlingual puns and provides a telling example. Lecheria in Spanish means milk shop but read as if it were an English word it becomes ‘lechery’ (Friedman and Fuchs 1995:32). The multi-linguistic passages of the novel reproduce this sense of loss for the reader forced to move from language to language as the main character of the book. As in the case of Federman, even if the author has opted for English as her main means of literary expression, the different languages are not arranged in a hierarchical pattern. The loss of identity through translation and travel, though, is only one side of an overall situation set between two extremes: on the one side, the pleasurable

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crossing of boundaries and the creative use of languages, twisted and used against themselves in the process of code-switching and, on the other, the night­ mare of a world made up of unconnected elements drifting apart in a whirl and jumble of topics and jargons. The novel begins and ends on the same formula – ‘between the enormous wings’ – suggesting that we never leave the plane of lan­ guage. With the small difference, however, that in the first case it is the body of the plane and in the second the body of the translator herself. The protagonist hovers in an interstitial liminal space comparable to the plane enclosing and transporting her from place to place. Both are vessels, containers, and act as shuttles between cultures. In a first version of the book that was subsequently rejected, Brooke-Rose conceived of the main character as an androgynous traveller. She abandoned the idea, realizing that translating and the passivity of circulation of a female body transported across national borders had to be linked to a female prota­ gonist. The gendering of the main character suggests that successful translation implies loss of identity, the translator becoming a mere conduit through which languages circulate freely. In this sense, translation becomes the central meta­ phor for loss of place and identity in an increasingly globalized world domi­ nated by the frightful fluency of the unchecked circulation of signs. The myth of androgyny, as the successful summing of contrary elements into a harmo­ nized whole seemed to suggest a deceptive freedom and a wrong sense of completeness (Lawrence 1995). Although the translator is female her gender markings are unmoored. Fur­ thermore, the narrator’s identity is unstable and uncertain. To stress this, Brooke-Rose has used, nearly throughout the whole book, a narrative form that may be called ‘free direct discourse’, being neither a first nor a thirdperson, but an unspecified ‘you’. The main character is a crossroad, the central consciousness in which the different languages meet, a vessel crisscrossed by flows of words unfixing her identity (Suleiman 1995:100–1). She is “a woman of uncertain age” and “uncertain loyalties” (Brooke-Rose 1986:445), an ambiguous figure, an ‘alonestanding woman’ literally echoing the German ‘eine alleinstehende Frau’ (ibid:490), only partially hidden in the incomplete translation, that again points to her intermediate, hybrid state in-between lan­ guages. Some aspects of her personality suggest a refusal of feminine rolemodels. She marries an Englishman but is separated from him, and entertains a series of unhappy short termed relationships with other men. In the midst of sadness and isolation, she enjoys the ambiguous independence of the ‘Jungge­ selle’, the eternal male bachelor (Simon 1996:65), escaping the entrapments of family and childbearing, opening up to independence and creativity. On a bicycle-trip with her German lover to a church in Rothenburg, she comes across a figure summing up her predicament: “a frail skeletal nun in a glass case. Heilige Munditia. Patronin der alleinstehenden Frauen” (Brooke-Rose 1986:490). This meeting, repeated two more times in the course of the novel sums up one side of the equation: images of absence and emptiness in the midst of overabundance.

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Brooke-Rose’s Between is a liminal text “liberally seasoned” (Lennon 2010:16) with words from various languages (ibid:84–91). The novel is written in English, with German and French inserts, Italian dialogues and bits in Bul­ garian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Provençal, Roma­ nian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Spanish and Turkish. Lennon, using another culinary metaphor, calls these bits and pieces from other languages ‘smatter­ ings’ that pepper and season “the texture of thought”. The different languages “form a cluster of complex nativity … within the larger languagescape of Between – less a center than a network of the familiar” (ibid:86). Foreign words or passages are neither italicized nor translated. Kramsch decribes it as an “echoic, circular style, where voices mesh and float into one another without any particular attribution or sense of ownership”. A “‘dis-membered’ lan­ guage, a ‘re-membrance’” (Kramsch 2004). In describing the erotic interconnectedness of the different languages in the narrator’s mind Brooke-Rose makes use of Federman’s incestuous metaphor. The description shifts from the bodies of language to the bodies of the main character and her German lover, both pleasurably intertwined. In this instance, the overabundance of free-floating signs does not lead to indistinctness and vagueness but to a joyful playfulness in the midst of promiscuous excess: words and body parts unbound, liberated from hierarchical, totalizing concepts fra­ ternize freely. In one of the central scenes of the novel, at least from the point of view of multilingual writing, the meeting of the two languages German and English reflects the (sexual) encounter of the narrator with her beloved Sieg­ fried, a fellow translator and traveller, who will eventually marry someone else. As Lawrence argues, the narrator not only moves from language to language but also from her German to her British lover (1995:82). The two languages mesh and merge in different ways like two loving bodies. However, the dis­ tribution of roles between the languages, the lovers, and their bodies remains ultimately undefined. The passage begins with a bilingual sentence that interweaves three English elements into a German utterance: in Deutsch instead of auf Deutsch and the temporal wann instead of the conditional wenn – which are both translated as when in English – and finally the absence of the obligatory comma before the German wann. This first contamination carries over into the ensuing reflections on the relationship between languages and the impossibility to keep them completely separated from each other. The mixing is enacted in different ways: alternation of German and English words (und since man spricht sehr little Deutsch); interlingual homographs (German man, one – English, man) and homophonies between German and English (viel – feel; du – do), but also between French and English (tout – toot; suite – sweet); bilingual word forma­ tion combining an English adjective with a German ending rendered in English orthography (erronish); interlingual alliterations (Bein – Brust – Belly, du – do – dein); German sentence structure with the conjugated verb at the end (wann man in Deutschland lives) and the inversion of subject and verb (while first die Dinge und die Personen kommen; then acquires it); bilingual composites

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(mädchen-goddess); and finally, repetitions linking language to body (in a Misch-Masch of tender fornication – in a Misch-Masch of swift fornication; delicious – delicious). The meshing of languages is thus also captured in the organic metaphor of language as a body. Languages both fraternize and have sex with each other. The various forms of grammatical, syntactical, semantical, phonetical and orthographic interpenetration of the various parts of the body of the two languages suggest the whole range of possible love games. – Man denkt in Deutsch wann mann in Deutschland lebt./– Auf Deutsch darling./– Und since man spricht sehr little Deutsch … man denkt in eine kind of erronish Deutsch das springt zu life feel besser than echt Deutsch. Und even wenn man thinks AUF Deutsch wann man in Deutschland lives, then acquires it a broken up quality, die hat der charm of my clever sweet, meine deutsche mädchen-goddess, the gestures and the actions all postponed while first die Dinge und die Personen kommen. As if lan­ guages loved each other behind their own façades, despite alles was man denkt darüber davon dazu. As if words fraternised silently beneath the syntax, finding each other funny and delicious in a Misch-Masch of tender fornication, inside the bombed out hallowed structures and the rigid steel glass modern edifices of the brain. Du, do you love me? Du, dein Bein dein Brust dein Belly oh Christ in Rothenburg gem city between the sheet and the tumbled sheeted eiderdown amid the central heating and the wooden panelling. Man works with hands … man feels as an abstract study in seduction man performs with the precision of the mouthpiece eyes voice hands over limbs that find each other delicious on a creaking bed somewhere along the Romantische Strasse in a MischMasch of swift fornication … for God’s sake make us coffee we’ve had enough of fornication on this late Sunday morning. Tout de suite and the tooter the sweeter. (Brooke-Rose 1986:447–8) This extraordinary passage not only questions the emotional exclusiveness exacted by the mother-tongue but also testifies to the excitement of mixing languages by “refusing boundaries, borders … the polyglot’s lust …” (Hayman and Cohen 1976:12). As Brooke-Rose emphasizes in another interview, there is “beauty and humour in confronting discourses, jostling them together …” (Friedman and Fuchs 1995:31). Suleiman compares her strategy to the Surre­ alist idea of “words making love” to each other (1995:98).

5 Promiscuous monsters or panlingual masters? George Steiner provocatively suggests a direct connection between mono­ lingualism and monogamy, on the one hand, and sexual libertinism and mul­ tilingualism, on the other, based on the metaphors of marital fidelity and adultery. “I have every reason to believe that there is a ‘Don Juanism’ of the

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polyglot, an eros of the multilingual. I believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language. That the love and lechery of the polyglot differs from that of the monoglot, faithful to one language, as the suggestive phrase has it” (Steiner 2008:72). Is to live between languages expression of a restless linguistic promiscuity? Are (self)translators and translingual authors “promiscuous monsters” or rather “panlingual masters” (Kellman 2013a:42)? The notion of hyperpolyglot used in Michael Erard’s Babel no More. The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (2012) describes people who speak fluently at least six different languages. They might, thus, “seem to represent the ulti­ mate case of speech as adultery” (Kellman 2013a:43) However, as Kellman points out, Erard’s book on a series of exceptionally gifted multilingual lan­ guage learners has no use for sexual metaphors. Central to their understanding of themselves as polyglots and multilingualism in general is rather a will to plasticity that can do without the questionable transgressive drama of fornica­ tion, adultery and incest. In a similar way, Vilém Flusser who developed over the years a writing prac­ tice based on multiple consecutive self-translation involving up to four different languages – German, Portuguese, English and French – did not describe his activity in terms of deviance or sexual transgression but made use of a com­ pletely different set of metaphors emphasizing multi-perspectivism, intellectual flexibility and textual nesting (chapter fifteen). Only once, in “Da língua portu­ guesa” (The Portuguese Language), the very first essay he published in 1960 in Brazil, did he fall back onto the familiar trope of the spurned mother-tongue and the multiple emotional attachments to a series of female lovers vying for the writer’s attention, which goes to show the pervasiveness of the metaphor but might also be interpreted as an early vision that was later given up. The last ontological stage in the relationship to a new writing language, writes Flusser in his essay, is love. One wants to be embraced by it, penetrate and conquer it, merge and dissolve in it in order to give birth to a child. In this situation, the mother-tongue and all the previous languages one has learnt appear on the scene to disturb and interrupt the intimate love song duet (Flusser 1960). Contrary to the conflicting pairs discussed in this chapter, in Flusser’s multilingual choir protesting against the new love the mother-tongue does not have a privileged role but is only one language among all others. Even if some bilingual writers tend to reproduce the gender metaphorics pre­ eminently associated with translation, these tend to be expanded and revised within the context of multilingual writing. The question of fidelity to one specific language, staged as a family-drama between husband, wife and lover, is aban­ doned in favour of a view in which unambiguous role assignments tend to lose their footing. The idea of illicitness, and the ideal of translational purity that goes with it give way to reciprocally contaminating encounters of the bodies of language.

10 Adoptive and stepmother tongues

Like chapters five and fifteen, this chapter is an attempt to break away from the metaphorical tradition of the monolingual paradigm and the use of insurgent metaphors that call it into question. Instead of celebrating the naturalness of monolingualism or questioning it as an ideological position the paradigm of the mother-tongue can be redefined and expanded through a shift in perspective. Leo Spitzer (1948a) described English, the language of adoption that he used for his academic writing after having migrated to the United States, as an ungener­ ous stepmother opposing it to his beloved German mother-tongue. In a com­ pletely different vein, Tawada describes her relationship to the new adoptive German mother-tongue as a chance to rediscover the Japanese mother-tongue through the eyes of a second language. Yildiz (2012) explores different ways in which the family romance of the monolingual paradigm can be rewritten. Besides Franz Kafka, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Theodor W. Adorno she also discusses the work of Yoko Tawada. The last part of this chapter deals with the notion of the stepmother tongue as another way of deterritorializing the ideolo­ gical concept of the mother-tongue

1 Tongues of adoption In 1936, the Austrian Romanist Leo Spitzer (1887–1960) emigrated from Turkey to the United States. He had fled from Germany to Istanbul three years before, because of the Nazi takeover. Spitzer succeeded to the chair in Romance philology at Johns Hopkins University left vacant with the death of David S. Blondheim and remained for the rest of his life. In an essay with the programmatic title “Erlebnisse mit der Adoptiv-Muttersprache” (Experiences with the Adoptive-Mother-Tongue) published in 1948, he retrospectively described his experiences in the new English-speaking academic milieu. Spitzer sets out with a series of rhetorical questions. With a bit of luck one can find a second homeland. Nevertheless, does that mean that one can also find a second mother-tongue? Can one ever forget one’s mother-tongue or succeed in having two mother-tongues, the same way one can have two differ­ ent mothers? The answer is unequivocal: one can indeed acquire a new lan­ guage but it will never become a new mother-tongue, it will always remain an

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adoptive mother-tongue. However, it is possible to establish a relationship with the adoptive mother-tongue that is not only beneficial but beautiful, “nicht nur ein gedeihliches, sondern schönes Verhältnis zur Adoptivmutter” (Spitzer 1948a:167). The German gedeihlich, from the verb gedeihen, to grow, gestures towards the organic world of plants and trees, which fits in with the notion that languages are living beings. The new language, however, will never be able to supplant the mother-tongue with its deep rootedness in the emotions and the body of the native speaker. Native speakers receive an early monolingual imprint that is expanded, deepened and refined in the course of their life. To emphasize the compulsiveness and the automatism of the first language, Spit­ zer uses the metaphor of the railway track. Those who want to enracinate themselves in a new linguistic environment, have to abandon the old tracks and try to find new ones on which their thoughts will unwind by themselves, “von selbst abrollen” (ibid:168). Therefore, it is not sufficient to simply rewrite a text in English that was first conceived in German. It is necessary to let one’s thoughts flow in the new riverbed, to rethink the text in the new language. However, such an endeavour is doomed to failure. Even today, writes Spitzer, after having attempted for more than ten years to rethink everything in the new language he can still not fully rely on his English style. In Spitzer’s under­ standing of multilingualism, the individual languages do not interact with each other, but run side by side and away from each other without ever touching or mixing. Even rails cross each other’s path eventually, but languages run in riv­ erbeds that will never meet and merge. To want to drive on new thought rails (Denkgeleis), that have not already been laid out in one’s brain is an endeavour worthy of the Baron of Munchhausen (ibid:169). The difficulties Spitzer is facing are partly due to the different traditions of the German and English academic prose styles, which in the course of his­ tory have gone completely different ways. After the Romantic era and in the course of the nineteenth century, the predominant German prose style developed its own metaphysical word-space differing significantly from the Anglo-Saxon usage, which has a more rationalist and pragmatist orienta­ tion. A German author who wants to write in English must therefore go back to earlier style patterns, to pre-romantic and more modest stylists such as Lessing and Lichtenberg. Nevertheless, s/he will never possess the unique abilities of a native speaker and will never be capable of drawing on unlim­ ited linguistic resources as in his/her own mother-tongue. The new adoptive mother will always treat her pupil in a stepmotherly way, “ihren Zögling immer stiefmütterlich behandeln” (ibid:170). The mother-tongue, on the other hand, bestows rich gifts on her protégés. The acquisition of a new linguistic competence might even be to the detri­ ment of one’s linguistic abilities. Whoever willingly leaves or is forced to abandon the area of the mother-tongue runs the risk of a double home­ lessness: one will never be completely at home in the other language, never reach the level of linguistic competence of a native speaker and, at the same time, one will expose one’s mother-tongue to enfeeblement and debilitation.

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Spitzer opposes true loving mothers to adoptive and stepmother tongues suggesting that there are no intermediate stages and that only affectionate and caring mother-tongues deserve the love of native speakers. As I will show in the last part of this chapter both the adoptive and the stepmother tongue can be used to rethink a unilateral understanding of mother-tongues. Further­ more, through comparison, newly acquired languages can enhance metalinguistic awareness and improve the knowledge of one’s mother-tongue. Spitzer ends on a conciliatory tone. He sees the true meaning of his personal linguistic fate in a mission that consists in bringing his linguistic abilities to other cultures in order to transform them into a cosmopolitan organ capable of expressing thoughts with a supranational linguistic subtlety, “übernationalspra­ chlichen Feinheit” (ibid:171). Despite this cosmopolitan vision of a possible reconciliation beyond the boundaries of national languages, Spitzer’s argu­ mentation fundamentally remains within a frame of reference that describes national languages and mother-tongues as coherent areas, from the centre of which a unique national style emerges. This vision, which insists on the separation of languages as unique embodi­ ments of a specific nation and its history, and neglects the epistemological and creative potential of language comparison and language mixing, can also be found in the essay “En apprenant le turc” (Learning Turkish) that was pub­ lished in 1934, a year after his arrival in Turkey. The text is based on Spitzer’s experience in Istanbul, where he worked as a university professor until 1936. The initial epitaph, from the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset sets the tone for the following considerations: for people from the Southern Medi­ terranean area the immediate sensual experience of reality is more important than its abstract essence. Spitzer builds his analysis of the Turkish language and its comparison with other Northern European languages – mostly French – on this dichotomic assumption. He discusses some grammatical structures of Turkish in view of corresponding traits in the national character and makes out a fundamental mental contradiction (Spitzer 1934:85). The vitality and the antilogical needs of the Turkish soul try to find an escape from the regularity and rigidity of the grammatical structures of the Turkish language, which are in turn a result of a parallel urge for order and discipline. Turkish tends to be less abstract than French and displays at times a nearly childish and primitive charm. Contrary to French, it displays an impressionistic and acoustic sensibility that is much closer to sensory perception than rational thought. Some other linguistic traits reveal the proverbial Turkish caution. The speech melody, for instance, tends to drop towards the end of the sentence. Spitzer interprets this as an expression of Turkish pessimism and fatalism. These comparisons, he cautions, are not inten­ ded as value judgements, but as simple characterizations (ibid:96). Logical thinking, he adds, should not be directly associated with Indo-European lan­ guages. It is, however, true that these languages have generated more abstract expressions than any other language family. Turkish, for instance, does not use any articles and tends to create linguistic unities through simple agglutinative

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addition rather than logical connection. To illustrate his point Spitzer uses a metaphor from architecture: on the one hand, the endless monotony of identical domes in mosques, and on the other, the gothic towers and spires that shoot into the sky like arrows. The horizontal domes epitomize the Turkish penchant for agglutination and the vertical tower the typically Indo-European summation of different functions in a single form. The dubiousness of such simple dichotomies based on a view that conflates all aspects of a specific culture into one, becomes clear when one thinks of minarets which generally testify to the culture of Islam more than cupolas, an architectural element that is also a widespread phenom­ enon in European church-architecture. The double contrastive architectural metaphor of the dome and the tower confirms Spitzer’s dichotomic vision of English and German as two separate and parallel railway tracks that never intersect. Spitzer admits that his observations about the Turkish language are like pages torn out of a book. However, he insists on the validity of his observa­ tions and employs a central organic metaphor from the arsenal of the mono­ lingual paradigm to drive his point home: in the same way that the character of a person can be deduced from his face, his gestures or his voice, it is possible to extract the psychological essence of a language from an ensemble of its dis­ tinctive traits and from there move on to an overall synthetic view. As in the essay on the adoptive mother-tongue, Spitzer adds a cosmopolitan perspective pointing to the fraternal aspect in foreign languages and cultures, what he calls the ‘eternally human’, a questionable concept that smooths out linguistic differences without providing any explanation as to its precise mean­ ing. In a truly Humboldtian and anti-nationalistic vein, however, he places the speaker at the centre: Turkish, French and German belong first to their speakers and only in a second moment to Turkey, France and Germany as nations (ibid:99–100). Within the international political context of the time dominated by the aggressive growth of German Nazism Spitzer’s endeavour, despite its theoretical shortcomings, is highly creditable. Add to this the fact that in contrast to many other exiled colleagues from Germany he was the only one to show a real interest in the Turkish language.

2 From the mother-tongue to the adoptive language-mother In “Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter” (From the Mother-Tongue to the Language-Mother), the opening story of the collection Talisman, Tawada proposes a different reading of the metaphor of adoption linked to an ironical reversal of the relationship between the organic and the mechanical (Yildiz 2012:125–32). The problem with the notion of the mother-tongue is not so much that it excludes certain speakers denying them membership and ownership but that it entraps and imprisons its speakers within a linguistic universe that is perceived as natural. The same holds true for citizenship within a specific nation-state, a con­ dition that cannot generally be freely chosen at birth but is imposed upon the single person. The mother-tongue plays an important role in ensuring an

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emotional, even corporeal link between the individual and the collectivity to which one is supposed to belong. Tawada tries to break free from this enforced inclusion and the “emotional servitude” to the mother-tongue (ibid:120) by destabilizing monolingualism both from within and without. She does this by generating a parallel bilingual oeuvre, systematically moving back and forth between Japanese and German, and uses her bilingualism “as a literary strategy of detachment from any language’s claim on the subject, rather than as a basis for a claim to double belonging” (ibid:111–12), as is the case, for instance, with Ariel Dorfman. Tawada does not mix her two writing languages but introduces single foreign elements to create an opacity that questions any kind of easy reciprocal understanding. This results in an acute sense of metalinguistic awareness. The female narrator of the short story who has recently moved to Germany where she works as an office clerk soon discovers that the world of writing is thoroughly masculine and phallic: der Bleistift, der Kugelschreiber, and der Füller. This discovery is made possible by the Japanese word for pencil, enpitsu: a foreign body without a gender of its own. In Japanese, which does not know the notion of grammatical gender, not even men are masculine (Tawada 2003a:11). The bilingual gaze, thus, reveals what is generally invi­ sible to a monolingual’s eyes. The allegedly natural is denaturalized and the social unconscious revealed. Tawada opposes to the male writing tools a typewriter, which in German is feminine and which becomes in her eyes a new adoptive mother. Mother-ton­ gues – as Spitzer’s case shows – are acquired in childhood, that is, only once and never again, and because of this entertain an emotional and corporeal relation­ ship with their speakers that is singular, exclusive, unrepeatable and irreplace­ able. In this view, a new affiliation of this kind is strongly denied, and not even taken into consideration. But Tawada goes a step further and turns to the realm of the mechanic “to undermine the primacy of origin and authenticity in think­ ing about linguistic affiliations” (Yildiz 2012:128). Die Schreibmaschine, a female being, a feminine machine bestows on the narrator the gift of a new lan­ guage. German does not become her new mother-tongue, but a new languagemother. The shift from Muttersprache to Sprachmutter results in a chiasm that embodies the radical transformation achieved by the acquisition of a new lan­ guage and the empowerment of the speaker/writer ensuing from it. The type­ writer has the broad sturdy body of a mother and sets itself apart from the more cultured and spindly male writing utensils. With this machine, the narrator can only type the letters of the Latin alphabet tattooed on the typewriter keys and the words and expressions already stored in it. Writing becomes a repetition but this makes it also possible to be adopted and to live through a second childhood: “Wenn man eine neue Sprachmutter hat, kann man eine zweite Kindheit haben” (Tawada 2003a:139). The new language-mother is no unique blood relation but allows for mechanical reproducibility. Tawada radically reconfigures the tradi­ tional linguistic family romance by providing an “alternative family romance” whose source is “a machine imagined as an organic body” (Yildiz 2012:128). The idea of a second childhood – and ideally of a third and fourth, when

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learning still other languages – implies the acquisition of a new independence which is not to be seen as a double belonging “or the assertion of roots and memories in two languages” (ibid:131). The story is held together by the three German verbs klammern, heften and haften: sich festklammern (to cling, to hold tight), die Klammer (the staple), haften, anhaften (to stick, to adhere), heften, anheften (to tack, to attach), das Heft (the notebook, the booklet), Seiten zusammenheften (to staple single pages), die Heftklammer (the paper clip), der Heftklammerentferner (the staple remover). These words are not only part of her office world but also address the question of how languages bring words and objects together and how learning a new lan­ guage can sever this seemingly natural link. Besides the typewriter there is another mechanical tool, der Heftklammerentferner. The staple remover cannot write a single letter. It is completely illiterate and does, therefore, not belong to the world of writing tools. It can only remove what has already been stapled before. As the tattooed body of the typewriter, the staple remover belongs to a world of magic. It has a serpent’s head with four fangs (Schlangenkopf mit vier Fangzähnen) (Tawada 2003a:14). In the mother-tongue, the words are attached to the speakers (den Menschen angeheftet). They cling to the thoughts so tightly that neither the words nor the thoughts can fly freely any longer. The staple remover of a foreign language, however, detaches everything that clings together: “Er entfernt alles, was sich aneinaderheftet und sich festklammert” (ibid:15). Tawada’s story operates with a series of transformations: the male writing tools are transformed into a female typewriter, the organic mother-tongue is turned into a mechanic language-mother, and finally everyday human reality is aban­ doned for a world of magic that is populated by animal figures. Tawada’s bilin­ gualism facilitates “language depropriation while shunning appropriation of a second or even of a first language” (Yildiz 2012:132). When you live in a foreign language, you become aware of the relationship between words and ideas, between the words and the objects they designate, because you are occasionally forced to translate words from one language into another. “Historical traces and hidden patterns of language become evi­ dent in the mirror of translation” and the “indestructible natural link” between the word and the thing breaks down. More than a few authors despise such a pathological unhealthy relation­ ship with their mother-tongue and avoid living in a foreign country. But I see an opportunity in this broken relationship to the mother-tongue and to language in general … you no longer see the semantic unity, and you don’t go with the flow of speech. You stop everywhere and take close-ups of the details. The blow-up of the detail is confusing, because it shows completely new pictures of a familiar object. Just as you are unable to recognize your own mother seen through a microscope, you cannot recognize your one mother-tongue in a close-up picture. But art is not supposed to picture the mother in a recognizable way. (Tawada 2017:32)

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3 Rewriting the mother-tongue As Nancy Huston observes provocatively in Lettres Parisiennes. Histoires d’exil (Parisian Letters: Stories of Exile), books can be born into the world only in a tongue that is not the mother-tongue (une langue non-maternelle) (Klosty Beaujour 1989:196 n41). It is only by othering the mother-tongue (Prade 2013), that is, by fundamentally questioning the intellectual and emotional attach­ ment to her/his mother-tongue that a writer ultimately manages to find his/ her own personal voice. This holds true both for monolingual and multilingual authors. Besides Tawada, Yildiz discusses three other German writers who found their literary voice by enacting their own private family drama, in an attempt to break free from the questionable embrace of their mother-tongues: Kafka, Özdamar and Adorno. Kafka develops an alternative linguistic family romance based on a gendered performance of Yiddish. Frau Klug, one of the actresses of the wandering theatre troupe Kafka met in the fall of 1911 becomes the embodiment of the Yiddish speaking Jewish mother who calls her children into a maternal embrace. This experience leads him to a redefinition of the connection between mother and mother-tongue, and a radical re-evaluation of German as his writing language. The detour through Yiddish, a non-native language, defamiliarizes his relationship to German, a language that he had always associated with a sense of illegitimacy (Yildiz 2012:45–6). In a letter to Max Brod written in June 1921 (ibid:62–4), he emphasizes that he had always considered German as someone else’s property, something not really earned, but stolen with a quick grasp (durch flüchtigen Griff). Because of this it would always remain a foreign property (fremder Besitz), even if he did not commit a single mistake (Kafka 1983:336). The unresolvable contra­ diction of not being born into a language but using it for writing results in a Zigeunerliteratur, a gypsy literature that has stolen the German child from its cradle in great haste and put it through a training of sorts. Kafka uses the word zurichten which recalls Schleiermacher’s foreign and unnatural contortions the mother-tongue is forced to perform in translation. Zurichten, dressing and trim­ ming, rather than training, implies damage and punishment, beating someone up (jemanden übel zurichten). Suggesting the precariousness of writing in a language that is not felt to be one’s own, Kafka compares this practice to a dance on a tightrope (auf dem Seil tanzen). The German language is no longer the mothertongue but a child stolen and forced to perform a foreign dance. Kafka, concludes Yildiz, does not really question the notion that the mother-tongue is a natural property of its speakers, but despite this “he goes beyond the premises of the mother tongue family romance and towards a yet-to-be-explored new realm of radical depropriation via negation and a negative aesthetics” (Yildiz 2012:65) that makes the mother-tongue appear uncanny. Emine Sevgi Özdamar survived her mother-tongue through a technique of literal translation that turns Turkish into German both enriching the target language and preserving the culture of the source language. Yildiz interprets her strategy as a form of elaborating one’s traumatic history. This might explain why the technique

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was more pervasive in her earlier work and is much less pronounced in later texts. This new dual language can be seen as “a site of affect in a way that the ‘mother tongue’ is not”. The “affective charges of one language can be recoded through the affective charge of another” (ibid:147). Özdamar’s texts also show that a mothertongue is not an unproblematic site of origin and belonging. Her subversive use of Turkish and German undermines the conventions of the monolingual family romance by questioning its supposedly unitary and homogeneous nature. Mothertongues are never a merely private affair. An interesting metalinguistic example in this sense is her use of three different pronunciations of the word mother that Özdamar enacts as a conflict between the narrator, her mother, and her grand­ mother who represent different historical and geographical moments in Turkish culture: an Anatolian dialect, a village dialect of Cappadocia and the standard Turkish form spoken in Istanbul (ibid:152–3). The existence of multiple vernaculars next to a state sanctioned national language, each a (mother) tongue in its own right, testifies to a fundamentally heteroglossic situation. Adorno’s reinterpretation of the linguistic family romance involves a gender shift and a parallel move away from the centrality of national languages to the marginality of a local dialect. Adorno wrote Minima Moralia, a collection of altogether 153 aphorisms during his exile in the United States. In the second part, he muses over an experience that brings him back to his youth, drawing him into the abyss of his childhood. Profound sadness and a sense of failure and shame encompass him. It is the use of a long forgotten “ridiculously false” (Adorno 2003:125) form of subjunctive that triggers the remembrance. The subjunctive mood expresses different forms of unreality such as possibility, or wish, but in the past form, it can also be used to denote sorrow and remorse. The verb itself does not belong to the standard language, but comes from a dialect spoken in Adorno’s town of origin, his parental home, his Vaterstadt, Frankfurt am Main. Adorno’s “invocation of paternal affiliation retains all the emotional intensity usually associated with the mother tongue” (Yildiz 2012:100). In the sentence immediately preceding Adorno’s brooding about his father, foreign-derived words are defined as the Jews of language (die Juden der Sprache) (Adorno 2003:125), an observation that takes on a special meaning when linked to Kafka’s speech on Jargon, which depicts the incursion of for­ eign linguistic elements into the territory of the Jargon in terms of migration and lack of assimilation (chapter twelve). By introducing Jews into the dis­ course of foreign-derived words, Adorno connects foreignness and alienation and draws a parallel between the function of foreign-derived words and the Jews in anti-Semitic discourse (Yildiz 2012:84–94). The Jews of language do not suggest any gender assignation, but could be interpreted as both male and racialized linking the spatial domain to a gender-perspective. Besides “On the Use of Foreign Words” (chapter three), Adorno wrote a second essay on the issue of foreign-derived words: “Words from Abroad” (Wörter aus der Fremde) (Adorno 1991b). In 1959, after a radio broadcast on Marcel Proust, he had received letters criticizing his excessive use of Fremdwörter and he decided to stand up in their favour. In the essay, he emphasized their

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importance in view of the development of a metalinguistic consciousness. For­ eign-derived words that are not immediately understood force us to pause and to reconsider, they interrupt the naturalness of conversations, and question notions of linguistic conformism. Furthermore, foreign-derived words show that lan­ guage does not simply belong to the intimate realm of the family sphere. In the view of the purist, all foreign words will ultimately and hopefully give in to the pressure exerted by their environment. Adorno, on the other hand, insists on their stubborn recalcitrant nature. Foreign-derived words are “tiny cells of resistance against nationalism” (winzige Zellen des Widerstandes) (ibid:186). Linguistic purism does not always imply monolingualism and precedes the birth of national languages but it significantly contributed to the emergence of the monolingual paradigm (Yildiz 2012:67). Foreign-derived words threaten national languages from the inside. They show that the foreign is lodged deeply inside the familiar and that our knowledge of it is always only partial. Add to this the fact that they occupy an intermediate position in that they are neither completely assimilated – like the words that are no longer perceived as foreign – nor completely foreign – like foreign words whose foreignness is still clearly perceptible. In this sense, they are like assimilated German speaking Jews who still exude an aura of foreignness. Adorno associates the emotional and sensual attraction exerted by foreignderived words with a craving for “foreign” (ausländisch) and possibly (womöglich) “exotic girls” (exotische Mädchen). The promise that accompanies this desire is a sort of “exogamy of language” (Exogamie der Sprache) (Adorno 1991b:187). Yildiz (2012:98–9) points to the fact that even if the mother-tongue is not explicitly mentioned in the essay it has nevertheless to be taken into consideration. The notion of exogamy, the marriage outside one’s kin, introduces the dimension of kinship in the discourse of language and points to a transgressive side in the relation to foreign words as it implies a betrayal of the emotional attachment to one’s mother-tongue. By inference, the relationship to one’s mother-tongue would thus have to be defined in terms of endogamy, of a legitimate marriage. The libidinal investment into linguistic foreignness suggested by the image of the exotic girls regards both culture and race. One has to imagine the foreign and exotic girls both as Non-European and possibly as non-white. The exotic girls – the plural form is important here – articulate a desire to leave one’s mother-tongue behind and to step into other foreign languages. Exogamy also implies the possibility of polygamy. Yildiz interprets Adorno’s earlier essay, “On the Use of Foreign Words”, in terms of gender. The shift from a corporeal – foreign bodies – to a territorial perspective – words from abroad – in the interpretation of foreign derivedwords goes to show how the different metaphorical source domains tend to merge. As Yildiz argues, the gendered axis opposes the more feminine and pli­ able foreign words that offer little resistance to assimilation to the hard male phallic unyielding foreign words that can be associated with “iron stigmata” and metallic “wandering cannonballs” (Adorno 1991a:288). In this earlier description, the cultural and racial dimension of femininity of the later essay, which deflects the dangers of easy assimilation, is still absent.

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4 The stepmother tongue and the orphaned writer In the introduction to the collection Stories in the Stepmother Tongue, the edi­ tors, Josip Novakovich and Robert Shapard use the term ‘stepmother tongue’ and ‘stepmother tongue writer’ to avoid what they call the technical, more “cold and bureaucratic” term of ‘second language acquisition’. The stepmother tongue indicates an “expanding family”. English has adopted many writers from all around the world, and even though stepmothers are proverbially cruel and occasionally treat newcomers “harshly and unlovingly” (2000:12) there are many cases of good stepmothers. Contrary to Tawada’s critical use of the notion of adoptive mother-tongue, Novakovich and Shapard’s reading of the stepmother tongue, thus, confirms the traditional ideological view of the mother-tongue as protective and sheltering. One of the contributors, Thomas Palakeel, describes his mother-tongue Malayalam – a Dravidian language spoken in the Southwestern Indian state of Kerala – as “old and strong and nasty and ambidextrous as his English stepmother tongue. She is good. She is a good mother, yet allowed a foreign stepmother to lure me away from my true home. My mother tongue has not abandoned me. I continue to dream in Malayalam” (Palakeel 2000:134). In The Stepmother Tongue. An Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction, John Skinner introduces in his classification of Anglophone literature the metaphor of the stepmother tongue as a supplement to the notion of the mother-tongue. The “conventional concept of writing in the mother tongue may seem self-explanatory”, however, for many authors a tongue is not “automatically possessed” (1998:11). More often than not it is painfully learned, consciously chosen, modified, subverted, rejected or simply aban­ doned. The choice of a writing language is not always based on a profound unproblematic emotional attachment, as the ideology of the mother-tongue would have it, but is very often a site of confrontation. Skinner speaks of “narratives of ambivalence or even resistance to the language” (ibid:11). The metaphor of the stepmother that plays a central role in European fairy tales conceives of the relations between children and foster parents as almost invariably fraught with conflict. Skinner’s attempt to redraw the relationship of an author to his/her writing language in terms other than those of the mothertongue moves in the same direction as Yildiz’s rewriting of the topos of the mother-tongue, but lacks some of its more radical implications. Yildiz uses the multilingual authors she discusses as possible models signalling how one might overcome the drawbacks of a total allegiance to the mother-tongue. Skinner’s project began as a research for a term that would exclude all ‘native English writers’ and include all others. This leaves a wide field ranging from Jamaica Kincaid to James Joyce, including Nadine Gordimer, William Golding, Margaret Atwood and William Faulkner among others. The list does not exclude post-colonial writing but focuses on what he calls other ‘stories of English’, including Irish, Scottish and Welsh authors. Skinner determines three different steps on the way of an author that has chosen not to write in the mother-tongue:

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from the first adoption of a stepmother tongue to subsequent adaptation, ending up becoming an adept. All these writers found viable solutions to the linguistic dilemmas they were confronted with. Skinner suggests constructing a taxonomy for all modern writing in English, which does not use the traditional division in geographical regions but tries to integrate global phenomena like migration, displacement and cultural hybrid­ ity. The two criteria are ‘language’ and ‘land’ both conjugated with ownership or absence thereof. Three categories are allocated to the stepmother tongue and one to the mother-tongue. It is only this last category that joins ownership of language to ownership of land. Besides being tentative, as Skinner cautiously argues, these categories reproduce one of the basic assumptions of the mono­ lingual paradigm: mother-tongues belong both to their speakers and to the land on which they grew. His attempt to draw a clear line between stepmother and mother-tongue authors, thus, leaves the ideological notion of the mothertongue ultimately intact. The notion of the stepmother-tongue that focuses on narratives of ambiva­ lence and resistance could have been used to question and rewrite the ideolo­ gical and idealizing relationship of a writer to his/her medium. The ambivalences of the writing process coming to light with the notion of the stepmother tongue do not leave the notion of mother-tongue intact, on the contrary, they contaminate it. This way, the pejorative connotations associated with the trope of the stepmother which is based on a certain vision of the mother/child relationship that was projected onto the affinity between a writer and his/her language could be fundamentally reconsidered: “With the new fluidity and flexibility of family structures in the West at the end of the millen­ nium”, writes Skinner, “there is no reason why the ‘stepmother’ should not be a positive force, and why the child of divorced parents should not have two lar­ gely undifferentiated mother (or indeed father) figures …”. A translingual writer “possessing” both “‘mother’ and ‘stepmother’ tongues” (ibid:14) could therefore become a cultural enrichment. The distinctions between mother and stepmother tongue continue to be eroded. Skinner points to literary recuperations of the image of the stepmother and a simplifying mutation from the wicked to the virtuous. However, instead of separating the two concepts of mother and stepmother tongue, they could be seen as the two poles of a continuum articulating different, conflicting aspects of any writing process, oscillating between discord and concord, dissonance and consonance. In his psychoanalytical analysis of fairy tales, Bruno Bettel­ heim (1976) points to the fact that the mother and the stepmother are indeed the same person. The child, writes Skinner, “projects onto the stepmother unresolved feelings of hostility towards the biological mother”. The conflictual unity of mother and stepmother might, thus, be taken “to (pre)figure the mer­ ging of mother and stepmother tongue in present of future literary practice” (ibid:14). Skinner, however, reduces the impact of this thought-provoking insight by choosing a non-native writer of English, the Nigerian Zaynab Alkali who comments on his writing as an ‘agonizing experience’. But perhaps, writes

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Skinner cogently, it is the “act of writing itself (in either English or Alkali’s native Hausa) which is really agonizing” (ibid:14). Even if Skinner’s analysis of literary texts and authors tends to fall short of his own theoretical insights, it opens up new ways to address the ambivalences of a writer’s relationship to his/ her writing language(s). The notion of stepmother tongue opens up the monolithical unity of the mother-tongue by decentring the supposedly unproblematic and symbiotic relationship of a speaker to his/her language, and consequently also to his/ her mother. As previously seen, Spitzer clearly separates the strong emo­ tional attachment to the German mother-tongue from that to the English adoptive tongue. The adoptive tongue is not without generosity but ends up treating her children like a stepmother, denying them emotional pleni­ tude and creative fulfilment. Canetti’s tormented relationship to his German writing language, on the other hand, can be reinterpreted in terms of the duality of the mother and the stepmother tongue. His experience radically questions the traditional unambiguous notion of the mother-tongue based on the caring and loving relationship of a speaker to his/her mother. Canetti’s mother acted more as a stepmother than a loving mother combining power and authority with affection. Canetti acquired German in a highly ambivalent process that welded pain to pleasure, inextricably tying him to the new language. Another kinship metaphor related to those of the adoptive and the step­ mother tongue is the metaphor of the orphan. Louis Begley is of Jewish origin (Kellman 2000:85–101). He was born as Ludwik Begleiter in Poland in 1933. In the fall of 1946, his family left the country. He lived in France until early October 1946 and left with his parents for the United States at the end of February 1947. In “On Being an Orphaned Writer” he writes: “The soil in which my special anxieties are rooted is the precarious relationship between me and the English language … Polish is my mother tongue. Since by reason of events over which I have no control I write instead in English, I am an orphaned writer. English is not even my first or second language” (2004:162). The metaphor has been used in a more provocative and creative sense by Gloria Anzaldúa and Feridun Zaimog˘ lu (Yildiz 2012:181–2) who discover a new sense of freedom through the loss of their mother-tongue. Gloria Anzal­ dúa defines her mixed tongue as a motherless tongue: “Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos – we speak an orphan tongue” (Anzaldúa 2012:80). Feridun Zaimog˘ lu who was born in Bolu (Turkey) in 1964, but has been living in Germany for over 30 years, focuses on male self-generation without any reference to mothers or other kinds of affiliation. His appropria­ tion of a language is not illegitimate as Kafka’s, as it stems directly from the male body of the speaker in “a painful physical process” (ibid:181), a phantasy of male self-generation comparable to Dorfman’s English child that is directly inseminated in his brain by his Spanish ancestors. Both authors invoke a motherless tongue in a sense that questions and transcends the harmonic set­ ting and the unilateral gendering of the monolingual family romance.

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5 From mother-tongues to adoptive and stepmother tongues The narrative of the second part of this book moves from a supposedly stable, hierarchic and centred ensemble of kinship relationships to multiple forms of transgression that disparage and dissolve family ties, unilateral gender assign­ ments and dichotomic sexual identities. The structure of the traditional family, which relies on stable roles and trustworthy relationships, is subverted. Lan­ guages contaminate each other and husbands betray their wives with adulter­ ous lovers or practice multiple bigamy. In this sense, the insurgent kinship metaphors can be compared to insurgent metaphors from the corporeal and spatial domain: unity is disbanded in favour of plurality and openness. Kinship-structures which describe relationships between languages and between native speakers and their (mother) tongues in terms of interacting gen­ dered human beings are complemented by the metaphor of the tree. Linguistic family trees not only define languages in female terms they personify them as mothers and link them directly to the kinship metaphor of the mother-tongue. With their insistence on the natural domain the two sets of metaphors endorse and bolster each other. Corporeal and spatial metaphors of mono- and multi­ lingualism mainly define relations of interiority and exteriority, exclusion and inclusion. Gender and kinship metaphors – and the related tree metaphor – tend to focus on relationships, that is, on fidelity and on the related notion of purity. The subversive potential of insurgent kinship metaphors consists in the trans­ gression of predetermined culturally sanctioned relationships and role assignments. In doing so, however, they cast multilingualism as a deviation, acknowledging indirectly the normality of monolingualism. The examples of Dorfman and Kha­ tibi, however, show how a critique of monolingualism as a forceful fidelity to a single wife can move beyond false alternatives and open up into a plurality of pos­ sible relationships that transcend restrictive notions of faithfulness. The last chapter revisits the metaphor of a unique idealized mother-tongue and reinterprets it from a critical point of view. Yildiz shows how the family romance of the monolingual paradigm can be rewritten focusing on ambiv­ alences and contradictions. Similarly the metaphors of the adoptive and the stepmother tongue open up the tight ideological and idealized relationship of native speakers to their mother-tongues to its problematic conflictual side.

Part III

Spaces: the seas of plurilingualism

11 Territorializing national languages

This chapter adds further layers of complexity to the metaphoric cluster of the monolingual paradigm. The metaphors of lactation, the organicity of languages and the genealogic vision of language families as single rooted trees, which are intimately linked to the notion of the mother-tongue, are augmented by the meta­ phors of territoriality and nativity. It is important to emphasize again that even though these metaphors build on each other, their unfolding in time is not be understood in terms of a linear and cumulative evolution. They were reinterpreted and connected with new tropes that altered and expanded their initial meaning. The tree metaphor of language, for instance, plays a central role in the texts of Speroni, Du Bellay, Herder and Schleicher. However, in each instance a very dif­ ferent understanding of nature and its relationship to culture and history apply. Similarly, the notion of mother-tongue can be traced back to the fourteenth cen­ tury, but it was only with the rise and spread of popular linguistic nationalism in the early nineteenth century that it fully acquired its modern meaning. Bonfiglio draws a list of the five main constitutive aspects of nationalistic language myths (2010:35). National languages are fundamentally unmixed and directly linked – both in a religious and a secular sense – to their origins through an unbroken line (primordiality). They possess the unique capacity to articulate the truth of a specific national culture (sanctity) and because of this cannot be satisfactorily translated (untranslatability). National languages are inborn and directly inherited from one’s parents, generally from one’s mother (innateness), as well as fundamentally corporeal and organic by nature (organicity and naturalness). To these criteria, I would like to add that of territoriality which anchors national languages and native speakers in a geo-political territory (rootedness). National languages originate and are organically enracinated in a specific circumscribed political territory and the national landscape that is associated with it. This collective vision is com­ plemented by the notion of the individual native speaker who is not only born into a country and a landscape, but also into a mother-tongue and shaped by these from the very beginning. Maternal metaphors of language acquisition have a long history of their own and have been directly linked to nature and femininity in the early modern period. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this nat­ ural tie is reinterpreted in terms of enracination in a geo-political space.

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Languages are trees in a double metaphorical sense: their roots connect them to their historical origins and to the nation and landscape in which they origi­ nated. In Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen, Herder uses an arbor­ eal metaphor linking languages to climatic conditions and the culture of a specific nation. As each soil is specifically different, all languages, like plants, grow in their own way. Each language has a distinct unique character dependent on the interaction of the natural environment and the customs and traditions of a nation. The collective and the individual dimension of the metaphor comple­ ment each other. Nature imposes on native speakers an exclusive obligation to their mother-tongue because it is better attuned to the sensitive organs of their bodies, as well as to their character and way of thinking. The mother-tongue is an inalienable national birth right that is ultimately inaccessible to the non­ native who generally lacks the ability to pronounce it correctly (Bonfiglio 2010:131–5). The same holds true for nations that grow on their ancestral ground like trees and native speakers who are born and rooted in their language. Because of this intimate emotional and corporeal connection, any forceful or voluntary change of place or language amounts to a painful deracination. The equation system tree = language = nation = speaker that bridges the gap between the single individual and the national collectivity is based on the common notions of uniqueness and inner homogeneity. “A nation and a mother tongue”, writes Benedict Anderson, “are something to which one is naturally tied … precisely because such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinterestedness” (Anderson 2016:143). Before retracing some of the historical and political conditions that brought about a territorialization of national languages confining mobile languages within fixed geographical and political territories, I will briefly discuss some of the interrelated metaphors of unity and uniformity revolving around the image of the nation-state and the notion of national language.

1 Metaphors of unity and uniformity In a chapter dedicated to the transition from mechanistic to organismic meta­ phors of the social and political body, Pheng Chea (2003:25–33) discusses how around 1800 society was reinterpreted in terms of a living warm-blooded organism. This paradigmatic shift took place at the time of the Napoleonic wars, the occupation of the German territories and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Contrary to the absolutist state of the Ancien Régime that was seen as an artificial man and a machine driven from the outside, the new bourgeois nation-state was conceived as a living organism infused with the blood of those who had created it. The German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), linking the metaphors of the organism, the ter­ ritory and the nation, described nation-states as complex organisms growing on a specific geographic site. Each community of people had an intimate rela­ tionship to the territory that it occupied from time immemorial, from which it got its unique ethnic character (Guldin 2014:270–5). The opposition between

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mechanism and organism, and its conceptual link to the new organic vision of language is, however, only one of many other discursive threads that link the metaphor of the nation to that of the national language. Like the body politic, discussed in chapter three, the new bourgeois nationstate of the late eighteenth century is seen as an independent unit, closed to the exterior. However, the stress lies now on inner homogeneity. Existing social differences and possible inner conflicts of interest disappear in favour of a collective all-encompassing national feeling. Nationalism is the unrestricted love for one’s country, its unique landscape and the beauties of its national language and literature. The single nations emphasize their individuality and self-sufficiency, but the very concept of nation cannot do without the existence of other nations. This initiates comparisons between the different nation-states and a series of translational movements across the separating borders that become an increasingly important aspect of cultural policy. In fact, contrary to the model of the body politic, the nation-state privileges borders over inner structure. The new national bourgeois social order, which established its power in the course of the nineteenth century, was in need of a new set of political metaphors of socio-political unity and cohesion in order to distinguish itself from the former power structures of the aristocratic Ancien Régime. Philip Manow (2008) focused on some aspects of this metaphorical shift and on the deep ambivalences that animated it. The new republic does not have a body like that of the king under monarchy. Ideally, the republic consists of individuals, each with a right to express his own will. Because of this, the new democratic power cannot be ade­ quately captured in the metaphors used for the older forms of power. However, the passage from the old aristocratic to the new bourgeois power shows a series of continuities despite the fundamental rupture it purports to be. Manow illus­ trates this point by a comparison between the spatial set-up of the British House of Commons and the French Assemblée Nationale. The British House of Com­ mons consists of two rows facing each other and a president that occupies the centre and the front side of the parliament. This configuration is reminiscent of medieval forms of representation that were prevalent before the French Revolu­ tion and recalls the dichotomy between the limbs of the body politic and the commanding head. The French Assemblée Nationale that became the main model for most European parliaments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries consists of a semi-circle with a central speaker position, from where the common will of the parliament is articulated. This avoids the more obvious bodily impli­ cations of the British Parliament but still relies on the difference between the commanding head and the attached collective body. As seen in chapter two, the metaphor of the circle signifying national unity and inner coherence was also used to describe national languages. Another interpretative tradition based on human bodies as territorial meta­ phors that reaches back into antiquity was charged with new, nationalistic meaning in the course of the nineteenth century. In the early modern period, it was still common to cast continents, nations and cities as female figures

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(Guldin 2011b). In 1537, the cartographer Johannes Putsch presented Europe as a virgin queen standing upright, with Bohemia as her heart and the Iberian Peninsula as her crowned head. The body politic and the body geographic express a similar idea of unity, boundedness and inner coherence. Marcus Gheeraert’s Ditchley-Portrait of Elizabeth I of England (1592), for instance, shows the queen standing on a map of the country. Her two feet are placed on the heart of England, near Ditchley, Oxfordshire. The natural and symbolical body of the queen joins the earth to the sky and the English nation to its national territory. The unifying metaphor of the human body resurfaces in female personifications of single nations (Guldin 2014:256–62). The collective female body of Germania draws a connection between an individual body and the social body of the community projecting a national self as unified whole. She was generally presented in a familial setting both as a mother with her sons or as a bride with her suitors. In the early nineteenth century, Eugène Delacroix painted the French and Greek revolution as bare breasted female figures. In the late nineteenth century, political maps of Europe used human figures to por­ tray the different countries. These often employed stereotyped notions of national character. An example of this iconographic tradition is Paul Hadol’s comic map from 1870 that shows France, Germany, Italy and Austria as sol­ diers, Ireland as a bear, Great Britain as an elderly spinster, and Spain as a reclining dancer. As already seen in chapter six, languages have also been described as female figures related to each other through family ties. Nations and national languages are both conceived of in territorial terms and associated with specific landscapes. The geographical body of the nation corresponds to its political organism and expresses some of its most typical characteristics: Switzerland defined itself through the mountainous fortress of the Alps (ibid:41–65), Norway through its fjords, the Austro-Hungarian Mon­ archy through the unifying ribbon of the Danube (ibid:195–213), and Germany through its dense forests (ibid:95–121). In his essay on the philosophy of land­ scape, the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858–1918) described the constitution of landscapes as a process of cutting out an element from a greater unit to which it is attached by a series of filaments. Once this element has been selected and wrenched from its origin, it becomes a new closed unit with a new inner coherence and a life of its own. As in the con­ stitution of nation-states and their territory – or the definition of languages for that matter – all the ties that link the newly created landscape to its complex site of origin must be carefully hidden. According to Simmel, landscapes can be compared to carpets. All the threads that connect them to the rest of the world must be cut away and carefully tied back to its centre (in den eigenen Mittelpunkt zurückgeknüpft) (Simmel 2001:474). This process of erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000) also plays a central role in the invention of national languages as bounded entities that are clearly differentiated from the outside, but homogenous and harmonious on the inside. The national territory and the space in which a specific national language is spoken neatly overlap; the borders between languages and nations tend to

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coincide. Monolingualism is also a powerful political metaphor. In this respect, political and linguistic atlases play a central ideological role. They confirm the parallel territorial set-up of nations and national languages through the use of specific, generally unmixed colours that set one nation and national language clearly apart from the others. In times of nation-states, the political map becomes an effective logo for the single nations or colonies, a monochromatic “piece of a jigsaw-puzzle” that can be “wholly detached from its geographic context … Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map” has not only penetrated “deep into popular imagination” (Anderson 2016:175) but still shapes our perception of languages and nations. The three interlinked source domains of the organism, the female personifi­ cation and the bounded space share a series of common traits. They represent autonomous units with an existence of their own and a specific character. These three source domains along with their attributes are mapped onto the nationstate and the national language, which in turn can be considered metaphors of each other. Even if these metaphors are not systematically used in close con­ junction with each other they are part of a common discursive field. According to the context within which they are deployed they can be joined in pairs or clusters to make a certain point or to enforce a specific ideological meaning. In the following section, I will discuss two diverging ways in which national languages were linked to territory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: a bounded geo-political territory in the first case, and an imaginary motherland in the second.

2 Inventing national languages One of the earliest instances of a national understanding of language within the European context is the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts signed by Francis I of France in August 1539. The decree was an expression of a growing national sentiment and a first step towards a linguistic and ideological unification of France. It was intended to end the discontinuous use of Latin in official docu­ ments and to avoid any ambiguity or uncertainty. Article 110 and 111 called for an exclusive use of the French mother-tongue in official legislation, legal acts and deeds of justice and all other proceedings of the royal courts, both in spoken and written form. The initial aim of the edict was to reduce the role of Latin in public life rather than to propagate Parisian French outside the capital (Bell 1995:1410). This attempt to create a unified language for the juridical and poli­ tical domain, however, has to be seen in conjunction with the efforts of the poets of La Pléiade in the literary sphere a few years later (Casanova 2008:92–4). On July 20, 1794, the French revolutionary government reiterated the request for a single national language. This tenet is still part of the current French Con­ stitution (Article 2). The decision was preceded by intensive political controversy. For the revolutionary government the presence of a wide array of provincial languages and dialects all over France became a political issue as early as Jan­ uary 1790. The Jacobins began a campaign to systematically eradicate the

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multiplicity of languages and to make French the uniform idiom throughout the young republic. “These revolutionary-era policies on language mark a symbolic turning point in the history of France as a nation and more generally in the his­ tory of modern nationalism” (Bell 1995:1405). Contrary to East European and German nationalists of the nineteenth century, the Jacobins did not consider language as a determining element of national character but as a sign of assim­ ilation into a community generated by a common political will. The plans of the Jacobins were never fully implemented but marked the beginning of the decline of regional languages. On 8 Pluviôse II (January 27, 1794), Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (1755–1841), a member of the Comité de salut public and a representative of the Département Hautes-Pyrénées, submitted his report to the National Convention in Paris demanding the establishment of a single national language throughout the entire territory of France and calling for French language teachers in the peripheral regions of the country. His “Rapport du Comité de salut public sur les idiomes” (Report of the Committee of Public Safety on Languages) (1975) is one of the first documents of its kind within the European context. Barère de Vieuzac’s request, which set the educated, cosmopolitan urban elite against the still largely illiterate dialect speaking peasant world, was part and parcel of the ongoing fierce military and political fight of the young republic against internal and external enemies. According to Barère de Vieuzac, a free people had to speak only one lan­ guage that was binding for everybody, because everyone had the same rights and obligations before the law. All other competing languages were to be considered barbarous and crude as they were still largely in the service of deluded fanatics and cunning counterrevolutionaries. In this sense, the choice of a single rational and democratic language was a strategy that went against ignorance and despotism, and helped prevent a return to earlier, barbarous times. Barère de Vieuzac described the language spoken in revolutionary France – the language of public instruction, freedom, reason and education – as the most beautiful language in Europe. It was the first language in which human rights had been formulated and therefore the only one truly capable of conveying to the rest of the world the sublime ideas of freedom and brother­ hood championed by the French Revolution. For quite some time, the French language had been enslaved and abused to flatter kings, corrupt the court and subjugate the people. It was a soft, dis­ honest, fanatical, lying and shameless tongue. In the years preceding the revolution, it had been smoothed, purified, refined and charged with new energies, but it still belonged exclusively to certain social classes. The nobility, however, had not been faithful to the French language, but had betrayed it to other languages. In the report, Barère de Vieuzac opposed the socially and geographically divided pre-revolutionary multilingual society to the linguistic, geographical and social unity of revolutionary France, whose citizens were all subject to the same legislation. The knowledge of the French language

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allowed a direct access to the new laws inspiring citizens in their worship and love of the Republic. Free men were all alike and spoke the same language. The main danger for the new monolingual and centralistic Republic did not come from internal linguistic differences, but from the linguistic periph­ eries and the external enemies hiding behind them, which still threatened the newly acquired linguistic and political unity. Barère de Vieuzac situated the four areas in the four geographic corners of France. This strategy allowed him to ignore other more central regional dialects like Berrichon, Poitevin, Limousin and Auvergnat which made up the complex heteroglossic landscape of languages spoken in France at the time of the revolution. In territorial terms, these centrifugal linguistic and political forces not only counteracted and subverted the centralizing centripetal linguistic strategy of assimilation practiced and enforced by the Republic, but ultimately also led to a deterri­ torialization and fragmentation of its territorial integrity. In the North-West there was Breton spoken in Western Bretagne, in the South-West, Basque spoken in the Atlantic Pyrenees, in the North-East the German of the Haut and Bas-Rhin and finally in the South-East, on Corsica, Italian. “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us break up these instruments of injury and error” (ibid:295). In these bor­ derlands, priests and nobles had prevented the revolution from spreading its message and actively played into the hands of enemies. The demagogic forces of the counter-revolution had used the local vernaculars to perpetuate the authority of the aristocracy and the church. Barère de Vieuzac bases his argument on the power of language to deter­ mine a person’s political outlook. This applies not only to French, the lan­ guage that gives direct access to the new revolutionary ideas, but also to the other hostile languages that subjugate man and keep him from freedom. This vision suggests a twofold linguistic determinism: multilingualism and linguis­ tic variety, delusion and subjugation, on the one side, and strict mono­ lingualism, reason and republican liberty on the other. Barère de Vieuzac’s notion of national language not only distinguishes between an enlightened centre and an obscurantist periphery, but creates at the same time a linguistic hierarchy. The new Republican French, in which the basic ideas of the revo­ lution are couched, is not only superior to all other regional languages spoken in France, but also to the languages of the neighbouring countries. Barère de Vieuzac sets out from the existing geo-political set-up of France and argues for a linguistic homogenization within the borders of its national territory as a way to spread the political message of the revolution and turn all inhabitants into active citizens of the Republic. In Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) (1978), a series of lectures delivered in Berlin between December 1807 and March 1808, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte evokes a sense of German nationhood based on Herder’s vision of the identity-shaping powers of language (Bauman and Briggs 2003:165–98). At the same time he calls for

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an active protection of the political and linguistic borders of the country to be. In fact, contrary to revolutionary France, in the early nineteenth century Germany as a nation was still a distant project, a jumble of a myriad of ter­ ritorial fragments, many of which were occupied by the Napoleonic troops. In this sense, Fichte argues for the constitution of a relatively vague territorial configuration that he calls Mutterland, the traditional common soil, on which German culture had been thriving for centuries. This soil of the motherland had allowed German culture to germinate, grow and expand. The specificity of German culture and the very sign of its superiority over other European nations was based on its close adherence to things past. Contrary to other tribes that had left their ancestral territory and embraced a new language, the German people had remained true to their land and safe­ guarded their original language. This explained the greater purity both of its lineage and its language. According to Fichte, a nation could have only one language. This created a sense of belonging and continuity among those who spoke it. In fact, human beings were moulded by their language more than they did shape it for their part. The German language had conserved its structural essence and remained fundamentally the same throughout history without ever being corrupted or contaminated by foreign influences. The living force of the language had flown down from its source without any interruption. Because of this, it expressed the true nature of the German people and predestined them before all other European nations to be the first in the creation of a new Menschengeschlecht (humankind) through educa­ tional means. The absence of a concrete unified national territory and the historical des­ tiny of Germany that was all too often shaped by war and fragmentation were, thus, more than made up by its future mission based on a profound sense of unity and belonging to the ancestral soil and a language whose living roots dug deep into the past. Contrary to Barère de Vieuzac’s vision, the ter­ ritoriality of the national language was not the result of a collective political will but grew organically and spontaneously in a tree-like manner from the national soil itself. Fichte’s view, which can be traced back to the early seventeenth century and the work of Schottel (chapter six), anticipates the connection of the notions of mother-tongue and native language with inheri­ tance and consanguinity, a racialization of language that was to become the general creed in Nazi Germany (Bonfiglio 2010:33–4).

3 The force of centripetality In his essay “Die Nationalsprachen als Stile” (National Languages as Styles), the German Romanist Karl Vossler (1872–1949) describes nations as “leibhaf­ tige Einzelmenschen”, living individuals (Vossler 1925a:6) who possess a will of their own. Nations, however, are speechless. If they want to express themselves and talk to one another, they have to constitute themselves politically and legally as persons and determine the language in which they are going to express

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themselves. The constitution of a self-contained nation and the invention of a national language mirror each other and are causally linked. Vossler avoids Fichte’s mystical association of territory with language and nation, but remains within a unitary vision of what languages and nations are supposed to be: sepa­ rate, self-contained bodies. As an individual linguistic unity, each national language is animated by its own spirit, an individual temperament, by which it differs from other nations. “The Romantics called this the … genius of a people … Thanks to this natural instinct of the mind (geistiger Naturinstinkt), a nation can conserve itself … and find its own limit within itself… The true form of life of a national language is centripetal and internal (zentripetal und innerlich), not moving outward (ausfäl­ lig)” (ibid:4–5). The notion of centripetality presupposes the existence of a gravitational centre. Instead of ‘centrifugal’, the other term of the pair, Vossler uses the word ausfällig, dissolute, or (verbally) abusive, which recalls ausländisch, foreign. Ausfallen means to fail or malfunction, an Ausfall is a sortie, or a foray. National languages are self-sufficient units arranged around a central mean­ ingful core. They can conserve their true nature only by focusing on themselves and not opening up to the influence of other languages. In order to remain authentic and genuine, a natural language must constantly remain true to itself. The existing limits may not be exceeded at will, as this would inevitably lead to self-alienation, or as the word Ausfall suggests, failure and malfunction. Because of this, foreign-derived words should not be actively sought out and freely assimilated, since they already keep forcing themselves on us, so that it would be distasteful to run after them (ibid:5). A national style determines expression and creativity down to the smallest detail. Even the tiniest element is shaped and sustained by the same artistic will that animates the whole. The centripetal will for inner cohesion is already visible and active in the formation of national languages. The individual dia­ lects strive for a desired norm until they come together in the realization of a specific national style. This notion recalls the purifying and centralizing efforts in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century dis­ cussed in the second section of chapter six. Vossler’s holistic vision of language and culture is underpinned by scenic and geological metaphors. National languages whose form can be compared to that of beautiful landscapes possess a geological substructure. These formative structures are hidden in the depths. They can be substantiated philosophically but not empirically proven. From this linguistic underworld that represents the metaphysical language community (metaphysische Sprachgemeinschaft) emerges the poetic-grammatical primal schema (das poetisch-grammatische Ur-Schema) (ibid:18). In Vossler’s metaphorical vision, the basic forms of a national lan­ guage erupt from deeper geological layers like incandescent lava, which cools and solidifies in the atmosphere. The generative and regenerating forces of a national language are anchored in a specific territory and reach down into the depths of history.

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In Geist und Kultur in der Sprache (Mind and Culture in Language), Voss­ ler uses the degree of love for one’s national language as a criterion of cultural and political evolution, and associates it with the opposition between centre and periphery. Depth and centrality complement each other when it comes to define the essence of national languages. “Not everywhere and not at all times, of course, does the sense of language and honour appear as sensitive, vigilant and jealous as in contemporary Europe. The Italians were the first, the Germans the last, but the French the most ambitious … while Eastern fringe populations are still the most boorish (die Flegelhaftesten), because of the half-grown nature of their cultures (ihrer kulturellen Halbwüchsigkeit gemäß)” (Vossler 1925b:137). In Vossler’s description, languages are con­ ceived as human beings with a certain age, maturity and education. The Eastern European Slavic languages are still young, unexperienced and bad mannered, which confirms their marginal position within the concert of Eur­ opean nations. Vossler’s holism determines also the relationship between language, indivi­ dual character and collective identity. The cohesion of an empirical speech community is achieved through a general will to work on a common language material as a special tool of understanding. Linguistic differences are con­ nected to the temperament (Gemütsart) that prevails in a specific language community, that is, its national character (Nationalcharakter) (ibid:128). Language, emotional disposition, as well as individual and collective identity are thus inseparably welded together. There is no causal chain, or mediation between these elements, no distance or tension, because from a phenomen­ ological point of view they are one and the same thing. “The French do not speak French because they have a French sentiment, temper or character, but only because they speak. Their language becomes … French by itself, and through their speech … their national character emerges and becomes real as something we call … the French language” (ibid:128). Precisely because these different dimensions are inextricably intertwined, one can never really discard or overcome one’s early linguistic imprint, or adopt a foreign language to substitute it. “Through exercise and habituation a Frenchman can acquire the right to citizenship in as many languages as he likes, his mental home (geis­ tige Heimat) will always remain French. He can deny and forget it, but never get rid of it, in the same way one cannot get rid of one’s childhood experi­ ences” (ibid:129).

4 From state languages to national languages As Eric Hobsbawm argues in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, the strong mystical identification of language and nation are “semi-artificial constructs” or “virtually invented”. They are “the opposite of what nationalist mythology supposes them to be, namely the primordial foundations of national culture and the matrices of the national mind. They are usually attempts to devise a standardized idiom out of a multiplicity of actually spoken idioms, which are

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thereafter degraded to dialects …” (1992:54), late inventions that were pro­ jected back in time inverting the actual causal sequence. There often is a lack of easily recognizable boundaries between national languages. Sweden and Norway, Serbia and Croatia, for instance, are different nations but have practically the same national language. There “is nothing intrinsically lin­ guistic about [the] borderline of native language nationality; it is erected by psychological, social, political, historical, and cultural anxieties that have been projected upon language” (Bonfiglio 2010:218). In Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation­ alism first published in 1983, Benedict Anderson intended to expose the Eurocentric provincialism that animated most visions of nationalism of his time by emphasizing its New World origins. He also showed that languages and nations, contrary to a Eurocentric prejudice are related in various ways. The complete identity of the two, suggested by Barère de Vieuzac and Fichte that became the leading model of interpretation by the second decade of the nineteenth century is actually only one possible option among others. Between the sixteenth and the late twentieth century, there is a succession of different models to be made out. The slow vernacularization that began in the sixteenth century and the birth of administrative vernaculars that substituted Latin have to be viewed within the context of ‘state-languages’ and cannot be subsumed to the later ideological notion of national languages (Anderson 2016:41–2). In these early instances, the choice of language was utterly dif­ ferent from the self-conscious language policies of the nineteenth century. State-languages are administrative languages used within a circumscribed space mostly for practical reasons, as in the case of the Ordinance of VillersCotterêts, which regulated language use primarily within the courts of justice. The rise of nationalism and national languages was a consequence of a decline in religion, a new philological-lexicographic interest in languages (ibid:71) and the concomitant rise of print capitalism that created “a mono­ lingual mass reading public” (ibid:43). The new industrialized state needed a well-educated work force for its new form of industrial production. Printlanguages laid the bases for national consciousness by creating unified fields of communication, bestowing on language a new form of fixity and perma­ nence and creating through this a new form of cultural and political power. Linguistic uniformity was needed to represent the imagined communities of the different nations. The first wave of nationalism was extra-European. In the struggle for national liberation and nation building in the new American states (1780–1820), the issue of language did not play an important role. The end of these liberation move­ ments coincided with the onset of the age of nationalism in Europe, which focused on the pivotal role of national languages in the construction of nationstates (1820–1920). In the nineteenth century, language of state and language of population generally overlapped. Each nation and each native speaker had its own language. Languages became the property of specific groups, each with its “autonomous place in a fraternity of equals” (ibid:84). The model of linguistic

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European nationalism posited an isomorphic relationship between these differ­ ent dimensions, metaphorically linking the national territory to the national language and the organism of language to the geo-body of the nation. “This splendidly eng-European conception of nationness as linked to private property language had wide influence in nineteenth century Europe” (ibid:68), and is still pervasive in our postmonolingual world. The philological-lexicographic revolution and the rise of intra-European nationalist movements led in the latter half of the nineteenth century to the rise of ‘official nationalism’, a conservative if not reactionary form of political power, that welded the old dynastic principles to the notion of an overarching national language. European examples of this specific relationship between nation and language are the multilingual empires of Russia and Austro-Hun­ gary (Wolf 2015), but this form was also successfully exported overseas, namely to Japan (Anderson 2016:95–9) and Siam (ibid:99–101). These differ­ ent long-lived dynasties whose legitimacy did not depend on any kind of nationalism settled on print-vernaculars as state languages for administrative purposes. The merger of empire and nation, achieved through a combination of naturalization and retention of dynastic power, was a response to the spontaneous rise of popular imagined communities in the course of the nine­ teenth century and the growing prestige of the national idea throughout Europe made possible by the isomorphism of nation and language of popular linguistic nationalism. Anderson uses a fitting body-metaphor to describe the tense artificial relationship between the two. The Russification that began with the reign of Alexander III, was an attempt to stretch “the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic” polyglot domain of the “body of the empire” (ibid:86). With the end of World War I, the nation-state became the legitimate international norm, and after World War II, this evolution reached and engulfed most of the former colonies. The very last wave of nationalism in the former colonial territories of Africa and Asia was a response to the new global imperialism. Although nowadays nations can be imagined without the help of linguistic communality and more complex ways to conceive of nationhood are available, the isomorphism of nation and national language created in the early nineteenth century is still quite effective and pervasive on a worldwide scale.

5 The schema of cofiguration Both Benedict Anderson and Naoki Sakai, refer in their critique of the Eur­ opean notion of nationhood to Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (1994). The idea of nation and national language as bounded isomorphic territories was successfully exported from Europe to the rest of the world. As already pointed out, in the late nineteenth century Japan and Siam adopted official nationalism. Siam had never been colonized in its history but between 1850 and 1910 the earlier maps which

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operated without territorial borders were substituted by a new cartographic vision. Siam was reinterpreted as a geo-body with boundaries demarcating an “exclusive sovereignty wedged between other sovereignties … the vectorial convergence of print-capitalism with the new conception of spatial reality presented by these maps had an immediate impact on the vocabulary of Thai politics” (Anderson 2016:172–3). The formation of a unified national lan­ guage that abstracted from the many local dialects followed suit. The metaphor of the geo-body allies notions of territoriality with notions of organicity. The two metaphoric fields overlap: the nation is a person with a body and a unified will and at the same time a clearly delineated territory. As Sakai argues, the geo-body refers to the “cartographic image of state terri­ tory” and describes “the nation as a community represented as an inter­ iority, … an aesthetic apparatus of imagination that demarcates an interior ‘us’ from an exterior ‘them’”, which “facilitates the formation of state sover­ eignty through its symbiosis with the figure of the homogeneous national community …” (Sakai 2014:25). In Translation and Subjectivity. On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, Sakai connects the rise of nation-states and the constitution of national languages to the ideological schema of cofiguration, “the means by which a national community represents itself to itself, thereby constituting itself as a subject” (Sakai 1999:15). Cofiguration enables us to conceive of language as a space encircled by boundaries with an inside and an outside (Sakai 2014:13). The advantage of the metaphor of the national language – like that of the organ­ ism, the national landscape or the female personification – lies in its intuitive visual and intellectual accessibility. Nations are abstract entities in need of explanation, complex systems not easily understood in their form or func­ tioning. According to this conception, national languages are countable, closed, homogeneous entities that communicate with each other across an intermediate space through translation processes and define themselves in relation to each other. The figure of a single nation is always developed with all the others in view, hence the notion of co-figuration. To accede to the international political arena a country has to constitute itself as a nation with a national language and a national territory of its own. Sakai questions the notion of a self-contained unified whole that is implied by the concept of a national language. “Is language countable, just like an apple and an orange and unlike water? … What allows us to represent language as a unity? … My answer is: the unity of language is like a regulative idea. It organizes knowledge, but it is not empirically verifiable”. It is a “schema for nationality and offers the sense of national integration …” (Sakai 2009:73). Languages are heterogeneous entities that overlap and mix with each other, they are sites of hybridity and multiplicity and in constant change. In this sense, they are not countable. The invention of national languages generally follows the constitution of nation-states as political entities. These are then projected back in time to supply a cultural justification for their unity and a naturalization of its existence, insofar

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as languages are allegedly rooted from time immemorial in a specific soil. The unity of a community is derived from the figure of language and the differences between national communities are described as a relationship of externality. However, as Sakai points out, languages cannot be mapped directly onto “the cartographic plane of global geography”. Languages are “an assemblage of activities of people who are not fixed to a location but are persistently dis­ located” (Sakai 2011:4).

12 The centrifugal forces of variation and stratification

In this and the following two chapters, I want to explore metaphors of multi­ lingualism that question the territorial notion of a stable, circumscribed national language by emphasizing openness, plurality, instability, fluidity and centrifugal tendencies. The overall narrative of this chapter leads from Franz Kafka’s talk on Yiddish and his notion of ‘small literatures’, to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the centrifugal forces of heteroglossia and Erich Auerbach’s observations on the merging of styles and genres. The main emphasis is on conceptual and terminological analogies and the possibilities of an alternative discourse on multilingualism that has received little attention so far. Chapter thirteen deals with the territorial metaphors of the archipelago and the coral, as well as with the organic metaphors of the rhizome, the mangrove and the banyan tree. Chapter fourteen pushes the movement of disintegration still further by focusing on liquidity and transoceanic passages over the waters of plurilingualism.

1 Language as an open heterogeneous territory In recent years, the tensions between mono- and multilingualism in Franz Kafka’s life and work have received a lot of scholarly attention (Nekula 2003; Pareigis 2007; Casanova 2008; Kramsch 2008; Yildiz 2012; Gramling 2016). However, in this section, I want to focus solely on Kafka’s description of the open-ended and heterogeneous territory of Jargon and its numerous metapho­ rical implications with regard to the closed space of national languages. His “Rede über den Jargon” (Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language) held on February 18, 1912 in the Jewish town hall of Prague together with the notion of ‘kleine Literaturen’ (minor literatures) developed in his diaries between Decem­ ber 25 and 27, 1911, can be read as a critique of the monolingual paradigm. Prague in the early twentieth century was not only a site of tension between different languages vying for supremacy but also an arena for a struggle between competing linguistic paradigms. An emergent monolingual para­ digm – German or Czech according to ethnicity – based on the notion of language ownership was up against earlier linguistic practices that favoured the coexistence of different languages. Kafka’s speech is an attempt to explore

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the “putative homology between native language and ethno-cultural identity” (Yildiz 2012:34) and the tensions that disrupt the monolingual paradigm from within. Even if Kafka’s texts appear monolingual at first they are animated by the presence of other languages, suggesting “the contours of a multilingual paradigm” (ibid:35). These languages, however, do not enter the texts themselves directly. Kafka does not introduce any Yiddish expressions or words in an attempt to appropriate the language. His use of Yiddish is not aiming for lan­ guage ownership in the sense of the monolingual paradigm but for a subversion of the German language from within. It is an attempt to disentangle and extri­ cate himself from its influence, an attempt at de-appropriation, akin to Tawada’s writing strategy. Yiddish “crosses German like a creole” (Prade 2013:5). The “first significant rhetorical move” (Yildiz 2012:50) in Kafka’s speech is the choice of the title: “Rede über den Jargon”. Kafka never uses the word Yiddish itself. Jargon is generally a language used in specific contexts and by specific social groups and possesses a vocabulary of its own. In the speech, Kafka links Jargon explicitly to cant, the argot of thieves (Gaunersprache) (Kafka 2007:31–2). Jargon has long been a disregarded language. Within the West European German speaking Jewish tradition it was used to designate an incorrect flawed form of German mixed with other languages, above all Hebrew. This purist attitude contrasted with the language practices of Eastern European Jews. In the wake of the founding of the Zionist movement in 1897, the term Jargon was substituted by the new term Jiddisch (Yiddish), which at the time of Kafka’s speech still held predominantly negative connotations (Yildiz 2012:50–1). It is important to add here, that within the Zionist move­ ment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there had also been attempts to redefine Yiddish as the national language of the Jews (Hutton 1999:191–2). Kafka’s romantic and exotic vision of Jargon is thus an open provocation to his audience, mainly German speaking assimilated Jews of the middle class whose origin is linked to the very existence of Jargon. This also explains his insistence on the anxieties the term is going to arouse, a fear that is visible on the faces of his listeners (Kafka 2007:31). Kafka is playing with the uncanni­ ness surrounding the notion of Jargon, urging for a different attitude. If one overcomes one’s fear by not looking for a simple explanation, but by emo­ tional understanding and by leaving solid and safe ground behind, one is carried right into the middle of Jargon. Kafka describes this liberating experience of foreignness in terms of self-recognition and self-abandonment (Kafka 2007:33–4). Jargon is not “a proper language with clear boundaries and its own desig­ nated vocabulary” like all official national languages, it is “a realm of cease­ less activity” (Yildiz 2012:52). Yiddish is the youngest European language, a dynamic idiom with little or no grammar at all, a language that never comes to rest. Its mode of expression is short and quick (kurz und rasch) (Kafka 2007:31). Jargon “consists only of foreign-derived words (nur aus Fremdwör­ tern). Yet these do not rest in it, but retain the hurry and liveliness (Eile und

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Lebhaftigkeit) with which they were taken. Great migrations (Völkerwanderun­ gen) move through Jargon, from one end to the other. All this German, Hebrew, French, English, Slavic, Dutch, Romanian, and even Latin is seized with curi­ osity and frivolity (Neugier und Leichtsinn) once it is within Jargon …” (Kafka 1989:264; 2007:31). Kafka speaks of a linguistic drift (Treiben der Sprache) and of fragments (Bruchstücke) (Kafka 2007:32). The centrifugal forces that govern the territory of Jargon call for a special kind of force to keep the different lan­ guages together (die Sprachen zusammenzuhalten) (Kafka 2007:31). Yiddish is also a conglomerate of dialects – “der ganze Jargon besteht nur aus Dialekt” (Kafka 2007:32) – which flow (strömen) into its territory. In this sense, there is no Hochjiddisch to speak of, like there is Hochdeutsch as an official centralized national language set off from a series of subordinated dialects. The territory of Yiddish is a heterogeneous assemblage of a double kind: a conjunction of inter­ nal and external multilingualism, a multiplicity of dialects and fragments from other languages that in many ways recalls Bakhtin’s parallel notions of hetero­ glossia and polyglossia, to which I will come shortly. As with creoles, Kafka’s provocative description of Jargon calls the very notion of language as a distinct, coherent and homogeneous system into question. In this sense, it could be interpreted as a poignant description of any other language. Within Jargon foreign-derived words do not settle down and strike roots, they are not forced into assimilation but keep the vitality resulting from their first uprooting and transference into the new context. These uprooted words from different national languages are contaminated by the fundamentally dispersive tendencies of Jargon itself. Analogically, the same happens to its speakers: they are contaminated by the frivolity and curiosity of the language. There is an analogy between the wandering words and the migrating people, the dispersal of linguistic elements and the diaspora of its speakers. Yiddish is a language that highlights the linguistic journeys of the single speakers. The original meaning of a foreign-derived word is of secondary importance, what really matters is the space between the languages. Pareigis speaks of a car­ tography of dispersal and a sense of becoming, and suggests the use of the metaphor of the rhizome to describe the multiple intricate paths that crisscross the territory of Jargon (2007:36–7). In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka’s work as an underground tunnel system with countless entrances and multiple exits (1986:3). A rhizome is a multiple network of burrows in which everything is linked to everything else. Even an impasse and a failure can be interpreted as being part of the rhizome. In chapter thirteen, I will come back in more detail to the metaphor of the rhizome, its link to deterritorialization, and their common relevance for creolization and the metaphors of the coral, the mangrove and the banyan tree. What has once entered the territory of jargon remains: “Was einmal ins Ghetto kam, rührte sich nicht so bald weg” (Kafka 2007:150). By describing Yiddish as a ghetto, Kafka strengthens the metaphorical link between the territory of language and the site of Jewish existence between the multiple linguistic elements and its speakers. Jewish history is characterized by

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unrootedness and the experience of the diaspora that Kafka evokes with the term Völkerwanderung. Jews do not own the territory on which they live, are not rooted in it, but live there only temporarily. In the same way, Yiddish is determined by a process of linguistic and geographic deracination (Pareigis 2007:36).The notion of the ghetto introduces another more ambivalent dimension. Yiddish is not only an open site of multiplicity but also the result of segregation and socio-cultural repression. The linguistic territory of Jargon is closely associated with Kafka’s utopian notion of small literatures. Kafka’s fragmentary and open ended notes on ‘kleine Literaturen’ scattered over three different days has to be placed within the cultural and political context of Prague before World War I. Their main focus are the Czech and Yiddish literatures and their role in the construction of small nations. For Kafka small literatures are clearly distinguished from the tradition and literary canon of great national literatures (Weissmann 2013). Small nations elaborate their subject matter differently from great nations. Their literature is less influenced by the expectations and rules of lit­ erary history and because of this more political. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘minor literatures’ are not the literatures of minor languages but the language of a minority using a great (major) lan­ guage in a subversive, minor way. The German spoken by Prague Jews is a fundamentally deterritorialized language. “Minor authors are foreigners in their own language”. Minor literatures, however, are not about a “mixing or inter-mingling of languages but … a subtraction and variation of their own language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:105). The focus is, therefore, not on bilingualism, multilingualism, or the amalgamation of different languages, and not even on the merging of a minor with a major language. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of bi- or multilingualism differs from Kafka’s description of Jargon as an open territory invaded and pervaded by dialects and other national languages, and from Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia. It tends to neglect linguistic plurality, both of the interlingual and intralingual kind, for a vision that emphasizes the subversion of a single language from within itself. “To be a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one’s own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even a dialect or patois. To be a bas­ tard, a half-breed …” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:98). The mistranslation of Kafka’s term ‘kleine Literaturen’ as ‘littérature mineure’ in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1986) and the widespread use of ‘minor literature’ within postcolonial theory can be traced back to Marthe Robert’s influential translation of Kafka (Weissmann 2013), where mineure is clearly set off against the idea of majeure, the well-established literary canon of greater national literatures. Contrary to ‘minor’ which has a subversive connotation, ‘klein’ is more of a descriptive term. The adjective ‘klein’ is a strategic notion signalling a creative potential inherent in all literature (Arndt, Naguschewski and Stockhammer 2007:13–14). In order to become small a literature has to activate its own plurilingualism. In this sense, Yiddish practices a sort of self­

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decentring, and harbours a principle of continuous linguistic deterritorialization (Pareigis 2007:40–2), which Deleuze and Guattari (1986) also define as the first criterion for a description of minor literatures. Even if Kafka – and Deleuze and Guattari, for that matter – do not explicitly compare Yiddish and minor literatures the two notions share some traits and can be linked to deterritorialization and the rhizome as Christina Pareigis (2007) does explicitly. One of the characteristics of small literatures is their vivacity (Lebhaftigkeit) (Kafka 1994:253), an attribute that Kafka also uses for his description of Jargon (Kafka 2007:31). This common restlessness of the two phenomena is an expression of their inner plurality and constant renewal from without, but also of their frailty and precariousness. Yiddish stands for a marginal subversive point of view; it is a minor language that can and does not aspire to being a national language. In the same way, small lit­ eratures do not aspire to the cultural power of national literatures and the higher reaches of literary canons.

2 Deterritorialization and centrifugality Fred Evans argues that the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Bakhtin share a series of striking similarities. Both “valorise heterogeneity and creativity” and the notions of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’ are cognate with Bakhtin’s concepts of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’ (Evans 2009:178). Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to Bakhtin’s work (1987:82) in connection with his analysis of voice and indirect discourse. Despite sig­ nificant differences, their work shares a rejection of unitary language systems which still underpin much of traditional linguistic theory. The deterritorializ­ ing process of becoming minoritarian discussed in the previous section in connection with Kafka consists in a “relentless and intrinsic division of lan­ guage into a myriad ‘minor’ languages or voices …” (Evans 2009:179). Simi­ larly, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and the associated forces of variation and stratification define language(s) in terms of numerous intersecting social idioms and voices caught between past and present. Both Deleuze and Bakhtin argue that each single enunciation involves a constellation of inter­ acting and conflicting heterogeneous voices. This interplay among voices is the very core of language. However, the similarity between the two conceptual pairs of deterritorialization/reterritorialization and heteroglossia/monoglossia is only partial. Contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological understanding of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, Bakhtin does not consider het­ eroglossia or monoglossia as forces naturally built into social reality. It is unclear “whether these processes are intrinsic to socio-linguistic life or dependent upon variable wills of individuals or some other non-linguistic factor” (ibid:13). Nevertheless they possess historical and cultural actuality and are embedded in concrete power structures that are absent in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization. Another major methodological difference is that Deleuze and Guattari shy away from the use of metaphors

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qualifying them as mere effects (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:77). In Bakhtin’s work, on the other hand, metaphors and their discursive interrelation play a central role in organizing the argumentation. Rather than looking for similarities between the two conceptual pairs of deterritorialization/reterritorialization and heteroglossia/monoglossia I sug­ gest comparing Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual pair with Bakhtin’s notions of centrifugality and centripetality as in this case the common spatial dimension is more explicit. Both territorialization and centripetality suggest a forceful inclusion and both deterritorialization and centrifugality an attempt to break out, which recalls the single body parts of Bakhtin’s grotesque body striving for independence. Deterritorialization can also mean to inhabit a territory without being rooted in it, which is the case of the German speaking Jews of Prague. Territoriality or territorialization is another less frequent term used some­ times as a substitute or synonym for reterritorialization (ibid:295). In other instances, it designates an act that takes place before deterritorialization. In this sense, territories and the functions performed within them are the product of a territorialization process. Territorialization “groups all the forces of the different milieus together in a single sheaf” (ibid:321). A sheaf is a large bundle of single stalks and ears of a cereal grass bound together after reaping. Contrary to the metaphor of the pluralizing and deterritorializing line of flight, the agricultural metaphor of the sheaf emphasizes the presence of a specific generative soil and the subordination to a single binding principle. Reterritorialization is a process by which components enter an assemblage and new articulations are forged. But the term can also be used for the restruc­ turing of a place that has previously experienced deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between relative or negative deterritorialization, absolute, but still negative and static deterritorialization, and positive abso­ lute deterritorialization (ibid:134). Relative deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization, but with the third form there is no longer a possibility of reterritorialization. In this connection, they speak of flows of absolute deterritorialization, and of an absolute drift or line of flight (ibid:55). These notions are directly connected to the metaphor of the rhizome. If the Deleuzian pair is an all-encompassing interpretative model, the Bakhtinian pair is exclusively used for the constitution and dissolution of languages. Deleuze and Guattari posit deterritorialization as a primary force and overriding norm. In the same way, Bakhtin places the monoglossic force of centripetality within the overwhelming and all-encompassing context of the disruptive multiple forces of centrifugal heteroglossia. A unitary language is never given but has always to be posited first. According to Deleuze and Guattari, language is in a constant state of transformation of its semantical and syntactical elements. “There is no language in itself … only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speakerlistener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Lan­ guage is … an essentially heterogeneous reality. There is no mother tongue,

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only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity” (ibid:8). As the two inseparable forces of centrifugality and centripetality, movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization are always connected and caught up in one another. They alternate “in a circu­ lation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (ibid:10). Territorialization and reterritorialization can, thus, be associated with Bakh­ tin’s centripetal force of unification and centralization, and deterritorialization with the pluralizing, dispersive force of centrifugality. Bakhtin does not dis­ tinguish between different types or degrees of centrifugality and presupposes a dialectical relationship between the two forces that keep producing and reproducing themselves in an endless struggle without a strengthening of centrifugality.

3 Polyglossia and heteroglossia Similarly to Humboldt in his philosophy of language, Bakhtin sets out from a fundamental a priori: Any active consciousness “comes upon ‘languages’ and not language” (Bakhtin 2006:295). This holds true both for external and inter­ nal forms of linguistic plurality. Each national language is surrounded by other languages and at the same time “heteroglot from top to bottom” (ibid:288). “Languages do not exclude each other”, but are dialogically interrelated and “intersect … in many different ways”, mutually contradicting and supplement­ ing each other. “It might even seem that the very word ‘language’ loses all meaning in this process – for apparently there is no single plane on which all these ‘languages’ might be juxtaposed to one another” (ibid:291). This radical vision goes against a long lasting European tradition: “Lin­ guistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language as forces in the service of the great centralizing forces of European verbal-ideological life – have sought first and foremost for unity in diversity”. Because of this, comparative lin­ guistics focused on phonetics as the most stable and least changeable “mono­ semic” aspect of discourse (ibid:274) and Indo-European linguistics “directed away from plurality to a single proto-language” (ibid:271). The mono­ lingualism of modern times practices an elision of multiplicity that occludes and obscures linguistic plurality. This vision is based on interrelated notions of unity: unity of language, unity of style, unity of the individual speaker, and of his/her monologic utterance. Linguistics and philosophy of language “pos­ tulated a simple and unmediated relation of speaker to his unitary and sin­ gular ‘own’ language …” (ibid:269), based on two abstract poles: a unitary language and the individual speaking his/her language. To distinguish the two aforementioned forms of external and internal many­ languagedness, Bakhtin distinguishes between polyglossia – from poly, many – and heteroglossia – from hetero, other, different (Renfrew 2015:94–101). Poly­ glossia, or the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages inter­ acting within a single cultural system – for instance Greek and Latin in Ancient Rome – is an extrinsic force that precedes and initiates heteroglossia. Its

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counterpart, heteroglossia, or internal speech diversity, is an intrinsic force. Polyglossia has two main functions: it explodes the myth of a unitary language and it prepares the terrain for a plurilingual consciousness. Polyglossia initiates and creates the conditions thanks to which heteroglossia becomes visible. “Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny” (ibid:61) of a single lan­ guage and the myth that goes with it. Polyglossia changes the perception and conceptualization of reality by laying bare the fiction of an isolated self-con­ tained unified national language with a self-sufficient character. Even if not engaged actively, the very existence of polyglossia questions and undermines authority, and successfully erodes the system of national languages and the myth of the nation. Thanks to polyglossia two linguistic myths perish: the myth of a single language presuming to be the only language, and the myth of a language presuming to be entirely unified. This distancing process of liberation that cracks open the shell of monolingualism seems not to be possible from within a single language alone. Speech diversity within a language can achieve complete crea­ tive consciousness only under the pressure of “active polyglossia” (ibid:68). Heteroglossia once discovered can, however, subsequently intensify this process from within. Even though polyglossia precedes and initiates heteroglossia, Bakhtin’s analysis of polyglossia is much shorter and less detailed than that of hetero­ glossia. His insistence on internal multilingualism has two reasons. The monolingual paradigm does not contest the necessity of other languages but owes its very existence to them. As long as the other languages subsist next to each other, they do not represent a threat. The real danger to the linguistic ideology of single self-contained national languages comes from the destabi­ lizing heterogeneity within. Polyglossia and heteroglossia are always co-present, inseparable and mutually complementary like the two forces of centrifugality and cen­ tripetality. Despite this terminological differentiation, Bakhtin often uses polyglossia and heteroglossia as synonyms. He distinguishes between ‘exter­ nal’ and ‘internal’ polyglossia, that is, heteroglossia, which is the internal complement to the process of inter-animation between (national) languages. This ambivalence is possibly intentional as it enhances their interrelatedness and the fact that they are basically the two sides of the same phenomenon – the fundamental plurality of languages – only seen from a different point of view. Polyglossia allows a vision outside the closed space of a single language that reveals the existence of other languages. Heteroglossia, on the other hand, shows the internal stratification and differentiation of a language. The terminological ambiguity of the two terms is linked to the ambivalence of the term ‘language’ itself, which can be used in the sense of national lan­ guage but also for dialects, sociolects, linguistic registers, literary languages, and idiolects. The same holds true for the concept of ‘nation’ that Bakhtin – like Humboldt before him – uses in the most diverse historical and cultural contexts, not only for the modern nation-states but also for previous pre­ modern forms of political power and even as a synonym for ‘people’ or

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‘ethnicity’. The semantic vagueness of the term ‘nation’ points to the fact that the struggle between mono- and multilingualism, between the centripetal and centrifugal forces, reaches a long way back into European history and repre­ sents a sort of transhistorical and transcultural constant intimately connected with power structures. I will come back to this point in section five. In this sense, the ambivalent use of the pair polyglossia/heteroglossia is also linked to a democratizing intention and the abolishing of a triple linguistic hierarchy: the hierarchy intrinsic to the notion of national languages, for instance, the alleged superiority of Indo-European over Semitic languages; the hierarchy of marginal regional dialects versus a centralized national language; and finally the hier­ archy of different languages within a national language, for instance the use of differing sociolects which denote a higher or lower social status. As Bailey (2012) argues, the term heteroglossia does not only imply intralingual and interlingual multilingualism but in a much more general sense also the simultaneous use of different kinds of signs. Besides its multimodality, heteroglossia is characterized by the primacy of social and histor­ ical context over the purely formal dimension. Language is an essentially social phenomenon, a medium through which a speaker can take part in the actual social and historical struggle. Heteroglossia focuses on the tensions and conflicts that arise among different languages and the relationship of language to its immediate cultural and political context. Formal linguistics, on the other hand, privileges standardization and linguistic unification over frag­ mentation and change and tends to exclude and erase the concrete social and historical dimension by emphasizing the relationship between the elements of an idealized abstract system. The strength and socio-cultural impact of heteroglossia can vary according to the historical context. In the most sharply heteroglot eras, like the Renais­ sance, “the collision and interaction of languages is especially intense and powerful” (Bakhtin 2006:418). These are also the periods that are most con­ ducive to the development of the novel. In these moments, the switches from language to language tend to be faster than in more conservative and stable periods. The novel decentres the ideological world and allows for a pluralistic ‘Galilean’ perception of language that Bakhtin opposes to the centred, uni­ form Ptolemaic and Aristotelic vision of the world. The Renaissance which was also an era of mathematical, astronomical and geographical discoveries, destroyed the finitude of the old universe substituting for it “the new open Galilean world of many languages, mutually animating each other” (ibid:65). Through a radical revolutionary act of self-liberation the shackles of the uni­ tary myth of language were broken. To remain within the planetary metaphor suggested by Bakhtin, this corresponds to the passage from the earlier geo­ centric model to the new heliocentric and Copernican model. Bakhtin collates this change with the idea that a national language is no longer the centre of one’s universe but just another celestial body orbiting around the sun. This new Galilean language awareness recognizing the polyphonic plurality of languages found its most adequate embodiment in the novelistic discourse, a unified

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system of languages lying on different intersecting planes. The new creative consciousness emerging from this multiple socio-historical rupture lives in a world “that is polyglot once and for all” (ibid:12). Heteroglossia is both an individual and collective site where the two gen­ erative forces of linguistic life, centrifugality and centripetality, meet, collide and clash. Centrifugal comes from Latin centrum, centre, and fugere to flee, flying off or proceeding out from a centre, and centripetal from centrum and petere, to seek, to aim for. The constant struggle between the two forces affects the consciousness of individual speakers, takes place in the event of an encounter with another listener or speaker, and operates within literary lan­ guages and national languages. Centrifugality and centripetality are locked in a constant endless fight. Both forces operate in all languages and at all levels from the text, to the sentence, and the single word. In each utterance the two “embattled tendencies” (ibid:272) intersect. As in Vossler’s work, centripetality is conceived of as a monologic reg­ ulatory force, a homogenizing pull towards a central point that generates hierarchies to produce an official standard unitary language through a system of linguistic norms. It is both a linguistic and a socio-political force leading to the formation of national languages. A unitary language is a theoretical con­ struct of linguistics, and in this sense, it is never “something given” but always “posited” and “at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the rea­ lities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystalizing into a real, although still relative, unity …” (ibid:270). Centripetality creates a stable firm linguistic nucleus within a heteroglot national language and defends it from the constant pressure of heteroglossia. Schools, literary tendencies, salons and grammars are part of this system of power which attempts to introduce order into heteroglossia in order to preserve social privileges and reinforce local interest at national level. Bakhtin gives the example of the Tuscan dialect that was chosen as the official Italian literary language. Centrifugality is a polyglottic denormatizing, decentring, and dispersing force that pulls single linguistic elements away from the centre and pushes them towards the periphery, producing linguistic multiplicity. It is not simply a negative or negating process but the very basis for intellectual and literary creativity. The same holds true for centripetality which can also be seen as a force that resists the unsettling chaos of absolute heteroglossia by introducing order and structure (Holquist 2002). Centrifugal forces deepen and widen, they break up and destroy unity by creating both vertical stratification and horizontal variation. Stratification itself is not a state or condition but an ongoing unending pluralizing process. Centrifugal and centripetal forces do operate in conjunction but in some historical phases, one of the two forces may temporarily prevail. The disper­ sion of a linguistic centre may lead to the formation of new centres out of the dissolving unity that in turn may be questioned by renewed centrifugality.

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Brigitta Busch described the dissolution of the former republic of Yugoslavia in the course of the 1990s and the subsequent formation of new nation-states with their own national languages as an example of such contradictory pro­ cesses (Busch 2013:104–5). However, phases of “comparatively stable and peaceful monoglossia” ensured by an overpowering presence of centripetality are always relative and transitory (Bakhtin 2006:66).

4 Concentric circles To describe the constant interaction of polyglossia and monoglossia, on the one hand, and centrifugality and centripetality on the other, Bakhtin uses the spatial metaphor of a set of concentric circles. When circles are concentric, they share a common midpoint and smaller circles will lie inside larger circles. One could interpret this metaphor as a possible belated response to Hum­ boldt’s understanding of unitary national languages as a series of closed cir­ cles positioned next to each other without overlapping. In Humboldt’s view, as seen in chapter two, a speaker can move from one circle to the other but never be in more than one at the same time. The metaphor of the closed selfsufficient circle, which is part of the ideological arsenal of the monolingual paradigm, is related to the force of centripetality and the idea that each national language presupposes the existence of a centre, an unchangeable “core of its own” (ibid:368), representing that which is unique to it, and because of this, untranslatable. Bakhtin uses the notion of a circular enclosure for the monologic singular world of the epic genre, which describes a “distanced, finished past” that is “closed like a circle” (ibid:19). By contrast, the open plurality of the novel presupposes a decentring of the unitary language and the ideological world that goes with it, as well as “a certain linguistic homelessness of the literary consciousness” (ibid:367) that Bakhtin describes in terms of a series of con­ centric circles alternating between plurality and singularity, dispersion and containment. The novelistic consciousness is placed in the midst of the dif­ ferent social languages of heteroglossia, which are contained within a single national language that finds itself in the midst of other national languages, which are in turn “surrounded by a single culture (Hellenistic, Christian, Protestant), or by a single cultural-political world (the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman empire and so forth)” (ibid:367). In this view, polyglossia and heteroglossia are both pluralities contained within a unity. The two moments alternate and collide like the forces of centripetality and centrifugality. Bakhtin uses the same spatial metaphor of circular concentric nesting in a description of the position of a literary language, but this time ends with multiplicity. “The internal speech diversity of a literary dialect and its sur­ rounding extraliterary environment, that is, the entire dialectological makeup of a given national language” are surrounded by an ocean of primary het­ eroglossia. “Even were an extranational multi-languagedness not … to pene­ trate the system of literary language and the system of prose genres (in the

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way that the extraliterary dialects of one and the same language do, in fact, penetrate these systems) – nevertheless, such external multi-languagedness strengthens and deepens the internal contradictoriness of literary languages itself …” (ibid:368). The metaphor of penetration is not the only military metaphor in Bakhtin’s work. This and other images – battle, violated boundaries, invasion – are most probably inspired by the Marxist notion of class struggle. The metaphor of nesting moves from the inside out, adding consecutive layers of complexity and connecting individual and collective, internal and external multilingual spaces to each other. Contrary to Humboldt’s vision of parallel worlds separated from each other, the metaphor of the concentric circles allows for a simultaneity of different worlds. Like the various strata of heteroglossia, these concentric circles are not static but animated by pro­ cesses of reciprocal exchange, both indirect and direct. The expanding series of concentric circles also points to the fact that each situation is embedded in a larger context acting upon it. Everything is part of a greater whole in which all elements constantly interact and possess the potential to condition one another. The spatial metaphor of concentric circles is linked to the metaphor of intersection and the notions of variation and stratification, the common focus being dynamic exchange and inter-relationship rather than static separation. Bakhtin speaks of linguistic areas “crisscrossed with intersecting boundary lines”, and languages “interweaving with one another in distinctive patterns” (ibid:64). Another important set of spatial metaphors that highlight the epis­ temological importance of linguistic plurality are the gap and the rupture. Both metaphors signal a distance that allows the speaker to emancipate him/ herself from the prison house of monolingualism. Besides the distance between language and reality, there is the gap between the intentions of the speaker and the words s/he uses, the gap between a speaker and his language(s), and, finally, the gap between word and object. Besides the system of concentric circles based on the principle of nesting, where container and contained keep exchanging their roles, Bakhtin discusses a spatial metaphor of separation that recalls Humboldt’s vision of circles positioned next to one another (2006:295–6). Significantly enough, he uses this metaphor against its grain and in connection with the linguistic world of an illiterate Russian peasant, highlighting the fact that heteroglossia pervades the whole of society from its lowest reaches to the very top. Linguistic com­ plexity is not a social privilege. The various languages used by the peasant are described as a series of different chambers lying next to each other. Each room is fixed and indisputable. The single languages are all part of the pea­ sant’s consciousness but do not intersect or collide in his mind and conse­ quently there is no attempt at dialogic coordination or an active effort on his side to view one language through the eyes of another. His highly ritualized everyday experience that leads him from one language to the other according to predetermined sequences based on habit, tradition and custom falsely suggests a fundamental monolingualism. In reality, however, like all other

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convinced monolinguals, he is multilingual without knowing it. What he lacks is the unifying perception of a Galilean point of view, a consciousness that participates equally in several languages, and lives in a universe of intersecting and mutually illuminating languages. In a footnote, Bakhtin points to the fact that in real-life the peasant would most probably have been able to perceive his multilingual existence, even if only to a certain extent (ibid:296). I would like to end this section with Bakhtin’s description of the word on its trajectory to the object and the listener, a spatial model that can be reinterpreted in multilingual terms and extended to the situation of multi­ lingual speakers, and the ‘muddy waters’ of code-switching. In traditional stylistic thought, the monoglottic monological word acknowledges only itself, its object and the unitary language it belongs to. As a ‘direct word’ it encounters only the resistance of the object itself. The living ‘indirect word’, however, never relates to its object in a singular direct way as the object is always surrounded and overlain by other alien words that have already been used to speak about it. In Bakhtin’s view, there is no no-man’s land; zones are never empty but always disputed. The dialogic relationship to the alien word in and around the object and the anticipated word of the listener are “tightly interwoven” with each other (ibid:283). To reach its object the word has to cross a tension-filled heteroglottic environment, around and in the object itself, weaving in and out of complex interrelationships, merging with some, recoiling from others and brushing up against “living dialogic threads” (ibid:276) woven around the object of an utterance. There is a readymade “multitude of routes, roads and paths” (ibid:278) that have already been traced and made available to the speaker by previous social practice. Because of this, the indirect word is always double-voiced, pos­ sesses a dual body, and is constantly engaged in a dialogic interaction with the multiple meanings of the object.

5 The segregation of styles The polyglossia and heteroglossia associated with the grotesque body of car­ nival and the literary form of the novel are not only linguistic phenomena but also have a much wider socio-political and cultural significance. The sub­ versive abolishing of external borders and internal hierarchies that takes place during carnival and in the novel becomes a metaphor for social change and renewal. In his two major works Rabelais and His World and Discourse in the Novel Bakhtin reconstructed the changing attitudes towards multilingualism within European culture in four different stages. These two narratives are interrelated (Taylor 1995) and illustrate the constant struggle between cen­ tripetal and centrifugal forces. The different stages alternate between closure and opening, singularity and plurality, mono- and multilingualism, purity and impurity as in the metaphor of concentric circles. In the book on Rabelais, the first stage is represented by pre-class society in which the serious and comical are both part of official culture. In the feudal

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world of medieval aristocracy and the teachings of the official church the two are strictly separated – serious (high) and comic (low). During the third stage of the Renaissance, the medieval orthodoxy and the artistic canon of anti­ quity calling for stylistic purity, which was the basis of Renaissance aesthetics, were radically challenged by the grotesque body image and the new Galilean language awareness. The arts and literature of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were again dominated by neoclassical conceptions lead­ ing to an exclusion of the grotesque which descended to a lower comical level. With modernity, the ambivalence of the grotesque is superseded by the new canon of the individual isolated closed body. In Discourse in the Novel, the first stage of ancient Greek society is characterized by a monoglottic attitude that is contradicted by the multilingual world of Antique Rome and Hellen­ ism, as well as by polyglottic medieval culture especially in the lower popular culture. The third stage is the heteroglottic space of the novel and the fourth and last is dominated by the competing forces of centripetality and centrifugality. A comparison of the third and fourth stages in the two books shows the way in which the space of the body is connected to that of the novel and how specific metaphorical patterns provide the argumentative deep structure of Bakhtin’s work. As we have already seen in chapter three, the world of the Renaissance is captured in the image of the grotesque body, which corre­ sponds to the heteroglottic space of the novel. The new body canon of mod­ ernity based on closure – which can be interpreted as a metaphor of the selfcontained unitary national language – is contrasted with the two forces of centripetality and centrifugality. Bakhtin’s narrative focuses on the contrast between monolingualism and multilingualism but he links this opposition directly and unequivocally to two different literary genres: the higher genre of poetry and the lower genre of the novel. This dichotomy that fits in with other conceptual pairs was criticized for its unilaterality (Grutman 1993). In Bakhtin’s view, the poetic genre is tendentially monolingual, does not allow for stylistic mixing, and is linked to the ruling social classes. It defends the interests of cultural and political hegemony and centralization. Whereas, the novel operates with a mixture of languages and styles, and is a direct expression of the political and social aspirations of the lower classes. In Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature), the German philologist, comparative scholar and literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) unfolds a history of the representation of reality in European literature from ancient to modern times that shows some striking parallels with Bakhtin’s work especially with regard to the question of mixing different registers and styles and its socio-political implications. Not much research has been done so far on these surprising analogies. An exception in this regard is Graham Pechey (2007:155) who pointed to the contiguity of Auerbach’s notion of Stiltrennung (separation of styles) and Bakhtin’s understanding of the modern novel. Contrary to

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Bakhtin, Auerbach focused mainly on the Classical Greek and Roman literary tradition rather than on the influence of Judeo-Christianity. Both writers, though, associated the mixing of styles, genres (and languages) with porous social borders and a promise of a more humane and democratic society. Similarly to Bakhtin, Auerbach (2015) distinguished between two stylistic traditions, one characterized by stylistic segregation and the other by the mixing of genres. The first originated in Greek and Roman culture and was based on a separation of genre and style according to class status and subject matter: the elevated style of drama was reserved for characters from the higher reaches of society and the lower style of comedy for the subaltern classes. The second tradition began with the biblical writings and their radi­ cally different social and philosophical outlook, which led to the discovery of the sublime, the serious and the tragic in the everyday life of humble people. Auerbach saw in the early Christian prose of the Bible an anticipation of similar mixed forms in the modern novel. During the Middle Ages, the two tendencies coexisted, but within different literary genres. The classicizing ten­ dencies of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation re-established the doctrine of the separation of the genres. This culminated in the French Neo­ classicism of the seventeenth century that went as far as banishing everyday actions and objects from the stage. In Protestant countries, the doctrine of the separation of styles never achieved such importance. The other tradition based on the fusion and mixing of high and low styles, of drama and comedy, resurfaced during Romanticism, and had a strong impact on the literature of Modernism. The classical tradition, based on the separation of genre, is gen­ erally monolingual; in the other tradition the use of mixed genres goes hand in hand with plurilingualism. Bakhtin’s and Auerbach’s parallel narratives both start out from two contrasting conceptions of the world and a notion of stylistic duality which pervades the European literary and artistic tradition, and is profoundly linked to political and cultural issues. They show that the ambivalent stance towards multilingualism and language mixing in the European tradition reaches back to Greek and Roman Antiquity and has to be perceived within a larger socio-cultural context including literary genres, social divides and political power structures. It has also got to do with deeper and more pervading misgivings and anxieties about the questioning of set boundaries, be they cul­ tural, socio-political, ethnic, racial or gender-related in nature. Practices and processes associated with multilingualism do not only concern linguistic mat­ ters, but are always also about the possibility of mixing in general. Plur­ ilingualism can be a powerful metaphor for a possible dissolution, abolition and renegotiation of various forms of separation and segregation. Bakhtin’s work has been widely influential and his notion of heteroglossia has received a lot of attention in different disciplinary fields, including philo­ sophy, literary studies, socio-linguistics and post-colonialism. Despite this sweeping success, his relevance for an analysis of modern multilingual litera­ ture has been rightly questioned. Burton (2000) pointed to the fact that

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although Bakhtin’s analysis was taken up by literary critics of the twentieth century he himself had paid scant attention to the multilingual novel of modernism concentrating on authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth century whose work, to remain within Bakhtin’s own terminology, is more hetero­ glossic than polyglossic. This explains in part the theoretical imbalance of his work that focuses more on internal rather than external multilingualism. Although in Bakhtin’s thinking polyglossia comes before heteroglossia, the novels he examines in detail are generally monolingual. On a few occasions he points to the fact that there are indeed plurilingual traces in some of the material he is working with (2006:262 and 265), but without following up this insight. Why is there not, for instance any comment on the frequent use of French in Tolstoy’s War and Peace or on multilingualism in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain? Grutman (1993:218–23) mentions a significant example from the ninth chapter of Rabelais’ Pantagruel where ten foreign and three artificial lan­ guages – among them Italian, German, Basque, Dutch, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek and Latin – are collated in a multilingual pastiche, a passage that Bakhtin, interestingly enough, does not deal with in Rabelais and His World. It does not come as a surprise, then, that in his writings on the novel he does not provide any sustained reading of modern polyglossic texts. One of his great merits, however, remains that of having been one of the very first theo­ reticians of the twentieth century to interpret multilingualism in clearly posi­ tive terms and to have provided a useful terminology for future research. So, what can we learn from Bakhtin’s writings about present time multi­ lingualism not only with regard to literature and society but also as a possible description of plurilingual identities? Although Bakhtin wrote in a historical context, in which the notions of nation and national language still had a pervading influence, his description of multilingualism is still relevant in a post-national, globalized world where multilingualism is used as a new form of socio-political control. He signalled the importance of linguistic plurality within allegedly homogeneous national languages linking it directly to the plurality of other languages. He highlighted the epistemological dimension of language plurality and language change like the modern multilingual authors discussed in this book. Finally, his notions of nesting, variation, stratification, dialogization and intersection provide a useful set of metaphors for a dynamic conceptualization of the complex and contradictory relationships between different languages, for a plurilingual vision of constantly interacting lan­ guages rather than a multilingual vision, based on serial monolingualism. In the conclusion, I will come back to Bakhtin’s innovative metaphorics of plurilingualism in connection with his use of visual and acoustic metaphors.

13 Continents and archipelagos

In this chapter, I will focus on metaphors of territorial dismemberment and on botanic metaphors that stress multi-rootedness in connection with cultural and linguistic creolization. The territorial fragmentation of the archipelago ques­ tions the unity of the continent, and the organic and spatial metaphors of the rhizome, the coral, the mangrove and the banyan tree criticize the verticality of the tree. These different metaphors pursue a similar theoretical agenda based on openness, uncentredness and multiplicity that distances itself more or less explicitly from the European notions of nation, national territory, national language and single-rootedness discussed in chapters six and eleven. In some cases, the metaphorical connection with the linguistic domain is explicitly stated, in others it is tacitly subsumed under a cultural interpretation. My intention is to focus on the conceptual side of these metaphors and to explore their epistemological potential for a different understanding of multilingualism.

1 Scattered fragments The Japanese writer and translator Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) was one of the first to introduce the discussion of nation and nationalism within the EastAsian context. He translated the English term nationality into kokutai (national body) in the 1870s, during the early Meiji period, associating the concept of nation with its territory conceived as an organism. This is in tune with the predominant metaphorical field operative within the European context of the nineteenth century that linked nation to territory and body. According to Yukichi, the creation of a Japanese nation had to rely on a collective feeling of nationality, and to mould the more than 6,800 islands composing the Japanese archipelago into a unified national community. Furthermore, the diverse populations had to be turned into a single people that was not only animated by a common feeling but also spoke the same language (Sakai 2012). In Japan the process of forceful monolingualization was mainly based on the European modernist language ideology. Minority languages became victims of the crea­ tion of a unitary national language (kokugo). Multilingualism was perceived as a form of backwardness that obstructed Japan’s access to the international political and economic arena (Heinrich 2012).

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Yukichi’s call for territorial, political and linguistic unity sheds a light on similar processes within the European context. All nations were originally a mosaic of regions loosely linked by political, economic, cultural and linguistic commonalities that coalesced only in the course of time. European nations came about by joining diverse geographical areas with different languages, as well as historical and cultural traditions. However, in these cases, the original territorial heterogeneity is less apparent because the process of unification took place over a much longer period of time and the existing geographical set-up was often less dramatic. Instead of the discontinuity of a myriad of islands scattered over the ocean, the territories of European nations were generally characterized by a certain territorial continuity. Their borders often coincided with rivers, mountain ranges or coastlines providing a seemingly natural explanation for their existence. Bertrand Westphal (2003) investigated the geo-political origin of archipe­ lagos starting out from the Greek myth of Absyrtos. In the version told by the Roman poet Ovid, Medea, who helped Jason and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece, took her younger brother Absyrtos along. To stop the pur­ suers, she killed and dismembered his body and dispersed the single parts on the escape route. Her father, King Aietes, collected the body parts to bury them properly. This made it possible for the Argonauts to escape. In the ear­ lier version by Apollonius of Rhodes, Apsyrtos is no longer a child. His father sends him with a fleet to recapture the stolen fleece, but he gets ambu­ shed and killed by Jason. His body is washed up on the beach of the archi­ pelago of the Apsyrtides, which lie in front of today’s Croatian coast near the city of Pula in Istria and are named after him. The single islands of the archipelago correspond to the scattered limbs of the sacrificed body. The myth of the slaughtered Absyrtos maps corporeal dismemberment onto the island cluster of the archipelago and allows to describe its origin in terms of a deterritorializing process. Besides linking body to territory, the metaphor has a political side to it. There is a long European tradition reaching back into antiquity that used bodily fragmentation as a metaphor for political renewal highlighting the symbolical reversibility of unity and disintegration, territorialization and deterritorialization, or to remain within Bakhtin’s terminology, centripetality and centrifugality (Guldin 2002). In this specific context, the metaphor of the archipelago acquires a double meaning. On the one hand, it addresses the contradictory nature of nations always poised on the border between fusion and break up, and discloses the ideological side of nationalistic discourses of territorial integrity and homogeneity. On the other, it articulates the possibi­ lity of an alternative, fragmented territory that fundamentally questions the self-contained ‘continental’, ‘island-like’ quality of single national territories. In territorial terms, the principle of symbolical reversibility mentioned earlier, could be described as a passage from archipelago to continent, or from con­ tinent to archipelago, and back.

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As against archipelagos, continents and islands are self-sufficient and basi­ cally alike insofar as they are closed territorial units. From this point of view, islands can also be understood as a smaller scale model of the continent (Voisset 2003). However, contrary to the territorial stability of continents which is opposed to the liquidity of the sea, islands are fundamentally two-faced combining continental stability and firmness with openness and a tendency to fray and disintegrate. This archipelagic character of islands is a result of the dialectics of sea and land. Continents are separated by the expanse of the ocean which accentuates their individuality. In the case of archipelagos, the sea is both a separating and connecting force. An archipelago is a hybrid geographic formation, half island and half continent, it is “not a group of islands that draw their cohesion from a supposed proximity”, but “a sea sprinkled with islands” (Westphal 2012:388). With archipelagos, the aquatic logic prevails over the tellurian. They are like seed capsules that once opened spill over into their surroundings. A definition of archipelagos remains difficult because of their changeability and instability. It is not clear, for instance, what number of islands is actuality needed to create an archipelago. Archipelagos negate the isolation and seclusion of the continent and the island in the name of the fragment and the mosaic. In this regard, they are not bounded territories, but rather open networks. In Brathwaite’s (1991) and Glissant’s (1997b and 2011) work, the islands of the Caribbean are autonomous, but con­ nected to each other in a web without centre or boundary. They are open to other islands and engaged in a constant dialectic exchange between water and land. In this sense, they oppose the colonial fragmentation and balkanization of the Caribbean and other archipelagos across the world, which had supplanted earlier precolonial systems of communication that linked islands to each other and to the continent. The colonial narrative of the isolated island assigned to each island a fixed, static space, which recalls that of nation-states. However, island unity is fundamentally subaqueous. The multiple aquatic roots of the Caribbean float freely, but are embedded in the sea. They are not fixed in some primordial spot, but extend and branch out in all directions. The Caribbean archipelagos are held together by a submerged network, a ‘submarine rhizome’, and the Antillean soil is not a territory but “a rhizomed land” (Glissant 1997b:146). The accompanying vision of a unifying sea is a trope for a new Caribbean regionalism shaped by a creolization of languages coming from all over the globe. “… bodies of water unite black Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific peoples and have a potential to dissolve the artificial boundaries of nationstates” (DeLoughrey 2007:26) (chapter fourteen). Similarly, the relationship of the single islands of an archipelago to each other and the whole is reduplicated in the complex network of archipelagos scattered over the oceans. The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott (1930–2017) born on the island of St. Lucia, weaves in his work a fine net between the archipelagos of the Creole Caribbean and those of the Greek Aegean: the two individual archipelagos constantly dream of each other. The different archipelagos are part of a multi-cultural trans-archipelagic web, a

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kind of global network of networks that spans four continents (America, Europe, Africa and Asia): the Caribbean, the Aegean and the Mascarene Islands (a group of islands in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar consisting of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues). Ette commented on the territorial metaphor of the archipelago in connec­ tion with pluri-perspectivism and multilingualism. Archipelagos articulate a worldview that is “highly discontinuous”. They embody “a splintered world, exploded into individual shards” (2012a:23). This plurality is accompanied by constant change: “The world is an archipelago, in which the multitude and specificity of islands generates new and incessantly changing sets of combi­ nation that may not be conceptualized or dominated from a single location” (ibid:29). The interconnections that make archipelagos possible are global, both geographically and historically. In this connection, Ette speaks of trans­ archipelagic landscapes and transhistorical vectors. The archipelago is an animated and mobile form of landscape, in which different cultures and lan­ guages converge and congregate without ever completely blending into each other. Within an archipelago, each island is both a small world of its own and a multi-layered complex assemblage of interdependences. Yoko Tawada’s wavering, transarchipelic writing and her fluid bilingual work could be described as an archipelago in its own right, a gigantic island-book of lan­ guages and language-games (Ette 2012b:314). However, there is also a problematic side to archipelagos. The geographical dispersal of the Creole islands, divided between the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, are an ‘unfinished archipelago’, an intersection of different languages and cultures traversed by powerful centrifugal forces. If they were gathered in one single ocean, they could impose themselves as an original dynamic ensemble. Now they look more like a ‘shattered universe’ (Benoist 1976:6; Carter and Torabully 2002:9–10). This gestures towards the volatile character of multilinguistic arrangements. Since archipelagos stand for a different geographical and socio-political order they have recently been used in literature and literary theory as a territorial equivalent of multi­ lingual communities. In the following, I would like to discuss these connec­ tions more in detail.

2 Archipelization and creolization The writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) used the differences and tensions between the continent and the archipelago as a territorial metaphor of creolization. In Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of Relation) Glissant interprets the difference between continent and archipelago in terms of two opposed ways of thinking and conceiving of the world. Archipelagic thinking is ambiguous, essayistic and ephemeral, it tends to sprawl and proliferate and it protects and rein­ forces the diversity of the world. Continental thinking, on the other hand, is dense and heavy, pays homage to systematicity, and strives for an imposing

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and stable synthesis. From the continental point of view, we see the world as one single bulk. The point of view of the archipelago, on the other hand, will disclose even the smallest rocks and rivers (Glissant 2009:45). Archipelagic thinking also cultivates a completely different approach to borders. Separa­ tions are not denied, but affirmed and emphasized in order to better connect the different worlds. “The borders between the places that have constituted themselves as archipelagos do not presuppose any walls, but passages … where the thoughts of the world finally” (ibid:57–8) circulate. In Introduction à une poétique du divers, Glissant (2011) specifies his con­ cept of the archipelago and the way it is linked to processes of creolization. His all-embracing poetic vision of global creolization metaphorically links the composite creole nature of languages to the territorial patchwork of the archipelago, a new relational identity and a new way of thinking. His starting point is the varied cultural landscape of the Caribbean and Central America. The Caribbean is not a closed space but open both internally and externally. Each island represents an opening to the world. As in Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, the focus is on processes that dissolve closed units both from the inside and from the outside. In this sense, Glissant distinguishes between centrifugal eruptions and destabilizing irruptions of foreign elements. The territory of Neo-America, which he opposes to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Euro-America, extends from the Caribbean to North-Eastern Brazil, and comprises Guyana, Curaçao, the Southern part of the United States, Vene­ zuela, Colombia, and part of Central America and Mexico. In this area, African elements play a central role. Neo-America is not based on cultural centring and unification, it is a zone, fraying at the borders, a place of pas­ sages and encounters. Three interrelated aspects characterize this transnational cultural project: unsystematicity, unpredictability and heterogeneity. The thinking of the trace (pensée de la trace) refers back to the origins, as the African rhythms in jazz, but no universalist claim can be based on it. Creole negates centred hier­ archies, and is composed of the most diverse heterogeneous elements, none of which is privileged in any way with regard to the others. This leads to a rediscovery of marginal moments, as for instance the largely neglected Afri­ can traditions in colonialism. Creolization “demands that the heterogeneous elements be put into relation with each other in order to confer value upon each other (s’intervalorisent)” (Glissant 2011:18). The same holds true for translation – one of the most important forms of a new archipelagic think­ ing – which Glissant compares to the contrapuntal compositional technique of the fugue that moves from one language to the other “without the first being erased and without the second renouncing to affirm its presence” (ibid:45–6). Languages can assume different roles according to socio-political and cultural context. In Canada, English commands French, but in the Car­ ibbean French commands the creole languages (Glissant 2007:81). In this view, a plurality of languages does not presuppose any hierarchic set-up, or centre, or matrix language, in which all other languages are

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imbedded. The irreconcilable differences between the single components are not smoothed over but actively used to highlight the single irreplaceable qualities of each of them. For this reason, the effects of creolization are also largely unpredictable. A poetics of relation makes it possible to think of unpredict­ ability as a positive challenge. No systematic conceptual system could do this in the same way. The identité relation, the relational identity resulting from creo­ lization processes, opens up to the whole world showing a possible way out of the unity and closure of national and local cultures. As Glissant ironically puts it: You may want to die for your beloved unique national identity, but not for an identity based on an amalgam of heterogeneous parts. Processes of creolization and archipelization are analogous. Glissant uses archipelagos and creole languages as synonyms. Creoles are composite lan­ guages, “an archipelagic agglomeration of languages” (Glissant 1997b:99) and, because of this, do not presuppose any hierarchy of values. Creoles do not take shape within monolingual, continental but plurilingual, archipelic contexts (Glissant 1997a:194). As such both processes of creolization and archipelization stand for an openly anti-nationalistic agenda, and, in this sense, they can be related to Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and cen­ trifugality. However, contrary to Bakhtin, who introduced the contending rival force of centripetality, Glissant focuses uniquely on dissolution and dis­ persal. In this respect, one might ask oneself if the formation of linguistic continents that are fragmented and dispersed by the force of archipelization might not also presuppose a contrasting force which might be called ‘continentization’. The Caribbean has become more and more important as a cultural and linguistic model, because the world itself is becoming more and more creolized. The continents are increasingly becoming archipelagos. Their monolithic structures are decomposing from within and under the pressure of global communication flows. Europe is turning into an archipelago through multiple processes of regionalization. The individual linguistic regions, the dialects and linguistic variants are like the interconnected islands of an archipelago. “The whole world is being creolized, all cultures are currently being creolized in their contacts with each other. The ingre­ dients vary, but the very principle is that today there is no longer a single culture that can pretend to purity” (Gauvin 1992:21). In the new geo­ political context envisaged by Glissant who wrote his two programmatic essays in the early, still very optimistic days of globalization national bor­ ders become permeable and slowly dissolve. With archipelagos, boundaries and the opposition between centre and periphery become obsolete. The single islands of an archipelago are organized in an open shifting structure that can always be redefined by adding new components. The different archipelagos are part of a global web that contradicts the international logic of nation-states. Glissant’s notion of networks within networks whose constituents are interacting in constant reciprocal communication recalls Bakhtin’s dialogized heteroglossic stratifications.

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A retreat into one’s own, safe and comprehensible, regional or national language-world is no longer possible today. We are currently living in the constant presence of all the other languages and cultures. This makes mono­ lingual thinking and writing an impossibility, even if one should happen to think or write in one language only. As he points out in a conversation with Lise Gauvin, multilingualism “does not presuppose the coexistence of lan­ guages nor the knowledge of several languages, but the presence of the world’s languages in the practice of one’s own …” (Glissant 2011:41). In this sense, multilingualism is not a matter of simple juxtaposition. Languages are all around us. Modernist writers like James Joyce, especially in his later texts, had already anticipated the linguistic simultaneity of the present multilingual world. Anna Livia Plurabelle is a “tangle of languages (maquis de langues), in which one has to roam and clear a path (errer et se frayer un chemin) … Reality has met with the imaginative project” (Gauvin 1992:13). Anderson described the North and South-American creole countries of the late eighteenth century as the actual pioneers in the discourse on nationalism (2016:46–65). Something similar could be said about the anti-nationalistic implications of the different discourses that have used creole language and cul­ ture as their starting point for a radical redefinition of notions of nationhood and identity. “[I]t is no coincidence that more innovative … constructions of cultural belonging have come from the Caribbean and Mascarenes”, writes Bragard, “which have been populated by transplanted people with ambiguous roots” (2005:231), from peripheries with complex contradictory affiliations. In an interview with Philippe Artières, Glissant comments on the utopian momentum inherent in the notion of creole languages. One of the questionable legacies of European colonial rule is the notion of national language. The languages of the colonized were either repressed and forced into a laughable role that had nothing to do with thinking and knowledge acquisition, or new languages were created that were called creole. It was only after a longue period that the fundamental epistemological importance of these languages was understood. They were not “original languages”, but “languages of languages”, and anticipated a process that is now involving all other languages over the world, which are actively creolizing each other (Glissant 2007:80). A creole language is neither a dialect nor a deformation of the prevailing official language. It is rather the unforeseeable (imprévisible) and dazzling (fulgurante) result of the meeting of heterogeneous linguistic data (Glissant 2009:65). In this sense, there is no such thing as a fundamental essence of Creole comparable to that attributed to national languages. Creolization is a transformative engine based on unpredictability and opacity, mainly because the single languages and cultures that meet, clash and merge do not have any prearranged hierarchical position that would determine the outcome. It does not lead to a formless, uniform mixture (mélange informe uniforme) (ibid:66). The different parts do not dissolve in a neutral undifferentiated whole but collide and unite, creating unexpected effects. Instead of simple juxtaposition and coexistence, the individual parts are woven into a network by the process

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of creolization. However, the real logic of all these conflictual encounters escapes us to a large extent. Contrary to concepts such as hybridity, multiculturalism or métissage, creoli­ zation privileges the processual and unfinished. The alchemy of creolization outgrows simple métissage, which has always a deterministic side to it (Glissant 2011:89). Creolization is a creative process of breaking down a whole into its single components and skilfully blending the ingredients, but not in the sense of the cooking metaphor of the Trinidadian callaloo. Diversity is not “le ‘bouilli­ bouilli’”, from the French bouillir, to boil, nor “le méli-melo”, from the French mêler, mélanger, to blend, to mix and pêle-mêle, higgledy-piggledy (ibid:94) as these do not account for immediacy and randomness. Creolization is closer to the image of the tossed salad. The result of creolization is never a neat synthesis, a homogeneous fusion or a soup of signs. Creolization is not a harmonious but a pluralizing process that defies the standardizing forces of globalization and sidesteps the pitfalls of folkloric multiculturalism based on the simple coex­ istence of different cultures and languages. Multiculturalism is a comfortable way of evacuating the problems existing between cultures without actually engaging in a true reciprocally enriching exchange. Glissant writes French, but a different French from the standard French spoken in France. He does not simply sprinkle the text with creole words but introduces creole structure in order to interrogate and destabilize standard French. The point is to emphasize the originality of Creole in relation to French and the originality of French in relation to Creole in order to create a new multilingual sensibility. It is about the infinite diversity of the world, and the endless variations of language. In this sense, creolization and archipelagic thinking belong together. They stand for a non-systematic system (système non systémisé) (Glissant 2009:82), and a non-totalitarian totality (totalité non totalitaire) (ibid:86).

3 Creolization and rhizomatic thinking Besides the territorial metaphor of the archipelago, Glissant – and, as we shall see, also Khal Torabully – uses the organic and spatial notion of the rhizome as a metaphor for creolization. Glissant’s choice was also dictated by the Caribbean mangrove tree with its tangled intertwined roots. Both the man­ grove and the rhizome articulate a notion of radical plurality and multirootedness that goes against the centeredness of continental thinking and the hierarchic concept of the tree. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, language is fundamentally rhizomatic, and so, I would add, are intra- and interlinguistic relationships. This manifests itself in the literary oeuvre of some modernist writers. Joyce’s plurilingual words have multiple roots that “shatter the linear unity of the word” (ibid:6) and of language. Kafka’s work “throws out rhizome stems” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:15). The multiple heterogeneity of the rhizome is a metaphor of plurilingualism, rather than multilingualism, insofar as it stands for a principle of relationality and

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connectivity. Contrary to the tree with its linear arborescent structures, the rhi­ zome creates connections that are neither linear nor chronological, and neither hierarchical nor binary. As Glissant’s notion of creolization, the rhizome is a site of multiple meetings generating erratic connections. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the metaphor explicitly in relation to the epistemological tradition of the tree metaphor and the single root that pro­ ceeds by simple dichotomy. “To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrat­ ing the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. … All of arborescent cul­ ture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventi­ tious growths and rhizomes” (ibid:15). Rhizomes possess a multiplicity of secondary roots. “In nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple lateral and circular system of ramification rather than a dichotomous one” (ibid:5) as with trees. Trees and rhizomes are more than just two models that exclude each other. They radically differ from each other, but can appear in a combined form. Rhizomes are fundamentally different from roots and radicles, however, trees and other plants with roots can be rhizomorphic in some respect. A tree branch or root may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. Conversely, one may find tree or root structures in rhizomes. “There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots” (ibid:20). “Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of arborescence” (ibid:34). Plurality and singu­ larity, fluidity and fixity, mix here, like in metrolingualism. Rhizomes can assume a variety of forms, “from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers” (ibid:7). The horizontal superficial ramifications of the rhizome moving in all possible directions are characterized by connectivity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. As with net­ works, each single point can be connected to any other. Furthermore, these multimodal connections take place across the most diverse regimes of signs. “Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are” (ibid:8). The multiplicity of the rhizome can no longer be reduced to a single privileged explanation as in the tree or single root model that “plots a point” and “fixes an order” (ibid:7). Rhizomes redefine the movement between the multiplicities of roots of which they consist. If in models of arborescence the evolution follows a line that moves from “the least to the most differentiated”, the rhizome operates within a heterogeneous context, “jumping from one already differentiated line to another” (ibid:10). In this sense, it is an anti-genealogy. As the work of Glissant and Torabully shows, the rhizome has the potential to become a possible metaphor of plurilingualism – even if this contradicts in part Deleuze and Guattari’s original intention. “The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or

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to which One is added (n + 1)” (ibid:21).” The rhizome is a dynamic nonhierarchical space of interconnectedness that initiates multiple contacts and generates surprising unpredictable new connections. It does not have a fixed linear order, is uncentred – as in the case of a linguistic multiplicity subsumed to one predominant matrix language – and also opposed to the notion of a polycentric assemblage – as in the case of a multilingualism conceived as a series of coexisting monolingualisms. “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and…’” (ibid:25). In Introduction à une poétique du divers, Glissant (2011:23) comments on his use of the metaphor of the rhizome highlighting the difference between single and multiple roots and its importance for a critical reformulation of the notion of identity. Single roots tend to destroy everything around them, the rhizome, on the other hand, is a root that extends to meet other roots. Thanks to creolization, multiple roots slowly replace simple roots: “single-rooted identities (identités à racine unique) are … giving way to relational-identities (identités-relations) …. rhizomatic identities (identités-rhizome)” (ibid:132). These new multiple identity-roots do not displace other roots but try to con­ nect with them. Single roots have the pretension of depth (la prétention de la profondeur) while the rhizome sprawls horizontally (ibid:69). In Le Discours Antillais, Glissant describes the identity of slaves forced into a subterranean life in terms of free-floating submarine roots that are not entrenched in a single space (1981:134). In this respect, the rhizome is more than just a plural site; it is the expression of a tension between a rootedness in a very specific place, which is, however, open to the rest of the world, a combination of a local and a global perspective, which both bypass the point of view of the nation. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant introduces the image of a fibril to visualize the initial uprooting of African languages, the stifling experience of the middle passage, and the subsequent contribution of African languages to the creolization of the West thanks to dispersal and redistribution. “American languages became deterritorialized, thus contributing to creolization in the West” (Glissant 1997b:5). The original deterritorialization removes African languages from the spaces where they were first spoken. It cuts the territorial link between the language, the single speaker and its original environment, that is, it radically questions the central nexus between a specific national territory, its national language and their native speakers. When the rootless African languages finally reach the foreign shore and begin meeting other languages, they blend with them to form a new composite language. Glissant’s fibril connects the notion of deterritorialization to the metaphor of the rhizome. It consists of a middle thread frayed at the edges, with three rootlike filaments on each side, a bridge between two opacities, a link between two multilingual configurations: on the one hand, the many sources of

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African languages and on the other the multiple processes of creolization in the Americas. “The Slave Trade came through the cramped doorway of the slave ship leaving a wake like that of crawling desert caravans” (ibid.). The middle passage is a narrow path during which the voices of the slaves are subdued and silenced. The single voiceless linear trait is opposed both to the plurilingual origin and to the multilingual point of arrival. This transoceanic passage, however, is also a site of rebirth and a redefinition of the origin in plural terms, which leads to the discovery of multiple roots. The fibril, which could be interpreted both as a rhizomatic root and a nerve fibre conducting electrical impulses, transports the initial linguistic uncent­ redness and the plurality of origins and disseminates it in the new environ­ ment contaminating the languages of the colonizers and ultimately conquering the whole world. Interestingly enough, in a footnote of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one can find an image from the work of Julien Pacotte that recalls Glissant’s fibril (1987:500, n13). The arborescent network is an arrow pointing both ways. At both ends, there is a circular arrangement of centrifugal darts. Archipelagos and rhizomes are metaphors for creolization and plur­ ilingualism that share a similar perspective on the status of single languages and cultures and the possibilities of their interrelationship. Both are plural composite phenomena. Archipelagos are swarms of islands and rhizomes thickets of roots animated by a centrifugal, deterritorializing force. Contrary to the monolithic continent and the vertical tree with a single predatory root, they opt for a horizontal egalitarian logic, a dialogue, in which each island and each root reaches out for all others. The archipelago is a rhizome like the coral, to which I will turn in the next section.

4 The coral imaginary The poet and filmmaker Khal Torabully was born in Port-Louis on the island of Mauritius in 1956 but moved to Lyon in 1976 where he obtained a PhD in Semiology of Poetics. He spent his childhood and youth in a highly multi­ cultural and multilingual environment including Christians, Protestants, Tamils, Buddhists, Muslims, Indian artisans, as well as the descendants of Chinese and African slaves. On Mauritius, the main language is a French based creole – Mauritian Creole, kreol morisien – but many other languages are spoken: Northern Indian varieties of Hindi, South Indian languages and languages from Southern China. Torabully writes predominantly in French but frequently uses features from other languages. As he explains in an inter­ view published online, he feels the necessity to elaborate his language by adding new sonorities close to Hindi and Urdu. “When I write in French, all my other languages invite themselves in my imaginary worlds and my writ­ ing”. His texts are a “free reshaping of the French language, blended with, among others, Tamil, Hindi, Creole, Mauricianisms [and] Sanskrit” (Bragard 2005:231). The use of neologisms, Creole, Hindi, Bhojpuri, old French and

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English words is an attempt to express “the imaginaire of a ‘plural’ society” (Carter and Torabully 2002:157). Torabully uses the coral as a metaphor for the hybrid world of the coolies – the indentured labourers from Southeast Asia that emigrated to Mauritius and to the Caribbean – a highly diversified cultural and linguistic phenomenon, which he sums up in the concept of coolitude, to which I will come back in the next chapter. Coolitude is not a lifeless fixed monument of stone but a mobile, living, “tongue-like, speaking coral” (Ette 2017:114). “The many voices of coolitude never spoke in unison or a single language, nor will they ever do so in the future” (ibid:117). The coral is a manifold image of complexity, a sedi­ mentation of innumerable layers traversed by the currents of the ocean. In Cale d’Étoiles – Coolitude, the founding text of coolitude, Torabully describes his writing practice in terms of a multilingual palimpsest similar to a coral: “… to lay the first stone of my monument of monuments, my language of my lan­ guages” (Torabully 1992:7). The narrator himself is “chair corail”, flesh of coral. “I open up as a coral/in the fragments of your words” (ibid:99). The coral is a metaphor of diversity, woven of watery material but also hardened into stone over time, a dual creature in many ways and, in this respect, sug­ gestive of Bakhtin’s description of the carnivalistic world. One of the starting points for Torabully’s reflections on coolitude and the poetic marine metaphor of the coral was Aimé Césaire’s (1913–2008) concept of Négritude (Bragard 2005:229–30). “Césaire says … my négritude is a rock … and I defined coolitude starting from this metaphor, and blending it with the rhizome metaphor of creolization … The composite identity is … assumed to be a root conjoined with another root (the root of the other), without a predatory or central root … the coral is visited by many external … stimuli, it is a marine ‘root’ or rhizome, growing with no predatory centre in the process” (Carter and Torabully 2002:151–2). In the above passage, the influence of Glissant is undeniable. Like the ecosystem of the mangrove situated in liminal submerged coastal areas, in both sweet and salty water, the world of corals exists both above and below water. Corals are hybrid beings, half-animal and half-plant, oscillating between biology and geology like the rhizome with all its ramifications. How­ ever, because of their fundamental openness and fluidity they are a better metaphor when it comes to express their “desire of archipelization” (Torabully 2012:70). The coral is a metaphor of the diversity of creolization. Its spiral formations and circumvolutions could be interpreted as visualizations of a fractal, diffracted logic (Glissant 2009:47). Linear logic allows for systematic description but relational logic, as Glissant calls it, cannot ultimately be syn­ thesized in a harmonious well-balanced way. In Traité du Tout-Monde, he describes interrelations as fundamentally characterized by rupture and fractur­ ing, adding that they are possibly fractal by nature (Glissant 1997a:24). The coral imaginary on which coolitude is based is a proposal to develop and enhance cultural and linguistic diversity and to spread it across the world. Contrary to the subterranean telluric rhizome, the coral is observable in his

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liquid living habitat and grows by agglutinating cohesion through successive layers of sedimentation, densification and stratification. In an undated inter­ view published online, Torabully distinguishes between agglutinative con­ nectivity (connectivité agglutinante) and wandering connectivity (connectivité errante) associating the first with the coral and the second with the rhizome. Corals connect because of an egalitarian relationship of reciprocal depen­ dency. They can undergo agglutination with other corals but also with other materials and supports like rocks, petrified lava flows and shipwrecks. They can leave their species in order to join others, which is not the case with the rhizome. Corals have an edge-like quality, as they are a natural habitat for different species of fish, crabs and other crustaceans. They are masters of transformation turning water and air into precious jewellery. When out of the water they harden into stone suggesting an identity that cannot really be grasped in its actual environment, and runs the risk of fossilizing when removed from its habitat (Bragard 2008:179). Because of their brownish appearance in daylight, corals tend to be viewed as stone or rock but, in fact, they contain protein pigments that are respon­ sible for a whole range of colours, the most striking being pink, purple and blue. Corals are a multi-coloured iridescent and self-changing (protéiforme), pliant and hard, a polyp and a root at the same time. They are composite collectivities, which are the result of a symbiosis between phytoplankton and zooplankton. Phytoplankton, from the Greek phyton, plant, and plankton, wanderer, drifter, are the autotrophic, that is, the self-feeding components of the plankton community. Zooplankton, from the Greek zoon, animal, are the heterotrophic components that cannot produce their own food. Corals are marine invertebrates living in colonies of many identical individual polyps that excrete an exoskeleton near their base creating in the course of many generations the colonies that are characteristic of the species. These giant skeletons with their fragile beauty are the geological side of their being. Corals are permeable and continuously traversed by different currents like the multilingual territory of Franz Kafka’s Jargon. The coral is “continuously open to new thoughts and systems … which are both vulnerable and solid, it is a symbol of the fluidity of relationships and influences” (Carter and Tor­ abully 2002:152). Even if corals are solidly rooted, they unleash the greatest migration on earth, that of plankton, which is visible from the moon. The underwater ecosystem of the Australian Great Barrier Reef, the largest sculpture on earth, is a continuously growing archipelago (Torabully 2012:70). Corals are fixed but can travel, and like Glissant’s processes of creolization and archipelization they are “always in the making … a continuous process” (ibid:71). Torabully discusses corals both as a biological, cultural and lin­ guistic phenomenon drawing a parallel between cultural diversity and biodi­ versity and the menace that hovers over both, in view of the impending impact of climate change and the standardizing forces of globalization. Interestingly enough, Charles Darwin considered using the coral as an alternative model (Bredekamp 2005:72–3) for the tree structure that in the

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course of the nineteenth century crossed over from evolutionary theory into the field of linguistics where it still exerts a strong influence even today. The tree model does not allow for a visualization of all possible evolutionary ramifications. These, in fact, not only move upwards, but can grow in all possible directions. Branches that die off cannot coalesce any longer with the rest of the tree. This is not the case with corals that use these dead parts as the basis on which to build new communities. The simple linear hierarchic model of the tree separates the trunk from the branch and the twig and cannot, therefore, capture any possible irregularities.

5 Mangroves and banyan trees In Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Litera­ tures, Véronique Bragard uses a painting by the Belgian cross-media artist Charley Case that represents a tree-like human figure slowly and painstak­ ingly moving forward while still carrying the weight of her/his roots. This paradoxical notion of “walking roots” is an attempt to describe the complex and contradictory identity of migrants torn between tradition and renewal (Bragard 2008:187). Another vegetable metaphor of multiple entangled iden­ tities is the mangrove. Both the mangrove and the rhizome are places of intertwining root systems that cannot be clearly told apart, and, in this respect, images of unpredictability and opacity. Bragard emphasizes the “dif­ ficulty of disentangling the interwoven identities that constitute” pluricultural and plurilingual Caribbean societies (ibid:178–9). Mangroves are not just isolated trees but complex ecosystems that survive in environments of high salinity. Their “swampy entangled branches”, their archipelagic nature, recall the image of the coral. Bragard describes them as walking trees because of their grey leg-like branches that look as if they were moving across the surface of the brackish waters of the swamp (ibid:180). Mangroves mesh land and water horizontally and produce lateral linkages (Mitsch 1997:58). They can act as borders, they can bind and strangle, but they are also sites of challenge and creation. Mangroves grow multiple roots leading to multiple ramifications. These are partially visible and partially invisible because of their entanglement. Prop roots are aerial roots that sprout from their stems, penetrate the earth and enable plants to breathe in a habitat with waterlogged soil. Another typical feature of trees growing in swamps are cypress knees, woody projections that form above the tree roots. Their function is not clear, but they probably help aerate the tree roots. Mangroves are an interweaving of contraries, grow above and below water, in a liminal zone of overlay where earth and water, land and sea, sweet and salt water meet and seamlessly join. Like corals, they are open to the influx of marine currents and an ideal habitat for a dense plural life providing both shelter and food for a wide array of animal species. In this regard, mangroves, like corals, are an apt illustration of Aronin and Politis’s (2015) edge metaphor of multilingualism.

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Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove) (1989) is a celebration of the importance of diversity. She uses the metaphor of the mangrove on different levels connecting individual to collective identity and offering an image for the multicultural, multilingual space of the Caribbean, and the textual space of her book (Ette 2001:461–538). The rhizomatic character and knotted structure of the mangrove is reflected both in the themes and in the structure of the novel, which operates with a multiplicity of contrasting perspectives. Nineteen interlinked voices create in the course of one night a maze of interwoven memories. The text is constructed as “a baroque musical exercise”, and a non-hierarchical “rainbow world” (Mitsch 1997:59) based on duplications, parallelisms and echoing processes branch­ ing out and ramifying in every direction. The novel has a circular narrative structure without a true beginning or ending (ibid:58–59). In the end, despite the promise of the title, the Mangrove cannot be crossed, and the mystery surrounding the death and life of Francis Sancher cannot be lifted. This is not due to the threatening and dangerous environment in which it lives but to the overabundant growth and the tangle of its roots. Roots cannot easily be untangled and opacity cannot readily be explained. The different characters show a great variety of cultural belongings and a multiplicity of ages. Their densely knotted relationships cannot be uncrossed or unravelled. Similarly, Francis Sancher, the main character, possesses a multiplicity of attachments and is hopelessly entangled in the intricate net­ work of the lives of the other characters. No single strand or root of his character can be untangled and isolated to fully explain his behaviour. In this respect, he resembles the impenetrable mazes of the mangroves themselves. The single characters, the main figure and their multiple interactions are governed by a sense of unpredictability which, however, is not due to the lack of a single root and identity but is the result of a cultural and linguistic overdetermination. In the same way, the mangrove can only live thanks to the impenetrable tangle of its roots. Besides the Caribbean mangrove, the multi-rooted banyan tree of the Indian Ocean has been used by local and Caribbean authors as a metaphor of linguistic and cultural plurality. The banyan tree with its many branches that send out roots growing to the ground can spread laterally and grow a sec­ ondary trunk. Older trees are characterized by aerial roots that can turn into thick, woody trunks, which in the course of time become indistinguishable from the primary trunk. This leads to the formation of a massive root system, a rhizomatic web that can extend over a considerable area. As the Bengali poet, musician and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) argued, the variety of human cultures cannot be compared to a Palmyra tree which has only one stem growing straight up, it is more like a banyan tree that spreads out in ever-new branches and trunks (Bhatti 2007:168). The Haitian author René Depestre (1926–) defined himself as a homme bananien, a banyan man and the Réunionese politician Paul Verges (1925–2016) defined the banyan tree as both an image of unity and diversity because of the

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multiplicity of entangled roots attached to the same trunk (Bragard 2008:184). This also points to the major difference between the mangrove and the banyan tree. Both express the “opaque creolization of cultures” (ibid:186) but the single trunk of the banyan tree makes for a more essentialist view. Gloria Anzaldúa (2012:273) uses the metaphor of the banyan tree to criticize the lack of rooted­ ness of Hispanic and Chicano culture. The seeds of the banyan tree do not fall to the ground but take root in the branches and, suspended precariously inbetween, they bloom and form fruit. The metaphors discussed in this chapter highlight horizontal forms of lin­ guistic contact and exchange, which played a central role in the work of Schmidt, Schuchardt and Boas (chapter six). Glissant and Torabully share the same attitude toward the linguistic diversity and plurality of creoles. Fur­ thermore, Torabully’s insistence on the double sedentary and migratory nature of the coral, their solidity and liquidity, is evocative of Glissant’s use of the two related and complementary metaphors of the archipelago and the rhizome. Add to this, Charley Case’s trope of the walking roots. These meta­ phors, together with the trope of the mangrove and the banyan tree, associate multilingualism with a liminal, edge-like zone, and combine stability with instability, and a local with a global perspective.

14 The ocean of heteroglossia

This chapter deals with the spatial metaphor of the sea and its epistemological relevance for multilingual identity and multilingual writing practice. The archipelagic, centrifugal forces of linguistic and cultural plurality that break up the centred, circumscribed spaces of the single nations suggest a fragmen­ tary and hybrid understanding of collective and individual identities which is based on solidity and fluidity. The metaphor of the sea goes a step further leaving all solid ground behind and embarking on a voyage across the bor­ derless expanse of the ocean. Continental thinking focuses on the autono­ mous, circumscribed territories of nations and national languages, and considers the sea as a separation. But the ocean is above all a space in its own right and a fundamental link both in temporal and spatial terms. Recent research in literary and cultural studies focused on the sea as an autonomous entity, crisscrossed by innumerable currents comparable to the territory described in Franz Kafka’s speech on Jargon. As with different archi­ pelagos, ideally entertaining a global interconnection and forming an allencompassing trans-archipelagic world, the different seascapes flow into each other to form a trans-oceanic whole. In this utopian vision, that transcends national and geographical borders, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific constitute a continuous body of water, a world-spanning water network. In the following sections, I will discuss Iain Chambers’s (2008) polyphonic Mediterranean, Paul Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic, Khal Torabully’s (1992) Indian Ocean and Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s (2007) Pacific, which share a common interest for the metaphorical dimensions of the sea. These authors move away from territorial thinking and conceive of the ocean as an open, borderless, multi-voiced space. This implies a radical shift of perspective from the single rootedness of the monolingual native speaker to the mobile figure of the multilingual migrant. As Thomas Nail argues, the idea of the primacy of membership in a single static and bounded national territory is still very much with us. Migrants are still “predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis” (2015:4) and their history is interpreted in terms of nation-states. Nail explicitly links the two terms contraposing them to the nomadic and transnational nature of the migrant. Echoing Glissant’s notion of a worldwide creolization process, he

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calls for a new point of view, because “we are all becoming migrants. People today relocate to greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history” (ibid:1). The last part of the chapter is dedicated to the polyglossic sea and the element of water as metaphors of plurilingualism in literary texts.

1 Traveling echoes and muddy waters Within the metaphorical context of the multilingual sea, the acoustic meta­ phor of the echo and the visual metaphor of opacity play a central role. The two metaphors articulate complementary but contrasting dimensions of the sea. Echoes moving across space, like waves traveling on the surface of the sea, or currents below its surface, are images of relationality that emphasize both similarity and difference. Opacity on the other hand suggests the impossibility of any final synthesis. The impenetrability of the sea, its dark surface and inscrutable depths, belong to the world of fractality and unpre­ dictability. Both metaphors articulate a view of plurilingualism based on the complexity and reciprocity of intra- and interlinguistic relationships. In her description of coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures, Bragard (2005 and 2008) makes frequent use of the metaphor of the echo to point to the similarities between the different territorial and botanic metaphors of the archipelago, the rhizome, the coral, the mangrove and the banyan tree. Glissant’s central notion of ‘écho-monde’, the world of things resonating with one another is comparable to a spider web where an interference quickly travels along the various threads. The echo-world brings places into relation and makes them echo beyond divisions of culture, race, class, gender, and language. Although the echo bounces back from an obstacle, the metaphor suggests a wavelike continuity, in a world without impediments or borders where everything is interlinked. Echoes and resonances belong to the intangible realm of music. When perceived singularly an echo has the same pitch but differs in loudness from the original sound. Walter Benjamin (2004:20) used the metaphor of the echo to describe the fragile relationship between source and target languages in processes of translation. The task of the translator is to find the right kind of echo that would ultimately lead to a resonance between his language and that of the original. In Glissant’s vision, the duality of the original sound and the secondary echo gives way to an echo chamber of interrelated languages reverberating and resonating with multiple sounds bouncing back and forth like the balls of a billiard table. The ocean is an echo chamber of different differing voices both above and below the surface, a multilingual choir, a heteroglossic space in Bakhtin’s sense. The visual metaphor of opacity, is linked to Glissant’s “chaos-monde”, which is inspired by chaos theory. The poetic concept of chaos-world implies that one cannot systematize unpredictable complexity but has to approach it tentatively though the imaginary. According to Glissant, any reduction to transparency has to be resisted. More important than the right to be different is the right to opa­ city, to a non-reducible singularity.

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2 A polyphonic echo chamber In his description of the many-voiced Mediterranean, Chambers introduces the notions of diversity and multilateral exchange. He highlights its contra­ dictory nature stressing both its heterogeneity and unity. By defining the Mediterranean as a closed, circumscribed space, a “complex echo chamber” (2008:48), in which multiple fluxes bounce and rebound, transmuting and transforming each other, he interprets the traditional vision of a unified Mediterranean, the Mare Nostrum of classical culture, against its grain. The metaphor of unity is reinterpreted in a polyglot sense akin to Glissant’s vision of the Caribbean. Chambers speaks of the “open, creolized complexity that the narrow requirements of modern nationalism and identity are unable to contain” and a “poetics of maritime life” (ibid:55), also to be found in the work of Paul Gilroy and Derek Walcott. The ‘mutable’ and ‘multiple’ Medi­ terranean is a ‘stratified’, ‘entangled’ site of continuous transit, a hybrid, “polylinguistic and polycultural composition” (ibid:32). In this view, the tra­ ditional pre-eminence of the land over the sea is subverted: “The seeming solidity of the lands, languages, and lineages that border and extend outward from its shores … become an accessory of its fluid centrality” (ibid:27). A description of the manifold complexity of the Mediterranean calls for a “floating semantics” (ibid:79), that – like Glissant’s creolization – escapes the predictable and frees the narrative from its “fixed moorings of a unilateral meaning, allowing it to drift” off (ibid:132). As with other views of the aquatic and maritime discussed in this chapter, the moment of fluidity clearly prevails over any kind of fixity and solidity. However, as DeLoughrey and Tawada cogently argue, the fluidity of water can be adequately perceived only in its conceptual dependency on the solidity of earth. I will get back to this aspect in the following sections of the chapter. In the metaphorical field, I am exploring in this chapter, multiplicity and liquidity complement each other. Borders are porous and successfully blurred, “both transitory and zones of transit” (ibid:5). Diverse and multiple currents mix and mingle on different levels and in manifold ways. “The tributary his­ tories” that flow into the Mediterranean “suggest deeper and more dispersive currents …a more fluid and fluctuating composition” (ibid:2). The logic of barriers is breached and the differences bridged, territories overlap and his­ tories intertwine. Metaphors of fluidity and liquidity articulate another his­ tory and another space. Arab and European music, the Neapolitan dialect and the other languages spoken on the shores of the Mediterranean merge “in a shared sea of sound” (ibid:47). Chambers calls attention to the still imped­ ing dangers of a solid, solidified sea, and the “attempts to freeze its composite components into a homogeneous image” (ibid:131) that transform the Medi­ terranean from a site of transit “into a mounting barrier” (ibid:68). Besides the idea of ever moving and constantly recombining currents, Chambers also discusses the spatial metaphor of the archipelago, which articulates the mutable transitoriness and complex heterogeneity of the

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Mediterranean. In an archipelago, the single cultural elements are bound together in an unfamiliar constellation of interlinked points without any rigid inner and outer boundaries or any clear-cut hierarchical orientations. The “provocative presence” of the sea, which is “both a route and a bridge – a póntos” (a path, a road) links together a “complex heterogeneity in an arch­ pélagos” (a sea studded with islands). Chambers calls this perspective, which privileges water over land and fluidity over solidity, an “uprooted maritime geography” (ibid:24), a “fluid geography that … challenges the very being and becoming European and modern” (ibid:131). The idea of the archipelago is connected to the arabesque, whose intricate pattern recalls the tangled roots of the mangrove. The “inconclusive” fig­ uration of the arabesque recalls Deleuze’s concept of the baroque fold, which brings together that which a linear Eurocentric vision of history tries to hold apart. Chambers links the Mediterranean to a processual, baroque space full of detail and unfolding configurations fleeing the “closure of planned, panoptical, measured, geometrical framing” (ibid:17–18). Tor­ abully also draws a parallel between the aesthetics of baroquism and the complex architectonics of coolitude. The baroque element has often been the “antonym of classicism” because of its “asperities” and “impurities” (Carter and Torabully 2002:172). This new fluid geography allows the discovery of new connections, it is an unsuspected cartography that disrupts “the rigid grids of national geo­ graphers” (ibid:131). The Mediterranean itself becomes this way a complex metaphor for interlingual processes and intercultural exchanges. It is not so much a “frontier or barrier between the North and the South, or the East and the West, as an intricate site of encounters and currents [animated by] the continual sense of historical transformation and cultural translation …” (ibid:32).

3 Liquid tapestry As Bragard points out, the publication of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic practi­ cally coincided with that of Torabully’s Cale d’Étoiles – Coolitude (Bragard 2005:223). Like Torabully with respect to the coolies from India and South­ east Asia, Gilroy separates the black diaspora from a binary territorial set-up based on the spatial asymmetry of the lost continent of origin, Africa, and the land of exile, America, and relocates it in the waves of the Black Atlantic. As he argues in the first chapter, cultural studies still work on the “unthinking assumption that cultures always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogeneous nation-states” (Gilroy 1993:5). The metaphorical implication is that the wall-like borders of nations not only contain the inner cultural flows, but seal them off from the surrounding tumultuous seas, the same way as flowing water is stopped by a dam. The main stress of the book is on a dual, Bakhtinian, Janus like “stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal” per­ spective, “trying to face (at least) two ways at once”. Gilroy captures this

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double point of view opening up onto a variety of diverse perspectives with a spatial metaphor: “rooted in and routed through” (emphasis added) (ibid:3). The Black Atlantic is a system of cultural exchange that has been con­ tinuously “crisscrossed by the movements of black people” (ibid:16). It is a fractal, rhizomorphic transnational, intercultural and multilingual formation that moves “beyond the binary opposition between national and diaspora perspectives”, a “webbed network” (ibid:29). Webbed networks are used in architecture, social sciences and the humanities to describe highly complex and dynamically interconnected forms of reality based on relational interac­ tions between fluid entities. These structural arrangements imply closest con­ nection through web-like interweaving and intertwining. A webbed network is a double form of connection that moves beyond the logic of nodes and threads in a spider’s web. It is more of an aquatic connection based on direct physical contact, as the connecting membrane made of thin folds of skin in the feet of certain animals, which they mainly use to paddle through water. If one applies this metaphor to the interrelation of languages, borders blur and tend to disappear. Languages flow into each other, through processes of osmosis and mixing. An example is the way music brought Africa, America, Europe and the Caribbean “seamlessly together”. In this network, London represents a crossroads or junction point on the “webbed pathways of black Atlantic political culture” (ibid:95). The surface of the Black Atlantic is a liquid tapestry, a connecting membrane crisscrossed by multiple forms of lin­ guistic, cultural, economic, social and political relations. Torabully shifts the perspective from the territorial fixedness of a singular idealized India – the lost land of origin – to the liminal space of the ocean in-between. The sea becomes the nodal moment of migration. From the unsettled point of view of the sea voyage, both India and Africa are to be considered as plural entities, as intersections and crossroads of multiple cultural and linguistic influences. India is a polylogical, archipelagic mosaic, a vast coral reef: “…the Indian subcontinent and the region of the Indian ocean looks like an immense coral made of arborescence (corail fait d’ar­ borescence)” (2012:63). The dichotomy of a true origin and a life spent in exile is superseded by a focus on the intermediate water expanse – in which one cannot take any roots – and the many journeys it entails: the first trau­ matizing, identity forming trip and all the subsequent ones. Torabully’s notion of coolitude articulates a poetics of global migration connecting diasporic movements with multilingualism. He relocates Gilroy’s vision in the Indian Ocean uniting the shores of India with those of Mauritius off the southeast coast of Africa and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. As Gil­ roy’s Atlantic, the Indian Ocean is not an empty space to be traversed, but a space of liberation and a site of rebirth that provides a new sense of shared connectedness eventually resulting in a new multilingual and multicultural identity. The slave past and the memories of the coolies are buried in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, which is at the same time the living embodiment of a whole array of possible imaginary homelands that transcend national

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borders, an ambivalent disorienting and inspiring space simultaneously bind­ ing and separating, but always more of a bridge than a breach. Seascapes unite people across cultural and linguistic boundaries suggesting a submerged submarine unity, an “aquatic interconnectedness” (DeLoughrey 1998:25). In this sense, the oceans are a space of memory and a reconnection to the ancestral heritage.

4 Tidalectics Gilroy’s (1993) narrative of a black diaspora moving across the open spaces of the Atlantic inaugurates a fundamental shift from terrestrial to aquatic his­ tory, from a land bound, nationalistic vision to a regionalist and at the same time global understanding of identity. This has profound consequences for visions of linguistic territoriality and nativity. “Focusing on seascape rather than landscape as the fluid space of historical production allows us to com­ plicate the nation-state” (DeLoughrey 2007:21), and the notion of national language. However, as DeLoughrey points out, the Atlantic paradigm of transnational crossings and flows has also its theoretical drawbacks. A uni­ lateral emphasis on ocean currents dissolving local attachments does not suf­ ficiently take into account the terrestrial counterpart. Routes should always be discussed in connection with roots, as “rooted routes” (ibid:3) generating “a fluid discourse of roots” (ibid:46). Furthermore, a time-based analysis of this newly discovered transnational aquatic space reveals its profound ideological ambivalences. More often than not, present day Atlantic studies ignore oceanic histories and present a onesided vision that highlights exclusively the deterritorializing side of the sea. The oceanic feeling, however, does not necessarily preclude a “nationalist bias or the expansion … of empire” (ibid:54). Additionally, Gilroy’s model of aqua nullius, of the ocean as a neutral space and a blank template for transoceanic migration, does not really question modernity. The notion of a boundless ocean, a space beyond territorialism was already crucial to British Empire building. These earlier maritime discourses constructed a homogeneous uni­ versal and natural oceanic space, but like “all bodies of water, the Atlantic … is socially” and historically inflected (ibid:69). “[R]egional and diasporic paradigms, while they may seem to exceed the limitations of the nation, often reflect their imperial roots and routes” (ibid:28). In Caribbean literature, “water is associated with fluidity, flux, creoliza­ tion, and originary routes” (ibid:51), but this vision is complemented by the interlinked concepts of “tidal tidalectics” (ibid:2) and ‘moving islands’, that DeLoughrey traces back to the work of the Barbadian poet and academic Brathwaite (1991), the Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist Hau’ofa (1993) and the Cuban novelist Benitez-Rojo (1992). The notion of tidalectics, which was introduced by Brathwaite in an interview, describes the cyclical backward and forward movement of sea water in low and high tide (1991:44). Hau’ofa shifts the focus from the land to the sea, these,

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however, remain closely linked to each other. Instead of isolated ‘Pacific islands’ in a sea crisscrossed by national boundaries, he speaks of Oceania as a “sea of islands” (1993:8) in a boundless ocean space animated by the totality of their relationships. Finally, Benitez-Rojo emphasizes the transi­ tory character and the lack of fixity and rootedness of the Caribbean, a “realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double folds, of fluidity and sinuosity” (1992:11). Hau’ofa’s oceanic identity transcends insularity and cannot be addressed without considering territorial claims from the land. Caribbean tidalectis foregrounds an alternative spatial model that questions the colonial myth of the geographical boundedness and isolation of islands, which, as I have already pointed out, in a way reproduces the myth of the nation-state. Tida­ lectis emphasizes the multiple engagements of each island with its aquatic and terrestrial surroundings and places them in a dialogue with each other moving beyond the limits of a national framework. Furthermore, the fluidity of the aquatic metaphor is a corrective to the botanical metaphors of rootedness and arborescence with their essentializing construction of territorial belonging. “The strength of tidalectology lies in its refusal to reflect facile rootedness in naturalizing ‘national soil’ …, and its shift from national to regional dis­ course” (DeLoughrey 1998:18). Glissant’s “watery trajectories” over the sur­ face of the ocean “provide an apt metaphor for ethnicities in flux” (ibid:22). DeLoughrey discusses the ambivalent nature of tidalectics in connection with the word ‘vessel’. A vessel is a canoe, a ship or a raft, but also a vein or an artery, a means of transportation and a channel at the same time. As with Charley Case’s ‘walking roots’ discussed in chapter thirteen, the metaphor of the vessel casts roots and routes as mutually constitutive dimensions that can be transformed into each other: When trees are fashioned into canoes, roots are turned into routes. The tree, the very symbol of rootedness and stability becomes the other, complementary side of the canoe, the symbol of unrest­ ricted wandering and the vehicle of transoceanic diaspora. The double nature of the vessel is related to the notion of ‘moving islands’. DeLoughrey speaks of a ‘land canoe’ and of ‘territorial mobility’ (DeLoughrey 2007:47). In liquid global modernity, and the destabilizing wake of the postmodern state “homeless indigenous people … must revitalize their genealogies to resist a global capitalist state that emphasizes the ever-moving present over a native past” (ibid:46). This challenges “theories of nationalism … revealing that indigenous practices of national belonging are far more layered and inclusive than diaspora theorists would let us believe” (ibid:45). The Pacific diaspora might thus “be usefully refashioned in terms of a creolized indi­ geneity that reflects global cosmopolitanism (routes) while maintaining gen­ ealogical continuity for land claims and sovereignty (roots)” (ibid:46). The metaphor of the “land canoe” and the tidalectic relationship of land and sea, settlement and diaspora, indigeneity and dispersal, described by DeLoughrey, has, even if not explicitly stated, a close terminological and metaphorical resemblance to the conceptual pair of fixity and fluidity posited by

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metrolingualism (chapter five). In both cases, mutually exclusive notions are overcome by envisaging a complex situation that can accommodate contra­ dictory aspects along with their constant interplay.

5 Transoceanic passages The work of Glissant, Gilroy and Torabully shares a common interest for transoceanic crossings and the metaphor of the ship that both question notions of territoriality and nativity. Torabully’s narrative of coolitude is a poetics of relation in Glissant’s sense. It is based on the paradigm of the marine voyage between cultures, the “coolie odyssey” (Torabully 2012:69). The middle passage described by Torabully also echoes Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic. It is not only a traumatic experience but also generates a web of cultural encounters. Coolitude is a complex multicultural and multilinguistic microcosm, a “constellation of signs spawned by the uneasy inter­ action of the exiled Indian’s values with the culture of the host country” (Carter and Torabully 2002:14). The word coolie is used in different languages. Originally, it designated the semi-nomadic people of Kula, inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic region. Later it was used for hired labourers or carriers, mainly with a negative connota­ tion. Coolies are indentured workers, mostly Indian but also Chinese, that from 1838 onwards until 1920 were exported to the replace the formerly enslaved Africans in the colonial plantations, principally in Trinidad, Guade­ loupe, Martinique, Guyana, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. For a long time they played a minor marginal role, were ignored and not included in Caribbean culture. Coolitude is neither a purely racial nor ethnic phenomenon, it is closer to Glissant’s creolization than to the notion of Négritude, even if Torabully calls it a “Négritude à l’Indienne” (ibid:15). In fact, both terms originate from a debased and pejorative word that was reinterpreted in positive terms. With Glissant’s notion of creolization, coolitude shares the idea of a continuous movement of cultural and linguistic interpenetration and interweaving that leads to the creation of an “infinite web of relationships” (ibid:154). Cool­ itude poetics conceptualizes a transcultural and translinguistic identity based on the transoceanic passage. “By accepting the impact of the sea voyage, the coupure, the diaspora necessarily repositions itself, and is led to consider the lost homeland no longer as the only centre” (ibid:159). The slave boat crossing the ocean is a womb that gives birth to a new multiple identity (Glissant 1997b:6). Glissant uses the slave ship to define a non-essentialist dual origin that he calls digenèse. In physiology, the term is used to describe forms of reproduction originating in two different birth modes. “The Genesis of the Creole societies of the Americas merges with another darkness, that of the belly of the slave ship. This is what I call a digenesis” (Glissant 1997a:36). The ship and the ocean, thus, represent a second origin that erases and effaces the first one which the monolingual

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paradigm associates with the mother-tongue and the national language. However, this second birth does not give any right of property over the land on which one lives, or the language one speaks. The ship and the figure of the sailor play a central role in Torabully’s and Gilroy’s work. The ship is a metaphor of cultural separation and historical erasure. In this respect, it represents the loss of origin, the truncation of the original root. At the same time, it celebrates cross-cultural hybridity. The ship is the first “potent space of … hybridity outside India” (Carter and Torabully 2002:158). The hold of the ship is a womb of collectivity and a microcosm of diversity. Gilroy describes the ship as the most important channel for AfroAmerican communication, a “living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (1993:4) across the open spaces between Africa, America, Europe and the Caribbean that fundamentally questions the supposed integrity of modern nation-states. Ships connect fixed places, but are at the same time metaphors of mobility (ibid:16). Several of the central figures of Gilroy’s multicultural Black Atlantic were sailors who spent a great part of their lives moving to and fro between continents and nations, “themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity” (ibid:12). As with the apparently empty expanse of the ocean, DeLoughrey proposes a vision of the metaphor of the ship that takes also its hierarchical side into account. “Theorists of the Atlantic who position the ship as a fluid and nonhegemonic place, an alter­ native to the conservative nation-state, might well be reminded of a tradition of depicting the ship as the republic” (DeLoughrey 2007:77) in Plato’s sense. Torabully compares his pluricultural inheritance and multilingual identity to the structure of a ship driven by contradictory forces. Creole is the rigging, the system of ropes, cables and chains that support the mast(s) of a sailing vessel and adjust the position of its sails, and the spars to which they are attached. The tree-like vertical mast of the ship represents the Indian legacy, and the horizontal yards – the spars on the masts from which sails are set – the European linguistic heritage. Mauritian creole constitutes the identitarian quest and French the ambivalent situation of exile (Torabully 1992:105). In Torabully’s metaphor of the ship, India – the lost origin and the truncated roots – and Europe – the place of a first self-chosen exile – intersect. The intricate system of ropes and cables that Torabully associates with creole recalls the entangled roots of the mangrove discussed in the previous chapter. The crossing of the Atlantic and its connection to the Indian Ocean are part of a planetary maritime nomadism. The middle passage is not a singular unidirectional voyage but can be made in reverse and as such inaugurates a whole series of possible multidirectional trips. In this sense, the instable world of the sea, the maritime voyage, “the flow patterns of ship and ocean” (Bragard 2005:227) and the various space vectors they imply articulate a dif­ ferent, non-linear but fractal concept of time. Glissant’s Caribbean is a sea of continuous transits and passages, a space of circular spiralling movements. Gilroy and Torabully used the notion of diaspora in connection with the middle passage. Diasporas are not characterized by essence and purity, but by

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the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity that is constantly producing and reproducing itself. Gilroy associated the foundational experience of the middle passage with the experience of the Jews using the diaspora as a model for understanding the history of Black America (Gilroy 1993:23). As he pointed out, the “diaspora concept was imported into Pan-African politics and black history from unacknowledged Jewish sources” (ibid:xi). The AfricanAmerican writer and abolitionist Martin Delany (1812–85) looked for the “Jewish experience of dispersal” (ibid:23) to describe the history of black Americans. Both traditions question the narrative of national belonging. Tor­ abully’s notion of coolitude draws on diasporic writing that he associates with Bakhtin’s multilingual dialogic imagination: “For Bakhtin, the language of the diasporic writer is itself a form of contestation. Language becomes doubleaccented and double-styled because this reflects the multiple identities of the writer. In other words it represents the essence and the expression of the con­ cept of hybridity that is itself central to the discourse of diasporic writing” (Carter and Torabully 2002:14).

6 The polyglossic sea In the multilingual poem The Waste Land published in 1922, T. S. Eliot makes an ambivalent use of the metaphors of the water and the sea which are associated with death, a transcendent experience, and with cultural and lin­ guistic plurality. One of the many quotations in a foreign language is from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: Öd’ und leer das Meer (Empty and desolate the sea). The poet does not travel over the sea, but lingers on the shores of Lake Geneva and the Thames, in desolation. As Taylor-Batty points out, The Waste Land is not a celebration of plurilingualism but a dramatiza­ tion of Babylonian confusion. Eliot makes use of words and quotations from different languages to maximize strangeness in order to achieve a disjunctive and unsettling effect, not only to “signify but to enact fragmentation” (Taylor-Batty 2013:30). The diverse voices in the poem are ultimately irre­ concilable and resist any unifying synthesis. The explanatory notes even add to this effect with a proliferation of quotations in their original languages. The last lines of the poem evoke an atmosphere of anxiety and displacement associated with the incommensurability of a multilingual world. “These frag­ ments I have shored against my ruins” (Eliot 1922:49). They are scattered unconnected words from different languages that the poet, sitting upon the shore and fishing, collects like driftwood. Eliot keeps the languages of the poem clearly distinct from each other. He italicizes and juxtaposes the foreign quotations rather than mixing and blending them with each other and the rest of the English text. In The Waste Land, the sea is not a metaphor for multi­ lingualism. It is an empty and desolate site from which only single fragments of timber might be safely shored. Another telling example that associates the dangers of the open sea with multilingualism in connection with James Joyce’s Ulysses, comes from James H.

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Maddox Jr. who refers to Episode 14, “Oxen of the Sun” (Joyce 1997:577–647), commonly viewed as the most difficult episode of the book because of the extremely high density of languages, dialects, slangs, pidgins and creoles. Maddox invokes the Babelian dangers inherent in the diversity of languages. The end of the chapter is like the site of a shipwreck, with uncountable linguistic fragments floating and drifting aimlessly on the ocean of the unnameable (Maddox 1978: 183; Taylor-Batty 2013:125). As in The Waste Land, the meta­ phorical focus is not on the sea itself but on the scattered remains of a shattered ship, highlighting fragmentation instead of possible blending. In Bakhtin’s history of the novel, the ocean and water in general are meta­ phors of plurality and fluidity directly linked to the notion of heteroglossia. Their presence as metaphors signals a new awareness of the liberating possi­ bilities of linguistic multiplicity. Monoglossia tries to fence itself in behind impermeable walls (Bakhtin 2006:61), but the tumultuous ocean of hetero­ glossia “rages beyond the boundaries” of sealed-off cultural and linguistic universes and its waves “wash over a culture’s awareness of itself and its lan­ guage” (ibid:368). The Sophistic novel of Hellenism a precursor of the modern novel is decentred and rootless betraying “veritable oceans of the most primal heteroglossia” out of which the single literary works “well up” (ibid:373). The waters of heteroglossia swirl “in from all sides” and “spill over” into the other monoglottic poetic genres (ibid:382). The dialogization of the themes in the novel through different speech types and languages is com­ pared to the “dispersion” of social heteroglossia “into rivulets and droplets” (ibid:263). Contrary to Bakhtin’s insurgent metaphor of the multilingual ocean chained to the continental mainland which it tries to erode and over­ run, the plurilingual sea of the other authors discussed in this chapter is an autonomous site of linguistic interconnectedness and intermingling. In an essay on the metaphorics of polyglot poetry, Knauth draws a typol­ ogy of different forms of literary multilingualism that consists of ten models most of which are of spatial nature. Besides the constellation model, cosmo­ poetics, and the literary movement of Simultaneism, to which I will come back in the next chapter, he discusses the nautical model embodied in the sea as a transnational space from where plurilingualism originates (1991:61–4). Like Gilroy and Torabully, Knauth operates with a metaphor cluster that connects the sea to the metaphors of the ship, the voyage and the sailor. The roughness and protean nature of the ocean are used as a metaphor for what Knauth calls Mischsprachigkeit, the mingling of diverse languages, rather than the more common but also less dynamic Mehrsprachigkeit, multi­ lingualism. The sea is the syntagmatic axis of the Babel paradigm separating and uniting languages at the same time. High tide and low tide ensure the reconciliation of languages, which mix in the deeper regions of the sea. From a genetical point of view, the sea gave birth to internal and external linguistic polyglossy (ibid:61), and, therefore, precedes the mythical construction of the Tower of Babel. On the one hand, the sea establishes a contact between the different languages, on the other, it represents a metaphorical analogy for

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the different languages: its many-voiced rush is an expression of multi­ lingualism, and its choppiness an expression of the constant merging or mixing of languages (ibid:63). In Knauth’s view, the verticality of the Babel Tower represents the com­ plementary paradigmatic axis of multilingualism. In “La Tour de Babel comme figure réversible: ruine et chantier du multilinguisme” (The Tower of Babel as a Reversible Figure: Ruin and Construction Site of Multi­ lingualism), he points to the fundamental ambivalence of the Babel Tower as a reversible figure, both a ruin and a construction site, both a sign of linguistic confusion and profusion (Knauth 2014). In “LogoDendro. Nella Selva delle Lingue” (LogoDendro. In the Forest of Languages), the Babel Tower assumes a fundamentally contradictory character and is linked to the contrary and complementary metaphors of the labyrinth, the forest of lan­ guages, the Pentecost and the sea of languages (Knauth 2012). Similarly, Glissant associates processes of creolization with the possibility of erecting new multiple Babel Towers. On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding apocalypse and Babel’s fall. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility. It is possible to build the Tower – in every language. (1997b:109) Seafarers are generally multilingual. Their prototype within European cul­ ture is Odysseus, the archetype of human errance, as Knauth points out in “The OdySea of Polyglossy” which explores the paradigm of multilingual migrancy and the use of maritime images of polyglossy in connection with the figure of Ulysses in the European tradition. The “aquatic polyphony” (Knauth 2016:210) of the multilingual and maritime discourse, which begins in the Iliad and the Odyssey and is related to Odysseus’s travels outside the Greek territory, has been transmitted through European literature and repre­ sents a hidden submerged plurilingual tradition that surfaced in the twentieth century. Two writers are of particular importance in this context: James Joyce and Haroldo de Campos. Joyce’s Ulysses (Taylor-Batty 2013:113–45) mixes and merges ancient and modern tongues including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Irish, Hungarian, French, Italian, Spanish, and German, creating an endless textual flow. Joyce defa­ miliarizes the English language exposing its internal linguistic and stylistic diversity. Taylor-Batty entitles her chapter on Joyce “Protean Mutations”, alluding to “Proteus” the third episode of the book (Joyce 1997:56–77). The sea-god Proteus stands for the power of metamorphosis thanks to intra- and interlingual mutation. Knauth interprets Molly’s interior monologue at the end of the book in maritime terms (Joyce 1997:1006–78). Her stream of

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consciousness is an endless sentence without paragraphs or punctuation, in which foreign words are no longer highlighted by italics as in the rest of the book. The first and the last word are identical suggesting a circular motion similar to that of low and high tide. In Galáxias, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos extended Joyce’s stream of consciousness to book length, an “unending stream of Meer­ sprachigkeit and Mehrsprachigkeit” (Knauth 2016:241). The homophony of Meer and Mehr links the ocean to overabundance. The neologism Meer­ sprachigkeit, literally ‘sealingualism’, associates multilingualism to the sea in both a metonymic and metaphoric way. In Galáxias, De Campos links mul­ tilingualism to the sea and the book on several occasions: martexto, seatext, livro mar, sea book, pélago-linguagem, language of the sea and idiom of the depths. He compares the blank page of the book to the surface of the sea and writing to a trip on the ever-moving ocean of intermingling languages. The many voices of the sea, its multiple echoes and resonances are captured in the rhythms and sounds of various languages and their play on assonances and homophonies. “[A]ll vocal, lyric and idiomatic cords including the nautical cordage of the Brazilian ‘martexto’ are brought to vibrate in a multilingual polyphony” (Knauth 2016:243). The book written between 1963 and 1976 consists of 50 full page units with a varying number of lines of unequal length, which give the single pages a fractured appearance, suggesting the up and down movements of waves and the sinuous meandering of meaning on an otherwise compact and uniform surface. There are no paragraphs, no punc­ tuation marks and only small letters throughout: a metalinguistic Odyssey, a whirling circle of letters and words like the illustration on the cover of the second revised edition of the book (De Campos 2004) by the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel.

7 The waters of plurilingualism As the metaphor of the ocean, the water metaphor has met with opposing interpretations within the literary domain. In order to illustrate the twofold ambivalent nature of water as a uniting and a separating force Goldschmidt described the relationship between his two writing languages, German and French, as the confluence of two rivers, the Saône and the Rhône, traversing Lyon side by side only to flow into each other when reaching its southern outskirts, (Guldin 2007a). Water flows in different riverbeds, it can be cold or warm, sweet or salty, opaque or crystal-clear, slow or fast moving. In the end, however, all different forms reunite again in the endlessly heaving and shifting pool of the ocean. Goldschmidt’s view emphasizes the basic unity of all languages, that which is common to each of them. If Humboldt posits the multiplicity of languages as a radical a priori that defines the main task of comparative linguistics as the study of existing differences, Goldschmidt ultimately insists on their sameness and on the ontological existence of an

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extra-linguistic realm of truth expressed in the ubiquity, fluidity and bor­ derlessness of water. In the first chapter of Quand Freud voit la mer. Freud et la langue alle­ mande (When Freud Sees the Sea. Freud and the German Language), “Les flots de la langue” (The waves of language), he describes human language as an endless ocean with innumerable shores, islands and invisible unexplored depths – the subconscious side of language, in Sigmund Freud’s sense – from which deeper layers are constantly flushed upwards. Water changes in rela­ tion to land adapting its form to the smallest asperity and at the same time is animated by a force of its own. It keeps changing and flowing, giving in to anything that stands in its way, only in order to better mould it. The sea keeps shifting its colour and appearance, from yellow-green to a deep blue. The slightest gush of wind ruffles its surface. In the end, nevertheless, water is always the same. As with human languages, there is no discontinuity or rupture in the sea. The sea of language connects and binds the single lan­ guages and appears in the interstices between them. One can travel around the world from language to language, and is always on the same boat (Goldschmidt 1988:13–14). This deeper unity allows languages to differ from each other in many ways. The specific shape of languages becomes visible when they are compared to each other in the process of translation. Through comparison languages lose their naturalness and that which is inexpressible in each specific language becomes visible. But although everything changes from language to language one always speaks of the same things (des mêmes choses) (ibid:24). Languages are ultimately the same water seen from a different angle or a different shore. Unity prevails over difference. However, the lack of boundaries between different languages suggested by the water metaphor does not necessarily have to be interpreted in this way. The metaphor of the sea questions the territorial notion of national lan­ guages. The sea is traversed by innumerable currents of different temperature, salinity and speed that mingle and blend at different depths. A maritime metaphor that highlights the prevailing difference within unity is that of the strait where waters of all kinds meet and merge at different angles and depths (Guldin 2016:66–7). From this point of view, diversity prevails over unity. In Extraterritorial, which discusses different aspects of an aesthetics of bilingual writing emphasizing the constant coexistence of languages within a single consciousness, George Steiner describes the various languages that animate a plurilingual text as currents. In Samuel Beckett’s English–French work both “language-currents seem simultaneously active” (Steiner 1969:121). The other language always shines through the transparent sea-like surface of the text. Similarly, Nabokov’s English–Russian texts are characterized by the “enig­ matic co-existence of different, linguistically generated world visions”, and animated by “a deep current” that “at moments obscurely conjoin[s], the multitude of diverse tongues” (ibid:124).

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Water is also one the leading metaphors in Tawada’s bilingual work (Gutjahr 2012). She describes her writing as a literary sea-voyage between different lan­ guages, a swim in the sea of multilingualism (im Meer der Mehrsprachigkeit) (Tawada 2012b:106). As Knauth, Tawada plays on the homophony of Meer, sea, and mehr, more, accentuating the shared notion of plurality with regard to water and language. Tawada focuses on specific manifestations of water. She is not interested in the linear, regulated course of rivers but in the disorderly flow of water and its ability to wash around (umspülen) things and to embrace (umfas­ sen) and mould them. The water metaphor, as already seen in chapter four, is part of a cluster that incorporates the sea, the mouth and the tongue, which are all connected to languages and their interrelations, as well as to writing and translation processes. The front and the back cover illustration of Überseezungen show the face of a delicate female figure that recalls an undine – from Latin unda, wave – an elemental being and a virginal water nymph originally associated with water. The figure holds her two hands in the form of a shell next to her ears. In German the pavilion of the ear is called Ohrmuschel, literally ‘ear shell’ which accentuates the metaphoric connection to the sea as an all-encompassing ele­ ment in processes of communication, allowing for translational Überseege­ spräche, oversea conversations. The word ‘see’ that separates and unites Über and Zungen is like a small oceanic water hole. Similarly, the figure’s thumb and forefinger (on the front cover) and the little finger (on the back cover) draw a small circle through which the blue background becomes visible. The sea is not only a visual but also an acoustic metaphor for linguistic plurality. The Meeresgeräusch, the sound of the sea, is a Mischgewebe, a mixed fabric, a fluid tapestry of sound composed of overlapping and super­ imposed divergent voices, both audible and inaudible, but present all the same (Bay 2012:248–51). Übersee, overseas, is another word for foreign countries and tongues (Zungen aus Übersee) and for trips across the multilingual manytongued ocean (die vielzüngige See). If writing and translating are seen as transformative processes based on the fundamental liquidity of languages, the t from Übersetzung which was substituted with an e points to the words Set­ zung, positing, and Satzung, statute, that is, to the drawing of borders that contain and curb languages and stop them from flowing into each other. By moving from Übersetzungen to Überseezungen these boundaries dissolve into the common sea of language (ibid:251). For many years, Tawada lived in Hamburg where the Elbe flows into the North Sea, and the riverbanks dissolve into the ocean. In an interview with Ortrud Gutjahr, she discussed the conceptual ambivalence of water and its dependency on the solidity of earth for commensurability. “But water does not exist completely without coast-lines or boundaries, the globe does not consist … only of water. Often when you are near water, you can even see two different riverbanks, as with the Elbe. These riverbanks are for me the Japa­ nese and the German language. For me, these are makeshift positions from which to experience water. In fact, water creates an intermediate space

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(Zwischenraum). In order to perceive this space, I need the riverbanks as a starting point. However, these are not borders, they do not exist in order to be crossed or to pin down something. Water can show very different forms of movement. On the sea, in the river, from the water tap. It is always a game with shapelessness (Spiel mit dem Formlosen), but I do not want to exclude forms” (Tawada 2012a:44–5). Water needs riverbanks or coastlines to be perceived. These are not limitations but necessary for an orientation in the endless vastness of the ocean. The same holds true for languages and their interaction. Fluidity has to be complemented by solidity, and vice versa. Water always contains soil in some form and land is always permeated by water. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey points out, “it is not enough to reclaim … marine currents … It is the dialectic between land and sea that is of crucial significance. … The focus on marine currents is a conceptual break from the homogenizing discourse of the nation-state … But the focus on marine routes cannot be divorced from its associated national territory” (1998:32). Tawada seems to suggest another possibility. In order to be perceived, (linguistic) plurality needs countability. If these disparate realities instead of being distinct solid sites were all made up of water, how could one still keep them apart and make them visible? What is the plural form of water? In other words, is it possible to think plurality in purely liquid terms or is it necessary to move from the image of water back to something countable like shores or riverbanks? Is fluidity only a moment of transition and not the aim itself ? (Tawada 2012b:55) How can we discuss the qualities of water if they are not measurable? Tawada does not answer these questions conclusively but pre­ sents a series of poetic reflections that focus on continuity in difference and degrees of interpenetration. When she was a child, she did not believe in the existence of foreign water. She thought that the earth was a ball all covered by the same water on which different islands were afloat. The Japanese archipe­ lago was also surrounded by water, and this was its actual border. How was it possible to know where foreign waters began, when the borders themselves were made of water? If water is not perceived primarily as a boundary but as an enveloping substance the mainland becomes a series of swimming islands full of holes, surrounded by water that separates them and brings them closer to each other (Bay 2012:245–6). Another reflection starts out with the notion of false friends in translation processes and discusses some differences between German and Dutch. Tawada sums up her reasoning with a maritime metaphor about the rela­ tionship of languages to each other. In Dutch, meer does not correspond to the German Meer, sea, but to der See, lake. The German die See, ocean, is the Dutch zee. This chasmic relationship points to the fact that two languages may contain features of each other without losing their differences. “So it is still possible that fresh water tastes salty, and freshwater fish are born in sea­ water” (Tawada 2012b:75).

15 Networks and constellations

In this final chapter, I will explore the spatial metaphors of the network and the constellation that also play a role in the tropes of the archipelago and the ocean. These spatial metaphors are not bound to the existence of a specific geographical and physical territory but define more evanescent imaginary spaces. The main focus will be on plurilingual textual spaces but I will also discuss the relevance of some of these metaphors for multilingual identities. As in chapter one, I will provide a brief overview of some of the theoretical issues involved in code-switching focusing this time on written rather than spoken forms. In the wake of Modernism, attitudes towards plurilingual literary texts have shifted, leading to an expansion of the number of languages involved, to horizontal non-hierarchical relationships between the single languages and to a growing importance of the epistemological and aesthetical role of multi­ lingualism. This includes also the use of a series of metaphors that emphasize effortless mixing and merging, layered complexity (palimpsest, false bottom, nesting, perforation, rift) and dynamic interrelation of elements (collision, web, network, constellation). The relationship between different languages can be organized according to a hierarchical or unhierarchical scheme, it can be quantitatively or qualitatively (un)balanced and based on cooperation or antagonism, that is, on harmonic or disharmonic relationships (SchmitzEmans 2004a:14).

1 Flashes of creation In a special issue of the design journal Visible Language with the subtitle “Graphic Collisions: Languages in Contact” published in 1987, the editors Richard Hodgson and Ralph Sarkonak discuss language contact in terms of collision, conflict and confusion. “Languages ‘collide’ in many different ways and for many different reasons. The ‘collisions’ or contacts (and the resulting conflicts) can take place” between different countries, within the boundaries of a single country or, as in this chapter, within the space of a single book or a single page: “… like colliding subatomic particles, the contact of languages can be seen as a natural process with positive effects, such as renewal or

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revitalization of the languages in contact” (1987:19). Besides code-switching, the two authors single out integration and interference as possible types of language contact. Despite the emphasis on the aesthetic purposes of codemixing and the different ways in which literary authors consciously play with language contact and bilingual typography in order to create a meta-linguistic awareness in the reader, the overall tenor of the issue is still characterized by a defensive attitude. “Interference carries with it a negative connotation of per­ ceived error or deviation from the linguistic norm of one language due to the influence of another language …” (ibid:31). However, as the authors rightly point out, the writers engaged in code-switching are not “just butchering both languages” (ibid:36). The “probable release of linguistic energy that results from languages in contact is well worth the price of these not so predictable” (ibid:39) collisions and conflicts. Glissant describes the results of an interactive intervalorization of lan­ guages as “momentary flashes of creation” (1997b:104–5). These mental processes take place with the speed of lightening – “vitesse foudroyante” (1997a:194). Tawada uses a similar metaphor to describe the rapidity and unpredictability of unexpected linguistic encounters in one’s head. “If you connect two words that are far apart, some sort of electricity is produced in your head. It is like a lightening (es blitzt), it’s a nice feeling” (2017:37). In the next section, I would like to discuss an example, in which the page of the book is seen as a battlefield and the notions of clash and collision are interpreted in a positive way.

2 Pilpul: a multilingual text thicket As Vilém Flusser argues, unlike other communities, Jews do not have their own specific language, and because of this do not fit into the system of nations and national languages that came about in the course of modernity. Although there are Jewish languages such as Hebrew, Ladino or Yiddish, none of these can be used to characterize the Jewish people in their entirety. This linguistic home­ lessness has led to a very specific relationship with language(s) that differs from that which most people normally have with their mother-tongue. At the same time, whether they know this or not, Jews are determined by close ties to the sacred texts and a unique connection to writing and signs in general. As a result, a Jew’s relationship to language is both distant and intimate. This dia­ lectics usually expresses itself in the typical Jewish ability “to babble (plappern) in more than one language” (Flusser 1995:132). In a letter Flusser wrote on March 5, 1989 to the editor of the German journal Spuren Hans-Joachim Lenger, he mentioned a few examples of the typically Jewish forms of multilingualism. Spanish Jews normally wrote in three languages – Hebrew, Arabic and Castilian – and the Babylonian Jews were quadrilingual – Hebrew, Aramaic, Babylonian and Persian. These expressions of a more relaxed and pragmatical form of multilingualism which was not complicated by ideological questions of nationality and the emotional and

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intellectual primacy of the mother-tongue (ibid:136) are the very basis of the philosophico-theological practice of interpretation of the Pilpul. Pilpul from the Hebrew word ‫פלפול‬, pilpél (pepper, and by extension sharp analysis, quibbling, hair splitting) is a playful and sophisticated multilingual Jewish thinking strategy, which was used in the study of the Babylonian Talmud. The method of Pilpul had already been used in antiquity but its inception is generally dated to the early Middle Ages. By the sixteenth cen­ tury, it was used throughout Europe. The two main, closely related and deeply intertwined languages to be found in the Babylonian Talmud are Hebrew and Aramaic, an expression of the internal bilingualism in rabbinic literature. The main Hebrew word in the centre was surrounded by Aramaic commentaries. Other languages (for instance Greek) could be added in the course of time depending on the geographical context. This resulted in var­ ious forms of code-switching and inner translation (Lubell 1993:175). As Flusser (1995) points out, Pilpul shows how non-discursive, nonlinear thinking operates representing a possible model of multi-perspectival, multi­ lingual thinking. In some ways, it recalls the complexity and unpredictability of Glissant’s process of creolization. Pilpul is a ballet around a given object, which it attacks from different vantage points, receding in different directions only to re-approach it again and again in order to reach new insights. Lan­ guage contact is described in ambivalent terms, both as a playful dance and as a clash of diverging perspectives. Similarly, Glissant defines creolization as a meeting that is both harmonious and disharmonious, an interference and a shock at the same time (Glissant 1997a:194). The starting point for Flusser’s analysis is the non-linear layout of the page. Instead of parallel lines running from left to right and top to bottom there is a concentric structure arranged around a central nub, usually a single word or a sequence of words. These circles do not only comment the nucleus but also one another. Contrary to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome which negate the very idea of a central instance Flusser assumes that languages are separated from each other by an abyss and pos­ sess an original kernel. The different rings that form around the core, as in a tree in the course of time, have been written at different moments, by different authors, and in different languages. They have created a sort of multilingual text “thicket” (Gestrüpp) (Flusser 1995:148) that recalls the entangled roots of the mangrove tree and Glissant’s notion of opacity. The notion of Pilpul combines a central core with a series of surrounding centres that gravitate around it in concentric circles. Pilpul is not based on a notion of linguistic polycentricity leaving each point of view intact and unquestioned. Its chaotic conflictual structure triggers off a circular reading and interpretation movement, which can be neither ended nor completed. The structure of Pilpul is akin to cognate notions of nesting that Flusser uses in descriptions of his multiple self-translating practice (Flusser 1996:341–2). These translation processes are kicked off by feeding an object-language into a meta­ language – the devouring ‘imperialist code’ – which in turn can become the

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object-language of another meta-language. In this open-ended and reversible process, spiralling outwards languages keep switching their roles and each meta-language can become the object-language of any other meta-language. This generates a constantly growing system without a predominant matrix language, in which all others are embedded: a series of Chinese boxes or Rus­ sian dolls. Contrary to a network, the metaphor of concentric circles is based on an initial central circle. This origin, however, is not preserved in its purity but constantly redefined and amplified the further one gets away from the centre. In the end, the last version containing all previous ones can be refed into the first one. Linearity is turned back into circularity. Flusser reinterprets the theological implications of Pilpul in epistemological terms to fit his own practice of multiple consecutive (re)translations. He describes Pilpul as a method of approaching a subject from as many linguistic points of view as possible making them interact and clash with each other. Languages comment upon reality and each other, and by doing so, that which cannot be said in one specific language becomes visible in the other. The commentaries beleaguer the core of the page and are at the same time direc­ ted against each other. The page is a field of circling points of view that attract and repulse each other. It is as if Pilpul had moved from the simple duality of true and false to “a multi-rooted form of logic” (mehrwurzelige Logik) (Flusser 1995:150). The centre is surrounded by an inexhaustible swarm of points of view and could be perceived completely only if all the points of view could be exhausted, this however is not a possibility that is contemplated in Jewish thinking. Similarly, Flusser’s own obsessive and cea­ seless practice of self-translation can never be really brought to a close. Truth is, thus, a limit that cannot be ultimately attained but made more concrete by accumulating specific points of view, that is, by moving from one language to another. As Flusser points out, European thought traditionally seeks to render the unthinkable thinkable. Jewish thought in contrast seeks to identify contradictions as unanswerable, and a sign of the limits of human thought. Jewish thinking runs up against the borders of the thinkable, not in order to demolish them, but rather to ascertain them. Before turning to spatial metaphors of multilingual texts, I will discuss a few significant examples of multilingual text-typologies to sketch the way attitudes have shifted in the field of literature both from the point of view of writers and from that of literary critics.

3 Containing plurilingualism In the essay “Sprachmengung als Stilmittel und als Ausdruck der Klang­ phantasie” (Language Mixing as Stylistic Device and Expression of Acoustic Inventiveness), one of the very first philological studies on modern literary multilingualism published in 1928, Leo Spitzer examines the work of the German journalist and writer Alfred Kerr (1867–1948) who uses dialectal phrases and foreign language elements to create a specific atmosphere of

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realism and authenticity (Guldin 2011a:308–9). Spitzer wrote his essay at the very height of literary modernism. In 1922, Joyce published Ulysses and in 1925 the first parts of Ezra Pound’s Cantos were released. Both works relied heavily on the use of multiple languages. However, the role of multilingualism in society at large, as well as within literature and literary criticism was still perceived as unusual and exceptional (Taylor-Batty 2013:2–15). Spitzer associates Kerr’s use of words from other languages with eclecti­ cism, describing it as “Sprachmengerei” (Spitzer 1928:84), a negatively con­ noted term that points to unnecessary interferences from foreign languages which endanger the unique character of a national language (Grutman 1993:208). Kerr uses foreign linguistic elements to depict his fictional char­ acters, that is, not in descriptive passages but in dialogues. Spitzer emphasizes the fact that these linguistic strategies might carry over from spoken into written forms of language, penetrating also within the realm of literature. The use of dialects or foreign languages in literary texts provides a more authentic colouring (authentisch färben), but at the same time it creates an awkward and entangled mixture, “ein sonderbares und unentwirrbares Gemisch” (Spitzer 1928:98), an ornamental, plurilingual flicker of sequins (Pailletten­ werk). Kerr particularly suffers from this linguistic infection, “sprachlichen Ansteckung” (ibid:98). According to Spitzer, there are only two possible ways out of this quand­ ary: to preserve the unity and uniqueness of the written language by dispen­ sing with all unnecessary injections of foreign words or to make a sparing use of foreign linguistic elements. His interpretation of multilingualism takes place against the background of a general principle of unity: textual unity, unity of the fictional character, the voice of the narrator and the writing lan­ guage. His assessment of multilingual texts is, therefore, tendentially negative. Language mixing can be an effective invigorating stylistic means only if it remains an occasional strategy when it comes to create an exotic effect or to enhance realism and authenticity. Foreign or dialectal linguistic elements are generally allowed when they are used to underpin the description of single characters or increase the realism of narrative voices (Helmich 2016:31). Spitzer pleads for a drastic containment of plurilingualism in literary texts. He does not consider the use of more than one foreign language at a time reducing its presence and function to a minimum. In Lennon’s view (2010) that distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ bilingualism or multilingualism in literary texts this situation would represent an extremely feeble form. Lennon’s distinction, which is more quantitative than qualitative, recalls Noorani’s (2013) historically grounded difference between hard and soft multilingualism. Weak forms generally make use of ‘serial’ strategies of translation of foreign words in a given text. This results in a doubling “redundancy designed to contain the foreign language by match­ ing and subordinating it to its English equivalents.” By reducing this redun­ dancy, a literary text becomes “parallel rather than serial” (Lennon 2010:18). Weak bilingual or plurilingual texts are merely ‘seasoned’ with foreign words

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and these are generally emphasized typographically and/or followed by translation. Strong forms, on the other hand, deny translation and by doing so turn the reader into a potential translator. Strong bilingual texts which create this effect by “inserting other languages in visibly internal parallel apposition” (ibid:78) are an attempt to express the “existential parallelism of a life lived simultaneously in multiple language-worlds” (ibid:189). Weak and strong bilingualism could be considered as the two extremes on a continuum. However, this should not mean that a single work always occupies only one precise position. In this sense, strong and weak plurilingualism can coexist openly or invisibly in the same text. Lennon tests the bilingual and plurilingual strength of the work of three authors that play an important role in this book: Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Brooke-Rose’s Between. Özdamar tends to accommodate the reader by foreignizing and domesticating the lan­ guages she uses. She presents Turkish elements in italicized form which are then immediately translated. By doing so, she “provides both the titillation of the foreign and its instant domestication …” (ibid:83). To this, I would add the presence of unmarked paragraphs of German–Turkish code-switching, instances of interwoven grammatical forms, and Turkish suffixes added to German words which altogether relativize Lennon’s assessment. Anzaldúa makes “fewer … gestures of overt accommodation” than Özdamar and fre­ quently switches from language to language. Spanish words, sentences or paragraphs are always italicized but not always explained or translated into English which amounts to a middle position on the continuum. The foreign­ izing elements are made visible but are not always completely contained. However, compared to Brooke-Rose, whose text I have discussed in more detail in chapter nine, Özdamar’s and Anzaldúa’s texts seem like “a lesser challenge” (ibid:84). Lennon’s conceptual pair is an attempt at classification of multilingual texts which considers the visual/spatial dimension of the page: foreign language elements are unmarked or marked (italics) – keeping the languages apart – and they are contained by translation or represent unexplained islands in the sea of the predominant idiom. The pair might also be used to describe the shift in attitude towards multilingualism described in this book which ten­ dentially moves from weaker to stronger forms, a change, however, that is far from being linear and cumulative. Lennon’s typology implicitly also refers to the in/visibility of foreignness to which I will come back in section five.

4 Interlingual encounters Code-switching in spoken language has received a lot of attention in the last few decades and found a theoretical focus in the genre of conversation. This cannot be said of written code-switching and its great variety of forms which generally, despite some overlap, do not correspond to the spoken genres. The analytical tools developed for the study of spoken code-switching do not seem

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appropriate for written multilingual texts (Sebba 2012:2–3). “It is difficult to say for certain whether written multilingualism is on the increase, or whether it has simply been less prominent – or less noticed by linguists – in the past” (ibid:6). One reason for this situation is the influence of hegemonic mono­ lingualism that is still particularly strong in the case of printed texts, with the exception of advertising and the internet. As the example of Pilpul shows, the way languages are juxtaposed in the text has also a visual dimension that affects the reader’s understanding. Sebba ela­ borates a series of criteria that are specifically suited for a formal description and interpretation of written code-switching, which contrary to the onedimensionality of spoken code-switching is “potentially multidimensional, involving juxtaposition or separation on both the linguistic and visual dimen­ sions” (ibid:17). Sebba distinguishes between units of analysis, language-spatial and language content relationships, as well as language mixing types. There are grammatical units (morphemes, sentences), genre-specific units (titles, para­ graphs) and visual/spatial units (columns, boxes). These contiguous areas on the surface of the page are generally separated by blank areas or lines and bands. The spatial relationships between them depends on their specific posi­ tion on the page, which in a European context where the script runs from top to bottom and left to right, tends to privilege the top, the centre and the left. Units can also be nested within each other – e.g. a paragraph within a column. There are three different types of language content relationships: Equivalent texts have a similar content, disjoint texts have different content, and over­ lapping texts share some common traits – e.g. some content is repeated in the other language. As far as language-mixing types are concerned, single units can be monolingual, mixed or language-neutral. Mixed units contain elements from two or more languages. This corresponds to inter- and intra-sentential codeswitching in spoken language. Language-neutral units consist of elements that belong to both or all languages used in a given text. These four criteria allow for a broad distinction between parallel and complementary texts which are placed, like Lennon’s weak and strong mul­ tilingualism, at the two ends of a scale allowing for a series of intermediate types. Parallel texts are symmetrical, with an equivalent or similar content and the single units are generally monolingual. Complementary texts are asymmetrical, have a different content and their language mixing type can vary: only monolingual units or a combination of monolingual, mixed and neutral units. Broadly speaking, parallel texts are weak and complementary texts strong forms of bilingualism. Similarly, Knauth distinguishes between a plurilingualism of the first and the second degree. The first, weaker kind makes use of different languages only in different texts (parallel versions), whereas the second, stronger form brings them together in varying forms of interpenetration (Knauth 1999:18). As Sebba points out, the absence of language mixing in parallel texts is a “response to a pervasive language ideology of monolingualism and purism and a preference for standard forms” (Sebba 2012:22).

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Werner Helmich developed another typology using spatial criteria, of proximity and distance (2016:30–2). He introduces the following criteria: typographic emphasis (mostly italics), localization within a single work (in the main text, in paratexts or more marginal parts of the text like footnotes), length of the different parts (single words, sentences, whole paragraphs), total extent of foreign elements and degree of heterogeneity (degree of interpenetra­ tion and mixing) of the single linguistic elements. Instead of a simple opposi­ tion between an additive form of multilingualism (forms of code-switching where the two codes retain their monolingual characteristics) and a synthetic form of multilingualism (forms of code-mixing based on the convergence between the different languages), Helmich suggests the use of intermediate stages to be defined in terms of spatial contiguity or intermingling. Helmich’s additive/synthetic pair corresponds by and large to Lennon’s and Sebba’s terminological distinction, which also suggest the possibility of inter­ mediate stages. Plurilingualism becomes a matter of degree. Helmich points to the fact that the absence of a clearly defined dominant language is a leap in quality that can be achieved both by additive and synthetic multilingualism and might be linked to specific literary genres. The number of languages concurring in the production of a literary text plays an important role, which, however, is dependent on their relationship. This remark is particularly inter­ esting in view of Yildiz’s notion of a postmonolingual condition in which multiple languages tend to coexist without really relating to one another, let alone mixing with each other. A high degree of mixing can, thus, be interpreted as a strong form of multilingualism. Besides the number of involved languages and the degree of their interpenetration, the type and socio-political status of the languages entering the composition has to be taken into account. Helmich also distinguishes between different historical periods, cultures and registers, to which I would add languages with different scripts, a point I will come back to in section six.

5 In/visibility The multilingual textual typologies discussed so far mainly focus on visibility. Foreign elements are typographically marked or unmarked, they are explained or translated, have a certain length or frequency, entertain rela­ tionships of contiguity or juxtaposition and occupy a specific position on the page that can be more or less central. Notes in the margin are like “flotsam and jetsam” (Sarkonak and Hodgson 1993:15) on the sea-like surface of the page. But, as Bakhtin argues, even if an author’s voice appears unitary at first glance, “beneath [the] smooth single-languaged surface” of a text one can uncover a hidden “three-dimensionality” and “profound speech diversity” (Bakhtin 2006:315). Because of this, bilingual or multilingual texts require a reading strategy that Sarkonak and Hodgson (1993) have characterized as both a visual and auditive double take, a binocular vision and a stereophonic hearing. In this section, I will, therefore, focus on forms of multilingualism on

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the very border of visibility and invisibility requiring a different kind of per­ spective. The reader is called to discover a latent, silent text, partially visible and invisible, hidden between the lines or showing through the surface of the visible text. And s\he is summoned to realize that monolingualism always hides a deeper pervading linguistic plurality. This specific strategy of literary multilingualism on the frontier between presence and absence that I have already discussed with regard to Khatibi and Özdamar is particularly impor­ tant in the work of Herta Müller. Despite the fact that Müller writes predominantly in German, her work can be considered trilingual. Besides her main writing language, she also makes use of elements from Romanian and the minoritarian regional Swa­ bian dialect of the Banat. To describe the relationship between the world of the Swabian dialect and the German learnt in school she uses the spatial metaphor of the rift (Riss) (Müller 2009a:1/16). The three idioms are sepa­ rated by successive cumulating cleavages (Weissmann 2016:184). The new language rips the fabric of the known world apart creating a layered palimp­ sestic perception. This first experience was confirmed and reinforced by the later encounter with Romanian. By opening German to other less powerful languages, Müller makes a minor use of her writing language and becomes a foreigner in her own mother-tongue (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). Norbert Eke (2008) and Grazziella Predoiu (2013) analysed the use of lin­ guistic foreignization in Müller’s work. To describe her multilingual writing strategies both authors make use of spatial and visual metaphors that emphasize doubleness and duality: double, false bottom (doppelter Boden), double exposure (Doppelbelichtung), double optics (doppelte Optik), and offset images (verschobene Bilder). Romanian words or idiomatic expressions shine through (hindurchscheinen) the German fabric of the text (Weissmann 2016:187). As seen in chapter four, Müller links a dual point of view to the notion of the false bottom. Both moments are connected to the frightening experience of the Romanian dictatorship. In German, the word for fear (Angst) has one syllable, but in Romanian it has two (frica). It was fear that “drove me between the floors of language (zwischen die Böden der Sprache)” and because “this fear that had unleashed the two languages onto each other did not stop”, German and Romanian “continued staring at each other” (Müller 1997:36–7). As Müller points out, Romanian is more sensual and malleable, its imagery livelier and more beautiful, even if ultimately she feels emotionally closer to her German mother-tongue. The language transfer from Romanian to German is an unconscious process, because the other language is always ready (parat) in the head (im Kopf vorhanden) (ibid:73). Her writing strategy operating on the border of visibility and invisibility is particularly important for titles which are often based on Romanian expressions and figures of speech that are directly translated into German generating new and surprising meaning that often contradicts the expectations of the German reader. The title of the novel Herztier (literally, Heartanimal), for instance, is based on

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inimal the combination of the two Romanian words animal and inima (soul) which in order to be translated into German had to be separated again. The title of the short story “Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt“ (Man is a Big Pheasant in the World) can be traced back to an ironical Romanian saying that highlights the fact that pheasants cannot fly and are therefore easy prey for hunters (Predoiu 2013:64). These hidden meanings (Herghelegiu 2001) are not directly accessible to a reader who does not speak any Roma­ nian, but create the necessity for translation moving the reader closer to the other language. Müller’s relationship to the German dialect of her childhood is more contradictory. On the one hand she describes it as emotionally cold and devoid of imagination, especially the traditional songs. On the other, she emphasizes the creativity and beauty of certain expressions like Tinten­ trauben, which links Tinte, ink to Trauben, grapes, via their dark blue colour (Müller 2009a:1/16). Words from the Swabian dialect are embedded particles that look German but point to the existence of another parallel, submerged world, which, however, is more accessible to a German speaking reader because of the common origin of the two languages. Müller tears at the mesh of her German sentences to create fissures and rifts that allow for another, second view behind and beneath the German façade. The frequency of foreign linguistic elements in Müller’s texts is definitely inferior to that in Anzaldúa’s or Brooke-Rose’s work but the presence of partially submerged foreign linguistic elements that shine through the surface of the text still make for uncertainty and irritation especially if the reader does not know the other language. This subtle strategies of foreignization foster ambiguity and uncertainty and deliberately destroy the apparent unity of aesthetic perception. Müller’s stylistic ambiguities generate non-mimetic palimpsests (Eke 2008:253). Her multilingual poiesis does not aim for simple realism but creates in-between spaces in which languages intersect cross-pol­ linating each other.

6 Multiscript codes A multimodal form of language mixing, with a long tradition of its own that reaches back into Antiquity (Ernst 2004), is script-switching, the juxtaposition of different scripts within the same textual space (Angermeyer 2012; SchmitzEmans 2004b and 2014). Tawada makes frequent use of different scripts in her German texts (Bay 2012:261) in order to signal the continuous compre­ sence of two languages within the same textual space. The logographic kanji script – characters adopted from the Chinese that represent a word or a phrase – makes the hidden presence of the Japanese language visible. Japa­ nese words are generally written in kanji, when they have a kanji form, unless one cannot remember how to write them or wants to save time. Besides the kanji script there are also elements from the hiragana and katakana scripts, which are syllabic scripts based on a phonetic lettering system. As Tawada,

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like Müller, is not writing for a bilingual, but for a monolingual German reading public the presence of these foreign characters, which the readers are not able to decipher, is meant to irritate and provoke. Contrary to the italiciz­ ing of foreign words or word strings, the multi-coloured kanji characters stand out from the black and white page like images of an exotic parallel world to which the reader does not have ready access. Tawada has expanded this plur­ alizing writing strategy that plays on the relationship of visibility and invisi­ bility in the course of the years, constantly adding new layers of complexity. In the second bilingual edition of Das Bad (Tawada 2010a), the Japanese original has been placed on the left and the German translation on the right, opposing vertical strings of Japanese script to horizontal alphabetical lines that call for a double reading. In Sebba’s terminology, this would correspond to a parallel multilingual text made up of matched units symmetrically arranged and with an identical content in each language. However, Tawada disrupted this parallelism by introducing German elements into the Japanese text on the last few pages of the book. Single German words or parts of words have migrated into the Japanese script signalling two contrasting ways of linguistic interpenetration and adding a meta-textual dimension: “durch­ ein … durcheinander … mitein … miteinander” (ibid:168 and 170). Durch­ einander suggests confusion, miteinander togetherness. The first monolingual German edition was printed on paper showing the outlines of a naked female body. The cover shows the body of a scaly fish and that of a woman in the background. On the cover of the new bilingual edition, the earlier cover was placed on an abstracted pink picture of the sea that is deliberately out of focus creating a palimpsestic effect. Some pages of the book take up this combina­ tion showing seascapes in different colours on which further pages from the first edition have been placed. The characters of the single pages which float on the waves or gently disappear into them are only partially legible. In Das Bad, languages are juxtaposed and mingle but are also connected through a complex strategy of mise en abîme. This creates a nesting structure that combines different scripts, as well as text and image, into a multi-modal form of code-switching. For the cover of Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (Adventures of German Grammar) (Tawada 2010b), Tawada opted for a more palimpsestic set-up by superimposing a mixture of Japanese characters in different colours onto the black and white pages of a German grammar book. In Schwager in Bordeaux (Brother-in-law in Bordeaux) (Tawada 2011), the colour scheme from Abenteuer der deutschen Grammtik was expanded even further. The text is German throughout but paragraphs are separated by single blue kanji characters that perforate the surface of the white page and act as water holes through which (the) other language(s) can enter in order to irrigate and permeate the German text (Bay 2012:261), which turns into an island afloat on a hidden sea. Single pages bearing intricate patterns of multi­ coloured Japanese script were introduced at the beginning and at the end of the book: a paratextual forest of signs the reader has to cross before acceding

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to and after leaving the German text. On several pages distributed throughout the book, there are single or multiple coloured Japanese char­ acters of different sizes. Some of them cover the whole page and stand next to each other, or move away from one another as if they were animated. Books can also be seen as spaces in which letters and words live a life of their own (Schmitz-Emans 2012:275). In order to point to the constructivist side of kanji characters, which are written according to specific rules, the single vertical and horizontal lines are in different colours. Tawada’s writing constructs a many-layered involuted network of images and texts, different languages and different scripts, a textual archipelago that swims on the sea of languages, a surge and flow of phonemes and graphemes (Bay 2012:257).

7 Plurilingual webs The authors described in the previous chapters have used the metaphor of the web and the network mainly in connection with a territorial set-up that questioned the integrity of nations and national languages. However, the metaphor has also been used for plurilingual texts, plurilingual identity and the act of writing in different languages. In his pioneering work on multi­ lingualism in literature, The Poet’s Tongues, Leonard Forster describes Joyce’s plurilingual texts as “an immensely flexible web of interwoven multiple asso­ ciations … With this equipment he set out to rejuvenate English as an artistic medium, in which words could be made polyglot and polyvalent – polyvalent because polyglot” (Forster 1968:77). As with the languages used in bi- or multilingual texts, plurilingual iden­ tity is often defined in purely quantitative terms, the single languages being countable units. This enumerative strategy generally follows the logic of the list that defines a centre and a periphery, or a top and a bottom, and clas­ sifies the different languages according to a hierarchical perspective: the most important language (the supposed mother-tongue) occupies the centre or the top. In her essay “Schreiben im Netz der Sprache” (Writing in the Web of Words), Tawada proposes a different, horizontal reading in which the single languages actively interact with each other. As she points out in the beginning, despite all the changes that have taken place in the wake of globalization, tourism, migration and the information revolution linked to the internet and the swift spread of cellular phones, we still have not devel­ oped a mental space to accommodate the linguistic contacts and exchanges that ensue from this. Nowadays one frequently sees words and images from different worlds juxtaposed (nebeneinander). Through migration, world travels, or Internet surfing people often find themselves in a situation where the juxtaposition already exists, but a corresponding frame of mind has not yet been developed. Sometimes I ride the bus through a city and am surrounded by several conversations in several languages. Two sentences where one

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right after the other (direkt hintereinander) penetrates my ears by chance don’t yet occupy a common space. You need a ‘framework’ to connect these sentences. (Tawada 2003b:152–3; 2017:41) This contradiction between a multilingual everyday reality and the lack of a mental space to accommodate it recalls Yildiz’s notion of postmonolingual condition. The hypothetical mental space that Tawada envisages does not have a meaningful centre and keeps growing and changing with each new experience. If a person were to acquire an additional personality when learning an additional language, someone who speaks five languages would possess five personalities. Should this person look like a country fair with five different booths (folkloristischen Verkaufsbuden)? I don’t have a single booth. I am similar to a web. The structure of a web gets denser (verdichtet seine Struktur) when new traits are incorporated. In this way, a new pattern is formed. There are more and more knots, tight and loose spots, uncompleted corners, edges, holes or superposed layers. This web, which can catch tiny planktons, I will call a multi­ lingual web (mehrsprachiges Netz). (Tawada 2003b:148; 2017:30) This finely woven net able to catch the migrating swarms of plankton recalls Torabully’s collectivities of the coral. To think and to write multilingually, then, means to develop the ability to perceive the tiniest linguistic differences and to incorporate them in a constantly expanding and shifting network-like structure. “When writing, I want to throw a large net into the sea, even if there is a risk that my little fishing boat is pulled by the net and not vice versa” (Tawada 2012b:75). The last spatial metaphor I will explore in this chapter is that of the constellation.

8 Plurilingual constellations Alfons Knauth describes the two spatial metaphors of the sea and the con­ stellation as complementary figures of multilingualism. Together they repre­ sent a transnational “comprehensive cosmic configuration: whereas the sea approaches Chaos, the constellations configure the relative ‘alphabetic’ order of the Cosmos” (Knauth 2016:241). Like the metaphor of the network, the metaphor of the constellation defines an open plurilingual space without a centre, a loose structure that can grow in different directions, an ensemble of points that entertain multiple relationships with each other. The earliest example of the constellation metaphor in modern literature, which emphasizes the importance of the spatial and visual aspects of writing, is Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1842–98) poem “Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le

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hasard” (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (1897) with intralingual forms of polyglossy and a radically new approach to the space of the page. Mallarmé who was a translator and a life-long language teacher was interested in polylingual resonances within English and imported some of its syntactical and lexical effects into his French writings (Taylor-Batty 2013:20– 1). Further examples, which reinterpret the spatial plurality also in a linguistic sense, are Eugen Gomringer’s (1925–) poetry collection konstellationen con­ stellations constelaciones (1953), written in four different languages, and Har­ oldo de Campos’s Xadrez de estrelas (Chessboard of Stars) (1976) that operates with up to ten different languages. In Galáxias, the different lan­ guages act like “wandering clusters of constellations” (Knauth 1991:65). The plurilingual constellation metaphor is linked to other multilingual writing projects of the twentieth century, with which it shares some essential traits: the Simultaneism of Futurism and Dadaism (ibid:71–4), the international movement of Concrete Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s and the Spatialism of the French poet Pierre Garnier (1928–2014) and the Japanese Niikuni Seiichi (1925–77). The Simultaneism of the early twentieth century goes hand in hand with a series of profound geo-political and social changes, a globalizing wave revolu­ tionizing communication technologies (telegraph, telephone, phonograph, cinema) and the means of transportation (steamboat, airplane, automobile) that is comparable to the changes of the late twentieth and early twenty first cen­ turies. In both cases, there was a surge in literary multilingualism. In his poem “Le Panama” (1913–14), Blaise Cendrars (1887–1962) draws a direct connection between the stars in the sky and the simultaneity of languages in the new inter­ connected world, of which the newly opened Panama canal linking the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean is a telling example. Apollinaire’s bilingual “Lettre-Océan” (Ship-to-Ship-Letter) (1914), a letter sent by boat to land by wireless telegraphy, consists of a French text interspersed with Spanish elements in varied typo­ graphic fonts that are disposed in concentric circles with rays protruding from the middle of the page. This textual arrangement undercuts any linear reading from left to right and top to bottom. Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1914) are visuals poems. The single words or letters are arranged on the page to form the lines of falling rain, the figure of a horse or the Eifel Tower, which Taylor-Batty used for the cover of her book on multilingualism in modern fiction. Robert Delaunay’s fractured and polychromatic painting Homage to Blériot (1914) that links the image of the Eifel Tower, a symbol of international wireless commu­ nication, to Louis Blériot’s first cross-channel flight (1911) can be interpreted as a new kind of Tower of Babel. It symbolizes “an unprecedented sensitivity to linguistic and cultural plurality and difference … a marked increase in multi­ lingual literary experimentation” that “might well be described as a ‘multilingual turn’” (Taylor-Batty 2013:3–4). Other examples of Simultaneism are the plurilingual manifestos of Futur­ ism (Knauth 2004:87–9). The Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) launched his Manifeste initial du futurisme and Manifest du

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futurism on February 20, 1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro and republished them together with an Italian version in the journal Poesia (February–March 1909). German, Russian, English, Spanish and Portu­ guese versions followed. The first explicit mention of polyglottism can be found in the bilingual “Manifeste synthèse. L’antitradition futuriste/Mani­ festo sintesi. L’anti-tradizione futurista” co-written by Marinetti, Apolli­ naire and Boccioni. Here appear for the first time the notions of “simultanéité/simultaneità” (Knauth 1999:17–18). Marinetti also coined the concept of “parole in libertà”, words in freedom, which articulates a radi­ cally new way of using literary language. The single words and letters from different languages are liberated from their syntactic and semantic bounds and subsequently arranged in innovative multilingual typographical pat­ terns. Other characteristics are the use of onomatopoeic words and the abolition of adverbs, adjectives and punctuation. The words are connected through analogy and juxtaposed without logical connectors. The international movement of Concrete Poetry also employed a visual and multilingual approach to the page. In 1952, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos founded together with Decio Pignatari the Brazilian group of concrete poets “Noigandres”. The three writers made frequent use of different languages in their poems, always looking for new and challenging solutions. Pignatari’s “Cuban Stele” written in 1962 and published as a folder combines Latin, English and Portuguese on three typographically marked axes that repro­ duce the classical fable of the wolf and the lamb and translate it into the post-colonial geo-political context of the early 1960s. Augusto de Campos’s trilingual, Portuguese, English and French poem “cidade-city-cité,” on the other hand, creates a gargantuan polysyllabic word that conveys some of the voracity of a modern, constantly expanding megalopolis. In Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias, the constellation (Guldin 2011a:323–6) and the sea metaphor represent two sides of the same phenomenon. Each page is an open-ended multilingual constellation of its own. Through multiple paronomasia and assonance, the emergence of letters and morphemes is organized in morpho-phonemic clusters, that is, in constellations. The jagged right margins which differ from page to page further enhance this idea. The absence of punctuation marks and capital letters creates an endless phrase revolving around itself, a flux of signs flowing uninterruptedly across the page, like a galactic expansion. The image of ever expanding galaxies has both visual and musical connotations, which are directly linked to the notion of the “verbicovisual”, a composite mosaic unit that combines the oral and visual dimensions of the text. The typographic space of the white page is “entirely covered by a constellation of black letters merging with the flowing sound of maritime discourse: silent signs … set free in the act of reading or recitation” (Knauth 2016:246). The totalizing approach of multilingual spatialism, of which Garnier and Seiichi are the main representatives, is conceived as a cosmopoetic model that includes besides all human languages also the sounds of nature, the murmur

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of the sea, smells, vibrations and the flickering of the stars. This polyglot lit­ erary cosmos is generated through different writing strategies: single words from different languages that attract and repel each other semantically, syn­ tactically or phonetically are juxtaposed; different scripts are made to inter­ sect spatially; texts are decomposed into single letters which are then recomposed to create words made up of units from different scripts; letters and numbers are placed next to each other; multilingual and multiscript units are arranged to create visual effects (Knauth 1991:75–7). In this sense, Gar­ nier’s and Seiichi’s supranational bilingual poetry (Simon-Oikawa 2011 and Wong 2015) represent perhaps the most radical attempt to bring two lan­ guages closer to each other through spatial means opening up linguistic bor­ ders and mixing units from different language scripts: the alphabetic writing system of French and the three Japanese script-forms, hiragana, katakana and kanji. Most of the poems incorporate French and Japanese words with dif­ ferent meanings, in some instances individual French letters and kana char­ acters from the other Japanese scripts are combined because of their sound value. The Spatialist approach operates with multilingual language matter, that is, with linguistic units that can be smaller than single words or in the case of Japanese single graphic components of kanji. In the poem Ame, rain 雨, the four dots are extracted to form a pattern suggesting raindrops falling (Wong 2015:117). Garnier used a typewriter to produce mechanical effects and wrote most of his work by typing. Seiichi, on the other hand, used the different graphemic systems of Japanese that he sometimes broke down into their graphic components. The aim is to liberate language from fixed impri­ soning linguistic postulates by creating a cross-linguistic dimension, a spatial syntagm based on interlingual contiguity. In this bilingual writing strategy the question what to select from the two languages is not more important than how to combine the single elements. In the expanded linguistic area of Spa­ tialism which facilitates the transition of national languages into a suprana­ tional literary language, works are transmittable across linguistic boundaries but not translatable. The two writing systems are closely interwoven but “never lost into each other” (Simon-Oikawa 2011:129). In the micropoem “fe/uひ” (fire), the hir­ agana ひ is used instead of the kanji 火. Both Japanese characters are pro­ nounced the same way, hi. Feu and ひ come together because of their common meaning but also because of the similarity of their outer appearance. The relation of contiguity is established by the slash. As a result, the “u from feu reaches out and joins ひ. The graphs u and ひ are so similar in shape that they look “as if they were lost graphemic twins, once separated by linguistic boundaries but now ‘reunited’ in a poetic syntagm that puts the sense of ‘fire’ in suspension” (Wong 2015:122). Graphic compositions are also organized syntagmatically. The poem “pierre/鳩”, stone, rock/pigeon, dove, consists of roundish dense shapes resembling rocks made from the Japanese kanji 鳩 (hato, pigeon) and fragmentary wavy lines of letters from the word pierre that wind around the stones. The semantic value of the two words is transposed in

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a graphic representation which gestures towards a sort of exchange between the two languages. The rock is transformed into an undulating rivulet and the flight of the bird turned into stone. We are a long way from bilingual texts operating with single foreign words that are clearly and unequivocally marked off from the rest of the text.

9 From territory to network The narrative of the third part retraces the logic of the first two parts. The territorialization of national languages is achieved by equating its borders with those of the nation-state. Similarly to the organic bodies of language, national languages are seen as internally coherent and homogeneous units, which are kept together by a centripetal force. Like trees, they are profoundly enracinated in the soil of the national territory. In accordance with Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque body, the centrifugal forces of variation and stratifi­ cation open up the spatial enclosure of national languages to foreign influ­ ences and inner contradictions. The borders between languages and nations do no longer coincide, but are both subject to incursions from the outside and the disarray caused by inner plurality. Bakhtin’s centripetal tendency recalls Deleuze’s notion of deterritorialization which inspired Glissant to his meta­ phor of archipelization. The monolingual homogeneous landmasses of the continents begin to break asunder and the single fragments drift apart to become integrated into a network of interconnected islands. Continents are land bound, stable territorial entities circumscribed by the sea. Archipelagos on the other hand are fragile isles between solidity and fluidity. Languages are no longer enclosed in their own protected space but appear as fragmented and incomplete, as they are surrounded by an expanse of water that continuously threatens their stability. This vision of dispersal is taken a step further by focusing on the ocean as another possible spatial metaphor for language interaction. The medium of the sea abolishes all clear-cut borders between languages and stresses lateral rather than vertical connections. Languages, flow into each other, mix and blend freely, but in doing so they tend to lose their very specificity. The result is a haphazard shapeless amalgam, in which the most important epistemolo­ gical dimension of plurilingualism – the generative potential of linguistic interanimation – is lost. Linguistic differences are difficult to distinguish, as water is uniform and difficult to measure. But the metaphor also allows for some discrimination. Languages differ because of the shores or coastlines they wash over. Fur­ thermore, the sea is animated by various antagonistic currents of varying densities, velocities, and at different depths. There are also variations in tem­ perature: deep-sea currents carry cold water from the poles to the oceans. The saltiness of the sea varies, as it is lower near the surface and higher at the bottom of the ocean. Add to this the dynamic properties of fluids: symme­ trical and laminar flow, chaotic patterns, turbulent flows, whirls, and vortices,

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which can rotate clockwise or counter clockwise. Finally, as Tawada’s work shows, the water metaphor can also be used to discuss the in/visible presence of languages within each other. The metaphors of the archipelago and the ocean are linked to insurgent botanic metaphors that question the European tradition of the tree and the systematic hierarchical arborification of languages (chapter six). The roots of the rhizome, the coral reef, the mangrove and the banyan tree signal plurality and interpenetration of languages. The essential moment, here, is the opacity of these complex processes of entanglement and the unpredictability of the possible results. Like the metaphors of the archipelago and the ocean, they are not hierarchically arranged and lack a significant centre. As in the horti­ cultural metaphor of grafting (chapter six), each language has its own importance and can impact in surprising ways on the other. Glissant speaks of “chaotic encounters with unforeseen results” that create relationships on an egalitarian footing between convergent histories (Carter and Torabully 2002:170). This allows for a “poetics of complexity in which the egalitarian mode must be respected, as it leaves the process open to its potentialities …” (ibid:171). Botanic and organic metaphors, however, even when they stress multiplicity tend to obscure the artificiality of languages, their constructedness and arbitrary nature. The metaphor of grafting is an exception in this respect because it combines nature with culture. The main conceptual advantages of the spatial metaphors of the network and the constellation are the absence of a unifying centre, the emphasis on openness, and the focus on multiple internal interactions among coequal partners. Networks allow different peripheries to reach out for each other by bypassing the mediation of a centre. Finally, networks and constellations do not simply grow by addition and juxtaposition but change as a whole when­ ever new elements are acquired.

Conclusion

As Suresh Canagarajah and Indika Liyanage point out “the struggle now is to find new metaphors that would capture plurilingual communication. How do we practice linguistics that treat human agency, diversity, inde­ terminacy and multimodality as the norm?” (2012:60). How can we describe linguistic interactions that differ both with regard to the number and nature of intervening languages, their shifting relationship to each other, and the form and function of the interacting elements themselves? There is a need for metaphors that move beyond the notion of languages as self-contained units and focus on speakers and the varied linguistic resources at their disposal (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). These meta­ phors should not simply question the older monolingual norm but describe plurilingualism as a new norm that integrates the possibility of a strong linguistic attachment to a single language – not necessarily one’s ‘mother-tongue’, but also a ‘adoptive’ or ‘stepmother tongue’ – next to more fluid and ephemeral forms of language practice. This emotional attachment radically differs from previous forms of monolingualism because it is lived within a context that is already considered as funda­ mentally and unequivocally multilingual. The monolingual paradigm defined language practice as a choice of one language over another. Plur­ ilingualism, polylingual languaging and metrolingualism conceive of lan­ guage use in much more complex and contradictory terms including the possibility to choose between varying forms of linguistic allegiances alter­ nating between fixity and fluidity. Canagarajah and Liyanage discuss a series of metaphors of plur­ ilingualism used in the work of Lachman M. Khubchandani that move beyond the insurgent metaphors of multilingualism discussed in this book. These metaphors do not address qualities that reside in the languages themselves but are generated by everyday language practice. Metaphors “like rainbow, symbiosis, osmosis, synergy and serendipity … describe a multilingual reality that lacks a suitable language in mainstream linguistics. Although these lesser known publications of periphery scholars are full of insight, they still lack elaborate theorization to produce sophisticated alternate

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models” (2012:61). Osmosis, porosity and symbiosis, which recall the meta­ phor of grafting (chapter six), imply subtle forms of interconnections which abolish any kind of clear cut border. The notion of synergy, which could be linked to Bakhtin’s principle of dialogism, implies the productive interaction of intersubjective meanings. Finally, the notion of serendipity suggests openness to unexpected outcomes, which recalls Glissant’s unpredictability and opacity, and posits a fundamentally positive attitude to variations in speech mixing and transformation. It is highly relevant in this respect, that the metaphors proposed by Canagarajah and Liyanage although connected to one or more of the three domains discussed in this book do not belong to them. The same holds true for visual and acoustic metaphors that tend to eschew the discursive entrapments of monolingualism and serial multilingualism, and generally focus on the agency of the single speaker. In this sense, the following con­ siderations document a shift from ontological to epistemological metaphors, from single languages to speakers and their resources, from the alleged objectivity and naturalness of body, kinship and space metaphors to the subjectivity and constructedness of acoustic and visual metaphors.

Visual and acoustic metaphors Visual and acoustic metaphors can be used on their own or combined. Among the visual metaphors are the kaleidoscope, the rainbow, the metaphor of colouring, but also the light metaphor and the metaphor of the eye (chap­ ter four). Among the acoustic metaphors are the echo and the resonance (chapter fourteen), the musical notation, the choir, and the orchestra. Anil Bhatti (2007:168) suggests a musical metaphor for multilingualism. It is the ability to deal with a great variety of musical material that allows a musician to improvise and change, to mix and merge different sounds in order to create new variations and tonalities. In this vision, the speaker and not the combined languages are at the centre. The single instruments are not attrib­ uted to separate languages, which would confirm their ontological status as self-contained units. Deleuze and Guattari also discuss osmotic borderlessness in terms of chromatic linguistics associating colour to musical notation. Chromatic languages suggest a continuous slippage from one sound to another. Intervals are blurred creating a sound continuum. Chromaticism generates forms that constantly dissolve and transform leading to a dis­ aggregation of the central principle (1987:95–7). In some cases, visual and acoustic metaphors stressing open-endedness, dynamic processual multiplicity and uncentredness are associated with cor­ poreal or spatial metaphors. Chambers’ Mediterranean Sea is a polyphonic echo chamber and Torabully describes his multilingual textual spaces as mosaics, in which the single “components would be able to find an echo of their own presence” (Carter and Torabully 2002:157). Commenting upon Condé’s novel Traversée de la Mangrove, Torabully links the kaleidoscopic

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identity of its characters to the botanic metaphor of the mangrove, “a swamp where multiple roots become entangled”. The unsuccessful attempt of the main character of the book to write about his multiple origins, combining the various “mosaic presences of Gaudeloupe” into an articulation of diversity where the “composite parts” (ibid:167) clash and interact, recalls Glissant’s notion of incompleteness and chaos, which is inherent to creolization and coolitude alike. The ultimate failure of any concluding synthesis is another metaphor for creolization, “a reminder that the totality of vision of this kaleidoscopic community is but a process with various possible combina­ tions” (ibid:168). Bakhtin used the visual and acoustic metaphors singularly and together to describe intra- and interlinguistic relationships. Both visual and acoustic metaphors are connected to his principle of dialogism. National languages do not listen to one another; they are deaf to each other and do therefore not engage in any form of dialogue. Bakhtin uses the word глухëй (gluxoj, dumbness). In the Renaissance the “dark and deaf coexistence” (Bakhtin 2006:82) of languages started to change. In the polyphonic universe of the novel, dialogic reverberations penetrate the deep strata of discourse, and the various interlinguistic strata mutually illuminate one another. In his work on Dostoevsky’s poetics, he described the linguistic elements of the novel as “juxtaposed contrapuntally” (Bakhtin 1993:40), a metaphor that Glissant uses to describe the relationship between languages in translation (chapter thirteen). The composition principle of the novel as a polyphonic text is the orchestration of languages, a musical score allowing for infinite variations. Traditional stylistic analysis does not do justice to the complexities of heteroglossic texts, because it transposes the orchestrated multi-voiced symphonic theme of the polyphonic novel onto the sole keyboard of a piano (Bakhtin 2006:263). One has to look at a language from the outside, through the eyes of another language, and from the point of view of different styles and registers. Linguistic interillumination or interanimation is based on dialogic reciprocity that tends to deprivilege languages in the name of a democratic principle of mutuality. In processes of literary creation, languages interanimate and interilluminate each other. They operate “in a field illuminated by another’s lan­ guage” (ibid:62). Novelistic stylization always involves a “sideways glance at other languages” (ibid:376) and other points of view. Heteroglossia is always in the background and the word of the novel never completely monological. A language can see and understand itself, its internal form and the peculia­ rities of its world view, only in the light of another language. The spatial metaphor of the indirect double-voiced word on its trajectory to the object and the receiver (chapter twelve), is couched in visual and acoustic metaphors. The object it is heading for is “enveloped in an obscuring mist”, or the previous light of other alien words about the same object, which high­ light or dim certain aspects of it in a “complex play of light and shadow” (ibid:276). The word itself, its intention and directionality, take the form of a

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ray of light. The image the word constructs about the object is a “living and unrepeatable play of colours and light” on its different refracting facets that can be described as a “spectral dispersion” of the ray-word. This does not take place in the object itself, but “in an atmosphere filled with alien words, value judgements and accents through which the ray passes on its way to the object”. The dense, many-layered atmosphere enveloping the object “makes the facets of the image sparkle”. The play of light is also interpreted in musical terms. The word breaks through to its own meaning and expression “harmonizing” with some elements and “striking a dissonance with others”. In this “dialogized process”, the word constructs “its own stylistic profile and tone” (ibid:277). In “On the Use of Foreign Words” (chapter three), Adorno makes use of a visual metaphor to underscore the difference between the words that do seem to belong organically to their linguistic environment and the foreignderived words from other languages. As in Bakhtin’s dynamic conception of the dual word, Adorno’s foreign words overtake and overshadow, transcend and transform the language of which they happen to be part of, and they do this in an aggressive dissonant way. “In the foreign word a ray of light from ratio strikes the stream of language, which gleams painfully in it. … For the old organic words are like gas lights in a street where the violet light of an oxyacetylene welding apparatus suddenly flames out” (Adorno 1991a:290–1). In Bakhtin’s epistemological perspectivism, “heteroglot languages mutually reveal each other’s presence and begin to function for each other as dialogiz­ ing backgrounds” (Bakhtin 2006:414). “Languages of heteroglossia” are “like mirrors that face each other, each reflecting in its own way a piece, a tiny corner of the world” forcing “us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects that is broader, more multi-levelled, contain­ ing more and varied horizons than would be available to a single language or a single mirror” (ibid:414–15).

Colour metaphors Besides visual and acoustic metaphors, colour metaphors best render the central aspects of plurilingualism. Knauth points to the frequent use of the metaphors of the rainbow, the iris and the colour palette in modernist lit­ erary texts that suggest a fundamental connection between colours and languages (Knauth 1999:27), between a plurilinguistic and polychromatic world. The advantage of colours is that they can be applied singularly next to each other, blended together, or juxtaposed in such a way as to articulate fluid boundaries and subtle transitions. The metaphors of the rainbow, the mosaic, and the kaleidoscope with its multiple mirroring effects, all stress plurality and can be linked to the colour source domain. The three metaphors, however, differ with regard to the significance of borders. Mosaics, like patchworks are made by assembling small pieces of

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coloured glass, or other materials. As with a kaleidoscope, the single parts are clearly separated from each other. In a rainbow, on the other hand, the coloured bands of the spectrum tend to blend into each other. The colour metaphor is also connected to the grafting metaphor (chapter six), the coral (chapter thirteen) and the iridescent surface of sea (chapter fourteen), which suggest osmotic and reciprocal forms of interaction and interillumination. Colours contradict the logic of the simple dividing line. They are closely related to blotches and stains as well as clouds with their uncertain and unstable margins. Besides the single colours of the spectrum separated from each other but constantly blending into each other, the ever-changing inten­ sity of the colours used also plays a central role. Claude Simon’s complex metaphor of the female centaur combines the organic metaphor of the double body with the metaphors of colouring and grafting in an attempt to focus on uncertain and fluid processes of mutual exchange (chapter one). Gloria Anzaldúa describes her Spanish accent when speaking English as a specific colouring conferred to her bilingual tongue (chapter four). Finally, colours can also be used to make the presence of multilingual scripts visible within the space of the page. Two examples discussed in this book are the colourful presence of kanji characters in Tawada’s books (chapter fifteen) and the use of a two-coloured script in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Amour bilingue (chapter seven). In Cale d’Étoiles – Coolitude, Torabully complements the multilingual text with the mandala-shaped paintings of juxtaposed colours by the Indian artist Sayed Haider Raza (1922–2016) creating a sort of multimodal heteroglossia in Gardner-Chloros’s sense. Haider Raza paints concentric circles, multi­ coloured layered and nested three-dimensional structures in different colours that echo the coral-like plurilingual palimpsest of the text. When colours are subordinated to the separating logic of the line, they appear as unmixed and uniform. Instances of this use of the colour metaphor can be found in political and linguistic atlases, where nations and national languages are generally described in monochromatic terms (chapter eleven). The dividing lines between the single colours coincide with the borders between nations and their corresponding languages. Furthermore, colour metaphors can be combined with organic metaphors to confirm the self-con­ tained nature of single languages. Jacob Grimm speaks of the unique colour­ ing that the vocalic soul of a language conveys to the outer appearance of its body and of the need of single foreign-derived-words to shed their original colouring in favour of the prevailing colour of the national language, in which they are incorporated (chapter two). For Goldschmidt, German is decidedly green and French orange (chapter five). In nearly all the language portraits discussed in chapter five, the single languages are represented by different colours and there are practically no attempts at mixing or blending. There are however, a few exceptions that point towards possible ways of expanding and reinterpreting the metaphor of the coloured body. Oliver’s bilingual body from Krumm’s collection is

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covered with green (Serbo-Croatian) and red (German) superimposed hor­ izontal lines that crisscross each other. In the upper part of the body, the red lines are stronger, partially hiding the underlying green lines and forming a kind of palimpsest that exceeds the limits of the body outline (Krumm 2001:12). In another unnamed portrait, four colours (lilac, green, blue and yellow) have been partially mixed and applied diagonally over the outline without respecting its boundaries (ibid:30).

Plurilingual synaesthesia The synesthetic combination of colours with sounds and words has been a frequent strategy in the literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first cen­ turies. In their collective Dadaist and Simultaneist works, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janko created multimodal, both visual and acoustic multilingual texts combining languages with colour and music. The layered structure of their trilingual German–French–English poem “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” recalls a musical score. Besides the different voices, there are musical instruments: rattles, drums and a whistle. The parallel texts read by the three artists are interspersed with quotations from the Bible, newspaper clips, popular songs, verses inspired by African singsong, and loose syllables. In a footnote, the authors explicitly compare the use of different colours in Cubism (Picasso, Braque and Delaunay) with their own multilingual textual Simultaneism (Guldin 2011a:313–16). In some of his poems, Augusto De Campos combined the spatial arrange­ ment of multilingual fragments on the page with the use of different colours, one for each language. This technique was inspired by the work of the Aus­ trian composer and conductor Anton Webern (1883–1945). In his short musical compositions, Webern used the musical technique of Klangfarbenme­ lodie (sound-colour melody), which consists in splitting a musical line or melody among several instruments in order to add acoustic colour. By fol­ lowing the affinity between the different colours, the reader links diagonally the word and word fragments of the poems with the different languages used (Clüver 2002:313–14). The resulting multilingual text defines a complex net­ work of interacting languages. However, the drawback of such a metaphor­ ization is the simple correspondence between single colours and languages, which confirms their ontological nature as separate, countable units. In her multilingual collection of poems Curry Flavour (2000), the Trinida­ dian-Bahamian poet and painter Lelawatee Manoo-Rahming combines the metaphor of colour with that of flavour (Bragard 2008:196). Curry is a blend of herbs or spices, including coriander, ginger, ground turmeric, cumin, pepper, mustard, clove, cardamom, bay leaf, fenugreek and fresh or dried chilies. The resulting taste is deep and earthy with touches of sweetness. The level of tanginess is determined by the type and quantity of pepper. Hot cur­ ries normally have red chillies, while mild curries may have black pepper or

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ginger. Like the colour metaphor, the flavour metaphor allows for fluid bor­ derless continuity and complex palimpsest-like layering or nesting. The watercolour on the cover page of the book done by the author herself is a flower-like assemblage of blooms and blotches of different colour and inten­ sity – mostly green, red, blue, yellow and lilac – which are positioned next to each other, on top of or within each other. The different colours blur, blend and bleed into each other and change intensity and chromatic quality through contact. Metaphors that move beyond the dual logic of insurgent metaphors of multilingualism tend to leave the three source domains discussed in this book behind. Rather than system- they are speaker-oriented. Contrary to the source domains of the body, the family and the territory, which emphasize the ontological dimension of languages, visual, acoustic and sense of taste metaphors, stress the epistemological side. This is also the case with culinary metaphors (chapter three) that reinterpret language use in terms of cooking and eating. The mouth is the very site where words of different languages meet and mix like the various ingredients and flavours of a dish. Composite metaphors of perception that conflate music, colour and flavour suggest a multilingual synaesthesia that mirrors and echoes linguistic plurality and the fundamental fluidity of borders between the single colliding and merging elements. These metaphors move beyond notions of purity and describe linguistic contact in terms of single features and available resources rather than as the meeting of whole languages. They emphasize porous osmotic borders, reciprocal forms of exchange, blending and mixing, multiple complexity, decentredness, lack of hierarchical structures and unpredictability of results. I would like to conclude this book with a comment from Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook that aptly sums up some of the main points high­ lighting the theoretical strictures that are involved with notions of multi­ lingualism. Contrary to additive multilingualism conceived of as a pluralization of separate monolingualisms that posits languages as distinct and autonomous systems, compelling the speakers to choose between them, multilingualism as a “lingua franca” calls for “transidiomatic practices” and a “translingual activism” (Makoni and Pennycook 2007:36). In this speaker­ centred “idiolectal multilingualism”, the “diverse features are blended toge­ ther, reflecting each individual’s personal experiences”. The languages involved are “so deeply intertwined and fused into each other that the level of fluidity renders it difficult to determine any boundaries that may indicate that there are different languages” at all. The resulting horizontal “multilayered chain” is constantly combined and recombined (Makoni and Pennycook 2012:446–7). This dynamic fluidity and multilingual density, its vertical layering, are best described in terms of colour. As Bakhtin’s notions of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘polyglossia’, the concept of ‘multilingua franca’ is used in the singular but suggests a fundamentally

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plural vision centred on the social grounding of human interaction, the single speaker and his/her linguistic resources rather than on a multiplicity of lan­ guages next to each other. The “critical issue is not whether one is mono­ lingual”, bilingual or multilingual, “but that one uses language” (ibid:450).

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Wong, Elaine S. (2015) Interlingual Encounter in Pierre Garnier and Niikuni Seiichi’s French Japanese Concrete Poetry. In L2 Journal, 7(1): 114–132. https://escholarship. org/uc/item/68p0w4jw [accessed 3. 10. 2018]. Yildiz, Yasemin (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press. Yumiao, Bao (2016) The Temporalities of ‘Fanyi’ in the May-Fourth Discursive Spheres – On Wu Mi’s Discussions about Imitation, Translation, and Literary Creation (unpublished speech held at the conference Translation and Time. Exploring the Temporal Dimension of Cross-Cultural Transfer, The Chinese Uni­ versity of Hong Kong, December 9).

Index

aboriginal languages 103–4

Accademia della Crusca 52

acoustic metaphors 117, 247, 248;

combined with spatial and visual

249–50, 252; and dialogism 249;

echoes 214; music, and diversity

248; the sea as 227, 248

Adelung, Johann Christoph: Über den deutschen Styl (On German Style) 33

adoptive mother-tongue 151–6, 163

Adorno, Theodor W.: Minima Moralia

158; “On the use of foreign words”

55–6, 159, 250; “Words from Abroad”

158–9

adultery and infidelity 61, 63, 109,

112, 125, 163; in translation and

bilingualism 125–6, 137–41, 150

African languages: acquisition 67,

92; uprooting, rhizome metaphor

206–7; use of the tongue 58–9

Al-Bakri 60

alliteration: body metaphors 16; and

linguistic contamination 148

Alsatian, in language portraits 80,

81, 82

amoeba metaphor 55–6, 139

Anderson, Benedict: Imagined

Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 168, 171, 177–8, 179, 203

Andrade, Mário de: Macunaíma 56

Andrade, Oswald de: ‘Manifesto

Antropofago’ 56

Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian

24, 238

animality: and the corporeal space 87;

and the grotesque body 50; and lan­ guage mixing 17–19; speech sounds

and language acquisition 96

anti-Semitism: and foreign-derived words

158; Nazi ideology of mother-tongue

97–9; tree metaphor 102

Anzaldúa, Gloria 67, 86, 121, 162, 212,

238, 251; Borderlands/La Frontera:

The New Mestiza 68, 134–6, 234;

“Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to

3rdWorld Women Writers” 68

Apollinaire, Guillaume 108; Calligrammes

242; “Lettre-Océan” (Ship-to-Ship-

Letter) 242

Arabic: body and colour metaphors 76; forked tongue as dual identity 60; translational relationship to French 114–19 Aragon, Louis 110–11 archipelago metaphor 245, 246; and

creolization 199–204, 207, 209; and

heterogeneity 215–16; and territorial

fragmentation 197–200

Armbrecht, Thomas J. D. 128

Arndt, Susan et al. 105, 184

Aronin, Larissa 1, 5, 6, 9, 121,

133–4, 210

Arrojo, Rosemary 138–9 Arteaga, Alfred 136

Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature) 194–5 Babcock, Barbara 48

Babel Tower 14–15, 34, 38, 69–70, 108,

140, 223–4; tree-like verticality and

multilingualism 108, 223–4

Bailey, Benjamin 189

Bakhtin, Mikhail 4, 18, 38, 42–3, 52, 76,

86, 87, 107, 129, 131, 136, 181, 183,

184, 185–98, 201, 202, 208, 214, 222,

274

Index

223, 231, 236, 245, 248–50, 253; Problems of Dostoevsky’ s Poetics 45; Rabelais and his World 18, 44–50, 193 banyan tree metaphor 211–12, 246 Bao Yumiao 56 Barère de Vieuzac, Bertrand 172–3, 177 Bastide, Roger 56 Bauman, Richard 2, 33, 103, 173 Bay, Hansjörg 227, 228, 238, 239, 240 Beckett, Samuel 141, 142, 143, 226 Begley, Louis: “On Being an Orphaned Writer” 162 Bell, David A. 171, 172 Bellay, Joachim du 29–30, 56 belly, and body politics 42–3 Bembo, Pietro: Prose della volgar lingua 28 Benes, Tuska 30, 33, 35, 36, 95 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio 218–19 Benjamin, Walter 135, 214 Benoist, Jean 200 Bensmaïa, Réda 114, 115–17, 119 Benyoëtz, Elazar 127 Berman, Antoine 122 Bettelheim, Bruno 161 Bhabha, Homi: The Location of Culture 53, 54 Bhatti, Anil 211, 248 bigamy metaphor 109, 110–14, 139, 143 bilingualism 3, 5, 109; adultery and bigamy metaphors 109, 110–14, 139–41, 143, 150; balanced 112; bi-langue 114–19; body part metaphors 60, 61, 65, 85–6; brain activation 21; and code-switching 22; and creativity, multimodal art 24; duality, body metaphors 85; gender-rela­ ted perspectives 73; in language portraits 75, 77, 78; and liminality 130–2; negative connotation 20; role of the mothertongue 91–2, 99; script forms 244, 251, 252; strong and weak 234, 235; and translation 121–7 Black, Max 6

Black Atlantic 213, 216–17,

220, 221 black diaspora 216, 218 Blendling 125, 127, 132 Blommaert, Jan 2, 4, 25, 27, 49, 78, 85 Boas, Franz: Race, Language and Culture 103–4 body metaphors 13, 15–17; as borders, and translational activities 130; eyes, accidentality and perspectives 71–2;

impaired, and the bi-langue 116–17; and language gender 33; in language portraits 75, 77–81; monolingualism 43–4, 60, 68, 72, 85, 87; mother-tongue acquisition 94–6; polylingual languaging 85–7; and territorialization 169–70; third ear 115, 116, 120; see also face metaphor; grotesque body; tongue metaphor body politic 42–6, 48, 52, 169, 170 Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul 15, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 91, 93, 94, 100–1, 102, 103, 125, 141, 167, 168, 174, 177 Bopp, Franz 34, 35–6, 101–2 botanic metaphors 219; banyan tree 211–12, 246; corals 197, 208–10, 212, 214, 217, 241, 246, 251; mangrove tree 124, 183, 197, 204, 210–12, 216, 221, 231, 246, 248–9; see also rhizome metaphor; tree metaphor Bragard, Véronique 53, 203, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 216, 221, 252–3; Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures 53, 209, 210, 212, 252–3 Brathwaite, Kamau 199, 218 Bredekamp, Horst 209 Briggs, Charles L. 2, 33, 103, 173 Brooke-Rose, Christine 119; Between 132, 145–9, 234 Burton, Stacy 195–6 Busch, Brigitta 61, 74, 81, 191 Busch, Thomas 61 Canagarajah, Suresh 5, 84, 247–8 Canetti Elias 59, 67, 86, 162; Die gerettete Zunge (The Tongue Set Free) 61–4 cannibalism 56 Caribbeans: coolitude 210, 211, 214; creolization and archipelization 199–204; tidalectics 218–19 Carter, Marina 200, 208, 209, 216, 220, 221, 222, 246, 248 Casanova, Pascale 28, 29, 30, 56, 171, 181 Case, Charley 210, 212, 219 Cassin, Barbara 38, 69; Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon 4 Celan, Paul 132 Cendrars, Blaise: “Le Panama” 242 centaur metaphor 87, 251

Index centrifugality 17, 194, 198; and (de)

territorialization 173, 185–7, 190, 200,

201, 207; in the grotesque body 43–4, 45,

245; of Jargon 183

centripetality 45, 173–6, 186–91, 193,

194, 198, 245

Césaire, Aimé 208

Chamberlain, Lori 125, 126, 138, 139

Chambers, Iain 215–16, 248

chaos 2, 8, 16–17, 190, 214, 249

Chea, Pheng 168

Chicano 68, 135, 136

chronotopes, and duality 46–7 classical aesthetics 49–50 classical languages 195; vs. vernacular, organic metaphors 29–30 Clifford, James 5, 82

code-mixing 13, 20–4, 26, 230, 236

code-oscillation 76

code-switching 6, 8, 13, 23–5, 143; attitudes towards 19–23; embedding and grafting 105–6; as forbidden, bigamy metaphor 110; monologue in The Name of The Rose 13–15, 17; multimodal form 239; and script-switching 238–40; in written form 234–6 Cohen, Keith 149

colours: in language portraits 74–81,

87, 251–2; and music 248, 252; and

plurality 250–1; relation to the logic

of the line 251; in script-switching

114, 239–40, 251; synaesthesia

252–4; in the tongue metaphor

62, 66

Combe, Dominique 114

Common European Framework of

Reference on Language (CEFR) 4

Concrete poets 243

Condé, Maryse 111, 113, 138; Traversée

de la Mangrove 211, 248–9

consonants 129; animal imagery 96; and

gender 33

coolitude 208, 214, 216, 217, 220, 222,

249, 251

coral metaphor 197, 208–10, 212, 214,

217, 241, 246, 251

creoles, creolization 21, 213–14, 218, 219,

221, 231, 249; arboreal metaphors

212; and archipelization 199–204; and

coolitude 220; and coral imaginary

208–9; culinary metaphors 53, 54;

entwisted tongue metaphor 60;

language interrelations 104–5; notion

203; and rhizomatic thinking 204–7

275

culinary metaphors 252–3; devouring and

digesting 55–7; dismemberment 48, 49,

148; Ensaladas 52–3; and macaronic

language 50–2; massalification 53;

melting pot 53–4; menudo-chowder

53–4; tossed salad 54–5, 204

cultivation metaphor 27–9, 91, 101

Dante Alighieri 140; De vulgari eloquentia

(On Eloquence in the Vernacular) 28,

92, 96

Darwin, Charles 36, 209

De Bot, Kees 20–1 De Campos, Augusto 243

De Campos, Haroldo 224; Galáxias 225,

243; “The Rule of Anthropophagy:

Europe under the Sign of Devoration”

56; Xadrez de estrelas (Chessboard of

Stars) 242

Delacroix, Eugène 170

Delany, Martin 222

Delaunay, Robert: Homage to Blériot 242

Deleuze, Gilles 107, 204, 205, 207, 216,

231, 237, 245, 248; Kafka: Toward a

Minor Literature 183–6

Delisle, Jean 137

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 199, 213, 215,

218–19, 221, 228

Depestre, René 211

Derrida, Jacques: La Dissémination

106–7; Le Monolinguisme de l’autre

114, 131

deterritorialization 120, 173, 181, 245;

archipelago metaphor 197–200; and

centrifugality 185–7, 190; Jargon and

minor literatures 181–5; rhizome

metaphor 206–7

dialects 51, 52, 65, 105, 110, 232–3, 238;

and centrifugality 183, 187, 189–92; in

language portraits 76, 80–4; linguistic

insecurity, and schizoglossia 109–10;

mother-tongue acquisition, and visual

metaphors 70–2; as problematic 95–6,

171–2

dialogue 46; grafting, and hybridization 107–8; relation to visual and acoustic metaphors 249–50 Dinev, Dimitré: Engelszungen (Tongues

of Angels) 61

dismemberment 16, 35, 43, 48–9,

130, 198

Djebar, Assia 136

Dorfman, Ariel 117, 132, 139, 155,

162, 163; Footnotes to a Double

276

Index

Life 111–14; Heading South, Looking North 111, 112

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 44, 45, 249

Dutch 18, 24; vs. German, maritime

metaphors 228

echo metaphor 214

Eco, U.: The Name of the Rose

13–17; The Search for the Perfect

Language 15

Eke, Norbert Otto 237, 238

Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land 222

embeddedness 22; concentric circles

metaphor 192, 232; and the linguistic

matrix 105–7, 119

English: in bilingual writers 111–19,

127–32, 139–54, 160–2, 222, 224,

226; in language portraits 75, 76,

80–1

Ensaladas, culinary metaphors 52–3 epistemological metaphors 205,

213, 248

Erard, Michael: Babel no More.

The Search for the World’s

Most Extraordinary Language

Learners 150

Ernst, Ulrich 238

Espagne, Michel 104

ethnolinguistic nationalism 27–8, 100

Ette, Ottmar 200, 208, 211

Evans, Fred 185

eye metaphor 58; dictatorship 70–1;

duality of identity 79; perspectives

71–2, 86

face metaphor: in code-switching

15–16; dual 47, 72, 85–6; hierarchical

subversions 48; language relatedness

to the nation 30–1; and linguistic

pluralism 25–6

family romance: and monolingualism

91–4, 141; reinterpretations 155,

157–8, 162, 163

Federman, Raymond 141–2, 148; “A Voice within a Voice” 142–4; Double or Nothing. A Real Fictitious Dis­ course 142; “The Bilingualist” 144–5 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 173–4, 177

flavour metaphor 54, 55, 247; combined

with colour 253

Fletxa, Mateu, el Jove: Las Ensaladas 52

Flusser, Vilém 104, 139, 230–2; “Da

língua portuguesa” (The Portuguese

Language) 150; A duvida 55–6

Folengo, Teofilo: Baldo 50–1; Liber

Macaronices 51

food see culinary metaphors foreign-derived words 127, 175;

Adorno on 55–6, 158–9, 250; Jargon

182–3; link to the body and plant

life 32

Forster, Leonard: The Poet’s Tongues 50,

123, 240

French 4, 29–30, 69, 196, 256; bilingualism,

and bigamy metaphor 110–11, 113; in

bilingual writers 127–8, 131–2, 139–48,

153, 226, 242–4; and creolization 201,

204, 207, 221; in language portraits

77–81, 251; territorialization and

nationhood 171–3, 176; translation

relationship to Arabic 114–19

Freud, Sigmund 94, 226

Friedman, Ellen G. 146, 149

Fuchs, Miriam 146, 149

Futurism 242–3 Gal, Susan 2, 6, 170

García, Ofelia 25

Gardner-Chloros, Penelope 20, 21,

22–4, 251

Garhammer, Erich 127

Garnier, Pierre 242, 243–4 Gauvin, Lise 202, 203

gender metaphor 33, 46; androgyny,

borders and identity 146–7; bigamy

metaphor 113; and heterotexts 136; in

a language wedding ceremony 116;

and nationalism 170; and perspectives

of reality 72–3; and translation 125,

126, 138–9

genres 136; hierarchy subversion 49–50; stylistic segregation 193–6 geological metaphors 175

German 16, 18, 36, 40, 95–6, 256; in

bilingual writers 148–58, 162, 225,

234, 237–40; vs. Dutch, maritime

metaphors 228; gender-related

perspectives 72; language acquisition

metaphors 59, 61–5; in language

portraits 75–81, 252; nationalism and

purism 101, 106, 127, 173–4; organic

metaphors 32–3; puns, bilingualism

and dual identity 142; role of the

tongue 58–66; as spoken by Jews

98–9, 184; water metaphors

227, 228

Gheeraert, Marcus 170

Gilmour, Rachael 8

Index Gilroy, Paul: The Black Atlantic.

Modernity and Double Consciousness

213, 215, 216–18, 220–2

Ginsburg, Ruth 46

Glissant, É. 54, 199, 200–8, 212, 213–15,

219, 220, 221, 224, 230, 231, 245, 246,

248, 249; Introduction à une poétique du

divers 201, 206; Le Discours Antillais 206;

Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of

Relation) 200–1; Poetics of Relation 206;

Traité du Tout-Monde 208

globalization 1, 2, 22, 82, 147, 196, 202,

204, 209, 240, 242

Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur 77–8, 85,

225–6, 251

Gómez-Peña, G. 53–4, 55; Dangerous

Border Crossers. The Artist Talks

Back. 54

Gomringer, Eugen 242

grafting 22, 30, 105–6, 246, 248, 251; and

hybridization 107–8

Gramling, David 3–4, 181

Greek 28, 29–30, 56, 64, 187, 195,

209, 231

Green, Julien 121, 127; Le Langage

et son double/The Language and

its Shadow 127–8, 129; Si j’ étais

vous … (If I were you …)

128–9

Grimm, Jacob 47, 125, 251; Deutsche

Grammatik 32–3, 35; Über den

Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin

of Language) 94

Grimm, Wilhelm 124, 125

Grosjean, François 21, 85

grotesque body 42, 129, 186, 245;

culinary metaphors 50–5; duality

45–7; and heteroglossia 193–4;

hierarchical subversions 47–50;

and the novel 43–5; spatial

borders 86–7

Grotius, Hugo 123

Grutman, Rainier 194, 196, 233

Guattari, Félix 204, 205, 207, 231,

237, 248; Kafka: Toward a Minor

Literature 183–6

Guldin, Rainer 6, 19, 42, 43, 46, 56, 77,

133, 168, 170–1, 198, 225, 226, 232–3,

243, 252

Hadol, Paul 170

Haugen, Einar 109–10

Hau’ofa, Epeli 218–19

Hayman, David 149

277

Hebrew 60, 62, 127, 182; bilabial and

plurality 69–70; Pilpul 230–2; tree

metaphor 102

Heinrich, Patrick 197

Helmich, Werner 233, 236

Herder, Johann Gottfried von 19, 50, 87,

123, 124, 168, 173; Abhandlung über

den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on

the Origin of Language) 16, 33–4;

Fragmente zur deutschen Literatur

(Fragments on German Literature) 17;

Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte

der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy

of the History of Mankind) 30–1;

Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten

Sprachen (On the Diligence in the

Study of Several Learned Languages)

18; Von der Ausbildung der Schüler in

Rede und Sprache in Kindern und Jün­ glingen (On the Education of Students

in Speech and Language in Children

and Young People) 96

heteroglossia 3, 44, 136, 158, 201, 202,

249, 251, 253; and the body 76–82, 84;

and borderlands 135; concentric cir­ cles metaphor 191–3; and deterritor­ ialization 183–6; and the grotesque

body 194–6; and metrolingualism 25;

multimodal 24; ocean and water

metaphors 213–28; and polyglossia

187–91; and stylistic segregation 194–6

Hioki, Naoko Frances 24

Hobsbawm, Eric J.: Nations and Nation­ alism since 1780 176–7 Hodgson, Richard 19, 229, 236

Hoffmann, Charlotte 120

Hokenson, Jan Walsh 127 Holquist, Michael 3, 4, 38, 44, 190

Hong Kingston, Maxine: The Woman

Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood

among Ghosts 61

Horace 16

Humboldt, Wilhelm von 4, 16–17, 30, 34,

35, 37–41, 66, 87, 103, 104, 123, 154, 187,

191, 192, 225; Über die Verschiedenheit

des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren

Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des

Menschengeschlechts (On the Diversity

of Human Language Construction and

Its Influence on the Mental Development

of the Human Species) 16, 39

Huston, Nancy: Lettres Parisiennes.

Histoires d’exil (Parisian Letters:

Stories of Exile) 131–2, 157

278

Index

Hutton, Christopher M. 97–8, 99, 182 hybridity, hybridization 104, 112–13; archipelago metaphor 199; coral metaphor 208; and dialogue/grafting 106–8; and gender identity 136; ship metaphor 221 idiomatic expressions 60, 237 imitation 28; of classic models 29–30; and creation 56–7; and mother-tongue acquisition 95 incest metaphor 140–1, 145, 148 incompleteness 55, 249 Indo-European languages 35, 37, 102, 103, 104, 153–4, 187 inflection 34, 39; organic metaphors 32, 35, 37 instrumentality: and the colour metaphor 80; and language diversity 40–1 insurgent metaphors 5, 7, 8, 163, 223, 246, 247, 253; see also grotesque body; kinship metaphors internalization 57 Irvine, Judith T. 2, 6, 170 Italian 28, 53, 64, 173, 190, 243; in language portraits 80–1, 82, 83; in The Name of the Rose 14, 16; textual hybridities 19 Jäger, Andreas: De Lingua Vetustissima Europae Scytho-Celtica et Gothica (On the Oldest Scytho-Celtic and Gothic Language of Europe) 101 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig 127 James, Henry 17, 140; The Question of our Speech 18–19 Japan 178–9 Jargon 181–4, 209 Jaworski, Adam 25 Jews 77, 97, 111, 123, 141, 142, 157; and the diaspora concept 222; Pilpul thinking 230–2; see also anti-Semitism; Hebrew; Jargon Johnson, Mark 6, 30 Jones, Sir William 34 Jørgensen, J. Normann 24–5, 87 Joyce, James 204, 225, 240; Anna Livia Plurabelle 203; Ulysses 222–4, 233 Kafka, Franz 157, 158, 162, 181–5, 204, 209, 213 kaleidoscope 248–9, 250–1 Kantorowicz, Ernst 43

Kellman, Steven G. 9, 24, 61, 63, 109, 112, 121, 130–2, 140–1, 150, 162; “Promiscuous Tongues: Erotics of Translingualism and Translation” 137 Kerr, Alfred 232–3 Khatibi, Abdelkébir 163; Amour bilingue 114–19, 120, 251 Khubchandani, Lachman M. 92, 248; Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos 84–5 kinship metaphors 6, 248; adoptive mother-tongue 151–6, 163; foreign words, and betrayal 159; the orphan 162; stepmother tongues 160–2, 163; translations 123, 124, 125; and the tree 91, 93, 94, 100–3 Kircher, Athanasius 108 Kittler, Friedrich: Aufschreibesysteme 1800–1900 94–6, 100 Klein-Lataud, Christine 111, 127 Klepfisz, Irena 68 Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth 3, 110, 128, 139, 140–3, 157 Knauth, K. Alfons 9, 50–3, 61, 101, 108, 223–5, 227, 235, 241–4, 250 Kramsch, Claire 61, 64, 148, 181 Krumm, Hans-Jürgen 74–6, 251–2 Kuhn, Thomas S. 6 Kundera, Milan 140 Kürtösi, Katalin: “Poets of Bifurcated Tongues, or on the Plurilingualism of Canadian-Hungarian Poets” 60 La Bruyère, Jean de 18 Laclos, Choderlos de, Pierre: Les Liaisons dangereuses 111 lactation and cultivation metaphor 27–30, 93, 101, 167 Lakoff, George 6, 30 Lang, Georg: Entwisted Tongues. Comparative Creole Literature 60 language acquisition 5, 76, 167, 203; and animal imagery 96; colours, in language portraits 77; and damage to linguistic competence 152; lactation metaphor 28–30; and loss of mother-tongue 92; of a new mother-tongue 61–4, 93, 155–6; speech and body acts 58–9 language awareness 47, 223; Galilean perception 189–90, 194; metalinguistic 153, 155, 156, 230; of a polyglot matrix 119, 120; using language por­ traits 74, 75

Index language contact 137; body metaphors 87; and code-switching 19–21; as a collision 229–30; and evolution 38, 40, 55, 103; and grafting 105–8; lightening metaphor 230; spatial metaphors 133–4, 235 language diversity 1, 3, 8, 16, 37, 82, 96; attitudes, and plurilingualism 84–5; coral metaphor 208–10; and instrumentality 40–1; internal speech diversity 188, 191; and interrelation of national languages 122–3; mangrove and banyan metaphor 211–12; relation to nations 37–40; and schizoglossia 109–10; ship metaphor 221, 223 language evolution 107; arboreal metaphor 34–5, 91, 100, 210; reticulate model 102–3 language portraits 74; exploring repertoires 76; as language biography 78–82; monolingualism in 75; temporality 87; use of colours 77, 80, 87, 252 La Pléiade 29, 50, 56, 171 Latin 13, 14, 38, 40, 60, 67, 105, 123, 131, 183, 187, 190, 227, 243; in the Ensaladas genre 52; macaronic 51; substitution, and territorialization 171, 177; vs. vernacular 28–9, 47 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 31 Lawrence, D.H. 98 Lawrence, Karen R. 147, 148 Lefevere, André 124 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 123 Lennon, Brian 8, 148, 233–4, 235, 236 Leppänen, Sirpa 2, 4, 27, 49 liminality 148, 217; arboreal metaphors 210, 212; in bilingual writing 116; border metaphors 134–5; and the grotesque body 49, 86; and linguistic transitions 130–2 lingua franca 41, 253; ‘multilingua franca’ 253 Livy 42 Li Wei 25 Liyanage, Indika 5, 84, 247–8 Lubell, Stephen 231 Luca, Ghérasim 132 Luxembourgish 80, 81, 82 Lvovich, Natasha 24, 121 macaronic tradition 50–2, 55, 142 Maddox Jr., James H. 222–3 Makoni, Sinfree 2, 3, 5, 83, 105, 247, 253

279

Mallarmé, Stéphane: “Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard” (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) 241–2 mangrove tree metaphor 124, 183, 197, 204, 210–12, 216, 221, 231, 246, 248–9 Mann, Thomas 196 Manow, Philip 169 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 242–3 Masalha, Salman 60 matrix 201, 206, 232; and embeddedness 22, 105, 107; matrix language frame (MLF) 22–3; and the notion of mother-tongue 100–1; poly-linguistic 119–20 Mazzio, Carla 59 McGuire, James 116 Medici, Lorenzo de’: Commento de’ miei sonetti 28 Mediterranean Sea 41; echo chamber metaphor 213, 215–16, 248 Mehrez, Samia 114 melting pot metaphor 53–4 Memmes, Abdallah 115, 117 Menenius Agrippa 42 Menging, Urbain 140 metrolingualism 5–6, 25, 26, 38, 82–4, 205, 220, 247 Middle Ages 17, 100, 195, 231; grotesque imagery 50; lactation metaphor 28 minor literatures 181, 183, 184–5 Mitsch, Ruthmarie H. 210, 211 monolingualism 1, 7–8, 27, 70, 74, 120, 134, 187, 203, 247; body metaphors 43–4, 60, 68, 72, 85, 87; and code-switching 20; commercial practices 8; in language portraits 75, 78, 79, 82; literary genre diversity 194, 195, 196; and monogamy 149; parallel vs. complementary texts 235; the postmonolingual condition 2, 94, 236, 241; relation to multilingualism 1–2, 3, 18; relation to the mother-tongue 91–3, 99, 152, 154–5, 157, 158, 161, 163; spatial metaphors 192; and territorialization 167–82 Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia 23 Moore, Robert 5 Morpurgo Davies, Anna 32, 35 mother-tongue 28, 91; adoptive 151–6, 163; body metaphors 94–6; and the concept of matrix 100–1, 105; and family romance 91–4; grafting 105–8; interrelations 103–6; in

280

Index

language portraits 75; loss 92, 99–100; and nationalism 91, 92, 95, 121–7, 168; Nazi ideology, and anti-Semitism 97–100; new, and language acquisition 61–4, 93, 155–6; rewriting 157–9; as a stepmother 160–2, 163; tree metaphor 91, 100–3 Müller, Herta 73, 82, 86, 99; Die Nacht ist aus Tinte gemacht (The Night is Made of Ink) 71–2, 237, 238; “In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen” (Each Language has Different Eyes) 70 multilingua franca 253 multilingualism 5–8, 252–4; and code-switching 13–15, 20–4, 26; and deterritorialization 181–96; in language portraits 74–6, 78; literary, and in/visibi­ lity 236–8; negative connotations 99; vs. plurilingualism 84; related tensions 37, 41; relation to monolingualism 1–2, 3, 18; and schizoglossia 109–10; sexual transgression metaphors 113, 139–41, 145, 146, 150; ‘soft’ 4; spatial metaphors 121, 131, 134–5, 243–4; visual and acoustic metaphor 248–9; writing about 8–9; see also archipelago metaphor; body metaphors; culinary metaphors; organic metaphors; tree metaphor; sea/ocean metaphors Munasinghe, Viranjini 54 Munson, Marcella 127 mythology: and multilingualism 17–18; tongue metaphor 68 Nabokov, Vladimir 139–40, 226; Ada 140–1 Nail, Thomas 213 Nama language 59 nationalism, nationhood, national culture and language: centripetality 174–6; conflict with dialects 95–6, 171–2; ethnolinguistic nationalism 27–8, 100; geo-body 178–80; invention of national languages 171–4; and language diversity 37–40; language myths 167; organic metaphors 28–30; and the physiognomy of speech 30–1; relation to the mother-tongue 91, 92, 97–8, 121–7, 168; and territorialization 167–80; and untranslatability 4, 29–30, 167 Nazi ideology 97–9, 174 new metaphors 6, 7, 13, 247 Niccolai, Giulia 52–3 Noorani, Yaseen 4, 233

Norway 109, 177 Novakovich, Josip 160 ontological metaphors 30, 252; Hebrew culture 69; and organic metaphors 39; shift to epistemological 248 opacity 155, 203, 210, 214, 231, 246, 248 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts 171–2, 177 organic metaphors 6, 17, 27, 30, 126, 149, 154, 209, 251; acquisition of a new mother-tongue 64; the amoeba 55–6, 139; the banyan tree 211–12, 246; common roots 33–7; corals 197, 212, 214, 217, 241, 246, 251; and grafting 105–6; and indigestibility 55–6; lactation and cultivation 27–30, 93, 101, 167; language as an organism 35–7; language as body and organism 30–3; language diversity 37–41; the mangrove tree 124, 183, 197, 204, 210–12, 216, 221, 231, 246, 248–9; rhizomes 108, 183, 185, 186, 204–7, 210–11, 212, 214, 217, 246 osmosis 44, 55, 217, 247 O’ Sullivan, Helen 61, 63, 64 Otsuji, Emi 5, 25, 82–4 Ouaknin, Marc Alain: “La belle au bois drogman” 69 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi: Mutterzunge 64–6, 70, 99, 115, 157–8, 234, 237 Palakeel, Thomas 160 Pareigis, Christina 181, 183, 184, 185 parody: body politic 48–9; macaronic tradition 51–2 Pechey, Graham 194 Pennycook, Alastair 2, 3, 5, 25, 82–4, 105, 247, 253 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 132 Perloff, Marjorie 17 Philcox, Richard 138 Piller, Ingrid 18 Pilpul 104, 231–2, 235 plant metaphors 33, 98; common ancestry 34; and grafting 106, 108; language evolution 34, 36–7; language origin and classifications 35–6; organic terminology 37; organic vs. mechanical languages 35 Plato 42, 221 plurilingualism 5, 7, 188, 196, 229; brain activation 21; and code mixing 22; corporeal and gender metaphors 72; echoes and opacity metaphor 214; ethos 82–5; metaphor of the rhizome 204–5, 207; and new metaphors 247–8; strong

Index and weak 232–4; synaesthesia 252–4; webs, networks, and constellations 240–2 politics 66, 85, 154, 184, 202, 217, 221,

242; body metaphors 42–6, 48, 52,

78–9, 169, 170; and mother-tongues

97, 124, 126; and territorialization

167–79, 198

Politis, Vasilis 121, 133, 210

polyglossia 183, 196, 253; concentric

circles metaphor 191–3; and

heteroglossia 187–91; sea

metaphor 222–5

polylingualism 38, 142, 215, 242, 247;

culinary metaphors 52–3; multilateral

directionality 87; ‘polylingual langua­ ging’ 24–5, 26, 87; poly-linguistic matrix

119–20

Pound, Ezra 233

Prade, Juliane: (M) Other Tongues:

Literary Reflections on a Difficult

Distinction 92–3, 157, 182

Predoiu, Grazziella 237, 238

psycholinguistics 20–1, 143

purism 32, 56, 235; mother-tongue and

national language 95, 101; removal of

foreign-derived words 127, 159

Putsch, Johannes 170

Pym, Anthony 123, 125

Rabelais, François 18, 46, 47, 50, 196

railway track metaphor 152

rainbow metaphor 211, 248, 250, 250–1

Ratzel, Friedrich 168

regionalization 202

religious context 24, 65, 167; body

metaphors 28; Judaism, and arboreal

metaphors 102; macaronic prayers 52

Renaissance 3, 28–9, 47, 52, 189,

194, 249

Renan, Ernest 102

Renfrew, Alastair 46, 47, 49, 187

reterritorialization 185–7

reticulate evolution 102–3

rhizome metaphor 108, 185, 186, 212,

214, 246; and creolization 199, 204–7;

and entangled identities 210, 211;

and Jargon 183; and wandering

connectivity 209; and webbed

networks 217

Rivarol, Antoine de: De l’Universalité de la Langue Française 4

Robert, Marthe 184

Romaine, Suzanne 91–2

Romanian 72–3, 237–8

281

Sakai, Naoki 133, 178–80, 197; Translation

and Subjectivity. On ‘Japan’ and Cultural

Nationalism 179

Sanskrit 34, 36, 102

Sarkonak, Ralph 19, 229, 236

Sasse, Sylvia 107

Scaliger, Joseph Justus 100–1, 105

Schendel, Mira 225

schizoglossia 109–10 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 35, 137

Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 34;

Über die Sprache und Weisheit der

Inder (On the Language and Wisdom

of the Indians) 35

Schleicher, August 34; Die Deutsche

Sprache (The German Language)

36–7; Über die Bedeutung der Sprache

für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen

(On the Significance of Language for

the Natural History of Man) 125

Schleiermacher, Friedrich 121–7, 131,

132, 137, 157

Schmeling, Manfred 15

Schmidt, Johannes 104

Schmidt-Rohr, Georg 97

Schmieder, Falko 106

Schmitz-Emans, Monika 15, 24, 142,

229, 238, 240

Schottel, Justus Georg 101

Schuchardt, Hugo 104, 105

script-switching 23, 24; and language

duality 115; use of colours 114,

239–40, 250–1

sea/ocean metaphor 213, 245–6; boat crossing, diaspora and diversity 220–2; fluidity and liquidity 215–16; literary domain 225–8; and polyglossia 222–5; tidalectics 218–20; webbed networks 216–18 Sebba, Mark 24, 235–6, 239

Sebbar, Leila 132

Seiichi, Niikuni 243–4 self-translation 112, 118, 137, 150, 231,

232; border metaphors 128–30

Semitic languages 36, 39, 102, 189

Semprun, Jorge 71

serendipity metaphor 247

sexual acts and behaviour: and the act

of writing 128–9; in grammatical

genders 33; incest 140–1, 145, 148; and

linguistic interconnectedness 141–9; and

multilingualism 139; and translation 118,

130; see also adultery and infidelity;

bigamy metaphor

282

Index

Shapard, Robert 160 Siam 178–9 Simmel, Georg 170 Simon, Claude: La Route des Flandres 19 Simon, Sherry 132, 146, 147, 251 Simon-Oikawa, Marianne 244 Simonton, Dean Keith 23 Simultaneism 242 Singleton, David 1, 5, 9 Skinner, John: The Stepmother Tongue. An Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction 160–2 sociolinguistics 21, 134 Sokol, Neal 85 soup metaphor 52, 53 Spanglish 85, 111, 135 Spanish 52, 62, 135, 146, 234, 251; in bilingual writers 68–9, 112–14, 132, 139, 242; in The Name of the Rose 14 Spatialism 242, 243–4 spatial metaphors 249; adjacent circles 40, 123; borderlands 135–6; border patrol, and self-translations 129–30; concentric circles 191–3, 231–2; corporeal borders 87; edges, gates, thresholds 132–5, 210; planting and transplanting, and translations 126; rift 116, 237; walls 113, 121, 127–9; webs, network and constellations 229–46; see also liminality Speroni, Sperone: Dialogo delle lingue 28–9 Spiller, Roland 61, 64 Spitzer, Leo 28, 99, 155, 162, 232–3; “En apprenant le turc” (Learning Turkish) 153; “Erlebnisse mit der Adoptiv-Muttersprache” (Experiences with the Adoptive-Mother-Tongue) 151–3 Spotti, Massimiliano 2, 4, 27, 49 Spracherleben team (Experiencing Language) 76 Stavans, Ilan 85, 111, 132 Steiner, George 87, 132, 139, 140, 141, 149–50, 226; After Babel 119–20 Steinitz, Tamar 8 Stephani, Heinrich: Beschreibung meiner einfachen Lesemethode für Mütter (Description of My Simple Reading Method for Mothers) 95 Stierle, Karlheinz 108

Suleiman, Susan R. 149 Suphan, Bernhard 18 Swabian dialect 237, 238 symbiosis 93, 179, 247 synaesthesia 252–4 synergy 247 Tagore, Rabindranath 211 Tannenbaum, Michal: “‘With a tongue forked in two’: Translingual Arab Writers in Israel” 60 Tawada, Yoko 7, 9, 86, 132–3, 151, 160, 182, 200, 215, 246, 251; Das Bad 66–7; “Schreiben im Netz der Sprache” (Writing in the Web of Words) 240–1; Schwager in Bordeaux (Brother-in-law in Bordeaux) 239–40; Überseezungen (Overseas Tongues) 66–7, 227–30; “Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter” (From the Mother-Tongue to the Language-Mother) 154–6 Taylor-Batty, Juliette 17, 99, 222, 223, 224, 233, 242 territorialization 167–8; centripetality 174–6, 190; fragmentation, archipelago metaphor 197–200; geo-body and cofiguration 178–80; invention of national languages 170, 175, 179; state languages 176–8; unity and uniformity 168–71; see also deterritorialization Thomas, George 52, 101, 127 Timm, Uwe: Morenga 58–9, 68 Tolstoy, Leo 196 tongue metaphor 58; bifurcated 69, 113, 116; and the erotics of translation 138; idiomatic expressions 60; Pentecostal 68–9; and plurality/multiplicity 69–70, 86; rebelling and gaining freedom 68; rebirth into a new language 61–4; relation to sea and water metaphors 66, 67; twisted 60–1, 65 Torabully, Khal 200, 204, 205, 207–9, 212, 213, 216–17, 220–2, 241, 246, 248–9; Cale D’Étoiles – Coolitude 208, 216, 251 Trabant, Jürgen 4, 28, 34, 35, 37, 38, 96 translanguaging 25, 26, 74 translation: and the adultery metaphor 125–6, 137–9, 150; and the bi-langue 114–19; and bilingual writing, dichotomy in 121–7; as devoration 56; and the echo metaphor 214; gender metaphors 125, 126, 138–9; relation to sexual acts and identity 118–19, 130; self-translation 112,

Index 118, 128–30, 137, 150, 231, 232; spatial metaphors 123, 126, 128–30, 132–3 tree metaphor 27, 167, 168, 210; in classical vs. body politic 45–6; and grafting 105, 108; language as an organism 33–4, 37, 85; mother-tongue and kinship relations 91, 100–3, 152, 163; and organic unity 29; relation to the vessel metaphor 219, 221; territorialization of national languages 167, 168, 174, 245; see also banyan tree metaphor; coral metaphor; mangrove tree metaphor; rhizome metaphor Trier, Jost 98 trilingualism 23, 120, 237, 243, 252 Triolet, Elsa 110–11, 113 Turkish 64; vs. German language acquisition 65; in language portraits 75, 83; in literary translations 157–8; vs. North European languages 153–4 Turner, Victor 130–1 unpredictability 20, 38, 54, 145, 201, 202, 203, 210, 211, 214, 230, 253 untranslatability: culinary metaphors 53; and indigestibility 55–6; national languages 4, 29–30, 167, 191 van Gennep, Arnold 130–1 variation and stratification 39, 53, 68, 76, 85, 92, 204, 215; and centrifugality 190, 245; in code-switching 20, 22, 196; and heteroglossia 185, 188; in minor literatures 184; musical metaphors 248; spatial metaphors 192 Venuti, Lawrence 125 Verges, Paul 211 vernacular 14, 15, 51, 158; arborification 100–3; organic metaphors 28–30; and territorialization 173, 177–8 visual metaphors 72, 116–17, 237, 248–9, 250; in/visibility 65, 115, 210, 236–9; kaleidoscope 248–9, 250–1; opacity 155, 203, 210, 214, 231, 246, 248; see also colours; eye metaphor

283

Vitéz, György 60 Vlasta, Sandra 61, 65 Voisset, Georges 199 Vossler, Karl 174–5, 190; Geist und Kultur in der Sprache (Mind and Culture in Language) 176 vowels: and gender metaphors 33; Hebrew script 69 Wagner, Richard: Tristan und Isolde: Öd’ und leer das Meer, Empty and desolate the sea 222 Walcott, Derek 199, 215 Weidner, Daniel 121–2, 126 Weinreich, Uriel: Languages in Contact. Findings and Problems 20, 22 Weisgerber, Leo 28, 98; Die volkhaften Kräfte der Muttersprache p 99 Weissmann, Dirk 7, 70, 82, 184, 237 Wells, Rulon S. 30 Wenzel, Siegfried 51–2 West, Kevin 138, 139 Weston, Daniel 23, 24 Westphal, Bertrand 198, 199 Wiener, Linda F. 102 Wilde, Oscar 139 Wilson, Edmund 139 Winichakul, Thongchai: Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation 178 Wolf, Michaela 178 Wolfson, Louis 121; Le schizo et les langues 129–30 Wong, Elaine S. 244 Wu Mi: “On Correct Methods” 56–7 Yiddish 114; compared to Spanglish 111; in Kafka 157, 181–5 Yilidiz, Yasemin: Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Postmonolingual Condition 1, 2, 31, 65, 66, 91, 93–4, 95, 122–7, 141, 151, 154–60, 162, 163, 181, 182, 236, 241 Yukichi, Fukuzawa 197–8 Zaimoğlu, Feridun 162