Words in Collision: Multilingualism in English-Language Fiction 9780228017769

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Words in Collision

Words in Collision Multilingualism in English-Language Fiction

Michael L. Ross

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1697-7 cloth ISBN 978-0-2280-1776-9 ePDF ISBN 978-0-2280-1777-6 ePUB Legal deposit second quarter of 2023 Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Words in collision : multilingualism in English-language fiction / Michael L. Ross. Names: Ross, Michael L., author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220467374 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220467412 | ISBN 9780228016977 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228017769 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228017776 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. | LCSH: Multilingualism and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. | LCSH: Language and languages in literature. Classification: LCC PR878.L35 R67 2023 | DDC 823/.80934 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11/14 Adobe Minion Pro.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

1 Introduction: Intruders in the Text

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Part One The Western Canon 2 Shakespeare and Company: Language Barriers and Penetrations 27 3 “Music to My Ears”: Charlotte Brontë’s French Immersion 4 Strange Encounters: Henry James’s French Connection 5 Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: D.H. Lawrence

Part Two

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67 94

Postcolonial Language Variance

6 As the Word Turns: Postcolonial Language Variance

119

7 “The Greatest Trick Colonialism Plays”: Nigerian Novelists and the Question of Language 139 8 Languages of History: Anita Desai and Arundhati Roy

161

9 Conclusion: Cities of Strangers and the New Insularity

180

Notes

193

Works Cited Index 209

199

Acknowledgments

A number of good friends and colleagues have generously read portions of this book in draft and offered valuable feedback. They include Sarah Brophy, Ron Granofsky, Linda Hutcheon, and – last and most of all – Lorraine York, who served in several different capacities – critic, research assistant, and cheerleader – and who read the entire manuscript more times than can possibly have been good for her mental balance. The two readers for McGill Queen’s University Press (MQUP) also offered helpful criticisms; one of them pointed out several oversights in my treatment of African languages. I owe thanks as well to members of the MQUP staff. Jonathan Crago, above all, steadfastly helped to guide the project from its inception through the lengthy process of its completion. Philip Cercone, too, provided support when it was needed. Kathleen Fraser managed the details of the book’s production, and the press’s eminently creative design staff came up with the witty and eye-catching cover art. Grace Seybold has been an exemplary copyeditor, invariably alert and diligent; working with her was a real pleasure. Michel Pharand not only helped with the index but also offered useful suggestions. Portions of this text have been based, in extensively altered form, on articles appearing in the following periodicals: Brontë Studies (44:4 pp. 352–63), The D. H. Lawrence Review (38:1 pp. 1–21), The Henry James Review (39:2 pp. 152–6), The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2019), and Research in African Literatures (50:1 pp. 111–26). They are reprinted by permission.

Words in Collision

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Introduction Intruders in the Text Aristotle was right when he said that man is a political animal, and language is one of the most political things about us. John Lanchester, How to Speak Money, 16–17

Apropos of Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley, which includes among its characters several voluble Francophones, the critic James Buzard comments: “Brontë seems intent on asking … how much French, and how strong a commitment to the emotional energies accessible through French, an English book can accommodate” (Disorienting 171). The present book will consider questions of precisely this sort: How much French – or Italian, or German, or Igbo, or Urdu – can a fictional work written mainly in English profitably contain? For that matter, what is the point of creating a “macaronic” text, one including elements of a language likely to be unfamiliar to many readers? What sort of fictional work are such “intruders” meant to perform? Do they, as Buzard assumes, bring in their wake emotional energies, or might they instead impede the affective momentum of the narrative? If, as John Lanchester asserts, language is one of the most political things about us, do “foreign” language passages have an impact on the ideological resonance of a literary work? This study will seek to illuminate such matters, focusing on texts by representative Western and postcolonial authors, ranging from Shakespeare and Sterne to Chigozie Obioma and Arundhati Roy. To begin with, I want to take a broader look at some general issues raised by the practice of language-mixing. Normally, languages contribute to our sense of belonging to a particular place and to a specific culture. According to the Australian theorist Bill Ashcroft, “The unshakeable link between ‘our’ language and us has made language … the most emotional site for cultural identity” (1). Languages have a pivotal role

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Words in Collision

in establishing and transmitting a sense of cultural affiliation, a role that can make them a vital binding force across generations. My own principal concern will be with what happens when that unshakeable link gets shaken by exposure to diverse languages contained within a single literary framework. Other questions follow: How may the identity of a fictional character be framed by the language or languages he or she happens to use? Does it make sense to say (modifying a familiar adage) “You are what you speak”? What sorts of effects may the performing of an alternate idiom produce upon a fictional subject’s sense of self and on her relations with her fellows? How do coexisting or competing languages reflect the power structures embedded in works of literature? In the field of everyday casual usage, as distinct from literary fiction, the intermixing of two or more languages is far from uncommon. As the sociolinguistic researcher Shana Poplack has found, while such mixing occurs less frequently than is often assumed, that is no reason to regard it as unnatural or eccentric. While it is “widely considered to display laziness and ignorance, when not blamed for the deterioration or even demise of one or all of the languages involved,” in actual practice it demands appreciable expertise on the part of speakers, and its medleys seldom violate the syntactical norms of either of the tongues in question (Poplack). Both in daily life and in literary settings, interlingual encounters can enhance the rewards of communication. A mastery of more than one language can confer both tangible and intangible benefits: the expansion of one’s range of ethno-geographic awareness, along with the broadening of empathy that often accompanies a perspective surmounting the insular. According to the renowned linguistics and political commentator Noam Chomsky, “[T]he variety of languages and cultures is – and should be – a source of human happiness and enrichment” (1251). And yet happiness and enrichment are by no means the predetermined outcomes of such variety. Language differences can ignite conflicts, sometimes violent ones, in jurisdictions as diverse as Québec, India, or Cameroon. In the latter country, an Anglophone separatist was not long ago sentenced by the ruling Francophone regime to life imprisonment for alleged felonies, including terrorism and secession (MacLean). (It is a sad irony that neither French nor English is a vernacular indigenous to the country in question; both are colonial impositions.) An informative 2018 collection entitled The Multilingual

Introduction

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Citizen sheds light on both the upsides and downsides of multilingualism as it operates over a broad spectrum of communities. In a chapter concerning “Language Rights and Thainess,” the authors warn: “When language loss occurs among an ethnic minority, the cultural identity of the members is threatened. Language loss leads to a loss of confidence, self-esteem, and life-long security” (Premsrirat and Bruthiaux 151). Not only that; language dispossession spells “the loss of knowledge systems, local wisdom, world views, history, and means of communicating and promoting cultural identity at the local level” (151) – sweeping claims, but not implausible ones. Other essays focus on how populations in far-flung zones of the globe are conducting campaigns to keep their minority languages vibrant, together with their allied cultures. Sections include analyses of conflictual language situations ranging from East Timor to Mozambique to Sweden to – again – Cameroon, detailing the painstaking negotiations often required to ensure that competing languages are treated equitably. Little wonder that one of the volume’s editors terms multilingualism “a space of vulnerability” (Lim et al. 19). Nonetheless, the jostling of diverse languages can offer a space not just of vulnerability but of opportunity. There is no good reason to consider hermetic enclosure within a single tongue as unavoidable or normative. According to the linguistics specialist John Edwards, “To be bilingual or multilingual is not the aberration supposed by many (particularly, perhaps, by people in Europe and North America who speak a ‘big’ language); it is a normal and unremarkable necessity for the majority in the world today. A monolingual perspective is often, unfortunately, a consequence of a powerful language of wider communication” (1). English, currently the most dynamic of such “big” languages, has been wittily described by Benedict Anderson as “a kind of global-hegemonic post-clerical Latin” (207). A recurrent focus of the present study will fall on power balances and imbalances among contending idioms. Language variance in literary works differs in important ways from informal polyglot discourse. Where in casual conversation it is improvisatory and spontaneous, in fictional texts it is premeditated and purposeful. Literary authors are seldom compelled to produce multilingual novels or poems as a matter of practical necessity, but there is no good reason to look askance at such texts as anomalous. Programmatically bilingual works consistently composed in two or more languages with none granted primacy, such as Canadian author Gail

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Scott’s 1981 novel Heroine, where French and English vie for dominance, are rare, and this study will not dwell on such outliers. More common, and different in their overall effect, are works framed principally in one language, usually a “big” one, with occasional forays into one or more others: Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Villette (1853), Henry James’s The Tragic Muse (1890), Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), to list a few examples to be considered later. The reasons for such language-mixing are many and various. One motive often cited is simple authorial bravado, the desire to parade one’s cosmopolitan sophistication. As William Cohen archly observes, “[A]n occasional dash of French adds a je ne sais quoi” (171). However, as I hope to demonstrate, other, more serious textual concerns commonly lie behind such unorthodox linguistic moves. One tendency shared by a number of such works is a special sort of linguistic self-consciousness. Perhaps owing to an inherent tug of artistic gravity, narratives that incorporate numerous “foreign” language elements typically foreground language itself as a major object of thematic exploration. The tendency crops up in as early a text as Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599); it is still prominent four centuries later in Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). It thus enables fruitful comparisons among a quite diverse roster of texts. Owing to my own limitations, this book is of necessity written in that “global-hegemonic post-clerical Latin,” English. My vantage point is that of an Anglophone Canadian reader acquainted to varying degrees with several European languages. The question of how non-Western readers might respond to the works discussed is one I am not in a position to address with any confidence. The writers themselves display varying levels of linguistic versatility, a fact that does not determine the merits of what they create. As Kenneth Haynes observes, “Multilingual knowledge is not like a key which a writer either does or does not possess; we must consider the entire range of bilingualism or else neglect many literary aspects of that phenomenon” (20). While the occasional critic – Haynes among them – has commented on the presence of multilingualism in this or that literary work, wide-ranging treatments, featuring attentive textual analysis, have been few in number. One reason for this paucity of attention may be that academic scholars are apt to view the presence of “foreign” elements in a work of fiction or poetry as peripheral or even self-indulgent: as

Introduction

7

a flaunting of erudition, or an authorial quirk not germane to the core concerns of a text. There is reason to believe, however, that attitudes may be evolving. At least one current journal (Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices) is entirely devoted to multilingual issues, and a recent critic has applauded “the burgeoning field of translingual literary studies” (Hansen 619). The present book is meant to contribute to that evolution. My primary aim is to demonstrate that language variance in literary texts is seldom capricious – that passages derived from French or German or less familiar tongues ordinarily have good reason to be there, and to be placed where they are placed.

Some Uses of Language-Mixing Collisions between diverse languages in a literary text are often at bottom encounters in a larger culture war, skirmishes stemming from endemic clashes of belief and commitment. Above all, the incorporation of words and phrases from “other” languages tends naturally to place in relief broader issues relating to otherness per se. The biblical myth of the Tower of Babel stands as a cautionary fable of the divisiveness that can attend language proliferation, and abrasive antagonisms between fictional characters are sometimes grounded in linguistic impasses. Repeatedly in the chapters to come, the unease of personal estrangement is closely linked with such dissonances. To list a few examples, such estrangement afflicts the displaced Scots-accented Jeanie Deans in Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), as it does Henry James’s dislocated Yankee abroad, Christopher Newman (The American, 1877), while a parental proscription of Igbo speech in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) estranges the teenaged protagonist, Kambili, from herself. What is more, such tensions frequently extend beyond individual conflicts to issues affecting broader sectors of a society. Still, although it may be the case that, as John Lanchester maintains, language is one of the most political things about us, not every instance of literary language-mixing lends itself to a political reading. It may be naïve to assume that any given feature of a fictional work is utterly devoid of ideological baggage, but often enough intruding words and phrases have no obvious connection with whatever substantive issues a text may explore. Occurrences of literary language variance may have an emotional impact without entailing advocacy.

8

Words in Collision

Sometimes even one word drawn from an alternate lexicon can carry a powerful affective charge. In Ernest Hemingway’s classic 1933 story “A Clean and Well-Lighted Place,” English (the default vehicle of narration) is punctuated by a single isolated item of Spanish. Despite this juxtaposition of national tongues, nationality itself does not figure as a controlling interest; the identity of the intruding language – Spanish rather than, say, French or German – is immaterial. The story’s plot line is minimal: the older of two waiters in a Spanish bar meditates at closing on the emptiness of human existence. “It was all nothing and a man was nothing too,” he muses glumly in presumed English “translation,” but then his interior monologue swerves momentarily to his mother tongue: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada” and so on (791). The hollow drumbeat of the single reiterated Spanish word has a disturbing force far stronger than would its English equivalent. What gives the passage its startling pungency is the juxtaposition of the two disparate language streams. Thrust sardonically amid the anodyne English cadences of the Lord’s Prayer, the relentless “nada” delivers a defamiliarizing jolt. The foreignness of the unexpected word mimics the foreignness of the hollow, godforsaken universe. “Nada” becomes more than simply a surrogate for the English “nothing”; it takes on the status of a metonym embodying the vast, dismaying vacancy of what it denotes. This is one more instance of language variance accompanying and enhancing estrangement, but the estrangement here is of a cosmic rather than a social or political order. The author is not attempting to enlist sympathy for the plight of oppressed Latin café servers. If the story has any sort of ideological thrust, it would have to do with the awful irrelevance of formal religious belief amid the modern waste land; but even that hardly feeds into any definable agenda. The word “nada” draws its withering force not from any concrete social grievance but from its eerie, metaphysical echo-effect. In some contexts, on the other hand, a single imported word can have a more precisely targeted social resonance. In Canadian-Nigerian writer Francesca Ekwuyasi’s 2020 novel Butter Honey Pig Bread, a central character, Taiye, tells a friend that her twin sister has married a man named Farouq. The news stirs curiosity: “Muslim?” “I think so. I’m not sure.” “Nigerian?”

Introduction

9

“No.” “Oyibo?” “I think, partly maybe. I’ve seen pictures. He’s brown.” (59) In this catalogue of identifying attributes, “oyibo” – Nigerian vernacular for a white person – has a destabilizing effect. Its consequence, particularly for readers of European descent, is to provoke a disruption of their comfortable, customary perspective. To quote the cultural theorist Richard Dyer, “For those in power in the West, as long as whiteness is felt to be the human condition, then it alone both defines normality and fully inhabits it” (9). The women’s casual use of “oyibo” de-normalizes whiteness, placing it not as the default human condition but as an anomalous peculiarity. Such a use of alternative language to effect a bracing perspectival shift is especially common, for understandable reasons, in postcolonial writing. It is equally common, however, for alternate diction to have not a distancing but rather a familiarizing intent. A “foreign” word can act as a semiotic spur, reminding readers that on the lips of some characters, speech should be understood as “really” situated in another discursive register. Often an English-language narrative concerning non-Anglophone actors will flout plausibility by representing those figures as speaking not their own actual language – Spanish, French, Urdu – but colloquial English, a transference Hemingway employs in the story cited above. This approach is sometimes termed the “homogenizing convention” (Delabastita, “A Great Feast” 307), though “homogenizing fallacy” might be more to the point. Where such a convention (or fallacy) has been adopted, a few inserted samples of indigenous vernacular can alert the reader to the fact that the surrounding English dialogue should be understood as “really” a translated version of a hypothetical “original” conversation. The use of such linguistic prompts dates back as far as Shakespeare (see chapter 2), and was in later centuries pressed into service by novelists such as Brontë and James. In Villette, Charlotte repeatedly introduces dialogue among French-speakers with some actual French phrases, signalling: The following exchange may be transcribed in English, but don’t be misled; it was “really” conducted in quite another tongue. This sort of rhetorical work-around is especially common in fiction by African, Asian, and Indigenous writers, where characters may be presumed to be using languages opaque to most non-natives. Such

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writers may naturally turn to ad hoc verbal expedients to minimize barriers to readability. Often, in postcolonial works adopting default Anglophone narration, English serves a prosthetic purpose, functioning as a stand-in for a local linguistic medium not readily accessible to the uninitiated. It therefore becomes essential that the “real” language spoken by characters peek through – make its presence intermittently but unignorably felt. The impulse to render an unfamiliar milieu less abstract often leads writers to interpolate “foreign” elements into an English-language stream. Such a proceeding can serve a hortatory purpose, intimating that the “other” culture being evoked, whatever its otherness, demands a transnational readership’s respectful attention. Such persuasion hardly amounts, however, to a full-scale ideological platform. Along these lines, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) sets a precedent by importing a substantial amount of French diction to enhance the credibility of the author’s evocation of place, as if to say, “Why this is France, nor am I out of it” (see chapter 2). A recent novel that makes use of non-English-language fragments to create such a sense of local presence is Min Jin Lee’s 2017 best seller Pachinko, which focuses on the lives of several generations of Korean migrants in Japan. While the novel’s central concerns can be called political, having to do with the hardships inflicted on such newcomers by unfriendly Japanese social policies and prejudices, the book’s linguistic strategies seldom bear directly on those concerns. There is an abundance of phraseology drawn from both national lexicons, Korean and Japanese. Although these could create obstacles for non-Asian readers, they contribute positively by conjuring a tangible sense of the density of the mixed cultural ambience – the “thereness” of place – and consist for the most part of names of “ethnic” foods or everyday expressions such as umma (Korean “mother”). While the novel dwells on the power imbalance between Korean migrants and native Japanese, the linguistic insertions seem on the whole balanced; imported language elements tend here, as they do in a host of other such instances, to play a mostly neutral, documentary role. Comparable “foreign” elements can also regularly be found in non-fictional texts. In the American poet Caroline Forché’s powerful memoir What You Have Heard Is True (2019), recounting the author’s experiences in turbulent 1980s El Salvador, Spanish words and phrases abound. These, again, transmit a vivid sense of presence in the foreign

Introduction

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(and frightening) place with its own unique cultural, political, and linguistic vocabulary. But here the Spanish words accomplish something more. In an account subtitled A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, they also actively solicit the reader’s sympathy with those Salvadorans who strive, at great risk, to defy a ruthless and corrupt regime. The dividing line between impartial reporting and riveting witness has a way of becoming blurred.

Verbal Intruders: Neutral and Activist In narratives that incorporate socio-political advocacy, language-mixing can add dramatic force and nuance to whatever issues are being spotlighted. A theorist whose thinking is germane to this state of affairs is the influential Russian philologist Mikhail Bakhtin. In the words of his editor, Caryl Emerson, Bakhtin believed that “[m]ultilingual environments liberate man by opening up a gap between things and their labels; analogously, the novel is more free than the epic because novelistic heroes are never equivalent to their plots” (Problems, “Introduction” xxxii). For Bakhtin (as for theorists such as Edwards and Chomsky), multilingualism is no aberration but rather a basic condition of human interchange: “Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts. Bakhtin’s writing is permeated by awe at the multiplicity of languages he hears. These are not just the bluntly distinct national languages – Russian, English, French – that exist as the normative material of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different ‘languages’ that exist simultaneously within a single culture and a single speaking community” (xxxi). In fact, while Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia meant for him primarily the jostling of discrete idiolects within a single linguistic field, he did not neglect the “bluntly distinct national languages” that his editor treats somewhat dismissively. To quote Bakhtin’s own words, “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (Dialogic Imagination 262, my emphasis). While the acknowledgment of national languages is only parenthetical, it does glance at the place of such languages within the dialogic schema of polyphonic voices constituting novel form. For the purposes of the present study I intend to jettison Bakhtin’s parentheses.

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Although Bakhtin has little expressly to say about them, fully interlingual collisions persistently arise from textual clashes of ethos and allegiance. In this connection the authors of the seminal study The Empire Writes Back (1989) make a crucial point: a language can come to operate as a metonym for a gamut of national or cultural values and affiliations; interpolated “foreign” elements “are directly metonymic of that cultural difference which is imputed by the linguistic variation” (Ashcroft et al. 53). In works of literature the interplay of idioms normally is, as Bakhtin asserts, artistically organized, but the organization tends often to channel the author’s ideological investments. Edwards speaks of “that identification with one’s own language which has always been a marker of nationalism, and the perception (which is true, at least to some degree) that each language interprets and presents the world in a somewhat different way; the unique wellsprings of group consciousness, traditions, beliefs and values are thus seen as intimately entwined with language. One’s language is one’s inheritance and one’s secret code” (5). As Edwards implies (with due caution), there exists a strong tendency to assume a kinship between the language one speaks and the national culture to which one belongs. In actual fact, such an assumption flies in the face of blunt empirical realities. There are many nations that are home to multiple languages (Switzerland, Belgium, India, and so on), while some languages are spoken across a spectrum of homelands (Spanish, English, Arabic). As Doris Sommer warns, “[t]he world has outgrown [any] one-to-one identity between a language and a people” (xv). What is more, modern linguists tend to regard languages as too fluid and multifarious to fit comfortably into rigid generic grids, “French,” “Italian,” and the like. Such labels, however, simplistic though they may be, are by and large taken for granted by the authors of the fictional works considered in the present study. For practical purposes of analysis, I will seldom cross-question such assumptions. Clashes of diverse languages regularly bring into sharper focus tensions underlying national or ethnic affiliations. Even a linguistically hybrid book title can have the force of a polemic. An example is Québécois author Roch Carrier’s 1968 novel La Guerre, Yes Sir! Though the book’s text is written in French, the title is divided evenly between words from that lexicon and words from the other official Canadian language. This might arguably reflect the Québec penchant for amalgamating the two

Introduction

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languages in casual speech, but the implications reach further. In its mere four words Carrier’s title manages to epitomize the state of affairs between the two language communities. To the Québec villagers in his novel, the great convulsion in which their homeland is embroiled, World War Two, which they designate indifferently as “la guerre,” is at bottom an “anglais” affair. The concept of military service is an abstraction a world away from their own peremptory daily concerns. The title’s lexical enjambment, its abrupt swerve from “home” language to “other” language, anticipates the whole ideological trajectory of the ensuing narrative. It highlights the power imbalance between the two ethnic cohorts: between the order-issuing prerogatives of the English commanders and the enforced compliance (“Yes Sir!”) of the Francophone subalterns. The two solitudes captured in the bilingual title are flagrantly unequal solitudes. For a further demonstration of how the “two solitudes” trope can make its point through language variance, one can cite another Canadian work, Mavis Gallant’s acerbic 1957 short story “Bernadette.” In it a bourgeois Montreal couple, the “kindly, liberal Knights” (60), run up against a stubborn communication barrier in their dealings with their young housemaid from the Québec hinterland. The barrier is not altogether linguistic (Robbie and Nora Knight know some French, Bernadette can manage a few words of English); it arises rather from the cultural gap undergirding language mix-ups. The Knights treat Bernadette chivalrously, as befits their name, but with bland, and blind, condescension. The obstacle stems from their utter ignorance of the confused inner workings of Bernadette’s psyche, a by-product of her limiting provincial upbringing. Suspecting that Bernadette is pregnant, Nora asks her if she is going to have un bébé; the girl replies evasively, “Sais pas” (Gallant 83). Urged to reveal the identity of the putative child’s father, she unhelpfully answers, “Un monsieur” (84). Her flat, reluctant French utterances contrast painfully with her employers’ earnest but glib solicitations. Her bleak family history convinces her that the infant she is carrying is doomed to die, but that its spirit will blessedly ascend to heaven and pray for her soul. In the end she assures herself pathetically, “Il prie pour moi” (He’s praying for me) (93). It is the story’s unfunny punch line. Both for the Knights and for Bernadette, a superficial knowledge of the other’s language collides with a disabling incomprehension of the other’s cultural formation.

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Often language clashes highlight less grave gaps of understanding, while still contributing to the pinpointing of characters’ foibles. Verbal affectation can sometimes provide a clue to more consequential traits. In Brontë’s Villette the footloose (and tongue-loose) young Ginevra Fanshawe vexes the heroine, Lucy Snowe, with her habit of sprinkling foreign locutions randomly amid her inane English prattle, the all-purpose Gallicism chose substituting for any word that does not spring readily to mind. This linguistic tic is not entirely trivial; it hints at the facile callowness Ginevra will evince throughout the narrative. Similarly, in Henry James’s story “An International Episode” (1879), the American matron Mrs Westgate’s compulsion to inject French mots into her conversation captures the narrowness of her subjectivity (“‘Look at that green dress with blue flounces,’ said Mrs. Westgate. ‘Quelle toilette!’” [Collected Stories I 411]). Even minor verbal intrusions can trigger portentous vibrations. In James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), when the impressionable Isabel Archer first encounters Madame Merle, the older woman explains that she is playing the piano “du bout des doigts” (with her fingertips) so as not to disturb Isabel’s ailing uncle (175). In a fashion Isabel (along with the reader) cannot as yet fathom, the French phrase presages Merle’s muffled but baleful influence over Isabel’s future. Questions of nationality enter here by the back stairs. The stranger’s words mislead Isabel into taking her for a Frenchwoman; only later does she discover that Merle is a fellow American. The riddle of the woman’s origins is in itself a secondary concern, but her willingness to manufacture a false impression is telling. The phrase du bout des doigts encodes Merle’s propensity for stealthy subterfuge, her practice of keeping awkward information under wraps. It matters that on our first glimpse of this personage, she should be faintly but distinctly marked with an aura of the alien, the equivocal, the euphemistic. As often in James, the motif of performativity is central here; while Madame Merle is literally performing at the keyboard, she is figuratively performing an identity not her own. Edwards’s identification of one’s language as a secret code has a special applicability to works of literature, where a specific national tongue can have repercussions out of proportion to its textual prominence. The impact of the isolated Spanish word nada in the Hemingway story is one such instance. Less ominous is the symbolic vibrancy of French

Introduction

15

as a liberating agent in some nineteenth-century works of fiction. The juvenile protagonist of James’s What Maisie Knew (1897) finds in her nascent grasp of that language a tempting escape route from her destabilizing life with self-indulgent, mendacious elders. In the earlier novella The Europeans (1878), the advent of a pair of vivacious French-speaking siblings has an impact on their austere Bostonian relatives, the Wentworths, that, while initially upsetting, turns out over time to be enlivening (see chapter 4). In fictional narratives, even seemingly minor language interpolations can underscore larger thematic patterns. A striking example is E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), where the theatre of action alternates between England and Italy, and the idioms of the two countries are juxtaposed. Italian is represented only by brief fragments, but it exerts a powerful subliminal tug on the psyche of Forster’s heroine, Lucy Honeychurch. The turning point of Lucy’s emotional journey hinges on an act of mistranslation, doubling as an interlingual Freudian slip. On a convivial excursion from Florence to the adjacent hill town of Fiesole, Lucy attempts to track down the two English clergymen in attendance, Mr Beebe and Mr Eager. Unsure of the proper Italian term for such worthies, she asks the waiting cabmen falteringly, “Dove buoni uomini?” (Where good men?) (66). The younger driver creatively misconstrues her adjective “buoni” to mean not “morally upright” but (in classic stage-Latin fashion) “erotically desirable.” He accordingly escorts her not to a pastor but to the thoroughly unclerical young George Emerson (“Eccolo!” the guide triumphantly exclaims), enabling the kiss between George and Lucy that kindles their wavering romance, culminating in their marriage. At the end, honeymooning in a Florence hotel, the couple hear a cabman below their windows intoning persistently, “Signorino, domani faremo un giro” (Young sir, tomorrow we’ll go for a drive1) (206 et seq). Though ostensibly an impertinent distraction, the Italian invitation confirms the full import of the earlier language-slip; it heralds the return of the no-longer-repressed. By this point in the novel Italian speech has become synonymous with the importunate whisper of Lucy’s sexuality. As Forster’s chapter title “The End of the Middle Ages” (205) intimates, having relinquished the dim, “properly English” past, Lucy is ready to welcome what the cabbie’s Italian words unwittingly portend: futurity (domani) and pleasure without shame. Shifts from one language

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Words in Collision

to another can thus signify a life-altering plunge from lacklustre inhibition into incandescent adventure. A comparable transformation occurs in Villette, where the adoption of French by another Lucy, Lucy Snowe, allows her to shed her stifling, unpromising English past (see chapter 3). Linguistic encounters like the foregoing dramatize tensions that occur on the level of interpersonal relationships, but other collocations may point to broader areas of ideological encounter. A compact example is Carrier’s title La Guerre, Yes Sir! Other, more fully developed instances will be treated in the chapters to follow. While in those works the primary language of narration is English, one should recognize that such strategic confrontations of language occur as well in other literatures, often with political implications. A famous case in point is Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), which is notable for – among much else – containing a surprisingly large amount of French, a peculiarity prompting a recent critic to call the work “truly bilingual” (Cohen 179), but which some of its early readers found seriously disconcerting (Jensen 609). In Tolstoy’s masterpiece, dialogic interplay is as dense as in any novel by Mikhail Bakhtin’s favourite, Dostoevsky. Boldly situated at the threshold of the narrative, the intruding language sets the fictional stage with a flourish: this Russian classic opens with a barrage not of Russian but of French. Princess Anna Pavlovna Scherer is holding forth about the monstrous deeds of the upstart, Napoleon: “Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, estates, de la famille Buonaparte” (3). (Well, my prince, Genoa and Lucca are no longer anything more than properties, estates, of the Bonaparte family.) Soon after, we are treated to a contrary viewpoint. At Princess Anna’s soirée, young Pierre Bezukhov, newly repatriated from the West, stoutly defends Napoleon as the avatar of progressive causes: freedom and equality. A reader’s impulse might be to identify the princess as an ardently patriotic Russian, Pierre as a turncoat cosmopolitan Francophile; even his given name is suspiciously Gallic. But language habits soon obviate any such presumption. Princess Anna’s anti-Bonapartist diatribe is, ironically, couched in the foreigner’s own tongue; in her zeal to safeguard her Russian homeland she labels him with “Gallic” hyperbole “[c]et Antichrist” (3). Some commentators have observed that by representing Anna and her set as habitually speaking French Tolstoy is simply adhering to historical fact; that is how Russian aristocrats of the time actually did speak (and the princess’s animus against the French emperor may stem

Introduction

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less from his foreignness than from the threat he poses to her aristocratic privilege). But as Julie Hansen argues, “The functions of French in War and Peace are not limited to realism … The narrative … reveals how the characters’ choice of language, like other aspects of their behavior, is always contextual, influenced by setting and social situations” (612). Closely considered, the predilection for French among Princess Anna’s set betokens their displacement from their country’s staunch Slavic roots. This deracination is made embarrassingly plain by the antics of one of their number, the vapid Prince Ippolit’s insistence on retelling a pointless, leadenly jocose anecdote in stumbling Russian, distorted by inflections of his customary French: “And Prince Ippolit began to speak in Russian, with a pronunciation such as Frenchmen have after spending a year in Russia” (21). If indeed you are what you speak, Ippolit has effectually declared himself an impostor, a flimsy imitation of a Russian. By contrast Pierre, despite his passing infatuation with Bonaparte, proves to be a dedicated defender of his homeland. While he displays a command of several European tongues he appears to be perfectly at home in his native Russian, and his later resolve to thwart Napoleon’s designs, if quixotic, testifies to his heartfelt patriotic zeal.2 But the metonymic valence of a language, whether French or some other, is not set in stone; it mutates in accordance with varying contexts. An English work dating from half a century after War and Peace, Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), again foregrounds French as an agent of displacement within a Russian setting, but the displacement in this case derives from an internal rather than a foreign menace. Here French figures as the idiom not of a Gallic adventurer but of reactionary tsarist officialdom; it becomes a medium frighteningly suited to purposes of intimidation. The young student Razumov, who has confided to his patron, the Prince, intelligence concerning the violent acts of his fellow student, the agitator Haldin, accompanies the older man to the residence of General T--, a high-ranking government functionary: Razumov held his breath before the bronze [figurine] as if expecting a crash. Behind his back a voice he had never heard before insisted politely – “Asseyez-vous donc.” The Prince almost shrieked, “Mais comprenez-vous, mon cher! L’Assassin! The murderer – We have got him …” (44)

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The crash the student anticipates takes the tempered form of a startling code-switch: an abruptly interjected alternate language: French, as opposed to everyday Russian (in Conrad conventionally rendered as English). (The shock may be all the sharper because, by the date of the novel’s action, French had largely fallen out of favour among the Russian gentry; it thus figures as an archaic anomaly.) It at once configures the interview in an artificial mode that further unnerves the already edgy student, operating as a private code that leagues the two older men in a shadowy entente cordiale from which Razumov is excluded. Here again, language variance aggravates estrangement; the alien words have an alienating impact, looking ahead proleptically to Razumov’s exile to a Francophone locale, where – even though surrounded by fellow Russian expatriates – he will be ineluctably estranged from his pristine Russian self. Obliged by the Russian authorities to remove himself to Frenchspeaking Geneva, Conrad’s Razumov is compelled, in his dealings with other exiles, to perform an assumed role as a committed revolutionary. The pretense ultimately embroils his life in unsustainable contradictions.

A Note on Dialect Because the differences between a “standard” language and its dialectal siblings are by definition slighter than those between formally distinct languages, the literary intermixing of such codes is a practice that obeys its own, somewhat separate rhetorical principles. A speaker of Yorkshire or Mississippi dialect in a novel narrated in orthodox English may risk appearing uneducated, as opposed to a character who speaks an unequivocally “foreign” language such as French or German. Nevertheless, dialect speech, too, can generate a Bakhtinian clash of diverse idioms and attitudes. Because dialectal variants are often stigmatized as markers of ignorance or uncouthness – as bumbling departures from a “proper” norm – they have long been standbys of comic business. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Captain Fluellen’s solecism “Alexander the Pig” for Alexander the Great is meant to elicit a chuckle at the oafish Welshman’s expense. But heteroglossia involving dialects can also serve non-comic affective and dramatic ends. Instances of this are, again, not limited to works in English. In Elena Ferrante’s novel La Vita Bugiarda degli Adulti (The Lying Life of Adults) (2019), the teenaged protagonist

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and narrator has, in effect, two separate selves, corresponding to two discrete modes of speech – indeed, even two different names. To her parents and childhood friends she is known by her “correct” Italian name, Giovanna; by her raffish aunt Vittoria and her circle she is called by its Neapolitan dialect equivalent, Gianní. The discrepancy feeds into a far-reaching contrast between bourgeois and working-class modes of life, coinciding with the topographical divide between Giovanna’s “proper” hilltop home (the family literalizes the term “haute bourgeoisie”) and her aunt’s helter-skelter lower-city residence. Or again, in Domenico Starnone’s memoir-novel Via Gemito (2000), the talented, volatile father, Federì (Federico), often expresses himself in (sometimes vulgar) Neapolitan dialect, whereas his son, as narrator, customarily uses “standard” (i.e. northern) Italian. The contrast accentuates the strained relations between father and son, a central theme of Starnone’s book. An analogous verbal contrast from an English work occurs in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), where it acts as a recurrent reminder of the rift between (here again) the father, Walter Morel, a dialect-speaking Midlands miner, and his upward-aspiring son Paul, who normally speaks “standard” (i.e. southern) English. Such linguistic dissonances recur in Lawrence’s later work, although here their implications tend to be reversed. A pioneer in the fictional deployment of such intramural verbal collisions was Sir Walter Scott, in whose work the contending speech modes – standard English and Scots dialect – recapitulate the persistent friction between British North and South. A classic embodiment of this paradigm, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, will be considered in the next chapter.

Collisions and Cosmopolitanisms The overall aim of this book is to explore the ideological and affective impact of language variance in a broad selection of texts, ranging in time from Shakespeare to the present. My critical approach to such macaronic or linguistically mixed texts will necessarily involve close attention to the rhetorical strategies employed in the works in question. Chapters are sequenced in a loosely chronological order; taken together, they compose a global trajectory, migrating from European and North American locales to an assortment of colonial and postcolonial settings. The study will fall into two geographically demarcated parts. Part I focuses on works stemming from the Western metropolitan tradition.

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In this section, after a glance at some historical precedents, I dwell at length on nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence. Part II focuses on the operation of language-mixing in texts by authors from the global “South.” An intermediate chapter assesses in more general terms the extent to which multilingualism in postcolonial works departs (or does not depart) from precedents established by Western models. Here emphasis falls on the role of alternate languages as a mode of resistance to Western hegemony. In the light of this general discussion I examine a novel with a foot in both cultural camps: the West Indian writer Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Subsequent chapters focus first on Nigerian writing (Chinua Achebe’s ground-breaking Things Fall Apart [1958] and more recent works by Chimamanda Adichie and Chigozie Obioma), then on relevant works by two eminent South Asian novelists, Anita Desai and Arundhati Roy. While the texts I consider are in most instances works of prose fiction, one should acknowledge that the artistic use of language variance is by no means limited to one sole creative genre; the procedure can also be applied to striking effect in poetry and drama, and in audio-visual media such as film and television. Roberto Rossellini’s classic 1959 film Il Generale della Rovere stages a cinematic combat between two adversarial languages, Italian and German; the “war” between the two tongues parallels the literal hostilities between Nazi occupying forces in northern Italy and the Italian partigiani. The more recent television series Unorthodox (2020) enacts a less violent but still acrimonious confrontation between a different duo of warring tongues: Yiddish and English. The young Jewish protagonist, Esty [Shira Haas], desperate to free herself from her stifling marriage and her severely orthodox Hasidic community in New York City, flees to the unlikely haven of Germany, where she embarks on radically altered habits of behaviour and speech. Her flight entails her discarding Yiddish, the traditional idiom of her sect, in favour of English, which she uses with the freewheeling students she encounters in Berlin and with her mother, long ostracized from the Orthodox fold. The two contending languages acquire strong metonymic value, Yiddish standing for inhibition, English for release. But though the impact of multilingualism on works in visual media would amply repay further study, the present inquiry will perforce be limited to texts in print. Words on a page cannot replicate the vibrant immediacy of

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linguistic clashes on stage and screen, but – as I hope the foregoing pages will have suggested – they can draw on rich resources of nuance and implication. Since the intermixing of languages in a literary text is often associated with a transcultural perspective, it seems natural to label such works as cosmopolitan in tendency. Such labelling, however, is not as straightforward a matter as it might seem. Especially of late, the term “cosmopolitanism” has (like the more recent term “globalism”) become the subject of critical controversy. The presumed link between multilingualism and cosmopolitanism has itself been challenged; one can, after all, be polyglot without being in any meaningful sense cosmopolitan, and vice versa. (Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as we have seen, incorporates an abundance of French discourse while displaying a marked spirit of patriotic Russian nationalism.) Furthermore, views differ as to what in practice constitutes a cosmopolitan outlook. According to Bruce Robbins, “Cosmopolitanism as it is currently conceived has to do with ‘a receptive and open attitude toward the other’” (41), an attitude often identified with a lofty embrace of humanity in general. Robbins objects that such a definition is indiscriminately broad. He and his co-author, Paulo Lemos Horta, point to the scholarly conceptual shift “from cosmopolitanism in the singular – an overriding loyalty and concern with the welfare of humanity as a whole – to cosmopolitanisms, plural, which were now seen to be as various as the sociohistorical sites and situations of multiple membership from which they emerged” (1). What is more, the “singular, normative account” of cosmopolitanism “has been gradually if only partially displaced since the late 1980s by a plural, descriptive understanding” (3). This change has brought with it a reassessment of the long-standing commonplace that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are irreconcilable opposites. As Robert Young observes, “The new cosmopolitanism … no longer operates in a binary opposition with nationalism, nor with the complementary emotion of patriotism” (136). To this, however, one could reply that a generous awareness of alternative modes of behaviour and speech makes such a binary construction, in practice, difficult to sidestep. If, as Thomas Bender says, “[t]he cosmopolitan is engaged but always slightly uncomfortable, even at home” (119), such a stance of semi-detachment from “home” leaves scant room for the sort of paramount commitment that ardent nationalism tends to exact.

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Whatever its contradictions, however, the new, pluralistic, more supple understanding of cosmopolitanism(s) lends itself well to literary treatments, which normally involve highly specific rather than generic interactions between self and other. A glance at a few of the works to be discussed in the early chapters of this study should suffice to indicate the varied and contingent forms that literary cosmopolitanism may take. The first such work, Shakespeare’s Henry V, includes an amount of dialogue in an “other” language (French) that very few modern playwrights would dare to place before an audience of Anglophones. One might therefore confidently deem the play a pioneering venture into cosmopolitanism, until one realizes that the primary function of French in this Elizabethan context is to establish the inherent superiority of English, and by extension of Englishness. One might therefore revise one’s first hasty impression by re-classing Henry V as faux-cosmopolitan – as a work displaying not an openness toward the “other” but rather a chauvinistic yearning for hegemony. Yet even that revised view may itself require revision. Shakespeare’s play may resolutely demean the French language along with its speakers, but at the same time it displays a lively interest in both: a neighbourly if condescending curiosity. Here, as typically happens, cosmopolitanism is mediated by facts of historical and geographic positioning. The outcome is an enriching complexity and ambivalence. The passage of time can reconfigure the terms of cosmopolitan engagement, as witness the opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768): “They order, said I, this matter better in France” (3). In this fictionalized travel account dating from a century and a half after Henry V, Sterne’s implied “attitude toward the other” is far more affably receptive than what prevails in most antecedent English works; it would thus appear to be more straightforwardly deserving of the label “cosmopolitan.” Sterne’s protagonist, Yorick, is notably welcoming to the “other” language; he gallantly strives to conduct his daily affairs in French, all the more gallantly when dealing with female interlocutors. And yet here again, cosmopolitanism is contextually mediated. When it comes to matters touching on sentiment, Yorick gives preference to his native land and his mother tongue, insisting on the gulf separating English “sincerity” from French “artificiality,” widely accepted platitudes of Sterne’s time and beyond. In the century following

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Sterne’s, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette projects a more capacious embrace of the “foreign,” and of a “foreign” language (French once again), than almost anything to be found in her literary predecessors, an engagement producing a sea-change in the protagonist’s self-image and emotional life. Yet even here there are frontiers which cordon off the other culture’s religious practices. (After Lucy Snowe in a moment of panic seeks the solace of the Roman Catholic confessional, she promptly undergoes a life-threatening nervous collapse.) Such cultural barriers reappear later in the same century, though sometimes in more permeable guise, in the “international” fictions of Henry James. Here attitudes toward “otherness” reach a further pitch of complexity; now the concept of cosmopolitanism itself becomes the object of probing authorial scrutiny. The elusiveness and malleability of a term such as “cosmopolitan” can lead one to wonder whether it has, finally, any genuine critical usefulness. I would argue, however, that while the concept may be malleable, at bottom it denotes a form of active exchange that is always potentially worth cultivating. As Kwame Anthony Appiah, a noted authority on the subject, has maintained: Of course, cross-cultural conversations will yield some agreements and some mutual knowledge and mutual understanding. These are commendable in and of themselves, and are a useful background to peaceful cohabitation. But the real virtue of conversation across cultures is that it allows people to get used to spending time together in a way that is rewarding despite their misunderstandings and disagreements. (272) I would add that works of literature displaying an adroit use of language variance constitute a special and valuable subtype of the cross-cultural conversation prized by Appiah. My hope, accordingly, is that this book will demonstrate how instances of such variance reward readers’ patient attention. As I argue in this book’s concluding chapter, even in cases where interpolated “foreign” words and phrases are not readily understood, the casual impulse to skip over them is worth resisting; such language barriers can impress on the reader a felt awareness of cultural difference. And, while no one can be expected to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of all the tongues they are liable to encounter in the course

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of reading, it is often no very onerous task to tease out the approximate sense of opaque-seeming expressions. As I have been emphasizing throughout this introductory chapter, authors do not generally insert “difficult” diction in obedience to a perverse or malign whim; more often than not, such linguistic imports add depth and perspective to a fictional passage. Language-mixing is, of course, a practice that is itself open to critical appraisal. In a widely read study, The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Graham Huggan has questioned the motives both of authors and readers of literary works set in the global South and featuring non-Western linguistic components. Such texts, Huggan claims, typically represent “the global commodification of cultural difference” (vii) and contribute to “an increasingly globalised culture industry (the alterity industry)” (x). In my concluding chapter, I will consider Huggan’s position at greater length. For now, I will only comment that the notion of “exoticism” does not come close to explaining the varied uses of interpolated language elements in literary texts, a contention supported by the examples I have cited in the foregoing pages. One vital consequence of imported language in works of fiction is, as Appiah might agree, sometimes simply an enhanced awareness of an available alternative code: a linguistic window opening onto a changed, if possibly perilous, cultural horizon, a novel mode of apprehending and communicating a personal vision. The eagerness for such alternatives is not ipso facto a vice, a reprehensible form of consumerism. To alter the words that open Sterne’s Journey, they may order this matter better in France – and they may even imaginably order matters better in French.

Part One

The Western Canon

2

Shakespeare and Company Language Barriers and Penetrations

While this study will be primarily concerned with prose fiction dating from 1800 onward, literary language variance has an eclectic history long predating the modern era. Space is lacking here for an exhaustive survey; the present chapter will accordingly limit its attention to a few representative examples. These are meant to provide a rough sketch of how the technique of language-mixing has evolved over time. Although polyglot texts may on occasion have given pause to contemporary readers or audiences, the passing of centuries has proven them widely approachable. Some originate within a cultural matrix more linguistically variegated than the one to which today’s speakers of a “big” language are accustomed. Many English texts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance borrow liberally from the ancient classics, incorporating Latin or (less often) Greek material, sometimes even writing exclusively in such a “borrowed” idiom. According to Barry McCrea, “Before the eighteenth century it was relatively common to write in a language other than the one one spoke in everyday conversation, and indeed to write in a language that in a vernacular sense was dead” (16). The inclusion of elements drawn from post-classical tongues came later, but it too has long been a staple of literary production. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s day French was still used in England for official purposes, and Latin was widely known among the educated (especially clerical) class; Chaucer himself translated works from both languages, and he was not unique. A logical starting point for this discussion, however, is one of the most audacious early instances of linguistic mixing, Shakespeare’s history play Henry V. The focus will next skip to an eighteenth-century text, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, in which France is invaded not by a hostile English horde but by a single curious (in all senses)

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English wayfarer, a venture distinguished by self-conscious eccentricity combined with cosmopolitan bonhomie, and incorporating French-language content with evident gusto. Finally, I will consider the intermixing of standard English and Scottish dialect in Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, whose scenario has little in common with that of Henry V, yet whose mingling of opposed idioms fosters a dialogism rivalling that found in Shakespeare’s play.

The King’s English: Henry among the French Henry V stands out from other dramas of its time, Shakespeare’s included, for its adventurous multilingualism. Dirk Delabastita remarks on the “extraordinary cocktail” of idioms to be found in King Henry’s courtship of the French princess (“A Great Feast” 311), while David Steinsaltz, in an influential article, asks pertinently, “Why are French words and phrases sprinkled liberally through the speeches of French and English alike?” (317). Such questions may seem natural ones to ask, yet this peculiarity of the play was for many years either skirted by critics or, if noticed, shunted aside as peripheral. Even John Walter’s 1954 introduction to the authoritative Arden edition includes no commentary on interlingual content. In the present century this scholarly inattentiveness has been rectified by the work of multiple critics, though there remains room for further discussion. In his essay Steinsaltz argues that, rather than a mere “sideshow,” the scenes displaying “bilingual singularity” “may, in fact, be the keystone of the play’s dramatic structure” (318). According to Steinsaltz, the play puts languages to work for the overriding purpose of arousing patriotic triumphalism: “As the Englishmen are virile, rugged, honest, and virtuous, so must be their language, in opposition to the womanish, effete, deceptive, and perfidious language of the French” (318).1 While these judgments call for some qualification, much in the work confirms them. As I noted in the preceding chapter, such a reading complicates any attempt to class the play as straightforwardly cosmopolitan. Given that Henry V can be viewed as staging a fierce collision between two national languages, some historical context becomes germane. According to Steinsaltz again, “[T[here can be no doubt that a new sensitivity to the history and character of the English language, a new pride in the national language, blossomed in Shakespeare’s day” (321). The effort to

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establish English as the country’s dominant tongue had been prolonged over multiple generations, and the fifth Henry had played a vital part in securing that ascendancy. According to Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh, Henry was “the first king to encourage linguistic nationalism by promoting the use of English as an official language against ‘the French language [which] came to appear more and more as an occupying enemy’” (62). For the same critic, Princess Katharine’s “language lesson” (III.4), in which the princess strives to master the tongue of the Saxon invader, thus becomes “profoundly ideological” (61). Recent critics, such as Steinsaltz, have tended to read the entire play as enacting a chauvinistic “England and English first” agenda. Leaving aside such political concerns, Alison Walls maintains that “Shakespeare’s extensive yet selective use of French serves an almost exclusively dramatic purpose” (128). In practice, there is no reason to sever dramatic values from ideological tendencies. The “foreign” words and phrases are clustered mainly in the second half of the action, where the English and French forces go head to head. This is no coincidence; national hostilities are paralleled by linguistic clashes, and such clashes intensify dramatic impact while they reinforce political messaging. An underlying assumption of Henry V (and doubtless of its early audiences) is the affinity between a national language and the character of its speakers. While assumptions about the congruence between the nature of a language and the dispositions of its speakers may arouse justifiable skepticism, they were then, and indeed remain now, widely accepted. Steinsaltz elaborates on how this metonymy works: “If the spirit of each nation lives in its native tongue, the language itself will not merely represent but partake of the national character” (324). The outcome of linguistic conflict thus mirrors the outcome of martial combat: English prevails, French succumbs. “The audience has not merely seen a representation of England’s triumph over France, but has experienced the humiliation and tumultuous trouncing of the French language, which had subjugated their native English for so long” (331).2 Steinsaltz’s characterization of the play’s French as “the language of French poltroons and English thieves” (325) is hyperbolic, but it gains credence from a scene such as IV.4 between Pistol and the wryly named French soldier le Fer, no redoubtable iron man but a “quaking coward” (Steinsaltz 325). Pistol himself has scant claim to linguistic (much less military) prowess; he takes le Fer’s frantic ejaculation “Ô Seigneur Dieu!”

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to be his captive’s name (“O, Seigneur Dew should be a gentleman” [IV.4.5–6]). His ignorance is buffoonish, but it does not manage to make the Frenchman’s snivelling seem eloquent by contrast. The whole scene flirts with slapstick, but it is the craven le Fer’s mother tongue that emerges as the more laughably slapped. More serious, though still tinged with the absurd, are the scraps of French sporadically placed in the mouths of the more elevated French characters. Delabastita, as I noted in chapter 1, speaks of the “homogenizing convention” (“A Great Feast” 307) whereby the French aristocrats are presented, implausibly (but helpfully for Anglophone auditors), as using English to communicate among themselves. However, they occasionally interject a French phrase, such as the Dauphin’s in III.7, “Le chien est retourné à son propre vomissement” (The dog has returned to its own vomit). As Walls notes, the function of the “peppering of French phrases” is to “remind us of [the speakers’] nationality, but without excluding the Anglophone audience” (121). Beyond their usefulness as prompts, however, the inserted French phrases (including the one just cited) tend to be risible for their crudity or pomposity. This applies most emphatically to the utterances of the Dauphin, Henry’s opposite number and rival. When the Dauphin brags about the merits of his horse (III.7), he does so partly, and fatuously, in his native tongue: “Ça, ha! He bounds from the earth as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk” (13–16). This fustian “Gallic” braggadocio – the speaker comes across as more jackass than predator – sounds all the more foolish next to a nearby scene in which Henry apologizes to the divinity for vaunting his men’s superiority to the French: “Yet, forgive me, God, / That I do brag thus!” (III.6.156–7). Henry’s “Saxon” modesty shines through his plain, mostly monosyllabic English words. Shakespeare marshals here his signature technique, perfected in the antecedent Henry IV plays, of implementing a telling dramatic contrast by juxtaposing parallel scenes, and the “foreign” language elements amplify the disparities between the English prince and the French pretender. But the play’s most celebrated French-laden scenes are Katharine’s “English lesson” (III.4) and Henry’s wooing of the princess (V.2). Brunelle-Vanrigh is justified in calling the lesson “profoundly ideological,” for it enacts the implicit yielding of French royalty to English verbal supremacy. As Steinsaltz observes, “English Henry is on his way to

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conquer the kingdom of France, and the French women must submit to the English masters, as the effeminate French language must yield to virile English. It is a reversal of the Norman conquest that imposed the French [language] upon England” (326). In effect, Henry’s interactions with Princess Katharine can best be read as an Anglo-Saxon Reconquest. The fact that the princess feels obliged to study what was still a minor insular language is itself the most pregnant testimony to that reversal. Beyond that, however, as Walls has noted (121), the lesson’s focus on the names of body parts draws attention to Katharine’s (and her attendant Alice’s) corporeality and thus vulnerability. The much-remarked “improper” interlingual double-entendres based on English words such as “gown” and “foot” jocosely intimate Katharine’s status as a sexual object. She is an object, too, of complacent laughter; while not petrified with terror like le Fer or arrogantly asinine like the Dauphin, she and her companion reveal themselves as linguistically challenged. As Delabastita comments, “Katherine and Alice are … naively unaware of their poor performance in English, so that the verbal humour resulting from it is made over their heads and at their expense” (“A Great Feast” 316). The Anglo-Saxon Reconquest is consummated in the play’s final scene (V.2), one that is again both broadly comic and ideologically charged. Henry is nominally the supplicant for Katharine’s hand, but the upper hand belongs to the king. Crunelle-Vanrigh claims that “Kate puts up a rugged resistance” (63), but “rugged” hardly captures the impression left by Katharine’s mostly submissive demeanour. True, each of the principals makes a tentative foray into alien lexical terrain, enacting a symbolic truce between their warring nations by each performing the role of a speaker of the other’s native idiom. Such cosmopolitan gestures do not, however, betoken linguistic parity. While not supine, the princess has precious little agency, a reality confirmed most concretely by the scene’s statistical lopsidedness. The king speaks 133 lines, all in English except for his half dozen of passable French; Katharine is given a mere twenty-four, in a melange of French and slipshod English – a five-to-one disproportion. Only one of her speeches is longer than a line or two; Henry’s, by contrast, surge with tidal profusion. When at the climax of the exchange Henry seals her lips with a kiss, the terminal stifling of Katharine’s voice (she does not speak again in the play) strikes one as overkill. As at Agincourt, but in a more pacific vein, the outcome is decisive. Where on the field of battle the triumphant English had been

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outnumbered, here it is the lady’s French that is grossly overmanned (the pun is intended) by the King’s English. The victor, once again, is Henry. And yet this outcome is not without its ambiguities. If Shakespeare’s presentation of the French language persistently associates it with weakness and absurdity, there are mitigating countercurrents at play. Walls reasonably demurs from the “over-simplified interpretation of French language in Henry V as a signifier of vulgarity and feebleness” (128). While some of the play’s French speakers are undeniably vulgar or feeble, the very fact of the unexampled abundance of the language in the text is a token of compensatory respect. Even despite the bumptious Anglo-triumphalism, the linguistic openness intimates that French is, at worst, a linguistic target well worth battering. And even Henry’s uncertain excursions into that tongue (e.g. V.2.187–91), while hardly brilliant, suggest that he considers it a worthy medium of expression (and, of course, the medium most available to his intended bride). The king views his future union with French Katharine as a means of guaranteeing fusion between their two conjoined houses, a union meant to produce a hybrid Anglo-Gallic champion to do holy battle against “the Turk” (V.2.215–18). For all his Anglophone loquacity, Henry may envision such a mixed-race scion as a future royal polyglot mixer of languages. Anglocentric as it surely is, Shakespeare’s jingoistic history of an English-speaking king still displays a provisional engagement with Continental otherness, an outreach transcending the insular. It is a vision, sadly, more difficult to locate in the twenty-first-century inheritors of Shakespeare’s cherished island. In this play preoccupied with issues of language, a species of domestic cosmopolitanism is conjured by the presence of speakers of English dialects from the Celtic fringe: the Irishman MacMorris, the Scot Jamy, and, most prominently, the Welshman Fluellen. These members of Henry’s entourage are unabashed national stereotypes (Debastita, “A  Great Feast” 305); their verbal quirks provide one of the play’s recurrent sources of humour. Fluellen is a courageous warrior – Henry himself remarks that “[t]here is much care and valour in this Welshman” (IV.1.84) – but the subtext is that such qualities are the exception among Welshmen rather than the rule. As noted in the preceding chapter, the Welshman’s speech marks him as a buffoon. His ignorance of common English usage along with his rustic mispronunciation causes him to refer to Alexander the Great as Alexander the Pig (IV.7.14). The effect,

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as Delabastita drily comments, “does little to make us view Welshmen as either well-educated or intelligent” (“Cross-Language Comedy” 173). (Apparently it occurs to no one that, along with his defective English, Fluellen may be the possessor of a perfectly serviceable language of his own.3) But together with their comic value, these exotic “beyond the fringe” followers of Henry contribute an important political dimension. Shakespeare and his London audiences would have been well aware of “the potential danger of a relapse into anti-English subversion and Celtic barbarity” (Delabastita, “Cross-Language Comedy” 175); a reminder is provided early in Henry V by the king’s mention of the threat posed by “the weasel Scot” (I.2.170). The comic treatment of the Celtic trio allays apprehension by defanging or domesticating the perfidious Celtic weasel, while demonstrating that these amusing grotesques comport themselves as loyal followers of English Henry. Only by securing their allegiance – and by symbolic extension the allegiance of the outlying reaches of his realm – can he emerge as Henry the Great rather than Harry the Pig. If such harmony among restive ethnicities can be called cosmopolitan, however, it is a cosmopolitanism of the vigorously subordinated. As will be seen, Shakespeare’s treatment of the conundrum of British union-in-disunion has broad affinities with Walter Scott’s handling of Scottish-English relations in a novel such as The Heart of Midlothian, despite the vast differences of that book’s historical and geopolitical purview. Scott, too, under radically altered circumstances, desired to affirm the essential unity of Britain as a concept while recognizing the uniqueness of its component parts. It is a project that still, in the twentyfirst century, haunts the optimistically named United Kingdom as a problem remaining to be resolved.

Yorick’s Sentimental French Immersion Over the centuries following Shakespeare’s, British attitudes towards France as a nation and French as a language tended by and large to replicate patterns already present in Henry V. While the swaggering assertion of English mastery embodied by Shakespeare’s Henry becomes a more remote historical possibility, the legacy of animosity persists, fed by the frequent recurrence of military conflict between the two nations, hostilities that eventually extended beyond the bounds of Europe to

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colonies in the New World. The popular mood is captured in an offhand remark by the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys: “We do naturally love the Spanish and hate the French” (97). The threat of an invading Spanish Armada has long been nullified, so Spain can be viewed with some equanimity, even guarded affection, whereas France remains a threatening neighbour across the Channel. An enduring assumption is the association of French speech with affected and sometimes deviously treacherous femininity. Fictional examples of this stereotype are numerous. In the century after Pepys’s, a particularly disreputable female French speaker appears in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778): the heroine’s foreign-born grandmother, Mme Duval. Duval’s fatuity and uncouthness shed an unflattering light both on the nation from which she hails and the language she speaks. Her attempts at English are replete with risible solecisms. When taunted by her arch-tormentor, Captain Mirvan, on the score of her claimed London society connections she replies huffily, “Who told you that? … you don’t know nothing about the matter; besides, you’re the ill-bredest person ever I see; and as to your knowing Lady Howard, I don’t believe no such thing” (51). On the other hand, her mother tongue is limited to stock ejaculations such as “mon Dieu” and “pardi.” Duval epitomizes French frivolity and affectation – above all when it comes to specifically “feminine” concerns – as opposed to sturdy English “naturalness.” The exchanges between her and the xenophobic Mirvan read like a compendium of hackneyed nationalist snubs. To Duval’s suggestion that he should spend some time in France – “They’d make quite another person of you” – he replies caustically: “What, I suppose you’d have me learn to cut capers? – and dress like a monkey? – and palaver in French gibberish? – hay, would you? And powder, and daub, and make myself up, like some other folks?” (61). (While such prejudices directed at French manners and “gibberish” may have been common among Burney’s English readers, there is no good reason to suppose that Burney herself shared them. It is worth remembering that later in life she married a French general, became Madame D’Arblay, and spent an extended period in her husband’s homeland.) Mirvan, like Duval, is a cartoonish figure, a laughable caricature of boorish British chauvinism. Ridicule of the French is itself no longer shielded from mocking skepticism. Even so, in the contest between Burney’s two clownish national emblems, it is the English clown who has the last laugh.

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The subsequent century witnessed a move toward greater cosmopolitan tolerance and curiosity on the part of some (though by no means all) eminent English and American writers. Besides Charlotte Brontë and Henry James, who will concern us later, these include novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, and poets such as Byron, Shelley, and the Brownings. In writing dealing with French subjects, however, the dichotomy between artfulness and naturalness remains a tenacious motif. It resurfaces in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), though in a more nuanced guise than in the raucous encounters between Burney’s Duval and Mirvan. Mr Knightley, the novel’s raisonneur, warns the eponymous heroine against investing too much trust in the interesting newcomer, Frank Churchill: “No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘aimable,’ have very good manners, and be very agreeable, but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him” (166). For Knightley, and implicitly for the author herself, the distinction between national characters – between English sincerity and empathy and polished French brittleness – is patently entrenched in their languages. The association between French speech and meretricious artifice survives well into the Victorian era; it is embodied melodramatically by such a figure as Rigaud/Blandois in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), with the Frenchman’s signature sinister ostinato: “Mort de ma vie!” And, looking back once more to the eighteenth century, this sort of dichotomy between “Frenchness” and “Englishness” appears even in a work as notable for its urbane cosmopolitanism as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. “They order, said I, this matter better in France” (3). The famous opening sentence of Sterne’s Journey, uttered by the authorial alter ego, Yorick, immediately signals the rejection of unreflecting insular prejudice that will characterize this quirky narrative. The disdain for convention is enacted in that narrative’s meandering form; Keryl Kavanagh rightly calls it a “parody of the travel book” (136). Recent criticism has tended to foreground the Journey’s experimentation with indeterminacy and teasing obliquity, likening it to its even more nonchalantly norm-defying predecessor, Tristram Shandy (1759). Kavanagh, for example, argues persuasively that “it is not plot but language which is the unifying logic of A Sentimental Journey” (138), claiming that Sterne “relinquishes the notion of a static text with a

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stable meaning by exploring that area of unsettled signification between the meaning of a word in one language and its meaning in another” (138). While I would agree that Sterne’s self-conscious interrogation of language can have destabilizing repercussions, what I would emphasize is Sterne’s originality in deviating from insular precedent, his boldness in challenging familiar English platitudes about French customs and, more particularly, French language. Although a war between France and England is purportedly raging at the time of Yorick’s Continental visit, we witness nothing of it; there is no Agincourt in Yorick’s itinerary. Despite incidental friction between him and locals arising from the vicissitudes of life in transit and from linguistic miscues, such annoyances soon pass. Yorick, unlike Shakespeare’s Henry, is not in France on a mission of military conquest (amorous conquest is another matter; this is, after all, a sentimental journey). The novel plays off an Anglophone male voice – the narrator’s – against a gallery of Francophone female ones, but both erotic and linguistic issues are settled peaceably. The animosity toward French speech and manners detectable in Shakespeare’s play and in much later English writing has mostly evaporated, though the associations of French language with risqué innuendo have not. Rather than deluging female interlocutors with English tirades in Henry’s overbearing fashion, Yorick must struggle, with his imperfect French, to hold his conversational own. What we hear is not the expression of chauvinistic venom, as with Burney’s Mirvan, but the voice of Enlightenment accommodation. Yorick’s (and, one infers, the author’s) attitude is summed up by his declaration: “Every nation have their refinements and grossiertés” (66–7); and as Sterne’s borrowing of French diction indicates, this transnational breadth of outlook nurtures, along with it, linguistic inclusiveness. Unlike the sketchy scraps of French Burney allots to her Mme Duval, in the Journey we encounter an ample array of French words and phrases. This is not to say that Sterne’s mastery of the language was equivalent to that of a fully bilingual writer such as James or Samuel Beckett. By his own admission, his progress toward fluency was halting: “[T]he French tell me that I speak [the language] most surprisingly well for the time. In six weeks I shall get over all difficulties, having got over one of the worst, which is to understand whatever is said by others” (qtd. Cash 131). According to Arthur Cash, he never really did get over all the difficulties: “French he never mastered in its spoken form, though his written French

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may have been respectable” (131). Still, while his French may never have been more than respectable (to adopt Cash’s patronizing adjective), his enthusiasm for the language is palpable, and his grasp of it was more than sufficient to match that of most well-travelled English writers. One seldom moves through many pages of the Journey without encountering a generous scattering of Gallic locutions. The resulting mixture of languages constitutes a distinctive feature of Sterne’s book; it accords with Yorick’s firm conviction that “there is nothing unmixed in this world” (93). A less surprising feature is the conventional association of France and its language with female sexuality. Yorick himself stumbles into a number of erotic “mix-ups,” sometimes with comical outcomes, and French words and phrases are especially numerous in episodes involving such misadventures. The mix-ups, one might add, are not solely Yorick’s. Sterne includes an entire letter in French, purportedly penned by a regimental drummer to his mistress, commiserating with her on the ill-timed return of her cuckolded husband (50–1). In its tone, the letter exemplifies what passes for “French” sang froid regarding amatory indulgence. One aim of such a passage is doubtless to titillate Anglophone readers possessing a smattering of French by producing an aura of risqué “Latin” naughtiness. More generally, the abundance of the foreign tongue bolsters the overall impression of otherness, of travelling amid a novel and beguiling milieu, while at the same time it reinforces the book’s claim to authenticity, to a first-hand knowledge of a world beyond the cliffs of Dover. In some instances, French elements lend pungency to surprised notations of cultural difference. One such involves Yorick’s outing into the countryside with a French noblewoman, Mme de Rambouliet. When the lady requests that the carriage stop, “I asked her if she wanted anything. ‘Rien que pisser,’” the lady calmly replies (67). Language here points up telling divergences in national styles vis-à-vis feminine propriety regarding bodily functions. Reviewing the incident in English, the narrator replaces the blunt French verb with the (faintly) bowdlerized “p-ss,” which obliquely but neatly dramatizes the disparity between notions of decorum prevalent in the two cultures; what is unremarkable in one country’s discourse becomes literally unprintable in the other. (Ideas of “decency” of course became still more stringent in the century following Sterne’s; carriages do not stop for any such emergency in the novels of Austen, Dickens, or the Brontës.)

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Nevertheless, the Journey does not embrace French habits of language use or indeed French mores in general without caveats. Sterne’s letters reveal his ambivalence toward such “foreign” matters, an ambivalence also at times detectable in the Journey. Despite his avowed hatred of “cold conceptions” in evoking the beauties of nature, Yorick takes umbrage at what he deems the French habit of intemperate exaggeration: “[T]he grandeur is more in the word; and less in the thing” (53). Elsewhere, summoning up a hoary commonplace, Yorick identifies England with nature and, by extension, “natural” manners, France (especially the Parisian metropolis) with brittle artifice. Sterne worried that his young daughter, Lydia, might suffer deleterious effects from a prolonged stay in France, “fearing … that French society had turned her into a coquette. ‘I will shew you more real politesses than any you have met with in France,’ he proclaims in a letter to her, ‘for mine will come from the heart’” (Cash 306). Analogous sentiments find their way into the Journey. Responding to his acquaintance the Count de B----’s claim that “les François sont polis” (the French are polite) (93), Yorick returns, “To an excess.” He goes on to intimate that the French sometimes lack “the politesse du Coeur, which inclines men more to humane actions, than courteous ones.” Sterne thus anticipates Mr Knightley’s tart distinction, in Emma, between French aimable and English “amiable.” Even so, Yorick is more inclined than the fastidious Knightley to reach for a French phrase – politesse du coeur – to drive home his meaning. Whatever his qualms, Sterne’s own readiness to engage with those he encountered in France in their own language is well documented. A travelling companion reports that “Tristram” (i.e. Sterne) talks “more bad French in one day, than would serve a reasonable man a whole Month. He talks à tort et à travers to whoever sits beside him wherever he happens to be” (Cash 130). Like his stand-in Yorick, Sterne appears to have striven in his host country to be both amiable and aimable – both courteous and humane – a pattern of behaviour not always duplicated (as Yorick himself takes pains to point out) by other British literary travellers on the Continent. In their graciously communicative spirit, Sterne and his surrogate foreshadow the fuller embrace of cosmopolitanism undertaken by writers of the succeeding century.

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“The Fashion of the Country”: Jeanie Deans in the South As I suggested in the preceding chapter, language-mixing is not confined to collisions between formally constituted national tongues; it may also involve encounters between dialectal variants of a single language. A pioneer of such intramural mixing was Sir Walter Scott, who in novels from the 1814 Waverly on explored the rhetorical power of confrontations between the “standard” English spoken in the south of Britain and northerly Scottish versions. What Scott demonstrated was that, like the clashes between French and English in Shakespeare and Sterne, collisions between dialect and “regular” English can lend a sharper edge to characterization and dramatic tension. As Graham Tulloch notes, “Though others had used dialect and archaisms before, no one in English had used it [sic] so extensively and thoroughly” (9).4 In Henry V, of course, Shakespeare had caricatured the “eccentric” speech mannerisms of members of the Celtic fringe – Jamy the Scot and his confrères – but these figures served largely comic ends. While Scott’s treatment of dialect does not exclude comedy, the positioning of “eccentric” Englishes here is considerably more nuanced. In Scott’s canon, encounters between dialect and “standard” speakers tend to embody a contrast between nature and artifice not unlike the distinction between English and French adumbrated in Sterne. In Scott the contending language cohorts are not national but regional, and the linguistic variations are relatively minor, sometimes indeed deliberately modulated to accommodate Scott’s numerous English readers. (The Gaelic spoken mostly in the Highlands, a separate language unto itself, was not accessible to Scott and is hardly heard in the novels; see Buzard, Disorienting 69.) But even if the linguistic differences are not huge, they loom large in the dramatic unfolding of the narratives. And the impediments to southern comprehension can be appreciable; some editions of The Heart of Midlothian append glossaries of Scottish locutions at the back of the volume (the list in the Rinehart edition runs to nearly 600 entries). In The Heart, Jeanie Deans’s intrepid expedition into the south reads like a latter-day Pilgrim’s Progress featuring a female, dialect-speaking Christian on a redemptive mission at once personal and political. Her itinerary thus reverses that of Edward Waverley in Scott’s antecedent

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novel; where Waverley’s sojourn in the north turns out to be a crash course in Scottish customs and idioms, Jeanie’s reverse journey immerses her in English habits of conduct and expression. But Jeanie’s own stirring impact on those she encounters in the south is equally consequential. Her Scots-inflected speech makes her the poster girl for her beloved and beleaguered homeland: in effect the clarion voice of her linguistic community. In a more urgent sense than Yorick’s her journey is a sentimental one: a frantic dash to save the life of her sister Effie, condemned to death for her imputed crime of infanticide. Here again, as in Shakespeare and Sterne, gender oppositions take centre stage; the narrative poses female speakers (Jeanie first and foremost) against males. Jeanie rejects her studious fiancé Reuben Butler’s offer to write a letter to the Duke of Argyle on Effie’s behalf, a kindly if patronizing gesture meant to spare Jeanie the hazardous trip south: “[W]riting winna do it,” the girl insists; “a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and beseech, as the human voice can do to the human heart” (290). It is Jeanie’s physical presence – above all her human voice – that has persuasive potency. And that voice, as the inflections of her appeal to Reuben impress upon us, is unmistakably Scottish. But Jeanie’s northern voice must overcome the southern hurdle of linguistic difference, which is the outward token of an age-old cultural divide. The risks of misunderstanding emerge in several pivotal exchanges during Jeanie’s perilous sojourn in the strange land of England. In the first of these confrontations, Jeanie struggles to explain her predicament to a patriarchal authority, the Reverend Mr Staunton, a pillar of the Anglican Church who turns out to be the father of the reprobate George, Effie’s secret lover. Placed at a disadvantage by compromising appearances, Jeanie must convince the elderly English divine of her respectability. Her strategy is to identify herself by forthrightly asserting her origin: “I am not a vagrant or a stroller, sir … I am a decent Scotch lass, travelling through the land on my own business” (346). In her eyes, the fact of her Scottishness is itself a testimony to her uprightness and sincerity. Although Staunton treats her courteously, and although Jeanie shows due deference, an evident disconnect hinders their efforts to come to an understanding. When Staunton imparts his misgivings about his son’s wild conduct, Jeanie begins her reply with an implicit nod to the impediments hampering their mutual comprehension: “I think I

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understand your meaning, sir” (367). The differences in their speech patterns, compounded by their disparity of age and social rank, render effective exchange between the young Scotswoman and the English clergyman precarious. Jeanie’s awareness of the difficulty causes her embarrassment when she reluctantly acknowledges her host’s hospitality: “I am but a wayfaring traveller, no ways obligated or indebted to you, unless it be for the meal of meat which, in my ain country, is willingly gien by rich or poor, according to their ability, to those who need it; and for which, forby that, I am willing to make payment, if I didna think it would be an affront to offer siller in a house like this – only I dinna ken the fashions of the country” (365). Her Scots inflections drive home the point: what puts her at a social disadvantage is her disorienting removal from her “ain country.” And yet, despite the barriers, fruitful exchange between the earnest Scottish stranger and her charitable English host proves to be feasible. What the reader takes away from The Heart of Midlothian is less an impression of troublesome sectarian friction than a sense of hard-won sociability, and Scott’s deployment of language consistently reinforces that sense. Buzard aptly refers to “the double perspective of Scott’s work” (Disorienting 71), and in fact Scott’s aims were essentially twofold (and not always readily reconciled): to promote recognition of his native Scotland as a distinct society, while at the same time appealing (like Shakespeare in Henry V) to the underlying harmony among the disparate pieces of the British jigsaw puzzle. But harmony – and political union – emphatically did not, for Scott, mean seamless identity. To quote Buzard once again, “[T]o consider Scott’s ethnographic translation as ‘anglicization’ is not to suggest that it seeks the wholesale domestication of the alien, the production of a uniform ‘English’ culture for Britain. On the contrary, the prospect of such uniformity filled Scott with dread and alarm” (74). Scottish speech itself serves as a talisman to enforce Scott’s position; in relation to the English spoken in the south Scots is a sibling, but not a twin. It functions as a recurrent reminder to the reader that compatibility does not signify identity but coexists with a strong centrifugal impetus of resistance. The primal rupture shadowing all else in The Heart – a Scottish girl’s undoing at the hands of a scion of the English cavalier class – places at risk the harmony between the two uneasily conjoined peoples. It must be mended by the daring cross-border exploit of another, formidably

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articulate Scotswoman. The narrative demonstrates that such a bridging of national gulfs can, with pluck, luck, and perseverance, be accomplished. The other personage enabling this outcome is the Duke of Argyle, a natural choice for this role because he is himself a hybrid, with an aristocratic boot in each camp. As the novel’s prime exemplar of urbane pluralism, he is ideally positioned to mediate ingrained differences. Buzard suggestively views him as a textual surrogate for Scott himself: “Argyle is a kind of apotheosis of the Waverley Novelist, since, as a holder of both Scottish and English dukedoms, he is perfectly situated to serve as an efficacious intercessor for all Scots with a grievance” (Disorienting 102–3). The duke’s ease in navigating both realms is accentuated by his speech habits. He normally speaks polished “standard” (southern) English, but repeatedly exhibits his facility with Scots speech through homely dialect adages, identified by provenance (“I’ll wad ye a plack, as we say in the North” [391]; roughly, “I’ll bet you a penny.”) The “we” roundly affirms Argyle’s sense of Scottish belonging, even though he resides in the south and is a familiar presence at the English court. It is in fact Argyle who engineers Jeanie’s audience with the English queen, Caroline, in the book’s climactic confrontation. Although she is the proxy of the absent King George, Caroline provides Jeanie with a desperately needed sympathetic female ear. It turns out to be an encounter as much between awkwardly assorted speech patterns as between oddly assorted individuals. Because of sectional barriers to understanding, repeatedly cropping up in the language of the speakers, the interview comes close to a tragicomic collapse before a last-minute redemptive swerve upward. In this scene, as Tulloch argues, “[I]t is particularly important that the heroine Jeanie should be above ridicule” (303), despite the convention, conspicuous in Shakespeare and elsewhere, that speakers of “rustic” patois are inherently comic. In this interview Scott deftly shades the tone of the dialogue from incipient laughter to moving attentiveness. The Queen herself is at first loftily amused by Jeanie’s rusticity of speech and demeanour – “Her Majesty could not help smiling at the awe-struck manner in which the quiet demure figure of the little Scotchwoman advanced towards her, and yet more at the first sound of her broad northern accent” (401). She is nettled by some unwitting gaffes on Jeanie’s part, and the unfamiliarity of Jeanie’s Scots idioms amplifies the distance between southern royal and

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northern commoner. “‘Some thinks it’s the Kirk-Session – that is – it’s the – it’s the cutty-stool, if your Leddyship pleases,’ said Jeanie, looking down, and courtseying. ‘The what?’ said [the Queen’s companion] Lady Suffolk” (402). Or again, when the Queen asks Jeanie bluntly, “How far can you walk in a day?” Jeanie replies, “Five-and-twenty miles and a bittock.” “‘And a what?’ said the Queen, looking towards the Duke of Argyle” (403). Yet these comic impasses, requiring the intervention of a bilingual interpreter, turn out not to be fatal. What emerges from the encounter is the human compatibility that transcends gaps of accent and lexicon. Jeanie’s lengthy, impassioned plea contains its share of dialect formations – barbarisms, as they might be termed by lordly southern courtiers: “O Madam, if ever ye kend what it was to sorrow for and with a sinning and a suffering creature, whose mind is sae tossed that she can be neither ca’d fit to live or die, have some compassion on our misery!” (405). And yet the Queen’s response – “This is eloquence” – confirms not only Jeanie’s claim to sympathy but her right to a respectful hearing in her own vernacular voice. Her Scottish speech is consecrated as the authentic outpouring of a worthy but long-suffering people, and it touches the queen’s heart. In its aftermath Jeanie’s journey has some surprising consequences, pointedly reflected in dialogue. Reunited with her now freed but soon-to-be-exiled sister, Jeanie addresses Effie in her familiar dialect: “Oh, Effie, dinna be wilfu’ – be guided for anes – we will be sae happy a’ thegither” (485). Effie replies in the same vein: “I have a’ the happiness I deserve on this side of the grave … and whether there were danger to mysell or no, naebody shall ever say that I come with my cheat-thegallows face to shame my sister amang her grand friends.” Ironically, years afterward it is Effie, now exalted to Lady Staunton, who has accumulated grand friends; the cheat-the-gallows face finds a warm welcome among the drawing rooms of the English gentlefolk. As befits her new social station, Effie has adopted a genteel, Anglicized form of speech, though overlaid with a chic residue of northern burr, a hint of commodified “Scottishness” to beguile the southern company she keeps. Revisiting her homeland after a prolonged absence, she airily directs Captain Duncan Knockdunder, a crochety follower of Argyle’s, “to have her trunks, &c., sent over from Roseneath,” prompting Duncan to grumble, “Cot damn her English impudence!” (520). His Scots inflection may elicit a smile from the reader, but for once the laugh targets the “proper”

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speaker. From former wretched victim of a draconic Scottish law, Effie has blossomed into a svelte southern turncoat, an apostate from her native folkways and a shunner of dialect. It is Jeanie who remains true to ancestral tradition, and who speaks (in her regional accent) to both Scottish and non-Scottish readers as a staunch model of patriotic probity. In the decades following The Heart of Midlothian, dialect speech featured importantly in the work of multiple English novelists, such as Charlotte Brontë’s sister Emily, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. But not until the dawning of a new century would dialect again be used so provocatively in the service of an ideological agenda. The user will be D.H. Lawrence, and both the agenda and the vocabulary (most obviously in Lady Chatterley’s Lover) will be more than a bittock removed from Scott’s.

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“Music to My Ears” Charlotte Brontë’s French Immersion

As the daughter of an obscure parson in rural Yorkshire, Charlotte Brontë would seem an unpromising model of cosmopolitanism; and yet the sheer quantity of French contained in her novels undermines assumptions about her provinciality.1 The circumstances of her upbringing help to account for this apparent paradox. From an early age, together with her brother Branwell, Charlotte fabricated tales about the mythical land of Angria, evidence that her imagination was already reaching out to scenes and experiences remote from her insular surroundings. Her later exposure to Continental foreignness reinforced those juvenile imaginings with a tangible embodiment. First as a student and then as an apprentice teacher, in the city of Brussels, she acquired an impressive command of the French language. For both personal and artistic reasons she felt impelled to include an abundance of that language in her work, particularly in her two final and most mature novels. But the manner in which she deployed her adopted tongue did not remain static; her treatment of “foreign” discourse underwent a noteworthy evolution between the first of those texts and the second.

“Curbing Forward Tongues”: French in Shirley What may seem perplexing in Brontë’s passion for the French language is that it does not coincide with any broader appetite for French culture generally. Towards that culture, in either its Belgian iteration (which she knew first-hand) or its Parisian one (which she did not), her attitude ranges from indifference to disdain. Both of the twinned heroines of Shirley make disparaging remarks about Gallic manners and mores. Caroline Helstone urges her half-Belgian cousin, Robert Moore, “tonight

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you shall be purely English” (114), but fears he is instead going to be “French, and sceptical, and sneering” (115). In a later chapter Caroline’s friend, Shirley Keeldar, accuses her uncle, who wishes her to make a marriage of convenience: “Your god is the Hymen of France – what is French domestic life? All that surrounds [the French marriage god] hastens to decay” (519). In Brontë, France is the hotbed of twinned false creeds: Roman Catholicism and materialistic cupidity. In Jane Eyre (1847) the Parisian prattle of Edward Rochester’s ward, little Adèle, gets short shrift from an impatient Jane. When the girl asks to have a blossom from a floral display “seulement pour compléter ma toilette” (just to complete my outfit), she receives the crisply English rebuke, “You think too much of your ‘toilette,’ Adèle” (149). As the scare-quotes indicate, the French word toilette is on Jane’s lips tinged with distaste. In some ways such attitudes look back beyond Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century relaxed geniality to earlier, more provincial postures.2 As James Buzard observes, however, the approach Brontë takes in her most popular novel is in some ways atypical: “[Jane Eyre] lacks certain of the complexities that define … [Charlotte’s] fictions of encounter with Belgian Frenchness” (Disorienting 163). In the fictions to which Buzard alludes, French language is valorized even while Frenchness is not. What accounts for this disparity? The fact is that in Brontë’s works the emotional resonance of French language is primarily intimate and personal rather than more broadly cultural. Her attachment to the language has conspicuous roots in her sentimental history, above all her nostalgia for her former mentor in Brussels, M Constantin Heger. In a postscript added to a letter to Heger of November 1845 written in French, Charlotte, switching to English, confides: “I have never heard … French spoken but once since I left Brussels – and then it sounded like music to my ears – every word was most precious to me because it reminded me of you – I love French for your sake with all my heart and soul” (Letters I 435). Incorporating French passages in her novels may thus have been a literal labour of love, a source of compensatory emotional sustenance, giving the author a vicarious sense of nearness to her adored maître. In her works, however, such imported words and phrases serve literary purposes that reach well beyond the strictly personal. In Shirley Brontë sometimes interrupts her English-language narrative to insert French expressions, explaining in one instance, “I use this

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French word because English is limiting” (307). In this novel French is repeatedly called upon, not just by the narrator but by the characters, as a means of vaulting beyond fixed parochial limits. This apprehension of French language as a sort of verbal release valve is not without precedent in Brontë’s work. In her first adult (but posthumously published) novel The Professor (1857), the protagonist, William Crimsworth, newly escaped from a wretched existence in his native England and employed in a Belgian school, is observed by his Francophone superior to have “l’air rayonnant” (a radiant air) (68). It is significant that this judgment is delivered in French, for change of idiom contributes as much to the young man’s buoyancy as change of scene; indeed, the two are fused. A similar logic applies to the female protagonists of Brontë’s later, more ambitious novels. As I mentioned at the outset of this study, Buzard claims that in Shirley Brontë implicitly raises the question of how much French an English novel can accommodate (Disorienting 171). This somewhat overstates the case; French language in the novel, though plentiful, occurs only sporadically, and is concentrated at a restricted number of sites. Still, it adds up to a much larger non-English component than readers would likely have expected, and thus calls for some scrutiny. Here, as in The Professor, the language is persistently associated with escape beyond English confines, most emphatically in connection with romantic impulses and attachments. As critics have observed, Shirley depicts a provincial society dominated by patriarchal figures such as Caroline Helstone’s uncle, Rector Matthewson Helstone, and the more worldly squire, Mr Hiram Yorke. This overarching fact of male hegemony helps to explain the unorthodox doubling of the heroines, Caroline and Shirley. The tacit point of the pairing is that there is, if not safety, at least heartening company in numbers. Though sharply differentiated in personality, the two girls are united by gender and sensibility; against daunting odds they constitute a tiny but energetic female “team.” The imbalance of those odds is driven home by the narrative structure. The four substantial opening chapters exclude the dual heroines, and indeed most other female presences; they sketch the outlines of the presiding male theatre of operations. That theatre is predominantly one of activity: “business,” mechanism, and incipient violence. Robert Moore, the book’s central male figure, is said to be “possessed of the quality of activity” (61). In his dealings with

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practical affairs he favours realpolitik; he taunts Rector Helstone that “God often defends the powerful” (69). The masculine world hinges on entities such as power, profit, and resilience; what it summarily banishes are such “feminine” concerns as feeling, sympathy, and imagination. Moore tells the bumbling stage-Irish curate Peter Malone, “It is my fancy … not to be dependent on the femininity in the cottage yonder [i.e. his own]” (58); Malone concurs: “You are not under petticoat government” (59). The phrase “petticoat government” has the force of an oxymoron; presumably, a petticoat is not a garment in which one can properly govern. The more venerable male characters similarly eschew “feminine” leanings. Mr Yorke, whose “every trait was properly English” (76), exhibits properly English no-nonsense convictions. If he lacks imagination, the narrator asks waspishly, “[W]ho cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, useless attribute – akin to weakness – perhaps partaking of frenzy – a disease rather than a gift of the mind?” (77–8). (Two answers to that sarcastic question spring to mind: women and novelists.) But the most aggressive of such petticoat-scorners is Caroline’s uncle, the Reverend Helstone. Although treated with indulgence by the narrator as a staunch if cranky pillar of the Established Church, Helstone is equally a pillar of the male-hegemonic power elite. “He made no pretence of comprehending women, or comparing them with men: they were of a different, very inferior order” (82). To his restless niece he gives predictable advice: “[S]tick to the needle – learn shirt-making and pie-crust making and you’ll be a clever woman some day” (122). His demeanour towards Caroline is for the most part one of benign neglect; but when it comes to encouraging her private longings, he can offer nothing beyond anodyne baking and needlework. Caroline is seldom tempted to appeal to him for sympathy, which she knows all too well he scorns as “a namby-pamby [i.e. womanish] word” (205). Both of the female principals are chronically thwarted by such patronizing estimates of women’s capacities, which drastically abridge their space for self-realization. The reproof Mrs Yorke issues to her youngest daughter – “Jessie, curb that tongue of yours and repress your forwardness!” (383) – could equally well define the plight of the young women at the core of the narrative, whose forward tongues continually risk being curbed. Caroline muses despondently on the “stagnant state of things” (377) that afflicts older unmarried women, but stagnation is

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a trap that systemically threatens younger women as well. The social framework is structured so as to deprive women of agency, replacing it with an insipid propriety. The closest Caroline and Shirley come to what might charitably be termed action is their surreptitious midnight foray to observe the workers’ attack on Moore’s mill (chapter 19, “A Summer Night”), and even that adventure is purely vicarious; it can hardly be called empowering. The antecedent clash between opposed Whitsun marchers (chapter 17, “The School-Feast”), in which Established Church adherents and dissenters square off against one another on a narrow footpath, is an encounter that does more actively involve the girls, but it is mock-heroic rather than serious. The Establishment group, patriotically intoning “Rule Britannia,” shoulders aside the dissenters chanting psalms, but their triumph is vainglorious rather than liberating. It does nothing to answer the question Robert Moore puts to his cousin: “What life are you destined for, Caroline?” (98). It is within this broad framework that the role of French language in Shirley needs to be read. It represents, not the crossing of national borders, as it did with William Crimsworth, but rather the crossing of psychological and behavioural Rubicons, a means of accessing spaces normally out of reach for Brontë’s cabined and cribbed heroines. Patricia Yaeger offers a relevant insight into the power of language variance as a tactic for feminist resistance, arguing that it provides women with a discourse that will put the hegemonic structure of the primary language entirely into question. The point is to make the dominant discourse into one among many possible modes of speech. By placing the discourse in contradiction, the woman writer begins to rescript her available language games, to locate multivocality as one site of transformation for women’s own writing and productivity. (41) In Brontë’s mature fiction, it is not just the female writer but her characters as well who avail themselves of this mode of verbal resistance, specifically through the adoption of French. As will be seen in later chapters, this strategy does not stop with a Victorian advocate for women’s freedom such as Brontë; it carries over to techniques of linguistic abrogation employed by non-Western writers in their struggles against colonial domination.

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For the twinned heroines of Shirley, speaking out can present major obstacles. As the narrator remarks apropos of Caroline’s frustrated feeling for Robert, “A lover masculine so disappointed can speak and urge explanation; a lover feminine can say nothing: if she did, the result would be shame and anguish, inward remorse for self-treachery” (118). For both Caroline and Shirley, French provides a private code, enabling them to enter into a compact species of what John Edwards calls a linguistic community (89) with their reticent lovers. It does not follow, however, that all occurrences of French in the novel operate to further female enfranchisement or romantic intimacy. Hortense, the half-Belgian sister of Robert and Louis Moore, figures as the most voluble French speaker in the book, but her utterances do not mark her as either liberated herself or a cause of liberation in others. Her outburst over a batch of scorched preserves strikes the keynote: “Les confitures! Elles sont brulées? Ah, quelle négligence coupable! Coquine de cuisinière – fille insupportable!” (The preserves! They’re burnt? Ah, what criminal negligence! Scoundrel of a cook – unbearable girl!) (394). The domestic “tragedy” is of course made comic by Hortense’s “Gallic” histrionics, and her French idiom is imbued with the comedy. She would plainly find Rector Helstone’s counsel to Caroline – stick to the needle, learn shirt-making and pie-crust-making – perfectly congenial. What gives French a contrasting character when it enters into Caroline and Shirley’s relations with the Moore brothers is its latent erotic charge. Besides being bilingual, the mill-owner Robert Gérard Moore is correspondingly bi-natured, with a hint of androgyny. As he tells Caroline, “I find in myself, Lina, two natures, one for the world and business, and one for home and leisure. Gérard Moore is a hard dog, brought up to mill and market: the person you call your cousin Robert is sometimes a dreamer, who lives elsewhere than in Cloth-hall and counting-house” (258). In order to form a stable affective bond with such a fragmented being, Caroline must somehow extract him from the man’s hard shell of market, mill, and money, where he is at home, and meet him in the “female” domain of feeling and imagination. The French language is not her sole channel of approach; she can also draw on her knowledge of English poetry. In the scene where Caroline obliges Robert to be “entirely English,” she induces him to recite lines from Coriolanus and thus leads him to recognize how his habitual arrogance and stiffness liken him to Shakespeare’s hubristic hero. But she can achieve a closer

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rapprochement by appealing to his French heritage. After his Coriolanus stint, Moore prompts her to recite a French poem he knows she admires, André Chénier’s “La Jeune Captive” (“The Young Female Prisoner”). It begins: “Mon beau voyage est si loin de sa fin! / Je pars, et des ormeaux qui bordent le chemin / J’ai passé le[s] premiers à peine” (My lovely voyage is so far from its end! / I depart, and I have hardly passed the first / Of the elm trees that border the road) (118). The poignant verses have a peculiarly apt application to the speaker herself; she, too, is at the beginning of her life’s voyage, and feels imprisoned by the circumstances in which she has been placed by rigid social convention. Her voyage may not be coming to a premature end, but it threatens to stretch out fruitlessly over many barren years. Moore, hearing such sentiments voiced in his native tongue, is strongly moved. It is the most intimate moment they share until much later in the novel. But proficiency in French, though widely regarded at the time as a suitable “accomplishment” for young ladies, in some quarters generates disgust. True, one of the resident patriarchal worthies, Hiram Yorke, is fluent in the language; but he is generally acknowledged to be a harmless eccentric, while his equal fluency in Yorkshire dialect vouches for his freedom from dubious “foreign” leanings. Meanwhile the historical placement of the novel’s action, toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, helps to explain the mistrust of French lurking in patriotic minds. Incensed by political differences with the Francophone Moore, Caroline’s uncle launches into a diatribe against her French studies with Hortense: “The language, he observed, was a bad and frivolous one at the best, and most of the works it boasted were bad and frivolous, highly injurious in their tendency to weak female minds. He wondered … what noodle first made it the fashion to teach women French: nothing was more improper for them; it was like feeding a rickety child on chalk and water-gruel” (185). The Rector’s outburst is notable for grouping together several key ideas linked with French in the narrative. In his infantilizing view, women are equated with children; French is a corrupt jargon injurious to their puny wits, while it is repugnant to robust masculine sensibilities. The ironic reverse-effect is to identify the language as a potential fund of anti-patriarchal energy, available to women such as Caroline who are at odds with the stultifying notions of propriety imposed on them by the male-authoritarian regime. It also follows that “foreigners” such as the Moore brothers gain a seductive

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attractiveness by virtue of their anomalous fluency in the stigmatized tongue. They thus figure as alternatives to the sort of pablum deemed a suitable intellectual diet for proper young Englishwomen. Shirley Keeldar’s attachment to her quondam French teacher, Louis Moore, is, according to the prevailing Yorkshire criteria, untoward and unseemly. Differences of rank and wealth here coalesce with suspect “foreign” origins to render Louis ineligible to seek the hand of the winsome young heiress. Far more suitable, in the eyes of Shirley’s upward-aspiring uncle, Mr Sympson, is the aristocratic Sir Philip Nunnely, who writes banal English verses and to whose lineage and bearing there clings not the least taint of the foreign: “[T]here was the English gentleman in all his deportment” (448). Shirley’s rejection of this impeccable candidate infuriates Mr Sympson, who hits on his niece’s French studies as the tell-tale clue to her waywardness. In this book of many doublings and recurrences, his denunciation of French has a familiar ring. “You read French. Your mind is poisoned with French novels. You have imbibed French principles” (513). We have been here before; this is a replay of Helstone’s earlier anti-French rant to his niece. Once again the French language is being demonized as a subversive influence, and the intrusive Gallic idiom is held guilty of sins both moral and literary. The reiteration confirms what has already been insinuated by previous episodes: Frenchness offers a sovereign alternative to the rigid notions of decorum that curb the aspirations of “forward” – and forwardlooking – young Englishwomen. Language itself becomes a zone of combat; Shirley’s declaration to her uncle – “We do not view things in the same light; we do not measure them by the same standard; we hardly speak in the same tongue” (518) – is literally accurate. It is when she resumes her lapsed habit of practising French with Louis Moore that her relationship with her former mentor gathers renewed momentum. During her student days Shirley’s copybook description of a snow scene had prompted Louis to exclaim “Voilà le français gagné” (437) (There’s French achieved!); now their revisiting of her old assignments not only allows her to regain her French, but also adds warmth to their intimacy. Reading aloud and imitating Louis’s intonation, Shirley soon manages to shed her accent’s rusticity. “C’est presque le français rattrapé, n’est-ce pas?” (It’s almost French recaptured, isn’t it?) she asks (455). Louis then proceeds to recite from memory Shirley’s early “devoir,” “La Première Femme Savante” (“The First Wise-Woman”). Although it is purportedly

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in French, the narrator “translates” the piece “on pain of being unintelligible to some readers” (455), as Brontë demurely explains. Even so, it is its presumed Frenchness that gives the piece its emotional timbre. Shirley’s parable, which recounts how a solitary and forlorn Eve figure is eventually gifted by Divine Grace with a male companion, has, unsurprisingly, been found disappointing by some feminist critics, as has the whole male-mentor-female-acolyte constellation. Kate Lawson sees the interaction between Shirley and Louis as an expression not of principled resistance to patriarchy but of craven subservience to the male: “Closure in Shirley brings with it the silencing of the female voice of dissent and the reestablishment of male authority” (738). Such a reading seems more in tune with contemporary feminist expectations than with those current in Brontë’s time. It also disregards contrary evidence in the text, such as Shirley’s spirited declaration to her uncle: “I disdain your dictatorship” (517). Shirley’s eventual submission to Louis is not a replay of King Henry’s English voice drowning out Princess Katharine’s French one at the close of Henry V; it is quite the reverse. By adopting her “foreign” lover’s native tongue, Shirley is embracing a corrective to the constraints imposed on her by the presiding Anglophones of her social circle, compliant females as well as authoritative males. In a reading echoing Lawson’s, Tara Moore points out that Shirley’s “devoir,” “La Première Femme Savante,” is “written in her future husband’s native French, and the narrative is actually recited by Louis himself,” concluding that “Louis has come to see recitation as a means of subduing Shirley’s spirit” (484). Again, such claims ignore the fact that French in the novel is not construed as a weapon of masculine subjugation but quite the opposite; it is not Louis’s singular possession but their shared tongue, the code of their mutual understanding. Generalizing more broadly, Sally Shuttleworth maintains that in Brontë’s novels “[t]he primary function of bilingualism or language acquisition in courtship  … is to establish male dominance” (177). Although such an argument has some surface plausibility, it oversimplifies the issues. True, Shirley tells her uncle, “[A]ny man who wishes to live in decent comfort with me as a husband must be able to control me” (514), and she then proceeds dutifully to marry her French language master. That fact, however, proves little; the equable Louis’s imagined “control” over the mettlesome Shirley is, on the evidence of the text, more notional than substantive.

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Shirley’s parable itself, to which Louis’s rendering from memory pays fond tribute, may seem from a twenty-first-century vantage point an anemic gesture at female assertiveness, but it has its own boldness when viewed in historical perspective; it focuses insistently on women’s subjectivity and female desire. (The very notion of a “wise woman” has a contrarian ring; we hear, for example, that the irascible Mr Helstone “could not abide sense in women” [138].) Few of the other males among the cast of characters are willing to make Louis’s psychological leap: to cross the boundary dividing the man’s world of nuts, bolts, and business – and English – from the woman’s world of imagination and sympathy – and French. It is true that Shirley is in some ways the most explicitly patriotic of Brontë’s novels. Early in their acquaintance, the dual heroines agree in their admiration of their native country and county: “‘Our England is a bonnie island,’ said Shirley, ‘and Yorkshire is one of her bonniest nooks,’” with which Caroline concurs: “We are compatriots” (220). The narrative demonstrates, however, that even “bonnie” insularity is insufficient for feminine fulfillment; both girls yearn for a symbolic alternative foreignness, an “Angria,” to supplant the bland conventions of English rural gentility. The Moore brothers serve the symbolic purpose of outsourcing emotional fulfillment to the Continent. Their “outlandishness” of demeanour, appearance, and accent is insistently stressed, especially with regard to Robert, who is regularly identified as “alien,” but the most obvious hallmark of their otherness is their facility in another language. It is this linguistic singularity that marks them as not just acceptable but as necessary mates. Informed by her irate uncle that her aristocratic suitor, Sir Philip, rebuffed by her coolness, has left the neighbourhood, Shirley dismisses the hyper-English poetaster with a cheeky Gallic shrug: “Shirley raised her eyebrows. ‘Bon voyage!’ said she” (511). It is the most trenchant French utterance in the book; Shirley blithely speaks French to male British power. The narrator indirectly colludes with the two heroines in their French transgressions. She sparingly but conspiratorially inserts her own French turns of phrase into her text; thus, describing Shirley’s facial features, she observes “that they were, to use a few French words, ‘fins, gracieux, spirituels’” (212). Such seemingly capricious interventions have ideological force; by hinting at the author’s alignment with the French “side” they lend covert aid and support to the girls in their quest for

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liaisons beyond the humdrum insular norm. These quests turn out in the end to be successful, and yet the satisfying otherness the young women secure is, after all, not so definitively other. The marriages of Caroline to Robert and Shirley to Louis promise to involve a more exhilarating spirit of adventure than most of the other unions depicted in the novel, and they point symbolically toward a world of feeling and language beyond the realm of mill and market, but they seem unlikely to upset the tried-and-true applecart of bourgeois domesticity approved by the local Establishment. Some nagging questions that have been mooted during the course of the narrative have been answered imperfectly or not at all: Robert’s “What life are you destined for, Caroline?” (98); Shirley’s “Caroline, don’t you wish you had a profession?” (235); Caroline’s (to Shirley) “But we are men’s equals, are we not?” (226). In Brontë’s next and last novel, where the scene crosses the Channel to the Continent, questions of this sort receive more searching scrutiny. French, and the gaining of French, are motifs more decisively integrated into the bildungsroman of the questing heroine, who ends her journey, though not alongside a mate to settle down with, at least with a meaningful profession to pursue.

Lucy Snowe’s French Renovation Because the bulk of the action of Villette (1853) takes place on the Continent, in the fictional land of Labassecour (read “Belgium”), French-language elements are even more in evidence than they were in Shirley. But the geographic shift has another, less foreseeable consequence: along with French-language content, the mistrust of “foreign” culture and manners also becomes more conspicuous. As Buzard writes, “One problem with any attempt to read Villette ethnographically is that Lucy Snowe never does decisively unlearn her proclivity for regarding the Francophone Catholics among whom she lives in Villette as uncivilized savages. On the contrary, growing understanding of them tends to confirm and activate British Protestant values that were perhaps underdeveloped or dormant in her when she lived in Britain” (Disorienting 247). It is certainly true that Brontë’s Protestant heroine and narrator feels estranged amid what she calls “this land of convents and confessionals” (85). After acute emotional stress impels her to enter a Catholic church and make a confession to a resident priest, her revulsion brings on a collapse both physical and mental. In her psyche, cosmopolitan impulses

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are channelled within strict limits. Buzard speculates that Lucy’s experiences in the new country lead her not to renounce Britishness but to develop a more flexible understanding of what that national label might stand for – to perceive the need for “recovering a multiple Britishness” (265). I would suggest that Lucy’s progress in the novel hinges not on her mutating national orientation but on her steadily evolving sense of self. Lucy never stops being British, but she does, in effect, stop being Lucy. In answer to Professor Paul Emanuel’s scathing indictment of Englishwomen, she utters a patriotic cry – “Vive l’Angleterre, l’Histoire et les Héros! À bas la France …!” (Long live England, its History and its Heroes! Down with France!) (289) – but she utters it, paradoxically, in the language of the country she condemns. What Lucy calls “Freedom and Renovation” (403) are central to her metamorphosis, and part and parcel of that process is her ongoing engagement with the French language. As in Shirley, but even more emphatically, French is here both a means of defense against self-abjection and the gateway to a fuller and richer experience. Through Lucy’s shifting relationships with the Anglophones and Francophones surrounding her, Villette stages a sustained Bakhtinian tug-of-war between English and French, and the outcome configures the protagonist’s mature identity. The answer to the question put to Lucy by the skittish young cosmopolite Ginevra Fanshawe – “Who are you, Miss Snowe?” (262) – is one Lucy must answer for herself, and she can best answer it in the language she has arduously acquired. Brontë herself was notably protective of the French-language passages in her texts. In a letter to her publisher’s reader, W.S. Williams, accompanying the returned proof sheets of Shirley, she asks: “Will they print the French phrases in Italics? I hope not; it makes them look somehow obtrusively conspicuous” (Letters II 255). Plainly, she resists the supposition that such interpolated French elements are in any way anomalous. Responding to a request by an elderly acquaintance of her father’s that in a new edition of Villette translations of “the French phrases” should be provided for the convenience of readers, she remarks tersely, “I can’t say that … this suggestion quite meets my ideas” (Letters III 139). For Charlotte, the language had a talismanic vibrancy, and it comes to have that vibrancy for her final heroine as well. While it may involve no decisive break in Lucy’s sense of national belonging, her renovation crucially incorporates a casting-off of old

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English ties and the forming of new Continental ones. In this novel, as in Shirley, French language blazes a pathway to emotional autonomy. Here the primary force blocking that outcome is not a patriarchal gerontocracy but a scheming “foreign” matriarch: Mme Beck, the head of the girls’ pensionnat where Lucy is employed. Closely regarded, however, this matriarchy bears in its operations a strong resemblance to patriarchy. Female though Lucy’s superior obviously is, at a climactic moment of Lucy’s stay Mme Beck “did not wear a woman’s aspect, but rather a man’s. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power” (66). Ultimately, to prevail in the power struggle with her employer, Lucy will have to complete her transformation from passive bystander to conscious agent of her own destiny. Lucy’s voice as first-person narrator brings a stirring depth of conviction to her account of that contest. Even though the central male Francophone in its cast of characters is nothing if not imperious, Villette does not support Sally Shuttleworth’s thesis, cited earlier, that in Brontë the function of language acquisition in courtship is to establish male dominance (177). True, Paul Emanuel, the male Francophone in question, is capable of flagrant bullying – his misogynistic rants rival those of the crusty Rector Helstone – but he is capable of disarming tenderness as well. As Paul himself impresses on Lucy, beneath their glaring differences of nationality, religion, and temperament, there exists a mystic likeness: “You are patient, and I am choleric; you are quiet and pale, and I am tanned and fiery; you are a strict Protestant, and I am a sort of lay Jesuit: but we are alike – there is affinity” (311). Lucy’s discovery of that unlikely-seeming likeness hinges on her growing mastery of French, and coincides with her psychological distancing not so much from England itself as from her own English past. The psychological confinement she has undergone in her homeland is epitomized by her situation as companion to the elderly invalid, Miss Marchmont: “Two hot, close rooms thus became my world … I forgot that there were fields, woods, rivers, seas, an ever-changing sky outside the steam-dimmed lattice of this sick-chamber” (31). Her move to Villette may not make her “rayonnant,” like William Crimsworth, but it does offer her the possibility of release, broadening her emotional horizons. While Lucy’s first encounter with unaccustomed surroundings and an unfamiliar language disorients and depresses her, any reversion

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to her earlier claustrophobic, insular condition becomes steadily less conceivable, a point Brontë obliquely but decisively underscores. After her breakdown following her panicky recourse to the confessional, Lucy awakes amid eerily familiar surroundings: a furnished simulacrum of the Brettons’ English home, recalled from her early years. “Strange to say, old acquaintance were all about me, and ‘auld lang syne’ smiled out of every nook” (93). What Lucy’s “auld lang syne” signifies is a regression of both an affective and a linguistic type, suddenly plunging the convalescent once more into an Anglophone domain. Mrs Bretton, who has been nursing her, confides reassuringly, “It would puzzle me to hold a long discourse in French” (147). The nostalgic recursion to auld lang syne cannot satisfy Lucy’s keenest yearnings: “I did long, achingly … for something to fetch me out of my present existence and lead me upwards and onwards” (93). The vaguely defined “something” takes the unexpected form of a prolonged linguistic shock therapy. Lucy’s saturation with French discourse, mimed in the text by the proliferation of French words on the printed page, becomes the force catapulting her out of her disconsolate lethargy. The French language takes on – as in Shirley, but with even more potency – a metonymic force, becoming the catalyst for Lucy’s exposure to unBritish modes of thought and feeling.3 For that exposure to occur, however, Lucy must first liberate herself from a more emotionally binding incarnation of auld lang syne: her compulsive attachment to her childhood companion, now practising medicine in Villette, Graham (“Dr. John”) Bretton. On her arrival in Villette, Lucy by chance encounters her former comrade. Amid the dazzle of the foreign scene she does not recognize his identity, but feels soothed by his British kindness: “[T]he sound in my ear of his voice, which spoke a nature chivalric to the needy and feeble … were a sort of cordial to me long after. He was a true young English gentleman” (54). English is here the operative word; Graham’s surname, Bretton, of course underscores his national origin, and the voice that comforts the bewildered young stranger speaks with her own native accents. The question Graham’s mother later asks about him – “Lucy, has he not rather the air of an incipient John Bull?” (160) – though facetious, drives home the point with perhaps undue bluntness. To free herself from her fruitless longing for this eminently British John Bull, Lucy must acknowledge her attraction to a man who is his diametric opposite: one who is capable of

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speaking at most a handful of English words. As Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky argue: “Through Lucy’s complicated and disappointing relationship with the Englishman Graham Bretton … and her formative encounters with the French teacher and Labassecourien nationalist, M. Paul Emanuel, Lucy gradually loosens the stranglehold of English national identification and the web of fantasy and invention in which she has been enmeshed” (926). Lucy’s first encounter with M Paul is not auspicious. On her arrival at the Pensionnat she overhears an exchange between Mme Beck and the professor concerning the character of her physiognomy: “I read it” [Paul announces]. “Et qu’en dites vous?” [And what would you say about it?] “Mais – bien des choses [Well – many things],” was the oracular answer. “Bad or good?” “Of each kind, without doubt.” (56–7) Here, as elsewhere, Brontë draws on the “homogenizing convention,” rendering some lines of dialogue as English “translations” of a postulated, fragmentarily transcribed French “original.” Despite the presence of some lines in Lucy’s mother tongue, the overall effect is to transmit an impression of the intimate bond between the two Francophones; they comprise a compact language community, using a code from which the Anglophone newcomer is unceremoniously shut out. Lucy can only wait patiently – ever the bystander – while the cryptic text of her physiognomy is being deciphered by the alien adepts. From this initial posture of blank exclusion, Lucy, little by little, through her interactions with speakers of the other tongue (above all with the choleric professor himself), gains an agency that does after all lead her “onward and upward.” Paul Emanuel’s primary role in this transformation is not that of a stern male preceptor seeking dominance, but rather that of coach and provocateur. To cite Lawson and Shakinovsky again: “That Lucy writes significant portions of the text in French, the language M. Paul taught her, reflects his capacity to encourage her to speak and think differently, to exert her identification beyond the narrowly national and pedagogical ones to which she clings initially in Labassecour” (939). The magnitude of Lucy’s linguistic sea-change is reflected both in the amount of textual

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French in her exchanges with Paul and in the supposed French origin of numerous passages transcribed in English. Repeatedly, a sentence given in French introduces a series of English statements to signal that the entire dialogue is to be understood as “actually” conducted in the other language. (We have seen the same work-around anticipated several centuries earlier by Shakespeare.) Despite the considerable number of Paul Emanuel’s lines rendered in English, his strictly French utterances are frequent enough to leave the reader in no doubt as to his linguistic profile. Paul figures in fact as the authoritative arbiter of proper French expression, as when he scolds Lucy for encouraging her pupils “to strangle their mother-tongue in their throats, to mince and mash it between their teeth, as if they had some base cause to be ashamed of the words they uttered” (206). Unlike the utterances of his skittish pupil Ginevra, who uses French “when about to say something heartless” (77), Paul’s words tend to be granted their “original” French imprint when he is being transparently wholehearted. His outburst to his “unfeeling” class is thus transmitted in his native vernacular: “‘Vous n’êtes que des poupées?’ I heard him thunder. ‘Vous n’avez pas des passions – vous autres?’” (Are you nothing but dolls? Do you have no passions – you people?) (111). Fulminations of this sort operate to brand French itself as the narrative’s premier vehicle for signalling emotional warmth; such a speaker is the polar opposite of a passionless automaton. A turning point in Lucy’s own emotional progress is her participation in a school theatrical under the aegis of M Paul. Her improbable casting as an amorous male fop obliges her to emerge from the self-protective cocoon in which she usually lurks and expose herself to the unsparing limelight. Mary Jacobus comments that “Lucy … crosses the sexual divide – impersonating a man while clad as a woman from the waist down” (45), but a parallel boundary that Lucy crosses is a linguistic one: she must deliver her lines in her fledgling French. As a general rule the act of speaking a language not one’s own entails an element of the performative, and Lucy’s bizarre role in the play redoubles the everyday role-playing she has perforce engaged in while navigating her unaccustomed Francophone milieu. Paul’s French exhortations apply as aptly to Lucy’s offstage personality as to her onstage persona: “À bas la timidité” (Down with timidity) (117) and “Courage, mon ami” (Courage, my friend) (120).4 His words reverberate beyond the immediate theatrical

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moment, pinpointing the endemic faint-heartedness Lucy needs to overcome in her offstage life, while enjoining on her the confidence she needs to acquire. The French language here again establishes itself as the verbal conduit within which this psychic conversion will be enacted. The theatrical interlude shows that Lucy is beginning to shed her cloak of passivity and to realize her potential agency; through acting a role, she discovers that in her daily life she can act. But it is a discovery she is still loath to embrace: “A keen relish for dramatic expression had revealed itself as part of my nature; to cherish and exercise this new-found faculty might gift me with a world of delight, but it would not do for a mere looker-on of life” (121). M Paul, ever the pragmatic prompter, will not allow Lucy to typecast herself in this pallid role of wallflower, a mere vicarious sharer of the experiences of others, a posture mirroring Shirley and Caroline’s passive surveillance of the attack on Moore’s mill. He imposes on her his adamantly dissenting perception of her true personality: “I know you! I know you! Other people in this house see you pass, and think that a colourless shadow has gone by. As for me, I scrutinized your face once, and it sufficed” (133). Again and again, as the narrative proceeds, it is Paul’s French urging that propels Lucy towards performing the unaccustomed role he is determined she shall play: “une forte femme – une Anglaise terrible” (a strong woman – a terrifying Englishwoman) (278). The leap from wan exile to fierce “Anglaise” is a vertiginous recasting, but it seems a natural outgrowth of Lucy’s fateful linguistic code-switch. Throughout this process Graham Bretton occupies the role of Paul Emanuel’s English foil. Although he is her fellow countryman and old acquaintance, Graham miscasts Lucy in a disappointing supporting part, one that curtails rather than enhances her burgeoning selfhood. Lucy characterizes her response to Graham with a revealing theatrical metaphor: “I realized his entire misapprehension of my character and nature. He wanted always to give me a role not mine” (270). She begins to understand that performing a part that does full justice to her nature will entail a change of directors: a move from her comfort zone into linguistic risk. In Brontë’s final novel, French operates as a verbal roadmap charting the evolution of the protagonist’s personality. Above all, it counterposes the two leading men’s perceptions of Lucy, and in so doing it executes a remarkable, carefully patterned balancing act. Throughout the action Paul and Graham make their entrances and exits

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like two figures trapped in contrary compartments of a revolving door. They occupy Lucy’s field of attention by turns, alternating speeches in French and English. After a series of telling encounters between the pair of male opposites, it is the French speaker who establishes his primacy in Lucy’s affections. Even when such encounters seem to work to the volatile Francophone’s disfavour, the tables are soon turned. Amid the crowd exiting a public concert, Paul, nettled by Lucy’s attentions to Graham, pushes brusquely by her. In a mocking glance at the professor’s native tongue, Graham labels him “what he himself would call ‘méchant’” (nasty) (191). But the ensuing action deflates Bretton’s hilarity. Soon afterwards, Lucy’s Francophone admirer more than atones for his rudeness by displaying his empathy with her downcast state of mind, an outreach of imagination of which Graham seems incapable: “Mademoiselle, vous êtes triste” (Miss, you’re sad), he declares simply (199). Often as he unsettles Lucy’s habitual “English” composure, the importunate foreigner just as often demonstrates his power to penetrate the shell of her private feelings. Over and over, passages in French, or in a blend of French and English, dramatize the fluctuating interplay of sentiment between Brontë’s odd couple. A prime example is the scene in which Paul enters Lucy’s classroom to hand her a long-awaited letter from the usually reticent Graham. Offended by her receiving a message from a possibly favoured rival in a language he does not speak, Paul is all the more piqued by the alacrity with which she welcomes it. Yet the overt tension between the two masks a subterranean process of rapprochement, subtly suggested by the French elements of their dialogue. Abashed by Lucy’s tearful response to his disgruntlement, Paul offers a disarming “Allons, allons” (Come, come) (207), signalling his softening towards her. He then shifts to a mode of self-recrimination (rendered in English) and offers Lucy his handkerchief, which becomes a moist “flag of truce” between them (207). Venturing onto the risky ground of romantic affairs, the dialogue switches back to French, Paul snidely insinuating “[O]n sait ce que c’est un ami” (We know what a ‘friend’ means) (207). Lucy meanwhile flaunts the talismanic handkerchief, finally provoking in the other a French outburst – “Je vois bien que vous vous moquez de moi” (I see plainly that you’re making fun of me) – as he snatches away the offending object (208). “Really that little man was dreadful,” Lucy muses (208); but the episode leaves her with sentiments far more

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complicated than simple dread. The dialogue in French (including some “translated” English) has drawn the sparring couple unexpectedly into a new closeness. A subsequent scene takes the form of a veritable duel between the opposed languages. It is initiated when Graham thoughtlessly presses the heartsick Lucy to act as a go-between in his courtship of another childhood companion, Polly Home. Stumbling on their colloquy, which he misreads as romantically compromising, Paul, like a blustering villain of melodrama, “hisses” French words of opprobrium into Lucy’s ear: “Petite chatte, doucerette, coquette” (little cat, tease, coquette) (271). The verbal abuse stings her into an indignant rejoinder in his own tongue: “Oui, j’ai la flame à l’âme, et je le dois avoir!” (Yes, I’ve got a flame burning in my soul, and I ought to have one!) (271). When the discomfited professor has exited the scene, Graham, who has overheard his words, thinks fit to ridicule the other man’s French mutterings with complacent Saxon raillery: “[C]apital! petite chatte, petite coquette!” (271). He “put his handkerchief to his face and laughed till he shook” (271). Once again, his mirth is ill-judged. Lucy is offended by the conduct of both men, but on a deeper level she is being steadily drawn into Paul’s passional Francophone orbit; a new flame, to steal Lucy’s metaphor, is indeed being kindled in her soul. (The detail of the handkerchief ironically recalls the earlier, heated encounter between the pair.) According to the novel’s contrarian affective logic, M Paul’s harsh and peremptory treatment of Lucy progressively shrinks the emotional distance separating them. The process is amusingly given concrete embodiment on an occasion when, seated at her worktable, Lucy displays her reluctance to position herself close to her prickly admirer. “Est-ce assez de distance?” (Is this far enough away?), he inquires sarcastically after seating himself at the opposite extremity of the table (280). His repeated French admonitions to Lucy can be understood not as belligerent attempts at supremacy but as gestures aimed at overcoming physical apartness; alone among the novel’s cast of characters the little professor engages with Lucy as a sexual being. Ever the would-be theatre director, when he perceives she has dressed herself with unusual flair for a May Day outing he casts her in a flirtatious role preposterously at odds with her real personality: “Mademoiselle Lucie est coquette comme dix Parisiennes … À-t-on jamais vu une Anglaise pareille. Regardez plutôt son chapeau, et ses gants, et les brodequins!” (Miss Lucy is as flirtatious

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as ten Parisian women. Has anyone ever seen an Englishwoman like her? Just look at her hat, and her gloves, and her boots!) (320–1). The reprimand is of course ludicrously misplaced, but the character it foists on Lucy, recasting her as a sultry Parisian “femme fatale,” points to potentialities in her make-up that are normally submerged. Here again, the French language operates as a signpost pointing toward those shrouded possibilities. Lucy manifests the change in her sense of self by her actions. A turning point in that evolution is her interment of her trove of letters from Graham, a meagre compendium of English-language commonplaces, in a hermetically sealed bottle (chapter 26). The gesture symbolizes her relinquishment not only of her longing for the impassive English John Bull but of a whole prior phase of her existence. While she may not be fully aware of it, what she is burying is, in effect, her old English – and Anglophone – self. After the private ritual she describes herself as “lingering, like any other mourner, beside a newly-sodded grave,” but the aftermath reveals her disposal of the sad souvenirs to be an act not simply of burial but of resurrection; she feels “strong, with a reinforced strength” (253). She follows up the entombment in a later chapter (31) with a terse valediction: “Good night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful, but you are not mine” (307). Lucy’s words have an added poignancy, because her attachment to Graham has been prolonged and obsessive. Yet her burial of a dead affection clears the way for one that is living; it marks a decisive turn from Englishness to Frenchness. The action that follows up Lucy’s declaration drives home the point; she awakes from a slumber out of doors to find that, while Graham has left her figuratively in the cold, Paul has kept her literally warm, covering her with shawls while she slept. The novel’s culminating scene takes the form of a heated dispute over  Lucy’s fate between Paul and his cousin, Mme Beck, with a distraught Lucy (in one last appearance in the role of passive bystander) looking on. Given that the two disputants are both Francophones with minimal knowledge of English, the structure of the dialogue as printed seems peculiar: “Leave her [Lucy] to me; it is a crisis; I will give her a cordial, and it will pass,” said the calm Madame Beck.

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To be left to her and her cordial seemed to me something like being left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply, harshly, and briefly – “Laissez-moi! [Leave me!]” in the grim sound I felt a music strange, strong, but life-giving. “Laissez-moi!” he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial muscles all quivering as he spoke. “But this will never do,” said Madame, with sternness. More sternly rejoined her kinsman – “Sortez d’ici! [Get out of here!]” “I will send for Père Silas; on the spot I will send for him,” she threatened pertinaciously. “Femme!” cried the Professor, not now in his deep tones, but in the highest and most excited key, “Femme! Sortez à l’instant! [Woman! Get out this instant!]” (405) William Cohen maintains, with some justice, that “Villette has an improvisatory attitude toward the division between languages, evident in the importation of French words as well as in the French-accented English” (190). Close reflection, however, can reveal the presence of a subtle method in Brontë’s seeming linguistic randomness. True, the disposition of lines of dialogue in the above passage may appear an oddly arbitrary application of the homogenizing convention, but it is one that brings into vivid relief what is at stake for Lucy. While one must assume that both disputants are “actually” speaking in their mother tongue, French, it is only the woman’s lines that are printed in English “translation.” The patterning, though unorthodox, has a compelling dramatic logic; it results in a truly dialogic joust of idiolects and mentalities. In the earlier discussion between the same pair concerning Lucy’s physiognomy, lines in both languages were distributed evenly between the two speakers in a fashion suggesting their long-standing amicable league. Here, instead, their linguistic unity has been fractured. Having at last mustered the resolve to press his emotional claim, Paul is now granted his natural French voice, one well attuned to his exasperated fury. (In French, “femme” is an unflatteringly brusque mode of addressing a person of the female sex.) Mme Beck, maintaining her businesswoman’s aplomb, is endowed with the “English” discourse of cool rationality (“This will never do”). Such language echoes the “sensible” but damply inhibiting

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tones of Lucy’s English past, the tedious auld lang syne from which Paul’s influence has been weaning her. By contrast, Paul’s irate French vernacular registers as “a music strange, strong, but life-giving.”5 The central conflict of the novel is powerfully focused here in the acrid battle of clashing tongues. It is a combat in which the expected gender roles are reversed; patriarchal authority is invoked by the female speaker, vested in a Church “father,” Père Silas, while a woman’s autonomy, her freedom to choose her own fate, is championed by a habitually arrogant male. Lucy’s transformative emergence from her old, passive “English” self is confirmed by the prospectus Paul shows her for the school he has established for her: “Externat de demoiselles … Directrice, Mademoiselle Lucy Snowe” (Young Women’s Day School. Miss Lucy Snowe, Director) (409). Despite Lucy’s English, wintry surname, the designation asserts her Francophone professional credentials, which complete the autonomous identity she has by this point made her own. As Lawson and Shakinovsky argue: To move from Madame Beck’s school to the position of mistress of her own Labassecourien school is to take the definitive step out from and beyond her narrow national identification as the English teacher. The more important kind of freedom she eventually seizes, then, is the freedom from her own limiting self-conceptions and identifications. (939) Or, as Lucy herself puts it, “[T]he blooming and charming Present [has] prevailed over the past” (394). I would add that her diligently acquired new language has prevailed over her old, inherited one; her emotional metamorphosis has progressed in tandem with her linguistic renovation. The bloom will be dimmed by Paul’s intimated loss at sea, but it will not be utterly blighted. In the ongoing clash of languages, the passion of French has triumphed over the prose of English, demolishing the wavering protagonist’s carapace of insularity. More decisively than Shirley, Villette embodies a nascent spirit of female cosmopolitanism: one that dares to speak its name in more than one language, to embrace (in all senses) the foreign. Still, it is a cosmopolitanism of a qualified, tremulous sort. Only later in the century will English and American writers – most notably Henry James – become bolder in their ventures into linguistically diverse territory.

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Strange Encounters Henry James’s French Connection

Although only a couple of decades separate Henry James’s earliest writings from Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, that brief period had a marked impact on the prevalence of multilingualism in literary works. One development of signal relevance to James in particular was the increased volume of transatlantic travel, especially from the post-bellum United States. The new availability of relatively fast and comfortable ocean crossings was a major contributing factor. As Mark Rennella and Whitney Walton observe, a “philosophy of travel as essential to life” was “probably possible only because steamships made the transatlantic passage so much more agreeable after the Civil War than it had been before” (367). As a result, the same authors report, “traveling to Europe became a popular pastime among a broad range of America’s middle class” (368). These changes, which tended to encourage a more cosmopolitan outlook among travellers, help to account for the differences between Brontë’s and James’s approaches to the inclusion of language variance. More confidently than Brontë, James could assume that many of his readers either had visited the Continent or meant to do so, and were therefore likely to be receptive to “international” themes. At the same time, however, while such readers may have had a smattering of French, Italian, or the like, it was apt to be no more than a smattering, As a consequence, James may have assumed that lengthy passages in those languages, after the fashion of Shirley or Villette, would have been unduly burdensome; in most of his texts such “foreign” elements are limited to single words or short phrases of a sort most readers were unlikely to find opaque. And yet that does not diminish the importance of such interpolations. Despite their brevity, they can play key roles in

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the Jamesian canon, contributing to a treatment of cultural difference that is bolder and more searching than what one normally encounters in earlier fiction. Not only was James, by disposition and upbringing, possessed of a cosmopolitan sensibility; his work often self-consciously dwells on cosmopolitanism as an idea and as an issue to be scrutinized. Some readers have interpreted James’s persistent habit of introducing “foreign” expressions into his texts as a penchant for gratuitous verbal display.1 As Eric Savoy observes, that penchant is shared by many of James’s globetrotting characters: “In the world of Henry James, the surest sign of an expatriate’s sophistication is the tendency – at once emphatic and off-hand – to sprinkle the conversational matrix with French words and phrases” (196). But rather than an affectation on the part of the characters, much less the author, such “foreign” intrusions need to be read as evidence of James’s lifelong fascination with issues of nation and identity. His disposition of such material is governed not by caprice or vanity but by a considered rhetorical economy.2 According to Edwin Sill Fussell’s useful 1990 study, The French Side of Henry James, The James text inscribes French so much and so well that it is no exaggeration to say that readings of James which scant the fact of language are no readings at all but the merest selective reduction. Attention to France and French further compels attention to questions of literary patriotism and internationalism, the relations of literature and world politics, as well as deliberately sought cultural alienation. (x) Fussell’s “no exaggeration” may itself be an exaggeration, but his claim is substantially valid. To undertake an exhaustive survey of James’s deployment of language variance throughout his voluminous canon would be a foolhardy venture. Instead, in what follows I will examine his treatment of French elements in three novels, two of them early and the third published somewhat later. This selection of works is not random; all three illustrate in especially palpable fashion the dramatic and thematic purposes for which James employs language variance. They will also serve to suggest something of the remarkable range of his approaches to multilingual textuality.

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Strangers and Tall Stone Walls: The American Commenting on The American (1877), Fussell posits a concordance between place and discourse: “Language is place. The French language is Paris” (55). Language indeed is what gives solidity to setting: French expressions “are the linguistic constituent of local color” (47–8). Fussell argues that, in addition to reinforcing the verisimilitude of the Parisian milieu, the “foreign” language elements provide a discursive realism to counterbalance the novel’s melodramatic extravagances of plot and characterization, with its fatal duel and its cabal of scheming French aristocrats. “In The American James will pursue melodrama in his narrative and the opposite of melodrama in his setting” (29) – and for Fussell, setting inescapably includes language. These seem useful general explanations for the appreciable amount of French in James’s book; what remain to be examined are the discrete local effects of James’s interpolations. While to James’s protagonists, as to Brontë’s, French may offer a tempting escape route leading to moral and emotional release, such release here takes a variety of forms. In James, language – above all the French language – tends to be tightly bound up with concerns of artistic production and appreciation; indeed, in The Tragic Muse (1990) French becomes a virtual synonym for artistic endeavour. The opening tableau of The American finds Christopher Newman, the self-made but unvarnished American, in the Louvre negotiating the purchase of a copy of a Murillo Madonna by the talentless dauber Noémie Nioche, pressing into service “the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary … ‘Combien?’” (19). He follows up that negotiation by arranging French lessons with Noémie’s (imperfectly) bilingual father. The conjunction of language and art is in this case not propitious; Newman as fledgling “collector” is conducting a baldly mercantile transaction, and Noémie eventually turns out to be a coquette who is herself, however expensively, for sale. As this opening sequence indicates, characterization in this early work will lean heavily on national stereotypes. Newman figures as the proverbial American Innocent Abroad faced with “European” skulduggery as he attempts to appropriate foreign objets and eventually a “collectible” French wife. On the other hand, Newman is far from being simply a Yankee bumpkin. As James Buzard argues, “The American

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evinces a fundamental ambivalence in its representations of the tourist, an unwillingness simply to condemn or satirize the ‘new men’ and new women from the United States who were beginning to make their way to the Old World” (Beaten Track 219). As a would-be explorer of that Old World, Newman exemplifies the slenderness of the line distinguishing cosmopolitanism from colonization. The American stands as a youthful embodiment of James’s metalinguistic self-awareness, surpassing anything to be found in Brontë. Late in the novel the narrator speaks of Christopher Newman’s “life-long submissiveness to the sentiment that words were acts and acts were steps in life” (281); the sentiment could serve for James’s own credo. James’s writings testify to his conviction that words possess agency, and that words from diverse languages can act in diverse ways. His dismissal of America as a setting for fiction, dating from 1881, a few years after The American, illustrates his rhetorical self-distancing from his homeland: “[W]ith this vast new world je n’ai que faire” (I have nothing to do) (Notebooks 25 November 1881; qtd. The American 367). Language here acquires a spatial dimension; with his mid-sentence leap from English to French, James enacts his literary passage from “new” continent to “old.” It is a leap his fictional American voyager, Newman, had attempted, only to fall flat on his Yankee face. James’s verbal jump resembles Lucy Snowe’s psychic self-distancing from her English past, involving a decisive shift to French as her chosen medium of relationship. Despite the obvious differences, there are resemblances between Brontë’s cross-Channel novel and James’s transatlantic tale. In both works, travel to the Continent marks a breach with past experience and an embrace of “foreign” entanglements, coinciding with exposure to a new linguistic medium. In both, the Roman Catholic affiliation of the loved one complicates the prospect of union. Both, too, incorporate a prominent motif of theatrical performance impinging on workaday life. In their outcomes, however, the two works sharply diverge. Where in Brontë cultural and linguistic challenges yield to a stimulating melding with the other, in The American no such merger can take place; the predetermined outcome is alienation, retreat, and renunciation. In a letter of October 1869 a youthful James had written to his mother contrasting his fellow American travellers abroad unfavourably with the English: “They [English people] have manners and a language. We lack both, but particularly the latter” (322). By the time he created

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his wandering American, Newman, James’s thoughts on the relation between language and nation had grown more nuanced. Newman, though laconic, can be eloquent in his native idiom; he attempts to compensate for his deficiencies in the tongue of his new surroundings through his sessions (such as they are) with M Nioche. Yet despite his efforts to meet French people halfway, his attempts to forge any deeper intimacy fail. Writing to his editor William Dean Howells in March 1877, James arrestingly describes the obstacles to union between his fictional hero and the Frenchwoman he pursues, speaking of “the tall stone walls which fatally divide us,” i.e. men and women of different nations (qtd. American 348). In The American the walls are most bluntly epitomized by the blank façade of the cloister into which the unnerved Claire de Cintré flees, but language too can function as a less material but equally resistant barrier. Not that language in general poses for Newman a serious obstacle; most of his important French contacts, like so many of their “foreign” counterparts in James’s other works, conveniently speak fluent English, and Newman himself acquires a limited store of “bad French” (133). Language difficulties, nevertheless, become metonymic of the “tall stone walls” dividing people from one another, walls that are at bottom mental and cultural gaps of sensibility and convention. Not surprisingly, the walls sometimes manifest themselves in disputes over the meaning of particular words. An amusing instance is Valentin de Bellegarde’s objection to a prospective match between his sister Claire and Newman: “Why, you are not noble,” he tells the American (105). “The devil I am not!” Newman snaps back. The exchange pinpoints ingrained differences between European and American concepts of nobility; for the aristocrat Valentin the word denotes an inherited rank, for the Yankee visitor an intrinsic, earned merit. (At the end of the novel, when he forswears revenge and destroys the late Marquis de Bellegarde’s note incriminating his devious wife, Newman lives up to his “American” criterion of nobility.) A misunderstanding that has a comparable origin occurs later when Valentin advises Newman, “My brother is a great ethnologist” (124). Newman’s response to the ethnological brother – “Ah, you collect negroes’ skulls, and that sort of thing” – is of course fatuously naïve. In reality Urbain de Bellegarde is far from being, in any professional sense, an ethnologist. What Valentin means by the term trivializes it; it is that his brother is snobbishly alert to habits of speech and manners

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separating well-bred Europeans like himself from “vulgar” commoners like Newman, distinctions to which Newman is oblivious. It is James himself who qualifies as an ethnologist in a truer sense: an investigator of divergent norms of courtesy and conduct from nation to nation and class to class. That more searching type of ethnology emerges in another disagreement, once again involving Valentin, when the young man tells Newman that he finds the mercenary Noémie Nioche’s charms “entertaining”; “I should sum them up by another word than ‘entertaining,’” Newman primly tells his friend, who objects, “Why, that is just the word to use” (179). The lexical dispute neatly focuses the gap between the sensibilities of the American moralist and the blithe Gallic hedonist. Richard Poirier has commented on the “pattern of [verbal] repetitions” (American 461) that insistently colours tonal nuance in this work. A salient instance is the adjective “strange,” which, along with its derivatives and synonyms, stands out boldly for its shifting suggestiveness throughout James’s text. “Strange” in this context tends to have the connotation of “foreign”; the word is related to the French word étrange and its derivative étranger (foreign, foreigner). Fussell observes that “semantic ambiguities concerning such words as ‘stranger’ and ‘foreign,’ in two languages, were bound to play a major role in the international multilingual work of art” (44–5), and he goes on to tease out the implications of those ambiguities at some length (46). In this connection, Oscar Cargill long ago noted the relevance to James’s novel of Alexandre Dumas fils’s play L’Étrangère (The Foreign Woman).3 In 1876, while he was at work on early serial numbers of The American, James attended and reviewed a performance of the play at the Théâtre Français. The eponymous foreign woman, played by the legendary Sarah Bernhardt, purported to be, as James puts it, “a daughter of our own democracy” (American 332). Although James found the play lacklustre, its title may have suggested to him the fateful conjunctions in his novel between the fact of foreignness and the idea of strangeness. In The American that association insistently recurs. In an early chapter Newman notices that “Madame de Cintré’s utterance had a faint shade of strangeness” (82), but the hint of the foreign only enhances in his eyes the fascination of “that cynosure of transatlantic longing,” as Fussell aptly calls her (34). When Claire’s mother, Madame de Bellegarde, says of her daughter “She is very strange,” Newman promptly replies, “I am glad to hear it … It gives me hope” (128). His train of thought is not hard

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to divine; since the young woman seems “strange” to her own haughty French family, Newman presumably reasons, she may be receptive to the advances of a peculiar foreigner – an étranger. However, as the action progresses strangeness mutates, becoming progressively shadowed by the grim reality of estrangement, evoking the stone walls that separate people of differing origins. (“We are a strange, strange family,” Claire advises Newman, who is unsettled by the gloomy “solemnity” attending his visits to her unwelcoming home [148].) As he soon comes to recognize, Newman himself is irremediably strange in the eyes of Claire’s relatives: “They would have said I was a queer monster, eh?” he remarks to her (164). He later confesses to Claire’s showily dressed sister-in-law, “I feel … as if I were looking at you through a telescope … It is very strange” (186); the telescopic trope drives home the insistent linkage between the qualifier “strange” and the motif of alienating distance. As the narrative moves on, the idea of strangeness takes on more sombre, not to say sinister, overtones. After a colloquy with her brother Valentin on the eve of the young man’s fatal duel, Madame de Cintré feels “as if something strange and sad were going to happen” (210), a foreboding amply justified by the event. On learning that Claire, under threat of parental censure, has withdrawn from their engagement, the baffled American confronts her dour mother: “There is something very strange in it” (217). In a subsequent, climactic interview with Claire herself, stunned by her decision to retreat into a Carmelite convent, Newman is overwhelmed by the strangeness of her action, finding it “a confounding combination of the inexorable and the grotesque” (244). At length the “strangeness” begins to rub off on the confounded suitor’s own demeanour. To his friend and mentor, Mrs Tristram, “he [seems] … to be in a strange way – an even stranger way than his sad situation made natural” (274). She is moved to implore him “of all things not to be ‘strange’ … [S]he could endure anything but his strangeness” (275). But Newman’s strangeness is indelibly inscribed in his sad situation; he is becoming estranged from his own stalwart American self. Still stranger, however, is the fate that Claire de Cintré has elected. Gazing at the blank wall of her convent, Newman finds it “too strange and mocking to be real” (276); he listens to the singing of the cloistered nuns “almost stunned by the strangeness of the sound” (277). Claire’s withdrawal into cloistered seclusion marks her terminal estrangement; it renders absolute, in Newman’s eyes, her identity as an étrangère. If the

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upshot leaves Newman “[attempting] to read the moral of his strange misadventure” (301), the only moral to be found concerns the dismal, estranging power of the “tall stone walls” of nation, sect, and language. It is above all the obstructive power of those cultural and national walls that the French locutions in James’s text serve to highlight. They function as recurrent talismans of how “strange” French people and Americans are bound to remain to one another, despite the bonds of friendship they may have formed. Although their number is limited, the cumulative impact of the French words and phrases that do occur exceeds their statistical tally; they never allow us to forget that James’s hero, late of San Francisco, is a stranger in a strange and (to him) inscrutable land. Such “foreign” expressions typically feature outlandish (from Newman’s perspective) twists of French character and behaviour. An example is Noémie Nioche’s jubilant reaction to the prospect of a duel fought over her by her rival admirers, Valentin de Bellegarde and the Alsatian bravo Kapp: “C’est ça qui pose une femme” (That’s what sets a woman up) (206). The sentiment, which disgusts Newman, is in this novel’s sometimes jaundiced terms characteristically “French”: callow, self-regarding, and obsessed with personal gain. The language itself becomes an estranging trope of unregenerate “Frenchness.” The implications dovetail with James’s equivocal verdict, in a letter to his brother of July 1876 written while he was still working on the novel: “The longer I live in France the better I like the French personally, but the more I am convinced of their bottomless superficiality” (American 341). For all the young James’s urbane cosmopolitanism, his emphasis on French shallowness and materialism still reminds one of the xenophobic strictures on French mores of a Shirley Keeldar. “Foreign” linguistic interpolations are especially numerous in the speeches of Claire’s brother Valentin, intensifying the impression one receives, despite his English volubility, of his essential “Frenchness.” Where in a novel such as Villette foreign language elements can act so as to bridge the gap of fellow-feeling between individuals of diverse nationalities, here the effect is, yet again, estranging. Valentin is for Newman the most companionable member of his family, but the gaps of understanding between them consequently loom all the larger, and Valentin’s use of French calls attention to those gaps. Describing his relatives to Newman, Valentin says of his mother, “[A]fter all she is ma mère”; his older brother Urbain he identifies as “the chef de la

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famille” (79); the abrupt language shift hints that for him family ties are tightly fused with national identity and heritage. His native idiom lends even his stray moods an ethnic stamp: “‘Je suis triste’ said Valentin with Gallic simplicity” (181). Newman harbours fantasies of setting up his personable French friend in business in the United States, but he is repeatedly brought up against the fact that the friend is, after all, an étranger, a perception repeatedly confirmed by Valentin’s French utterances. At a performance of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, when he is about to return to his box to provoke the duel that will end his life, in response to Newman’s exasperated query “Are you going back there?” Valentin declares, again with “Gallic” simplicity, “Mon dieu, oui” (205). “That is the trouble with you Frenchmen,” Newman grumbles, ascribing his friend’s rash French words to his inheritance of the impetuous Gallic temperament. Though long domiciled in Paris, the half-English Bellegardes are fluently bilingual; the dying Valentin himself is described by his friend and second Ledoux as “plus qu’un Anglais – c’est un Anglomane” (more than an Englishman; he’s an Anglomaniac) (225). The judgment seems illogical, but it may be meant to dissociate the good-natured young man from the morose and perfidious model of French character the novel largely projects. (Englishness comes off favourably by comparison; Newman’s covert ally against the Bellegardes, the housekeeper Mrs Bread, is reassuringly English in both name and language.) Still, however “English” Valentin may appear to Ledoux and his fellows, such a perception leaves the American incredulous: “Newman said soberly that he had never noticed it” (225). At moments of stress Valentin’s mother and brother as well tend to have recourse to French utterances; these do little to place them in a positive light. Informed of his brother’s deathbed denunciation of the family’s shabby treatment of Newman, Urbain replies with a shrug: “Le misérable!” (251). By contrast, Claire de Cintré is given relatively few lines in her mother tongue, perhaps so as to minimize lacunae of understanding between her and Newman and thus to render their intimacy more easily imaginable. Still, when her mother inquires, “You are going to marry him [Newman]”, Claire chooses French for her reply: “Oui, ma mère” (166). Her language, like Valentin’s, merges filial deference with an aura of family allegiance. In its context, her linguistic shift, even as she declares herself committed to the American interloper, evokes the

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estranging “tall walls” that separate inhabitants of the Old World from those of the New. French discourse thus subtly presages Claire’s ultimate, estranging withdrawal. One imagines that in his later life on his more familiar and accommodating native turf, Newman’s French will grow rusty, possibly along with his passion. His “strange” French adventure is itself perhaps destined to be, in his bruised mind, hermetically walled off.

Hebraists and Hellenists: The Europeans The Europeans, published the year after The American (1878), could be imagined as a mirror image of its predecessor. Where in the earlier work Christopher Newman attempts to find fulfillment in a European land but is rebuffed by its estranging cultural investments, in this follow-up work a pair of mettlesome European siblings migrate in the reverse direction with only limited success. The Countess Eugenia travels to America in search of novelty and solace, only to find the moral climate unpropitious, while her brother Felix, although accepted into a prosperous Boston family, shows little inclination to settle down there. Some leading features are common to the two works. The Europeans again trades heavily in national stereotypes, a feature of characterization perhaps to be expected in this predominantly comic narrative. Here again, prominent motifs are repeatedly reinforced by interpolated French expressions. Lynda Zwinger has noted the interplay in The Europeans between the words “strange” and “foreign” (27); it is a feature already familiar from The American. In the later work, however, the idea of “strangeness” has somewhat different ramifications. The Europeans dramatizes clashes of language in a fashion strongly recalling Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic form. Zwinger writes aptly of the “nicely paired dichotomies on offer” in this short novel (26). But along with the famous Russian philologist, the work’s persistent dichotomies call to mind a more venerable precedent, that eminent Victorian, Matthew Arnold. James had early voiced admiration for Arnold in an 1865 review, to which I will return. More immediately relevant are Arnold’s celebrated concepts of Hebraism and Hellenism, which he would develop in Culture and Anarchy (1869). In chapter 4 of that work Arnold explains: “The uppermost idea of Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience” (127). Further, “The governing idea of

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Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience” (128). In adapting Arnold’s categories for his own artistic purposes, James embeds them in concrete fictional patterns of behaviour. The Hebraist side of the ledger again stresses ideas of duty, abstinence, and repentance, while the Hellenist side now includes the more active pursuit of sensuous enjoyment and aesthetic connoisseurship. As Alwyn Berland has argued, “The opposition of Hebraism and Hellenism may be seen, in varying dramatic forms, over and over in James” (31). In The Europeans that opposition is defined cartographically: Europe is the hotbed of Hellenism, Boston the coldbed of ascetic Hebraism. In the opening pages James sets the tone by dubbing the American city “the little Puritan metropolis” (16). As the Countess Eugenia infers from her brother Felix’s account of their relatives, the Wentworths, “They must be Puritans to their finger-tips; anything but gay!” (33). The pictures hanging on the walls of the Wentworths’ home validate her guess; they are “old-fashioned engravings, chiefly of Scriptural subjects, hung very high”; the Hellenist principle of artistic adornment has been chastened by Hebraist severity. The patriarch of the clan, Mr Wentworth, appears to the newcomer Felix, an aspiring portraitist, as “delightfully wasted and emaciated” (62); he is repeatedly credited with the unprepossessing physical attributes of chill and pallor, expressive of his abstemious habits. But the Hebraist tinge adheres as well to most of the other, less wasted Wentworths. As Felix tells the younger daughter, Gertrude, who wishes to see her sister Charlotte “married to so good a man” as her own dogged suitor, the cleric Mr Brand, “You always put things on those grounds; you will never say anything for yourself. You are all afraid, here, of being selfish. I don’t think you know how” (101). Hoping to be affable, Felix, receiving a visit from the upright Brand, asks him brightly, “Have you been preaching one of your beautiful sermons today?” (138). For the austere preacher, nothing could be more baffling than connecting the idea of beauty with one of his own edifying discourses. Undaunted, Felix cheerfully takes on the mission of modelling Hellenist hedonism for his self-abnegating hosts. Gertrude herself, whose fingertips are not utterly Puritan, proves an apt pupil; she masters the art of selfishness and marries her debonair young preceptor. This personal evolution compels her to come to terms with various sorts of “strangeness,” but strangeness in this context points not to estrangement but to its opposite. The process begins with her first

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glimpse of the “stranger,” Felix: “The young man, with his hat in his hand, still looked at her, smiling and smiling. It was very strange” (24). When the Countess subsequently arrives on the scene, Gertrude’s sister Charlotte is struck by her air of the outlandish: “Charlotte thought her very strange-looking and singularly dressed; she could not have said whether well or ill” (36). But the “strangeness” once again cuts both ways. The European visitors are struck by the strangeness of the sights amid which they have landed. Gazing from her Boston hotel window soon after her arrival from Europe, Eugenia observes “a strange vehicle … such a vehicle as the lady at the window, in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had never seen before” (6). (It turns out to be a colourful local omnibus.) This sense of the strangeness of the New World milieu continues to cling to the pair’s later, more considered perceptions. “You Americans have such odd ways!” Eugenia tells her new local admirer, Robert Acton, puzzled by her hosts’ self-censoring reticence. “You never ask anything outright; there seem to be so many things you can’t talk about” (80). Conversely, the Wentworths themselves have “a constant sense of the lady’s foreignness” (46). Confronted with the idea of domiciling the European newcomers in an adjacent cottage, Mr Wentworth inquires nervously, “Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house – in this quiet place?” (48). Given such reciprocal diffidence, one might expect that “the tall stone walls which fatally divide us” would inexorably sever the Hebraist hosts from the Hellenist guests, but that is not what happens. Rapprochement between the two sets of actors may be precarious, but it is feasible; verbal confusions tend to be a source not of unease, as in The American, but of amusement. Such comedy attaches itself to Acton, who, though by Bostonian standards widely travelled and cultivated, with numerous Chinese collectibles attesting to his eclectic tastes, reveals himself as a Hebraist in Hellenist clothing. While he admires Eugenia – “By Jove, how comme il faut she is!” he muses, in a rare burst of Bostonian French – he is too self-protective to trust her, or to trust himself with her, a guardedness suggested by his habitual gesture of thrusting his hands into his pockets. His Hebraist wariness is aggravated by his perception of the Countess’s “foreign” penchant for occasionally departing from strict veracity. “She is not honest,” he admonishes himself (148), as if the woman were a treacherously conniving Bellegarde. He is discomfited by the aura of theatricality that clings to both European visitors; suddenly

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obliged by the illness of a friend to go to Newport, he feels “as if he had been called away from the theatre during the progress of a remarkably interesting drama” (115). His relationship with the Countess never, in fact, proceeds beyond the bounds of “remarkably interesting” spectatorship. His failure to act forecloses his opportunity to lead a life more stirring than his tepid suburban routine, and his eventual decision to marry “a particularly nice young girl,” to quote the story’s lethal last line (173), hardly seems an adequate compensation. It is Gertrude Wentworth who, unlike Acton, succeeds in crossing the liminal space between risk-averse Hebraist habits and more intrepid Hellenism. What allows her to do this is the trait provincials might consider her maladjustment – her “strangeness.” She is from the start a crypto-Hellenist, potentially responsive to the allure of the perilous “foreign.” Her nonconformist temperament prompts her family to look at her askance as “peculiar,” an adjective applied to her on multiple occasions. To the perceptions of her alarmed relatives, the advent of their European cousins risks inflaming Gertrude’s oddity; “Gertrude … was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of [her] peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners” (45). The first words we hear addressed to Gertrude, by her sister, express Charlotte’s unease at Gertrude’s obstinate reluctance to attend the prescribed Sunday morning service: “Gertrude … are you very sure you had better not go to church?” (19). Soon after, the arrival of the unchurchly Felix Young offers Gertrude a tempting alternative to the ordained ritual. Gertrude’s “peculiarities” will have the effect of easing rather than obstructing her path to Felix’s affection; at the novel’s climax, in answer to Charlotte’s hesitant question “If Gertrude is so – so strange … why do you want to marry her?” Felix answers calmly, “I like strange women; I have always liked them” (153). Gertrude’s progress in The Europeans follows the well-worn lines of the myth of Sleeping Beauty, with Felix self-consciously performing the role of Prince Charming. “She has always been a dormant nature,” Felix tells Mr Brand complacently. “She was waiting for a touchstone. But now she is beginning to awaken” (140). What Gertrude is awakening to is a Hellenist apprehension of life as enjoyment and adventure, a view opposed to her long-inculcated Hebraist trance of restraint and repentance. (To Felix’s declaration, “I am very sure that no one in your

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excellent family has anything to repent of,” Gertrude retorts, “And yet we are always repenting!” [65].) Repentance, it would seem, can become addictive. A trait of Gertrude’s her relatives find especially troubling is her interest in the French language. When she remarks that having Felix and Eugenia as neighbours “will be a great chance to learn French,” her staid sister gives “a little soft, helpless groan” (49). How much of the “incomprehensible tongue” (49) Gertrude eventually acquires is left vague, but what matters is the general openness that tongue fosters: in James’s story it is the emblem of foreignness per se and of that “foreign” ideology, pleasure-seeking Hellenism. When Eugenia, in her disarming style, pays a compliment to Mr Wentworth – “‘You are a beau viellard [handsome old man], dear uncle,’ said Madame Münster, smiling with her foreign eyes” (63) – the beau viellard is disconcerted by the unwonted conflation of aesthetic appreciation, foreignness, and “outlandish” language. Later, when he confides to Felix that his son Clifford has been suspended from Harvard College for alcoholic overindulgence – “‘He was too fond of something of which he should not have been fond. I suppose it is considered a pleasure’” – the younger man laughs, “‘My dear uncle, is there any doubt about its being a pleasure? C’est de son âge, as they say in France’” (90). His nonchalant homage to the pleasure principle gains added piquancy from the worldly French maxim (It’s typical of his age). In general, the brief but numerous French phrases scattered throughout the text acquire a telling resonance; they are recurrent talismans of a perspective on life sharply at odds with Bostonian austerity, a perspective that Gertrude, at least, finds natural. (“You wouldn’t let me be natural” [162], she admonishes her sister and father after disclosing her intention to accept Felix as her husband.) It is in the scene of Felix’s proposal, which resembles the madcap finale of a French farce, that James’s counterpointing of French and English becomes most eloquent, reinforcing the clash between Anglophone compunction and Francophone equanimity. When Felix suggests that he should have brought a bouquet – “In France they always do” – Mr Wentworth responds ponderously, “We are not in France” (158); nonetheless, the ensuing dialogue takes on a distinctly Gallic flavour. Asked the purpose of the obligatory bouquet, Felix replies, “Pour la demande!” (i.e. for the request for Gertrude’s hand), as though the action were unfolding in a Parisian drawing room. The young man assures his

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prospective father-in-law that he has sown his Bohemian wild oats: “And then, c’est fini! It’s all over. Je me range” (I’ve got myself in hand); “I have settled down to a jog-trot” (160) – a mode of protesting his newfound sobriety that may leave his skeptical Anglophone auditors less than convinced. When Mr Wentworth opines that the outcome of Felix’s offer should be left to Providence to decide – “I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours” – Felix counters with pragmatic French realism: “‘But en attendant the last resort, your father lacks confidence,’ he said to Gertrude” (162). The “foreign” phrase puts in sardonic relief the older man’s parochial sanctimony. By this point, Wentworth is coming to expect such clashes of perspective. After visits to his niece in her adjacent quarters he has been “paralyzed and bewildered by her foreignness. She spoke, somehow, a different language. There was something strange in her words” (60). This does not, of course, imply that the étrangère is speaking anything but perfectly intelligible English to her Bostonian uncle; the “difference,” rather, resides in nuances of expression and sensibility. But in The Europeans French itself – “that foreign tongue which they both [Felix and Eugenia] appeared to feel a mysterious prompting occasionally to use” (14) – takes on a metaphorical dimension that continually accentuates the more comprehensive “difference” that Mr Wentworth intuits. The ongoing confrontation of tongues transmits the sense of a wider world beyond the “little Puritan metropolis,” wider not just physically but also spiritually. As Eugenia, on the point of departing from the unaccommodating New World, responds to her brother’s forecast, “We shall often meet over there”: “I don’t know … Europe seems to me so much larger than America” (172–3). One suspects that for James himself the promise of Newman’s consoling New World is fading, and that he has by now begun to share his much-travelled heroine’s unorthodox sense of spatial dimensions.

Foreign Infection: The Tragic Muse The Europeans could be thought of as a curtain-raiser to James’s later and weightier novel, The Tragic Muse (1890). Questions of language take on here an enhanced urgency; Fussell notes that the book contains “more French than … any other novel by Henry James” (144), and I will argue that that language is what effectively defines its contending

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character groupings. Although its cast includes no American Puritans, the Arnoldian clash between Hebraists and Hellenists again dominates the scene, and geography again provides a moral correlative: France is cast as the domain of art par excellence, England as the epicentre of civic rigour. In his early (1865) review of Arnold’s Essays James had already gestured toward such a dichotomy, praising Arnold’s freedom from English parochialism along with his openness to German and French literature. He argues that English critical practice has retarded the development and vulgarized the character of the English mind, as compared with the French and the German mind. This national inference may be nothing but a poet’s flight, but for ourselves, we assent to it. It touches us too. The facts collected by Mr. Arnold on this point have long wanted a voice. It has long seemed to us that, as a nation, the English are singularly incapable of large, of high, of general views. They are indifferent to pure truth, to la verité vraie. (Literary Criticism 716) The Anglo-Hebraists lack, that is (as Arnold would soon argue in Culture and Anarchy), the Hellenistic resolve “to see things as they really are.” What Arnold would have been less likely to do is formulate the concept of “the real truth” in French. It is typical of James that, even at the outset of his career, when extolling the superiority of Continental thought he would turn, as if by reflex, to a Continental idiom. The whole review confirms the deep congeniality of Arnold’s conceptual framework to James’s sensibility as an aspiring writer of fiction. Over the years James’s attitude toward both Arnold and England underwent significant shifts. T.J. Lustig argues that James came to take a less blandly admiring view of the older writer, considering him “both a critic and an instance of Englishness, simultaneously both essential and exceptional” (189). In his nuanced 1884 appraisal for The English Illustrated Magazine, James foregrounds the exceptional side, declaring that Arnold “is, among the English writers of our day, the least of a matter-of-course Englishman – the pair of eyes to which the English world rounds itself most naturally as a fact among many facts” (Literary Criticism 722–3). In James’s mature view “the exasperating thing” about ordinary English people was “their serenity, their indifference, their tacit assumption that their form of life is the normal one” (721). It follows

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that James’s critique of English complacency would have extended to linguistic matters, to the insular prejudice that Anglophone discourse is normative, “foreign” modes deviant. The freedom from insular complacency James admired in Arnold – in short, his cosmopolitan outlook – he would emulate in his own writing through his linguistic practices. His habit of scattering elements drawn from French, Italian, and other European tongues feeds into his campaign against arrogant Anglophone hegemony. In The Tragic Muse, as in The American and The Europeans, language habits provide a key to the characters’ positions regarding insularity and its adversaries. The numerous French interpolations serve, here as elsewhere, an ideological agenda, reminding readers that alternatives to English exist and claim equal footing. As Fussell puts it, “[I]t is a main textural message of The Tragic Muse that willful ignorance of French properly defines an indolent mindless uncultivated barbarian provincial Philistine Briton or American” (148). While Fussell’s formulation may sound overheated, it captures the polemical nature of the novel’s discursive tactics. In The Tragic Muse, as in The Europeans, who is, and who is not, in the habit of using French counts for as much as the words a character may actually utter. One should also note that most of the lines of French dialogue (leaving aside native speakers such as the actress Honorine Carré) are assigned to British sophisticates such as Peter Sherringham and Gabriel Nash. These figures, by virtue of their habitual French discourse, constitute a team: the Francophile champions of the creative arts, standing in opposition to the workaday legions of Union Jack conformity. (Sherringham’s professed devotion to that cause, as will be seen, is eventually exposed to skepticism.) The Gallic interpolations tend often to be exclamatory, raising the temperature of verbal exchange above the temperate Anglophone mean. They are for the most part carefully positioned to score maximum rhetorical impact. The novel’s opening sentence strikes a mordant anti-insular keynote: “The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a general thing, are to their perception an inexpressive and speechless race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness of contact with verbal or other embroidery” (I 3).4 While the tone is arch, the generalization is soon bolstered by James’s tableau of the English Dormer clan huddling mutely in the garden of the Paris Palais de l’Industrie. The picture is capped by the dismissive shrug of a fancied

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French onlooker: “En v’là des abrutis!” (Just look at those dullards!) (I 4). The sudden imaginative switch here to an “alien” viewpoint, detached from the one habitual to the characters and (presumably) to most readers, is a classic cosmopolitan manoeuvre. The French words are meant to compel attention to ingrained Anglophone dullness; it is no accident that the family name, Dormer, bears a suggestive resemblance to the French verb dormir (to sleep). It soon becomes apparent that not all Dormers are intellectually dormant, unresponsive to verbal or other embroidery. Still, the presiding Dormer, the dowager Lady Agnes, finds little stimulus in the artistic objects in evidence around her. Contemplating a marble group of “a man with the skin of a beast round his loins, tussling with a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or capture,” she grumbles, “Everything seems so very dreadful” (I 8); no doubt she recoils, with Victorian horror, from the sight of implied erotic contact, while disregarding whatever formal excellences the object may possess. Art of the type cultivated in Paris appears to her depraved; indeed, art in principle, according to her son Nick, strikes her as a sort of morbid contagion. She holds “a general conviction that the ‘aesthetic’ – a horrible insidious foreign disease – is eating the healthy core out of English life” (II 212). Like Mr Wentworth in The Europeans, she is ill at ease with foreign parlance. When, entering a café with her like-minded daughter, Grace, she is asked, “Mesdames sont seules?” (You ladies are alone?) she responds curtly in fractured French, “Non; nous sommes beaucoup” (No, we are many) (I 37). Overhearing a conversation concerning contemporary French dramatists, she exclaims, “What an extraordinary discussion! What dreadful authors!” (I 68). Against Lady Agnes and her Hebraist counterparts, a group also including her daughter Grace and Sherringham’s widowed sister, Julia Dallow, James sets a troupe of worldly Hellenists. The most flamboyant of these is Nick’s old college friend, Gabriel Nash, whose posture of Francophile dilettante and voluble French speaker stirs nervous tremors among the ranks of the more staid Anglophones. In answer to Nick’s rhetorical question, “Don’t we both live in London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?” he strikes the pose of a congenital exile dislocated in both time and place. “I don’t live in the nineteenth century,” he assures his friend, adding with a typical French flourish, “Jamais de la vie!” (I 24). The French language, for Gabriel, has a numinous status, conveying his rejection of workaday affairs and his dedication to artistic pursuits.

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When he is told that Nick intends to stand for Parliament, Nash’s comic dismay cannot be voiced in mere mundane English: “To do that sort of thing without a bribe – c’est trop fort!” (It’s outrageous!) (I 54). (He is not aware that Nick’s “bribe” is the favourable regard of the attractive, politically engaged Julia.) Nash’s singular presence makes him a plausible advocate for the interlinked values of French discourse and aesthetic connoisseurship,5 but not the novel’s paramount advocate. That distinction belongs to the eponymous “tragic muse,” the greatly talented, though initially amateurish, young actress Miriam Rooth. Where Nash’s frequent forays into French strike one as dandyish, Miriam’s use of the language seems consistently natural and spontaneous. And where Nash’s character seems essentially static, Miriam’s evolves, along with her control of language, an evolution that provides the narrative’s mainspring. In a fashion that broadly recalls Lucy Snowe’s progress, her ability to draw on the resources of French tracks the course of her growth into an independent and dedicated performer. In its central narrative, the novel is a bildungsroman, tracing a female artist’s growth into her vocation. It has become a critical commonplace to view Miriam in abstract terms as a vacant signifier in search of a tangible signified. In her Derridean reading of The Tragic Muse, Karen Scherzinger even dubs the girl “absence personified” (85). Such a position is understandable; it echoes Peter Sherringham’s conviction “that a woman whose only being was to ‘make believe,’ to make believe she had any and every being you might like and that would serve a purpose and produce a certain effect … such a woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing to ‘be fond’ of, because there would be nothing to take hold of ” (II 198). But to accept Sherringham’s judgment at face value, with its implied devaluing of fluid imagination, is to disregard the full fictional context. As the novel proceeds, one gets a strong sense that Miriam is a remarkably present sort of “absence.” In fact, it is rather Peter’s controlling urge to “take hold” of Miriam, to cramp her protean autonomy by obliging her to conform to his definition of the role she should play, that better deserves the epithet “monstrous.” Peter’s qualms are, to be fair, not totally unfounded; Miriam’s identity does tend to undergo chameleon-like fluctuations. She is first introduced, along with her importunate mother, as someone without any fixed national affiliation; Nick’s younger sister Biddy reflects “that they

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were people whom in any country, from China to Peru, you would have immediately taken for natives” (I 23). Biddy’s off-the-cuff perception leads Sara Blair to call Miriam “[a] woman without a country” (136), but the woman does not long remain countryless, despite her migratory past.6 She adopts a country – France – as her artistic homeland. That fact bears crucially on the role of language in her professional life. Sherringham is struck by her “equal mastery of two languages” [French and English]; “Say of half a dozen,” Miriam breezily replies. For all her polyglot bravado, however, she seems most at home in French. She is assured by Peter that “your French is better than your English – it’s more conventional” (I 202). (It seems a curious way to measure language skills, but then Peter, at bottom the proper Englishman, has a high regard for convention.) It is precisely Miriam’s linguistic adaptability that enables her to manage a French-based but transnational stage career, equipping her to bestow her mastery of the French dramatic tradition on a theatrically backward Britain. Before that, however, she must undergo a rigorous initiation at the Parisian hub of that tradition. In a suite of pivotal chapters James chronicles Miriam’s introduction to the French canons of artistic excellence under the tutelage of a renowned practitioner, Madame Carré. In these episodes James dramatizes the girl’s metamorphosis from stage-struck neophyte to confident professional. It is here above all that interpolated French phrases transmit a vibrant sense of the workings of this tutelage. To begin with, the ebullient Nash introduces the ancient actress with an appropriate tribute: “Ah, la voix de Célimène” (Ah, the voice of Célimène) (I 117). His words at once establish Carré as more than a venerable stage veteran; they enshrine her as the reincarnation of Molière’s famous heroine and thus as the warden of his legacy, a legacy enshrined in the French language. Forgoing verisimilitude for the benefit of Anglophone readers, the scenes featuring the Francophone Carré are inscribed not in her mother tongue but (via the homogenizing convention) in a tongue foreign to the actress herself. Thus, although the other participants (Nash, Sherringham, Miriam, and her mother) are all fluent in French, the dialogue is presented in the guise of a postulated English “translation” of what was “actually” said. However, lest the French character of the dialogue be forgotten, James mixes in the occasional French word or phrase to serve as reminders of the “true” language one should imagine being spoken. One need not follow Pierre Walker in assuming that the

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French component “[seduces] James’s English language readers into the belief that they are reading French” (Review of Fussell 105). Rather, the function of these fragments is, as in Brontë, to operate as semiotic prompts, nudging readers to adopt the pretence that the conversation is occurring in an alternate language situated in an alternate cultural space. A fervent advocate for her own theatre and its rich history, Carré challenges the Anglophone normativity that James scorned. Her scanty knowledge of English does not stop her from dismissing it as an inferior medium: “[I]t was a language of which one expected so little” (I 130). Carré might herself fairly be charged with parochialism, but because her prejudice arises from a storied artistic legacy it seems more a foible to be indulged than a narrowness to be censured. “Je ne connais qu’une scène – la nôtre” (I know only one stage – our own) (I 122), she declares, in the one language she fully commands. As a worldly Parisian she has no room for Hebraist squeamishness: “Bad women? Je n’ai joué que ça” (That’s all I’ve ever played) (I 124). More gravely, after pressing upon Miriam the imperative of strict professional discipline, she drives the point home with an emphatic French envoi, “Il n’y a que ça” (There’s only that) (135), a code switch that clinches the bond between her national stage and the language used upon it. Miriam, for her part, affirms her commitment and her independence in both languages, but most ardently in French. While the word “strange” occurs less frequently in The Tragic Muse than in The American or The Europeans, when it does occur it highlights the novel’s central collision of values. When Sherringham remarks condescendingly to Miriam, “You are a strange girl,” she concurs tartly in French, “Je crois bien!” (I should say so!) (I 162). The riposte succinctly conjoins her French identity and its power to distance her from the English diplomat who hopes to subdue her inconvenient “strangeness.” Later, when Peter makes a gauche attempt to pigeonhole her as a Jewess, she drops into her favoured tongue to claim her true lineage: “I’m of the family of the artists – je me fiche of any other!” (I 205). Her identity, she implies, springs not from ethnicity but from artistry, and French is the idiom of the arts. A turning point of Miriam’s artistic odyssey is marked by her visit, in Peter’s company, to the Théâtre Français, where she is thrilled to meet several of the star performers. The visit quickly evolves into a rite of passage, establishing the girl’s special status as a “young lady sur le point d’entrer au théâtre” (on the point of entering into the theatre

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world) (I 356) – as the language stresses, not just any theatre but the unrivalled French theatre. Her gracious welcome into the dressing room of a leading lady, Mademoiselle Voisin (who acts as a sympathetic “neighbour” for Miriam’s ambition), turns what might seem a casual kindness into an open-hearted gesture of welcome. Voisin’s selfdeprecating words about her room, “Voilà, c’est tout” (Look, that’s all there is) (I 368), only highlight by contrast the gravity of the occasion in the mind of the young aspirant. In a narrator’s aside James confides, “We have chosen … for some of the great advantages it carries with it, the indirect vision” in presenting Miriam (II 43), and in his Preface to the novel he notes that he does not “go behind” his own heroine by representing her private thoughts and feelings (xvi). Critical commentary has generally followed James’s lead. Both the author and his critics have, however, overlooked a small but important exception to his principle of indirection, one that occurs during Miriam’s visit to the Théâtre Français. Deeply moved by Voisin’s example, Miriam engages in a self-colloquy that begins in English but ends with a French exclamation: “No wonder she acts well when she has that tact – feels, perceives, is so remarkable, mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” (I 367). The French words are not simply a decorative flourish; they sum up all the passion the occasion has inspired in the girl. Her thoughts reveal that what so deeply moves her is less the star’s technical mastery than her less tangible delicacy of spirit, the empathy that allows her to enter wholeheartedly into the roles she plays. The whole experience seals Miriam’s fate, and seals it for the best. She declares breathlessly to Sherringham: “Everything’s done – I feel it tonight” (I 373). As William Storm observes, in this novel James “contrast[s] an older tradition with modern practice … At one extreme stands the Comédie Française, at the other the London booking house” (141). The shift of locale affects Miriam painfully; beyond the change in her vocal stage medium, it involves some compromise of the exacting standards she has absorbed from Carré and Voisin. In the British phase of her career, she compensates for this loss by lavishing on the musty English potboilers she exhumes all her French reserves of stylistic finesse. To quote Storm, “In spite of Miriam’s theatrical dress and comportment, her authenticity and sincerity in defense of her art are … unquestionable; her commitment to it is complete and absolute” (153). Blair claims that after crossing the Channel Miriam loses her “exotic” aura of Jewishness and becomes

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“a thoroughly English subject and genteel bourgeoise” (153), but this perception ignores the more significant fact of what does not change in Miriam: the French core of her professionalism. Far from dwindling into an ordinary British performer and spouse, she clings staunchly to her hard-earned French legacy, and the continuing frequency in her speech of French phrases broadcasts that allegiance. In her new career she occupies an artistic space between the two countries, but she never consents to turn her back on the Continent. The would-be painter Nick Dormer offers a sobering parallel with the brilliantly successful actress. A revealing difference between the two is that while Nick does occasionally use French expressions, he uses them sparingly.7 It is of course true that most of those with whom Nick interacts are monoglot Anglophones, but their habitual avoidance of the foreign has more to do with choice than with capacity. For Nick to parade his Gallic lexicon before his elderly patron, Mr Carteret, let alone Carteret’s august friend, Lord Bottomley, would be tantamount to revealing himself as a pretentious renegade. The link the novel forges between French discourse and artistic ambition operates in reverse here; in the eyes of English philistines both things are tokens of alarming unsoundness. For Carteret, Nick’s devotion to art constitutes an affront to caste, lineage, and honour: “The pencil? The brush? Not the weapons of a gentleman” (II 171). They are rather, one infers, the weapons of a man liable to address you impudently in a barbarous foreign jargon. Nick’s intended, the politically minded Julia Dallow, though less intransigent is nevertheless unnerved by Nick’s bent for portraiture: “It seems so odd your having a studio,” she remarks (II 12). The need to justify his “odd” artistic vocation elicits from Nick one of his rare extended French utterances: “Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère” (II 12) (Rags and tatters, if you will, but my rags and tatters are precious to me). Like several of Dormer’s French sayings, this one – drawn from Molière’s comedy Les Femmes Savantes – evokes Miriam’s realm of French classic theatre, obliquely linking together the two divergent halves of James’s plot. It is, however, a realm that Julia is loath to enter. Pondering their relationship, Nick “become[s] more and more aware of their speaking a different language” (II 187). As it did in The Europeans the stock phrase has both a literal and a figurative sense; Nick’s fiancée is as unlikely to enter into a discussion of artistic concerns as she is to formulate her opinions in French.

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An individual apt to do both of those things, Gabriel Nash, now reenters the action. Like his earlier sojourn in Paris, Gabriel’s re-emergence in London sets the scene for both Gallic bons mots and artistic gossip. When he wishes to praise Nick’s artwork he automatically assumes a French persona (“C’est de l’exquis, du pur exquis”) (It’s exquisite, simply exquisite) (II 23); his enthusiasm forcibly pulls the artist back from English political affairs and propels him toward his cherished aesthetic pursuits. Under the influence of his urbane polyglot admirer Nick is prompted to embark on a drastic life-altering detour, away from matrimony and government blue-books toward a more enlivening career as a free-lance portraitist. In terms of psychic geography, this marks a symbolic Channel re-crossing from tight English island to sumptuous Continent. Yet the decisive impetus launching Nick into a full-scale commitment to art comes not from Gabriel but from the tragic muse herself: Miriam, the overnight London stage sensation. The radiant young actress is the antitype of Julia Dallow, with her political tracts and fixation on British parliamentary infighting. Miriam’s foreignness is emphasized by her quandaries regarding English usage. Groping for the correct word to designate Nick’s fiancée, she falters: “Ah then do bring your – what do you call her in English? I’m always afraid of saying something improper – your future” (II 39). By conventional English standards the actress’s very presence in a young man’s lodgings is improper, and her habitual resort to French expressions intensifies the pungent whiff of the risqué. References to theatrical affairs, in particular, cause her to fall back on her preferred lexicon. Musing on the prospect of having her portrait done by Nick, she tells him he would need to see her often on stage “to profit by the optique de la scène – what did they call that in English?” (II 39). In this instance the hard-to-translate French phrase implicitly connects Miriam’s theatrical art with Nick’s “optical” pursuit of portraiture. Nick is confronted here with choices not just between alternate women, languages, and vocations but between broader philosophical antinomies: between Hebraist austerity and Hellenist indulgence. Miriam herself has no doubts about which side of the cross-Channel balance sheet to choose. To express her approval of Dormer’s unfinished portrait of herself she, like Gabriel, automatically reverts to the French language: “Ah bien, c’est tapé” (Oh good, it’s first-rate) (II 55). Her demanding Parisian apprenticeship has sensitized her to artistic

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distinction, even in a medium distant from her own. But Nick’s future, too, is faced with a choice. In a seriocomic plot turn Julia, unexpectedly bursting into Nick’s studio, is confronted by a scene she reflexively reads as scandalous: the vivacious young actress sitting for her portrait at the eager hands of the evidently faithless fiancé. Her response to the “Gallic” tableau is one of outraged propriety; she blurts the sepulchral AngloSaxon monosyllable “Home!” and flees to less lurid surroundings (II 64). In The Tragic Muse romantic dilemmas become the sites of ideological strife, a contest with geopolitical ramifications; Fussell accurately calls the novel “a literary war between the two nations” (124). Although for the New York edition of the novel James made only slight changes to the original French phrases, those few alterations tend to intensify one’s sense of Miriam’s Continental ties. In the revised version, when Peter, jealous of Nick’s closeness to the young actress, asks Miriam whether she might marry his friend, she scoffs at what she deems the English obsession with matrimony: “C’est la maladie anglaise, you’ve all got it on the brain” (II 253). The earlier edition reads instead: “‘Mercy, how you chatter about marrying!’ the girl laughed, ‘You’ve all got it on the brain’” (Novels 1130). The ironic French intrusion underscores the fact of national belonging, reminding us that Miriam is diagnosing “the English malady” from a distinctively French perspective. It is only to be expected that, when Peter attempts to draw Miriam into what he considers a brilliant marriage, she clings fiercely to the professional path on which she embarked in France and which she is vigorously pursuing in Britain. A union with Sherringham, the up-and-coming diplomat, she realizes, would spell a divorce from the world of theatrical art. In scenes between the pair French phrases, though sparse, are precisely targeted. Countering Peter’s brusque dismissal of her professional ambitions, Miriam asks, “What do you do with that element of my nature? Où le fourrez-vous?” (Where do you stuff that?) (II 254). As Miriam remarks later to her mother, “The gift of tongues is in general the sign of your true adventurer” (II 308); the multi-tongued performer possesses in abundance that gift, and Sherringham can offer her no adventure to rival it. While himself fully bilingual and ostensibly cosmopolitan – he is embarking on a diplomatic mission that will take him to far-flung corners of the globe – Peter’s cosmopolitanism is little more than a veneer; he has at the core of his make-up a stony deposit of insular English complacency. Miriam, with

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her two-pronged national allegiance and her border-defying dedication to artistic excellence, is the true cosmopolitan. In The Tragic Muse, as in The Europeans, a tense proposal scene – Sherringham’s literally eleventh-hour offer of marriage (chapter  46) – gains added tension from French interpolations. In this novel the dramatic intensity is greater than in the earlier one because the issues at stake probe more deeply. The French language becomes, as it does in Brontë, an aid bolstering feminine resistance, a shield against masculine emotional bullying. To Sherringham’s intemperate “I loathe you!” – “you” meaning all those collectively populating Miriam’s theatrical world – she replies with spirited irony, “Je le vois parbleu bien!” (I can damned well see that!) (II 338). Peter’s exasperation finally goads him to disavow the French language itself; he now wilfully transfers its possession to the woman thwarting his desires. Charged with betraying his professed devotion to the theatre for his own selfish purpose, he retorts: “‘Selfish purpose’ is, in your own convenient idiom, bientôt dit” (easily said) (II 344). In his mind French discourse and theatrical affairs have fused, both of them to be dismissed as “belonging” to the uncooperative actress. What he fails to grasp is that his abandonment of the French “side” amounts to a betrayal of the woman he professes to love. Meanwhile, Miriam’s French interjections lend a sharper sting to her refusal. To Peter’s advocacy of the benefits of union with an accomplished diplomat, she replies, “What you propose to me then is to accompany you tout bonnement [quite simply] to your new post” (II 345); the French tag adds a sarcastic twist to Miriam’s indifferent reception of the prospect. A similar bit of Gallic derision accentuates her scorn for Peter’s lustrous evocation of her future as an ambassadorial accessory: “It’s vulgar to think only of the noise one’s going to make – especially when one remembers how utterly bêtes [stupid] most of the people will be among whom one makes it” (II 347).8 Peter’s last-ditch move is to parry Miriam’s imputation of vulgarity, aiming an equivalent slur at her own vocation, which he claims involves the unseemly flaunting of her “person.” Under the stress of the moment Sherringham’s genial Hellenist mask slips off, revealing his censorious Hebraist visage. Miriam shrugs off his prudery with one more French rejoinder: “Je vous attendais [I was waiting for you] with the famous ‘person’” (II 352). Throughout the altercation Miriam’s excursions into French inevitably recall her youthful, transformative initiation at the

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Théâtre Français, which established once and for all her commitment to that guild, its traditions, and its life. The entire proposal scene enacts the triumph of Continental artistic commitment over philistine Anglo-Saxon pieties. Its upshot is revealing: “If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with a genuine British distrust of the uncanny principle [i.e. art] as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island” (II 355). As the narrator sums up Peter in an earlier passage, “[T]he Englishman’s habit of not being effusive still prevailed with him after his years of exposure to the foreign infection” (II 119). James’s dry irony places Peter as at bottom merely a more presentable incarnation of the insular Lady Agnes Dormer, with her dread of artistic “infection.” Miriam’s continuing attachment to French, by contrast, helps her to resolve emotional entanglements and to hold steady her focus on her treasured professional ideals. By the time of The Tragic Muse James was prepared to undertake a more searching valuation of French culture in relation to those both inside and outside its orbit. As Buzard outlines in The Beaten Track, James’s attitude toward cosmopolitanism and its exponents always tended to be ambivalent. Miriam Rooth, however, exemplifies the affirmative side of the balance; no mere rootless nonentity, she is an adventurer bent on a consecrated artistic mission. In service to that mission she wields the weapon of multilingualism to ward off the importunities of those who would deflect her. The generation that followed James had reason to harbour more unsettling doubts.

5

Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents D.H. Lawrence

On 10 August 1914, on the brink of the First World War, Henry James wrote to his friend and fellow author Rhoda Broughton: Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this grand Niagara – yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible destructive way. (Lubbock, Letters 2: 389) While James may have occasionally harboured doubts about the blessings of cosmopolitanism, throughout his career he prized the possibility of fruitful contact and exchange between diverse perspectives and languages. In his fiction such interaction sometimes issues in disappointment, even in tragedy, but James himself remained attached to the promise that it held. The Great War, the Niagara convulsing the European family of nations at the end of his life, appeared to have cancelled that promise, casting a retrospective shadow over his fondest articles of faith. For ornaments of a younger generation, modernist writers emerging early in the twentieth century such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the subject of this chapter, D.H. Lawrence, James’s faith in the steady progress of civilization seemed naïve. Some displayed a lively interest in “foreign” cultures and languages, but in their overall view of internationalism, suspicion came increasingly to eclipse hope. Lawrence himself was a

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prime example of such a bifurcated attitude; his distrust of cosmopolitanism was equalled only by his loathing of insularity. A major cause of this generational shift was the impact on younger writers of the war itself, which could be as wrenching for them as for a more seasoned observer like James. In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith of 31 January 1915, Lawrence wrote: “The War finished me; it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes” (Letters 2: 268). (The parallel to the crucified Jesus is doubtless deliberate.) But where the conflict inspired in James feelings of Anglo-Saxon allegiance, impelling him to take up British citizenship in 1915, in Lawrence it produced feelings of a contrary sort. In a subsequent letter to Lady Cynthia (1 September 1916), after being called up to register (unsuccessfully) for military service, he avows: “I am no longer an Englishman, I am the enemy of mankind. The whole of militarism is so disgusting to me, that, well, well, there is silence after all. But I hate humanity so much, I can only think with friendliness of the dead” (Letters 2: 648–9). Such sweeping revulsion was not conducive to a Jamesian probing of the subtle nuances of transnational relations. But then Lawrence, the Nottinghamshire miner’s son, was never likely to bewail the collapse of the elite globetrotting lifestyle dear to writers such as James and his well-to-do American disciple, Edith Wharton. And yet, paradoxically, Lawrence himself was a peerless globetrotter. During his brief lifetime, and despite fragile health and limited means, he would make his way to a remarkable number of the earth’s far-flung corners and come into contact with a broad sampling of that hateful breed, humanity. His travels to Australia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Mexico, and the American Southwest range far beyond the wanderings of Brontë or even James. But for all his footloose journeying, Lawrence’s attitude toward cosmopolitanism and the multilingualism that often accompanies it remained equivocal. Where in Brontë and James linguistic variety could be celebrated as fostering an expansion of personal horizons, in Lawrence’s fiction it carries no trustworthy promise. What lies behind this difference is in large part the brute fact of history. While the opening decades of the twentieth century saw the stirrings of an increasingly interconnected world, the tensions attendant on that development soon ushered in the cataclysm of global war. It is hardly surprising that in modernist writing the proliferation of transnational contacts and modes of discourse can lead to disorientation and gloom. A widely

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influential work of the period, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in German in 1918, projects a pessimistic view of the European future that runs closely parallel to Lawrence’s writing during and after the war. Although it seems unlikely that Lawrence was familiar with Spengler’s work when he was framing a novel such as Women in Love (1921), the correspondences suggest that Lawrence’s dim outlook, rather than anomalous, was in sync with powerful intellectual currents of the time.1 Commenting on macaronic dialogue in Women in Love, Tony Pinkney writes: “The … debates between Gudrun [Brangwen] and Loerke range across an entire field of modernism and primitivism … Moreover, made as it is ‘out of the different coloured strands of three languages’, their conversation virtually becomes a Modernist artifact in its own right, formally enacting the polyglottism of [T.S.] Eliot’s Waste Land or [Ezra] Pound’s Cantos as well as thematically meditating upon such texts” (82). Pinkney’s concluding claim cannot be taken literally, since Lawrence’s novel coincides in time with The Waste Land (1921) and predates the Cantos (1925); but the general analogy holds good. And the principle of verbal mélange constitutes as much a destabilizing as an affirmative force in Lawrence’s novels, as it does in Eliot’s poetry. A leading feature of Lawrence’s writing is the tension among multiple discursive registers, a tension that runs through his fiction from first to last. Most of that fiction is, of course, narrated in “standard” English; but the narration is continually disrupted by competing idiolects. On the one hand there is the Midlands vernacular spoken in the author’s birthplace, on the other a cornucopia of “foreign” tongues. John Lyon calls attention to “Lawrence’s insouciant habit … of peppering his letters and novels with snippets of French” (8), and one can add to those snippets frequent excursions into German and Italian and (latterly) Spanish. The interplay of languages recalls the clash in a classic Scott text such as The Heart of Midlothian between southern English and Scots dialect, but now internationalized rather than circumscribed. On a thematic level, this tension corresponds to the conflicting options of local allegiance and cosmopolitan outreach, neither of which is presented as finally satisfactory. As Michael Bell argues, “The question of language is obviously central to Lawrence in several respects” (4). The present chapter will explore some manifestations of that centrality.

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Multilingualism versus Dialect Lawrence’s awareness of linguistic variety dates from his juvenile years. According to Hilary Hillier, “[T]he dialect of Eastwood and the Erewash Valley is the ‘linguistic norm’ for the social community represented as Bestwood” in Sons and Lovers, and “it was a norm to which Lawrence was accustomed from childhood through his coal-miner father and the people of his neighbourhood” (24). At the same time, Lawrence studied French and German, both in school (Early Years 86–7) and through private lessons (89–90). His aptitude for learning languages was likely an offshoot of his precocious gift for mimicry; John Worthen records that the young Lawrence’s “mimicry of all kinds of dialect and accent … was brilliant” (62), and Agnes Mason remembers meeting the young man “chattering clever nonsense in three languages” (213). Polyglottism, in short, seemed to run in the young Lawrence’s bloodstream. Inevitably, however, his fluency at times faltered, and as a writer he was capable of turning linguistic mishaps to comic use. Examples of such mishaps figure prominently in Lawrence’s unfinished novel Mr Noon (1920–21; published 1984). The bipartite structure of the extant text is somewhat idiosyncratic; the protagonist is named Gilbert Noon throughout, but is recognizably two quite different characters. The Gilbert of the first part, a provincial schoolteacher, becomes farcically embroiled in sexual misdemeanours; to free himself he decides to leave his Midlands home in order to study in Germany. Gilbert the Second is no longer a schoolteacher but rather a surrogate for the author himself, adrift on the pre-war Continent after his elopement with Frieda Weekley. This autobiographical Gilbert encounters predicaments of a different sort (though still largely comic), reminiscent of those faced by uprooted characters in Brontë and James. His reactions to change of place may reflect Lawrence’s recollected first exposure to the Continent of a decade earlier. Initially his sensations follow a familiar pattern; like William Crimsworth in The Professor, he experiences a liberating psychic enlargement. He feels the “glamorous vast multiplicity” of Europe dwarfing the smallness of his home island: “His tight and exclusive nationality seemed to break down in his heart” (135). “For the first time he saw England from the outside: tiny she seemed, and tight, and so partial. Whereas till now she had seemed all-in-all in herself. Now he knew it was not so. Her all-in-allness was a

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delusion of her natives. Her marvellous truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal” (134–5). As happens in James, change of place has here a relativizing effect, disconcerting but by the same token stimulating. Such eye-opening detachment is, of course, a common attribute of cosmopolitan rebellion against complacent nativism. Gilbert soon finds, however, that European multiplicity can be more trying than liberating. Above all in his dealings with the family of his German lover, Johanna, it can pose awkward obstacles. These typically involve perplexities concerning language; the verbal mishaps evince Lawrence’s awareness, both bemused and amused, of the pitfalls of polyglot exchange. Whether held in the German relatives’ cranky English or in Gilbert’s own halting German, conversations run up against linguistic roadblocks. The German language itself becomes for Gilbert tainted with the restrictive atmosphere of the border town of Detsch (a sly conflation of “Deutsch” and “Metz”). “Yet he was uncomfortable in Detsch. The German language seemed to strangle in his throat. He couldn’t get it out. And he seemed not to be in his own skin” (180). At the root of his language problem lies a bothersome social one, echoing Lawrence’s sentiments in his letters to Lady Cynthia: “This rampant Germanism of Detsch was beginning to gall him: a hateful, insulting militarism that made a man’s blood turn to poison” (201). His sense of entrapment by toxic chauvinism is further inflamed by the fact that in some quarters of the town French is proscribed: “Gilbert had noticed, at the entrance to the gardens, a board which said that it was forbidden to speak French on the Wilhelmgarten” (181). And yet, ironically, in his everyday dealings Gilbert has equal difficulties with the tabooed rival tongue. Conversing with Johanna’s father, the Baron, who feels little love for this English disrupter of his daughter’s respectable marriage, a “tongue-tied” Gilbert “stutter[s] hopeless French” (214). He makes a schoolboy mistake involving gender (“la peuple” instead of “le peuple”) (214). The Baron acidly corrects him, then switches to German to deliver the verdict that his companion is an “ungebildeter Simpel,” a “gewönlicher Lump” (an uneducated simpleton, a common lout, as Lawrence translates) (215). Afterwards, the still unnerved Gilbert finds himself unable to answer a simple question posed by a waiter in both feuding local tongues: “Fruit ou fromage? … Obst oder Käse?” (Fruit or cheese?) (215). Exasperated, the waiter seconds the Baron’s opinion: “‘Imbécile!’ … Gilbert understood this” (215). Nor

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is this the limit of his linguistic travails in Germany. Obliged to listen to an endless litany of complaints in German from Johanna’s tiresome mother, he once again sinks into a sullen silence: “Johanna would not have been at all surprised if he had started to bark” (27). He is rescued from canine incoherence by their decision to move on to Italy, where Gilbert finds an atmosphere that is genuinely liberating, both linguistically and socially. When in a Trento café they ask for food in German, they receive the reply “Non parliamo Tedesco” (We don’t speak German) (357). Since neither of the pair speaks a word of Italian this is awkward, but one senses Gilbert’s relief at having left behind the regimental palaver of Detsch. The lengthy though unfinished second section of Mr Noon is the most profusely multilingual stretch of fictional narrative that Lawrence was ever to pen, and the diverse linguistic streams it features – English, German, French, Italian – are metonymic of conflicting ideological postures pitting attitude against attitude, class against class, nation against nation. The narrator’s teasing, insistent polyglot address to an imagined female reader – “Gentle reader, gentille lecteuse, gentilissima lettrice” (177) – self-mockingly directs attention to the novel’s preoccupation with language choice. That preoccupation, and the allied concern with issues of national attachment, had already emerged persistently in the novels preceding Mr Noon. The heteroglossia to be found throughout Lawrence’s canon supports the thesis, advanced by several critics, that the novels embody a Bakhtinian principle of dialogism. According to David Lodge, “In his own less exuberantly experimental fashion, Lawrence was like [James] Joyce a ‘polyphonic’ novelist, to use a … term coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin” (Write On 193). In Lawrence’s best work, Lodge argues, “conflicting ideological positions are brought into play and set against each other in a dialogue that is never simply or finally resolved” (193). Michael Bell similarly contends that though Lawrence is widely regarded as a “monologic” writer he regularly incorporates an open-ended, dialogic tendency: “Lawrence’s need to relativize the point of view has equal priority with his doctrinal and prophetic absoluteness” (41). But while Lawrence was no stranger to relativism, such critical judgements overstate the case by minimizing the “prophetic absoluteness” that Bell acknowledges. It is true, however, that Lawrence’s earlier novels at least, to which I will now turn, incorporate substantial reluctance to arrive at determinate resolutions.

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Repeatedly these works pit local dialect against “foreign” idioms in a fashion that can plausibly be called dialogic. In Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock (1910), the linguistic contraries are particularly marked. The central male character, George, a plain-spoken countryman, is drawn to two young women who are opposites in caste and speech: the elegant, sophisticated Lettie and the more homespun Meg. Lettie is versed in languages, which she employs as a sort of verbal chastity belt, keeping George at bay and perhaps shielding herself from her own unconfessed longings. Her use of “foreign” idioms places George at a distance, rubbing in his social inferiority and rendering him painfully diffident. When he invites Lettie to tea, her reply bewilders him: “She answered him in Latin, with two lines from Virgil” (213), hardly a response inviting libidinal boldness. But French discourse is Lettie’s preferred mode of averting a potentially dangerous intimacy: She put back her head as if she were drinking. They felt the blood beating madly in their necks. Then suddenly breaking into a slight trembling, she turned and left the room … She came back along the hall talking madly to herself in French … The sound was strange and uncomfortable. There was a painful perplexity in his brow, such as I often perceived afterwards, a sense of something hurting, something he could not understand. (30–1) Unfortunately for George, the madness of the blood is all too effectively stifled by the countering madness of Lettie’s French-babbling mouth emitting words he quite literally cannot understand. “Painful perplexity” seems all too predictable an outcome. For a more relaxed alternative to daunting “foreign” chatter, George turns to the verbally and socially down-to-earth Meg, a local barmaid. Here, as happens also in Brontë and James, proposal scenes have a way of bringing language issues to the fore, and George’s offer of marriage to Meg confirms the pattern. George first banters in dialect with Meg’s solicitous gran’ma, who announces: “Goodev’nin’ – go forrard – er’s non abed yit” (139). To Meg herself he begins brusquely with “Come here, I want ter ax thee summat … I’m going to marry thee” (142). The emotional tension of the encounter is palpably lower than was the case with Lettie, but at least George can securely expect an intelligible reply.

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A secondary but parallel strand of the narrative concerns the local keeper, Annable, who reveals that he has in the past confronted a choice parallel to George’s. Like Oliver Mellors in Lawrence’s final novel, Annable is at home in both dialect and “standard” English. He has come to grief through his relationship with a “peacock,” a society belle who resembles Lettie in her intellectual pretensions and her predilection for French. With Annable she performs erotic scenes cribbed “from a sloppy French novel” (150), and takes a fancy to treating him as “son animal, son boeuf ” (151). Disgusted by her condescending faux-Continental airs, he turns like George to a dialect-speaking unlettered countrywoman, to whom he refers, with comparable condescension, as a “breeder.” He does indeed father a ragged brood of children with her, but he dies suddenly in a suspicious-seeming “accident.” Meanwhile George, disenchanted with his Meg, comes to no better an end. The clash between dialect speech and “foreign” volubility, and between the life-choices those alternatives signify, is left unresolved, in a fashion that confirms critical claims concerning the indeterminacy of Lawrence’s fiction. And yet the indeterminacy has strict limits; an iron determinism recalling Thomas Hardy’s novels seems to haunt the destinies of the dramatis personae, regardless of their habits of speech. In a more complex fashion such linguistic divides configure the lives of the principal actors in Lawrence’s first fully mature novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Here the contradictory pulls, both linguistic and affective, controlling the life of the protagonist, Paul Morel, originate from within his own household. The conflict is initially between what might be termed his “mother tongue” (“standard” English) and “father tongue” (Midlands dialect), the first habitually used by Paul’s mother, Gertrude, the second by his father, Walter. Earl Ingersoll calls attention to “the bilingual context of the Morel home” (5). The novel’s treatment of these two clashing idioms is far from even-handed: Walter Morel’s dialect speech becomes tinged with associations of brutality and uncouthness; though Gertrude Morel had at first found it captivating, she soon grows disillusioned. Ingersoll claims that “Walter’s dialect … is ‘feminized’ by his position of powerlessness” (5); but while it is true that Walter is repeatedly reduced to impotence, his speech, which he shares with most members of his community, does not ipso facto undergo a change of gender. A more pertinent distinction is spatial; dialect is strongly

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associated with the local and the rooted, while “standard” English looks outward to a broader, more gentrified social panorama, and “foreign” speech to remote zones beyond most people’s imagining. Since the primary vector controlling the novel’s action is centrifugal, impelling Paul to relocate himself from small town to large city and beyond, “foreign” languages have a seductive, dynamic allure. Paul’s progress in French goes hand in hand with his artistic accomplishments, and like those becomes an index of his hesitant movement outward towards personal fulfillment. As a job applicant at Jordan’s hosiery factory, venturing out for the first time into the world of work, he stumbles into a Gilbert Noon–like verbal muddle, translating the word “doigts” in a letter as “fingers,” whereas to the stocking merchant Jordan it can only mean “toes.” In his nervousness he falters even over a common English word, when he cannot call to mind the noun “handwriting” to explain that a letter’s script is illegible (120–1). In later years, however, his command of French helps to endow him with ascendancy in personal relationships. At his prompting the doting Miriam composes a journal in French, in effect a serial love letter to Paul himself. Paul, however, falls back on the niceties of French grammar to keep the girl at arm’s length. Ignoring the journal’s fervid emotionality, he corrects her language: “‘Look.’ He said quietly, ‘the past participle conjugated with ‘avoir’ agrees with the direct object when it precedes’” (120–1). It is a damply pedantic response, recalling Lettie’s verbal stiff-arming of George, an evasion symptomatic of Paul’s wariness of any intimacy rivalling the one he enjoys with his adored mother. In Paul’s later relationship with Clara Dawes French plays no part, but he occasionally drops into dialect to register affection, thus co-opting, as multiple critics have noted, the role his father had played with his mother. In the novel’s extended competition between dialect and “genteel” speech, dialect, though looked at askance, continues to assert a subterranean tug.

Polyglot Perversity: The Brangwen Saga In the “Brangwen Saga” comprising The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love, a centrifugal movement again governs the unfolding narrative, which starts out on a Midlands farm and ends pinnacled high in the Austrian Alps. Two separate chapters in The Rainbow have as their title “The Widening Circle” to indicate the progressive enlargement of Ursula

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Brangwen’s ambit of experience, and what gets widened is a function of linguistic capacity. Widening does not, however, ipso facto spell progress. In the earliest, undifferentiated generations of Brangwens living on the Marsh Farm, a phase the novel briefly and lyrically sketches, the family is firmly anchored in the locality, and their speech tends to favour Midlands dialect. Already, however, there are tremors of an outward thrust; the Brangwen women in particular look up wistfully to more smoothly articulate members of the “superior” caste, such as “the vicar, who spoke the other, magic language” (11). Then the first individuated Brangwen family member, Tom Senior, comes into contact with a radically different linguistic scene. Tom meets and falls in love with a woman of foreign origin, the half-Polish, half-German Lydia Lensky, whose hesitancy of manner and speech accentuates her condition as an outsider. On her first visit to the Marsh Farm she asks Tom for a pound of butter “in the curious detached way of one speaking a foreign language” (34). The unwonted contact with otherness unsettles and expands Tom’s view of the world, while it emphasizes by contrast his own stolid fixity (“We’ve been here above two hundred years,” he assures Lydia [37].) Already before meeting his future, foreign-born wife Tom has dreamed of remote places, even while still feeling securely tied to his ancestral ground. This tension between stasis and outreach will be replayed and further strained in subsequent Brangwen generations. At first differences of language seem to place a barrier between Anglophone Tom and the Polish newcomer; when he goes to propose to her he is shaken by overhearing her sing a lullaby in Polish to her little girl, Anna: “Then he heard the low, monotonous murmur of a song in a foreign language” (42). Even later when Lydia is giving birth to their own first child, an occasion one might expect to mark her full assimilation, she remains absorbed in her linguistic past: “She looked at [Tom], and oh, the weariness of her, the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her” (72). However, while Lydia may still at this point perceive her English husband as alien, the keynote of these early chapters is not alienation but syncretism. Whatever distance persists between the two yields to a positive magnetic force of adhesion. Lydia’s Polish origins are eventually eclipsed by her absorption into the local matrix of custom and vernacular speech, and her Polish-born but English-speaking daughter clings to parochial

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norms by marrying her Brangwen cousin, Will. At their wedding Tom Senior is inspired to deliver a tipsy address in their honour: “For the first time in his life he must spread himself wordily” (128): “If we’ve got to be angels … and if there is no such thing as a man nor a woman amongst them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one angel” (129). Tom’s serio-comic harangue, with its imagery of the mystic union of opposites, crystallizes in homely terms the dialectic governing this whole earlier portion of The Rainbow, a dialectic whereby the established is preserved and renewed through penetration by fertilizing novelty. The next featured Brangwen couple, Will and Anna, falls short of achieving any such celestial union. They do not incorporate “foreignness” in a literal sense; both speak “standard” English rather than dialect, but in fundamental respects they are polar opposites. They devote much of their energy to contending for supremacy, never quite arriving at a stable equilibrium. As the circle of experience continues to widen, the characters’ discursive field expands even while their relationships grow more problematic, and the rootedness that once fostered life at the Marsh becomes increasingly precarious. As Bell sums up this dual movement, “Lawrence combines the religious myth of the fall with the scientific myth of evolutionary progress” (77). But Bell’s word “combines” raises difficult questions. The coexistence of the two essentially incompatible “myths” in Lawrence’s narrative introduces a contradiction into that narrative’s substructure; it becomes hard to decide whether one is reading a generational bildungsroman or its discouraging contrary. As Bell goes on to explain, the dilemma reflects The Rainbow’s underlying dichotomy, “the equal and opposite needs for rootedness and transcendence” (77). In the Brangwen generations following that of Tom and Lydia, rootedness becomes a scarce commodity, while transcendence remains an elusive dream. Tom and Lydia’s son, Tom Junior, is as cosmopolitan as his father was insular. Because of his presence there is “a superior, foreign element” in the Marsh (224), recalling the figure of the vicar that beguiled earlier Marsh-dwellers; but the superiority turns out to be brittle. The son is a “romantic, alluring figure” (225) who “spoke other languages easily and fluently” (226), but his polyglot facility brings with it a vitiating anomie. Far from possessing his father’s earthbound solidity, he “belonged nowhere, to no society” (226). This sense of spiritual vagrancy will beset not only this Rainbow cohort but also the principal figures populating Women in Love.

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Ursula, the pathfinder of the third Brangwen generation, looks in multiple directions to locate a usable personal language. Unlike her alienated, multilingual Uncle Tom, she searches for tangible ties with the past, and temporarily locates them in her Polish grandmother. “The little girl and the musing, fragile woman of sixty seemed to understand the same language” (236), a metaphor linking Ursula at once to her Continental antecedents and to local family history. For a while, following her uncle’s example, she becomes versed in foreign tongues. She is drawn to French, but unlike a Brontë heroine she does not discover in that tongue a path leading to personal fulfillment. At first, “How happy Racine made her!” (400). But her enthusiasm is fleeting: “Suddenly she threw over French. She would take honours in botany. This was the one study that lived for her” (404). Not only does language study stop living for Ursula; the whole matter of “foreign” ties becomes a source of romantic disillusionment. The appeal of her first lover, Anton Skrebensky, derives from his mixed European ancestry and apparent sophistication; but where the foreigner Lydia had an enlarging impact on Tom Senior’s sensibility, Skrebensky has the reverse effect on Ursula’s. His connections with the vast British colonial empire only aggravate the confinement she experiences under his influence. The failure of the love affair causes Ursula to internalize the novel’s pervasive contradictions, feeling at once liberated and adrift: “I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist” (456). The widening circle of experience has arrived at its contradictory outer limit: one can read Ursula’s reflections on her own unbelonging as either exultation or lament. The uncertainty still dogs her at the outset of the second novel of the dyad. Women in Love represents the most carefully calibrated use of multilingualism in the Lawrence canon. Published soon after end of the First World War, it is clearly meant to have an international resonance; its linguistic inclusiveness, however, hardly supports an optimistic reading. The opening of the novel finds both Ursula and her artist-sister Gudrun ensconced in their family’s Beldover home, but not securely settled. Asked by Ursula why she has decided to return, Gudrun replies with a French adage borrowed from Montaigne: “I think my coming back home was just reculer pour mieux sauter” (drawing back to jump better) (Women 10). The image hints at something catlike about the young

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woman, and the abrupt switch to a foreign language itself presages her eventual “jump” away from prosaic English surroundings. More generally the novel itself executes such a calculated drawing back to jump better. Starting out in Lawrence’s familiar English Midlands, it leaps to several inland locales – Hermione Roddice’s aristocratic estate of Breadalby, the louche bohemian milieu of the London Café Pompadour – before finally coming to an uneasy rest atop its snowbound, “Continental” Alpine terminus. The linguistic mixtures in the novel contribute to its staging of keen ideological contention. Lodge argues that “[a]lthough Rupert Birkin is the principal spokesman for Lawrence’s own ideas … and a kind of self-portrait, he is not allowed to win these arguments. There are no winners” (After Bakhtin 63–4). Lodge’s assurance here again raises doubts. Birkin does win, if only by default, his ongoing argument with that pillar of modern industrialism, Gerald Crich; Gerald dies, Birkin lives on. As Lawrence proclaims in his “Foreword” to the novel, “The people that bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure. Those others, that fix themselves in the old idea, will perish with the new life strangled unborn within them” (480). Although Gerald is in conventional terms a “forward-looking” industrialist, in the novel’s terms he fixes himself in the old idea, clinging to what Lawrence viewed as the obsolete ethos of mechanical production, and he perishes. By the same token, Birkin wins his argument with the preciously intellectual and “aesthetic” Hermione, whose violent assault on her former lover leads not to his death but to his release and renewal. Lodge advocates for the book’s dialogism on the grounds that the narrator distributes the point-of-view impartially among the various major characters. But the presumed impartiality is seriously compromised by one’s awareness of an authorial thumb pressing down on the scales; our glimpses of Hermione’s subjectivity are far from engaging. It is true, however, that in the heated quarrels between Birkin and Ursula, both sides are granted ample air time and a good measure of persuasive eloquence. Most of the dialogism that can be attributed to the book lies in these scenes. An essential component of the novel’s drama of ideas is the frequent inclusion of “foreign” locutions in the characters’ dialogue. As Jack Stewart claims, Women in Love “examines language, mythos, the whole logocentric tradition” (“Myth” 159), a tradition exploited and sometimes subverted by the novel’s speakers. Even though the narrative begins not in the metropolis but in the provinces, its topography has been

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both gentrified and fragmented. The pastoral world of Tom Brangwen Senior has been left in shreds; as Bell observes, the modern characters’ “freedom to range across so many inner and outer possibilities goes with their loss of rootedness in time” (107); they are not people like Tom for whom “an ancestral self guides the emotional life through immediate personal crises and uncertainties” (118). And as Karola Kaplan notes, “Women in Love begins with a diagnosis of early twentieth-century malaise as proceeding from the loss of communal life and values” (184). Dialect speech is now mostly banished from the scene. Where it does occur it is debased, offering little support to the communal values Kaplan cites. A revealing example is the salacious exchange between two colliers as they ogle the flamboyantly attractive Gudrun: “Her with the red stockings. – What d’you say? I’d give my week’s wages for five minutes; – what! Just for five minutes,” says the older of the two. The younger man laughingly replies, “Your Missis ’ud have summat to say to you” (114). The vernacular dialogue has nothing more generous to express than crude objectification along with a kind of leering sexual status-craving. “Foreign” languages, rather than enlarging characters’ perspectives, enhancing their range of insight and feeling, in this novel frequently convey an estranging detachment. A small but telling example is an exchange between Gudrun and Birkin after the latter declares he means to leave England: “‘Ah, but you’ll come back,’ said Gudrun, with a sardonic smile. ‘Tant pis pour moi’” (So much the worse for me), Birkin replies (396). To signal his disaffection with his homeland, Birkin “leaves” verbally by switching to French. (Compare Gudrun’s earlier nonchalant “reculer pour mieux sauter.”) Again, when the sisters bid farewell to their vacated family home, they share their revulsion from parochial fixity, extolling the virtues of vagabondage by appropriately borrowing a word from a “foreign” lexicon: “‘What a lovely word – a Glücksritter!’ said Ursula. ‘So much nicer than a soldier of fortune!’” (374). The hallowed Brangwen tradition of rooted stability has been replaced by the lexicon of Teutonic wanderlust. In Women in Love “foreign” speech can operate as a buffer against unwanted attentions from provincial philistines. When the sisters are en route to Gerald Crich’s water party, Gudrun shields herself against the curiosity of oafish bystanders who snicker at her outré attire by breaking into French: “‘Regarde, regarde ces gens-là! Ne sont-ils pas des hiboux incroyables?’ [Look, look at these people! Aren’t they incredible

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owls?] And with the words of French in her mouth, she would look over her shoulder at the giggling party” (156). Here, as elsewhere, the codeswitch becomes a performative mode of mocking the narrow-minded insular norm. But the weaponizing of “foreign” speech as a marker of superiority can set off less innocent vibrations. Although attributable to her Florentine upbringing, Hermione Roddice’s excursions into Italian underscore her besetting air of patrician condescension. She uses the language to cajole her pet (male) cat, in a fashion that indirectly but ominously reflects on her troubled relationship with her lover, Birkin: “‘Vieni – vieni qua’ [‘Come – come here’] Hermione was saying, in her strange, caressive, protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior” (299). Hermione’s cat is not the sole victim; other animals, too, are subjected to linguistic bullying. At the water party, Ursula sings a song in German that assists Gudrun in mesmerizing Gerald’s cattle (165). In his “Foreword” Lawrence says Women in Love “is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (485). Even a stray detail such as Ursula’s rendition of a German song, potentially offensive to the ears of ardent British patriots, gains added edge when read in the context of that bitterness. Another linguistically based reminder of war crops up amid the gathering at Hermione’s Breadalby estate to which the Brangwen sisters have been invited. The assembled group includes representatives of several of the participating nations in the conflict – England, Italy, Germany – with correspondingly varied mother tongues. There is “a young Italian woman, slight and fashionable,” and “a Fraulein März, young and slim and pretty” (83), but the company turns out to be no prototype of a convivial league of nations. The conversation is described suggestively as a nervous crossfire: “The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery” (84). It seems hardly surprising that the episode should culminate with an act of shocking aggression: Hermione’s assault on Birkin, using an art object, a beautiful lapis lazuli paperweight, as her intended murder weapon. In this miniature re-enactment of recent European history, aesthetic refinement subserves murderous force. In the later “Rabbit” episode in which Gerald and Gudrun subdue the child Winifred Crich’s skittish pet, overtones of violent combat are again accompanied by a potpourri of European languages. The animal’s name,

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“Bismarck,” of course recalls the architect of German military might. In this context, heteroglossia has a vital role in conjuring an atmosphere of the eerily decadent. John Edwards’s observation that “attitudes towards code-switching are often negative” (78) helps to account for the sinister effect; the rampant switching here transgresses not just language boundaries but, by implication, accepted moral restraints. As Stewart observes, “The most explicit case of linguistic incantation in Women in Love is the dialogue, with its fairytale overtones, at the beginning of ‘Rabbit.’ Repetition and transposition of key words and phrases in assorted languages here set in motion a demonic ritual that leads to magical bonding of the protagonists” (“Linguistic Incantation” 5). Here again the languages getting mixed – English, French, German – are those of contending powers in the Great War, and the “fairy tale” has a lurid subtext of sadomasochistic cruelty. The precocious child follows up her French mistress’s suggestion that the rabbit is “un mystère”: “Oui, c’est un mystère, vraiment un mystère! Miss Brangwen, say that Bismarck is a mystery.” The art mistress cooperates, augmenting the linguistic variety: “‘Bismarck is a mystery, Bismarck, c’est un mystère, Der Bismarck, er ist ein wunder,’ said Gudrun, in mocking incantation” (237). At the end of the scene, when Gudrun and Gerald pruriently compare the wounds the animal has inflicted on them, the display of scratches and the parade of disparate tongues coalesce as component parts of a sordid communion. As Stewart sums up the effect: “The turning of ‘mystery’ into a lexical merry-go-round, with words tripping off the tongue in one language after another, is a mocking violation of the otherness that lies beyond words and, at the same time, an ironic exposure of their inadequacy” (“Linguistic Incantation” 5). As the action of the “Rabbit” chapter proceeds, the proliferation of tongues becomes associated with a morbid layering of consciousness, a pathology revealing itself in Gerald and Gudrun’s pornographic savouring of their own animality. As Gerald Doherty has observed, “Women in Love … juxtaposes the harsh disintegrative violence of animal sacrifice (the ‘Rabbit’ episode, for example) explored by Gerald and Gudrun as an erotic turn-on, to the holistic biocentrism that sacrifices sacrifice itself ” (dhlr 20). An example of such juxtaposition is the placement of the “Moony” chapter immediately following “Rabbit,” where Birkin’s stoning of the moon’s reflection merges light and shadow – consciousness and the unconscious – in a counter-ritual meant to purge the moon and make it whole. (In its fictional context, it also “purges” the acrid taste

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left by the preceding “Rabbit” chapter.) Birkin’s performance contrasts pointedly with the antics of Gerald and Gudrun, who peer pruriently at each other’s sexuality while engaging in a promiscuous melange of languages. The scene enacts Birkin’s reverence for what Stewart calls “the otherness that lies beyond words.” The only “foreign” words Birkin utters during his stone-throwing are muttered to himself, though overheard by Ursula: “Cybele – curse her! The accursed Syria Dea!” (246). This, however, is an exorcism, not a mantra; Birkin is condemning a cult (one, essentially, of mother-worship) that he wishes to expunge. There is no hint of the esoteric verbal calisthenics that accompany Gerald and Gudrun’s salacious ritual; this action is healing and (to use Doherty’s word) holistic. The motif of linguistic promiscuity reaches its peak, appropriately, in the Alpine sequence that concludes the novel. Here the alchemy between Gudrun and the troll-like German sculptor Loerke, which eclipses Gudrun’s amour with Gerald, depends on the weirdly suggestive lingua franca the pair concoct. Here once again heteroglossia feeds prurient innuendo. Loerke is “a chatterer, a magpie, a maker of mischievous word-games which were sometimes clever but which often were not” (422). It is a type of verbal mischief which generates destructive rather than positive energy. The little sculptor embodies the exact opposite of what Tom Brangwen Senior represented: a deathly modern rootlessness and disaffiliation. He is an extreme incarnation of the cosmopolitan outlier; his imputed Jewish lineage is no mere stray detail (“He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him,” Birkin knowingly confides to Gerald. “I suspect he is a Jew – or part Jewish” [428].) As Stewart comments, Loerke “is a hybrid, polyglot creature, a scavenger of culture whose utterance is a bricolage from the rubbish-heaps of Europe” (“Linguistic Incantation” 6).2 The sculptor’s gift for adapting himself to any and all situations is clarified by Rebecca Walkowitz’s observation: “That one might belong to a culture by choice rather than by nature was commonly vilified, in the early twentieth century, as a principle of cosmopolitan ‘adaptability.’ An insult with a double edge, adaptability implied a lack of positive identity on the one hand, and a surfeit of abject identity, often Jewishness, on the other” (35, emphasis added). Loerke’s delivery of a humorous anecdote in Cologne dialect on his first appearance betokens no robust connection to local folkways; it is, rather, merely a flaunting performance. His derisive parody of regional speech suggests his disdain for the very concept of local belonging (405–6). Gudrun’s response intuitively hits the mark: “She knew that

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Loerke, in his innermost soul, was detached from everything, for him there was neither heaven nor earth nor hell. He admitted no allegiance, he gave no adherence anywhere” (452). He is, in short, a glücksritter of a singularly luckless type: not a blithe wanderer like James’s Felix Young, but a sort of indifferent waif or stray. It is his categorical rejection of connectedness that, paradoxically, entices Gudrun to connect with him, particularly at this point, when her emotional bond with Gerald has begun to fray. And it is the lack of any clearly defined attachment to a specific place or nationality that renders their polyglot lingua franca so seductive to both of them. Their intimacy is at first impeded both by the sculptor’s aloofness and by verbal barriers: “He made her feel that her slow French and her slower German were hateful to him. As for his own inadequate English, he was much too awkward to try it at all” (422–3). They eventually, however, devise between them a serviceable composite code, typified by Loerke’s inquiries about Gudrun’s work: “‘Travaillé – lavorato?’ he cried. ‘E che lavoro – che lavoro? Quel travail est-ce que vous avez fait?’ [Worked? Worked? And what work? What work? What work is it you’ve done?] He broke into a mixture of Italian and French, instinctively using a foreign language when he spoke to her” (425). Loerke recognizes in Gudrun a kind of twin, a kindred alienated spirit, a fellow connoisseur of evasive obliquity; the fractured pidgin he devises to communicate with her is a fitting vehicle for their flirtation. This promiscuous medley of language shards, overtly about art, shades into coy insinuation. Transparency is a crudeness to be shunned. Indeed, the double entendre becomes a staple of their exchanges: They talked in a mixture of languages. The groundwork was French, in either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in whatever phrase came to her. She took a peculiar delight in this conversation. It was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double meanings, of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of the different-coloured strands of three languages. (453–4) The concluding metaphor oddly evokes the image of a spider extruding the strands of its web.

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The verbal guessing game exceeds even the perversity of Gudrun and Gerald’s squinting comparison of rabbit-scratches. As Doherty comments, “Loerke, as it were, is the name for desires that elude proper objects and goals” (“Ars Erotica” 151). Gudrun’s engaged response to this charade suggests that it has an element of genuine artistic appeal, for all its obfuscations. It shuts out the pedestrian Gerald; that of course is partly its point. At the same time, the mixed, fluid conversational medium symbolically betrays a lack of real commitment on both sides, a doubleness that shuns integrity. It is an Esperanto of nihilists, serving the pair as a fitting basis for their cynical fantasies: “As for the future, that they never mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction of the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man’s invention: a man invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two and the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the dismay of the inhabitants” (453). (A century later, such apocalyptic fission seems unfortunately less far-fetched.) Such fantasies of ultimate fragmentation are the logical outcome of the pair’s attitude toward life, and are perfectly in keeping with the splintered code in which they are delivered. “Ultimate fragmentation” might make an appropriate subtitle for the novel’s Alpine denouement, where polyglot dialogue provides a soundtrack for shocking violence. John Worthen declares himself mystified by some emendations Lawrence made between the 1916 and 1921 versions of Women: The strangest things are changed at times … After Gerald has attempted to strangle Gudrun … Loerke faintly protests: “‘That also,’ he said in his thin, bitter voice: ‘that’s the sport.’ He was acridly sarcastic” (First Women in Love [1998] 436). In 1921, his protest would become: “‘Monsieur!’ he said, in his roused voice. ‘Quand vous aurez fini – ’” (Women in Love [1997] 472). Why were such changes important? (“The First ‘Women in Love’” 67) There are several possible answers to Worthen’s question. One concerns plausibility; after having made a point of Loerke’s deficient English, Lawrence may have found his original speech in that language – under duress! – implausibly fluent; hence the change to French. The more interesting answer, however, concerns the scene’s dramatic impact; Loerke’s

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revised, French utterance, with its punctilious use of the future perfect mode (“quand vous aurez fini”) makes a memorably ironic contrast with Gerald’s lurching, John Bull–ish behaviour. At an earlier point in the scene the little sculptor’s offer to Gudrun, in German, of a drink provokes a specimen of such bullying: “Then suddenly [Loerke] elevated the bottle gallantly in the air, a strange grotesque figure leaning towards Gudrun, and said: ‘Gnädige Fräulein … wohl – ’ There was a crack, the bottle was flying. Loerke had started back, the three stood quivering in violent emotion” (471). With its spasmodic violence the scene recalls the brutality of the war that had been fought by other Britishers and Germans on European soil, and the heated multilingual exchanges drive home that parallel. In the aftermath of Gerald’s death Ursula unwittingly underscores the broader analogy, likening Birkin’s repeated, grieving “I didn’t want it to be like this” to the rueful German Kaiser’s “Ich habe es nicht gewollt” (I didn’t want it) (479). The novel’s outreach to foreign vocabulary becomes an analogue to modern European mayhem. The liberating impulses that prior Brangwens sought to derive from exposure to Continental ways of being and speaking seem, in the light of Women in Love’s disastrous Alpine denouement, a sad anachronism.

Return to the Native The years following the publication of Women in Love and the abandonment of work on Mr Noon witnessed Lawrence’s most ambitious transoceanic wanderings, yet the writings he produced in this period do not display any increase in “foreign” verbal matter. Quite the contrary; there is if anything a dwindling of such non-English intrusions. Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), represents the culmination of this trend; “foreign” vocabulary is now purged, while Midlands dialect is resurgent. Although Lawrence was never to return to his home island to live, in his later writings insularity tends to overshadow cosmopolitanism. Even Lawrence’s travel writings give evidence of an increasing defensiveness toward “foreign” discourse. In Twilight in Italy (published in 1916 but mostly composed before the outbreak of war) the most obvious purpose of Lawrence’s insertion of Italian words and phrases is to transmit a sense of the distinctiveness of the places visited, but

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the interpolations also leave a lively impression of Lawrence’s attitudes toward the individuals he encounters. Twilight shows a Lawrence on companionable terms with ordinary Italians, though at the same time it intimates his alertness to the comic possibilities of national difference. Attending a local performance of “Amleto” (Hamlet), Lawrence finds that “the whole scene was farcical to me because of the Italian. ‘Questo cranio, signore – ’” (This skull, sir) (771). Unlike his later proxy Gilbert Noon, whose arrival on the Continent gives him a sense of England’s relative smallness, Lawrence-as-raconteur retains a residual sense of British normativity. “And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful, because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to him, as if he were a child, and we adult” (771). Such patronizing judgments (who exactly is “we”?) may unconsciously compensate for Lawrence’s latent feelings of inadequacy (“pale and insignificant”) vis-à-vis Italian “suppleness,” but they do not noticeably govern his behaviour toward the actual Italians he meets. By the time of the post-war Sea and Sardinia (1921), however, his infantilizing perception of Italian otherness has hardened into a more nakedly acerbic type of humour, typically provoked by the locals’ resentment of Lawrence as a supposedly privileged English tourist. This treatment triggers, in turn, Lawrence’s indignation at being categorized as a national emblem: “I am not the British Isles on two legs” (50).3 In this context Lawrence often incorporates Italian words and phrases ironically, to rub in the tiresomeness of reiterated complaints concerning the price of British coal and the unfairness of the exchange rate. “The coal – il carbone! I knew we were in for it. England – Inghilterra she has the coal. The exchange! Il cambio. Now I am definitely in for it” (50). A self-commiserating Italian expression repeated several times with satiric intent is “Noi italiani siamo cosi buoni” (We Italians are so good-hearted) (e.g. 17). Amusingly, Lawrence even takes umbrage at presumed “Italian” rhetorical excess as manifested in Palermo shop-window displays: “But can I care for the innumerable fantasias in the drapery line? Every wretched bit of would be extra chic is called a fantasia. The word goes lugubriously to my bowels” (23). Where in Twilight Lawrence had commonly referred to his Italian interlocutors by name – his landlords, the Di Paoli, or the repatriated emigrant “John” – in Sea and Sardinia that token of

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fraternal recognition vanishes, and the various Italians met on the road are designated by generic English epithets: “the bus-driver” or (in the case of a bumptious Milanese travelling salesman) “the bounder.” It is true that even in this later book Italy continues to offer Lawrence a transformative immersion in otherness: “So that for us to go to Italy and penetrate into Italy is a most fascinating act of self-discovery – back down the old ways of time” (117). Here, however, Lawrence continues to regard travel to the peninsula as an exercise in cultural regression, however exhilarating for the voyager. Lawrence’s subsequent wanderings – to Australia, to the American Southwest, to Mexico – continued to impress him with the transformative power of place. His fictional output of these years often extends the metaphor of journeying backward in time to “early,” or at least pre-modern, cultures. These adventures, however, seldom inspired anything resembling the earlier, dynamic literary exploitation of alternate languages. The Plumed Serpent (1926), set in Mexico, occasionally interpolates expressions from Spanish, but most of these do little more than contribute to a dutiful evocation of “local colour.” Only rarely do they have a dramatic impact, as when Don Ramón Carrasco speaks derisively of the phrase Viva la muerte! (Long live death!) as epitomizing modern Mexican degeneracy (40), but even this expression is incidental and does not have further resonance. The numerous “Aztec revival” chants embedded in the text are meant to evoke a belief system antithetical to European Christian devotion, but their language is modern English (though presumably “translated” from Spanish) and they do not engage dynamically with the local linguistic scene. Similarly, the travel book Mornings in Mexico (1927) introduces a number of Spanish expressions to evoke a concrete sense of milieu, which it vividly accomplishes, but linguistic issues themselves seldom arise. On at least one occasion Lawrence as narrator does display an eagerness to investigate regional peculiarities of speech. When the peasant Rosalino calls a large hawk “Gabilan,” Lawrence asks, “What is it called in the idioma?” (local dialect) and Rosalino replies, “‘Psia!’ – He makes the consonants explode and hiss” (13). But this, again, is an isolated occurrence, and does not introduce further excursions into native vernaculars. Although Lawrence never resettled in England, he did, in his final novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), return in imagination; it was, in a sense, his last exploit of reverse time-travel, and it took him full circle.

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Here, travels to far-away places of the sort favoured by Constance Chatterley’s fashionable sister, Hilda – even Italy – are thrown on the moral rubbish-heap of modern irrelevancies, and so, in effect, are those places’ languages. Connie, on holiday with Hilda in Venice and temporarily separated from her lover, Oliver Mellors, feels repelled by the conspicuous over-consumption: Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many motor-launches, too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too many silk shawls, too many large, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls; too much enjoyment, altogether too much enjoyment! (270) Too many languages rattling! – It is risky to identify a fictional character’s perceptions with the author’s preferences, but in this case one can reasonably assume that Lawrence is siding with his heroine in dismissing polyglot discourse as merely part and parcel of the modern mania for consumerist mass pleasure-seeking, in which languages become just one more negotiable item, equated with cocktails and ices. Lawrence’s estimate of contemporary cosmopolitanism, already ambivalent in prior works, seems by this point to have grown still more negative. In keeping with that shift, the long contest between local dialect and “foreign” idioms has been definitively settled in favour of the former. Lawrence’s last novel is in some respects a throwback to his first; the charismatic, dialect-speaking gamekeeper Mellors resuscitates and redeems the ill-fated, dialect-speaking gamekeeper Annable. The local vernacular becomes the privileged idiom of sexual liaison, and Mellors instructs his high-born but untutored lover in its syntax. It is a tongue that has the virtue (though in some eyes the vice) of explicitness, the polar opposite of the leering multilingual pastiche devised by Loerke and Gudrun. And yet, in its self-sufficient nativism, it represents a retreat from the dawning realization of England’s smallness that had come to Gilbert Noon at the outset of his Continental pilgrimage. For all its life-affirming intentions, it cannot help signifying the abandonment of a vital verbal and intellectual dimension of Lawrence’s creative vision.

Part Two

Postcolonial Language Variance

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As the Word Turns Postcolonial Language Variance

Where in Lawrence’s Women in Love the mixing together of languages becomes associated with the unseemly and even the decadent, in postcolonial fiction it is likelier to seem a mere matter of course. More often than not, such an attitude reflects the experience of the authors, who commonly have grown up in localities where multilingualism represents the norm. Literary works originating in such a milieu, even if written primarily in a “big” language such as English or French, are still apt to acknowledge the linguistic complexity of their settings. In postcolonial contexts, power relations among contending tongues tend to operate in a somewhat different fashion from what one expects in Western narratives. Where in British and American novels alternative languages are typically encountered by protagonists like Lucy Snowe or Christopher Newman in their travels abroad, in comparable Asian and African works “alien” tongues are often those imposed by intruders from elsewhere. As a consequence, linguistic clashes impinge more directly on broader conflicts of national identity. The present chapter will, within this general framework, offer a brief overview of some distinctive features of postcolonial language variance. It will then go on to examine how such variance operates in a well-known early example of the genre: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It follows from the foregoing that linguistic variety tends to occur more abundantly in postcolonial texts than in most Western ones. That is one reason for considering such texts within a category of their own, and for recognizing that they are marked by their own characteristic aims and strategies. Yet it would be misleading to argue that such works are sui generis. In the shift from Western to postcolonial writing not everything changes; some basic patterns, linguistic ones included,

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persist. The following discussion, while focusing on distinctions, will not neglect analogies. First, however, a word about terminology. “Postcolonial” is an ad hoc, somewhat nebulous label; it may suggest deep affinities where none exist. In practical terms, strategies of language variance may themselves vary according to the geographic and social matrices from which texts emerge. While the bipartite structure of the present study seems to me justified, it may prompt unintended inferences: not only that Western and non-Western writing have little in common, but that within each of the two groupings the works examined are homogeneous. Neither of these assumptions fits the case. The chapters to follow will examine texts from several disparate locales – Nigeria, the Caribbean, India – and authorial approaches will inevitably be conditioned by a variety of circumstances. Temporal shifts must be taken into account; Chimamanda Adichie’s twenty-first-century Nigeria is not identical to Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria of half a century earlier, not to mention the pre-modern Nigeria evoked in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Nevertheless, certain general principles apply to all these disparate sites of writing, and I will highlight some of the ways in which those commonalities manifest themselves. While admitting its drawbacks, for the sake of convenience I will continue to apply the imperfect label “postcolonial” when generalizing about the diverse works to be discussed in the chapters to come.

Rewards of Language-Mixing One important source of the distinctiveness of postcolonial writing has to do with the nature of its imagined audience. Eileen Julien has applied the term “extroverted novels” to works aimed primarily at a transnational readership and “characterized above all by [their] intertextuality with hegemonic or global discourses and [their] appeal across borders” (681); presumably the alternative “introverted” category would designate fiction aimed at a more narrowly defined “home” audience. Such a clear-cut, either/or binary seems, however, to oversimplify the actual, messier picture. While keeping in mind the needs and interests of the readership of his or her homeland, an Asian or African novelist will likely be cognizant of the international readership whose “big” (usually Western) language he or she has adopted for purposes of narration.

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That consideration is apt to inflect the author’s handling of indigenous vernacular elements. A key motivation for including such elements may be the desire to disrupt the Western reader’s linguistic complacency, the assumption that her mother tongue – English, French, or the like – is normative, other types eccentric and somehow inferior. In this connection, the authors of The Empire Writes Back speak of the corrective force of what they term “abrogation”: “Whether written from monoglossic, diglossic, or polyglossic cultures, postcolonial writing abrogates the privileged centrality of ‘English’ by using language to signify difference while employing a sameness which allows it to be understood” (51). A small example of such abrogation occurs in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), where the Indian writer Zeeny Vakil, the lover of the hapless protagonist Saladin Chamcha, teases Chamcha about his compulsive compliance with English norms of behaviour and speech: “You know what you are. I’ll tell you. A deserter is what you are, more English than, your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don’t think it’s so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache” (53). While most of Zeeny’s acerb take-down is formulated in English, the interpolated Indian vernacular elements – “Angrez” (English), “baba” – clinch her point: other idioms exist that would be more authentic channels for Chamcha’s subjectivity than the stilted one he has supinely borrowed. With just a couple of verbal squibs, Zeeny has made a dent: a gesture of resistance to European colonizing of expression. While Rushdie tends to adopt language variance sparingly, he deploys it on occasion with pointed pungency. Historically, the use of language variance to counter linguistic hegemony is far from a novelty. As we have seen, Henry James commends Matthew Arnold for his freedom from Anglocentrism, and James’s penchant for creating multilingual texts stems from his own antiinsular agenda. In postcolonial fiction, however, the impetus behind the disruption of insularity tends to become more broadly political; Zeeny Vakil’s mockery of the pretend-Anglophone Chamcha is a case in point. As Bill Ashcroft observes, “[L]anguage variance can be a powerful form of resistance” (43). In postcolonial texts, interpolated vernacular words and phrases often foster a Bakhtinian jostling of idioms with a covert if not overt ideological bearing. According to Graham Huggan, postcolonial literatures “might be seen in very general terms as having both a recuperative and a

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deconstructive dimension” (40). Native vernacular elements inserted into a predominantly European-language fabric partake of both dimensions; they reclaim as living and normal the language (or languages) used by non-Western people, while at the same time challenging the dominance of Western usage. Such texts thus perform an ethnographic function, countering misleading or simplistic representations of non-Western societies, distorted images of the sort historically imposed by Western anthropological accounts. But another salient fact is the presentation – or often, non-presentation – of indigenous language in canonical Western texts. The Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o recalls his anger, as a student, at reading literary treatments of Africa by Karen Blixen (“Isak Dinesen”) and Elspeth Huxley; he argues that Huxley’s writings had given “literary immortality” to the claims to the primacy of white settlers in Kenya (2016, 103). Such a Eurocentric bias helps to explain the routine neglect by European novelists of indigenous vernaculars, apart from the occasional item meant to document “native backwardness,” e.g. juju (“magic”). A famous example is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), where the Congolese population observed by the narrator, Marlow, is given no coherent utterances but only a repertory of unnerving howls and yells. The sole exception is the terse announcement “Mistah Kurtz, he dead” (69), a contemptuous message in Pidgin that invites no further exchange. One can understand why Chinua Achebe’s scathing critique of Conrad’s novel has gained wide currency and provoked a much-needed debate (“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” [1977]). Even when indigenous actors are given more scope for verbal expression, the result is apt to be unflattering. In Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939) the clownish African protagonist’s poignant declaration, “I true Englishman for my heart” (127), defeats itself by its comically out-atelbows, un-English syntax. We are given no hint of what Johnson’s mother tongue (presumably a Nigerian vernacular) might be; from a Western colonial point of view that is irrelevant. For that matter, Johnson is not even granted a recognizably African name, only a generic, faux-Anglo one to match his own fragile pretensions (like Saladin Chamcha’s) to an English identity.1 Against such demeaning literary models, novelists from Africa and Asia have naturally felt impelled to endow their characters with distinctive identities and verbal footprints. In the interest of that project their texts frequently foreground indigenous languages,

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even though these may be represented only in token form. Such efforts involve both the deconstruction of colonial literary precedents and the recuperation of the sorts of humanizing detail that those precedents routinely elided.2 A basic question confronting postcolonial writers has been whether or not to adopt (as many have done) a major Western language as the default vehicle of narration. That choice obviously hinges on the writer’s decision regarding the imagined audience he or she aims to engage, the sort of choice Julien attempts to pinpoint in her “extrovert/introvert” dichotomy. A text written in Igbo or Malayalam will be accessible to the author’s home readership, but not, except in translation, to most readers from elsewhere. On the other hand, a work written in a language with global circulation, such as English, has the benefit of being immediately available to a vast potential audience, but can provoke both practical and ideological demurrals. The adoption of an acquired or “borrowed” language as one’s standard mode of expression is not an anomaly unique to Asian and African writers, as witness Europeans such as Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett, but it is more common in non-metropolitan circles, and it can entail substantial drawbacks. A practical one is that many people, literary or not, simply do not feel at ease using an adopted language to express complex thoughts and intimate feelings, a sentiment eloquently voiced by the protagonist and narrator of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (2013). The teenaged speaker has been obliged to move from her native Zimbabwe to the midwestern United States, where she must rely on English as her primary mode of expression: Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside, trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when we were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back down. (242)

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It is a moving avowal, and yet a paradoxical one. While lamenting the loss of her “real” vernacular voice, the speaker’s English voice comes across as engagingly expressive; the horse of her adopted language is galloping at a robust clip. One is left wondering which of her voices is in fact more “real.” Still, it seems natural to identify the speaker’s unease with the author’s implied sentiments; while Bulawayo’s mastery of English is patent, her borrowed tongue may feel less suited to her purposes as an African author than the one she has sacrificed.

English as a Colonial Legacy The objection to English or other Western languages as unsuited to the aims of African or Asian authorship has at times, not surprisingly, taken on a polemical dimension. Ashcroft cites the relevant dispute between Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: In essence, the conflict is simple: do writers who continue to write in the colonial language “remain colonized” – by retaining a colonized identity – or can they appropriate the language as a tool for their own purposes? Does literature in a language such as English privilege western cultural values, and with them the whole history of colonial oppression and control, or does such a literature use English as a tool to reveal the non-western world and even record resistance to the colonial world view? (103) While the conflict may be simple, its ramifications are not. The antiappropriative stance is the one espoused by Ngũgĩ, who in his 1986 work of advocacy, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, goes so far as to deny the legitimacy of the label “African” as applied to any text not written in an indigenous vernacular (20). This categorical veto seems arbitrary, turning on issues of mere labelling – a sort of guilt by historical association. One might ask: if books such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, written primarily in English, are not African, then what are they, and why does that question even matter? The more fundamental issue, however, has to do with the common assumption that a language – English, French, Igbo – is constitutive of the worldview of one particular culture or society and none other. In a recent interview Ngũgĩ rejects the idea

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advanced by some (e.g. Adichie) that “English is becoming an African language”: “Africa has got its own languages” (Inani interview). In general, Ngũgĩ appears to be embracing a linguistic essentialism that does not stand up well under scrutiny.3 Specific words or phrases in a language – e.g. German “lebensraum,” English “savages” – may embody an ideological bias on the part of partisan speakers, but they cannot control the overall character of the language itself, ensuring a leaning toward imperialism, democracy, or whatever else. There are any number of reasons why a writer might prefer to compose works of fiction in his or her mother tongue, and no writer need be faulted for doing so. Unhampered familiarity with vocabulary and idiomatic usage is one motive for such a preference, and another is the difficulty of rendering the flavour of local speech when it is translated into an alien tongue. It does not follow, however, that a novel by an African or Indian writer narrated mainly in English is inevitably less “authentic” than one using an indigenous language, or that it ipso facto incorporates the ideology or sensibility of the European overlord. A multitude of texts testify to the contrary view. Perhaps the most persuasive objection to the adoption of a “borrowed” language, however, is not that it may be ideologically alien but simply that it inevitably lacks the immediacy of the “home” idiom and curtails by default the number of available texts in that language. The same objection would apply hypothetically even to the adoption of a “big” language not directly associated with European colonialism, such as Mandarin or Bengali. It might also be argued that to produce a narrative centring on African or Asian characters framed exclusively in a non-native language is to risk replicating the disregard of indigenous modes of expression typical of older white canonical texts. A frequent recourse against such disregard has been language variance, whereby interpolated elements of native vernacular serve (as they do in The Satanic Verses) to provide that tongue with at least a foothold on the page, reminding readers of the existence of an alternate, non-metropolitan mode and of the culture linked with it. The authors of The Empire Writes Back observe that “[o]ne of the main features of Imperial oppression is control over language” (7), but they point out that in postcolonial writing, polyvocality can become a means of challenging that control. It follows that language variance is “a feature of all postcolonial texts” (59). (Under the category of variance they would include the frequent practice of adopting a non-“standard”

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English style strongly inflected by indigenous usage. A famous example of the use of such a modified English style, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, will be discussed in the next chapter.) The frequent insertion of vernacular elements in novels by Achebe and kindred writers helps to lend density to cultural scenes remote from the experience of most Western readers, scenes hitherto evoked principally through simplistic Western caricatural accounts. Huggan argues that Achebe’s novel, like numerous other works of African fiction, “operates to some extent as an ethnographic counter-narrative that scrutinizes the questionable assumptions behind Western anthropological descriptions of, and inscriptions upon, ‘non-Western’ cultures” (41). Numerous African and Asian writers have followed Achebe’s lead, sometimes specifying their reasons for doing so. Achebe’s younger compatriot, Adichie, when asked “what [led] her to [throw] in a lot of [Igbo] words into what was an English novel really,” replied, “I have read books from Asia and Africa that mix languages, but [the reason] I did that was simply because … I wanted to remind the reader that you’re reading conversations between characters who are mostly not speaking English. If they are speaking English, they are also speaking in a mix of both, which is the reality for many languages in Nigeria today” (Forna interview 56). In the next chapter I will argue that Adichie’s Igbo interpolations often serve more complex ends than her statement might indicate, but that is not to say that the rationale she offers is unsound. If the foregoing seems to imply that postcolonial language variance represents a clean break with prior Western practice, no such conclusion would be justified; the differences are real, but not absolute. As earlier chapters have established, Western language-mixing too could advance fictional alternatives to established linguistic and cultural norms. To recall a colourful example from Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Yorick’s French companion’s blasé reply to his inquiry as to her reason for stopping their carriage – “Rien que pisser” – sharply focuses the discrepancy between Gallic and English attitudes toward the etiquette of bodily needs. In a more serious vein, to the paired female protagonists of Brontë’s Shirley, the French language offers a counter-narrative implicitly challenging the hegemonic agendas of the patriarchs dominating their world, just as Malayalam functions as a code defying the overbearing Anglophone establishment in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (see chapter 8). Again, in Villette, French

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serves Lucy Snowe as a verbal bulwark enabling her to resist the tug of Anglo-Saxon codes of conduct and of her own past attachments. Or turning to James, French endows Miriam Rooth with resilient agency, enabling the young actress’s defense of her artistic vocation against the protests of the arrogant Englishman, Peter Sherringham. As Buzard has shown, such works of nineteenth-century British and American fiction merit the label “ethnographic,” probing as they do issues of national norms and forms. Such ethnographic exploration is thus by no means a radical postcolonial innovation. In such Western works, as in novels by Achebe, Adichie, and Roy, language variance can place in perspective the broader social dimensions of interpersonal conflict.

Hallmarks of Postcolonial Language Variance What, then, distinguishes the postcolonial deployment of this technique from more traditional practices? Above all, I would suggest, the collective resistance that language variance tends to betoken in postcolonial texts. Again, this is not to minimize the ideological force of alternate languages in prior works; the resistance to male Anglophone dominance by the heroines of some nineteenth-century novels could, for example, be construed as supporting nascent feminist activism. In general, however, where language variance in a Victorian novel such as Villette focuses on relations among individual actors, in postcolonial works such variance more commonly aligns with conflicts between antagonistic national or ethnic cohorts. Thus, while the narrative of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart centres on a clearly individualized protagonist, Okonkwo, that individual is emblematic of a tribe with its hallmark culture and language, headed toward a collision with an opposed cultural and linguistic formation. Similarly, in Roy’s The God of Small Things the characters can be sorted into two clashing “teams” defined by their linguistic signatures: the  English-speaking upholders of embedded colonial precedents, and the Malayalam speakers who resist backward-looking Anglophilia and the hidebound conventions relating to caste, sex, and language. What results is a dialogism of contending collective discourses. A recurrent feature of language clashes in postcolonial narratives is an imbalance in power relations between linguistic groups. Such imbalances also, of course, occur in earlier works; in Shakespeare’s Henry V, English asserts its dominance over French, along with (and partly owing

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to) Henry’s military triumph. In postcolonial works, however, such imbalances tend to have a more blatantly ideological basis. Language itself becomes a zone of contention. In Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus the controlling father acts as a cultural spearhead, determined to enforce English speech on his children and to keep them, even by violent means, from using their native Igbo (see chapter 7); similarly, in The God of Small Things, the Ipe twins are penalized by their martinet aunt for speaking Malayalam instead of “proper” English. In Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, as in numerous other postcolonial texts, English figures as a “status” language, exalting those capable of speaking it authoritatively. In such novels it is frequently the language of the present or former European colonizers which occupies a position of superiority, and which accordingly becomes targeted for animosity by speakers of local vernaculars. Resistance often arises in response to the presumption of speakers of the privileged European tongue, who are intolerant of native modes of discourse. Such intolerance has, of course, not been confined to Africa and Asia. It has been conspicuous in North American attitudes toward Indigenous languages, a posture Sarah Dowling calls “settler monolingualism” (3). As Dowling explains, while this position centres on language as its immediate locus, it has wider ramifications: “Monolingualism is an ideology, a structuring principle that touches every aspect of social life. It shapes how we understand ourselves and our units of belonging by constructing homologous relationships between mother tongue, ethnicity, and nation” (3). Champions of Indigenous tongues confront a discouraging situation; they are often outnumbered by monolingual users of “mainstream” languages, such as English or French, who see no reason to concern themselves with Native vernaculars; indeed, they may harbour an antipathy toward types of discourse they consider archaic and opaque. One consequence of this majoritarian hubris is to place Native vernaculars themselves in jeopardy, exacerbating the tendency for such languages to lose their complements of proficient speakers and eventually even to vanish.4 Naturally enough, Indigenous writers, even those accustomed to using English as their primary medium, have been motivated to devise stratagems to defend their own languages and cultures against the juggernaut of settler monolingualism. An example of such defiance is offered by the Anishinaabe poet and songwriter Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose comments

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place the Native writer’s predicament in bold relief. Asked why, in her 2016 collection This Accident of Being Lost, she no longer, as previously, supplied English translations of Indigenous words, Simpson replied: When you don’t have the translation there, you assume that your reader can understand the words and you’re assuming a certain audience. I wanted to welcome Indigenous and Anishinaabe people into this space and reaffirm that I’ve written this book for them, not for a white audience, and I’m going to assume that you know what makwa is, and those of you that don’t I’m going to assume that you know how to find out. (Johns interview) Like other similarly positioned writers, Simpson has felt obliged to consider carefully the nature of her envisioned audience, and her aims display familiar fissures along ethnic lines. Even while insisting that her book is written primarily for an Indigenous readership, she leaves the door open for a broader, “extroverted” reception; non-Indigenous readers are also implicitly welcomed. She does not, however, wish to provide such readers with a tempting work-around by including parenthetical translations or an appended glossary, giving them the option of skipping over the unfamiliar Indigenous words to find the “real” (i.e. English) meaning. Including such untranslated elements clearly amounts to an ideological statement, a means of asserting the validity of her own lexicon and cultural tradition against settler disdain. As the The Empire Writes Back authors point out in another context, “The use of untranslated words … is a clear signifier of the fact that the language which actually informs the novel [Randolph Snow’s Visitants] is an/ Other language. The text constantly draws attention to cultural differences between the groups of people involved” (64). Such verbal flagging of cultural difference points to a further distinctive feature of postcolonial language variance: the vernacular elements in texts by African or Asian or Indigenous authors often tend to strike Anglophone readers as more dauntingly “other” than do such interpolations in European or American writers such as James or Lawrence. Even if they are not easily intelligible, French or German passages have at least a comfortingly familiar ring to Anglophone ears. Rien que pisser is apt to seem less obscure than makwa, and may elicit a readier response. Whether monolingual readers will in practice diligently track down

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makwa (“black bear,” an Anishinaabe clan designation) as Simpson hopes cannot, of course, be predicted with confidence. The effort to defeat monolingual exclusiveness has induced some sympathetic non-Indigenous writers to experiment with comradely types of linguistic interplay. In a 2020 study of Canadian environmental writing, Paul Huebener cites lines from a poem by Asian Canadian poet Rita Wong that incorporates words from a dialect of the Stó:lō Nation of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia: The city paved over with cement english cracks open, stubborn Halq’eméylem springs up among the newspaper boxes and mail receptacles in the shade of the thqa:t along the sidewalks lined with grass and pta:kwem waiting to grow anywhere they can Huebener comments: “The replacement of the word cement with english likens the language of colonization to an infrastructure that conceals and suppresses both the landscape and its Indigenous cultures … Meanwhile, the Halq’eméylem language becomes the weed, the persistent life that thwarts the suppression caused by the English pavement” (189–90). As Huebener convincingly establishes, one does not need to be Indigenous to make strategic use of Native vernacular in the joint interest of age-old traditions and environmental justice. Generic properties condition the feasibility of such wordplay; poetry such as Wong’s belongs to a literary mode that accommodates interlingual experiment more readily than prose fiction. Indigenous novelists, however, have also found means of effectively inserting vernacular elements into English-language narratives. To cite a recent example, in her novel The Night Watchman (2020), which concerns the American Congress’s attempt in the early 1950s to terminate the Turtle Mountain Band, Louise Erdrich interpolates Chippewa vocabulary sparingly but effectively to transmit a tangible sense of the band’s cultural cohesion and the urgency of defending it against settler disruption. These insertions tend to be strategically positioned at moments of high emotional intensity, as when a young band member is attending a boxing match: “Patrice,

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using Chippewa in her excitement, screamed, ‘Bakite’o!’” (Hit him!) (53). Later, moved by a spectacular wintry woodland scene, Patrice murmurs “‘Onizhishin, so beautiful’” (342). Even a fragmentary glimpse of the band’s traditional speech patterns works to underscore the preciousness and the precariousness of their cultural legacy. Leanne Simpson’s decision to omit translations of Indigenous words and phrases in her work may seem a quixotic challenge to the indulgence of non-Native readers, but it is by no means unique. As noted in an earlier chapter, even the Victorian Charlotte Brontë spurned suggestions that she should provide English versions of the French passages in her work. Brontë, like Simpson, evidently felt that the force of such “foreign” material would be diluted by concessions to readerly convenience. At the same time, there is an obvious difference between the two cases, hinging on the circulation of the languages involved. Brontë was certainly enamoured of French, but she felt no need to act as its advocate; millions of Francophones in multiple countries could guarantee that tongue’s flourishing. The same holds good for the other languages – most commonly German, Italian, and Spanish – introduced by other Western authors into English narratives; these were languages, moreover, with which Anglophone readers often had at least a cursory acquaintance. Interpolated Indigenous elements, by contrast, seldom benefit from any such prior exposure; their insertion consequently takes on an air of dedicated challenge.

Jean Rhys: The Wideness of the Sea Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a Janus-headed production, looking back to familiar Victorian precedents while shifting the scene to colonial locales. It has commonly been treated as a spin-off from Jane Eyre, to which it provides a prequel, but as reimagined by Rhys the spin reverses its direction. Rhys’s revisionist narrative centres on two figures imported from Brontë, each of whom narrates a generous share of the action: Edward Rochester, identified only as “the Man,” and the madwoman in Brontë’s attic, Bertha Mason, here transformed as the Jamaican heiress Antoinette Cosway.5 Discussions of the relationship between the coupled works have been plentiful, their prevalent bearing epitomized by Trevor Hope’s dictum that Wide Sargasso Sea “revisits the British literary canon … in order to subvert it from within” (67).

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In one important respect, the subversion is limited: the central actors in Rhys’s novel are mostly of white European origin, as was the author herself. In an obvious way that fact distinguishes Wide Sargasso Sea from the African and Indian texts to be discussed in the chapters to follow. But while this difference is meaningful, it does not predetermine the narrative’s overall direction. Rhys’s Antoinette, as a Creole, belongs to the Caribbean white settler (and formerly slave-owning) caste, but she is set apart by upbringing and temperament from an English interloper such as the Man. She is in some ways at odds with the non-white islanders, but on an emotional plane she identifies with them, rather than with visitors from abroad. Her attitude toward England, a place she knows only at second hand, is skeptical. “‘Oh, England. England,’ she called back mockingly [her husband recounts], and the sound went on and on like a warning I did not choose to hear” (65). It is a warning the Man ignores at his peril, for it reveals a mindset blankly at odds with his own. Like her mother, Antoinette is “without a doubt not English”; like her stepfather Mason, “so sure of himself,” the Man is “without a doubt English” (33). As her husband perceives her, Antoinette has “long, dark, alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (61). In their geographic origins, both husband and wife could be called insular; but by a psychological if not literal measure, his European island is smaller than her Caribbean one. In one of its defining features, Wide Sargasso Sea represents a notable departure from Jane Eyre: the prominence of language and linguistic conflict as a dominant thematic concern. Rhys’s novel foregrounds a discursive diversity on the whole absent from Brontë’s novel, which (even though the protagonist studies languages and has mastered French) is less hospitable to “foreign” idioms than the author’s other works. On the score of linguistic diversity, Wide Sargasso Sea has more in common with James’s “international” tales; it shares with The American a preoccupation with incompatibilities arising from differences of national origin and idioms. In both James’s novel and Rhys’s, obstacles to cultural rapprochement are epitomized by thwarted romantic unions: in James a broken betrothal, in Rhys a broken marriage. In both works, linguistic diversity operates to focus discrepancies of perception that defeat mutual understanding; in both, spatial dislocation leads to an affective fracture. James’s ingenuous American in Paris runs afoul of unfamiliar French

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social and material expectations; the ingenuous Man, in the Caribbean, runs afoul of something more portentous: the otherness that the islands and his wife alike embody. In both novels, questions of identity loom large. In Wide Sargasso Sea even the Cosways’ pet parrot keeps babbling a French tag, “Qui est là?” (Who’s there?): a query at the heart of the novel’s antagonisms. But the most striking verbal resemblance between James’s novel and Rhys’s is the recurrence in both of the word “strange” and its variants, underscoring motifs of affective distancing. In The American the culmination of this strand is Claire de Cintré’s self-estrangement within the walls of a convent. In Rhys’s novel, where Antoinette (now Bertha) ends up cloistered within an attic, the exile is not of her own choosing. In Wide Sargasso Sea words such as “strange” are typically attached to the Man’s perceptions both of his young wife and of the subtropical island (Dominica) on which they are miserably honeymooning. To cite just a scattering: the Man, whose narratorial voice is predictably disaffected, says of the island, “It was all very brightly coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me” (69). (In context the adjective “coloured” may have unpleasantly racial overtones.) Or again: “It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness” (79). No cosmopolitan he; even the attraction he cannot help feeling is “alien” or estranging. An identical mix of attraction and alienation attaches to his perception of his wife, who comes to personify the “strange” paradise. As the Man reflects, “Everything is too much … Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers are too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger” (63). By implication, the woman is saturated with the island’s too-muchness, and a growing sense of estrangement permeates the Man’s further dealings with her: “I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (85). The estrangement motif reaches its apogee at the convulsive crisis of their union, where the Man perceives Antoinette, who is distraught and inebriated, as absolutely other: “this red-eyed, wild-haired stranger who was my wife shouting obscenities at me” (135). The barriers separating the pair – barriers of discordant sensibility – are not the “tall stone walls” dividing James’s American, Newman, from his French love, Claire, but they are equally insurmountable. And they are made taller by dissonances of language.

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It is not a question here of literal linguistic barriers like those Newman encounters in Paris. Neither partner is inarticulate, far from it, but the woman is warmly comfortable with the island’s polyglot ambience, whereas the Man is not; to him the variety of tongues he finds on the island has little to recommend it, but merely makes even stranger the strangeness of his perceptions. He is disgruntled even when his wife chats with a local islander: “The two women stood in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English but the debased French patois they use in the island” (61). As Silvia Cappello observes, the Man, “representative of … European discourse and power, rejects the varieties of English, and he refuses Creole [i.e. patois] as a language which he dislikes and cannot understand” (47–8). He embodies, in short, the classic metropolitan linguistic chauvinism, the overbearing colonist’s will to suppress alternate, insurgent codes. At the same time, one infers that his wife, consciously or not, takes refuge in those codes as a tactic of resistance to his dominance. Amusingly, when Antoinette’s former nurse, Christophine, brings in a tray with coffee and boasts in typical fashion that it is not “horse piss like the English madams drink,” the Man comments morosely, “Her coffee is delicious but her language is horrible” (77). A discourse purist, he is unreceptive to what Hope calls “the linguistic hybridity of the Caribbean archive” (64). Rhys’s metaphorical wide Sargasso Sea is wide indeed – even wider than James’s Atlantic in its power to sever those who might otherwise be united. It recalls what Matthew Arnold, in the famous section from his poetic sequence Switzerland beginning “Yes! In the sea of life enisled,” calls “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (Poetry and Criticism 81). Antoinette and the Man are lexically estranged; despite being both Anglophones, in their personal epistemologies they speak utterly discordant idioms. As Cappello says, they “are representatives of two cultural worlds incapable of reciprocal understanding” (52). The configuration of that cultural divide aligns Rhys’s novel more closely with other postcolonial works than with Victorian novels such as Jane Eyre or The American; the collapse of the union between Antoinette and the Man points to a clash of cultures with global ramifications. Above all, here, as in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a society based on tradition, mythology, and the occult is invaded by an antithetical force, one privileging linear rationality, expediency, and the assertion of power. Not that Rhys’s Man is a paragon of lucid reason – he is in fact paranoid

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and impulsive – but he subscribes to the principle of the rational. Nor is the island society in Wide Sargasso Sea pre-literate like Achebe’s villagers; and yet the leading representative of island life, Christophine, is unlettered. To quote her final, summative line of dialogue, “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know” (146). As for Antoinette herself, Alexander Neel points out that by the end of the narrative she “has no access to writing materials or has returned to a preliterate state” (181). The Man, by contrast, as the bearer of European knowledges, has the leverage to manipulate structures of authority, the forces of “law and order,” to his own liking. The consequence is the overthrow of non-European constructions of propriety and precedent. The principal actors in Wide Sargasso Sea, though man and wife, play antithetical roles typical of this mode of fiction: those of colonizer and colonized. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, “In the figure of Antoinette … Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism” (250). While the Man in a literal sense colonizes nothing, in effect he treats Antoinette as a subaltern, finally plunging her into the uncongenial world of Victorian England – indeed, of Victorian English fiction. The Man’s xenophobic bent, his aversion to the brown people of the island, is inseparable from his lack of empathy with his white English but island-bred bride, who welcomes the company of Christophine and her fellow islanders. He, by contrast, is susceptible to an “English” disease: an aversion to otherness, encompassing the Caribbean and its dark-skinned inhabitants. (His distaste may subconsciously stem from his resentment of his own disadvantaged status as an “other” – a second son estranged from his father’s favour and patrimony.) Antoinette’s relations with the coloured population of the islands have not been untroubled; in a childhood spat she directs a racial slur at her Black friend, Tia, who later repays her with interest by hurling a stone that injures her severely. And yet not even this vindictive act of aggression suffices to blunt her sense of affectionate kinship with her fellow islanders. The deep rift between the central couple’s perceptions of the island and its people determines all that occurs in this narrative, intensifying their alienation from each other. “I love [this place] more than anywhere in the world,” declares Antoinette. “As if it were a person. More than a person” (81). For the Man, instead, the island is “[n]ot only wild but menacing. Those hills could close in on you” (63) – language

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uncomfortably akin to that which he applies to his wife. An identical opposition characterizes their feelings toward the local population. Antoinette says that Christophine “smelled, too, of their smell, so warm and comforting to me (but he [the Man] does not like it)” (98). The gulf separating husband and wife is visceral, arising from elemental divergences of personal chemistry. According to Spivak, “Christophine’s unfinished story is the tangent to the [main] narrative” (252). This may apply on a literal level, but on a deeper one terming Christophine’s role “tangential” understates her importance; she is what Spivak herself calls “a powerfully suggestive figure” (252). Paradoxically, Christophine, the “obeah” (“witchcraft”) adept, occupies the position of raisonneur among Rhys’s cast of characters. Her terse estimate of the Man – “Hard as a board and stupid as a foot” (104) – testifies to her acumen. The feminist thrust of Rhys’s novel emerges vividly in the solidarity between Christophine and Antoinette, who together form an incipient league against the Man, whose generic appellation appropriately emphasizes his assertive maleness. The women’s united front is unfortunately not sufficient to prevent him from enforcing his dominating will. Language differences inflame the Man’s annoyance both with the black servant and with her ally, his wife. Besides singing songs in patois – “Adieu foulard, adieu madras” – Antoinette also likes to “natter to Christophine” in that dialect (83), a form of intimacy that aggravates the Man’s paranoia. It constitutes an act of resistance on the women’s part, betokening a repudiation of male Anglophone hegemony. “I wouldn’t hug and kiss them,” the Man grumbles of the islanders (83), conflating verbal with physical intimacy. Christophine epitomizes the idea of discursive “island” adaptability: “[T]hough she could talk good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they [i.e. other Black islanders] talked” (19) – a flexibility that does not recommend itself to Antoinette’s husband, who is indeed hard as a board. Christophine’s whole being is so contrary to the unbending reserve of the model Englishman that she balks even at acknowledging England’s existence (101–2). It follows that Christophine cannot be bothered to speak “proper” English. Her dialectal idiom showcases her independence, her cheerful flouting of the fixed “rules” of English grammar and syntax. On top

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of that, a number of more recondite “island” expressions enliven her utterances, intimating her privileged access to the numinous dimension of Caribbean reality. At a point where Antoinette’s marital grief has reached fever pitch, Christophine admonishes her to take a “[g]ood shot of rum” in her coffee; “Your face like dead woman and your eyes red like soucriant” (a soucriant is an elusive, shape-shifting creature in Caribbean folklore) (105). The “soucriant” is a fanciful extravagance, but it transmits a stark image of the extremity of Antoinette’s desperation, and it is accompanied by prosaic practical advice. Of more ominous import is the local epithet for a white person – béké – that Christophine applies to Antoinette when resisting the young woman’s frantic pleas for a love potion to forcibly regain her husband’s love. “So you believe in that tim-tim story about obeah you hear when you so high?” she challenges Antoinette. “All that foolishness and folly. Too besides, that is bad for béké. Bad, bad trouble come when béké meddle with that” (102). Despite her show of skepticism regarding “tim-tim” magical “foolishness,” Christophine’s sombre premonition is soon vindicated. It points to the nub of Antoinette’s dilemma: because she is a béké – a person of white European descent – she is barred from Caribbean cult mysteries. As her old nurse’s patois epithet sternly intimates, she is by her lineage placed at a remove from the islands she so dearly loves. That separation is exacerbated by the anguish stemming from her unravelling marriage. “I loved this place and you have made it into a place I hate,” she bitterly accuses the Man. Ironically, her hatred aligns her feelings squarely with his; but for Antoinette it has fatal consequences: it spells estrangement from her own selfhood. That rupture is capped by what Spivak rightly calls the Man’s “violent” act of renaming (250). As will be seen in later chapters, names and name changes assume a weighty importance in postcolonial narratives, often signifying wrenching shifts of orientation. Because in Wide Sargasso Sea the new name is not one chosen by its recipient but arbitrarily inflicted by a hostile other, it constitutes a pivotal act of violation. The Man insists on replacing Antoinette’s French given name with the curtly Saxon “Bertha.” She attempts to resist – “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name” (133) – but to no avail. The name-change belongs to the Man’s project of domestication, meant to convert the rich and strange, the soucriant, into something tame and

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unremarkable, and thus pliable to control. The result is to obliterate her identity, sealing her up in the attic of an English Victorian novel and in the vestibule of his mind. For Antoinette, the only recourse against such aggression is an act of insensate self-destruction, the final outcome of her estrangement from her beloved native milieu, formerly the basis of her secure sense of self. In Wide Sargasso Sea this psychological collapse is registered on the level of language. As previously noted, Antoinette, beside herself, hurls obscenities at her impervious mate. “Your dou-dou certainly knows some filthy language,” the Man tells Christophine, snidely appropriating the old nurse’s affectionate patois name for Antoinette. The verbal dissonance, posing the servant’s idiom of tenderness against the Man’s favoured idiom of cold critique, compactly sums up the dialogism of the narrative’s clashing idioms. In the closing pages, with Antoinette (truncated to Bertha) locked in the Man’s English attic, the voice of the islands has been stilled. Grace Poole, whatever her merits, provides merely a pale substitute for Christophine’s vernacular comradeship. In this early experiment with postcolonial motifs it is, atypically, a white woman who is the effective victim of the European colonizing impulse. Her fate is exceptional, unfolding as it does within Victorian literary parameters, but viewed in a broader perspective it is not unique. Her counterparts in later examples of the genre will normally be non-white and indigenous, but they too repeatedly risk imprisonment within mental if not physical attics, their voices and their accents subdued or stilled.

7

“The Greatest Trick Colonialism Plays” Nigerian Novelists and the Question of Language

According to the Nigerian political commentator Eniola Soyemi, “The greatest trick colonialism plays is to convince us it has really left” (Guardian 20 July 2020). Like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind, Soyemi deplores the lingering influence of Western conceptual paradigms on the thinking of decolonized Africans. She argues that the continuing subjection to “false notions of ‘rationality’ as espoused by European philosophy and science” is an “affliction” that in Nigeria is “responsible for the most obvious displays of self-alienation.” The Nigerian novelists considered in the present chapter might have reservations concerning Soyemi’s diagnosis, but the sorts of issues she raises emerge in one form or another in their work, conditioning their treatment of language in general and multilingualism in particular. The first such work considered here, Chinua Achebe’s landmark Things Fall Apart, focuses not on the aftermath of colonialism but on its momentous advent. The book’s impact on subsequent African and especially Nigerian writing has, nevertheless, been profound. As Russell McDougall observes, “Without Things Fall Apart, African literature, particularly West African literature, would probably not have achieved the quality and renown that it has today” (161–2). For later Nigerian works of fiction, Achebe’s classic has sometimes served contradictory purposes, as both an object of veneration and a cautionary tale. Both of these views will figure in what follows.

Chinua Achebe and the Limits of Syncretism Dennis Walder has called Things Fall Apart “the most widely read and influential work of African fiction” (117), and numerous other scholars have voiced similar estimates. In his debut novel, while still in his

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twenties, Achebe set himself the daunting task of recuperating an early Igbo society that by his own time had witnessed drastic changes. His major aim was to replace stereotyped Western anthropological and literary accounts of African life with a compelling representation of a vibrant precolonial community, and to dramatize the destructive impact on that community of British rule. As Achebe commented in his Paris Review interview, “There is that great proverb, that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter … I had to be that historian … [I]t is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunter will also reflect the agony, the travail, the bravery even, of the lions” (Brooks interview). Critical opinion has generally agreed that Things Fall Apart convincingly celebrates Achebe’s metaphorical lions, promoting a receptive and complex understanding of Igbo communal life, while lamenting that life’s erasure by arrogant and callow European invaders. According to one critic’s admiring appraisal, “Achebe appears to have tested Igbo culture against the goals of modern liberal democracy and to have set out to show how the Igbo meet those standards” (Rhoads 61). (Whether “the goals of modern liberal democracy” provide an appropriate touchstone by which to judge Achebe’s villagers is a question not considered.) The same critic notes that rather than idealizing Igbo society, “Achebe also presents its weaknesses which require change and which aid in its destruction” (61). In what follows I will suggest that the society’s strengths and weaknesses resist being so schematically separated, and that Achebe’s deployment of language variance demonstrates the inadequacy of that binary division. In a seminal 1984 article, Abdul JanMohamed pinpointed the constitutive dilemma that Achebe’s pioneering project needed to confront: how to transmit a coherent account of a pre-literate society through the eminently literate lens of prose fiction in English. “The African writer who uses English … is faced at some level with the paradox of representing the experience of oral cultures through literate language and forms” (21). According to JanMohamed, Achebe resolves the paradox by adapting his English prose style, making it conform to the oral conventions of Igbo discourse: “The style and structure … so encode the phenomenology of oral cultures and thereby create a new syncretic form and contribute to the negative dialectics deterritorializing the English language and the novelistic form” (32). The syncretism – the invention of a hybrid English/Igbo discourse – allows the novelist to accomplish “a program

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of regaining the dignity of self and society by representing them … in a manner that he considers unidealized but more authentic” (19). According to JanMohamed, a great gulf separates the epistemology of an oral culture from that of a literate or “chirographic” one. The preliterate apprehension of the world, he claims, “disregards the border between the secular and the sacred”; Achebe is therefore faced with “the unenviable task of ensuring that his characters do not seem foolish because they believe in the absence of that border” (32) – that is, because they subscribe to what a literate Western reader would be apt to dismiss as superstition. The novel employs stylistic means to forestall skeptical responses: “[B]ecause Achebe is able to capture the flavour of an oral society in his style and narrative organization, Things Fall Apart is able to represent successfully the specificity of a culture alien to most Western readers” (28). The English narrative voice mimics characteristic Igbo speech patterns: “[T]he narrator refuses to emphasize either the chirographic/scientific or the oral/mythic viewpoint, thereby … reinforcing the flat surface” (33). The flatness is produced by rhetorical devices such as parataxis, the absence of subordination of one idea or fact to another. What I would suggest is that Achebe’s masterly handling of style, and of Igbo verbal elements in particular, is likely to generate more ambivalence than JanMohamed seems willing to concede. A compact illustration of how flatness of effect (and affect) can prompt conflicted reader reactions occurs early in Things, in a passage celebrating the hero Okonkwo’s valour in battle: “In Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head. That was his fifth head, and he was not an old man yet” (14). By impassively representing the respectful attitude of an imagined native onlooker, the passage cleverly challenges the moral dogmatism likely to be exercised by modern novel-readers. Dramatizing the fact that one’s ethical judgments hinge on one’s cultural positioning is a substantial accomplishment of Achebe’s stylistic finesse. At the same time, within such a fictional context, relativism has its limits. Readers who are duly impressed by Okonkwo’s headhunting prowess may nevertheless have qualms about a society that valorizes such exploits. And this is not an isolated instance; such ambivalent tremors are apt to be set off by numerous other passages, jeopardizing Achebe’s presumed project of vindicating “the dignity of [Igbo] self and society.” In view of such complications, the insertion of Igbo words and phrases can operate effectively to bridge awkward cultural distances.

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For example, the resonant, repeated cry “Umuofia kwenu!” (People of Umuofia, greetings!) used to call the villagers together for an assembly, transmits a tangible sense of communal cohesion that readers may find recognizable and reassuring. On the other hand, however, such vernacular interpolations can sometimes intensify one’s sense of unbridgeable difference. A memorable (and much-discussed) example is the episode in which the boy Ikemefuna is, as he thinks, being escorted by elders back to his long-lost home village, but is actually on his way to be slaughtered by his foster father, Okonkwo, to propitiate the local oracle. To steady his nerves, as he walks along the boy sings to himself a rhyme beginning “Eze elina, elina! Sala Sala / Eze elikwa ya” (58). The Igbo words convey a warning to a king not to break a taboo by eating food set aside for a sacrifice; their subtext may be an oblique caution to Okonkwo not to violate a taboo by shedding the blood of his foster child. But the most relevant point of the lines is to remind us that Ikemefuna is still a child, one bound by common language and customs to the group of men bent on his destruction. By enlisting anxious solicitude on the boy’s behalf, the words throw a shadow of cruelty not just over Okonkwo, the prime actor, but by extension over the tribal system that authorizes such cruelty. The extended episode is a brilliant piece of writing, but one not calculated to encourage approval of the communal social system it exemplifies. What is more, the incident effectively triggers shock waves that reverberate throughout subsequent episodes, heightening one’s perception of this society’s vulnerability to disruptive outside forces – its potential to “fall apart.” These repercussions do not fully emerge until much later, when Okonkwo’s son Nwoye becomes a convert to the invading colonizers’ religion. To mark his conversion, he abandons his Igbo name and assumes a biblical one, Isaac. To Okonkwo this is an unforgivable apostasy, but its underlying motivation seems clear: the Old Testament Isaac, though spared at the eleventh hour, was due to be slain as a sacrifice by his father, Abraham; no doubt Nwoye’s choice of name is prompted by his identification with his childhood companion and foster brother, cruelly slain by his own father. As the narrator comments, “[T]he poetry of the new religion … seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the [abandoned] twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed” (137). Such imponderable questions haunt Achebe’s narrative, troubling his

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project of restoring dignity to the society he recreates. It is Achebe’s widely and justly praised honesty of representation that complicates his evocation of his legacy society; such honesty is hard to harmonize with straightforward ancestral veneration. Episodes in which “the border between the secular and the sacred” is erased can raise somewhat different questions, provoking not recoil but amusement; the impression created may be one of quaintness rather than dignity. Here, interpolated vernacular elements can thwart rather than support the project of allaying reader resistance to animist belief and practice. A memorable example is an incident that centres on Okonkwo’s young and spirited daughter, Ezinma. The girl’s mother, Ekwefi, has given birth to a discouraging series of children who died in infancy; now it is feared that Ezinma too will turn out to be an ogbanje, a wicked child who persists in being born, perishing, and getting reincarnated just to vex its distraught parents. An expert in such matters, Okagbue Ulwanya, is summoned to perform a rite of exorcism. He attempts to cajole Ezinma into revealing the whereabouts of her iyi-uwa, a talismanic object that embodies “a bond with the world of ogbanje” (77). After some initial recalcitrance and repeated urging (“Where did you bury your iyi-uwa?”) the obviously playful girl leads the search party on a wild goose chase before at last providing an answer to the shaman’s question: “Where they bury children” (77). At length, in the area indicated, the talismanic object is successfully retrieved: “But Ezinma’s iyi-uwa had looked real enough. It was a smooth pebble wrapped in a dirty rag” (77). As JanMohamed explains, in terms of the mythic epistemology of an oral culture, “the entire cosmos inheres in the most insignificant object” (25). Following this logic, it is natural to assign numinous significance to Ezinma’s smooth pebble. The narration of the entire episode, however, with its deliberately flat, tongue-in-cheek syncretism (“Ezinma’s iyi-uwa had looked real enough”!), is slyly humorous in tone, and comedy is the sworn enemy of dignity. For Western readers, the unfamiliar vernacular terms (ogbanje, iyi-uwa) seem all too apt to heighten the air of absurdity hovering over the whole exorcising project. The episode is at once singular and representative; as happens here, Achebe’s linguistic practices throughout the novel frequently prompt readers to experience clashing pulls, on one hand toward solicitousness, on the other toward alienating skepticism. The novel’s most stirring evocations of Igbo traditional belief occur in the nocturnal episode in chapter 11 in which the priestess Chielo carries

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the child Ezinma on her back for a lengthy promenade. Here there is no hint of the comic, but the scene once again elicits a conflicted response of empathy and estrangement. Possessed by the spirit of her god Agbala, Chielo erupts into Okonkwo’s compound asking for Ezinma, who is about to go to bed. “[A]t that very moment a loud and high-pitched voice broke the outer silence of the night. It was Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, prophesying” (94). Chielo’s Igbo utterances – “Agbala do-oo-o! Agbala ekeneo-o-o-o-o! (95) – are meant to convey her god’s greeting to Okonkwo’s household. But their exact sense matters less than their eerie, drawn-out reverberations. Furtively tracking Chielo and her own captive child on their meandering course, Ekwefi herself feels divided, torn between her culturally inscribed terror of the supernatural and her maternal concern for Ezinma’s safety: “Ekwefi stood rooted to the spot. One mind said to her, ‘Woman, go home before Agbala does you harm.’ But she could not” (99). The episode projects a keen sense of the woman’s fraught subjectivity, which is explored in greater depth than is that of any of the novel’s other actors, Okonkwo included. Chielo’s repeated cries provide an unnerving counterpoint to reinforce the reader’s sense of Ekwefi’s panicky perplexity. The novel concludes with an abrupt stylistic shift designed to determine the outcome of the contest between estrangement and empathy emphatically in favour of empathy. The British District Commissioner’s report, relegating Okonkwo’s tragic history to a perfunctory footnote, operates by reverse impetus to provoke an indignant protest. The code-switch – the replacement of syncretic syntax with banal English bureaucratese – ensures this reaction (a sample is the Commissioner’s Orwellian projected book title, “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger”) (191). By this point readers recognize that “pacification” is a euphemism for “subjugation” or “liquidation” and that the adjective “primitive” is a Western construction insulting to the highly articulated communal pattern of life Achebe has rendered imaginatively palpable. Still, Okonkwo’s own character flaws are not his exclusive possession; they are symptomatic of serious deficits in that pattern of life. His insistence on personally ending the life of Ikemefuna stems from an individual pathology, his dread of re-enacting his flute-playing father Unoka’s disgraceful “effeminacy.” As a boy he learns “that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who

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had taken no title” (17), in other words his craven father. But while this detail helps to account for Okonkwo’s dogged compensatory ambition, it also reflects the broader culture’s low estimate of women and the feminine, a misogynistic bias inscribed in its very lexicon. This attitude, as will be seen, poses a significant problem for female, and feminist, Nigerian novelists in the generations following Achebe’s. Still, by frankly representing that attitude, Achebe demonstrates his own radical good faith. To quote McDougall once again, “Things Fall Apart is a book that refuses to deal in stereotypes … but balances blame without denying truth” (173). That kind of delicate balance is what enables Achebe to do impartial justice to the lion’s role in his fictive history.

Feminist Syncretism: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie An arrestingly different representation of Igbo life, as witnessed from a female perspective, is presented in a book published almost two decades after Achebe’s, Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price (1976). While Igbo vernacular elements are again interspersed in the text, they often foreground rather than mitigate the society’s oppressive treatment of women. A lurid example is the “white otuogwo cloth … edged with red checked patterns” spread on a bed where an abducted teenaged “bride” is slated to be raped (134), a testimony to what the narrator calls “the crude life of Obuza,” the local village (165). While such grim particulars clearly place the society in a negative light, the contrast with the more balanced picture Achebe presents may be owing to the facts not only of the author’s sex but of her geographic vantage-point. Emecheta spent most of her adult life in England; her ties to Igbo traditions were consequently more tenuous than Achebe’s and demonstrably less affectionate. The case of the younger Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, a self-declared feminist, is more complex. Avoiding Emecheta’s disaffected stance, Adichie has been less reluctant to retrace Achebe’s footsteps in celebrating Igbo cultural traditions. She recalls that when, as a girl, she read (among other African works) Things Fall Apart she found it a fertile source of inspiration: “[I]t just opened the world for me” (“New Writing and Nigeria” 52). On the issue of which language to adopt as her primary literary medium, she aligns herself firmly with Achebe. One of the central characters in her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), the professorial Odenigbo, announces gravely “the success of

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the white man’s mission in Africa.” He goes on to explain: “I think in English” (402). His logic anticipates that of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and of Eniola Solemi; it is not, however, a logic that the author herself embraces. Her defense of her own position is forthright: I do not believe in being prescriptive about art. I think African writers should write in whatever language they can. The important thing is to tell African stories … Sometimes we talk about English in Africa as if Africans have no agency, as if there is not a distinct form of English spoken in Anglophone African countries. I was educated in it; I spoke it at the same time as I spoke Igbo. My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English. (Azodo interview)1 Adichie would endorse the Indian scholar Chitra Nair’s plea for linguistic eclecticism: “Membership in or affiliation with a particular ethnic group does not compel one to use one’s own ethnic tongue; at the same time, even though one may come more strongly under the influence of the colonizer’s language, that does not imply discarding traditional language” (210). Although she writes primarily in the colonizer’s language, discarding her legacy language is for Adichie not an option. She stresses the need “[t]o teach our children our [Nigerian] languages,” partly for the sake of “deeper questions of self-esteem and fundamental pride in who we are” (Azodo interview). Both her custodial posture toward her mother tongue and her partiality for her acquired one are conspicuous in her writing. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), is consistently preoccupied with issues of language. Like Things Fall Apart, it strives to achieve a fruitful equilibrium between traditional Igbo customs and speech and Western-oriented modernity. As a female writer, however, Adichie is aware of the masculinist bias of the older society and its discourse, a tendency that had led Emecheta to depict it in highly critical terms. Adichie achieves a more nuanced picture by drawing on several strategic authorial moves. An important one involves focalization: the novel’s action is narrated through the eyes of an adolescent girl, Kambili, who testifies to the deforming consequences of oppressive patriarchal dominance. Here such authority is chiefly vested not in Kambili’s elderly

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grandfather, Papa Nnukwu, an Igbo speaker and animist believer, but rather in her father, Eugene, a political progressive but a dogmatic Roman Catholic and Anglophile. In his zeal for what he considers propriety, Eugene inflicts grievous physical and emotional harm both on his two children and on his long-suffering wife, who is finally driven, somewhat melodramatically, to poison him. He repudiates his own father as a deplorable heathen, and will not allow Kambili and her brother Jaja to associate with him. By contrast, Eugene’s sister, Kambili’s kindly Aunt Ifeoma, though an eminently literate and independent-minded woman, reveres her animist father and is distressed by her brother’s intolerance. In her easygoing outlook, she personifies the ecumenical syncretism that the novel celebrates as an ideal to be striven for. All three of Adichie’s novels to date have featured language as a pervasive thematic concern, not a surprising one for a writer who had chosen communications as a field of study during her university years in the United States. In Purple Hibiscus this preoccupation is especially prominent. Eugene’s tyrannical behaviour is exhibited not only in the form of corporal punishment but also on the level of discourse. The situation here reverses that obtaining in a canonical Western novel such as Brontë’s Shirley, where the nativist Yorkshire patriarchs display stern disapproval of Shirley and Caroline’s enthusiasm for a foreign language, French. In this African setting, instead, it is the imported European language that Kambili’s father wishes to enforce, at the expense of the local vernacular, which he considers “uncivilized.” “He hardly spoke Igbo, and although Jaja and I spoke it with Mama at home, he did not like us to speak it in public. We had to sound civilized in public, he told us, we had to speak English” (13). To borrow Soyemi’s formulation, for Eugene British colonialism may be gone but it has not really left; he has internalized its Eurocentric assumptions and he enforces them violently on his own family. His disapproval of native vernacular extends to religious matters; when an innovative young priest, Father Amadi, breaks into an Igbo song in the midst of his sermon, Eugene “pursed his lips” (28). He later pronounces dourly, “People like him bring trouble to the church” (29). The novel’s implied target, of course, is not the English language itself but Anglophone fetishism. As Brenda Cooper has observed, in Purple Hibiscus Adichie creates a “syncretized world,” striving for “a holistic vision … that integrates Igbo customs and language with

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Catholic ritual” (110). Cooper adds, “The pathway to a more syncretic religion is via Igbo language, songs and rituals … [T]he use of words from another language provides an alternative frame of reference outside the dominance of English” (120). It is in fact the dominance of English – not just in religious rites but in her everyday life – that places Kambili under duress. In their study of Adichie’s linguistic practices, Emma Dawson and Pierre Larrivé call Igbo “the language of emotions” (930). If that is true, then it follows that the curtailment of her freedom to use the language may have an inhibiting effect on Kambili’s emotional life and on her sense of belonging. In particular, the disruption of Igbo networks of affective affiliation can cause far-reaching psychological damage. As several critics have observed, Kambili’s speech impediment or voicelessness can be attributed to her overbearing father, himself inwardly stunted. Daria Tunca notes that “Eugene’s shadow looms over the narrative” (124); as far as Kambili is concerned, that shadow is pre-eminently a linguistic one. Eugene’s allegiance to Anglophone primacy does not go unchallenged – the recurrence of Igbo on the lips of members of his own household represents a resistance, however furtive – but it takes an appreciable toll. When conversing with her brother or cousins Kambili must “pace [her] breathing so that [she] would not stutter” (92), a source of embarrassment against which she must constantly struggle. As Heather Hewitt observes, Kambili’s father’s “patriarchal rule has subsumed her individual identity almost entirely, and his abuse rends from her her ability to speak … Kambili’s linguistic alienation underscores her personal alienation” (85). Where in Things Fall Apart Okonkwo’s son Nwoye is estranged by his father’s cruel adherence to established Igbo practices, Adichie’s novel turns the situation around: it is Eugene’s over-commitment to the ways and words of the former foreign masters, his contempt for those of his own people, that alienates his daughter. As Rebecca Walkowitz notes, “[M]odernist writers often use stutters or stammers to register antagonisms within a civic rhetoric that claims to be uniform and consistent; the stutter … registers a protest that is otherwise prohibited” (136). Adichie resituates this modernist trope within a postcolonial context; Kambili’s speech defect involuntarily defies the Anglo-conformity that her father exacts. Eugene’s proscription of Igbo has on her a self-alienating effect; it frustrates her linguistic development

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and thus her capacity to relate to others as an integrated personality, like her fluently bilingual aunt Ifeoma and her cousin Amaka, who “opened her mouth and had words flow easily out” (99). As Hewitt claims, “[O]nly in speaking out can [Kambili] begin to exist as a whole person with a future as well as a past” (88). But since “speaking out” itself amounts to an act of filial insubordination, it risks being met with punitive force. In Purple Hibiscus, as Hewitt observes, the “polyvocal speech” of Kambili’s aunt and cousin “interrupts and contests the dominance of Eugene’s [consistently English] monologue” (86), For Eugene, language policing is a mode of legislating domestic compliance; to quote Sarah Dowling once more, “Monolingualism is an ideology, a structuring principle that touches every aspect of social life” (3). Here, the “structuring principle” operates in the interest of maintaining fealty to an outmoded colonialist slate of prescriptions. Kambili herself must pursue an arduous uphill pathway to achieve polyvocality. Amy Novak argues that by identifying with a white subjectivity, “the colonized subject undergoes a wounding, and this injury … results in a loss of voice and no sense of identity” (37). Under the impress of her father’s Anglo-colonial dogmatism, Kambili, even after she has listened spellbound to an Igbo chorus joined by Father Amadi, still imagines God as a white administrator, his rumbling voice “British accented” (179). What she must manage, in the face of despotic authority, is to take confident ownership of both languages, Igbo and English. Only then can she take full ownership of herself. Even in her first novel, Adichie displays a mature adroitness in playing off one language contrapuntally against another, producing a polyphonic verbal fabric that achieves heightened dramatic tension. This technique is central to one of the novel’s most poignant scenes, the death of Kambili’s aged animist grandfather. Here Igbo interpolations place the old man’s passing within a sharply defined cultural and linguistic perspective. The sequence of the discovery of the event opens with Kambili’s cousin remarking in Igbo that her grandfather is sleeping: “Nekwa, Papa Nnukwu is still asleep.” She then calls, “Papa-Nnukwu, Papa-Nnukwu, kunie!” (Wake up!), only to discover that her grandfather is no longer breathing. She calls her mother, who makes frantic efforts to revive the old man and then cries desperately, “Nna anyi! Nna anyi!” (Our father! Our father!). Finally Ifeoma admits, “Ewuu, he has fallen

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asleep” (182). These utterances, along with other repeated Igbo phrases, endow the spontaneous outburst of grief with the character of an intimate communal ritual. It is, in symbolic terms, a lament for the passing of the pre-literate, animist cultural order – for its “falling apart” – but it contains an element of hope. The vernacular words offer implicit assurance that the endangered tradition of native speech and worship Papa-Nnukwu embodied will not disappear along with his life but will be revered by his descendants, even though they themselves represent a modernity of outlook foreign to the grandfather’s generation. The one discordant element in the scene is the declaration by Kambili’s brother: “‘Papa-Nnukwu is alive,’ Jaja said in English, with authority, as if doing so would make his words come true. The same tone God must have used when he said ‘Let there be light’” (183). The boy behaves here like a smaller replica of Eugene, mimicking his father’s reliance on the Western tongue as a talismanic code with the potency to bestow “enlightenment” and even to resuscitate the dead. The proceedings powerfully associate English supremacism with denial and displacement, Igbo with reverence and clan solidarity. Adichie’s follow-up novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), was voted in 2020 the best book ever to have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, but the acclaim has not been universal. Brenda Cooper, who saw the interpolation of Igbo elements in Purple Hibiscus as the pathway to a syncretic form of religion, objects to the use of such elements in the later work. According to Cooper, the novel disappointingly shows how “the insertion of another language or of stories or of wisdoms” could “become symbolic of an idealised and essentialized African pre-colonial culture.” To support her point, she cites Eileen Julien’s use of the tern “ornamentalism,” which Julien “identified … as arising out of “the pressure on African writers to prove their credentials of authenticity” (146). Such a critique, however, rests on an ad feminam reading of Adichie’s main motive as author (the anxiety to meet global commercial expectations) that the evidence of the text does little to support. In fact, the treatment of languages, including Igbo insertions, in this second novel does not depart markedly from Adichie’s practice in her first one. To quote Cooper herself, “[I]t is the use to which language is put that counts” (122). The presence of Igbo in Half of a Yellow Sun again challenges the hegemony of English, but makes no counter-claim to vernacular superiority.

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A good many of the Igbo expressions in Half of a Yellow Sun operate locally to add a distinctive flavour to dialogue; the meaning is normally apparent from the context. Thus, when Odenigbo’s countrified mother remarks caustically of her son’s well-to-do lover, Olanna, that she grew up with servants to wipe her ike (98), the sense of ike is both plain and more arresting than the expected English monosyllable. Such an interpolation may in some sense be “ornamental,” but it is hardly idealizing; it has the justifiable purpose of transmitting the bluntness of everyday speech in the mouth of an unrefined speaker. But elements of vernacular speech in this novel are more often sombre than amusing; they are persistently associated with scenes of suffering or violence. Madhu Krishnan concedes that Half of a Yellow Sun is “a novel that invites reading through the lens of exoticism” (26) but goes on to demonstrate that “the subversive deployment of the exotic unmasks the ideological frameworks underpinning traditional notions of identity and positioning of alterity” (36). Novak too sees Adichie’s aim as the exploding of stock Western assumptions about Africa; the book “challenge[s] the Manichean organization of the colonial world by uprooting the symbolic order that structures the Western subject’s sense of the real” (39). She views this uprooting as the outcome of linguistic strategies that “perform … an act of translation by implicating the Western subject and contesting its privileged position as detached observer” (45). The frequent interpolation of Igbo speech elements functions as a vital counterforce to potential reader detachment; and yet the language is not idealized or obtrusively privileged. The novel takes pains to discourage nativist claims to Igbo precedence. During the war for Biafran independence, when a pregnant woman snaps at her attending physician “It is you non-Igbo who are showing the enemy the way!” Olanna’s outspoken sister Kainene rebukes her, even while voicing a patriotic Igbo slogan: “We are all Biafrans! Anyincha bu Biafra!” (320). Here again, as in Purple Hibiscus, it is syncretism that is privileged, hybridity of discourse. Odenigbo’s houseboy Ugwu, newly arrived from the countryside, is captivated by “the musical blend of English words in [Odenigbo’s] Igbo sentences” (10). While Ugwu himself enters the novel speaking “bush” Igbo and faltering English, his increasing mastery of both idioms is one of the ongoing threads of the narrative. His progress as a linguist can be read as paradigmatic; by implication national autonomy, too, hinges on feats of polyglot versatility.

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At the same time, however, the novel acknowledges the entrenched hierarchy among languages in this former British colony. Fluency in English has the potential to unlock doors. Brooding over her partner Odenigbo’s seduction of the village girl Amala, Olanna imagines sardonically that he “made a drunken pass and she submitted willingly and promptly. He was the master, he spoke English, he had a car” (250). Like the ownership of flashy modern commodities, control of the prestigious European language is an avenue to power. Olanna herself exploits her linguistic capital to obtain express medical attention for the sick “Baby,” Odenigbo’s infant daughter by Amala: “‘It’s terribly important,’ she said and kept her English accent crisp and her head high,” while a snubbed, wearily waiting seeker for help curses vainly in “plebeian” Igbo: “Tufiaka!” (263). Odenigbo explains to Ugwu – in English – that proficiency in the tongue of the former conquerors can function as a resource for resistance: “How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand the exploitation?” (11). But the value of English transcends the instrumental; hearing Olanna speak it effortlessly, Ugwu reflects, “Here was a superior tongue, a luminous language, the kind of English he heard on Master’s radio” (22). Such sentiments obviously reflect a sort of retrospective linguistic elitism, a naïve nostalgia for the dulcet tones of bbc newscasters. The issue is self-consciously aired in a conversation when Odenigbo’s militant friend, Miss Adebayo, derides “[Olanna’s] mimicking the oppressor English accent” (51). Such an attitude, however, runs counter to the novel’s spirit of linguistic eclecticism; tellingly, Olanna speaks “equally perfect Igbo” (23). Approaching linguistic diversity from the contrary direction, the novel’s most prominent Western character, Richard Churchill, undergoes a remarkable personal evolution. For understandable reasons, not least his hyper-colonial name, Richard has been characterized by critics as a belated agent of empire, a British interloper lusting after the African exotic. Krishnan, for one, reads Richard’s desire for Olanna’s twin, Kainene, as a displacement of his collector’s lust for Igbo roped pots, “turning her into the object of exoticism and fetishistic desire”; “his ‘aching to touch the delicately cast metal’ parallels his desire to touch Kainene” (31). Such readings oversimplify the issues; if Richard has exoticist impulses, he also has other, more disinterested ones. An important piece of evidence in his favour is his eagerness to master the Igbo language. The unorthodox nature of this effort is made plain; as

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Richard’s narrowminded English friend Susan remarks huffily, “One couldn’t cross certain lines” (67). It is Richard’s temerity in crossing lines that allows him to act with confidence amid the scorched African earth. At a climactic juncture, the success of his assimilation is placed beyond doubt when he manages to get cleared through a military checkpoint. “‘Abu onye Biafra,’ Richard said … He thought about how easily those Igbo words had slipped out of him. ‘I am a Biafran’” (181). The utterance is his passport to an African identity; he has outgrown his ignominious role as prurient Churchillian pot-collector. Throughout the narrative Adichie repeatedly relies on linguistic code-switching to point up the keenness of interpersonal conflict. Olanna, reunited with Kainene after an interval in which she has had a fleeting sexual liaison with her sister’s lover, Richard, addresses her affectionately in Igbo: “‘Ejima m’” (My twin). The other woman barks back in English, “You fucked Richard” (254). The emotional U-turn is joltingly conveyed by the abrupt shift from the soothing warmth of the African language to the curt staccato of the English vulgarism. But the overall impact of Adichie’s linguistic strategy cannot be adequately accessed through a sampling of scattered sites. It is above all the cumulative effect of reiterated Igbo expressions that counts, reinforcing one’s general sense of Igbo life not as a doomed anachronism, even amid the duress of civil war, but as a vibrant and “normal” endowment. Above all in moments of heightened tension, the cohesiveness of the culture is powerfully transmitted. In the harrowing episode of the genocidal massacre Olanna witnesses in Hausa territory, Igbo refugees are fatally betrayed by their speech. During the nightmarish train journey Olanna takes in the company of other traumatized survivors, the moment of passage to safety is signalled by a shout in the targeted tongue: “Anyi agafeela! We have crossed the River Niger! We have reached home!” (149). Nothing could more vividly convey how tightly language is bound up with local belonging, to the point of spelling the difference between life and death. In Adichie’s fiction, as in Wide Sargasso Sea and Things Fall Apart, the verbal sub-category of naming and renaming takes on a far-reaching importance. In a catalogue of the damaging cultural effects of imperialism, Ngũgĩ singles out the weakening of “a people’s belief in their names” (Decolonising 3). It is precisely that belief that is endangered in Purple Hibiscus when Kambili’s cousin Amaka balks at being pressured

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to choose an English confirmation name from an assortment proposed by Father Amadi. The priest explains that the practice is merely a pro forma stipulation of the church, and Aunt Ifeoma grows impatient with her daughter’s waywardness. But Amaka holds firm: “‘Ekwerom,’ she said to Aunty Ifeoma – ‘I do not agree’” (272), and the novel implicitly sides with her. Rather than adolescent crankiness, the girl’s refusal betokens a principled reluctance (comparable to Antoinette Cosway’s) to allow her identity to be deformed by alien authorities. Even a perfunctory yielding to such compulsion threatens her inherited selfhood. The Igbo expressions distributed liberally throughout the scene have a pointed salience; they serve as reminders of the characters’ ancestral idiom, which imported European names have no business usurping, An analogous dispute arises in Half of a Yellow Sun, involving an ongoing perplexity over what to call the child Odenigbo has fathered with Amala. Olanna, who raises the child as her own, insists on referring to her by the English (and of course generic) name “Baby.” Kainene eventually grows irritated: “[I]t’s about time the girl came to be called Chiamaka,” she complains. “This Baby business is tiresome” (344). Olanna merely laughs, but her sister has a point, one closely related to Amaka’s in the prior novel. What is at stake here is the whole matter of the extramarital child’s belonging – or not belonging – to the family and to the community. As Kainene may intuit, calling her “Baby” amounts to a tactic (no doubt subliminal) of estrangement, betraying Olanna’s reluctance to embrace the little girl as fully her own. Here, as in Adichie’s other works, issues involving naming tend to focus on a woman’s quest for her personal identity and on her relation to her community and its traditions.2

Languages of Violence: Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen Like Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Chigozie Obioma’s acclaimed first novel, The Fishermen (2015), is preoccupied with issues of language. As Maria López says in an illuminating essay, “The Fishermen enacts the power of words to determine and transform personal and collective beliefs and even reality itself ” (149); the tragedy, she adds, is “triggered by the power of words to signify and act in non-literal ways” (156). Yet an equally marked feature of Obioma’s narrative is the relentless sequence

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of incidents of horrifying violence. As I will argue, these two preoccupations – language and violence – are closely intertwined. López’s discussion of the novel’s linguistic concerns focuses usefully on how performative speech acts, and above all the “madman” Abulu’s prophecies, can have catastrophic consequences. Obioma himself situates the fatal prophecies within the wider context of Nigerian political tensions: “I intend Abulu as a metaphor for this entity that infiltrates the lives of others, creates chaos through mere words, and causes suffering among people, while the family of four boys is a metaphor for the major tribes of Nigeria” (Curtin interview, emphasis added). As the novel makes plain, the devastating “entity” has already distorted Abulu’s own life in ways that parallel its effects on the Agwu brothers and their family. Impelled by dire poverty, the young Abulu and his brother had robbed the house of a rich widow. As the narrator explains, using characteristic metaphors of explosion and fragmentation, “Want and lack exploded in their minds like a grenade and left shrapnel of desperation in its wake” (90). Afterwards, fleeing in a panic from an angry mob, Abulu had been struck by a car, suffering irremediable brain damage. In his subsequent derangement, he acts not so much as the instigator of destruction as its unwitting oracle. His fatal prophecy of the murder of Ikenna, the oldest Agwu sibling, at the hands of his brother is the outcome not of personal malice but of what might be termed addled clairvoyance.3 An ostinato accompaniment to the novel’s violent action is its profuse multilingualism. English (both in narration and in dialogue) is mixed with numerous fragments of Nigerian vernaculars, both Igbo and Yoruba; Hausa and Pidgin too have walk-on parts. But where in Adichie linguistic variety is for the most part treated positively – estimable characters in Half of a Yellow Sun including Odenigbo, Olanna, and Richard are fluently bilingual – in The Fishermen such variety is more often than not a harbinger of misprision and mischief. According to Cédric Courtois, the disillusionment that characterizes “third generation” Nigerian novels “goes against what some writers [such as Adichie] advocate … when they argue that it is time to put an end to Afro-pessimism” (3). (One should note, however, that Adichie’s fictional texts are by no means uniformly sunny.) While Obioma speaks appreciatively of English, calling it “[o]ne good thing we got from the British” (Go interview), he considers the overall impact of colonialism deplorable, and his treatment of linguistic variety reflects that opinion.

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In the Nathan Go interview Obioma declares, “I played with the languages because it [sic] has big political implications.” The implications can be traced to what Obioma deems the underlying design flaw of his country: “The distinct tribes, like Yoruba and Igbo, they are their own states. They used to have no contact and they progressed in their own way. But then a colonizing force came in and said, ‘Be a nation.’ It is tantamount to the prophecy of a madman.” The narrator of The Fishermen echoes this perception of disunity when he refers glumly to “this ramshackle country” (63). When the oldest Agwu brother, Ikenna, destroys the boys’ prized calendar given them by the charismatic political leader M.K.O. Abiola, the language underscores the imagery of fragmentation: the calendar “was burned to pieces, and meticulously destroyed” (63). The proliferation of disparate tongues has a comparable metonymic function; it becomes expressive of the deadly ramshackleness of the randomly assembled nation. While the social context is radically different, the effect of polyvocality here recalls Lawrence’s use of heteroglossia to project a panorama of moral and emotional disarray. The actual insertions of indigenous vernacular transmit a sense not of fertile variety but of strife and intimidation. An example of the tone is the song in Yoruba the boys devise to celebrate their own fishing prowess, the words an altered version of lyrics drawn from a popular Christian soap opera: “Bi otiwu o ki o Jo / ki o ja, / Ati mu o, / o male lo ma” etc., translated as “Dance all you want, / fight all you will, / We’ve caught you, / you cannot escape” (17). The mode of masculine triumphalism in the Yoruba words is later rebuked by the boys’ mother’s recitation of frightening biblical proverbs in Igbo translation: “Anya nke na’ akwa nna ya emo, nke neleda ina nne y anti” etc. (The eye that mocks a father, that scorns an aged mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures) (24). Filial submission is enforced by parental fearmongering, all the more effective for being delivered in the familiar vernacular of home. Even the mere fact of a code-switch can serve as an augury of disorder. During the fatal quarrel between the two elder brothers, Ikenna supercharges his accusations with such a switch from the Yoruba of the schoolyard to – here again – the more intimate Igbo: “Ikenna spoke on in a louder voice, switching from Yoruba to Igbo: ‘Were it not for that malicious act [of destroying his passport], I would have been in Canada by now, living a better life’” (124).

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In the Go interview, Obioma differentiates the book’s characters according to their language preferences: “The Father, a lover of Western culture, is always speaking in formal English. The Mother, being more traditional, always speaks Igbo. The children, being playmates with other local kids, speak Yoruba. So English, when used, creates craters between family and friends.” When people such as the father switch to English “they intentionally create distance.” Despite Obioma’s avowed fondness for the language, when it occurs in dialogue English frequently exacerbates friction. Like the father in Purple Hibiscus, this one views English as “civilized,” African vernaculars as implicitly backward. Fishing too – a traditional pursuit – shares this stigma. “‘I sweat and suffer to send you to school to receive a Western education as civilized men, but you choose instead to be fishermen. Fish-a-men!’ He shouted the word repeatedly as if it were anathema to him” (33). He then proceeds to inflict brutal corporal punishment on his undutiful sons. But his verbal violence plays as important a role as the physical beating in creating a rift between himself and the boys. His sarcastic use of the arcane English word “guerdon” in reference to the flogging is itself a form of alienating contempt. The father is thus doubly estranged from his children: first by his forced removal for purposes of work to a remote part of the country, second by the physical and verbal drubbing he administers to compensate for his absence. Violence in The Fishermen transmits itself from one generation to the next, and its sources are jointly physical and verbal. The “change” in Ikenna that issues in his disastrous clash with his brother Boja is ostensibly caused by his superstitious susceptibility to the prophecy of Abulu, but it also coincides with his humiliation by the father’s vicious “guerdon.” Even leaving aside Abulu, the emotional and verbal climate of the Agwu household, not to mention the whole enveloping country, suffices to account for the family’s fragmentation. Even an incident mentioned in passing, the father’s callous mockery of his son Boja’s persistent bed-wetting, reinforces the vectors of alienation. Later, after Obembe and Benjamin’s gruesome murder of Abulu, rather than condemning the boys’ shocking cruelty the father whispers a commendation: “‘Ge nti, Azikiwe,’ he said in a subtle Igbo. ‘What you have done is great. Do not regret it’” (279). Little wonder if the domestic turmoil reduces the loquacious, peace-loving mother to silence: “This tongue, which was now frozen, used to produce words as fungi produced

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spores” (178). Once again the imagery is violently explosive: “There had been a cataclysmic explosion of her mind, and her perception of the known world had been blasted into smithereens” (182). As is plain from that quotation and other, similar passages, the narrator Benjamin’s penchant for extravagant metaphor is regularly in evidence. The same tendency colours the utterances of other characters, where it all too often aggravates interpersonal conflict. Benjamin, as chronicler, has a habit of identifying people close to him with animals, especially predatory ones. Thus, he declares “Father was an eagle” (25), while his brother Ikenna “was a python” (41). Such expressions may stem from the inherent figurative bent of Igbo, the family’s “home” idiom. As Benjamin comments, “Our parents often found the need to explain … expressions containing concealed meanings because we sometimes took them literally, but it was the way they learned to speak; the way our language – Igbo – was structured” (39–40). As López observes, “The most obvious effect of this constant use of metaphorical characterization is its contribution to the strongly symbolic and mythical dimension of the novel. But it also needs to be seen as related to the novel’s inquiry into the relation between the literal and the figurative uses of language, in particular, to the fatal consequences that the blurring or confusion between these two dimensions may have” (150). She adds, “[I]n Ikenna we certainly see the self-destruction to which the literalization of prophecies can lead” (154). But confusions arising from the persistent metaphoricity can also operate in reverse; the shift from the literal to the figurative can be an especially perilous form of code-switching. Thus, after denouncing the innocuous pastime of fishing as anathema, the father goes on capriciously to place it on a figurative pedestal, telling his sons, “I want you to be juggernauts, menacing and unstoppable fishermen” (37). Thus exalted, the activity for which the boys have just been harshly disciplined becomes magically transmuted into a symbol of hypermasculine glory. A closely related syndrome in Obioma’s novel is the erasure of lines between fiction and fact, specifically in relation to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which Obembe and Benjamin take as a gospel guiding them to exact vengeance. Obembe dubs their scheme to punish Abulu for his alleged murder of their brothers “The Okonkwo Plan” (208), but as Beniamin Kłaniecki points out, taking Achebe’s protagonist as a role model for present action shows a naïve disregard for historical realities:

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“From a single literary character, dubiously positioned at the crossroads between pre-colonial traditions and the colonial future, Okonkwo has risen to become the archetype of tragic Nigerian masculinity, whose epitomic status anchored back in decolonialism requires fresh revisions and reinterpretations to match the dynamic changes in Nigeria and on the literary scene” (401). Ironically, as Kłaniecki argues, the brothers’ literal-mindedness places them “in a position of entrapment similar to that of Okonkwo” (403). What is more, the basic assumption of Abulu’s responsibility for the brothers’ deaths rests on comparably naïve confusions between the literal and the figurative. As Obioma himself points out, Abulu harbours no malign intent: “[H]e doesn’t know the harm he’s causing. He doesn’t realize he’s done damage” (Go interview). And yet even the adult members of the family thoughtlessly deem Abulu a bloodthirsty assassin; the mother gloats when informed of his violent death. “‘My God has finally vanquished my enemies,’ she sang, lifting her hands. ‘Chineke na’ eme na, ime la eke le diri gi’” 258). The vernacular words underscore the confusion embedded in the mother’s jubilant hymn, which performs a misconceived kind of syncretism: an unstable blend of Christian piety and Igbo mythology. She elaborates on the mythic dimension: “‘You see, my Chi [guardian spirit] is alive and has finally avenged me. Abulu lashed my children with his tongue and now that tongue will rot in his mouth’” (259). The vindictiveness directed at a mentally damaged person is hardly Christian, nor can the mother’s “Chi” plausibly be deemed an accessory to the rotting of the miscreant’s tongue. But Obembe, in the culminating item of the budget of charges he formally draws up against Abulu, engages in a still wilder literalization of metaphor, producing a patent absurdity: “It was he, not Boja, who planted the knife in Ikenna’s belly” (205). All such metaphors amount merely to self-deluding evasions, designed to shift responsibility for tragedy away from the family itself to an eligible scapegoat. Such verbal contortions exemplify what López calls “the power of words to transform their listeners and make things happen through them” (157). Unfortunately, in The Fishermen spoken words are as apt to lead to warfare as to welfare, and the multiplicity of tongues serves only to compound lexical snares. In this respect the novel’s action represents, as Obioma himself has suggested, a microcosm of the broader Nigerian predicament, whose very keynote, as reflected in The Fishermen, seems to be blundering mishap. The brutality of the “guerdon” the father inflicts

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on his sons is mirrored on a broader plane by the besetting political turmoil, whereby the wife of a democratic political leader is assassinated and a military dictator dies “frothing at the mouth” (285–6). In this light Ben and Obembe’s attempt to kill Abulu by feeding him rat poison reads like a grotesque parody of current national events. Still more grotesque, however, is the boys’ actual murder of Abulu using fishing tackle and fish-hooks, “unstoppable fishermen” as they have sadly become. It is the novel’s climactic, nightmarish instance of the literalization of metaphor. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart may be a landmark of African fiction, but it is fiction, not a blueprint for conduct amid the radically changed, chaotic African terrain in which Obioma’s narrative unfolds. The sort of hyper-masculine aggressiveness that Achebe’s Okonkwo represents does not provide a workable plan of action to exact justice amid an altered set of realities. Given those realities, speech itself becomes a precarious gamble, and the only alternative envisioned by Obioma’s novel seems to be “the massive graveyard whose language was silence” (152).

8

Languages of History Anita Desai and Arundhati Roy

India is a nation whose huge linguistic diversity rivals that of a profusely polyglot African country such as Nigeria. The Indian constitution recognizes twenty-two languages as “scheduled” (i.e. major), but dozens of others are used by millions of inhabitants. As one might expect, Indian novelists, like their Nigerian confreres, often take pains to register this variety in what they write. Those who produce primarily English texts are apt to adopt the common postcolonial practice of introducing an abundance of elements drawn from indigenous vernaculars. As in Nigerian Anglophone writing, the resulting text is likely to dramatize friction stemming from differences among competing and sometimes sharply antagonistic modes of discourse. The two novels examined in the present chapter, Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1987) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1998), differ in their styles and subjects, but converge in their focus on forms of linguistic estrangement amid the turmoil of twentieth-century history. Both dwell on the confusions and hazards besetting newcomers confronted with the complexities of Indian social practices. In both, clashes of diverse idioms conduce to tragic outcomes; and in both, young children suffer traumatic dislocation, partly as a consequence of linguistic confusions. The protagonist of Desai’s novel, Hugo Baumgartner, passes his childhood years in Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s accession to power; he is forced to flee to India to escape persecution, not realizing that ultimately no such escape is possible in the increasingly interconnected world he inhabits. The children at the centre of Roy’s narrative, the twins Estha and Rahel, are the objects of no political endangerment in the strict sense, but they are subjected to types of social dysfunction

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that are comparably destructive. For all their differences, both novels disturbingly evoke the chaotic onslaught of twentieth-century history, while illuminating the power of language to shape individual destinies.

Hugo Baumgartner’s Tragic History Lesson The epigraph appended to Desai’s novel, drawn from T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” states gnomically: “In my beginning is my end.” The words turn out to be all too accurate a comment on the trajectory of the hapless protagonist, Hugo Baumgartner, whose itinerary spans half the globe but concludes, figuratively speaking, where it started. It is grimly appropriate that Desai’s narrative, which persistently skips backward and forward in time, should begin at its chronological endpoint, with the aftermath of the hero’s horrifying murder. Baumgartner’s life is a study in chronic dislocation amid a frighteningly violent twentieth-century topography  – he is the eternal étranger – and the dislocation manifests itself in terms of language. In Bombay even people he sees frequently, such as Farrokh, proprietor of the restaurant called optimistically “Café de Paris,” invariably mangle his Germanic surname as “Bommgarter.” The solecism, repeated on multiple occasions by other Indian acquaintances, is a tell-tale reminder of Baumgartner’s unalterable status as a “firanghi” (foreigner), tellingly the most frequent Indian vernacular word in the text. Baumgartner’s role as perennial odd-man-out leads Judie Newman, in a stimulating article, to say, “Throughout the novel, Baumgartner … is established as a clown” (37). But while Baumgartner certainly has his share of comical traits, this judgment needs to be qualified. Overall, Hugo’s personal history is no laughing matter. His clownishness stems largely from his besetting dislocation; it is the sad clownishness of a fish out of water. The poignance of Baumgartner’s history derives above all from the stark contrast between his infantile security and his later displacement. The retrospective narrative of his Berlin years transmits a powerful sense of his initial cozy belonging in the milieu of his birth. Here he is ensconced in the warm bosom of his prosperous nuclear family, with little sense of his difference, as a Jew, from “normal” Berliners. The family appears to be thoroughly integrated; the father even bears the eminently Teutonic name Siegfried.1 Linguistically, the family medium is impeccably German. The point is driven home by a distinctive feature of the

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text, an interpolated selection of German nursery rhymes. (As a result of her unusual family circumstances Desai herself spoke the language from infancy.2) The verses are mostly printed without English translation, an omission Newman reads as an implicit critique of “the claustrophobic over-immersion in texts” of “self-centred European society” (39). I would argue that beyond marking such cultural narcissism, the withholding of English versions performs more immediate textual work: it transmits to readers a tangible sense of the utter Germanness of Hugo’s childhood scene, a scene soon to be obliterated as alien. The verses themselves typically feature animals, furred and feathered creatures of which little Hugo is inordinately fond, a partiality that persists into his adult life as a rescuer of stray cats from the byways of Bombay. A typical example, concerning a pony, begins “Hopp, hopp, hopp, / Pferdchen lauf galopp’” (Hop, hop, hop, / Little horse, run at a gallop) (25). The placement of such verses tends to be carefully considered. This one follows immediately after Hugo is seen playing a silly hat-exchanging game with his father, both adult and child laughing. Ultimately, the impression of jolly domestic security turns out to be delusory. In hindsight, it creates a painful contrast with the wrenching dislocation of Hugo’s later years, his flight halfway around the globe to escape Nazi persecution. Baumgartner’s whole period of exile might be termed a fruitless quest for the lost, happy language of childhood – so to speak, for the missing pony. His cosmopolitanism is of a type not hitherto encountered in these pages: the forced cosmopolitanism of the harried exile. He begins to lose that happy language of childhood early, when he is obliged, by Nazi decree, to attend a distant school for Jewish children where instruction is in Hebrew, a tongue which Hugo “had never heard before” (37). This code-shift reinforces his sense, already acute in his prior, mostly Christian class, “that he did not belong” (36). Afterward, during all the years he spends in India, he never again encounters a linguistic comfort zone, making do from his arrival on, primarily with “his new and hesitant English” (86). The decades he spends in his adopted country bring him no assured fluency; he remains “uncertain, as ever, of which language to employ.” He reproaches himself dejectedly with a scrap of his vestigial German: “After fifty years, still uncertain. Baumgartner, du Dummkopf” (6). His haphazard English mode can be inferred from his vocal alarm at witnessing a homeless drunkard brutally beating his wife: “What is happen? … Is police not come?” (8).

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Yet in Desai’s novel the sharp before-and-after contrast of languages is made subtly problematic. Even his native tongue is rendered suspect; to Baumgartner’s serene German infancy there clings an aura of cloying, excessive sweetness, imperfectly masking the bitterness of the historical process that will devour his happy family. The narrative opens with a foretaste of that treacherous, treacly sweetness. After Hugo’s murder his distraught friend Lotte, reading the now blood-stained, cryptic postcards his mother had sent from the Nazi camp – cards featuring endearments such as “meine kleine Maus” (my little mouse) and “mein Haschen” (my little rabbit) – is appalled by the “suffocating sweetness” of the language (5).3 As Newman comments, “[I]n their sugary endearments [the cards] offer a sickly-sweet language of childhood which is construed as destructive” (38–9). Saccharine images crowd the pages evoking Hugo’s earliest years; among the horses running in a race his father attends, one is named “Sweet Sensation” (34). To console him for the death of a pet baby hedgehog Hugo’s mother sings a nursery song “with ineffable sweetness” (28), but Hugo himself finds it less than mollifying: “the sweetness always ended in a quaver” (29). His alertness to the quaver is grimly prophetic. In fact, the “comforting” rhymes to which little Hugo is exposed almost all, on close inspection, harbour a menacing quaver. The song cited just above begins sweetly enough: “Lieber Vogel, flieg weiter / Nimm ein Gruss mit, einer Kuss” (Dear bird, fly farther, / Take a greeting with you, a kiss) (29). But it continues less chirpily: “Denn ich kann dich nicht begleiten / Weil ich hierbleiben muss” (Since I can’t come along with you / Because I must stay here). The lines obliquely but darkly foreshadow the separation between mother and child, when he will be compelled to seek his fortune abroad while she remains behind, at the mercy of the Gestapo. A subsequent rhyme makes the point more bluntly: “Hãnschen klein, geht allein / in die weite Welt hinein” (Little Hans goes alone / Out into the wide world) (38). Accoutered with an elegant walking-stick and hat, Hans is cheerful (“wohlgemut”), but his abandoned mother is desolate: “Doch die Mutter weinet sehr, / hat ja nun kein Hänschen mehr” (But the mother weeps bitterly, / She no longer has a little Hans). Baumgartner’s Mutti, too, will be left weeping without a little (or a big) Hugo to comfort her. Other rhymes follow a pattern corresponding to those already mentioned, in which an aura of beatific sweetness masks a dark, even

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gruesome subtext. Readers with no German are constrained to rely on the context to tease out these nuances, but those with at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language will find the rhymes’ simple diction no formidable obstacle. Even the innocent-seeming verse about the pony, cited above (“Hopp, hopp”), looks ahead proleptically to Baumgartner’s later betting exploits at the Bombay racetrack, to the horse he buys together with his Indian business associate, and ultimately to the silver trophies he wins, the proximate motive for his undoing. The same verse, in fact, contains a veiled caution: “Über Stock und über Stein / Aber bricht dir nicht die Beine!” (Over stick and over stone / But don’t break your legs!) (25). Metaphorically speaking, as a grown-up Baumgartner neglects due prudence and incurs a still graver breakage. Even a simple lullaby, “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf!” (Sleep, little child, sleep!) (37), contains an alarming proviso. Outside there are two sheep, a black one and a white one; and if you don’t sleep “dann kommt das Schwarz und beist es” (then the black one will come and bite you). But the most unnerving overtones of these children’s rhymes are those that in retrospect anticipate Baumgartner’s ill-fated encounter with the addicted and possibly psychotic German youth, Kurt. According to the narrative’s implacable circular logic, Baumgartner, who had fled Hitler’s Germany to escape atrocities, meets his demise as the victim of just such an atrocity – “In my beginning is my end.” Not that Kurt is literally a Nazi; he does not appear to be motivated by any tangible ideology. His speech and behaviour, however, are suggestive. The first word he utters in the novel, addressed to a solicitous Baumgartner, is “Raus” (get out, go away), confirming his German origin but also alarmingly reminiscent of the Nazi catchphrase Judenraus (Jews, get out). (Baumgartner himself, it is true, says “raus, raus” to himself when thinking disgustedly of Kurt [253], but the expression has quite a different ring when uttered by a Jew in the privacy of his mind.) Kurt subscribes, as well, to what Newman calls “the Aryan cult of strength” (43). The preposterous account of his adventures he gives Baumgartner may be entirely, or mostly, invented, but its foregrounding of acts of revolting transgression reveals the twisted track of his thoughts. Asked by Baumgartner if he has consumed human flesh, he replies, “Why do you look like that? Is only flesh. Only meat. For eating. For becoming strong. Strong” (157). Even more chilling is Kurt’s response to his discovery of Baumgartner’s ethnicity: “Kurt peered at the small handwritten label

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pasted on the door. H. Baumgartner. The name made his mouth twist with sarcasm, with ferocity. To come half-way across the world and meet H. Baumgartner, what an irony” (217). The irony cuts in more directions than Kurt can fathom. Yet along with the penumbra of Nazism, Kurt embodies something that looms even larger: the spirit of rampant disorder disrupting the twentieth-century global panorama, a chaos not limited to India but extending far and wide beyond its borders. In this connection other rhymes from Hugo’s childhood gain a frightening further dimension. Kurt, the lawless marauder, looks back to the fox that steals the goose, a verse containing an ugly threat of violence: “Fuchs, du hast die Ganz gestohlen, / gib sie wieder her! / Sonst wird dich der Jãger halen / mit dem Schiessgewehr” (Fox, you’ve stolen the goose, / give her back! / Or else the hunter will get you / with his gun) (44). Most disturbing of all the nursery spooks, however, is the stammering, nightmarish spectre conjured up by adults for the purpose of scaring wayward children into submission: “Es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann / in unserem Haus herum, didum” (A bi-ba-bogeyman is dancing / in our house, round and about) (39). The verse comments obliquely on its immediate context, the disruption of the Baumgartner family’s ménage during the early Nazi years; the house is becoming unkempt because Hugo’s mother has difficulty keeping it up after her customary domestic help has decamped, while the father’s business is languishing from the loss of its harried Jewish clientele. But the Butzemann motif ’s relevance extends into later episodes as well. An obvious reprise is the “nightmare house” in Calcutta in which Baumgartner resides during the violent lead-up to Partition: “[W]hen guns were fired, he jumped to his feet and went to the window to see the ghosts in their white shrouds fleeing and running pell-mell as men in theatrically bloodsoaked clothes entered through the gap in the wall with torches and knives, screaming those slogans of religious warfare that were raised everywhere now” (179). But the Butzemann par excellence turns out to be Baumgartner’s footloose German houseguest, whose name, Kurt, is “abrupt, like a blow, or a slash” (161), and who grossly violates Hugo’s living space, messy, smelly, and overstocked with cats as it is. Like the demonic bogeyman of childhood fables, Kurt prides himself on having learned “to be like the devil” (157). And, again like the Butzemann, who “wirft ein Säckchen

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hinter sich” – carries a little sack behind him, possibly for stowing refractory children – so too Kurt has his knapsack (220) into which he tosses Hugo’s most precious material possession, his collection of silver trophies, after robbing him of a still more precious possession, his life. While Kurt’s sociopathic antics may call to mind the bogeyman of Germanic childhood folklore, they establish as well the childishness of his own psychology. As Newman observes, “Baumgartner’s own arrested development, his paralysis by a European past, reappears in the young German’s infantilism” (43). Newman’s analogy, however, holds good only up to a point. Whatever Hugo’s failings, he never exhibits the sheer destructiveness that attends Kurt’s immaturity. Unsurprisingly, the German stranger provokes in Baumgartner mixed feelings, among them an instinctive revulsion. “Baumgartner found his concern aroused in spite of himself. The boy was not so different from a sick cat, he told himself in order to overcome the revulsion he felt from contact with this fair-haired boy that was instinctive and uncontrollable. To think of Nazi Germany now, after all these years, in faraway Bombay, was absurd after all” (142). His reflections are lamentably obtuse. Kurt is more profoundly ill than any stray cat Baumgartner has ever sheltered. What is more, the modern world shares that illness; it can no longer be so comfortably partitioned into pigeonholes: Nazi and non-Nazi, European and Asian. Baumgartner asks himself, “[W]hy did he bother about this stranger, unknown to him till this morning? He had felt no slightest stir of nostalgia when Farrokh had pointed out his fair head lolling helplessly on the table” (150). His question may have no simple answer, but it is an important one for understanding Baumgartner’s chronically unstable feelings. While the sight of Kurt’s Aryan scalp may arouse in him no nostalgic pangs, he has throughout his exile been subject to a more generalized longing for his childhood homeland and culture, combined with an equally potent dread. This kind of toxic nostalgia lies behind his infatuation with the blonde German wife of a missionary, a woman glimpsed in the adjacent female detention centre during his wartime confinement. His contradictory feelings extend to the German language itself, which becomes for him, during his long exile, a talisman with both a positive and negative valence. The novel enacts a sort of intramural Bakhtinian combat, whereby a single idiom is set on a collision course with itself. German comes to stand in Baumgartner’s mind for his lost home, his happy childhood, and his closeness to his mother. Talking to

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his coven of stray cats, which function for him pathetically as an ersatz family, he uses German endearments: “du Alte, du Gute, du” (you Old One, you Good One, you) (151). But at the same time, the language evokes for him childhood fears and eventual disillusionment. Near the end of the novel he recalls a variant of the “Hopp, hopp” rhyme recited to him by his mother to console him for being excluded when his father attends the races: “Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter, / Wenn er fällt, dann schreit er” (Hop, hop, rider, / If he falls, he’ll holler) (193). Rather than soothing the little boy, the rhyme (with the usual admonitory sting in its tail) infuriated him, prompting him uncharacteristically to begin striking his mother. “To have lost a day at the races, the real races, and for her to imagine a baby game would do instead, had been intolerable” (193). The sweet German blandishments of Hugo’s childhood have soured; they proved, in retrospect, to conceal ugly snares and delusions. The disillusionment applies as well to his early reading: “He spent too many hours with old tattered copies of Der Gute Kamerad [The Good Companion] which now seemed pure fantasy, its stories of camping in the forest and journeys on the sea no more relevant to his life than a dream is to daytime” (50). But for that matter, his mother’s attempts to find solace in German Romantic poetry, such as Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land / wo die Zitronen blühn” (Knowest thou the land / Where the lemon trees bloom), prove equally futile: under the grim circumstances, a mere babbling of grown-up nursery rhymes. As a consequence of such associations, the German-language elements scattered throughout Desai’s text assume a doubled significance. On the one hand they are tokens of Baumgartner’s essential Germanness and of the much-missed warmth and security of his infancy, but at the same time they are eerie portents of his traumatic deprivation of an available past, a stable identity, even a comfortably usable language. In the light of such loss, the most poignantly expressive of the children’s verses is the following: “O du Lieber Augustin, / alles ist weg! / Geld ist weg, / Beutel ist weg, / Augustin liegt in Dreck” (Oh, dear Augustin, / Everything is gone! / The money is gone, / The purse is gone, / Augustin is lying in filth) (49). The rhyme is positioned, with cruel aptness, just after Baumgartner and his mother discover the father’s dead, gassed body in their kitchen, a room Siegfried has contrived to convert into his own private Auschwitz. But this, for Hugo, is only one of a series of traumatic losses inflicted on him by the history of his time. He will lose

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his home and his homeland, his mother, his rosy illusions, his mother tongue, finally his life. The line “all is gone” – “Alles ist weg” – echoes throughout the novel like a woeful theme song. As Baumgartner’s friend and fellow displaced German, Lotte, reflects, “Yes, there was nowhere to go. Germany was gone – phut. Europe was gone, all of it. Let us face it, Liebchen, there is no home for us” (80–1). And the loss is not confined to Europe. Returning to post-war Calcutta after years shut up in a British detention centre, Baumgartner discovers that everything in that city, too, is weg. When Hugo asks his former employer Habibillah about the state of their business, the other man replies with a sigh, “What business, sahib, what business? … Everything finished, gone” (167). And finally, as Baumgartner is drifting off to the sleep from which he will not wake, he meditates drowsily, “[T]here was nothing to look at, it was all gone, and he shut his eyes, to receive the darkness that flooded in, poured in and filled the vacuum with the thick, black ink of oblivion, of Nacht und Nebel” (216). It is painfully ironic that the last words we hear Baumgartner pronounce to himself – Nacht und Nebel (night and mist) – are those of a German catchphrase regularly applied by the Nazis to the fate of prisoners despatched to the death camps. Throughout Baumgartner’s years as a firanghi, a foreigner in India, he has cherished sentimental memories of the lost, or perhaps fantasized, Germany of his childhood. Though avid for news of the fate of Jews in Germany, he attempts partially to block it out: “It was as if his mind were trying to construct a wall against history, a wall behind which he could crouch and hide, holding him to a desperate wish that Germany were still what he had known as a child and that in that dream-country his mother continued to live the life they had lived there together” (118). But Hugo’s yearned-for mental wall can no more resist the force of history than could the Berlin Wall, made of more solid materials, that he is destined never to see. Events prove that the mother’s Germany, of Goethe and Schiller and forest murmurs and nursery rhymes with sweet animals, no longer exists – indeed, never actually did exist. As Newman justly observes, “[T]he reader is left with an image of history as textual repetition. And of repetition as horror” (44). That horror is brought home to the reader in part through Desai’s adroit manipulation of language variance. Baumgartner’s general disorientation is acutely registered by his partial loss of his native language; for him German too is weg: “Gradually, the language was

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slipping away from him, now almost as unfamiliar as the feel and taste of English words or the small vocabulary of bastardised Hindustani that he had picked up over the years” (150). Eventually he concludes that the most suitable option for someone of his sort is speechlessness. When the Nazi fellow-prisoners in his detention camp roar “Heil Hitler!” he “decided at that instant that silence was his natural condition” (117). It is a silence that speaks volumes about the century in which Baumgartner has had the bad luck to live.

Love Laws and Language Laws: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Baumgartner’s Bombay is in some respects an outlier in Anita Desai’s canon; her novels do not ordinarily engage so overtly with geopolitical concerns. By contrast, Arundhati Roy’s two novels to date, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), both hinge on issues that are subjects of widespread public controversy: issues of caste, gender, and political malfeasance. Partly for that reason, their critical reception has itself frequently provoked controversy. More specifically, exception has sometimes been taken to Roy’s deployment of language variance, her introduction, for strategic purposes, of scraps of Indian vernaculars. In The God of Small Things such borrowings derive mainly from Malayalam, the dominant tongue of Roy’s home state of Kerala. The abundance of such elements is cited by Graham Huggan to support his claim that The God caters to a metropolitan yearning for the exotic; he finds in the novel “the continuing presence of a colonial imaginary” (77). This seems a puzzling objection, since a prime target of Roy’s corrosive vision in the book is precisely the anachronistic persistence in India of such an imaginary. Elleke Boehmer acknowledges Huggan’s strictures, but maintains that “[t]he commercial and cosmopolitan complicities of Roy’s novel are offset both by its enunciatory resistances … and by … ‘the sophisticated debate over agency’ – relative to its transnational but also national axes” (199–200). My own concern here will be not with the alleged exotic appeal of Roy’s linguistic practices but rather with the specific work verbal interpolations perform in their fictional contexts, and with their contribution to what Boehmer terms enunciatory resistances. Although it is the native tongue of millions of individuals, Malayalam is, by comparison

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with English, a “small” language, arguably one of the “small things” to which the novel’s title alludes. Two of its principal speakers are the Ipe twins, Estha and Rahel, themselves “small things” up against an adult world of intimidatingly large things. In Roy’s book it is the small – the “minor” – that stands in valiant opposition to the “big” forces of hardened sectarian convention. According to Leela Gandhi, minor “is perhaps the most salient [adjective] for designating the unique style of anti-imperial ethical global democracy” (66). The God of Small Things, in its linguistic tactics, lends fictive substance to Gandhi’s insight. Like several of the Nigerian works discussed in the preceding chapter, The God of Small Things dwells on intergenerational conflict. Here this involves tensions between stasis and dynamism; between those invested in outmoded traditions and practices, who act as the bygone Empire’s rear-guard, and those younger people who, by design or by instinct, defy those traditions. Roy’s own positioning in this dispute owes much to the American thinker Noam Chomsky. Roy shares Chomsky’s pragmatic wariness of deliberate distortions of discourse, along with his ardent championing of linguistic diversity. She would heartily second his declaration (cited earlier) that “the variety of languages and cultures is – and should be – a source of human happiness and enrichment” (141). Above all, she shares Chomsky’s conviction “that there is and will always be a need to discover and overcome structures of hierarchy, authority and domination and constraints on freedom” (395). For Roy, as for Chomsky, the manipulation of language for authoritarian ends gravely jeopardizes that struggle. Such discourse, for Chomsky, has one “essential function: to design, propagate, and create a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent understanding and analysis of institutional structures and their functions” (619). It is precisely such a dystopian system – a “structure of hierarchy” – that we see operating in The God of Small Things, controlling and stymying the lives of the central characters. In an appreciative essay, “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky” (2016), Roy attests that the American “has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live” (265). She concludes by confessing that “hardly a day goes by when I don’t find myself thinking – for one reason or another – ‘Chomsky Zindabad’” (275). The unexpected vernacular phrase (“Long live Chomsky!”) metaphorically enlists the renowned Western writer in the ranks of Eastern activists. It is a striking example

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of Roy’s inventive code-switching, her nimbleness in navigating between disparate idioms. In The God of Small Things the Chomskyan contrast between authoritarianism and resistance is dramatized largely through such agile juxtapositions. The opposed character groupings are defined dialogically by their contrasted habitual idiolects. Speakers of “standard” (i.e. British colonial) English, such as the adult members of the Syrian Christian Ipe family, are set off against the juvenile Ipe twins, Estha and Rahel, who are distinguished by the flexibility with which they approach both available languages, the indigenous and the imported. As Anna Clarke observes, “In the narrative of [The God of Small Things], and for the characters represented in the novel, language matters” (133). Unlike the grown-up users of either of the available tongues, the twins are notable for their linguistic brio and their openness to alternative discourses. They may prefer to speak the local Malayalam when away from the eyes (and ears) of censorious adults, but when informed that the word cuff-links means “to link cuffs together,” “they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language” (50). They tend to have strong if quirky feelings about individual English words; “Boot was a lovely word. Sturdy was a terrible word,” Rahel muses (146). Even years later, as an adult, her penchant for scrutinizing language usage remains vibrant: “What a funny word old was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself: Old” (88). At the same time, the twins are far more attached to the local language than are the adult members of their family, who (like the Anglophile adults in some Nigerian novels) look askance at the vernacular, viewing English as more “civilized.” Such an attitude is epitomized by the twins’ great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, who, early in life, while an acolyte in a Madras Catholic convent, decided that “she spoke much better English than anybody else” (25). Solicitous that the twins speak “properly,” she characterizes their use of the local vernacular as a speech-crime deserving of chastisement, or as she puts it, of an “imposition.” She obliges the aberrant children to write out lines: “I will always speak in English” (36, emphasis in original). On the eve of the arrival of British visitors, her nephew Chacko’s ex-wife Margaret and their nine-year-old daughter Sophie, she becomes all the more insistent on such a lexical lockstep. Chacko himself, who has spent several years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, accurately describes the family to which he belongs as confirmed

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Anglophiles; attentive in his own right to the children’s English-language progress, “[h]e made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest Encyclopaedic Dictionary” (50–1). The family embargo on Malayalam may, in the twins’ eyes, endow that tongue with the seductive lustre of the tabooed. Whatever their partialities, however, both Rahel and Estha display a curiosity about language in general and a spirit of irrepressible playfulness in using it. That tendency reveals itself in vagaries such as their delight in spelling words backwards, behaviour that can disconcert humourless adults like Baby Kochamma’s Australian friend Miss Mittens, who claims to have “seen Satan in their eyes” (“nataS ni rieht seye,” the narrator teasingly interjects [58]). While the children’s flouting of the Language Laws is hardly satanic, it does parallel, in its juvenile fashion, their mother Ammu’s unruliness, her scandalous disregard of the age-old taboo against sexual relations between people of different castes. (In effect, she spells the Love Laws backwards.) Although the ancient Hindu caste system technically should not apply to the Syrian Christian Ipes, they appear to have absorbed it by a species of cultural osmosis. Childish rhymes and language games abound in Roy’s novel as they did in Desai’s; the overall impression they create, however, is altogether different. In The God of Small Things such material stems from an indigenous folk tradition devoid of the cloying Germanic sentimentality that colours Baumgartner’s upbringing. For Roy, childhood is a phase of openness and experimentation, though also of peril. On the other hand, adulthood, envisioned in a spirit harking back to Wordsworthian Romanticism, is imagined as a lapse from grace into blinkered conventionality. It is no accident that two of the novel’s more unpleasant authority figures, the labour leader Pillai and the police inspector Mathew, each exerting a baleful influence over events, are described as “men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult” (248). Such joyless maturity is identified with an unquestioning acceptance of precedents hallowed by long use, an attitude guaranteed to ossify social conservatism and intolerance. That Pillai poses as a Marxist revolutionary is one of the book’s caustic ironies. Childhood, not Marxism or Leninism, is what is genuinely subversive; it is linked with the healthy potency of nature, with spontaneous egalitarian impulses, as opposed to the leaden weight of caste and precedent.

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But the positivity of childhood is here subject, as it was in Desai, to distortions. That liability is exemplified by the rote recitations of English verse passages by Comrade Pillai’s niece Latha and his son, a small boy tendentiously named Lenin. The episode is funny, but it is more than “a juvenile attempt at humour,” as Indira Nityanandam dismissively calls it (116). It is, instead, a textbook demonstration of how childhood itself can be perverted when made to conform to arbitrary adult codes. The extracts the two children attempt – Scott’s “Lochinvar” and Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar – are the sorts of canonical specimens long enshrined in British textbooks for the edification of “unlettered” colonials. They can have little conceivable relevance for children living in the south of India, a fact ludicrously confirmed by little Lenin’s mangling of Antony’s famous lines (“I cometoberry Caesar, not to praise him / Theevil that mendoo lives after them” [257]). While such cringeworthy displays of parroting-on-demand may be amusing in themselves, the action of the novel comments more generally on the disastrous impact the misuse of language can have on children’s impressionable psyches. In The God of Small Things, Ammu, although the most imaginative adult in her family circle, has a fatal tendency to speak rashly to her even more imaginative twins. Admonishing a petulant Rahel, Ammu says, “D’you know what happens when you hurt people? … When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less” (107). The irony, of course, is that it is Ammu’s own words that are damagingly careless. They convince Rahel that she is losing her mother’s affection, and thus motivate her subsequent behaviour, with disastrous consequences. A later, even more thoughtless outburst aimed at both twins is triggered by Ammu’s rage and despair at being locked in her room by her outraged family members: “I should have dumped you at the orphanage the day you were born! You’re the millstones around my neck!” (240). The twins’ literal reception of her words leads them to picture themselves as unwanted millstones, a misinterpretation that determines the narrative’s calamitous denouement. Roy’s English-language narration pays loving tribute to the subjective world of childhood. It regularly responds to the individuality of the twins’ mode of expression and to their idiosyncrasies of perception. In this respect it exhibits its own species of syncretism, a somewhat different sort from what one encounters in Things Fall Apart. Here a

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literate English style is amalgamated not with an early form of pre-literate discourse but with a dawning phase of personal awareness, affectionately encoding the eccentricities and misconceptions of childhood. The adult narratorial voice becomes, as it were, an echo-chamber for not-yet-fullyformed sensibilities. An example of this echoing, already cited, is the narrator’s reversal of “eyes of Satan,” but other examples abound. Among such instances of the narrator’s sympathetic mimicry is her treatment of Estha’s childish crush on Elvis Presley, a performer facetiously known as Elvis the Pelvis. Roy transfers the joke to the young fan himself by insistently referring to him as E. Pelvis, an alias the boy might well have welcomed. The capacity to make (and to take) a joke defines the small cluster of characters arrayed against the terrifyingly adult legions of the hierarchical order. The Paravan (Untouchable) Velutha’s easy empathy with Rahel and Estha, his willing recruitment in their whimsical world of make-believe, sets him apart from most of those the narrator dryly refers to as Touchables. With his first spoken lines we see him playing a teasing multilingual game with Rahel, who claims, correctly, to have spotted him among the marchers in a workers’ rally. Velutha puts the girl off with a Malayalam phrase, “Aiyyo kashtam,” translated as “Would I do that?” He then claims that the person the girl saw was actually a fictitious twin brother named Urumban, but he gives the game away by laughing: “He had a lovely laugh that he really meant” (169), a detail that at once sets him apart from the ranks of straight-faced, strait-laced adults. Velutha’s rapport with children manifests itself in the ease with which he enters into the twins’ language games. When he goes on to allege that on the day of the march he was sick in bed, Rahel objects that he is smiling: “That means it was you. Smiling means it was you.” But Velutha, unfazed, counters the child’s logical objection with a transparent sophistry: “That’s only in English! … In Malayalam my teacher always said that ‘Smiling means it wasn’t me’” (169). This lighthearted banter between adult and child reveals their common at-homeness with both languages, as well as with each other, an ease that sidesteps the compounded caste and age gap separating them. The scene also provides a clue to the Untouchable’s erotic appeal to the stifled sensibility of a woman such as Ammu. Brinda Bose contends that “it is through [a] sense of shared raging that [Ammu] finds it possible to desire to touch the Untouchable Velutha” (125). While rage is doubtless

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a contributing factor, I would argue that a shared capacity for laughter is an even more decisive one. As Doris Sommer observes, bilingual jokes “punctuate the … signs of cultural difference and acknowledge them with a laugh” (73). Amicable disputes about how words work can overleap barriers of caste and class, as can the force of silent personal observation. Ammu’s perception of Velutha’s relaxed physical intimacy with her twins registers his warmth and his comfortable sense of belonging in his own skin. Memories of his own childhood are readily available to Velutha, granting him some solace even amid desperate circumstances. During his humiliating flight from the Ipe residence, after being foully castigated by Mammachi for his sexual trespass, Velutha attempts to console himself with a Malayalam nursery rhyme about a train, beginning “Koo-koo kokum theevandi / Kooki paadum thee evandi” (269). Even absent a translation, the tonal simplicity of the lines clinches the point: only the vernacular honesty of his early memories offers Velutha a bulwark against the world of intolerant caste-bound Anglophone adulthood. The most intolerant of them all is the disappointed spinster, Baby Kochamma. The name is mordantly ironic, since there is nothing truly childlike about this enforcer of the codes governing love and language. Although she is biologically grown up, she displays symptoms of a debilitating emotional immaturity. As Judie Mullaney explains, “‘Baby’ … ostensibly relating to her diminutive stature, comes to describe her general stagnation and failure to go forward in life” (31). Although as a case of arrested development she has something in common with Desai’s murderous Kurt, the violence she inflicts is not directly physical but verbal and psychological. Until late in life she retains a sophomoric fixation on the Irish priest who had captivated her as a young woman. But if the name “Baby” suggests a paralyzing failure to evolve, the name “Kochamma” fixes her firmly within her class niche; in Malayalam it denotes a woman of privileged status. Sexually frustrated but glorying in her inherited rank, Baby bridles at manifestations of robust adult passion. Having internalized demeaning, age-old caste stereotypes, she scorns “untouchables” such as Velutha. Confronted with the unthinkable fact of physical intimacy between the Paravan and her own niece, she has recourse to a rancid racist cliché: “How could she stand the smell?” (75). In her mentality, nostalgic Anglophilia merges with inherited cultural myopia, reinforcing her aversion to any trace of sensuousness and nonconformity.

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A telling incident that hinges on a clash of languages occurs when Ipe family members are en route to a screening of The Sound of Music. After the car’s progress is halted by the workmen’s demonstration, Baby is maliciously asked her name in English. An onlooker proposes a Malayalam label meaning “landlord”: ‘What about Modalali Mariakutty’ someone suggested with a giggle” (76). The taunting becomes still more aggressive when Baby is compelled to say “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long live the revolution!) while waving a party banner: “Wave it!” [the demonstrator] ordered. She had to wave it. She had no choice. It smelled of new cloth and a shop. Crisp and dusty. She tried to wave it, though she wasn’t waving it. “Now say Inquilab Zindabad!” “Inquilab Zindabad,” Baby Kochamma whispered. “Good girl.” The crowd roared with laughter. (77) Being jeered at while obliged to utter words that flout her sacrosanct social standing is humiliating enough for the woman; being forced to violate her own Language Laws by uttering those words in vernacular is possibly even worse. The incident forcibly affronts Baby’s deepest amour propre, prompting her to redirect her rage at the nearest and most convenient scapegoat: “In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha” (78). Her outrage will later help to bring about the young man’s violent death and the subsequent disintegration of the Ipe household. Most of the other adult family members are equally wedded to both stultifying local custom and the Anglo-imperial past. Pappachi, the twins’ late grandfather, was an eminent entomologist; the symbolic associations with insect life are unflattering. In colonial times he was an assiduous toady of British officialdom; domestically he was a sadistic tyrant, physically abusing both his wife and his daughter. Mammachi’s promise as a violinist was aborted by her husband’s pathological jealousy. Nevertheless, she caters to the male members of the clan, fiercely attached to the Ipes’ inherited status and to the shibboleths of caste. Her son Chacko, the supposed house intellectual, returns from England after his marriage collapses to manage the business his mother has founded,

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Paradise Pickles & Preserves, whose motto, Emperors of the Realm of Taste (261), pays mocking homage to the defunct Raj. Superficially enlightened, Chacko reveals himself to be at bottom as prejudiced and unoriginal as his elders. Like Pappachi’s collection of desiccated insects, his business activities are symbolically appropriate to a man committed to preserving – pickling – the entrenched order. It is likewise appropriate that Chacko should wind up in another, whiter former colony, Canada, dealing in second-hand pieces of furniture – as it were, “preserved” chairs and tables. The one truly independent spirit among the family group is Ammu, who becomes the inevitable whipping-girl of “the smug, ordered world that she so raged against” (167), an etiolated world in which she cannot survive and from which she must at all costs be expelled. The arrival of Chacko’s British ex-wife Margaret and their daughter Sophie Mol (“Sophie girl”) places the fragility of that “preserved” order in unpromising relief. The twins’ viewing of The Sound of Music, an Anglophone film featuring a troupe of “clean, white children” (100), provides an apt prelude to the general family adulation of the lightskinned visitors. The fact of racialized difference is highlighted by Sophie herself, who tells the twins complacently, “You’re both whole wogs and I’m a half one” (17). Despite her moiety of woggishness, Sophie’s fair skin excites lavish admiration in the Ipe precincts; the maid, Kocha Maria, calls her a “sudari kutty,” a little angel (170). (The effusive adulation, of course, causes Sophie’s later accidental drowning to register as a uniquely appalling blot on the family standing.) To favourably impress the guests Baby Kochamma predictably adopts “a strange new British accent” (137). As befits the stilted affectation of the family’s welcoming behaviour, the entire performance is wryly characterized by the narrator as “the Play.” Meanwhile, as a piquant counterpoint to the Play, Rahel and Velutha are shown engaging in unaffected, uncapitalized play of their own; their interaction is by contrast spontaneous and imaginative. “Outside the Play Rahel said to Velutha: ‘We’re not here, are we? We’re not even playing,’” to which Velutha loyally replies, “‘That is Exactly Right … We’re not even Playing’” (173, emphasis in original). But they do go on to play in their own unscripted fashion, dancing and singing nonsense rhymes. Once again, their differences of age and caste dissolve away. Together, Rahel and Estha constitute a nonconformist fraternal league too subversive to be tolerated by Baby Kochamma and her like. “‘It’s useless,’ Baby Kochamma said. ‘They’re sly. They’re uncouth. Deceitful.

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They’re growing wild. You can’t manage them’” (142). Averse to what she considers wildness, Baby wants the children to be small models of docility. Estha is accordingly “returned” to his alcoholic estranged father like a damaged Christmas gift; his great-aunt, keeper of the Language Laws, manipulates discourse to terrorize the boy into falsely incriminating Velutha. Traumatized by his enforced treachery, Estha abjures language altogether: “Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt” (303). Losing his childhood, he loses, like Kambili in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, his individual voice. Faced alike with the sickening violence endemic to their century, both Desai’s Baumgartner and Roy’s Estha retreat into silence as their natural protective shell. Both novels demonstrate that India, though vast and apparently insulated from modern European mayhem, offers no impregnable sanctuary. The legacies of local history and British colonialism grip the lives of Roy’s characters, condemning them to futile repetitions of all-too-familiar patterns. At the close of The God of Small Things the pair of illicit lovers, Ammu and Velutha, end their tryst by promising, multilingually, to meet the next day: “She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley Tomorrow’” (321). For them, as for Baumgartner, there will be no tomorrow; but for the belatedly reunited twins, we may glimpse a tremulous hint of one.

9

Conclusion Cities of Strangers and the New Insularity

In “Beginning Again,” a poem from her bilingually titled collection The Other Side / El Otro Lado (1995), Julia Alvarez ponders her personal “losses.” She declares that migrants with histories resembling her own “are always descending / Into a city of strangers, always forcing / Our tongues to shape the foreign word / for what we really mean” (53). Alvarez’s work regularly reflects on the relationship between her birth tongue, Spanish, and the one she acquired subsequently, English. (After spending her childhood in the Dominican Republic she moved with her family to the United States.) As Catherine Wall claims, “The author’s bilingualism is unambiguously inseparable from her self-identity” (129). Another poem from the same volume, “Bilingual Sestina,” which elaborates on the tensions involved in moving between languages and places, combines a strict formal structure with a self-reflexive interplay of linguistic nuances. The poem follows, with some latitude, the prescribed sestina pattern, comprising six stanzas of six lines each and concluding with a three-line envoi. Six words (or their variants) are repeated in alternating sequence to close the lines: said, English, closed, words, nombres (names), and Spanish; then all six resurface in the closing three lines. The opening bluntly presents the speaker’s predicament: “Some things I have to say aren’t getting said / In this snowy, blond, blue-eyed, gum-chewing English / dawn’s early light sifting through persianas” (lines 1–3). On a first reading “Bilingual Sestina” may look like a lament for the vanishing of childhood and the idyllic discursive innocence that accompanies it, a linguistically fraught arabesque on a familiar Romantic trope. The loss of the poet’s pristine “world before English” (line 10) amounts to a fall from grace, “doubling the world with synonyms”

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while somehow diminishing it, unleashing a “dizzy array of words,” whereas “the world was simple and intact in Spanish” (lines 32–3). In that primal world, words, Spanish words, were “the outer skin of things, as if the words were so close / one left a mist of breath on things by saying / their names” (lines 35–7), a serene fusion of signifier and signified. Growing up and learning another tongue comes at the cost of a painful self-consciousness, entails learning the bewildering contingency of nombres in any language. Relinquishing her Spanish vocabulary involves forsaking the enveloping amniotic surround of her first, tactile verbal universe and its warm registering of perceptions. Now, in her acquired English, she feels stymied: “Some things I have to say aren’t getting said.” Considered more closely, however, Alvarez’s “Sestina” reveals contrary currents, complicating the picture, allowing the poem to be read not as a lament but as an implicit rebuke to inflexible monolingualism. The enjambment in the third line of “dawn’s early light,” an echo of the American national anthem, with the Spanish word persianas (blinds) slyly mocks the xenophobic refusal of unfamiliar, “unamerican” modes of expression; this poem’s lexicon refuses to halt at border checkpoints. Even while the sestina, with its elaborate formal structure, may seem to regret the language displacement it inscribes, it revels in the empowering effect of a command of doubled vocabularies. Indeed command, not loss, is the keynote of the intricate poetic template Alvarez has chosen to adopt. As Wall points out, Alvarez’s wordplays “accentuate the role of language as a metaphor for [dual] identity” (128). The reiterated line-closing words (Spanish, English, nombres, and so forth) drive home the idea of language itself as the poem’s primary concern. One gains from the interplay of idioms less a sense of sorrow than of exhilaration. Whatever unease the possession of alternate vocabularies may cause her, the expressive repertory of the speaker has been amplified rather than narrowed, and the reader participates in that expansion. The precarious yet fertile poise between alternate languages evoked by Alvarez’s poem is mirrored, overtly or tacitly, in the works treated in this study. It is also a fact of daily life beyond the pages of books, an experience attested to by countless users of two or more languages. In her recent book Memory Speaks (2021), Julie Sedivy frames the tension between competing tongues, a tension evoked in Alvarez’s “Sestina,” as a fundamental question: “In the end, can multiple languages co-exist peacefully, either in a person’s mind or in society at large?” (5). Such

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a question has a direct bearing on Sedivy’s own history. Like Alvarez, she underwent the loss of a birth language – in her case Czech – when she moved with her family to North America as a child. For Sedivy, too, matters of language loss and acquisition loom large; she maintains “that for all of us, language is not just a means of sharing knowledge; it is also a temple, a refuge, a sacred mountaintop, and a home” (6). Sedivy is well aware that linguistic multiplicity can be a source of stress or even strife, but she too believes that the benefits more than make up for any adverse consequences: the “liberating effects have long been described by speakers of more than one language, who feel that the rewards of their inner linguistic battles far outweigh their mental costs” (183). What complicates matters is the fact that words of similar meaning may carry differing emotional charges in different languages, even for the same speaker; thus, for Alvarez the Spanish word “persianas” clearly has a warmer resonance than would the English equivalent “blinds.” A vivid example of such a discrepancy of affective temperature occurs in another recent book with a bilingual title by a polyglot author, Sadiqa de Meijer’s alfabet / alphabet (2020). De Meijer, a native speaker of Dutch transplanted at an early age to Canada, records that she displayed little feeling when talking in English about her grandmother’s death, but when using her birth-language to report it to a Dutch-speaking friend she broke down in tears. “I never had a grandma,” she explains, “but I had an oma” (85). Such concerns are clearly relevant on a general level to issues examined by this book, but, as I noted in the introductory chapter, language-mixing in works of literature operates according to its own distinct rhetorical logic and therefore raises special questions. One such question has to do with the amount – or scarcity – of an alternate language present in a work narrated primarily in a “big” language such as English. Can a novel including a limited amount of another tongue, such as James’s The Europeans or Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, be called in any meaningful sense bilingual? Such doubts obviously apply more pertinently to some texts than to others. The quantity of French contained in novels such as Shirley, Villette, and (moving farther afield) War and Peace would seem to endow them with a strong claim to bilingualism, whereas in the case of a book containing fewer “foreign” expressions, such as Women in Love, the claim seems more tenuous. I would argue, however, that even a slender component of an alternate language can significantly transform

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the impression created by a text, signalling the presence of a perspective transcending the parochial. The textual analyses included in this book should, I believe, confirm the point. To cite another example from James: the quantity of actual French reproduced even in a novel such as The Tragic Muse is in statistical terms modest, and the French expressions that do occur are for the most part brief and commonplace; yet their recurrence is vital in establishing the primacy of French culture (above all French theatrical culture) on which the narrative hinges. Or again, in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, the quantity of Igbo, a tongue unfamiliar to most non-Nigerian readers, is necessarily limited. Yet here too, there is enough of that vernacular to drive home its centrality to the life of the protagonist, Kambili, and to the culture to which she adamantly adheres. A related point applies to Obioma’s The Fishermen, where the profuse intermingling of vernaculars provides a powerful parallel to the chaotic condition of the author’s homeland. Generally speaking, the texts I have examined, along with numerous others resembling them, draw on interpolated languages as a controlling metaphor, concretely underscoring central ideas of cultural tradition, rivalry, and resistance. What I hope to have demonstrated is that omitting the multilingual component of such works would result in an impoverishment of their richness and range of meaning. Yet even granting that, there remains the vexed question of how readers of such works may in practice respond. Faced with a text containing unfamiliar language, many will predictably devote little or no attention to passages inscribed in that language. There is little point in self-righteously censuring such avoidance; confronted with what they cannot understand, people are naturally tempted to skip over the obstacle until they arrive at something friendlier. The obvious problem is that such skipping tends to annul whatever added value the skipped content may offer. (It is also worth mentioning that not all interpolated languages are equally daunting for non-speakers; Anglophone readers are likely to find European idioms such as French or Spanish more approachable than, say, Igbo or Malayalam.) The Indigenous writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson may expect non-Indigenous readers to look up the meaning of the Anishinaabemowin word makwa, but there is no guarantee that they will comply by tracking down the puzzling word. There exist, however, practical expedients to offset readerly resistance to “foreign” diction. To begin with, phrases in languages that readers may find obscure are often glossed within their contexts so that their

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meaning becomes plain. (Adichie’s novels offer frequent examples of this expedient.) And even when no such aids are provided, “foreign” expressions may still, as the authors of The Empire Writes Back maintain, transmit a potent metonymic signal, dramatizing by their very presence the fact of competing outlooks and impulses in the society being evoked. Even if not fully understood, they may thus constitute a reminder of cultural otherness, a symbolic antidote to Anglophone, and more generally Western, normativity. That is why a reader can profit from paying close attention to the wording even of passages she cannot fully comprehend, rather than brushing impatiently past them. But the opposite of such readerly impatience, a species of prurient avidity, has lately been made a target of critical disapproval. Obscurity can have its own fetishistic allure. While some readers may bridle at words and phrases they find opaque, others may revel in them, relishing them as tokens of sumptuous otherness. They may harbour the belief that through exposure to unfamiliar idioms they will gain a privileged insight into the habits and longings of peoples in remote quarters of the globe. In a critique I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, Graham Huggan has caustically termed such assumptions the anthropological exotic. In a similar vein, Sarah Dowling observes that “ethnicity, like food, is something that audiences expect to consume” (15). Dowling and Huggan coincide in their strictures on the popular inclination to treat evocations of non-Western locales as exotic commodities to be effortlessly consumed. While such a tendency doubtless exists, however, it seems natural to ask how much weight metaphors of consumption should be given – how far postcolonial authors themselves are to be held accountable for the “feeding” of native vocabularies and practices to readers avid for “outlandish” stimuli. Huggan argues that non-Western writers are often rewarded for a shallow version of cosmopolitanism whereby they “respond to and creatively rework metropolitan demands for cultural otherness in their work” (26). Such a critique raises serious issues; there are manifestly commercial as well as artistic incentives for postcolonial authors to cater to such idiosyncratic tastes, and the outcome can be vulgarized or simplistic renderings of “native” life. And yet it is possible to take debunking to overly corrosive lengths; such censure can shade into the solemnly censorious. The much-stigmatized exoticism can, after all, be a feature not of production but of reception; that is, it may stem not from the wily designs of the author but from

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the naïve curiosity of the suggestible reader. What is more, one wonders whether such curiosity, naïve or not, deserves ipso facto to be chastised. Such literary encounters with otherness, even when stereotyped, are at least an alternative to the narcissism that breeds a dogged fixation on local lifestyles and languages; they may be no substitute for a searchingly honest representation of alterity, but they can still prompt an enlivening expansion of perspective. One positive outcome can be an exposure to unfamiliar modes of expression, even though what is said is not always translated, and may occasionally be not fully translatable. To quote de Meijer, “The untranslatable is inherent in all intercultural contact, where its particles may accumulate and become tropes of otherness” (140). A related concern that has become pressing of late is what might be termed language attrition. As Julie Sedivy reports, “Linguists generally agree that at least half of the world’s languages are in danger of becoming extinct over the next few generations” (25). A major reason for this trend is that languages with fewer speakers are often locked into a quasi-Darwinian struggle for survival with “big” languages, above all English. Unsurprisingly, this process is all the more observable in predominantly English-speaking regions such as North America and Britain. It is a development that has some unfortunate repercussions. One of them, germane to the present discussion, is that in numerous areas public receptivity to linguistic diversity appears to be diminishing. One underlying factor is the long history of the circulation of English as a transnational medium of communication, a history that has evolved over centuries. In Shakespeare’s day, English was far from a dominant presence in European affairs; that is why, in Henry V, it is represented as grappling valiantly with its dynamic neighbour, French. By Victorian times the international currency of English had vastly expanded, but other languages – notably, again, French – could claim a comparable footing. That fact made alternate tongues more readily available, for writers such as Brontë and James, as sites of competing cultural expectations. Such authors could count on at least a modicum of familiarity with one Continental language or another among a sizable segment of their readership. By the present day, however, writers cannot count on their audience either to have much knowledge of alternative languages or to manifest keen curiosity about them. The use of English, whether for international diplomacy, trade, or more general social

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purposes, has grown so pervasive that many in Anglophone regions have come to regard it, naïvely, as the entire planet’s lingua franca. A veneer of cosmopolitanism coexists with a default monolingualism. Even de Meijer, though herself a native speaker of Dutch, acknowledges the “bigness” of English: “English may feel larger to me not through its actual vocabulary but because of the enormous number of people who speak it, its vast geographic territory, and its prevalence in popular culture” (130). In some jurisdictions, and most conspicuously in the United States, the use of alternate languages can provoke distaste or downright hostility. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of former president Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policy, qualifies as a poster boy for this attitude. In a review of Hatemonger, Jean Guerrero’s astringent portrait of Miller, Carlos Lozado reports: “At his liberal [Santa Monica] high school, Miller admonished Mexican American students to ‘speak only English.’ He worried that a Chicano student group wanted to reclaim California. ‘Racism does not exist,’ he told a school district committee on equality. ‘It’s in your imagination.’ He fought against bilingual education, Spanish-language school announcements and Cinco de Mayo celebrations.” Miller’s juvenile nativism, which foreshadows his mature performance as a government functionary, exemplifies the desire to exclude “others” from the national conversation, an antipathy to “foreign” inroads on the single, sacrosanct “American” language. While it takes an especially virulent form in this iteration, such linguistic jingoism is by no means unique. Animosity toward non-English tongues is a commonplace feature of the American scene; the testy shopper outraged by hearing Spanish at the supermarket checkout has become a byword of comedy. Nor is the United States alone in this regard; such intolerance is not confined by its borders. To cite Dowling’s insight once again, “Monolingualism is not simply a numerical designation referring to the presence of only one language. Monolingualism is an ideology, a structuring principle that touches every aspect of social life” (3). John Edwards observes that “attitudes towards code-switching are often negative, particularly on the part of monolinguals who are sometimes inclined to dismiss it as gibberish” (78). But even when they are not shrugged off as impenetrable or meaningless, “alien” idioms have long been stigmatized as a menace to communal cohesion. Edwards cites President Theodore Roosevelt: “[W]e have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the

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crucible turns our people out as Americans, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house” (166). Apparently, the New World melting pot must burn at so fierce a temperature as to incinerate all tongues but one. The analogy of the boarding house is telling; such a domicile is not a real home but rather a provisional shelter suitable for rootless transients, possibly of dubious character. (In his identification of multilingualism with an atomized, untethered mode of life, Roosevelt oddly anticipates Lawrence’s damning portrayal of Gudrun and Loerke in Women in Love.) The assumption of an indissoluble bond between fatherland and mother tongue commonly underlies rejections of multilingualism like Roosevelt’s. American candidates for political office gifted with fluency in a language other than English may be well advised to hide their proficiency under a bushel, for it could, in the minds of some, call into doubt the wholeheartedness of their patriotism. (In the 2004 United States presidential election, the Democratic candidate John Kerry’s proficiency in French was effectively used against him on this account.) Roosevelt’s conception of the great American melting pot dramatically reverses Mikhail Bakhtin’s model of form in the novel; for the rough-riding president and his like, uniformity of language trumps the potentially fruitful (if possibly unsettling) interplay of alternate types of discourse. The most potent present-day adversary of multilingualism, however, is not active hostility, presidential or otherwise, but sheer apathy. Lack of enthusiasm for language learning appears to be endemic throughout the contemporary Anglosphere. This sort of inertia is a phenomenon that has been amply documented: • Kathleen Stein-Smith observes: “Despite [numerous compelling] reasons to learn a foreign language, there has been a steep decline” in such instruction in American colleges and universities. Over a recent three-year period, according to the Modern Language Association, such institutions lost 651 foreign language programs. • According to an Independent article from 2017, in British universities student demand for both Western and non-European language instruction has declined sharply: “The numbers of applications for degree courses linked to European languages have fallen by almost a quarter in the past five years, while the numbers for other language courses have dropped by almost a fifth” (Kershaw). The impact of Brexit on these trends is imponderable,

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but the process of British uncoupling from the Continent seems likely to have aggravated them. • Canada, unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, can boast two official languages, French and English. Notwithstanding that distinction, according to an article in The Carillon, “Bilingualism is on the decline in Canada,” with particularly marked losses in the study of French (Cameron). (As an offsetting factor, increased attention to the variety of Indigenous languages present in Canada has lately challenged the adequacy of the binary, French-or-English model of the national linguistic profile.) One can cite an array of reasons for this apparent fading of linguistic interest. The budgetary squeeze faced by numerous post-secondary institutions poses a material obstacle, but retrenchment here also reflects waning student demand. The common belief in (or illusion of) the global omnipresence of English may, in turn, have a negative impact on such demand. But whatever the causes, and despite a plethora of commentary concerning the onrush of globalization, what might be called the New Insularity appears, in the twenty-first century, to be alive and flourishing. This situation inevitably has an impact on the character of literary production. British and North American writers are unlikely to feel the assurance available to a Brontë, a James, or even a Lawrence that many readers will take in their stride textual material imported from a variety of languages. It is also likely to be the case that contemporary writers themselves may lack competence in languages other than English. Whatever its cause, the likely reduction in the number of texts that adventurously mix languages has consequences, among them an unfortunate narrowing of the general repertory of cultural perspectives, and a loss of the intellectual cross-fertilization that often accompanies linguistic variety. As Sedivy argues, “The friction of competing worldviews constantly rubbing against each other demands that [those exposed to multiple cultures] become adept at creating new solutions, at finding ways out of paradoxes” (208). Sedivy herself, a committed polyglot, considers multilingualism integral to such exposure. Such linguistic inclusivity is nowadays more to be expected from authors with non-Anglophone backgrounds, among them poets and novelists such as Julia Alvarez and Sadiqa de Meijer for whom English is

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a second language acquired as a consequence of immigration. The bilingual title of Alvarez’s book of poetry The Other Side / El Otro Lado hints at the mixing of Spanish and English language in the poems themselves; similarly, in her memoir alfabet / alphabet, de Meijer frequently varies her English text with specimens of her native Dutch.1 A distinctive recent development in multilingual writing is marked by the combining of language variance with what might be called gender variance: a focus on individuals with a non-normative gender identity. Two notable examples of this sort of textual linkage, widely separated by geography and culture but akin in the psychological territory they explore, are the Nigerian writer Akwaeki Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) and Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Both of these books centre on characters who, in the eyes of others, are outsiders – who do not “fit in.” In popular parlance, a misfit is a square peg attempting to squeeze into a round hole; for both Emezi and Roy, the problem lies not with the squareness of the peg but with the roundness of the hole. For both writers, the most troublesome sort of hole is the pigeonhole: the widespread penchant for forcing procrustean categories onto fluid, multifarious reality. Alex Tickell singles out “Roy’s ethical commitment to what we might call the radical postcolonial politics of ‘unclassifiability’” (“Writing in the Necropolis” 3). Similarly, in a 2019 interview Emezi decries “the power and control that people get from labeling, from categorizing, from being able to feel like the world is in these discrete boxes that help us make sense of it” (“Talking Monsters” interview). The two works in question both feature protagonists who are unclassifiable by reason of their sexual indeterminacy, and in both, language variance fuses with sexual fluidity to create an arrestingly heterodox vision. For both the Indian writer and the African, fixed boundaries attached to linguistic practice and personal relationships are alike anathema. Vivek Oji, the central figure in Emezi’s novel, is a medley both in ancestral heritage and in personal make-up; he is mixed-race Indian and Nigerian, and his/her sex oscillates waywardly between male and female. It is hardly surprising that the linguistic texture of Emezi’s novel is characterized by mixtures and anomalies. Emezi has celebrated the richness of the “Black community” as “people from all over the diaspora … talking each other’s dialects, and using different forms of Patois, and Pidgin, and vernacular Englishes … [T]hat fluidity between

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language[s]” (“Talking Monsters” interview). In The Death of Vivek Oji dialogue between the two young people at the core of the action, Vivek and his cousin Osita, is conducted mainly in colloquial English, but it is infiltrated by a multifarious stock of loan words drawn from several available idioms, most prominently Igbo and Pidgin. Because an energizing impulse of this novel is the will to normalize fluidity, this pattern of improvisational code-switching becomes key to its ideological thrust. In the cousins’ conversations the most frequent source of variation is Igbo, generally left untranslated. Some repeated expressions are routine, such as biko (please) or mba (no). Sometimes languages are amalgamated to form hybrid locutions. On occasion the cousins interject expressions such as wahala (problem, trouble) from Nigerian Pidgin, for rhetorical emphasis and a tinge of jocularity; abeg (please) is another recurrent example. At times recourse to Pidgin can be a means of defusing tension or embarrassment, as when Vivek challenges Osita as to whether his cousin perceives him as a woman: “You dey see breast?” (68). And occasionally, as we have seen in other Nigerian texts, characters remodel English phraseology to conform to vernacular syntax. Thus, when Vivek asks to use Osita’s shower, his cousin claims to fear that he will “block the drain with all that your Bollywood hair” (58–9). The hint of “native” speech adds pungency to Osita’s insinuation that his cousin has assumed the role of a pampered drama-queen. It seems only fitting that Arundhati Roy, that connoisseur of the irregular, should have produced a work that makes a provocative companion piece to The Death of Vivek Oji. Published twenty years after The God of Small Things, Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in important respects represents an arresting new departure. Here, as in Vivek, a melange of languages provides a matrix for the travails of a non-gender-conforming protagonist, in this instance the transgender hijra (courtesan) Anjum. The linkage between verbal variety and sexual ambiguity is less overt in Roy than in Emezi; Anjum speaks elegant Urdu but no other tongues. The polyglot component of the novel hinges on the other central figure, the young activist Tilo. A champion of minority rights and minority tongues, Tilo is implicitly (and by the end of the book explicitly) leagued with Anjum; together, the pair embody the signal virtue, in Roy’s thinking, of the eccentric, the anomalous, the unclassifiable. In her essays Roy repeatedly protests against the use of language to classify and categorize, the reductive recourse to pigeonholes. She

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colourfully decries “imaginations that are locked down into a grid of countries and borders, in minds that are shrink-wrapped in flags” (Things 92–3). Tilo’s mind and imagination are anything but shrink-wrapped. Her linguistic eclecticism emerges in a casual but pointed encounter, her first meeting with one of the novel’s numerous oddballs, Dr Azad Bhartiya, when both are waiting to have their shoes mended by a street cobbler: “Dr. Bhartiya surprised Tilo by asking her (in English) if she had a cigarette. She surprised him back by replying (in Hindi) that she had no cigarettes but could offer him a beedi. The little cobbler lectured them both at length about the consequences of smoking” (266). In this mixing and matching of languages there is no fraught ideological tension; we witness, instead, a relaxed camaraderie, a mutual enjoyment of the diverse codes available on this multiform discursive terrain. It is a tiny but engaging specimen of informal cosmopolitanism in its most affirmative guise. As Paul Brass points out, in the Babel that is India “[t]he dialect/ language chosen, as well as its form and style, constitute political as well as linguistic acts” (195). The impression one receives from Roy’s second novel, with its abundance of linguistic variants, is that of cascading multiplicity: a protean and turbulent cultural flood, its cross currents colliding with one another in dialectical fashion. Attempts to stem this flow, to hold it at bay or sort out its components, will prove futile. By the end, when she has taken up residence in the cemetery that Anjum has improbably transformed into a guest house, Tilo has found a paradoxical refuge from the falsely normalizing conventionality against which she has always rebelled. Tickell calls the Jannat Guest House “a space of both literal and figurative exclusion where those who are not accepted or welcomed in wider society can find a kind of sanctuary” (“Writing in the Necropolis” 8), but the converted graveyard is by the same token a space of inclusion, a place that tolerantly nurtures moral and linguistic adaptability and openness: [Tilo] didn’t teach her own pupils to sing “We shall Overcome” in any language. Because she wasn’t sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone’s horizon. But she taught them arithmetic, drawing, computer graphics … a bit of basic science, English, and eccentricity. From them she learned Urdu and something of the art of happiness. (403)

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The close association intimated here between multilingualism, eccentricity, and happiness is no accident; it charts the sensibility of Roy’s protagonist, and indeed of Roy herself. And it is, above all, that implied rejection of rigid, normative categories which likens The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to The Death of Vivek Oji. Emezi’s novel and Roy’s are both innovative in enacting heterodoxy while they celebrate it; yet they do not represent utterly unprecedented departures from the older texts we have traced through several centuries. Like those earlier works, they participate in a cavalcade of protest against confinement by conventions that are socially and linguistically binding. Their embrace of multilingualism maps onto other varieties of non-conformity; by and large, the polyvocal is the political. As Bonnie Honig has argued, democracy presupposes some deep relation to foreignness (18), a relation that manifests itself socially in what Honig calls “Democratic Cosmopolitanism” (13). By this she means, I believe, not the facile, self-indulgent cosmopolitanism practised by Lawrence’s Gudrun and Loerke, but rather a more generously ecumenical type, one combining cultural rootedness and multiplicity. I would add that, as far back as the nineteenth century, in texts by such writers as Scott, Brontë, and James, “foreign” language elements have gestured toward the need for such a deep relation. The threat that orthodoxy and insularity pose to diversity of thought and expression is targeted in these works, a threat taking the form of a claim to hegemony by one arrogant citadel of power – Anglo-Saxon, American, masculinist – or another. In postcolonial texts, as I have noted, the object of resistance commonly shifts to dominant Western norms of discourse. In all these instances, however, a dialogic interplay of idioms operates on the side of what Roy calls eccentricity: the freedom from narrow, entrenched grooves of conviction and speech. In the face of many forces in the contemporary world promoting self-enclosed national and sectarian certainties, narratives that feature collisions between languages can still contribute to the working of Honig’s Democratic Cosmopolitanism. Erecting literary Towers of Babel can be a demanding and sometimes bewildering task, but – unlike the building of the original, biblical Tower – it can also be an exhilarating one.

Notes

Chapter One 1 I have slightly amended the translation provided by the editor. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of “foreign” phrases in this study are my own. 2 For the sake of full disclosure: I am not a speaker (or reader) of Russian. My comments on Tolstoy’s presentation of that language are based on the widely admired Vintage English translation. A similar disclaimer applies to several of the other languages (e.g. Igbo, Malayalam, Urdu) referenced in this study. For a fuller account of both prior and more recent critical opinion concerning the issue of multilingualism in War and Peace, see Julie Hansen, “Reading War and Peace as a Translingual Novel.” Hansen focuses on metalingual dimensions of Tolstoy’s novel; these seem to me, however, of less compelling interest than the sociopolitical ones. A recent work that incorporates clashing languages for the sake of a comparable political framing is Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019). In Mengiste’s novel, while the primary language of narration is English, Ethiopian characters are given some expressions in their native vernacular, Amharic, while Benito Mussolini’s invading troops have some lines of dialogue in untranslated Italian. The result of this linguistic potpourri is to play off the Ethiopian resistance fighters, who “belong” where they are, against the European interlopers, who clearly do not.

Chapter Two 1 The popular association between the French language and femininity, or effeminacy, is made explicit a few years after Shakespeare’s Henry V by a contemporary: “As early as 1602, Richard Carew included in a list of stereotyped descriptions of European languages the statement that French is

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‘delicate, but even nice as a Woman, scarce daring to open her Lippes, for fear of marring her Countenance.’ … This view of French as a ‘feminine’ language has persisted to the present day” (Joan C. Beal in Percy and Davidson 143). 2 It should be noted that the Elizabethan English Shakespeare places in the mouths of Henry and other English characters is anachronistic; the historical Henry of almost two centuries earlier would of course have spoken a type of English much closer to Chaucer’s. 3 It is true that in Henry IV Part I Shakespeare had directed the boy actor playing Lady Mortimer, one who was presumably conversant in the language, to improvise some lines of dialogue and a song in Welsh. 4 Fictional texts in which dialect is not mainly confined to dialogue but is employed throughout by the narrator or narrators are relatively scarce (well-known examples are Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Samuel Selvon’s Moses trilogy). Such works raise somewhat separate rhetorical issues that lack of space rules out discussing here.

Chapter Three 1 William Cohen has described Villette as “the canonical Victorian novel that contains more French than any other” (173). 2 Cohen comments that Jane Eyre “draws on a conventional British image repertoire that contrasts lax French morals with upright British ones” (175). 3 Cohen observes that “[t]he movement between languages is coextensive with Villette’s other forms of narrative disruption, muddying ordinarily sharp distinctions between dialogue and narration, and throwing grammatical personhood into question” (184–5). My own focus diverges from Cohen’s in stressing ideological and geographic concerns rather than formal and structural ones. 4 Presumably, male “ami” rather than feminine “amie” to be consistent with the masculine persona Lucy has assumed in the theatrical. 5 The phrase suggestively recalls Charlotte’s declaration in her letter to Heger that hearing French spoken after a long lapse of time was “music to my ears.”

Chapter Four 1 In a letter of 24 November 1872, James’s brother William feels moved to “protest against [Henry’s] constant use of French phrases. There is

Notes to pages 68–96

2

3

4

5

6

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an order of taste – and certainly a respectable one – to which they are simply maddening” (Selected Letters 86). An exception to the general disregard of James’s artistry in using “foreign” words and phrases is Eileen T. Bender’s “‘The Question of His Own French’: Dialect and Dialectic in The Ambassadors,” The Henry James Review 5 no. 2: 128–34. Bender’s analysis makes a solid contribution to one’s understanding of the famous late novel she takes as her subject. See Cargill, The American (Norton), 426ff. Cargill argues that The American was meant by James as a “refutation” of the crude, caricatural representation of Americans in L’Étrangère. The version of The Tragic Muse normally cited in this chapter is the revised New York edition (1908). References to the earlier 1890 edition are from Henry James, Novels: 1886–1890. It is worth noting that the celebrated aesthete on whom the character of Gabriel Nash is thought to have been based, Oscar Wilde, was fluent in both English and French. Cosmopolitanism is a trait that has long featured (most often disparagingly) in stereotypic representations of Jews. The sculptor Loerke in Lawrence’s Women in Love can probably be classed as an example (see next chapter). In The Tragic Muse, however, Miriam’s (partly) Jewish ancestrty does not lend itself to such stereotyping. Sherringham makes an issue of it; Miriam herself does not. By Fussell’s count, “poor Nick Dormer” is allotted only thirteen French passages, compared with Miriam’s fifty-four (149). In the 1890 version the line reads “Surely it’s vulgar to consider only the noise one’s going to make, especially when one remembers how unintelligent nine-tenths of them will be” (Novels 1194) – the edge added by the French epithet is here absent.

Chapter Five 1 In a 1969 article, J. Barry traces parallels between Spengler’s Decline and Lawrence’s Brangwen Saga. While many of the parallels are convincing, Barry’s essay does not suggest that Lawrence was personally acquainted with Spengler’s writing. It is possible that Frieda Lawrence, with her numerous German ties, could have discussed with her husband a work that was all the rage in her homeland’s intellectual circles at the time Lawrence was finishing Women in Love. It is worth adding, however, that Lawrence’s apocalyptic premonitions predate The Decline of the West by several years. In a letter to Barbara

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Low of 30 May 1916, written while he was working on Women in Love, he announces: “I read Thucydides too, when I have courage to face the fact of these wars of a collapsing era, of a dying idea. He is very good, and very present to one’s soul” (Letters 2: 614). 2 Compare the speaker’s peripatetic Jewish landlord in T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” (1920), who has been “Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, / Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London” (Poems 1: 31). For a discussion of Lawrence’s attitudes toward Jews and toward race in general see Ronald Granofsky, “‘Jews of the Wrong Sort’: D.H. Lawrence and Race,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 23 no. 2, 1999/2000, 209–23. Also Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D.H. Lawrence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 3 For a discussion of this and similar sentiments on Lawrence’s part, see Suzanne Hobson (2011).

Chapter Six 1 I have been reliably informed that Johnson is a perfectly possible, if not common, “African” surname. The essential point, however, is that it would be unlikely to be so identified by most of Cary’s readers. 2 A partial exception to that erasure is the work of Rudyard Kipling, who included elements of Indian vernacular in Kim and elsewhere. 3 Some stereotyped preconceptions concerning the ideological “slant” of individual languages are probably the outcome of exposure to their treatment in popular entertainment media. Thus, films dealing with the Second World War may leave the impression that German is somehow a “Nazi” language, or at least one that by its nature inculcates Nazi attitudes. The staccato aural quality of some German speech-patterns may cause barked military commands in that tongue to sound especially harsh, but the notion that German (or any other language) is “inherently” suited to one ideology rather than another is untenable. By the same token, the fact that a language has been used by colonizers does not make it inescapably a vehicle of settler ideology. 4 One should note, however, that some Indigenous languages, such as Cree, are against the odds actually growing their complement of speakers. 5 I follow Peter Muste (74) in calling the husband “the Man” rather than “Rochester” because I find persuasive Muste’s argument that the withholding of a specific name is rhetorically apt.

Notes to pages 146–55

197

Chapter Seven 1 Compare Achebe: “On language we are given … simplistic prescriptions. Abolish the use of English! But after its abolition we remain seriously divided on what to put in its place” (Hopes and Impediments 41). Emma Dawson and Pierre Larrivée argue that Adichie’s approach to language belongs to a more cosmopolitan phase of national development than Achebe’s: “Nigerian society has moved beyond a historically situated postcolonialist paradigm that pits Ibo [sic] and standard English one against the other, to a globalized one that reflects a complex interplay of Ibo, Nigerian Englishes and Standard English that are not always strictly hierarchized” (921). Where Igbo is “circumscribed” in Things Fall Apart, in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus it is “part of the repertoire of the characters” (927). But while this is a useful description of language variance in the two novels mentioned, it cannot confidently be generalized to apply to the broader discursive evolution of Nigerian society. It is the temporal framework of the narrative that largely determines the frequency or scarcity of Igbo in works by Nigerian writers, Achebe and Adichie included. 2 Related tensions arising from naming and renaming provide the focus of several stories in Adichie’s The Thing around Your Neck (2009). In “The Headstrong Historian” the feisty Igbo matron Nwamgba, upon the birth of a granddaughter, will have nothing to do with the innovation of baptismal names: “Father O’Donnell baptized her Grace, but Nwamgba called her Afamefuna, ‘My Name Will Not Be Lost.’” Years afterward Nwamgba’s stealthy act of naming turns out to be an act of prophecy. Though now an eminent scholar with a life far removed from that of her grandmother and her ancestral village, Grace is mysteriously moved to reverse the renaming cycle: “It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses, would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her first name from Grace to Afamefuna” (218). Her name has, after all, not been lost, and her legacy-culture has been ritually repossessed. 3 Kłaniecki suggests a parallel between the determinative force of Abulu’s prophecy and the power of the prophecies of Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, to decide “Okonkwo’s tragic fate” in Things Fall Apart, a fate thus “mediated by a woman” (401). In fact, however, in the episode in which Chielo invades Okonkwo’s compound, the priestess does not foretell Okonkwo’s downfall; she simply warns him against blocking her access to the girl Ezinma, who is her primary interest: “Beware of exchanging words with Agbala” (95).

198

Notes to pages 162–89

Chapter Eight 1 According to Alex Ross, “For some German Jews an attachment to Wagner served as a kind of shield, minimizing their otherness and advertising their national bona fides” (255). 2 Desai’s mother was German, her father Bengali; she grew up speaking several languages, both European and Indian vernaculars. 3 A comparable cache of actual postcards, not of course blood-stained, provided the original inspiration for Desai’s novel. See Newman 44–5.

Chapter Nine 1 An unusual twist on this bilingual pattern is represented by Jhumpa Lahiri, an American writer of south Asian parentage, whose first childhood language was Bengali but who has become celebrated as the author of English-language novels. In mid-career Lahiri became enamoured of Italian and switched to that language for her work; the move gave her, she claims, an artistic renewal, a shift “to a language and then to a place and then to a new life, a new way of thinking, a new way of being” (Allardice interview). Her first full-length novel in Italian, Dove mi trovo (2018), appeared in an English translation by the author with the title Whereabouts in 2021. It is a remarkable feat of linguistic versatility, yet both the original and the translation are essentially monoglot texts, offering little or no linguistic interplay within themselves. They therefore do not belong in the same category as most of the works discussed in the present study.

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Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey (1768) and The Journal to Eliza (1904). Dent & Sons, 1960. Stewart, Jack. “Linguistic Incarnation and Parody in Women in Love.” Style, vol. 30 no. 1, Spring 1996. Web. – “The Myth of the Fall in Women in Love.” In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook, edited by David Ellis, 159–81. Oxford University Press, 2006. Storm, William. “Henry James’s Conscious Muse: Design for a ‘Theatrical Case’ in The Tragic Muse.” The Henry James Review, vol. 21 no. 2, March 2000, 133–50. Tickell, Alex, ed. Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” Routledge, 2007. – “Writing in the Necropolis: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Originally published in Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Studies, vol. 18 no. 1, 2018, 100–12. Version cited in this text: Open Research Online, http://oro.open.ac.uk/56045/3/56045.pdf, 1–10. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace (1869). Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Vokhonsky. Vintage, 2008. Tulloch, Graham. The Language of Walter Scott. André Deutsch, 1980. Tunca, Daria. “Ideology in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003).” English Text Construction, vol. 2 no. 1, 2009, 121–31. Walder, Dennis. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory. Routledge, 2010. Walker, Pierre A. Review of Fussell, The French Side of Henry James. The Henry James Review, vol. 13 no. 1, Winter 1989, 104–6. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. Columbia University Press, 2006. Wall, Catharine E. “Bilingualism and Identity in Julia Alvarez’s Poem ‘Bilingual Sestina.’” melus, vol. 28 no. 4, Winter 2003, 125–43. Walls, Alison. “French Speech as Dramatic Action in Shakespeare’s Henry V.” Language and Literature, vol. 22 no. 2, 2013, 119–31. Weaver, Robert, ed. Canadian Short Stories, Second Series. Oxford University Press, 1968. Whittaker, David, ed. Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Brill, 2011. Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912. Cambridge University Press, 1991. – “The First ‘Women in Love.’” In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook, edited by David Ellis, 51–77. Oxford University Press, 2006. Young, Robert J.C. “The Cosmopolitan Idea and National Sovereignty.” In Cosmopolitanisms, edited by Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta, 135–40. New York University Press, 2017. Zwinger, Linda. Telling in Henry James. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Index

Achebe, Chinua, critique of Heart of Darkness, 122; dispute with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 124; Things Fall Apart, 20, 120, 124, 126, 127, 134, 139–45, 146, 148, 153, 158, 160, 174, 197; honesty of representation in, 143, 145; Igbo traditional belief in, 143–4; Igbo verbal elements in, 141–2; linguistic practices in, 143. See also syncretism Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 20, 120, 125, 127, 145–8, 184; approach to language of, 126, 146, 147, 197; Half of a Yellow Sun, 6, 124, 128, 145, 150–4, 155; syncretism of, 151; “The Headstrong Historian,” 197; Purple Hibiscus, 7, 128, 146–9, 150, 151, 153–4, 157, 179, 183, 197; alienation in, 148–9; focalization of, 146; polyphonic verbal fabric of, 149; syncretized world of, 147–8; The Thing Around Your Neck, 197 Alvarez, Julia, 180–1, 182, 188; “Beginning Again,” 180; “Bilingual Sestina,” 180–1; The Other Side / El Otro Lado, 180, 189

Anderson, Benedict, 5 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 23, 24 Arnold, Matthew, 76–7, 82, 83, 121, 134; Culture and Anarchy, 76–7, 82; Essays, 82; Switzerland, 134 Ashcroft, Bill, 121, 124; et al., The Empire Writes Back, 12, 121, 125, 129, 184 Asquith, Lady Cynthia, 95, 98 Austen, Jane, Emma, 35, 38 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11–12, 16, 18, 56, 76, 99, 121, 167, 187; and multilingualism, 11. See also dialogism Barry, J., 195 Beckett, Samuel, 36, 123 Belgium, 12, 55 Bell, Michael, 96, 99, 104, 107 Bender, Eileen T., 195 Bender, Thomas, 21 Berland, Alwyn, 77 Bernhardt, Sarah, 72 bilingualism, 6, 53, 180, 182, 188. See also monolingualism; multilingualism Blair, Sara, 86, 88 Blixen, Karen, “Isak Dinesen,” 122 Boehmer, Elleke, 170 Bose, Brinda, 175

210

Index

Brass, Paul, 191 Britishness, 56. See also Englishness; Frenchness Brontë, Branwell, 45 Brontë, Charlotte, and French, 3; knowledge of French of, 45–6; Jane Eyre, 46, 131, 132, 134, 194; The Professor, 47, 97; Shirley, 3, 6, 45–55, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 126, 147, 182; French a subversive influence in, 51; Villette, 6, 9, 14, 16, 23, 55–66, 67, 74, 126, 127, 182, 194; French phrases in, 56; French as a metonymic force in, 58; protagonist’s emotional metamorphosis, 61, 66 Brontë, Emily, 44 Broughton, Rhoda, 94 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 35 Browning, Robert, 35 Bulawayo, NoViolet, We Need New Names, 123–4 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 39 Burney, Fanny, 34–5, 36; Evelina, 34 Buzard, James, 3, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 55, 56, 69, 127; The Beaten Track, 93; Disorienting Fiction, 39 Byron, Lord, 35 Cameroon, 4, 5 Cappello, Silvia, 134 Carew, Richard, 193 Cargill, Oscar, 72, 195 Carrier, Roch, La Guerre, Yes Sir! 12–13, 16 Cary, Joyce, Mister Johnson, 122, 196 Cash, Arthur, 36, 37 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 27, 194 Chénier, André, “La Jeune Captive,” 51

Chomsky, Noam, 4, 11, 171, 172 Clarke, Anna, 172 code-switching, 18, 61, 109, 144, 153, 156, 158, 172, 186, 190 Cohen, William, 6, 65, 194 colonialism, 125, 139, 149, 155; British colonialism, 105, 147, 172, 179; decolonialism, 159 Conrad, Joseph, 18, 123; Heart of Darkness, 122; Under Western Eyes, 17 Cooper, Brenda, 147–8, 150 cosmopolitanism, 21–23, 38, 45, 184, 186, 191; and stereotypic representations of Jews, 195; democratic cosmopolitanism, 192; domestic cosmopolitanism, 32; female cosmopolitanism, 66; in Arnold, 83; in Brontë, 45, 55–6; in Desai, 163; in James, 68, 74, 91–2, 93, 94; in Lawrence, 95, 110, 113, 116; in Roy, 170; in Shakespeare, 32–3; in Stern, 22, 35 Courtois, Cédric, 155 Crunelle-Vanrigh, Anny, 29, 31 Dawson, Emma, 197, 148 Delabastita, Dirk, 28, 30, 31, 33 de Meijer, Sadiqa, 185, 186, 188; alfabet / alphabet, 182, 189 Desai, Anita, 20, 198; knowledge of German, 163; Baumgartner’s Bombay, 161, 162–70, 179; German-language elements in, 168 dialect, 194, 195; as political act, 191; use of, 18–19; in Emezi, 189; in Lawrence, 44, 97, 100–2, 103, 104, 107, 110, 113, 116; as marker of ignorance or

Index uncouthness, 18; in Rhys, 136; in Scott, 28, 39, 42–4, 96; in Wong, 130 dialogism and dialogic form, 11, 16, 28, 65, 76, 99, 100, 106, 127, 138, 172, 192 Dickens, Charles, 35, 37; Little Dorrit, 35 Doherty, Gerald, 109, 110, 112 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 16 Dowling, Sarah, 128, 149, 184, 186 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, L’Étrangère (The Foreign Woman), 72, 195 Dyer, Richard, 9 East Timor, 5 Edwards, John, 109, 186 Ekwuyasi, Francesca, Butter Honey Pig Bread, 8–9 Eliot, George, 35, 44 Eliot, T.S., 94; “East Coker,” 162; “Gerontion,” 196; The Waste Land, 96 Emecheta, Buchi, The Bride Price, 145, 146 Emerson, Caryl, 11 Emezi, Akwaeke, 189–90, 192; The Death of Vivek Oji, 189, 190, 192 English, as the planet’s lingua franca, 186 Englishness, 22, 35, 64, 75, 82. See also Britishness; Frenchness Erdrich, Louise, The Night Watchman, 130–1 Eurocentrism, 122, 147 “extroverted novels,” 120 Ferrante, Elena, La Vita Bugiarda degli Adulti (The Lying Life of Adults), 18–19

211

First World War (the Great War), 94–5, 105, 108–9. See also Second World War Forché, Caroline, A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, 11; What You Have Heard Is True, 10 “foreign” elements creating a sense of local presence, 9–11 “foreign” and “foreigner,” defined and explained, 72, 73, 162, 169 foreigners, 16, 51, 62, 79, 105 Forster, E.M., A Room with a View, 15 France, and/vs. England, 29, 30–1, 33, 34, 36; in Brontë, 46, 56; in and for James, 68, 74, 80, 82, 83, 91; in Sterne, 10, 22, 24, 27, 35, 37, 38 French, diction, 10, 36; discourse, 21, 58, 76, 83, 85, 89, 92, 100; disparaged by the English as affected and effeminate, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 193; drama, 84, 86; and English, 6, 28, 29, 30, 31, 39, 56, 62, 80, 86; expressions, words, and phrases, 9, 14, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 46, 47, 54, 56, 58, 63, 65, 68, 69, 74, 76, 80, 84, 86, 88–91, 183, 194. See also language interpolations; language-mixing; Shakespeare French manners, culture, and character, 34, 36, 38, 45, 74, 75, 93, 183. See also Gallic mores and temperament Frenchness, 35, 46, 52, 53, 64, 74. See also Britishness; Englishness French theatre. See Théâtre Français Fussell, Edwin Sill, 68–9, 72, 81, 83, 91, 195; The French Side of Henry James, 68

212

Index

Gallant, Mavis, “Bernadette,” 13 Gallic mores and temperament, 16, 30, 45, 50, 72, 75, 80, 83, 92, 126. See also French manners, culture, and character Gandhi, Leela, 171 gibberish, 34, 186 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 168, 169 Granofsky, Ronald, 196 Guerrero, Jean, Hatemonger, 186 Hansen, Julie, 17, 193 Hardy, Thomas, 44, 101 Haynes, Kenneth, 6 Heger, Constantin, 46 Hemingway, Ernest, “A Clean and Well-Lighted Place”, 8, 9; use of “nada” in, 8, 14 heteroglossia, 11, 18, 99, 109, 110, 156 Hewitt, Heather, 148, 149 Hillier, Hilary, 97 Hobson, Suzanne, 196 “homogenizing convention,” 9–10, 59, 65, 86 Honig, Bonnie, 192 Hope, Trevor, 131, 134 Horta, Paulo Lemos, 21 Howells, William Dean, 71 Huebener, Paul, 130 Huggan, Graham, 24, 121, 126, 170, 184; The Postcolonial Exotic, 24 Huxley, Elspeth, 122 India, 4, 12, 120, 161–3, 166, 169, 170, 174, 179, 191; languages of, 161 Indian vernaculars, 121, 162, 170, 196, 198 Indigenous languages, 122, 125, 128, 188, 196

Indigenous vernaculars, 9, 121, 122, 124, 156, 161 Ingersoll, Earl, 101 Jacobus, Mary, 60 James, Henry, and Matthew Arnold, 76–7, 82–3, 121, 134; and performativity, 14; and cosmopolitanism, 68, 74, 91–2, 93, 94; foreignness, strangeness, and estrangement in works by, 72–6, 77–9; metalinguistic self-awareness of, 70; on French “superficiality,” 74, 195; The American, 7, 69–76, 78, 83, 87, 132, 133, 134, 195; and L’Étrangère, 72; similarities with Villette, 70; “An International Episode,” 14; The Europeans, 15, 76–81, 83, 84, 87, 89, 92, 182; Hellenism and Hebraism in, 77–80; metaphorical dimension of French in, 81; The Portrait of a Lady, 14; The Tragic Muse, 6, 69, 81–93, 183, 195; French discourse and artistic ambition in, 89; ideological agenda of French in, 83, 91; Hellenism and Hebraism in, 82, 84, 90; postulated English “translation” of French in, 86–7; “strangeness” in, 87; What Maisie Knew, 15 James, William, 74, 194–5 JanMohamed, Abdul, 140–1, 143 Jews and Jewishness, 20, 87, 88, 110, 162, 163, 165, 166, 169, 195, 196, 198 Joyce, James, 99 Julien, Eileen, 120, 123, 150 Kaplan, Karola, 107 Kavanagh, Keryl, 35

Index Kerry, John, 187 Kipling, Rudyard, Kim, 196 Kłaniecki, Beniamin, 158, 159, 197 Krishnan, Madhu, 151, 152 Lahiri, Jhumpa, Dove mi trovo, 198; Whereabouts, 198 Lanchester, John, 3, 7 language, and childhood, 128, 142–3, 146, 154, 157, 159, 161– 2, 163–4, 166–8, 169, 173–5, 179, 180, 198; and language loss, 5; and the “homogenizing convention,” 9–10, 59, 65, 86; and sexuality, 15, 31, 37, 65, 107, 110, 116, 189, 190 language interpolations, 10, 12–18, 23–4, 170, 183; in Achebe, 142, 143; in Adichie, 126, 149, 150, 151; in A Room with a View, 15; in Desai, 163; in Erdrich, 130; in James, 67, 69, 74, 76, 83, 86, 92, 129; in Lawrence, 114, 115, 129; in Roy, 170; in Rushdie, 121, 125; in Villette, 56 language-mixing, 3, 6, 7–11, 24, 27, 39, 120–4, 126, 182; as a mode of resistance and challenge to Western hegemony, 20, 121, 126, 150, 152 languages (other than English), Amharic, 193; Anishinaabemowin, 129–30, 183; Arabic, 12; Bengali, 125, 198; Chippewa (Ojibwe), 130–1; Cree, 196n4; Creole, 132, 134; French, see French; Gaelic, 39; German, 3, 7, 8, 18, 20, 82, 96–9, 108, 109, 111, 113, 125, 129, 131, 162–9, 196, 198; Halq’eméylem, 130; Hausa, 153, 155; Hebrew, 163; Igbo, 3, 7, 123, 124, 126,

213

128, 140–59, 183, 190, 193, 197; Italian, 3, 12, 15, 19, 20, 67, 83, 96, 99, 108, 111, 113–15, 131, 193, 198; Japanese, 10; Korean, 10; Malayalam, 123, 126, 127, 128, 170, 172, 173, 175–7, 183, 193; Mandarin, 125; Nigerian vernaculars, 9, 22, 146, 155, 190; Pidgin, 111, 122, 155, 189, 190; Russian, 11, 16–18, 193; Spanish, 8, 9, 10–1, 12, 14, 34, 96, 115, 131, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 189; Urdu, 3, 9, 190, 191, 193; Welsh, 32–3, 194; Yiddish, 20; Yoruba, 155, 156–7 languages, and cultural affiliation, 3–4; and enhancing communication, 4 language variance, 5, 7–8, 13, 19, 20, 23, 27, 67, 68; aggravates estrangement, 18; as tactic for feminist resistance, 49; postcolonial, 119–21, 125, 126, 129, 140, 169, 170, 189 Larrivée, Pierre, 197 Lawrence, D.H., and heteroglossia, 99, 110; attitude to cosmopolitanism of, 95, 110, 113, 116; multiple discursive registers in the works of, 96; polyglottism of, 97; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 113, 115–16; Mornings in Mexico, 115; Mr Noon, 97–9, 113, 114, 116; The Plumed Serpent, 115; The Rainbow, 102–5; Sea and Sardinia, 114–15; Sons and Lovers, 19, 97, 101–2; Twilight in Italy, 113–14; The White Peacock, 100–1; Women in Love, emendations to, 112–13; estranging detachment of

214

Index

foreign languages in, 107; 96, 104, 105–13, 119, 182, 187, 195, 196 Lawrence, Frieda (Weekley), 97, 195 Lawson, Kate, 53, 59, 66 Lee, Min Jin, Pachinko, 10 Lim, Lisa, et al., eds., The Multilingual Citizen, 4–5 linguistic diversity, 132, 152, 161, 171, 185 linguistic estrangement, 7, 18, 73, 161 linguistic jingoism, 186 linguistic stereotypes, 34, 193–4, 196 Lodge, David, 99, 106 López, Maria, 154–5, 158, 159 Low, Barbara, 195–6 Lozado, Carlos, 186 Lustig, T.J., 82 Lyon, John, 96 Mason, Agnes, 97 McDougall, Russell, 139, 145 McCrea, Barry, 27 Mengiste, Maaza, The Shadow King, 193 Miller, Stephen, 186 Molière, 86; Les Femmes Savantes, 89 monolingual exclusiveness, 130 monolingualism, 5, 128–30, 149, 181, 186; “settler monolingualism,” 128. See also bilingualism; multilingualism Montaigne, Michel de, 105 Moore, Tara, 53 Mozambique, 5 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Don Giovanni, 75 Mullaney, Julie, 176 multilingual knowledge, 6

multilingual texts and writing, 5, 20, 67, 68, 72, 119, 121, 183, 189 multilingualism, and apathy, 187; and cosmopolitanism, 21, 95; and Lawrence, 95, 105, 187; as “a space of vulnerability,” 5; in Emezi and Roy, 192; in Obioma, 155; in postcolonial fiction, 119; in War and Peace, 193; for Bakhtin, 11. See also bilingualism; dialect; monolingualism Mussolini, Benito, 193 Muste, Peter, 196 Nabokov, Vladimir, 123 Nair, Chitra, 146 Napoleonic Wars, 51 national stereotypes, 32, 34, 69, 193, 195, 196 Nazis and Nazism, 20, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 190, 196 Neel, Alexander, 135 Newman, Judie, 162–3, 164, 165, 167, 169 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 122, 124–5, 139, 146, 153; linguistic essentialism of, 125; Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 124, 139 Nityanandam, Indira, 174 Novak, Amy, 149, 151 Obioma, Chigozie, 3, 20; on languages, 156; on Nigerian political tensions, 155; The Fishermen, 154–60, 183; multilingualism of, 155, 159; polyvocality in, 156; persistent metaphoricity of, 158; and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 158–9, 160

Index patois, 43, 134, 136, 137, 138, 189 Pepys, Samuel, 34 Pinkney, Tony, 96 Poirier, Richard, 72 polyglot discourse, 5, 112, 116 polyglottism, 96, 97 Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices, 7 polyvocality, 125, 149, 156, 192 Poplack, Shana, 4 “postcolonial,” 120 postcolonial language variance, 119, 126, 127–31 postcolonial texts, and “abrogation,” 121; and language variance, 119–21, 125, 126, 129, 140, 169, 170, 189; and politics, 121; and polyvocality, 125; dialogism of contending collective discourses in, 127; English as a “status” language in, 128; foregrounding indigenous languages in, 123–4; imbalances in power relations between linguistic groups, 127–8 Pound, Ezra, 94; The Cantos, 96 Presley, Elvis, 175 Québec, 4, 12–13 Racine, Jean, 105 religion, 23, 57, 142, 147–8, 115, 150, 159, 163 Rennella, Mark, 67 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, 20, 119, 131–8, 153, 182; and discursive diversity, 132; and estrangement, 133; similarities with James’s The American, 132–4 Robbins, Bruce, 21 Roosevelt, Theodore, 186–7

215

Ross, Alex, 198 Rossellini, Roberto, Il Generale della Rovere, 20 Roy, Arundhati, 3, 6, 20, 190–1; and “enunciatory resistances,” 170; and Noam Chomsky, 171–2; The God of Small Things, 126, 127, 161, 170–9, 190; “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky,” 171; The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 6, 170, 189, 190–2; and Ezemi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, 192 Ruderman, Judith, 196 Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses, 121, 125 Savoy, Eric, 68 Schiller, Friedrich, 169 Scherzinger, Karen, 85 Scott, Gail, Heroine, 6 Scottish dialect, 28, 39, 40, 41, 43 Scott, Sir Walter, 42, 44, 192; The Heart of Midlothian, 7, 19, 28, 33, 39–44, 96; Scottishness in, 40–1; “Lochinvar,” 174; Waverley, 39–40 Second World War, 13, 196. See also First World War Sedivy, Julie, Memory Speaks, 181–2 Selvon, Samuel, Moses trilogy, 194 Shakespeare, William, 3, 9, 19, 60; and cosmopolitanism, 32–3; and French, 22, 28–33, 36, 127, 185; Coriolanus, 50–1; Hamlet, 114; Henry V, 6, 18, 22, 27–8, 29, 32, 33, 39, 41, 53, 127, 185, 193, 194; linguistic nationalism in, 29, 32; Julius Caesar, 174 Shakinovsky, Lynn, 59, 66 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35 Shuttleworth, Sally, 53, 57

216

Index

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 128–9, 130, 131, 183; This Accident of Being Lost, 129 Snow, Randolph, Visitants, 129 Sommer, Doris, 12, 176 Sound of Music, The, 177, 178 Soyemi, Eniola, 139, 147 Spengler, Oswald, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), 96, 195 Spivak, Gayatri, 135, 136, 137 Starnone, Domenico, Via Gemito, 19 Steinsaltz, David, 28–9, 30 Stein-Smith, Kathleen, 187 stereotypes, linguistic, 34, 193–4, 196; national and racial, 32, 69, 76, 140, 145, 176, 185, 195 Sterne, Laurence, 3, 35–40, 46; cosmopolitanism in, 22, 35; knowledge of French of, 36–7; A Sentimental Journey, 10, 22, 24, 27, 35, 36, 126; the French in, 35–8, 39, 126; Tristram Shandy, 35, 73 Sterne, Lydia, 38 Stewart, Jack, 106, 109, 110 Storm, William, 88 Sweden, 5 syncretism, 103, 139, 139–54; 159, 174; feminist syncretism, 145–54

Tolstoy, Leo, 193; War and Peace, 16–17, 21, 182, 193; multilingualism in, 193 Tower of Babel, the, 7, 192 transatlantic travel, 67, 70, 72 translingual literary studies, 7; War and Peace as a translingual novel, 193 Trump, Donald, 186 Tulloch, Graham, 39, 42 Tunca, Daria, 148 Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn, 194

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 35 Théâtre Français (the Comédie Française), 72, 87–8, 93 Tickell, Alex, 189, 191

Yaeger, Patricia, 49 Young, Robert, 21

Unorthodox (TV series), 20 Wagner, Richard, 198 Walder, Dennis, 139 Walker, Peter, 86 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 110, 148 Wall, Catharine, 180, 181 Walls, Alison, 29, 30, 31, 32 Walter, John, 28 Walton, Whitney, 67 war. See First World War; Second World War Wharton, Edith, 95 Wilde, Oscar, 195 Williams, W.S., 56 Wong, Rita, 130 Worthen, John, 97, 112

Zwinger, Linda, 76