An Other Tongue: Language and Identity in Translingual Writing

An Other Tongue: Language and Identity in Translingual Writing by Tamar Steinitz Submitted for PhD Examination Queen Mary, University of London September 2009 1 Abstract Abandoning one‟s mother tongue for another language is one of the most profound aspects of exile experience, often fraught with feelings of loss and alienation. Yet the linguistic switch can also be viewed as an advantage: the adopted language becomes a refuge, affording the writer creative distance and perspective. This thesis examines the effects of this switch as reflected in the works of two translingual Jewish authors, Stefan Heym (1913-2001) and Jakov Lind (1927-2007). Both were forced into exile after their lives in Germany and Austria were shattered by the rise of Nazism, and both chose English as a medium of artistic expression at certain periods of their lives. Reading these authors‟ works within their post-war historical context, the thesis argues that translingualism is associated with a psychic split as the self is divided between its languages. This schism manifests itself differently in the writing of each of these authors, according to their distinct perceptions of their identity and place in the world: in Lind‟s work, it is experienced as a schizophrenic existence, and in Heym‟s – as an advantageous doubling of perspective. The first chapter focuses on autobiographical writing in a foreign language, exploring how self and language are bound together in Lind‟s English-language autobiographies. The second chapter draws on Bakhtin‟s notion of dialogism as it considers the relationship between narration, ideology and propaganda in Heym‟s war novel The Crusaders. The third chapter examines Lind‟s and Heym‟s representations of the writer in their fiction, and how their translingualism defines their perception of their own identity and role as writers. The final chapter shows how the two authors reinterpret the figure of the Wandering Jew to construct different visions of a humanistic Jewish identity that correspond to their own diasporic existence. 2 Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 5 1. Introduction 6 2. In Other Words: Jakov Lind’s Translingual Autobiography 25 Initiation in Language 29 Mother Tongue, Fatherland: At Home in Vienna 32 Trauma: Separation and War 36 Splitting as Survival 45 A Linguistic Split 49 Homeless in the Jewish Homeland 52 A Hallucinatory Voyage in the Desert of the Mind 56 Rebirth in Language 66 3. Fighting Words: Propaganda and Ideology in Stefan Heym’s The Crusaders 78 The Pen and the Sword 78 The Wartime Novels 82 Propaganda: The Voice of America 91 The Nazi Enemy 96 The Enemy Within 102 The Man Between: Identity and Identification 107 A Convert to the Crusade 112 From Crusader to Skeptic: The Narrator as Outsider 117 4. The Writer and His Languages 120 The Writer as Madman 127 The Writer as Moralist 138 The Writer and the Truth 148 The Writer as Self-Translator 157 3 5. The Wandering Jew 168 The Legend of the Wandering Jew 171 Politics and Mysticism: Two Wandering Jews 175 Doubling as Disintegration 183 Doubling as Redemption 198 The Non-Jewish Jew 210 6. Conclusion 225 Bibliography 232 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Jacqueline Rose, who supervised this thesis, for her patient guidance, invaluable criticism, and considerate encouragement at every stage of my research. I am also grateful to Professor Paul Hamilton, Professor Leonard Olschner and Professor Cora Kaplan for their insightful comments on sections of my work. The Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London provided financial support for my research, as well as a stimulating scholarly environment. I feel immensely fortunate to have had this intellectual home for the past few years, and my sincere thanks go to the many members of staff and fellow postgraduate students who have always been happy to listen, advise, debate, and create a sense of community. I have benefited from access to the Stefan Heym Archive at the Cambridge University Library and the Jakov Lind Archive (Sammlung Jakov Lind) at the Literaturhaus Wien in Vienna. I would like to thank Dr. Ursula Seeber and Mr. Stefan Maurer for their knowledgeable help in navigating the newly catalogued Lind Archive. My family and friends have been enthusiastic about this project and encouraging through its highs and lows; my mother, Rivka Steinitz, made valuable contributions as an unofficial research assistant, and a special debt of gratitude is owed to Nadia Atia, who proofread the dissertation. Last but by no means least, my heartfelt thanks go to Ben Plesser, whose unfailing support has helped me – in so many ways – to start, and indeed complete, this work. 5 1. Introduction „My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody‟s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English.‟1 – Vladimir Nabokov „Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy.‟2 – Salman Rushdie The decision to abandon one‟s mother tongue for another language is one of the most profound aspects of exile experience, often fraught with feelings of loss and alienation: Vladimir Nabokov, for example, described his break with his native Russian as „exceedingly painful – like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.‟3 In is no coincidence, perhaps, that the native tongue is described in various languages as mother tongue - „Muttersprache, langue maternelle, mama loshen, sfat em, lengua materna, modersml, lingua maternsa, matesk jasyk.‟4 Severing this primal connection, then, can be perceived as „tantamount to matricide.‟5 Yet such a linguistic switch can also be viewed as an advantage: the adopted language becomes a refuge, affording the writer creative distance and a new sense of perspective. In this thesis, I contend that translingualism, which ruptures the perceived link between language and world as the writer chooses between two systems of representation, is associated with a psychic split that 1 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 15. 2 Salman Rushdie, „Imaginary Homelands‟, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism (1981-1991) (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 9-21 (p. 15). 3 Nabokov, p. 54. 4 Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. ix. 5 Kellman, p. ix. 6 can be reflected in the translingual author‟s work as a schizophrenic existence or as a productive doubling of perspective. The twentieth century saw some of the most celebrated instances of literary translingualism – which Stephen Kellman defines as writing „in more than one language or at least in a language other than [one‟s] primary one‟6 – in writers such as Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett and Nabokov. While these writers are often seen as exceptions to the rule that one can – and perhaps should – write only in one‟s native tongue, translingualism, as Kellman shows in The Translingual Imagination, has a long tradition: from Seneca, Erasmus, and Dante to contemporary authors such as Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai and J. M. Coetzee, to name but a few.7 The complex relationship between language, consciousness and experience, and by extension between language and identity, has occupied philosophers and linguists for centuries. Throughout history, attempts have been made to explain the diversity of languages: as George Steiner notes, a version of the myth of Babel – a tale of the fragmentation of one language into many – exists in various cultures.8 In the gnostic tradition Steiner describes, the original, single language, perceived as divine, had „a congruence with reality such as no tongue had had after Babel. […] Each name, each proposition was an equation, with uniquely and perfectly defined roots, between human perception and the facts of the case.‟9 The multiple languages that replaced the original one cannot achieve its clarity: whereas „the tongue of Eden was like flawless glass‟, our speech „interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.‟10 In the European tradition of the philosophy of language, the view that all languages have a common underlying structure – a „universalist position,‟11 Steiner calls it – competes with a „monadist‟ position,‟ which „holds that universal deep structures are either fathomless to logical and psychological investigation or of an order so abstract, so generalized, as to be well-nigh trivial.‟12 This position has its roots in Leibnitz‟s late seventeenth-century work on 6 Kellman, p. ix. 7 Kellman, pp. 117-118. 8 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 57. 9 Steiner, pp. 58-59. 10 Steiner, p. 59. 11 Steiner, p. 73. 12 Steiner, p. 74. 7 monads: the „“perpetual living mirrors of the universe”‟ which reflect „experience according to [their] own particular sightlines and habits of cognition.‟13 In the monadist view of language, language and thought are inextricably linked, and each language both reflects the world – like a monad – in a specific way and at the same time structures the perception of the world: „[thought] is language internalized, and we think and feel as our particular language impels and allows us to do.‟14 The legacy of the „monadist‟

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