Polyglot Passages: Multilingualism and the Twentieth-Century Novel James Williams Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 I, James Williams, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: James Williams Date: 18 April 2017 2 Abstract This thesis reads the twentieth-century novel in light of its engagement with multilingualism. It treats the multilingual as a recurring formal preoccupation for writers working predominantly in English, but also as an emergent historical problematic through which they confront the linguistic and political inheritances of empire. The project thus understands European modernism as emerging from empire, and reads its formal innovations as engagements with the histories and quotidian realities of language use in the empire and in the metropolis. In addition to arguing for a rooting of modernism in the language histories of empire, I also argue for the multilingual as a potential linkage between European modernist writing and the writing of decolonisation, treating the Caribbean as a particularly productive region for this kind of enquiry. Ultimately, I argue that these periodical groupings – the modernist and the postcolonial – can be understood as part of a longer chronology of the linguistic legacy of empire. The thesis thus takes its case studies from across the twentieth century, moving between Europe and the Caribbean. The first chapter considers Joseph Conrad as the paradigmatic multilingual writer of late colonialism and early modernism, and the second treats Jean Rhys as a problematic late modernist of Caribbean extraction. The second half of the thesis reads texts more explicitly preoccupied with the Caribbean: the third chapter thus considers linguistic histories of Guyana and the Americas in the works of the experimental novelist Wilson Harris, and the fourth is concerned with the inventive and polemical contemporary Dominican-American novelist, Junot Díaz. 3 Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Multilingualism, Modernism and the Novel 6 1. Post/Colonial Linguistics: Language Effects and Empire in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo 41 2. Lost for Words in London and Paris: Language Performance in Jean Rhys’s Cities 91 3. Self, Dialect and Dialogue: The Multilingual Modernism of Wilson Harris 138 4. The Dangerous Multilingualism of Junot Díaz 188 Conclusion 240 4 Acknowledgements This work was made possible by a studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to the Council for its support, and to the Department of English at Queen Mary for seeing the potential in this project. Thanks are due first of all to my two supervisors, Dr. Rachael Gilmour and Dr. David James. Their support for and belief in this project have been unwavering, and it could not have come to fruition without their peerless generosity, patience and rigour. Throughout my time at Queen Mary I have benefited from a lively, stimulating and diligent research community. More friends and colleagues than I could name have offered valuable thoughts on this work, knowingly or not, in seminars and conferences, lectures and receptions, and in moments of conversation around campus. Special mentions are due to the PGRS committee who invited me to share some of this work with the department, to Prof. Bill Schwarz for his inspirational MA teaching and guidance through the application process, to Prof. Jacqueline Rose for offering her thoughts in the early stages of the thesis, and to Dr. Ben Poore for providing both insight and levity, particularly in the final stages. My students, too, have been a delight, and discussing many of the works which appear in this thesis with multiple undergraduate classes has been a privilege for which I am grateful. Timely reminders of the riches of the world outside my thesis have been provided by Emma and Dan, Katie and Morten, Soraya, Marek, Sarah and Rich. Finally and least adequately, my heartfelt thanks to my mum Kate, without whom I might never have started, and to Jenni, without whom I might never have finished. 5 1. Introduction: Multilingualism, Modernism and the Novel I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of language, and opinion will strenuously object, since it opposes “disfiguring nature.” - Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text1 My languages slid into each other’s ear from one continent to another. - Hélène Cixous, ‘My Algeriance’2 This thesis investigates multilingual writing across the twentieth century, as exemplified by a series of novelists whose work engages, in a variety of ways, with multilingualism. The four authors I consider in detail – Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris and Junot Díaz – are brought into dialogue by their multilingualism; each of them writes from some personal and political engagement with plural languages, and each explores in their work the possibilities of writing multilingually within a text which is notionally Anglophone. The four authors whom I consider in this study are also united with regard to their choice of literary form. The novel, which classical accounts posit as having arrived at roughly the same time as the functionally monolingual European nation-state, and risen to prominence as those European nations themselves became global imperial powers, is a form whose history is uniquely tied to that of empire. But if the novel is, in part, weighed down by this history, populated with the baggage of empire in various 1 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p.37. 2 Hélène Cixous, ‘My Algeriance, in Other Words: To Depart not to Arrive from Algeria', trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p.226. 6 ways both thematic and formal, implicated with global marketplaces and channels of readership that are themselves products of empire, it also contains within itself a unique set of resources with which to work through these problematic associations. The novel, in the memorable formulation of Mikhail Bakhtin, represents an unusual management, engagement with, and deployment of a plurality of voices: in the novel multiple narratives can coexist or compete, and it is in the very nature of the form to deploy a variety of languages. The parameters of the novel form, though, are of course not static, and the multilingual must also be understood as a dynamic force, one which continues to act upon and to shape the novel as it develops in the century of the decline and demise of empire. A consideration of multilingualism in the novel in the timeframe I propose must necessarily begin with modernism. The advent in literature in the early decades of the century of a foregrounding of form, a renegotiation of the terms of realism inherited from the nineteenth-century novel and a fragmentation of political, ethical and philosophical commitments bestows a number of concerns which unavoidably mediate the novel’s transition from a time of high empire through the world wars to the decades of decolonisation. Modernism’s shift in attention toward form invites investigation of the mimetic links between writing which embraces fragmentation and often explicitly experiments with the multilingual at the level of the text, and a world wherein the process of decolonisation challenged the political status commanded by European metropolitan languages and those of their colonised subjects. Alongside such formal concerns, the historical boundedness of classical accounts of modernism by the height of the so-called scramble for Africa at one end and the Second World War at the other necessitates a discussion still unfinished as to the engagement in modernist writing with the decline of empire and the accompanying alteration in political and linguistic thought. 7 Just as the periodical classification of literature is a messy exercise, so too are the geopolitical contexts in which such literature arises. Multiple accounts exist which explore in different ways the dovetailing of modernist and postcolonial concerns in literature. While some older perspectives tend to see modernism as petering out by the mid-century, and while a certain version of the postcolonial sees it as the literary projects of former colonies gaining independence, the interrelation of these two strands of critical thought have been complicated.3 A range in perspectives is thus available, from those which rigidly maintain a view of modernism as a Euro-American product, albeit one whose formal parameters were taken up in various ways by writers from colonies and former colonies, through those which see the Euro-American example as just one kind of modernism among many, with postcolonial literature representing the entry into modernity of various other parts of the world, to those which see the ‘original’ modernism itself as a kind of writing of decolonisation. While I will offer some scattered thoughts on these linkages, I also propose that through the multilingual, we can discern a different chronology: a series of writers who treat the novel as an opportunity to engage with histories of multilingualism, and who thus engage throughout the twentieth century with legacies of empire, and who continue to explore and to reinvent the linguistic possibilities of the novel.