Inimical Languages: Conflicts of Multilingualism in British Modernist Literature

Inimical Languages: Conflicts of Multilingualism in British Modernist Literature Emily Hayman Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Emily Hayman All rights reserved Abstract Inimical Languages: Conflicts of Multilingualism in British Modernist Literature Emily Hayman Twentieth-century British literature bristles with words and phrases in foreign languages, fragmentary residues of conflicts between the English-language text and the national languages and cultures that surround it in this era of war and instability. This project addresses the form and function of these remnants of foreign language – what are here called “multilingual fragments” – analyzing and contextualizing them within the historical use of foreign languages in British discourses of national identity and international politics over the course of the twentieth century. Within modernist literature, phrase- and word-length fragments of translated and untranslated foreign language reveal texts’ deep engagement with the political conflicts of their time on the level of the letter, enabling authors to express a variety of political ideologies, from the liberal or cosmopolitan to the reactionary or jingoistic. At the same time, these fragments’ inherent contrast between foreign language and English context interlace the text with points of rupture, exposing authorial manipulations of language and disrupting any single-minded ideology to reveal ambivalence, ambiguity, and nuance. This study historicizes and expands the long-held conception of multilingualism as a central aspect of modernist commitment to formal innovation, and provides a more comprehensive context for understanding large-scale experimental works. It argues that it is specifically through the disruptive effects of small-scale multilingual fragments – traces of foreign language so slight that they are at once easily overlooked and subtly influential – that modernist texts engage in complex interventions on issues ranging from wartime xenophobia to debates over class, women’s rights, immigration, and the afterlife of empire. This project’s attention to word- and phrase-length fragments of multilingualism through a series of case studies reveals a more specific, historicized understanding of what Rebecca Walkowitz has influentially termed twentieth-century literature’s “cosmopolitan style”: first, in demonstrating the centrality of both canonical and minor, extra-canonical authors in the development of new, internationally-oriented multilingual techniques, second, in exposing the breadth of ideologies and complex political discourse that such techniques can facilitate, and finally, in demonstrating how writers use multilingual fragments to reveal the inherent hybridity of all language. This historical and wide-ranging study contributes to current critical discussions in four major fields: twentieth-century British literature, world literature, translation studies, and women’s and gender studies. Contrary to past conceptions of modernist multilingualism as benignly aesthetic, exclusionarily elitist, or unilaterally liberal, it demonstrates that multilingualism can be applied in the service of a range of ideologies, and that the inherent instability of fragmentary multilingualism further complicates expressions of political allegiance or affiliation. Further, it expands our understanding of what constitutes “world literature” by making the case for fragmentary, small-scale multilingualism as a vehicle which transports the concerns of world literature – border-crossing conversation, “gaining in translation” – into texts produced in and for a national readership. Finally, it draws together the canons and concerns of world literature and women’s and gender studies in order to make the case for marginalized female and homosexual figures as major innovators of multilingual usage, deliberately manipulating multilingual fragments to disrupt and protest the political status quo. Each chapter of “Inimical Languages” presents a case study analyzing a specific nexus of linguistic and political conflict, demonstrating how multilingualism is employed both to express and to destabilize political ideologies by means of language. In the first chapter, this method is demonstrated via the model of E.M. Forster’s novels (1906-24), which incorporate fragments of multilingualism in order to advocate humanist connection in the midst of the increasing anti- German xenophobia of pre-World War I Britain, as well as the rifts created by British imperialism in India. Despite Forster’s explicitly cosmopolitan intent, his use of small-scale multilingualism exemplifies the technique’s inherent, often unintentional ambivalence: foreign phrases contradict the xenophobia of their era, yet at the same time, are increasingly constrained, equivocated, and even effaced by Forster’s doubts at the achievability of his humanistic mission. Chapter 2 discusses Ford Madox Ford’s participation in World War I propaganda which denigrates its German enemy by presenting untranslated German terms like “Kultur” as at once self-evidently nefarious (intelligible as such even to the monolingual English reader) and utterly alien (expressing untranslatable German depravity). An Anglo-German, Ford proves himself a master of this multilingual propaganda, yet its play of revelation and concealment ultimately exposes his underlying ambivalence as a propagandist in his manipulation of a silently translated German phrase (“unter vier Augen”/“under four eyes”) in his novel The Good Soldier (1915). The novel’s dependence on this phrase for its thematic and symbolic structure calls into question Ford’s propagandistic appeals for the German language’s eradication. Later, in his postwar tetralogy, Parade’s End (1924-8), Ford deliberately dismantles the workings of propaganda, exposing and criticizing its dependence upon linguistic control and manipulative translation. Chapter 3 addresses early spy fiction’s development of the multilingual spy in the context of World War I-era concerns about espionage, demonstrating the implications of multilingualism as both a skill and a tragic liability, showing it to be the origin of multi-faced affiliations which threaten to undermine the spy’s national loyalty. In creating a new taxonomy of early spy literature (c. 1890-1925), this chapter shows how the slippage between languages is mapped onto narratives of sexual incontinence and transgression. Multilingual spies – and particularly female and homosexual spies – are shown to be inherently volatile and untrustworthy unless they strictly police their linguistic choices as well as the inadvertent sympathies they form through direct communication with the enemy. This chapter discusses literature by a host of writers (many of whom were spies themselves), and charts a movement from pre-war espionage fiction (Erskine Childers, John Buchan), which seeks to contain the multilingual English spy’s shaky loyalties, to post-war fiction (i.e. A.W. Wheen’s 1924 Two Masters), which depicts a less idealized vision of the alienation and dangerously inimical sympathies inherent to real espionage. Chapter 4 reads the full canon of Jean Rhys’ work in its depiction of linguistic estrangement as a form of female suppression. In her novels of the 1920s and ‘30s, Rhys, who had married a stateless Dutchman in 1919, exposes the repercussions of the widespread European/American legal predicament of female expatriation and estrangement by depicting exogamic English protagonists adrift in Paris, their imperfect knowledge of French signaling their inability to find a home within any national community. Rhys employs multilingualism’s fracturing effects deliberately, forcing her readers to navigate between the languages of her texts as a means of experiencing her protagonists’ uneasy residence between languages and cultures. In her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys adapts these earlier multilingual techniques to address the grave predicament of colonial disenfranchisement. Demonstrating the heightened stakes of linguistic inequality in a colonial context, Rhys exposes women’s experience of linguistic alienation even within the English language itself, and shows how the equivocal, idiosyncratic Englishes of colonized women (of both the servant- and master-class) come into conflict with the hegemonic, standardizing English of colonizing men. Chapter 5 shows how modernist experimentation with multilingual fragments is adapted by postwar authors at the periphery of the British empire to demonstrate the experience of living within a hybrid identity suspended between multiple cultures, and further, to expose the hybridity inherent to all language. G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948) deliberately undermines assumptions of linguistic authority or standardization by exposing the constructedness of all language, imbricating Desani’s authorial voice in the eccentric, Joycean idiom of the half-Indian, half-European Hatterr and his friends, and creating a mélange of multilingual Englishes that prevents any attempt to isolate a “standard” English or even a standard Indian-English. In The Satanic Verses (1988), Salman Rushdie continues Desani’s project of exposing all English as “migrant” or “mongrel” by depicting a London scene in which his many characters – including the deific narrator – all speak different, hybrid forms of English. In doing so, Rushdie uses multilingual fragments

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