Translating narrative and stylistic empathy in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding Camille Le Gall To cite this version: Camille Le Gall. Translating narrative and stylistic empathy in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. Literature. 2018. dumas-01868253 HAL Id: dumas-01868253 https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01868253 Submitted on 5 Sep 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. MEMOIRE DE RECHERCHE DE MASTER 1 ETUDES ANGLOPHONES Translating narrative and stylistic empathy in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. Sous la direction du Pr. Sandrine Sorlin. Camille Le Gall Année universitaire 2017-2018 Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, professor Sandrine Sorlin, for providing constant and valued support, guidance, attention and enthusiasm for my project ; my friends Axèle Le Breton, Marvin Caugant, Lauranne Boisselet, Alma Rosa Sozzani, Savleen Kaur, Pauline Durin, and Alice Rabilloud, who read my work and offered recommendations and endless support; my parents, for always encouraging me to fulfil my projects; finally, The Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, who gave me the chance to work on a subject that was close to my heart. 3 4 Introduction In his review on Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, Richard Gray quotes Graham Greene who stated that “Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D.H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D.H. Lawrence because she has no message”. Subsequently, Gray contradicts that last statement, saying that “All her best novels and stories are pervaded by loss, absence, and loneliness” and thus convey a message (247). Today this contradiction is even more legitimate if one reads her novels through the lens of theories like gender theory, queer studies, feminism or post-colonialism. However, one could also infer that Carson McCullers did not obviously want to convey a message; indeed, her ideas and her identity were very avant-garde at the time her novels were published, that is the 1940s and 1950s – she would dress “like a man” and she nourished a certain attraction towards then unusual love obsessions, for example – but there is no saying that she was socially committed. Queerness was her reality, it was not obviously a fight but a way of life that she conveyed in her work – and she conveyed it by writing “clearly”. Her style is indeed simple yet poetic, because through it she expresses the main ideas of her novels. The Member of the Wedding is the novel I have chosen to study and it does not differ from this statement. The protagonist, Frankie Addams, is a twelve-year-old living in a Southern town of the United States, and she is going through her first encounter with pre-adolescence. However, that experience does not consist in the usual physical changes that a child feels when growing up: Frankie is lonely, afraid and lost, and her body is uncomfortably stuck between childhood and adulthood. She develops an obsession for a queer love triangle, and wants more than anything else to escape her home town and the suffocating heat of the summer. One follows her psychological journey through pre-adolescence as a queer being through the third-person narrative. 5 That novel is unique in many ways: as I have stated, the notional charge of Carson McCullers’s novels has exhaustively been studied in literary theory. However I wanted to initiate a reflection on her peculiar style, on narratology. For this reason I have chosen to study the translations of the novel that have been published in France, the first in 1949 by Marie-Madeleine Le Fayet, the second in 1974 by Jacques Tournier. Studying this novel in the context of translation studies will allow me to prove that, in terms of style, “clear” and “simple” do not mean “easy” and “familiar” in The Member of the Wedding. The main reflection behind this work of translation analysis and comparison will be oriented towards the translation of a certain empathy towards this queer twelve-year-old girl, embodied through narratology and literary style. Thus, what are the stylistic issues linked to an empathic style, and how can these challenges be appropriately translated? I will dedicate the beginning of this dissertation to the definition of the frames of study that will allow me to lead a fruitful reflection on the translations of this novel in French. The observation of the official translations will constitute the heart of my reflection, as I will try to bring out the main translation issues and compare how both translators tackled them, logically leading to a critical view of these translations. Finally, in order to justify my vision of the novel and of its translations, I will include a personal translation of a short passage and comment upon it, thus applying my general remarks and ideas more practically into this dissertation. 6 Chapter 1: The Member of the Wedding, a marginal narrative of adolescent woes. The first chapter of this dissertation will be aimed at defining the thematic and linguistic interests of The Member of the Wedding for a work on translation studies, and at framing the essential theoretical considerations and tools that will be used to examine, compare and criticise the translations, but also to practise translation, in the following chapters. A) Frankie’s queerness and its influence on the narration. Numerous academics have studied and analysed Carson McCullers’s adolescent fictional characters, among which stands Frankie Addams, the twelve-years old tomboyish pre-adolescent from The Member of the Wedding. The novel may be included in the wide range of novels featuring a teenager in American fiction, and somehow corresponds to the way adolescence was depicted in the Post-War period as mostly unfit to the world. Ihab H. Hassan states in “The Idea of Adolescence in American Fiction” that “it celebrated the lonely, the freakish, the simple and delicate children of earth” (Hassan 313), and further cites Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel. To include McCullers’s novel sounds quite appropriate in light of Hassan’s definition: from the beginning of the novel Frankie is compared to a “big freak” (McCullers 4), and appears particularly lonely, as “a member of nothing in the world” (3). As The Member of the Wedding may be included in the list of Post-War novels made by Hassan, its marginality apparently does not lie in its differentiation from the essential literary theme of the time, but in its opposition to the vision of adolescence in developmental narratives. This is the idea that Nicole Seymour develops throughout the article entitled “Somatic Syntax: Replotting the developmental narrative in Carson McCullers’s ‘The Member of the Wedding.’” Characters from McCullers’s novels are often, and purposely, described by academics as “queer” and “freakish”, two very important adjectives which regularly appear 7 throughout the novel under scrutiny (Adams 551-83). These adjectives impart the characters with an essential notion of difference, especially from the heteronormative narratives embodied in the social norms of the novel’s time of publication (Seymour 295). Only whereas “queer” refers nowadays to an extensive area of studies, the adjective was used negatively at McCullers’s time in order to justify violence against sexually deviant people (Adams 554). McCullers’s characters’ inadequateness to the social norms of the time consequently leads to their inadequateness to human narratives, especially the developmentalist narratives. Nicole Seymour summarises the view of developmentalism on adolescence by stating that “developmentalism has retained the emphasis on periodization and progress characteristic of turn-of-the-century modernity” (295). Thus, “adolescence was being described as the time at which (white) children could evolve beyond their baser instincts and become productive members of society” (295) and “human development is periodized into three and only three significant stages (childhood-adolescence-adulthood, also conceived of as beginning-middle-end, or stasis-disequilibrium-stasis)” (296). It is then from that scheme that The Member of the Wedding differentiates itself, not only thematically, but also in terms of “literary techniques” (Seymour 310). Obviously, the aim of this dissertation is not to ponder over how socially committed McCullers’s work is towards sexually and bodily deviant people, but to understand what interest the text presents for translation studies. I will thus not read it following in-depth feminist or queer- studies points of view. It remains, however, important to consider Frankie’s queerness and inability to fit social norms in order to understand her consequent inability to narrate her own experience, to create her own adolescent narrative, because from this inability will follow a peculiar narrative offering particular translation issues. Consequently, Frankie appears not only thematically deviant, but also shows narrative inability. I shall first consider the thematic aspect of the question, the latter being a consequence of the first. Frankie differentiates herself thematically from the developmental norms in the way that 8 her experience of adolescence is anything but dynamic and future-oriented. Frankie’s body is not once described in the novel as presenting the usual bodily evolution of adolescence.