The Republic of Dissent

French as the language of the infinitesimal

The sentence of the morning is from the greatest writer of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett writing to Georges Duthiut:

Never understood so clearly as when reading you, not even when reading Proust to what extent French is the language of the infinitesimal.

That explains why French is the best language for poetry!

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Jokes and Fluency

I agree with this:

"fluency" should be reserved for those people who can understand humor and jokes in the language for which they claim it.  If you get -- if you feel yourself to be on the inside of -- the humor of a culture expressed in its own language by natives, then you're fluent.  Of course, under this definition one could be a fluent Spanish speaker and "get" the inside jokes of Mexico, but not Spain.  That's fine -- so long as you can palpate with ease the humorous underbelly of at least one country where the language is spoken.  But if, like most of us, when you are in a group of native speakers who are laughing and nodding knowingly together about some delightful little joke or bon mot, the best you can do is offer a dumb, ignorant grin, hoping that no one will perceive your alien creature status, then you're not fluent.  You should use a label that connotes something less than mastery of the language.  Maybe obfluent, or affluent.

The N word and cleanliness

I agree with Roger Ebert on this:

Anyone offended by the use of that word the way it is used in Huckleberry Finn cannot read and possibly cannot think.
The word is spoken by an illiterate 11-year-old runaway on the Mississippi River of the mid-19th Century. He has been schooled by his society to regard the runaway slave Jim as a Nigger and a thief. Jim's crime: Stealing himself from his owner. Huck reasons his way out of ignorant racism and into enlightenment and grace. He makes that journey far in advance of many of his "educated" contemporaries. Part of reading the novel is learning to be alert about how the N-Word is used in that process.

In an outbreak of mealy-minded Political Correctness, an edition of Huckleberry Finn has now been published which meticulously replaces the word nigger with the word slave. The argument is often put forward that a young reader might be traumatized by finding a word in a 19th century novel that he hears a hundred times a day. If I were that young reader, I would be more disturbed by the notion that I was incapable of learning how and why it was used.

One of my favorite Eluard's quotes is, 'les mots ne mentent pas' (words don't lie). Nowadays, people have this childish notion that words are the problem when it is quite obvious that they are not. I'm wondering how did the apparent consensus that cleaning up language was the way to cleansing a society started and why too many believe that cleanliness is the surest way to Godliness as if people had to stop being imperfect. Is accepting that people are bad and can have disgusting thoughts and beliefs about one another really that unacceptable nowadays ? The answer seems to be yes, and it is a further proof of intelligence or rather common sense as Thomas Paine would say has lost a lot of ground .

Language and premises

I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates on this:

I think a lot of us are more interested in deploying terms like "white privilege" and "patriarchy," then exploring what they really mean, and how they, specifically, curtail the ambitions of humanity. I strongly suspect that this vague language accounts for some of our inability to connect with people who don't share our premises.

The difficulty of androgyny and gender-neturality in literature

Fascinating:

(...) today the “dominant masculine” no longer applies in grammar, and still no gender-neutral pronoun thrives. It turns out that it’s not just the conservatism of the pronoun system that’s blocking the gender-neutral pronoun. It’s also the fact that the speakers of English seem content to muddle along without this particular innovation. Even before the generic masculine started its decline, singular they was always an option, both in speech and, despite the tongue-clicking of purists, in serious writing as well. More recently, writers seeking to avoid the generic masculine have been plugging in the coordinate he or she, him or her, his or her(s), sometimes choosing slashed forms instead, he/she, him/her, his/her(s), despite long-standing objections that such constructions are cumbersome, especially when they’re repeated several times.

In fact, despite the almost universal condemnation of the coordinate he or she by supporters of gender-neutral pronouns, the rule books now opt for he or she and not an invented word to replace the generic he. Students who once were taught that the masculine pronoun must always be used in cases of mixed or doubtful gender are now taught instead to use coordinate forms, not for gender balance or grammatical precision, but simply because that’s the new rule. Those writers who question the rule, who realize that multiple he-or-she’s just don’t make for readable prose, won’t seek out a new gender-neutral pronoun. Instead they’ll recast some sentences as plural, and for the rest they’ll just take their chances with singular they. After all, if you, which is also gender neutral, can serve both for singular and plural, why can’t they do the same? In any case, after more than 100 attempts to coin a gender-neutral pronoun over the course of more than 150 years, thon and its competitors will remain what they always have been, the words that failed.

The issue of gender irks me less in English than in French for I have made the recent realization that it is easier to be gender-neutral in the former than in the latter. I had always assumed with foolish pride that French was a less sexist and gender-oriented language than English. My opinion changed when I decided that two of the main characters, Andrea and Leah, of my novel, L’Empreinte des Choses Brisées, weren't going to have a gender..I had read and loved Jeanette Winterson's Written on the body and thought unconscionably that it would interesting to try to write a story in French with gender-neutral characters without the issue of gender-neutrality being the main aspect of the story. I didn't realize how difficult that decision would make the story very challenging to write. In French, masculine pronouns are gender-neutral for characters are presumed to be male if the writer doesn't use the female pronoun elle or doesn't assert their gender. My point isn't very compelling, but it is that French is such a specific and a precise language that gender-neutrality is almost impossible to achieve because masculinity is assumed not only to be the norm, but to be all encompassing.  To be frank, I'm not sure that I succeeded in making my characters gender-neutral for most people so far who have read the book assumed with a disturbing certainty that my characters can only be women in spite of the fact that I keep asserting that I don't know their gender, for they never told me what it was. In short, French makes androgyny and gender-neutrality difficult,.

As Eluard, I believe that words don't lie and that it has forced me to realize that in fact, language says a lot more than it should about gender and its place within a society. The argument isn't that language frames one's mind or conditions one's thinking, but rather that it mirrors most societal conditions and what has always been believed about gender.

Defined down bigotry

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Norman Geras on the attempts to define down anti-Semitism:

(...) there are people who, keen to deny the scope of the problem of anti-Semitism, want to limit it to overtly anti-Jewish hostility of mind. 'Since I don't have the hostility,' they will confidently assure their audience, 'how can anything I say or do be anti-Semitic?' Such people fail to explain why the assumption behind their rhetorical question doesn't apply to other forms of racism; or why they temporarily forget the insight which elsewhere they recognize quite freely - as Howard Jacobson has lately expressed it, that 'language has a mind of its own'.

One of my favorite Paul Eluard's quote is "les mots ne mentent pas (words don't lie)", however I have to say that I have come to wonder whether the trouble isn't so much in defining down anti-Semitism or any form of bigotry than in making the end of any discussion, when it seems that bigotry always requires explanations and cannot be washed away or even just condemned with the idea of good or bad faith or with the idea that it is the end of something when it is its beginning.

Playing dumb to ignore the context

I agree with Joel Meares's assessment of the latest media controversy in the US involving Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican party, and his assertion that Afghanistan is Obama's war:

It is a case in point of something the political press does all the time: latch on to the words or phrases that are sure to provoke, and play dumb i n terms of the fuller context or the speaker’s obvious intent.

This age is one where the media and the majority love to beat people up for the littlest thing just to be able enjoy another morbid spectacle of public apologies and shaming for misspeaking or for forgetting that nowadays finesse and complexities are out of style.

Journalists and flashy English

I agree with Merrill Perlman on this:

Journalists seem to love certain words that no one actually uses in normal conversations. Have you remarked on the “acrimonious” divorce your friends are going through? (Almost 300 hits in Nexis in the past month.) How about those “temblors” that have shaken the world recently”? (More than 300 uses in the past month.) Did you ever note that your favorite team has been “beset” by injuries? (Nearly 700 hits.) Have you ever said that you were “slated” for surgery next week? (More than 3,000 hits.)
All of the words are perfectly good English, but people just don’t talk that way. They’re really jargon—non-idiomatic uses of words that rarely appear anywhere but news reports.
Journalism, written or spoken, should be conversational, so it can make a better connection with the audience. Depending on audience, the language can be informal, even slangy. But these words go in the opposite direction

Sarah Palin and childspeak

Sugary excerpt from John McWhorter 's extensive post on Sarah Palin's manner of speaking:

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.

I have a problem with McWhorter's using the world "child" within this context. It brings to my mind the image of Forest Gump, lovable, shrewd, surviving the cruelties of life while speaking like a child and not being very smart. The trouble of course is that the supposed female version of him is threatening especially if she is attractive.

On sin

Quote of the afternoon from Gary  A. Anderson who has written a book on sin:

I think the dominant language of sin and forgiveness is that of the therapeutic. And this would go both for evangelical and mainline Christians: the seriousness of sin is often dramatically underplayed. What might have been seen as sin in the past is now understood as something reflecting my upbringing or other formative circumstances. It's much easier to talk about fulfillment and human flourishing than it is to talk about sin.
Having said that, though, the evidence of horrible human sinfulness is still present, and from the most unlikely quarters one will find a return to the biblical idiom.
In what was to become a celebrated address on racism, then-candidate Barack Obama referred to slavery in this country as our original sin—a sin that had left a stain on our national character. Well, there we have an individual rhetorically reaching back into the Bible to make the point that sin really has a certain "thingness" to it—it has a very unfortunate habit of hanging around long after it has been committed. So even within the contemporary realm, the need to reach for biblical metaphors can still be found.

Rehabilitating Social Democracy

Oliver Kamm on Tony Judt's latest book Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents:

Judt claims too much from limited evidence. That would matter less if his account of the breakdown of social democracy and the rise of free-market economics were reliable. But it’s flawed. Throughout the book you struggle to gain an insight into why expansive welfare states and interventionist industrial policies fell out of favour in the 1980s. The nearest you get to an answer is the power of ideas — malign and acquisitive ones, in Judt’s depiction — and the rise of individualism. This is not wrong, and Judt is astute in noting parallels between the counterculture of the 1960s and the appeal of economic libertarianism. But it is question-begging. Why, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, did some ideas gain political traction and some fall out of favour? The reason is that social democracy appeared to have reached natural limits. Economic planning had turned into an unaccountable system of corporatism. Legal immunities had turned the trade unions into “insiders” against the interests of the public. The quadrupling of the oil price in 1973 by the Opec cartel and wage claims by powerful unions caused accelerating inflation. It is extraordinary that the word “inflation” appears only twice in Judt’s book, and each time in a specific technical context (the effect of inflation in pushing workers into higher tax brackets). The notion that the great inflation of the 1970s damaged working-class living standards and was a source of social discontent is absent from the book.

My only observation is that the biggest trouble with social democracy is that it has  lost its meaning and that social democrats in order to circumvent this limitation have try to become all things to all people and more importantly by solely defining themselves against a Right that knows what it is and what it will never agree to be.

Foreignness and the marketability of fiction

Astute observation from Russell Smith on the difficulties of naming local places and to sell books in America:

When situating fiction in your hometown, you risk relying on street names as a kind of shorthand, a code for those in the know who will immediately situate the characters and action in terms of social class and ambience. But that relies on what’s called extratextual knowledge on the part of the reader. I know Queen and Broadview as rather seedy, for example. I have done this rather lazily in my own fiction: I have mentioned Yorkville, a shopping district in Toronto, as shorthand for rich, which is a message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto. I have had editors suggest I take out street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.
But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders. The story might be set in Ottawa, and it might be recognizable to Canadians as Ottawa, but if the Americans think it’s a nameless northeastern U.S. city, they’re more likely to buy it, so let’s not scare them off by naming it. Toronto in particular is a good stand-in for urban U.S. life anywhere, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies; you just blur out the CN Tower and you’ve got instant everywhere.
It’s pretty common to run into Americans, even at literary conferences, who love Alice Munro and who have not yet realized her Midwestern settings are in a foreign country. She doesn’t always identify her settings as Canadian, but one does recognize them if one is from here. It’s an extra layer of meaning that’s available to you, but you can be moved by the story without it.

I wonder whether what Smith is talking about with regards to American taste hasn't everything to do with the fact that Canada isn't exotic enough to Americans to read its literature and to be engaged by the foreignness of its context. Moreover, my sense is that for too many Americans, Canada is lesser America, a country that wishes it were the United States, in other words the main difference between Canada and America in the 'American' mind is power, which makes the most powerful nation, the better country.
I suspect that Belgian, Luxembourger, and Swiss writers who write in France have the same concern when it comes to their French audience which in my opinion would be more open to reading about London, New York or even Bamako than about Chaleroi or Berne. 

Linguistic subterfuge

Quote of the early morning from Tony Judt;

In America the misuse of language is usually cultural rather than political. People will accuse Obama of being a socialist. Italians would say magari – if only. However, no one takes this very seriously. What we have instead in the US is cultural communities policing what can and can’t be said, and that shapes how we define difference. The idea is that you can’t have an elite, since elitism is undemocratic and unegalitarian. Therefore, you always make the point that people are in some important way the same. If they are badly disabled like me, they are ‘differently abled’, which I find very amusing. It is not a ‘different’ ability: it is no ability. But since it’s politically uncomfortable to distinguish between people who can do things and people who can’t, the latter are described as separate but equal. There are numerous things wrong with this: first, it is lousy language; second, it creates the illusion of sameness or achievement in its absence; third, it conceals the effects of real power and capacity, real wealth and influence. You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.

South Africa, censorship, colonial mentality

BruElla N Gila on South Africa, Winnie Mandela,  freedom of speech, and  censorship:

What matters most in a democracy is for the people to be fully involved in the political discourse that gave them their democracy in the first instance.
Why then would a person of Winnie's stature resort to fear and denialism in fear of reprisal by fellow comrades or even worse being declared an outcast in a party she has made her home since her youth?
It is not important when and why the interview was held, it is also trivial to focus on who conducted the interview, but it is important that these views were expressed.
South Africa has an entrenched culture to discourage freedom of expression, a mindset that speaks of the damage caused by the colonial mentality endured by many for years.
What is wrong with having a contrary view when it comes to certain people? We never fought to protect holy cows - neither did we vow to always say the "right" things - we fought to express our views by speaking to power and being true to ourselves. We need to remind ourselves that many died and were jailed solely for the reason of speaking out.

I would love to agree that the question here is uniquely one of the colonial mentality, and of censorship, because it would make it simpler, but I cannot. In countries, which have been torn by atrocious events such as Apartheid as is the case for South Africa or by a genocide for Rwanda, freedom of speech is always judged in the historical context and with the hard learned realization that it can undo reconciliation and revived deep and old resentments within their societies. Societies who have experienced traumatic events are likely to view words as weapons that can erode its hard to maintain cohesion, but inflaming old hateful passions. The reason why Winnie Mandela backed down had nothing to do with censorship, but with her recognition that she had crossed a line that she couldn't crossed if she wanted to still be a revered figure internationally and be invited everywhere to give speeches for a fee. The point is that Winnie Mandela backed down because she is very astute as identity politics and at marketing and knows when words can become not only politically, but also financially costly. In short, Winnie Mandela isn't a victim of censorship, she is a victim of her sense of self and of history. South Africa isn't suffering from its supposed colonial mentality, but rather from its understandable difficulties to let go its history, without insisting that it should be omnipresent in their present and their future because it was so traumatic and bloody.

Volapük

I've always said that Sarkozy was as good with words as Obama, just in a different way, this proves my point:

The French president, complaining about negotiations leading up to last December's UN climate summit, said world leaders had been handed a draft text "similar to volapük."
Even native French speakers were stumped by this one, and some at first thought he said "vol a Buc", or "flight to Buc," a small and obscure town near Paris that has no airport.
Better-versed minds prevailed, and it turned out not only that Mr Sarkozy was making a nod to history and his hero. Volapük is a language invented in the late 19th century by a German Roman Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, who dreamt of creating a universal means of communication. His idea never really took flight and other international languages, such as Esperanto, emerged as more successful candidates. In French, "to speak volapük" was once used to denote gibberish or gobbledegook, but it was last used in any major context at a press conference in 1962 by General de Gaulle, who is revered by Mr Sarkozy.

Would it too condescending or too cynical of me to suggest that Sarkozy had no idea what Volapük meant until his advisers suggested that he used the word this morning to convey his mastering of the situation? It is amazing how language is important in politics especially when it is used either to elevate one self or to suggest that one is part of the common folk. Something tells me that Sarkozy is about to undergo another transformation just in time for his reelection 2012.

Rwanda, Free speech, and reconciliation

I have to admit that I have mixed reactions when reading this from Stephen Kinzer's article on Paul Kagame and his efforts to advance the reconciliation in Rwanda after the genocide:

Kagame's government has passed laws against disseminating "genocide ideology", meaning views that could inflame communal hatreds. People are supposed to describe themselves only as Rwandan, never as Hutu or Tutsi. Kagame claims these laws are necessary to keep Rwanda back from the abyss of violence. If he enforces them during the political campaign, though, critics will accuse him of suppressing free speech.
Last month, a Rwandan-born businesswoman who has spent more than a decade in the Netherlands, Victoire Ingabire, arrived in Rwanda and announced that she was a candidate for president. Her party is based abroad and not recognised in Rwanda. According to a UN report (in French), she is supported by leaders of the principal Hutu insurgent group, which is among factions terrorising the eastern Congo.Ingabire's first statements after landing in Rwanda were thinly veiled appeals for Hutu solidarity. "There is no shame in saying I am Hutu or am Tutsi; there's nothing wrong with that," she told one interviewer.
Appealing to ethnic identity this way is illegal. The official press launched a sharp campaign against Ingabire, and her campaign group has been attacked at least once. She has been interrogated by police and warned that she will be arrested if she continues preaching "genocide ideology". Amnesty International responded by accusing the government of "intimidation and harassment".Nonsense, replies President Kagame. He believes western human rights activists underestimate the prospects for a new outbreak of ethnic violence in Rwanda, as well as the danger of allowing ethnically charged speech. "We've lived this life," he said angrily at a news conference. "We've lived the consequences. So we understand it better than anyone from anywhere else."

I am torn for two reasons.  I believe that Kagame is right and that the priority had to be on making sure that history didn't repeat itself and that therefore no fighting words lighted up the poudrière. However, I also realize that those are short-term measures which may lead to cover old wounds without leading to healing.  I wonder whether it is possible to have reconciliation based solely on the victims' terms especially when they are still a minority as the Tutsis are in Rwanda. I worry about what is going to happen not only really after Kagame, but in more than twenty years for now when it would be less difficult for too many with a tenacious sense of resentment and entitlement not just to deny the severity of the genocide, but to deny its very existence.

A bilingual Olympics

André Pratte stressing the importance of the Vancouver Olympics to be fully Canadian by according an equal place for the two languages of Canada, English and French even though Vancouver is not a Francophone city:

Canada has two official languages.
It doesn't mean that all Canadians should speak both, or that the city of Vancouver should become bilingual. It doesn't diminish the importance of the First Nations and of immigrant cultures. Official bilingualism is not a constraint; it is a symbol of the country's unique approach to diversity. Confederation was built on the notion of accommodating cultural differences.
"French Canada can survive not by turning in on itself but by reaching out to claim its full share of every aspect of Canadian life. English Canada should not attempt to crush or expect to absorb French Canada. All Canadians should capitalize on the advantages of living in a country which has learned to speak in two great world languages," declared Pierre Trudeau during the debate on the Official Languages Act, in 1968.
Although we have not always been faithful to that ideal, we have tried hard and succeeded most of the time. The task is exacting; it will never be completed. The work in progress is Canada's destiny.
Therefore, when Canada holds an important international event, French and English should be conspicuous.

I can only subscribe fully to Pratte's sentiments since for it is impossible to even entertain the possibility that French cannot be the equal of English in any circumstance. That said, because I know how French Quebeckers Québécois can be when it comes to language,  I'm maliciously wondering how bilingual and Canadian the Olympics would have been if they were happening in Montréal or Québec city.

Seeing something new in Shakespeare

Great stuff as always from Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyblog:

(...) Heritage stops us seeing Shakespeare for the troubling and unsettling writer that he manifestly is: "The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." The times are ever-troubling; and it is always the time to speak in a heartfelt way against the present's deadening cant. These are not sane times; Lear is as untimely as it has ever been.
Shakespeare was writing when what constituted the written English language, what constituted the very tools which he went on to fashion into the best ever expression of those tools, was still particularly unsettled. And how he wields words seems to reflect a view of the self that suggests that what constitutes the self -- fashioned on the stage merely by the playwright's words, of course -- is itself ever-unsettled. Shakespeare’s language is an erratic, antic, fizzing brew which captures, and expresses existentially, a particular take on the non-fixity of the human state. He is a poet not of an age, but for all time because time is written into the ambiguity -- the play -- of his writing, and into the ambiguous, uncertain, unanchored, disarranged characters he sets before us. His language moves -- his characters move -- as we move as time moves...

As a Francophone, it was easier to like Shakespeare and to penetrate his writings in spite of their presumed and assumed difficulty and inaccessibility (the difficulty of a language or rather of the writing of an author is seldom an obstacle for a Francophone because French is an extremely difficult language to master) because I thought that he was a greater and more improved version of Corneille. I have always hated Corneille because I thought he made reading French an unnecessary unsavory experience despite having the best ingredients just because he must have thought that his works was too good be for the masses. In any case, I agree that Shakespeare's language moves. I would like to think that the reason for this is that like Balzac he could never really fall in love with his writing and therefore continuously thought of it as something that must not be allowed to kill his plays. The reason why there isn't a Shakespeare in French theater (Molière doesn't even come close) is that it is harder to make French move as characters do simply actions always overwhelms the language or language overwhelms the characters. Thus, it is not a coincidence that French theater needed Beckett and that it has been difficult for it to replace him.

Integration in Canada and the US

Fascinating...:

The reality is that Canadians talk about multiculturalism but don't practise it. That does not mean we don't embrace diversity. Both Canada and the United States, because of high levels of immigration, are diverse societies, but diversity and multiculturalism are not synonyms. Diversity encompasses a variety of characteristics that differentiate people, including dress, culinary and musical styles. An example is Toronto's hugely successful Caribana festival. Such events are hardly unique to Canada; several major U.S. cities have Caribbean festivals too.
Diversity is not divisive in secular democracies that respect individual freedom, such as Canada and the United States. On the other hand, culture is not just about superficial differences but also about core values. The people who were attending cock fights in Cloverdale simply don't understand our tender feelings toward animals. This is a difference in values and there is no room for compromise.
The notion that Canada is a mosaic while the United States is a melting pot does not survive scrutiny. In 1994, a study by two University of Toronto sociologists, Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton, found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent in both countries. This was significant. One would expect foreign languages to dissolve into the American melting pot. But Canada is supposed to be a mosaic: a set of separate and distinct cultural entities. If it really were a mosaic, ancestral languages would survive through the generations. But they don't, because the offspring of immigrants are quickly absorbed into the dominant language milieux of North America.

A posse ad esse

Libby Purves loved Obama's speech in Ghana:

Mr Obama cut across a lot of nonsense in averring that Africans are no more or less capable than anyone else of good, evil, venality, heroism and patient nation-building. Yes, they have a harder struggle than many, because of wars and wrongs. Yes, they have some terrible leaders (but they overthrew apartheid and gave the world Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu). Yes, they are made up of tribes with ancient grudges — but so is Northern Ireland and much of Europe.

I watched and read the speech. It was as almost always well written and beautifully delivered, but I'm waiting for actions, for a change in policy that would illustrate that Obama practices what he believes rather than just preaching what ought to be. I'm firm believer that policy in cases where realities are harsh matter more than divinely inspiring and inspired words. In short, I'm waiting for the possibilities to become realities.

Twitter and race

Interesting stuff from  Caitlin Moran:

(...) my biggest discovery has been on the subject of race. An internet facility that allows connection with the whole world gives you a deeper and a richer understanding of different people and their problems. It makes you rethink things you had blithely taken for granted.
The big revelation I have had is that the phrase “mixed-race African-American” takes up 26 letters, from the available Twit-posting-limit of 140. The descriptor for a white American, meanwhile, would be simply “American”, a mere eight letters.This glaring disparity gives a Twittering advantage to white Americans — they have an extra 18 letters to communicate with. Mixed-race Americans, however, have to spend so many letters simply defining themselves that their actual announcements, jokes and links to duff YouTube clips are brutally curtailed. We can’t shillyshally around this — that is a racial disadvantage. In the interests of an equal and happy world, we have to find a snappier way to describe people’s ethnic heritage or Twitter will turn into a ghastly WASPy golf club and die of whiteness.
This is given added impetus because we now live in a post-Obama world. Obama is the most famous mixed-race African-American in history. Given how many times a day Obama is written about, discussed or name-checked, if we don’t tackle this “mixed-race African-American” problem soon, millions of people are going to be crippled by RSI. As the world is an increasingly mixed-race, mixed-nationality place — because of the unstoppable forces of a) increasingly cheap international travel and b) hot lust — it behoves us all, in our global brotherhood, to chip in with suggestions on this pressing linguistic problem.

I have to say that the fact that  Moran's observations about the linguistic and racial problems of twittering are interesting, they don't make me want to care because she is addressing mundane, pc, and fluffy issues, which come to the center just because they are modern even though they should force the technically aware crowd to the realization that some worldviews and categorizations are just too old and too odd for the new world.

Still Shakespeare

More from John McWhorter on Shakespeare and I have to say that I agree with his view point:

No one would expect modern English speakers to rise to the "challenge" of Beowulf (Old English) or Chaucer (Earlyish Middle). On the other hand, we figure that if the language of a Congreve play of 1700 is somewhat formal and dense at times for modern tastes, it is hardly unreasonable to expect people to just listen closely. Shakespeare is an intermediate case.
Many take as a given that the solution for this intermediate case is simply that one should have read the text beforehand. Certainly, reading, which is slow and allows backtracking and checking helpful notes, allows comprehension of the language.
(...) In the old days it was common for anyone with even pretensions of literacy to regularly peruse Shakespeare editions - Abraham Lincoln's fondness for such is often adduced. However, these are different times. We recede ever more from serious engagement with print / text. It is unclear that this powerful trend can be retarded.
As such, an expectation that one has read a Shakespeare play before seeing it will result, it would seem, in the current situation unchanged: a select few who pride themselves on having done their homework, while the majority sit through the plays genuflectively
Because Shakespeare is such imperishable material - something I am well familiar with despite the impression some seem to have that I must be deaf to poetry or unable to appreciate challenging writing - I see this as unfortunate, and perhaps even elitist. Countless Americans do not have access to the quality of education that allows previous readings of Shakespeare plays. Is Shakespeare only to be available to the hyperliterate?
I sincerely understand if some would say, perhaps ruefully, yes. However, my preference is that Shakespeare be more widely cherished than that, and that as such, the language be "translated" into the one we speak - available in assorted translations just as Beowulf and Chaucer are. 

Finding Shakespeare in translation

I agree with John McWhorter on this:

The irony is that people in foreign countries often possess Shakespeare to a greater extent than we do, since they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language that they speak. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris or Moscow can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. A friend of mine has told me that first time he truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when he saw one in French!

I think that Shakespeare's poetry and verses are great in French for the simple reason that there isn't such a thing as English poetry. While translating Shakespeare's verses in French, an imaginative translator gets to rewrite them by focusing not on the words, but on images and on meaning, which make them new and fresh instead of just being translated poetry, which is what occurs when French poetry is translated into English. What I'm trying to say is that French deals better with Shakespearean complexity than English for the simple reasons that the French language loves difficulty and rigor.

French and a rush of blood to the head

When I'm brain dead, surprisingly it becomes impossible for me to write in English, which explains why I haven't been posting as much as I want to. I'm suffering from chronic fatigue, which just drains all of my energy and makes it impossible for me to write bilingually because I have this awful sense of being near death because my brain has frozen. Luckily, I live in a city where getting a cab is easy and where you can do everything else on the net such as buy decent groceries. English may be my lazy language, but I have the feeling that in these times when it is difficult for me to find the energy to do what I want /have to do, I revert to French not to feel useless and dead.

Words, deeds, and the post-Rushdie world

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kenan Malik who has a great book out titled From Fatwa to Jihad which is is one of the best of the year :

There is usually, in other words, no direct relationship between words and deeds. How people respond to words depends largely on the individuals themselves. They are responsible for interpreting the words and translating them into actions. Between words and deeds stands a human being, with a mind of his own, an ability to judge between right and wrong and a responsibility to face up to his own actions. It is not the words themselves that cause things to happen, but our estimation of the value and truth of those words. Free speech empowers the speaker. It also empowers the listener, placing a premium on his or her ability to weigh up the arguments and draw their own conclusions.
Most people would accept that there is a distinction between words and deeds and yet in the post-Rushdie world the law often acts as if there is no space between the two. ‘Words are deeds,’ Aesop wrote in his fable ‘Trumpeter Taken Prisoner’. And this is how it appears to the law. Muslim protestors who chant ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark’ or ‘Behead those who insult Islam’ may be moronic and offensive. But the idea that they are inciting murder is equally moronic and offensive to our intelligence. People do not respond to words like robots. They think and reason, and act upon their thoughts and reasoning. Bigots are, of course, influenced by bigoted talk. But it is the bigots who must bear responsibility for translating talk into action. In blurring the distinction between speech and action, incitement laws blur the idea of human agency and of moral responsibility.

Language and places

Quote of the day from Anne Michaels's essay in the Globe and Mail on language:

When language fails it can fail out of thoughtlessness, irresponsibility, poor judgment, lack of conception. But language also fails for the best of reasons and in the best of ways: by bringing us to moments when only silence and touch will serve. The place that language can take us is precisely to that place beyond language. To raise one's head from the book and to look into the face of one we love.

Americans and translated literature

Aviya Kushner on Americans and their reluctance to read translated literature:

Translations are rarely bestsellers; it can be hard to find a newly translated book at a ­mega­bookstore, even if that book was hugely important in its home country. (...) It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all. It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the ­heavy ­lifting required to make a cultural connection. As the ­Peruvian-­born writ­er Daniel Alarcón ob­serves, Americans would rather read stories by an American about Peru than a Peruvian writer translated into English. “There’s a certain curiosity about the world that’s not matched by a willingness to do the work,” Alarcón said in a phone interview from his home in Oakland, California. “So what happens is that writers of foreign extraction end up writing about the world for Americans.”
Perhaps it’s not laziness or insularity, but just being overwhelmed by a barrage of information. We are now expected to keep up with what’s going on in China, Russia, and India, just to keep our jobs. The work of writers in smaller or low-profile countries, like most of Africa? Well, we just don’t have the time to hear from them directly. And we’ll survive—or so we think.

The issue has to do with the fact that Americans don't read for the same reasons as the French read for example. To an American, more often than not, reading is about getting some type of information and a book is a product not a work of a rt. Americans read the way they watch movies or play video game and the way they travel to be entertained and to gain access to valuable, usable, and practical information. Those are the reasons why translation becomes a perceived barrier to entertainment and to information because it is assumed that reading translated literature is like watching a movie with subtitles, which defeats the purpose of the experience, which is direct enjoyment and knowledge. Translation is perceid as reducomg the value of the book as getting a copy of Louis Vuitton's bag does. The point is that not enough Americans view literature as an essential part of culture and value books as artful objects, which don't have to have a practical purpose and to be useful. For those who are able to enjoy reading as a meaningful and pleasant experience in itself , translated literature is more accessible and enjoyable because the goal isn't a quest for information and for purpose, but something deeper.

Beckett and languages

Sugary excerpt from Joseph O'Neill's  review of Volume I of Samuel Beckett's letters in the New York Times (hat tip: Azra Raza):

The kicker, here and elsewhere, is Beckett’s uncanny multilingualism. (Remember, this is the man they entrusted with the translation of portions of “Work in Progress,” a k a “Finnegans Wake,” into French.) Italian phrases and poems judiciously and joyfully pepper these letters, and never gratuitously: Beckett seems practically incapable of an unconscientious utterance. Among the most affecting streams of correspondence is the one he conducts with his teenage cousin in Dublin, a promising student of modern languages. Lucky, lucky fellow, because from Beckett he receives long letters in French and German that are master­pieces of mentorship: learned, utterly uncondescending, self-revealing, personal. (The editors, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, throughout provide translations of all foreign-language letters.) It is to the youngster that Beckett makes the crucial admission (in German) that “no sooner do I take up my pen to compose something in English than I get the feeling of being ‘de-personified.’

Reading Beckett's letters just confirmed my views that he is the greatest writer of the twentieth century.

Escaping mastery

Interesting theory about the reason why Beckett chose to leave English to write in French (hat tip: conversational reading). It is interesting, but I'm not buying it even though the quote Wyatt Mason uses to support his theory makes it legitimate and persuasive:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

I'm not buying it. I know from experience that to decide to write in another language than one's native one isn't about escaping one's mastery of it.  It is about falling in love with another language and realizing that it is possible to do things with it that you can't possibly do with your own language. I don't think that French was to Beckett a way to escape English or to pursue new challenges, I think that it was rather a vehicle, which enabled him to reach his purpose as a writer without feeling limited and austere. I have never been able to give up French for English because it never made me fall in love in it. It never made it believe that it was more magical than French even though it is more permissive and inclusive.

Politicians and the bad use of language

The Times of London  has an article discussing Sarkozy's conscious butchering of the French language almost in the same manner Bush II used to butcher English. The difference, here, is that the French to the contrary of Americans, take their language seriously and usually expect their politicians to use it perfectly. Yet, in a very American way, Sarkozy believes that speaking French badly connects him to the people who otherwise would see him just as the republican monarch who loves Rolexes. Sugary excerpt:

Stressing his youth, President Sarkozy makes informality a mark of office. He uses the familiar tu form of address to people he has never met. He mangles his pronunciation, in a manner reminiscent of Tony Blair's glottal stop. He makes grammatical mistakes, such as removing the ne from the ne ... pas construction. Purists are unamused. They condemn as philistinism the President's partiality for colloquialism.
The critics have a point. Language is a social medium. A politician who fails to speak it clearly and ignores grammar risks giving an impression of arrogance - as if only those in subordinate roles need trouble with linguistic convention. Politicians who lack the facility to speak their own language comprehensibly are ripe for mockery.

What disturbs me is, to quote one of Bush II's most famous expressions, the soft bigotry of lower expectations. The fact that politicians believe that the people want their politicians to come down to their level instead of wanting to get up to theirs when they are sophisticated and well-educated is a disturbing global trend, which shows that, more than ever, artificial and pompous populism works. There has been a globalization of political strategy  in the sense that nowadays, politicians spend too much time copying each other, sharing the same image consultants, pollsters, and policy advisers without taking into consideration the fact that differences matter and that what works in Washington doesn't work in Paris and shouldn't even in some cases be tried because local sensitivities and traditions are sometimes crucial. People may live in the same interconnected world, but they are not the same. Simplicity is dangerous when it becomes about oversimplification and the sacralization of the grotesque and of mediocrity.
What bothers me with Sarkozy and its contention that orthographic and grammatical errors make him part of the people and demonstrate that he is at heart a simple man is the fact that he is dumbing down French politics and putting down the French language by making the point implicitly that it is too complicated and that speaking it unwell on purpose without making the effort to perfect its usage is a sign of welcomed simplicity and of populous nobility.

Postmodernism and evil

Garth Risk Hallberg has a great post on the Millions Blog on Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, Holocaust, Evil and Postmodernism. It is a bit long, but it is worth reading. Sugary excerpt:

Under the old dispensation, writing about the Holocaust was seen as brave precisely because one owed it to one's subject to also be good. Under the new one, you can dedicate your novel to "the dead" and still have your readers walk away remembering mostly the masturbation fantasies. If no one will honor your bravery, it's only because you've managed to annihilate the source of any risk you might have run.
Such is our current situation. We've moved from the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy to the Angel at the Fence kerfuffle, from The Drowned and the Saved to BOY IN PJS. We've crossed the great divide between reverence and "meh." This movement is called postmodernism, and in abler hands than Littell's, it may yet prove itself capable of finding new ways to speak about the unspeakable. And yet it's worth remembering that its direct forerunner, Friedrich Nietzsche, called not for the abandonment of all values, but their revaluation. The example of The Kindly Ones suggests that that revaluation becomes more difficult, not less, in the absence of something to rebel against. When nothing is sacred, there can be no sacrilege.

Having read the book both in French and in English (it was a better read in English because French can make the mundane and heavy prose so irritable and depressing that reading it feels as one felt as a child having to read part of the Bible, which didn't talk about sex, romance or some form of betrayal), I never felt that I was reading something masterful, but rather a work of art,  something on which somebody had worked hard. I guess is that sense of hard work, which make people can it masterful. My point is that Littell's book is about the desacralization of its subject matter and not much else. I don't remember any of its sentences. I can still see some of its gross imagery, but everything else is gone and disappears in the abyss of pompous noise and grandiose-like literature enamored with the easiness in which it can deconstruct something sacred or important. The book isn't about the banality of evil, because that would me it reflective and philosophical, it is about its nihilation. The more its narrator talks, the less we see and feel. He doesn't have a face and what he did is evil,but it is mostly about nothingness. The Kindly Ones doesn't horrify, it doesn't leave me perplexed, I read it like I read my chemistry book in English in High School. I was having a hard time understanding English and yet, I had to try to understand a subject, which I hated. It was an interesting exercise because I had to try to make Na-Cl mean something. I was never successful,but still, I couldn't help but to try fearing that I was missing, which is probably why I read The Kindly Ones in both French and English. But the way, I managed to get a C in chemistry and that should tell you a lot about my ability to complete atrociously boring tasks.

A good translation

Interview of Charlotte Mandell who translated Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) from French to English. She did such a great job that the novel is better in English than in French because it feels less stuffy and less forced. Sugary excerpt:

People talk about ‘free translation’—and they usually mean something that I’d judge sloppy or pretentious. For me, my real freedom as a translator is to follow strictly, alertly, joyfully, the moves and rhythms of the original text. I want the reader to know exactly what the author thought—and when he thought it. That means I want the translation to present ideas, images, events in as close as humanly possible to the order in which those ideas, images, events occur in the original. I want the reader to hear the author think.

Latin America literature

Ummmmmmm:

It’s dangerous (and probably impossible) to reduce the connections between two literary cultures to a single cord, so I’ll wimp out on answering the large question about the relevance of Latin American fiction to U.S. readers and just say that what’s relevant is relative. Certainly, writers, scholars, and serious literature fans should read Latin American fiction because there probably is a lot of truth in Carlos Fuentes’ claim that the second half of the 20th century belonged to Latin American writers.

The sad thing about the Carlos Fuentes' assertion as a francophone and francophile is that it is impossible even to assert with a provocative confidence the same thing about French/Francophone literature. I mean what does it say that the most talked about French novel in decades, the Kindly Ones was written by an American who lives in Barcelona  (Jonathan Littell) ? It tells us that native French speakers may have too much respect, adoration for their own language to own it to write beautiful novels.

Defending the use of the "N" word

I don't agree with Goldberg's reasoning, but it's interesting to hear a different point of view.

The joys of multilingualism

Agnès Poirier attempting to convince the Brits to give up their “monolingualism” to open themselves to the world by learning new languages:

I don't know what's most irritating though: the abyssal linguistic ignorance of the British or their worn-out excuse to justify it, which always comes with a coy smile: "Our nation is simply not good at languages." I have kept hearing it ever since I set foot in Britain, and I'll happily throttle the next person who dares say it to me. Linguistic weakness is not a congenital disease; it's not in your DNA any more than loving Château Haut-Brion 1989 is in mine. Being good at languages only requires political will, state intervention and cultural rigour. In Europe, learning two foreign languages is compulsory; if it wasn't, we'd all live in a Tower of Babel and be at each other's throats.

Multilingualism is not only about escaping foreign tricks and avoiding insults on Italian trains; it is also pure unadulterated joy. Ah, the délices, if slightly sadistic, of reading Proust in the text rather than in Moncrieff's outdated translation; oh, the allegria of laughing with Carlo Goldoni at his Venetian comedies; hey, the fun of hearing King Juan Carlos of Spain tell Hugo Chávez to shut it. Multilingualism makes mental and geographical borders disappear, annihilates chauvinism, and educates the world citizens of tomorrow.

However, before you reach the many ecstasies of multilingualism, you must go through the hardship of learning. I promise you, the rewards are worth all the pain.

If Poirier finds the Brits to be monolingual, I wonder what she would say of Americans and if she believes the French are as good with languages that people from Northern Europe.

Making love in French

The Guardian has an interview with George Stein in which he says the following about the relationship between languages and eros activity, with which I agree:

Sex, Steiner thinks, is mediated by language in interesting ways. "I have every reason to believe," he writes, "that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language." This isn't an unexpected position for Steiner - who has written extensively on translation and "the polyglot condition" in general - to take. But eyebrows have been raised over his arresting examples of multilingual sex-talk, which draw on his own characteristically recondite experiences. A French lover, he writes, once distracted him "in, as it were, mid-flow" by using a tricky subjunctive pluperfect ("Proust may have been among the last to handle these with ease"). "V", whose dreams were filled with "cats, chamberpots and left-handed firemen", liked Viennese place names: "Thus 'taking the streetcar to Grinzing' signified a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access."

I think that language conditioned the way one seduces, interacts with, and makes love to somebody. From my own personal experience, I know that my relationships have been different and that those differences have more to do with language than with culture. I’ve also realized that sex has in different meaning, a different shape, a different taste, which make difficult to view purely as something one does for reproductive purposes. What I’m trying to say is that French is a more erotic and more sensual language than English and that more often than not, it forces me to make sex an erotic experience, which it isn’t always in English. There is a reason why it is less disturbing to read Lolita in French than in English and that reason is that Humbert Humbert sounds less like a perverted bastard because he writes well and know how to talk about eroticism.

L'Académie Française and decay

Anita Elash had an excellent article earlier this week in the Globe and Mail on the Académie Française and its struggle to remain the center of French cultural life. My point of view that what is ailing that old and conservative French institution is that it has never accepted that French culture is never stagnant, but continuously evolves and that French is not solely the language of the French. The point is that l’Académie Française is plagued today by its inability to accept that French culture isn’t solely French and to take advantage of its internationalization instead of resisting by being afraid of the world and of change. Aimé Césaire, one of the best French poets, died yesterday in Martinique away from the Métropole and the glories that it usually gives enthusiastically to the masters of French literature. The fact that Césaire was considered solely as le “nègre fundamental” and that his work was considered to be first black French, because of its négriture, shows that the Académie doesn’t know how to defend French because in a futile and chauvinistic attempt to preserve French language and culture, it is helping them to die. Sugary excerpt:

With an average age of 79 among members, seven of the Immortals - as members of the Académie are called - have died in the past 18 months. The remaining members have rejected as unworthy a string of potential candidates to replace the departed ones. Even after Mr. Dabadie's election, six of the 40 seats are still empty, the most since the Second World War.

And critics say that in its hard-line quest to define precisely what is and is not proper French, the academy has made itself irrelevant.

"[It] is fading away like an era," philosopher and poet Michel Deguy wrote in the daily newspaper Libération. "It is asphyxiated, rarefied, empty."

Even members of the literary elite, who have traditionally formed the academy's ranks, seem to agree. Novelists Milan Kundera, Patrick Modiano and Philippe Sollers have all refused invitations to join. Mr. Sollers has dismissed membership as something "reserved only for the mediocre; those who will leave no trace behind."

[…] The academy still goes by the same rules established in 1635. Its members wear traditional gold-braided uniforms and feather-plumed hats and carry an ornate sword when they meet in the domed conference hall in the centre of Paris where they have always met.

Its main work - producing an official French dictionary - has moved at a snail's pace. The latest edition was started in 1935, but there are so few volunteers to do the editing that the committee is still working on the letter "r."

When it does issue lists of words it deems inappropriate, most French people, including editors of French dictionaries, dismiss them as hopelessly out of date. Earlier this year, it named more than 500 mostly English words it wants to see banished from the French language, including "e-mail," "blog," "supermodel," and "Wi-Fi."

Canada and Bilingualism

Konrad Yababuski has written a must-read essay in the Globe and Mail on Canada, and bilingualism, which shows that it is in too many cases a failed policy. Bilingualism can only work when the two languages to be learned are considered equals and when it isn’t more valuable to learn one than the other or not to know it. In Canada, it is obvious that French is only indispensable in Québec and even then it is possible to survive without it on a short stay especially if one pretends not to be an English speaking Canadian. In the rest of Canada, French is so absent that one would never know except for the street signs written in both languages that Canada has a French speaking population. Jean Chrétien, the former Prime minister, used to state, mostly during times when Québec was deciding through a referendum whether to secede from Canada, that Canada without Québec isn’t Canada and that Quebec without Canada isn’t Québec, I believe that that the “language question” puts that affirmation in doubt. Sugary excerpt:

If English Canadians cared about learning French, they would. That is simply human nature. Around the world, everywhere, when people need and want to learn a language, they do. .

[…] If learning French is a luxury in English Canada, most people in Quebec consider learning English a necessity. Yet Quebeckers know they are playing with fire. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Quebecker who does not feel he or she has been personally and professionally enriched by learning English. But when census data show, as they did in December, that mother-tongue francophones now make up less than 50 per cent of the population on the Island of Montreal, and less than 80 per cent of Quebec's population for the first time since the 1930s, it gets a people thinking in survivalist terms. It gets a newspaper such as Le Devoir to write this headline: "Historic retreat of French in Quebec."

The issue gets framed — more or less — in these terms: Without a thriving francophone metropolis at its core, Quebec will be reduced before long to a Louisiana with sugar shacks.

Each of the solitudes maintains a tortured relationship with the language it doesn't speak first. English Canada needs the French fact to distinguish itself from the United States, but apparently not enough to become truly bilingual. Quebec needs to learn English to thrive in North America and avoid a retreat into isolation, but fears that each step out of its shell might deprive it from the option of going back.

Beckett, Mallarmé and foreign languages

Marina Warner has a fascinating article in the Times Literary Supplement on Beckett and Mallarmé and the role that a foreign language played in their development as writers. Beckett of course chose to write in French and Mallarmé flirted with English even though he never chose to write poetry in that language. Sugary excerpt:

When Beckett was asked why he wrote in French, he gave a celebrated answer: “Pour faire remarquer moi”. Like the word “panais”, this is a phrase that is not quite French but purposely askew; it draws attention to itself on purpose to say, “to make people take notice of me”. The turn of phrase is “pidgin”, Michael Edwards has commented, adding that this deliberate clumsiness establishes “a gap, a confusion, and we find ourselves conversing in Babel”. Beckett thus shares with Mallarmé a pleasure in unfamiliarity and also a sought-for dépaysement, an estrangement through the foreign tongue. For Beckett did not assume French identity in the trilogy of novels in which he first adopted the language: the man himself might have come back from Paris and shocked his parents in the respectable Dublin suburb of Foxrock by wearing a beret and smoking Gauloises, but his literary personae stick to Irish caps or vaudeville toques. They have names like Molloy, Moran or Malone.

[…] In 1930, in one of her most free-associating essays, “On Being ill”, Virginia Woolf meditated on the relation between sounding and meaning:

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other – a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause – which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain . . . . In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty . . . words give out their scent and distil their flavour . . . . Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage.

Mallarmé and Beckett were “foreigners” in relation to English and French respectively, and they both used their advantage, but with this difference: Mallarmé’s English lessons exhibit a scrupulous, chaste fastidiousness with language that Beckett profoundly shares; a near-pedantry, the grammarian’s niceties. But Mallarmé’s writings in English sever language from subjectivity, and syntax from significance. They do not possess Beckettian poignancy, or his sense of personal hebetude.

Beckett is the most important and most impressive writer of the last century not only because he wrote his best works in French, but also because he was able to subjugate French, which is very difficult. French is not only difficult language to master than English, it is also a more poetic language than English and that is why in my opinion Mallarmé never adopted even though he would have been able to master. It was a greater challenge for Beckett to chose to write in French, which is probably one of the reasons he took it on than it would have been for Mallarmé to write poetry in English, which is probably the reasons why he never crossed that frontier because he knew that poetry in English is White Chocolate and never come close to French poetry.

Words aren't everything

I’m not sure if I agree with this:

But words are not about individual creativity, however witty or wicked. We don't carry an arsenal of our own words around with us, ready to trip off the tongue, Babel-style. Words are meaningless if they only have meaning for us.

We make language between us, and the hammering-out of what words mean doesn't happen in a vacuum. Movements in politics, society and technology, shifts in how we see ourselves - all these changes have a bearing on the words we use. We agree on the meanings of words from moment to moment, and because society changes, the meanings of words evolve. […] When I need to get things done, I have a habit of furrowing my brow and declaring, "Right, let's get down to the nitty-gritty," and I was horrified to find that the phrase allegedly has its roots in the slave trade. For me it's the same as saying "let's get down to the nuts and bolts", and I've never used or heard it used in a racially abusive sense. So should I carry on comfortably trotting it out? Does it matter any more what I am trying to say when I speak those words? This is not as straightforward as you might think. Identity politics matter, and identity politics are often played out in language.

[…]If 'who we are' rather than 'what we do' now defines our public selves, where does that leave the words we use? Is our common language under threat, with certain words ring-fenced and segregated, meaning and offending differently depending on who uses the word? Even within a community, words can be a battleground. The rehabilitation of 'Nigga' by the hip-hop generation continues to infuriate older activists from the civil rights era. In the UK, too, the n-word irks.

When we start worrying about words, we have failed politically.

Shirley Tent’s argument reminds me of Paul Eluard’s beautiful verse, Les mots ne mentent pas (Words don’t lie). If language becomes solely a matter of interpretation, then what’s the point? It is possible to simplify the debate by asking the Husserlean or as I would prefer to say Sartrean question which whether a word is a thing in itself or for itself. I believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle because I want to believe Eluard and to live in a world where it is possible to say what you mean and to mean what you say no matter if people get it or not.

The beauty of accents

Things fall apart again

Peter Monighan has a must-read article on Chinua Achebe and his essential novel Things Fall Apart. It talks about the dilemma faces about writing in English, describing Nigerian post colonial life truthfully, and accepting English literature in spite of what he perceived to be the racism of some of its giants such as Joseph Conrad. Sugary excerpt:

Things Fall Apart emerged at a time when very few Africans had written novels. Literary conceptions of the continent were still steeped in reductive romance, primitivism, and colonial sentiment. Providing an expansive alternative to those conceptions was, to say the least, a mighty accomplishment for an author still in his 20s. Achebe forged an original voice by merging African storytelling traditions with elements of the Western literature that he most admired growing up — including one of its foundations, Greek tragedy, as well as modernist techniques like the breaking of linear sequence. In a tale of a tribal leader floundering to come to terms with a new social order in an Igbo village, he suggested the destructive power of colonization, as well as Nigeria's struggles to achieve postcolonial stability.

[…] His decision to write the novel in English, a choice some critics questioned, was similarly deliberate: English was the language in which Nigeria had been misrepresented, so he would redress inaccuracies in that language, too. To emphasize the inadequacy of those earlier portrayals, he worked Nigerian proverbs and idioms seamlessly into his prose.

Achebe says it was his love of English literature that inspired him to believe that somewhere there would be a Nigerian equivalent. He came to realize that it might even reside in him. He sees a kinship between novel writing and Igbo storytelling. In the Igbo fascination with stories and proverbs, he says, he finds a "struggle with language, to make language say as much as possible to our condition."

[…] In a 1975 lecture, and then in an essay, Achebe took Conrad to task for emerging in his seminal short novel, Heart of Darkness, as a "thoroughgoing racist" even as he denounced imperialism. Achebe pointed out that Conrad had deprived his African characters of any voice, granting them only eight caricaturing words in the whole short novel. Pointing, still today, to those meager eight words, he says: "That's all that Africa has, of language; the rest is screaming, shrieking, howling — animal sounds, you see."

His criticism of Conrad drew vigorous protest from the author's defenders. But Achebe says his intention was simple: to ask "why does one go to Africa for this kind of exoticism that demeans people, makes them less than their worth?"

I agree strongly with Achebe’s point of exoticism for I think that that too often people use it as a way to belittle cultures that they don’t understand and to protect themselves from questioning their complex of superiority. Things fall apart to me is one of the greatest English novel and possibly the quintessential African novel of the last century for two reasons.  The first is that it shows that not that Africans can write, but that they can create a legitimate and remarkable literary universe that is understandable and admirable by non-Africans in a language that isn’t supposedly theirs. The second reason is that it exposes the chauvinism of the French language and of the French literary world, which are still resisting difference and what they perceive to be Africanness and foreignness. There is no French equivalent to Things fall apart because English is a much more welcoming language and adaptable language than French and because Anglophones are more open to the fact that they don’t own English and that others have to write to shape, mold, and adapt it to their own cultural and identical realities. It is for this reason that it is a lot easier to Africanize English than it is to Africanize French. To the French, their language is something that they are willing to lend, but not to share because they believe that they gave birth to it and that nobody has the right to adopt it and to mold it. In short, Achebe showed with Things fall apart that it was possible in English to explore, conquer, or create old and new literary territories.

French and slang

Agnès Poirier has a nice article on French Slang and of its significance. She makes the point that Le Léxik is the language of a multicultural France. Sugary excerpt:

The very names of the four boys and seven girls behind Le Léxik speak of a multicultural France: Alhassane, Alhousseynou, Cédric, Franck, Boudia, Cindy, Dalla, Imane, Kandé, Marcela and Marie. It's this colourful France whose language they decided to decipher for the whole country. They were helped in their work by the pope of French language, Alain Rey, 79, in charge of French dictionary Le Petit Robert's editions. The introduction to the book, a formidable exchange between Alain Rey and French rap artists Disiz la peste (a word play on disease and the plague), sets the tempo.

The selected words, almost all fruits of immigration, have been born in the last few years. They are often of Berber, West Indies, English, Romani and even old French origins. For a taste of what you will find in Le Léxik, see here. Paris suburban slang has spread to all playgrounds in France, whatever their social and ethnic backgrounds, leading many parents to buy the book in order to, at last, understand their children's "tchatche" (or what they're chatting about). Others, lovers of the French language, have bought it to follow the evolution of the language. "It is fascinating to see how a language evolves with time. Words are incredible world travellers, they come and go, and when they come back home, they are forever changed from their adventures abroad. There is no such thing as a ministry of Immigration for words," says Alain Rey, referring to the new Ministry of Immigration set up by Nicolas Sarkozy.

Language plays a big part of someone’s identity. What is happening with Le Léxik is that young French who feel rejected by France are trying to claim their Francité by marking the French language with their own stamp and making it theirs.

How to learn to speak English in French

Hitchens on Lessing

Christopher Hitchens has some praise for Doris Lessing, whom he believes (I agree with him), deserves the Nobel Prize:

Harold Bloom might conceivably be right (actually, if it matters, I do think he is right) to say that Lessing hasn't written much of importance for the last 15 or so years. But that's not to say that she shouldn't have received the Nobel laurels 20 years ago, if not sooner. (It was Hemingway who first acidly pointed out that authors tend to get the big prize either too early or too late. In his own case, he compared it with swimming ashore under his own steam and then being hit over the head with a life belt.)

To review the depth and extent of Lessing's work is to appreciate that some writers really do live for language and are willing to take risks for it. It's also to understand that there is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Speaking French in France

I love this video because it shows so many things. The man answering the question or refusing to be asked a question in English is Sebastien Chabal , the best French Rugby player (it is hard not to love him). France lost yesterday to England in the semi-final of the Rugby world cup. But to come back to the issue, is Chabal rude? Yes,  but he is right even though if I had been in his place, I would have answered the question and then asked the journalist if he spoke French. Anyway, the fact is that the French are very sensitive when it comes to their language  the French language especially when foreigners refused to learn or to even try to speak it when they are in their country. On the other hand, I know that the French are less charitable than Americans (it is unfortunately less and less true) with people who don't speak French well even though it is a more difficult and less flexible language than English.

German, language, Science, and dumbing down

Sign and Sight has an article on the efforts of Stefan Klein to ensure the future of German as a language of science. The article deals with the dominance of English in science and about its effects on German and German Scientists. Klein's argument is that the issue here is one of democracy and one of excellence because forcing people to speak English makes them less smart than when they were able to express themselves in their mother tongue. Sugary excerpt:

Today, scientists are headed towards a reversal of Pacioli's revolution. But how do they expect to win the sympathy of a public with which they no longer even have language in common? And will we soon reach a point where we no longer can discuss the results of new research in German because we can't find the vocabulary? Society is threatening to split: On one side will be those who employ an elite language, and on the other, all those who miss out on the latest developments. So the issue of whether German remains a language for science is not merely a question of national pride. It has to do with something far more momentous: democracy.
Anyone who only encounters scientific research in a foreign language pays a heavy price, even if he is a master of the idiom. "We are dumber in English" – this was the conclusion that researchers came to in Sweden and the Netherlands, where children were introduced to English on their first day of school. Lectures in English are part of every subject, but nevertheless, the test results are about ten percent lower on average than in courses taught in the mother tongue. In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.

I don’t usually feel sympathetic towards arguments against the use of English, but in this case, it is difficult not to agree with Stefan Klein because the issue is not as much preserving German as to preserving diversity of thought, culture, and communication. Language matters and although I have when people beat up on English, I understand the concerns that many have about uniformity and indeed dumbing down, which can occur by the use and the domination of one language in a profession. Language and diversity should not be sacrificed in the name of practicability for the simple reason that difference whether it is still one of language or of anything else is still one of the best ways that we have to ensure that we don’t become sheep and that we are constantly forced to defend  our ideals and to accept complexity.

Language, Love, and the Elvira complex

Lisa Friedman has a fun article in the New York Times about communication between men and women. She makes the point that women must speak to men in a language that they must understand. Sugary excerpt:

THE simple truth is that if you want to be heard by your husband, you must speak a language he understands.

An example: A friend of mine is married to a wealthy spendthrift who used to drive like a maniac — tailgating, speeding, weaving between lanes. My friend repeatedly expressed her fear about his dangerous habits but he didn’t modify his behavior; money was the language he spoke. She gave him one final warning: slow down or else. He didn’t, so without any fanfare, she withdrew $40,000 from their bank accounts and bought herself a luxury convertible. I hear he’s a pretty safe driver now.

Friedman’s article is interesting because it shows two things about the relationship between men and women. The first is that the burden for success and communicating is placed on the woman under the pretext that men don’t get it and that it is their nature to be insensitive and inattentive. The second is that women have to raise their men, their husbands in order to make them behave well not only toward them, but also toward society. I don’t know, but that seems to me to be too much to ask out of women and to be a recipe for disaster for it creates the overbearing assumption that a woman can change the man she loves with love, patience, understanding, and flexibility. That’s called the Elvira complex, which is the belief for a woman that she can change the man that she loves with the strength of her love. In both Molière’s Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Elvira loves the hero and tries at the end in spite of his shortcomings and infidelities to save him by pleading with him by exposing her naked and wounded heart. It never works because words although they may change the world, they cannot change a man. The point is that women make too often the mistake to believe that they can mold their relationship by speaking differently, by trying and loving harder because they feel that they carry most of the burden of failed relationships. I’m not arguing that they should stop trying, but that they must understand as Elvira did that it isn’t their job to do all of this work and to save their man’s soul. It must be very difficult to be always the one who has to find the right words, to speak in the other’s language in order to get a few drops of love.

Négritude, French, and French colonialism

The Sidney Morning Herald has an interesting portrait of Nigerian writer and 1986 Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka talks about his political struggle against Colonial Rule in Nigeria and about his activism. He makes the following point about French colonialism and Négritude, which is enlightening:

He also attracted fire from intellectuals associated with the so-called Negritude movement, which endeavoured to define and promote an African spirit and took exception to his use of European literary techniques. Soyinka cautioned his Negritude critics against promoting a stereotypical dichotomy between Western rationalism and African emotionalism. "A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude," he wrote. "It acts."

Yet Soyinka later came to accept "that Negritude was an insurgent tool that was needed for the peculiar nature of French colonialism, which tried to make its colonials French and denigrated African values - unlike the British, who felt that the black man could not apprehend European civilisation, so left their colonials alone with their culture".

Négritude in my opinion was a failed but good faith attempt to create a literary movement, which would separate French African literature from French literature. I think that it failed for two reasons. It failed to realize that blackness is not enough to create and to sustain a literary movement and that although literature can be about language, it cannot be about color. In other words, Négritude continued the stereotypical stubbornness of the French to make French literature and the French language be about Frenchness for the truth of the matter is that once France made the choice to become a colonial power, it could no longer claim French solely as its language and claim to have the sole right to control and to mold it.