Translation and the Fantastic: Nancy Huston's Instruments des ténèbres

The starting point for this paper is "translation," translation as a vital practical activity for the author Nancy Huston, and more broadly as a metaphor for the author's situation as an expatriate bilingual. Huston's autobiographical works, Nord perdu (1999), Désirs et Réalités (1995), and Lettres parisiennes: Histoires d'exil (Huston & Sebbar 1986) offer statements which can be used to elaborate components of the metaphor of translation: transfer, transformation, hybridity, and the double. The paper explains how conceptions of translation and conceptions of the fantastic bear close similarities. Although Huston is not known as an author who writes fantasy literature, the fantastic plays a central role in her novel Instruments des ténèbres (1996). The metaphor of translation is used in the paper as an interpretative framework with which to examine the workings of the fantastic in that novel. It is shown how the metaphor of translation permeates the novel in terms of setting and structure, and more importantly how translation bearing on the fantastic presents solutions to the two main characters regarding their attitudes to life, attitudes which may also be adopted by an expatriate bilingual in order to come to terms with his or her complex situation.

Translation

Huston is well known as a bilingual author who produces two versions, a French version and an English version, of each of her novels. She has various ways of doing this, but it is not generally a straightforward process of producing a version in one language which is then translated to produce the version in the other language. One of her methods is to work on the two versions simultaneously, moving between languages, such that the activities of writing and translating are intertwined, and it becomes impossible to distinguish an original text and a translation. With regard to Instruments des ténèbres, Huston wrote in English the narrative of the character who is an American author, and used French to write the embedded story of the French girl Barbe. She then translated each part into the other language, so that there were two complete versions in each language (Klein-Lataud 1996, 226).

This description of Huston's modus operandi masks the tortuous process by which she largely came to terms with her situation as an expatriate bilingual writer (an Anglophone Canadian resident in Paris), and which she reflects upon in her autobiographical works. Huston recounts how for the expatriate the transfer to another culture and language results in both cultures and languages embodying strangeness, such that there is no real belonging anywhere: the expatriate is never perfectly integrated into the adopted country, and has an uneasy relationship with his or her birth country. The feeling of being in limbo between cultures and languages is an important aspect of Huston's autobiographical musings:

Cette sensation de flottement entre l'anglais et le français, sans véritable ancrage dans l'un ou l'autre—de sorte que, au bout de dix années à l'étranger, loin d'être devenue "parfaitement bilingue," je me sens doublement mi-lingue.

(Huston & Sebbar 1986, 77)

The expatriate becomes a hybrid, possessing a mixture of cultures and languages: "Tu ne peux te réconcilier avec toi que dans le croisement; tu n'es chez toi que dans un lieu qui n'en est pas un" (Huston & Sebbar 1986, 154). Each culture/language may transform one's perception of the other in a "douloureuse relativisation de l'une par l'autre" (Huston 1999, 37). Each culture/language may also "contaminate" the other: Huston (1999, 47, 39) recounts how it is easier for a foreigner than for a native speaker to transgress the norms of the French language; and conversely how her native tongue, English, has been adversely affected by living in France for a long period of time.

On the other hand, the expatriate may have the feeling of separateness of the two cultures/languages which thus constitute a conjoined but absolutely unmixable double. This may even be felt as a need: "nous avons besoin d'un pays et de l'autre; de la...