In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual literatures, Monolingual States (review)

Reading In Babel’s Shadow from the perspective of an applied linguist studying the conditions under which individuals acquire foreign languages, or, to use the more politically correct phrase, “world languages,” the question posed by Brian Lennon—what are the conditions of possibility of a multilingual world literature?—has unusual resonance. In applied linguistics, multilingualism, both as an individual and a societal phenomenon, disturbs the traditional view of language teaching as the transmission of one national standard language spoken by putative monolingual native speakers to supposedly monolingual nonnatives. It forces applied linguists to rethink their object of research; it prompts language teachers to reconsider their goals and pedagogies (see, for example, Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter’s essay “A Holistic Approach to Multilingual Education”).

In this fascinatingly complex and brilliant essay, Lennon explores multilingualism from the perspective of a scholar in comparative literature. He examines the paradoxes raised by the increasing number of literary authors writing in a language that is not their own (for example, Vladimir Nabokov in English, Yoko Tawada in German, and Nancy Huston in French) and whose books, like Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Stavans’s On Borrowed Words, or Brooke-Rose’s Between, often make use of multiple languages, with or without glosses or translations. To what extent is multilingual literature still literature? To what extent can it reach its intended readership? What larger disciplinary, economic, and political interests regulate its publishability, its translability, and, ultimately, its viability? Does a multilingual literature open or close doors to mutual understanding in a globalized world? Does the curse of Babel refer to the multiplicity of languages or to the very efforts made to overcome that multiplicity?

Lennon’s sophisticated argument makes three main points that he spells out in the preface to the book. First, world literature is less a system of cultural objects to be researched by literary critics than the rhetorical scene of a particular use of writing and composition to be analyzed and theorized. Second, it is the site of fruitful paradoxes and antinomies. For example, multilingual authors can only hope to be published by trade-book publishers if they write about their multilingualism in the monolingual discourse of the publishing house. Third, writing in multiple languages is neither a regression into the private sphere of diaries or elitist writing nor a utopian progressive globalism but a “productive antinomy or constitutive obverse of literature” (xviii) that Lennon, following Stavans, calls “kitsch” (xvii). “If language makes us able to fit into a context, what is to be found in the interstices between contexts is not silence, but kitsch,” says Stavans. Kitsch as the attempt to express publically “the silent and private art of a divided, multiple, plurilingual self ” (14) that paradoxically both lives in and is lost in translation. Kitsch as a blurring of the boundaries between private and public and between the “globalizing and globalist impulses of the new century,” on the one hand, and “the material apparatus of U.S. trade book publication and distribution” (xiv), on the other.

The remainder of the book is a meditation on various aspects of this kitsch. Chapter 1, “Language as Capital” discusses the disciplinary, economic, and symbolic spaces of legitimacy of literary works that must be by definition publishable and translatable from one language to another (which multilingual literature, being still largely a space of “public nonrelation,” is not). “Translation is an antinomy of literature, which cannot ‘live’ at all without translation—yet cannot live entirely in it, either. What we call literature lives, if it lives at all, only in Babel’s shadow” (22). As chapter 2, “Translation Being Between” shows, one way of serving monolingualism is paradoxically through an act of translation that is, in the case of strong bilingual or plurilingual texts, both necessary and impossible. It is also served through containment strategies that Lennon explores in the illuminating chapter 3, titled “Containment.” On the examples of Anthony Burgess’s...