Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Yet I am certain of one thing. However much French intellectuals bemoan the fall of their language, it would never occur to them to compare French with a language like Japanese, much less to think of the two as being on a par. After all, French is French. How could anyone dare compare it with a language spoken in the Far East by people whose culture is marginal, a language that has no global resonance whatsoever, a language written with the strangest set of signs — in a word, a language that appears thoroughly incapable of embodying l ’ esprit cartésien . And yet, with the emergence of English as the most powerful lingua franca, French and Japanese are no different in one critical point: neither language is English.

Was this one of those instances that fulfilled the palm reader’s prediction that I am fated to have ties with foreign countries? Several years before my stay in Iowa, I was given a chance to urge French intellectuals to face this rather humiliating reality when an invitation came to give a talk at a symposium in Paris. I had not been there in over a decade. Well pleased to be summoned back as a novelist to that magical city where I had previously stayed only as a student or a tourist, I snapped up the chance. I decided moreover to speak in French: for once in my life, I would actually put to use the language that I had spent precious time learning. I retrieved one French word after another from my rusted memory, checked my spelling in a dictionary, and had my draft reviewed by a French teacher at Berlitz before my departure. As always, I traveled economy class, which, as always, felt like being transported in a prison van or a cattle truck; but once I set foot in Paris, I was greeted with boulevards shimmering with new leaves and skies gloriously liberated from the dark of winter. It was in the month of May, just when the city so beautiful to begin with becomes more beautiful still.

“Time” being the theme of the symposium, I organized my discussion around the notion of time — temporality — and gave it a title: “La littérature moderne japonaise: Deux temps” (Modern Japanese literature: Dual temporalities). Here is what I said. 3

THE TALK IN PARIS

I am not a courageous woman. But I have decided to be one just once in my life. So here I am, having decided to speak to you in French — in my rudimentary French. I will read slowly, trying to pronounce each word as clearly as I can. This is the first time that I have ever spoken French in front of an audience. This is the first time that I have ever spoken French in front of a French audience. To mark what is for me a very special occasion, I would like to begin by recalling my first encounter with the French language.

What was the first French expression that I learned?

It was Par Avion , which I wrote on a postcard to my father who was on a business trip to the United States. I was still a child. I still lived in Tokyo. “Why do I have to write in French?” I asked. “There is an agreement between countries to use French in international mail” was the response I got. Maybe it was my mother, or maybe it was the clerk at the post office; I no longer remember. At the time, even English was an unfamiliar language for me, let alone French. From then on, every time I wrote the words Par Avion my heart fluttered with excitement. A few years later, just after I entered secondary school, my father was transferred to New York, and I moved there with my family. Too proud and too cowardly to restart life as an Asian girl in America — for we were not immigrants — I stubbornly resisted getting along either with the United States or with the English language. I kept writing Par Avion on the envelopes that I now was sending to Japan. And every time I did so, I felt as if I were battling against the English language, which surrounded me and invaded me from every corner. The battle lasted for a long time — for a very long time. Even after I finally returned to Japan, I kept writing Par Avion .

But one day it all came to an end. I was no longer writing Par Avion . I was writing “Air Mail.” This transition must have occurred sometime in the mid-1980s, without my being quite aware of it. I stopped writing Par Avion one day. I simply stopped, just like that. Perhaps French was still the official language of international mail, but such a fine point seemed superfluous. No use resisting English. Needless to say, this transition from Par Avion to “Air Mail” corresponded with a larger transition that was taking place in the world. I would venture so far as to claim that it was a radical transition that would not leave any writers unaffected, regardless of the language they wrote in, be it French, Japanese, or even English.

Let me try to explain myself by going back a little in time.

In 1868, the isolationist Edo shogunate, which reigned over Japan for more than 250 years, finally came to an end. The Meiji Emperor took over power in what is called the Meiji Restoration, and Japan officially opened its doors to the West. Innumerable changes proceeded to take place in the country. One of them was the change in Japanese awareness of time — of temporality — which is directly related to the subject of this symposium. This awareness also concerns modern Japanese literature.

For Japanese people before 1868, Europeans were little more than curious beasts, strange and incomprehensible. Then, after the Meiji Restoration, everything changed. Along with European science and technology, European art flooded into Japan, all forms of it representing themselves as the universal — and most advanced — model. The same was true of novels. The Japanese, with characteristic diligence, began to read masterpieces of European literature, first in the original and then in translation. And such is the power of literature that through the act of reading, little by little the Japanese came to live the lives of Europeans as if they were their own. They began to live the ambitions of Julien Sorel, the happiness of Jane Eyre, the sufferings of young Werther, and the despair of Anna Karenina as if they were their own. They thus began living a new temporality — that which flows in the West, dictated by the Gregorian calendar, marked by major historical events in the West. And by so doing, they eventually joined what the Europeans called “humanity.”

Bravo to my ancestors!

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital “T,” which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small “t,” which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it’s not because Japanese people now had to live in two temporalities. It’s rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world — the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular.

Whereas the Japanese who joined humanity began also to live in universal, Western temporality, people in the West did not live in Japanese temporality. Japanese temporality was merely particular. In fact, since modernity, all educated people in the world have come to live in Western temporality in one way or another. Yet only the Japanese lived in Japanese temporality (with the exception of those colonized by the former Japanese Empire who had no choice but to live in even more complicated temporalities). Japan’s entry into humanity meant living in this asymmetrical relationship.