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

For what happened because of the wars Napoleon waged and lost? First, Britain, with its strong rival France finally out of the way, emerged as the world’s leading power for the next hundred-odd years — years that coincided with the age of imperialism. At its height, the British Empire covered nearly one-quarter of the planet, whereas the French Empire, the second largest, covered only one-tenth. English naturally became the lingua franca of the British Empire. Second, the United States as we know it emerged through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when Napoleon sold off the vast French territories in the heart of North America to secure funds to wage war against Britain. The sale was made at the astonishingly low price of three cents per acre (under fifty cents per acre in today’s currency). The Louisiana Purchase meant that the United States, which until then had been clustered on the Atlantic shore, at once doubled in size and could then sweep farther on, acquiring fertile territories westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean without having to fight the mighty French army. When Britain’s supremacy finally declined in the twentieth century after World War II, who should inherit the title of the world’s leading power but the United States, another English-speaking country, ultimately making the English language circulate beyond the boundaries of former British colonies.

Today, a Japanese person speaking to a French person would use English as a matter of course. And the French have no choice but to answer in kind. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today. No language has ever been as completely and absolutely dominant. Moreover, once the spread of a language gains momentum, it follows its own logic of propagation, independent of the economic, political, or military power that first propelled it onto the stage. Regardless of the future that awaits the United States, the hegemony of the English language can only expand in the years to come. The number of bilinguals — those who communicate with the outside world by using English — can only expand as well.

Now, where do novelists come into all this? A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist’s mother tongue. A novel not written in the novelist’s mother tongue tends to be taken less seriously as a work of literature. This inevitably puts novelists today, even those writing in major languages, in a sorry position — except for those whose mother tongue is English. A great chasm divides the two. The asymmetry is stark.

To be sure, novelists writing in English have their own lament. They will argue that most of the English language now circulating globally — in academia, journalism, commerce, Hollywood, the Internet — is impoverished, degenerate, and uprooted. They have to wage war from day to day against facile English. Yes, I will reply, but you see, waging war against inane language that circulates almost automatically is a writer’s eternal mission, and the day will never come when those battles are unnecessary. As a novelist who writes in Japanese, I have no sympathy for their complaints; they would certainly not dream of trading places with me.

Just think. Just think of all the readers who could go ahead and read your work in the original if you wrote in English. Aside from all those whose mother tongue is English, there are even more potential readers throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, those who truly make the English language circulate as the universal language. For literature, they are the readers that truly count, being almost invariably the best-educated and best-read members of society. As bilinguals, they also translate what they read into their other language. Both in the original and in translation, whether recent works or classics, novels written in English are increasingly dominating the world and can only continue to do so.

The act of writing is not mere masturbation. It is the writer’s delivery of words somewhere far beyond the world right before her, beyond the world that surrounds her — beyond the immediate world of here and now. By delivering our words to an unknown future and space, we writers share them with our true readers — our spiritual comrades — people that we never have met and never will. The written word can overcome barriers in ways no spoken words can, and English written words are doing precisely that on a scale heretofore unimaginable. Take the case of Jane Austen, my favorite writer in English. If she found out how many spiritual comrades she has in the world today, she’d be embarrassed, even shocked. For while she was an ironist with a sharp tongue, she was also a perfect lady with a strong sense of modesty.

And that is not all. English no longer belongs to this or that group of people but to everyone who wishes to use it. At a certain point in history, the language became disconnected from its past. When those in the former British colonies first began to write in English, English must have felt like someone else’s language. When the descendants of slaves, refugees, or immigrants first began to write in English, the same must have been true. Yet as those people swelled in number, English evolved into a language that everyone could claim as their own. English is no longer a national language, and texts written in English are no longer national literature. Today novelists using English, whether they be Canadian, Indian, or Nigerian, are novelists in a universal language. Inevitably, little by little, more will defy the notion of there being a special tie binding novels and one’s mother tongue and choose to start writing novels in English if , by chance or effort, they acquire sufficient mastery of the language.

Which brings me to make this pronouncement.

My heart goes out to novelists who are writing in French today. No, I ought to be more honest. My heart is filled with discreet joy when I think about their new predicament. For I now have the pleasure of having such fine people join my company. I will cry out to them with my arms wide open:

Welcome! Welcome to my side of the asymmetrical relationship! You used to be on the other side, on the dominant side. No, you used to be more than that. Because of your past splendor, you were often the very symbol of that dominant side. Yet, alas, you are now sadly in the same sorry camp as me. You too are now made to live in two temporalities: the universal temporality that flows in texts written in English, and the particular temporality that flows in texts written in your own language. Like much of the world’s population, you too can easily hear the voices of those who speak in the universal temporality, but you can no longer easily make your own voices heard. Moreover, this asymmetry does not end there. It even robs you of your past splendor. That’s right. Until just a while ago, Racine was a figure on a par with Shakespeare. But look where he is now. Most high school students in the world — which has now come to include the whole non-West as well — are probably familiar with the name of Shakespeare. But what about Racine? Who is he? Probably only a very few high school students anywhere have heard his name. I am afraid their number may eventually dwindle to the number of those who have heard the name of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji . What a shocking demise!

Yes, this is the pronouncement I would humbly make to novelists who write in French today. The asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West will continue to exist. That is inevitable. However, now, on top of it is added a new and in some ways equally fundamental layer of asymmetrical relationship: the asymmetrical relationship between the world of English and the world of non-English.