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

Now, please forgive my impudence and allow me to use the word “we” when talking about French novelists and myself. What could we do? What on earth could we do as novelists? The answer is, clearly, nothing. Even if we know that our voices will not reach the wider world, that doesn’t stop any of us from writing in our own language. There’s the desire — the psychological necessity — to do so. There’s also the pleasure. Desire and pleasure combined are more than enough reason for any undertaking. And yet I would like to ask if there may not be some special gift endowed only to those of us who do not write in English. I dare say that there is.

If we were to compare ourselves with novelists who write in English, we might find our minds infused with countless unsavory sentiments such as jealousy, ill-will, anger, despair, and apathy, as if we had opened Pandora’s box. Yet, just as “hope” was left inside the box, there is one thing left for us. On this one point, we have absolute superiority over novelists who write in English. For those of us who know we are living in this asymmetry are the only ones condemned to perpetually reflect upon language, the only ones forced to know that the English language cannot dictate “truths” and that there are other “truths” in this world that cannot be perceived through the English language. Of course, I am sure that many novelists writing in English also reflect upon language just like we do. Yet they are not condemned to do so in the way that we are.

They are not condemned to know, for instance, that the works that are usually translated into English are those that are both thematically and linguistically the easiest to translate, that often only reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language, and preferably that entertain readers with just the right kind of exoticism. They are not condemned to know that there is thus a perpetual hermeneutic circle — that in interpreting the world, only “truths” that can be perceived in English exist as “truths.” They are not condemned to know that this hermeneutic circle is further consolidated by the honorable Nobel Prize in Literature, which inevitably suppresses all the problems inherent in the act of translation. Only we are condemned. Only we are forced to constantly reflect that when Proust’s maman is replaced by “mom” or “mother,” the very “time” that Proust retrieved is not the same. Similarly, replace my mother’s kaasan with “mom” or “mother,” and her story is not the same. Fortunately, I am not here today to represent contemporary Japanese writers. I do not know what they think about the things I have been talking about. I don’t even know if they ever think about them. Yet everything I write is in one way or another haunted by the thought that I am writing in Japanese, that I am living in the asymmetrical relationship I have described. And this has much to do with my own personal history.

To use my remaining time effectively, let me briefly talk about my novel Shishōsetsu from left to right (An I-novel from left to right), published in 1995. In both its content and its form, this novel most directly addresses the question: What does it mean to write in Japanese in this day and age? The Japanese word shishōsetsu refers to a fictionalized autobiographical work, and my novel is just that. It’s a story about a Japanese woman who left her native country as a girl and moved to the United States with her family. Instead of making the United States her new home, she turns her back on it, shuts herself up in her room, and spends every day reading Japanese novels. After twenty years of living in the United States — twenty years during which she absurdly rejects her new country while hesitating to return home — she finally decides one day to go back to Japan and become a writer.

Ever since Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , what can be called “how-I-became-a-writer” stories have flourished in the world. Shishōsetsu from left to right is no doubt a variant. You may even detect in my novel that self-complacent, self-congratulatory tone that is characteristic of such stories. Yet my novel is also something else. For it is not just a how-I-became-a-writer story; it is also a how-I-became-a-Japanese-writer story. And this story is inseparably connected to another story that runs parallel to it and yet is a far more sober tale, full of regret: a how-I-failed-to-become-a-writer-in-the-English-language story. The female protagonist of Shishōsetsu from left to right went to the United States at a privileged age, a time when she was still young enough to adopt a new language and make it her own. Why was she so fixated on the Japanese language — a language that does not even belong to a major linguistic family, one that’s used only in an island country in the Far East, one that’s singularly isolated? In other words, why didn’t she choose to adopt English? Why didn’t she choose “correctly,” like many others who moved to the United States at an age similar to hers — those who are now writing how-I-became-an-English-writer stories? How did she end up making such a terribly wrong choice? Why did it never even occur to her that she had such a choice until the choice was forever lost?

Why? It is true that as an Asian living in the United States, she felt she was an outsider. It is perhaps also true that she was too proud or too cowardly, afraid of the humiliation that necessarily accompanies the experience of learning a new language. Yet these sociological or psychological reasons are not sufficient to explain what in the last analysis represents a profoundly literary phenomenon. For what made the protagonist persevere in her resistance to English was the act of reading Japanese. The more she immersed herself in Japanese novels, the more irrevocably she turned her back on English. It was in reading that she encountered the irreducible material difference of the Japanese language from English, making it acutely uncomfortable for her to live in two worlds, to live with two subjectivities.

Hence the peculiar form of Shishōsetsu from left to right . As the awkward bilingual title indicates, the novel has some English phrases and sentences scattered here and there; to a limited extent, it is a bilingual novel. To realize the coexistence of the two languages — to allow the novel to be read without having to turn the book around — the novel is written horizontally, from left to right, unlike a typical Japanese novel that is written vertically, from top to bottom. It even begins with an overdramatic sentence in English: “Alas! Twenty years since the Exodus!”

I hoped, through this bilingual form, to attest to the linguistic asymmetry that I have been talking about. Any writer writing in English, even if she herself knew some Japanese, could not possibly expect her readers to understand Japanese phrases and sentences scattered in her novel. In contrast, any writer writing in a language other than English can reasonably expect her readers to understand some, if not most, of the English words she might happen to throw in. It would therefore be possible to replicate the bilingual form of Shishōsetsu from left to right in any language in the world — be it Korean, Bengali, or French — by translating the Japanese and leaving the English parts as they are. The only language in which this wouldn’t work would be English. If we leave the English sentences as they are, how are we to replicate the bilingual form in the translation? Yet into what language are we to translate the English words and sentences? Indeed, the very impossibility of maintaining the bilingual form while translating the work into English, and the singularity of that impossibility, are clear testimony to the linguistic asymmetry we now face in this world.