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

As with any art form, the novel as a literary genre took a long time — a good two centuries — to realize its full potential. At the dawn of the genre, in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders , the life story of a woman by the same name. Here is Defoe’s summation of her life in his preface: “Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon.” Yet as one reads through the story of her “sinful” life, one finds that she feels precious little for all that she has gone through. She displays an astonishing, or rather alarming, absence of interiority. Almost exactly two hundred years later, during a period that might possibly have seen the culmination of the novel, in his semiautobiographical novel In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), Marcel Proust has his protagonist, a fully grown man, reminisce page after page about the time when, as a boy, he would lie in bed waiting for his dear maman to come up to his room and give him a goodnight kiss — something that often and tragically wouldn’t happen when there were guests in the house. The author/protagonist is revealing a supremely personal moment, in language at once analytical and poetic, bringing readers to share in his search of a lost time when such a small ritual meant everything. Readers are then reminded of their own memories of childhood moments — moments that may have been insignificant in and of themselves but that, in retrospect, bestow the grace of a heightened sense of being alive.

As the novel continued to evolve, works often became more difficult to translate, even into closely related languages. As the libraries of national languages expanded, writers began to quote from, allude to, and parody the “texts to read” within their own language, and so the canon of “texts to read” written in the same national language began to form a unique chain of its own. Novelists began to take on such texts and play them off against one another; they also exploited the peculiarities of their own language through dialects and wordplay. The untranslatability that had been more or less characteristic of poetry all along began to extend to novels as well, culminating in a revolutionary work like Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce. Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of an untranslatable “reality” that can be expressed only in a particular language. It also added to the discovery of untranslatable “truths.”

Moreover, what became clearer through the separation of literature from the usual pursuit of knowledge is that there are two kinds of truths in this world. This distinction, I am aware, is a crude one that often fails to apply in reality, but it helps us to grasp what is at stake in the relationship between language and knowledge. On the one hand, there is the kind of truth that can be attained by reading textbooks; on the other hand, there is the kind of truth that requires reading the text itself.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

In the pursuit of knowledge, we are dealing with truths that are attainable through the reading of textbooks because they lie in the realm of science (using the word again in its archaic sense), where the accumulation of previously discovered truths enables the discovery of the next. Copernicus’s heliocentrism of the early sixteenth century led to an accumulation of later truths that eventually made it possible for Einstein to formulate his theory of relativity in the early twentieth century. In this process, the later scientist need not return to any original texts, for the discovered truths they contain do not depend on the language in which they were written. (In the case of natural sciences, discovered truths ultimately do not depend even on human existence: Earth revolves around the sun and the speed of light remains constant whether we exist or not.) Because they do not depend on language, the truths accumulated in science are ultimately attainable through textbooks, where language is used clearly and economically to elucidate how one truth led to the next. The best example of this kind of pursuit of knowledge would be a textbook filled with mathematical formulas.

In contrast, the truths found in texts are not replaceable by textbooks. They depend on the very language that expresses them, and to understand them each person can only go back to and read the text itself. Moreover, this kind of truth does not reside only in literature in the modern definition. Aristotle’s geocentrism was later proved not to be “true,” yet Aristotle continues to be read because his writings include passages that are not transferable to a textbook. The truths found in the text are in the final analysis inseparable from the author’s style of writing. Those truths depend on the author’s choice, out of an infinite range of possibilities, of a particular word order; a particular noun, adjective, or verb; a particular turn of phrase.

Written language comes in many shapes, ranging from some that are completely transferable into textbooks to others that compel one to return to the original text. That range continues to signify the aporia between the possibility and impossibility of translation — which brings us to the final but crucial characteristic of the novel. Though a text , the modern novel is in this critical aspect more attuned for translation among different cultures than earlier forms of prose, for even though — or rather, precisely because — it is written in a national language, it belongs to a genre that is highly global .

As the language of a nation-state, a national language is a product of modernity. Unlike the Greeks or Chinese of a bygone era, citizens of modern nation-states do not look on those living outside their country as barbarians who babble incomprehensibly and observe strange customs. Citizens of modern nation-states are aware that they are surrounded by many other nation-states where other people, different from yet similar to them, are living and using languages of their own.

Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world history as your contemporaries elsewhere, though how each of you interprets and relates the same historical events may vary greatly. You follow the same major scientific discoveries; you have read the same kinds of world classics; and you share with your contemporaries similar concepts of what humanity ought to be. If you were to write a novel today, for example, you would need to know not only that Earth goes around the sun but also that Earth is getting warmer. No matter how oppressive the society you live in, you would need to know that most people around the world embrace the universality of concepts such as “basic human rights” and “individual freedom.” You can choose to criticize your own country or your own people from the standpoint of that global consciousness.

The act of reading a modern novel also presumes a similar global consciousness. An American I once met believed that The Tale of Genji was written in the era before Christ, generously giving the classic an extra thousand or so years of history. If he were reading a modern Japanese novel, he would no doubt have roughly guessed the time in which it was set. Readers of modern novels necessarily share a historical awareness.

To repeat, the novel flourished during an age when literature was believed to transcend science as a source of wisdom. During that time, seekers of knowledge not only wrote texts in their own languages but also read them — sometimes with amused laughter, sometimes with raised eyebrows, but always with devotion, passion, and respect. It was a time of the celebration of national languages of every stripe, golden years for those languages as well as for the writers and readers of national literature.