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

Literature in the broad sense of the term will never come to an end. Yet now in the age of English we face the possibility that, depending on how people treat their national languages, some countries’ literature may witness a gradual fall. What was once a national language may be reduced to nothing more than a local language; a national literature, to nothing more than a local literature that no discriminating person takes seriously.

SŌSEKI: WHAT IF HE WERE ALIVE TODAY?

A sad fate might be in store for someone like Natsume Sōseki in the age of English.

In the past, when Europe’s three principal national languages still circulated as universal languages, Japanese scholars in the humanities faced a huge linguistic challenge. Many felt pressured to learn all three, as if they themselves were European — this on top of reading Chinese, their legacy from the past. Some even went so far as to learn Greek and Latin in an attempt to capture the soul of Europe. And yet Japan’s immense physical and psychological distance from the West, combined with the “ideology of national language,” meant that hardly any of them attempted to write in Western languages. The state of academics that Sōseki portrayed in Sanshirō did not change in essence for nearly a hundred years, although the phenomenal accumulation of translations greatly lessened the need to read original texts quite as avidly. Forced to be content with translating and introducing new Western scholarship to their compatriots, Japanese scholars would cross the ocean once in their lifetime to visit the Western scholar whose works they had studied, have their photograph taken next to him all smiles, shake the great man’s hand, and return to Japan.

Now in the age of English, Japanese scholars are finally free from the pressure of modeling themselves after multilingual European scholars of the past. Now a single foreign language — English — will do. Even scholars in the humanities have finally begun to write in English, rare though the instances still may be. For the first time, this small number of scholars is making a transition from being mere translators on the sidelines to being real players in the game: what they write can finally enter the chain of the world’s “texts to read.” The transformation now taking place within Japanese academia is still largely ignored by the general public, but in time it will likely be too obvious to miss. Even when writing about Japan, the more important the subject, the more meaningful it will be to write in English.

This is not necessarily good news for either the Japanese language or the Japanese people.

History is full of irony. A century and a half ago, Japanese universities served as major institutions for translation and transformed the Japanese language into a suitable vehicle for the pursuit of scholarship. Today, in the age of English, universities are inviting back foreigners to give courses in English. In some instances, even Japanese professors are being assigned to give courses in English. Within the top echelons of academia, Japanese is slowly turning into a second-class language.

A new challenge, no less frustrating than the previous one, awaits Japanese scholars in the humanities. For the difficulty of writing in an “external language” is proportionate to how different that external language is to one’s mother tongue. It is no easy task for a Japanese scholar to write a “text” in English, one that conveys truths irreducible to and irreplaceable by “textbooks.”

What of the unusually gifted scholar? Let us reimagine Natsume Sōseki as our contemporary and try to envision the path he might follow if he were born today. First, let us establish his credentials as a passionate seeker of knowledge. Like Fukuzawa Yukichi — who hardly slept properly while learning Dutch, who grasped the importance of electricity as soon as he saw an entry on it in a Dutch book, who had the grit to start all over with English as soon as he saw the uselessness of Dutch — Sōseki was a knowledge seeker of the first rank. He truly wanted to know everything there was to know. His two-and-a-half-year stay in London gave him for the first time in his life unlimited access to newly published books in English, and hence to the most recent research in diverse fields. He concluded soon after his arrival that attending classes was a waste of time; he spent nearly all his money buying books, shut himself up in a rented room, and devoured them. It was during this time that his ideas for Theory of Literature were first taking shape. Believing that the treatise would be his magnum opus, he felt an obsessive need — a need bordering on madness — to be updated on every conceivable subject.

Here is how he explained his project to his father-in-law in a letter from London: “I will begin with the question of how one should perceive the world and then go on to the question of how one should interpret life, addressing its meaning, purpose, and dynamics. I will then discuss what enlightenment is and analyze the elements that constitute enlightenment. I will then discuss how these elements combine and develop to shape the evolution of literature.” 1To do so, he declared he would have to be versed in “philosophy, history, politics, psychology, biology, and theories of evolution.”

When translated into English, the grandiosity of what Sōseki is trying to achieve sounds a bit comical. But the original is written in one heavily Sinicized sentence, full of Chinese characters, befitting such grandiosity. Anyone who reads the lines cannot but be struck by Sōseki’s impassioned craving for encyclopedic knowledge. The thought of returning to Japan, becoming a language teacher, and not having “the leisure for thought or the time for reading” was repugnant to him, he goes on to say. He even “sometimes dreamed that he found ten thousand yen on the street and built a library and wrote a book in it” (emphasis added). When I read Sōseki’s letters and diaries from his London years, what comes to mind is an image of a man from the distant Orient sitting alone in a poorly heated room, on fire with aspiration, reading book after book after book. He was eventually called back to Japan because of the rumor among his fellow countrymen that excess studying had driven him over the edge.

Sōseki’s passion for knowledge was not limited to literature or the humanities. Again like Fukuzawa — and unlike most novelists — he had the makings of a fine scientist. He had a lifelong friendship with the distinguished physicist Terada Torahiko (1878–1935), who is said to have been the model for the physicist Nonomiya in Sanshirō . In fact, the scene in which Nonomiya talks about his experiments on the pressure of light in his cellar-like laboratory was something Sōseki invented after hearing Terada describe the activities of researchers on the frontiers of science. In his essay “Natsume Sōseki sensei no tsuioku” (Memories of Natsume Sōseki), Terada expresses amazement that Sōseki was able to grasp the essence on one hearing: “The novel portrays with remarkable reality an experiment that Sōseki had only heard about but never seen. I think this [ability] is quite rare among Japanese writers.” 2In other scenes in Sanshirō , we see scientists debate about melting quartz threads in the flame of an oxyhydrogen blowpipe, about the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) and the Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev (1866–1912), and about how “the pressure of light is proportionate to the square of the radius, but gravity is proportionate to the cube of the radius, so the smaller an object is, the less gravitational pull and the stronger the effect of light-pressure on it.” These and scenes from other of his novels give us a glimpse of Sōseki’s command of scientific concepts and his potential as a scientist.