Abstract
One of the most important articulations of the German-Austrian ‘Sprachkrise’ at the turn of the century, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’, presents the modernist linguistic crisis as a Babelian fall. The story takes the form of a letter from a fictional Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon, explaining his cessation of literary activity. Chandos’s previous state of linguistic and literary transcendence contrasts acutely with his current condition whereby his relationship with language — and, in consequence, the world — is completely ruptured. Everything is viewed with a microscopic closeness which prevents a unified vision of the whole:
Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile, und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen, die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich schwindelt, die sich unaufhaltsam drehen und durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt.1
[For me, everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back — whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.2]
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Notes
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ein Brief’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Christoph Perels and others (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1991), 45–55 (p. 49).
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’, in Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hittinger, Tania Stern and James Stern (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), pp. 129–41 (p. 134).
David E. Wellbery, Judith Ryan and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (eds.), A New History of German Literature, Harvard University Press Reference Library (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), p. 655.
For an analysis of the impact of bilingualism on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 34–64. For North, ‘there is no doubt that [Wittgenstein’s] philosophy took shape through a process of bilingual conversation’ (p. 34).
Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3rd edn. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1921), p. 176.
See Gershon Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 59–60.
Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 95 (1980), 183–200 (p. 183nn13–14).
William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 197. Gershon Weiler describes Mauthner’s complex linguistic upbringing: ‘His mothertongue was German and with the servants he spoke Czech. He also had to study Czech in the gymnasium as a second living language, and being Jewish, he was subjected to the rudiments of Hebrew, even though it is unlikely that he ever passed beyond the point of mastering the alphabet. Born in a linguistic border-area and growing up at the time of the rising Czech nationalism, awareness of his own Jewish background necessarily made him question his own identity and belonging.’ Weiler, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, p. 332.
Antonio Sousa Ribeiro indicates the significance of Hofmannsthal’s 1926 essay ‘Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation’ [‘Literature as the Spiritual Space of the Nation’] in which he asserts ‘that beyond the spirit of the language there lies the spirit of nation’. ‘A Center That Can Hold: The Figure of Empire in Portuguese and Austrian Modernism’, in Modernism, ed. Ástráuðr Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), pp. 561–72 (p. 566).
Emilie Morin, ‘Samuel Beckett, the Wordless Song and the Pitfalls of Memorialisation’, Irish Studies Review, 19 (2011), 185–205.
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana, 1997), pp. 317–36. See also Morag Shiach, ‘“To Purify the Dialect of the Tribe”: Modernism and Language Reform’, Modernism/Modernity, 14 (2007), 21–34.
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 239–52 (p. 244).
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 227–33 (p. 230).
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Les Mots anglais’, in Oeuvres complètes II, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 937–1100.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, Crosscurrents (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 104.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1951), p. 66. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1959), p. 50.
Eugene Jolas and others, ‘Inquiry About the Malady of Language’, transition, 23 (1935), 144–74 (p. 153).
C. K. Ogden, trans., ‘James Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in Basic English’, transition, 21 (1932), 259–62.
As Beckett explains to one enquirer, his reason for writing in French was ‘le besoin d’être mal armé’ [‘the need to be ill equipped’ but also, punningly, ‘the need to be Mallarmé’]. The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 462, 464. See Chapter 5 of this book for a discussion of Beckett’s statement.
Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Resurrection of the Word’, in Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann and John E Bowlt, trans. Richard Sherwood (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), p. 46.
Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 16–18. Such anxieties are also manifest in responses to the literature of American expatriate writers, as Daniel Katz has demonstrated. Wyndham Lewis, for example, critiques Hemingway’s use (under the influence of Gertrude Stein) of an American vernacular which is being ‘debased’ through the impact of immigrant speech on the language (and whose potential influence on English language and letters Lewis also fears). Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 101–10.
As Jolas writes in 1933: ‘With this issue, transition enters upon a new policy of tri-lingual publication. The crisis of language is now going on in every part of the Occident. It seems, therefore, essential to retain the linguistic creative material intact, and to present constructive work, as much as possible, in the original.’ ‘Glossary’, transition, 22 (1933), 177.
See Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). As Yao writes, ‘The sheer abundance of translations produced during the period gives concrete, textual expression to interest on the part of Modernist writers, both in England and the United States, in foreign cultures and, most especially, languages as sources of both instruction and inspiration for renewing their own culture and expanding the possibilities of expression in English’ (p. 5).
Craig Monk, ‘Eugene Jolas and the Translation Policies of transition’, Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 32 (1999), 17–34.
See Eugene Jolas, ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, transition, 11 (1928), 109–16.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961), p. 67. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 80.
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 99–118.
Victor Llona, ‘Foreigners Writing in French’, transition, 2 (1927), 169–74 (p. 169).
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Werke Band I: Herder Und Der Sturm Und Drang 1764–1774 (München: Hanser, 1984), p. 81.
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster, trans. Michael N. Forster, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 50.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1919), p. 207.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation, ed. Gregory Moore, trans. Gregory Moore, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 166.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 68.
Emilie Morin notes the ‘conceptual proximity’ of the Irish Literary Revival ‘to nationalist projects in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe’, and writes that the Revival ‘is generally envisaged as a culturally orthodox, antimodern phenomenon, shaped by the nationalism of Yeats’s early writings […]. When issuing guidelines to Irish writers in the 1890s, Yeats associated the idea of a national literature with stylistic and thematic homogeneity, gradually imposing an understanding of Irish writing that was largely defined by its proximity to folk myth and legend.’ Revivalist writers, despite their differences, shared a ‘desire to find modes of representation through which the nation might be awakened to a sense of its own cultural specificity’. Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 25–6.
Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 10. See also ‘Logocinéma of the Frontierman’, a trilingual poem which expresses his own trilingual poetic development, but which ends with a nightmarish articulation of his ‘triwords’ as being in ‘chaosnight’. Eugene Jolas, ‘Logocinéma of the Frontierman’, transition, 23 (1935), 187–91.
As Robert Chodat has argued, languages in The Waste Land ‘stand […] as mutually exclusive, discrete, independent of one another’. Robert Chodat, ‘The Many Uses of Dialogue: Eliot, Stevens, and the Foreign Word’, English Language Notes, 41 (2004), 50–63 (p. 56).
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Wörter aus der Fremde’, in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 216–32.
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974), p. 81.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1971), p. 149. In later editions, Eliot deletes this judgement of the translation, describing the English phrase as ‘our equivalent to this word’. It is significant that Eliot, in this revised version, does not describe the English specifically as a translation at all.
Nico Israel, ‘Geography’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 128–9.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 22.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Joyce and “the Revolution of the Word”’, Scrutiny, 2 (1933), 193–201.
Unlike Eliot’s deliberate separation of languages as distinct shards and fragments, Joyce’s portmanteau idiom explores creolising processes and interlingual complementarity. As Derek Attridge puts it, the Wake ‘shatters any illusion that the systems of difference in language are fixed and sharply drawn’, and a significant aspect of this is a ‘blurring’ of ‘edges between languages, dialects, registers, idiolects’. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 204. Even as Joyce’s language emphasises plurality and difference, it brings languages together in harmony as well as discord. As Laurent Milesi has demonstrated, the ‘miscegenated portmanteau word […] aptly reconciles, as it were through a process of at-one-ment, estranged languages and cultures they represent into a localized, transcultural synthesis’. Laurent Milesi, ‘Joyce, Language and Languages’, in Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 144–61 (p. 154).
Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 77–8.
Jolas, ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’. This essay was republished in Samuel Beckett and others, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber, 1929).
Eugene Jolas and others, ‘Proclamation’, transition, 16/17 (1929), 13.
Eugene Jolas, ‘The King’s English Is Dying — Long Live the Great American Language’, transition, 19/20 (1930), 141–6 (p. 146).
Eugene Jolas, ‘Logos’, transition, 16/17 (1929), 25–30 (p. 28). Jolas celebrates American English in particular. He argues that ‘[i]n the crucible of the immense racial fusion of indigenous and immigrant America there is occurring today an astounding creation that ultimately will make the American language, because of its greater richness and pliancy and nearness to life, the successor of British English […] It is in the immigrant development of the new America that the possibilities for a fundamental revolution of the word are inherent.’ Jolas, ‘The King’s English Is Dying — Long Live the Great American Language’, p. 146.
Carola Giedon-Welcker, ‘Work in Progress: A Linguistic Experiment by James Joyce’, transition, trans. Eugene Jolas, 19/20 (1930), 174–83 (p. 179).
As Leonard Bloomfield wrote in 1933, ‘the creolized language has the status of an inferior dialect of the masters’ speech. It is subject to constant levelling-out and improvement in the direction of the latter.’ Cited in Lawrence Alan Rosenwald, Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 17.
Marjorie Perloff cites James’s warning to students at Bryn Mawr College that the new immigrants were turning the American language into ‘a mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises’ akin to ‘the grunting, the squealing, the barking, or the roaring of animals’. ‘“Logocinéma of the Frontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s Multilingual Poetics and Its Legacies’, in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 82–101 (p. 83).
Laurent Milesi (ed.), James Joyce and the Difference of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.
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© 2013 Juliette Taylor-Batty
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Taylor-Batty, J. (2013). Modernism and Babel. In: Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367969_2
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