Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)
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Introduction / Angela Flury and Hervé Regnauld
No theorization, inasmuch as it is produced in a
language, will be able to dominate the Babelian
performance.
—Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel”
<1> The idea of this issue is to consider the possibility of Babelian performances in the context of scholarly mediations on multilingual realities in translation. The idea came to me as I was reading John le Carré’s 2007 novel A Most Wanted Man. While generic conventions have long prescribed at least one polyglot character per spy novel—often the spy himself—le Carré goes out of his way to represent in his post-cold-war fiction the traffic in languages that the locale demands. Set in Hamburg amid the war on terrorism and the global traffic in capital in the first decade of the 21st century, the author’s obsessive signaling at every turn which language is spoken by and among the multilingual cast of characters who inhabit the metropolis—German, Turkish, English, Arabic, Russian, and Chechen—got me to imagine what a film adaptation of this English language novel would do with these incessant shifts in language, indicative of linguistic inadequacies as much as instrumental to the plotting. For a film, hypothetically, might be better equipped to represent the dialogue in various languages by resorting to subbing, the use of subtitles. This way of reading the novel as—at least as far as the dialogue is concerned—a series of subtitles would suggest that le Carré’s text is something like a simulated translation, evoking the specter of an original where there is none.
<2> The spectral luminosity of Ben Ulke’s photographic landscape “Turmbau zu Babel,” our cover image, renders the Babelian legacy, surrounded by rubble, graffiti on a wall, with a hazily distant towering structure leaning in the background, a game to be played. In “Des Tours de Babel,” Jacques Derrida asks “how a text written in several languages at a time [is] to be translated,” and, more generally, “how…the effect of plurality [is] to be ‘rendered’” (171). These questions are prompted by the sentence “And he war” in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The Germanized past tense of the verb “to be” is a play on entangled meanings (which include the English noun “war”), and while the phrase’s playfulness is high modernist, it can also be overheard as the quotidian blurting of a voice perhaps in momentary confusion. Or even as the utterance of multilingual drunken stupor. I was myself admittedly quite focused on multilingual realities in novelistic contexts before joining forces with Hervé, who helped make the call for papers a more expansive invitation for submissions. Our issue, like all multilingual realities, may be “reviewed as [a] kaleidoscopic formation,” to use contributor Eva Repouscou’s words.
<3> There are times when the urge to communicate in more than one language “at a time” is nearly irrepressible though not necessarily in the form of “And he war.” In A Most Wanted Man, le Carré, who studied and taught German, has a native German speaking character tell another “He speaks no word of German” (35). In other words, by rendering typical German syntax—Er spricht kein Wort Deutsch—into awkward English, it seems that Le Carré creates, intentionally or not, a hazy transparency that shows the multilingual traces of his single language novel. But one might object here that as long as the problem of multilingualism doesn’t become a problem for the reader (and “He speaks no word of German” is perfectly comprehensible, whereas “And he war” constitutes an idiomatic puzzle), it can hardly be said to be represented. It’s here that we might acknowledge the plight of the reader who cannot access the multilingualism of a text and reality and for whom the question why Walter Benjamin chose not to translate Mallarmé from French to German in his own work has more to with Benjamin’s expectations that his readers speak French than with anything else. This then is the necessity and the impossibility of translation: on the one hand, the text is sacred in the way it expresses the event of writing—therefore it should not be modified, or translated—on the other hand, the text has no meaning in itself but only because of its differences with other texts, especially when translated into another language.
<4> Quotidian utterances forming multilingual realities really are ubiquitous and common, if often underrepresented in the realm of fiction (the heteroglossic nature of novelistic discourse notwithstanding), and come closest perhaps to what as children we often sense as the meaning of Babel, namely, a fully dramatic, raucous cacophony where any differentiation among intralingual translation (understood as rewording in the same language), intersemiotic translation (for example, on word-picture flashcards so fundamental to learning writing), and translation proper (the translation that, Derrida proposes, needs no translation because “If there is transparency that Babel would not have impaired, this is surely it, the experience of the multiplicity of tongues and the ‘proper’ sense of the word ‘translation’”—174, my italics), is moot. Yet even in all of the noise that the people of Babel at a loss to be understood may produce, there is communication—however discordant—there is ingenuity, resourcefulness, in short, there is translation going on. It is the cacophony, in one’s Sunday school childhood often disparaged as the fitting punishment of God, that must be the basis for thinking of multilingual realities in translation. For cacophony and communication contain each other in the Derridean sense of a Babelian performance. That is to say, no single language exists: languages need to be many in order to exist. What Derrida writes about language is coincident with conceptualization. And the idea of a pure tongue is as tantalizing and empty as that of a pure concept. We need the go between, which for Derrida is designated by the neologism différance, difference as spacing and as temporal deferment. The "go between" is as much defined by empty space as by its idiomatic meaning of someone who facilitates a process by "minding the gap.”
<5> The tower of Babel exhibits the impossibility of totalizing something on the order of systems. Not surprisingly, visual representations of the Tower of Babel—famously by Pieter Bruegel the Elder—frequently show its precarious architecture, or, as Derrida would have it, “archi-écriture,” with its lack of structural integrity seeming on the verge of collapse. From the beginning, différance is cast in terms of a “puncept” (to use Gregory Ulmer’s neologism) with architecture. Bruegel’s paintings suggest that there is no possibility for anything like a structure to encompass all the languages, and therefore, arguably, there is no foundation for a science of human being, be it called anthropology or by any other name. For if words are like bricks, they fill in spaces, but the spacing of language occurred concurrently with the falling out of bricks, the solid tower of Babel, which always was at its limits, made jagged. Babel signifies the first myth to be deconstructed, namely, the myth of the “meaning.” No such thing may ever be thought of as common in an absolute sense.
<6> Hervé and I much appreciate the range of Babelian performances in the essays that follow. In yet another memorable multilingual utterance, “Ah come on, c’est mon journée off,” the( ironically nationalist) Quebecois speaker, suggests our contributor Heather Macdougall in her essay “Facing off: French and English in Bon Cop, Bad Cop,” simply uses every word “at his disposal.” John Muthyala’s essay “Call Center Cultures and the Transnationalization of Affective Labor” offers a thoughtfully critical and well-researched analysis of postmodern economics and identity in Indian call centers. Muthyala launches into his argumentation via Danny Boyle’s dramatization of call center culture in Slumdog Millionaire (2008). This popular film also features, along with other films, in DT Kofoed’s very original essay “Decotitles, the Animated Discourse of Fox's Recent Anglophonic Internationalism,” where he coins a neologism—decotitles—to suggest that the term “subtitles,” long embedded in a “subsidiary role,” is insufficient in capturing the “new aesthetic paradigm” of films like Boyle’s. Befittingly, we have one critical treatise of a high modernist text, Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood. In “The Spectropoetics of Trauma: Ghosts, Language, and the Wound in Nightwood,” Brad Baumgartner examines the illegibility of Barnes's text in terms of the translations that are always occurring between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. The multilingual signage of public spaces in a northern Mexican city, Guanajuato, is the subject of Karen Rodriguez’s essay “Mapping Desire and Transgression Through Other Languages: Sex and the (Occasionally Multilingual) Provincial City.” She, too, draws on psychoanalysis, in particular Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, and on linguistic landscape theory, to understand how signs and flyers as foreign language texts signify the irrepressible taboo in, paradoxically, their uncharacteristic permissiveness. Catalina Florina Florescu’s “Impossible Returns Through Joy Kogawa’s Novel Obasan addresses the difficult relationship between assimilation and translation, and the need to adjust. We avoid translating what we do not wish to adjust to. "Adjust," like différance and architecture, is a spatial term, and Florescu’s essay raises the question whether when we refuse to translate, we really adjust, or whether we ignore a part of the architectonic proliferations of culture only in order to create a maladjustment, because not to translate something is to set it aside (like a psychoanalytic repression) though it is still there, translated as untranslated, like a rock we might stumble over. Eva Repouscou brilliantly theorizes in “Untranslatable Realities” the impossible desire that is “the need to adjust the unknown to the standards of the familiar reality.” This is the need that occasions translation in all its forms as the Babelian performance, a performance that can simultaneously be conceived in terms of infinite lack and witnessed as infinite acts of communication.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. “Des Tours de Babel.” Transl. Joseph F. Graham. Difference in Translation.
Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 165-248.
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