Abstract
This chapter discusses “bilingual” literature and literary criticism on it, surging since the 1980s in Japan, which finally brought to the fore the notion of “mother-tongue.” While the surge may partially be in response to the rising global interest in literature beyond the national and linguistic boundaries, I try to demonstrate that such consciousness in Japan was evoked partially by the dissemination of the theory of transformational grammar. Further, the works of representative “bilingual” literati such as Tawada Yôko, Hideo Levy, Mizumura Minae, et al. are analyzed. Their access to the Chomskyan theory of a “native speaker” will be documented. In spite of their “exophonic” (outside the mother-tongue) problem consciousness, however, it will be pointed out that they have occasionally recuperated the linguistic (and hence national) boundaries and restored “language” as an ideological apparatus of a nation-state. I conclude the chapter by referring to more promising cases such as some works by Tawada Yôko, which present rich osmosis of varying linguistic paradigms, although her “exophonic” theory itself highlights and even essentializes the linguistic boundaries.
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Notes
- 1.
To be more exact, Hideo is Levy’s middle name, Ian being the first. The reprint of his translation of Man’yô shû (The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) was published in 1987 under the name Ian Hideo Levy. According to Cynthia Haven, Levy “left a tenured position as a Stanford prof to move to Tokyo” in 1990 (“Kotodama”). Levy’s debut novel (1992) was published under the name Hideo Levy. Apparently, after he moved to Japan, he dropped his American first name and turned his Japanese middle name into the first name to emphasize that he was half American, half Japanese (if not racially, at least, culturally).
- 2.
Or at least, this is the story we read in A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard. However, although many critics choose to view Levy’s novel as a kind of I-novels (shishôsetsu) (see, for instance, the postscript to Levy’s Broken, Broken into Thousands of Pieces by Numano Mitsuyoshi), given the paucity of biographical information on Levy , it is highly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in his works. Therefore, I am merely speaking of the lives of Hideo (Levy), Ben (the hero of A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard), and Henry (the hero of The Summer Travel Diary of Henry Takeshi Lewitsky), et al., equally as literary constructs.
- 3.
“The ship is farting” may be the more accurate (literal) translation.
- 4.
Nonce-borrowing is a use of foreign terms that are not integrated into the system of the host language at all. Intersentential code-switching is “switching between languages at sentence or clause boundaries”; intrasentential code-switching is “[s]witches within a clause involving a phrase, a single word or across morpheme boundaries” (Brown, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 512). Encyclopedia further explains that there are stages of borrowing from nonce-borrowing to the full borrowing: “[At the stage of nonce-borrowing] the word is not phonologically or morphologically integrated into the host language and its usage is more or less limited to bilinguals. Once a foreign word becomes part of the monolingual speech of a host language, most researchers agree that it has become part of the host language and hence a language borrowing. At this stage, the borrowed word will also show signs of adaptation to the morphology and phonology of the host language” (513). I argue, though, that there can never be complete integration or adaptation. A foreign word retains its extraneity at the last instance. A notion of “fully integrated single words that have been completely adapted to the host language phonology and morphology systems” (513; emphasis added) is an illusion. Incidentally, I have observed one intriguing linguistic phenomenon of dissymmetry of borrowing. When a speaker of English says in Japanese (even if he/she is a fluent speaker of Japanese): “Watashi wa Los Angeles kara kimashita (I came from Los Angeles),” he/she invariably pronounces “Los Angeles” in perfect English (except that, of course, “Los Angeles” itself is a loan word in English). He/she hardly ever utters it as “Rosanjerusu,” as a Japanese speaker would. In contrast, when a speaker of Japanese says in English: “I came from Toyama,” he/she will customarily utter “Toyama” as if pronounced by an English speaker: [təjá:mə]. Hideo Levy in A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard confirms my observation. The leader of the English conversation club mentioned Hiroshima, to pronounce which “he used the British pronunciation Hiro-SHEE-ma” (23). I have yet to determine whether this phenomenon is an expression of English Imperialism or not.
- 5.
Needless to say, that Japanese and English have different writing systems is instrumental.
- 6.
Such was the aspiration of French-English bilingual writer, Raymond Federman , described in Beaujour’s Alien Tongues: “Federman says that his ambition is to write a book—admittedly, totally unreadable—in which the two languages would come together in the same sentence” (198 [note 56]). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her provocative novel, Dictee (1982), demonstrated such an unintelligible multilingual hodgepodge without any translation or notes. Incomprehensibility of this kind, however, disappears if the reader is also a bilingual or a polyglot thereof. In the linguistic studies of bilingual enunciations, it is invariably the case that the listener (the receiver or the decoder) of them is a bilingual of the languages involved. Both in the linguistic and literary studies of bilingualism we should be paying more attention to the role of the decoders in realizing the bilingual formulation of an enunciation/text. When a zainichi writer inserts a Korean word/phrase into his/her literary text in Japanese, the act has a political, literary and, possibly, linguistic significance, which will be received as such by a zainichi reader. But when that text is read by a Japanese without the knowledge of Korean, the reception may be a simple case of (nonce-)borrowing , where an alien linguistic element is introduced without interfering with the grammatical or lexicographical system of Japanese, producing merely exoticism. True bilingualism, however, may start with such a scene of incomprehensibility.
- 7.
That his (biological) mother was a Pole does not seem to have given him familiarity with yet another language; Polish. One is inclined to think that Levy does not know Polish. In The Summer Travel Diary of Henry Takeshi Lewitsky. Levy transliterates Lewitsky as レウィツキー, that is, with a long vowel [i] at the end as if this is a Russian name, not Polish. Levy is probably familiar with Russian names through the reading of Russian literature, but not with Polish.
- 8.
This is, of course, quite a common story for Jewish people. One is reminded, for instance, of Anton Rubinstein , who said: “Jews regard me as a Christian; Christians, a Jew; Classists, Wagnerian; Wagnerian, a Classist; Russians, a German; Germans, a Russian” (Kavos-Dekhtereva 136–7). Or we may think of Joseph Brodsky’s description of himself as “a Russian poet, an English essayist – and of course, an American citizen” (Haven ix). (In a different version, Brodsky was asked at the Stockholm airport before the Nobel Prize ceremony: “You are an American citizen, living in America, and also a Russian poet, receiving the Nobel Prize for your poems in Russian. Who in truth are you?” to which he simply answered, “I am Jewish” [Markish 207]). But then again, it can happen to anyone, not just a Jew. Concerning Austen Henry Layard, the discoverer of Nineveh: “Europeans took him for an Arab, Arabs took him for a Turk, and Turks took him for a Kurd” (Damrosch 49).
- 9.
This is, actually, an important “fact” that coincides with the author Hideo Levy’s autobiographical information, according to which neither Hideo nor Henry is a Jew, strictly speaking, since Jewishness is determined by the maternal line.
- 10.
Note that “They became” (both here and in the previous quote) is written in English in the original text of the novel. I will return to the significance of the choice of a language used to describe certain things in this work.
- 11.
“Bilingual ” in the conventional sense, at least, in terms of form (bilingual edition). That is to say, all the poems are given both in Japanese and German versions. Which version is the original and which is the translation is not clear.
- 12.
Although this term appears to be commonplace at the first glance, Japanese people, it seems, do not use it for some reason. There do exist, however, terms: Northern Japan, Eastern Japan, and Western Japan.
- 13.
With Tawada the distinction between a novel and an essay or between fiction and non-fiction is sometimes difficult to make. The “novel,” The Nun and Cupid’s Arrow, which we discussed above, is narrated by a Japanese writer living in Germany and, thus, appears to be based on some experience from Tawada ’s real life.
- 14.
There are several hypotheses as to the true etymology of kokeshi as a Japanese word, none of which is familiar to a speaker of Japanese. According to one of them, kokeshi is derived from ko (small) keshi (poppy) (Shôgakkan’s the Great Japanese Dictionary).
- 15.
The date of coming to the dominance of the school of transformational grammar in the English Language Teaching in Japan is difficult to determine with exactitude. In 1971, Yasui Minoru published New Dictionary of Linguistics (Shin gengo gaku jiten). In the preface, Yasui states that the title should rather be read as Dictionary of New Linguistics and that by “New Linguistics” transformational grammar is implied (v). The publishing of a dictionary of linguistics which, in essence, features Chomskyan linguistics suggests the decisive significance of this theory in linguistic circles at the moment of publication.
- 16.
“With the advent of the ‘Chomskyan revolution’ in linguistics, language was redefined as ‘a set of sentences,’ grammar as ‘a system of rules that … assigns structural descriptions to sentences,’ and the goal of linguistic theory as accounting for the knowledge that native speakers have of their language” (Painter 3).
- 17.
In Exophony Tawada gives a slightly different version of the story: “When I listen to various voices and various languages, coming from the [audio] speakers, I sometimes remember the word, ‘native speaker .’ /Occasionally, it was suggested that ‘we should listen to the pronunciation of a native speaker’ during the English classes at junior high school and high school in Japan. The voice of a native speaker always came from the [audio] speakers. For me, a native speaker was a speaker as a machine” (73).
- 18.
According to George Steiner , Chomsky is aware of this theoretical problem of his and is attempting to mend it: “In recent papers, Chomsky himself has been modifying his standard theory. He now allows that rules of semantic interpretation must operate on surface structure as well as deep structures. He is also prepared to shift key morphological phenomena from the grammatical model, whose power may have been exaggerated, to the lexicon” (496 [note 1]). Hasumi Shigehiko, in his Against Japanese, although apparently seeking a way to deconstruct Western phonocentrism, voices a (proto-Chomskyan) belief that lexicon has nothing to do with language: “Whether we see that structural system [of language] from the aspect of langage as something universal to mankind or from the perspective of its practice, the shifts in the ‘meanings’ or ‘pronunciation’ of ‘words’ do not change the structural system that is language” (278).
- 19.
BEI WEIN UND VERLORENHEIT, bei
beider Neige:
ich ritt durch den Schnee, hörst du,
ich ritt Gott in die Ferne – die Nähe, er sang,
es war
unser letzter Ritt über
die Menschen-Hürden … (1: 213).
- 20.
Or “rule-oriented,” perhaps. Chomsky is not particularly interested in “grammar” in its traditional sense.
- 21.
One example of this is the use of idiomatic or proverbial phrases (which, incidentally, Matsumoto cites as a criterion for native-ness, as we saw above). In Murderous Intent for Dropping of “Ra” Mr. Ebina, who believes that a “proper Japanese (person)” should only use “proper Japanese (language)” (19), is also upset when his colleague mistakenly uses the idiomatic phrase “inu mo arukeba bô ni ataru (a dog may hit on a stick on the street)” not in the dictionary sense of “one is bound to meet misfortune in attempting something” but in that of “an unexpected good fortune” (73–4). (We will discuss this play in more detail in the next chapter.)
- 22.
Needless to say, this democracy is very much akin to the kind of democracy founded on the basis of illusionary “equality” that the linguistic apparatuses of the concept of “mother-tongue ” and vernacularization (gembun-itchi ) instanced, something that the political program of nation(-state) required.
- 23.
It remains my future task to examine Tawada’s recent exploration in the Russian language, observed, for instance, in Yuki no renshûsei (self-translated as Etüden im Schnee).
- 24.
I am using this term here in a looser sense than that of Holliday which I quoted in Chapter 3, that is, in the sense of the reified valorization of native-ness of a speaker.
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Yokota-Murakami, T. (2018). Contemporary Bilingual/Exophonic Writers and Their Politics. In: Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8512-3_6
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