Multilingualism and Minor Languages

In writing Finnegans Wake Joyce exploited to the full the possibilities of multilingualism. No writer after him has drawn so extensively on the world's languages, but some have found a resource in the freedom to move between one language and another. Sometimes this switching occurs without comment, as in Cormac McCarthy's use of Spanish in many of his novels or the occurrence of Dutch and English in some Afrikaans novels (to be discussed in the following chapter), but occasionally it becomes part of the thematic point of the work. One such novel is W. F. Hermans’ 1966 novel Nooit meer slapen, one of the best-known Dutch novels of the second half of the twentieth century, a staple in Dutch classrooms and a work that has been widely translated. The English translation, under the title Beyond Sleep, is by Ina Rilke.

The conceptualisation of singularity that I have sketched in earlier chapters is a response to the distinctiveness among all human productions of the making and receiving of art, and to its non-instrumental relation to human actions. But unlike most versions of the autonomy of the artwork, an emphasis on singularity recognises the inseparability of the work of art from its contexts of production and reception, and the freedom it implies is not a freedom from the constraints of economics, politics, culture, or society but rather an ability to exploit those constraints as resources to enable what they occlude to be heard and seen.

One of the most important contexts within which the singular work is constituted is language: the particular language a writer uses brings with it a host of resonances and implications, including its ethical and political resonances and the implications arising from its role in the power relations that necessarily operate in relation to other languages (and, behind languages, cultures). This fact alone prevents the literary work from having impermeable boundaries; it's always engaged, overtly or covertly, with the larger world of linguistic relations. A work in a minor language may seem to ignore the major languages of the world, but in so doing makes a claim about the relationship between them; and if the work is translated into a major language (with or without the author's involvement) the relationship becomes all the more evident.