Excerpt from Literature in Late Monolingualism by David Gramling
It took me decades to name the hunch that led me to write this book. Obvious enough as it was all along, it was also elusive, even embarrassing. Meir Sternberg (1981) had spotted the awkward problem well enough some forty years ago, in his article on “Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis,” but he’d been a bit too polite to name it squarely. My own belated stance now reflects a kind of bless-and-release admission, after decades of insisting otherwise. Namely, I’ve found that the contemporary novel in a European mold may just not be ergonomically all that well-suited to worldly multilingualism after all—at least, significantly less so than are film, video, music, theatre, audiobooks, radio plays, podcasts, and other bi-graphic creative formats.
Such is not the mere argument of this book. But it is surely this vein of recognition that first jarred, and then burnished, much of the thinking and feeling about literature (the sentipensamiento about it, Fals Borda 2009) that comes across in these pages, and in the novels (by Tidbeck, Nors, Miéville, and Stephenson) to which its chapters are devoted. As for my own delay in facing up to this disappointing unmutuality between the novel and multilingualism—two objects of study that I truly love, and love to think about—blame may have lain all along in a gross category error of my own.
Throughout my early training, many luminous people in the research fields I aimed to join seemed assured that the relation between literature and multilingualism had to enjoy a kind of Most Favored Nation status, treasured if sometimes complicated. In 2020, no less than the Modern Language Association—most of whose assembled attendees are contracted to teach monolingual literatures and languages in monolingually named academic departments like “Spanish and Portuguese” or “English Languages and Literatures”—announced multilingualism as the umbrella theme for its massive annual convention. Conferences, seminars, journals, and calls for papers heralded this relation as a kind of epic win on the horizon, presuming multilingual literature to be both an epitome and a belated birthright of the humanities—in the academic realm and in the trade publishing industry alike. That shimmering, assonant relation “multilingual literature” felt like a magical just-in-time key—poised to open for us literary scholars a menacing lock, at just the historical, geopolitical, disciplinary, and post-Theory moment when we’d begun rummaging around for its like amid the bludgeoning fuzz of neoliberal globalization’s “monolingual international” (Anderson and Donato 2015).
But—I found myself thinking in the midst of this all—what if there was just something about the modern and contemporary novel, in the major publishing houses’ Eurogenic mold, that would routinely betray this promise of inclusivity, applicability, and ecumenical convergence, precisely when it came to the matter of linguistic multiplicity? Put bluntly, what if published literature (and the Eurocentric novel in particular) was, on the evidence, just too ideologically and formally monolingual to champion the multilingual world in any kind of credible way?
Worse, what if “the novel,” as a conventionalized format, was exponentially more monolingual in its idioms, timbres, discourses, disseminations, and orthographies than was everyday social life in the vast majority of the world? And if, gods forbid, the hunt for multilingualism-in-literature had therefore to be set aside pending an investigation, what sort of role would be left for literary criticism, and for literature, amid all the talk of multilingualism across the disciplines?
These are not quite my anxieties anymore, nor those of this book. But they amount to what has been an interestingly indicative problem over the last thirty years in the humanities, since literary publishing really went transnational. And yet, the proposition that multilingualism and literature are not now on the same team (and likely haven’t been for several centuries at least) still tends to prompt more irritation than insight. There might seem to be a presumed line of thinking here that promotes multilingual literature as essentially and politically better literature. The truth is that I love monolingual novels. I chase them with deep and needful appreciation. I translate them passionately, and even try to write them. I do not wish for monolingual novels to disappear summarily in a pyrrhic moment of critical renunciation.
Rather, I want monolingual novels to be better able to share the road—the literary traffic in meaning (i.e., the infrastructures of meaningful uptake and dissemination, Pratt 2002, Yeager 2007)—with texts that translanguage and resile linguistically in many of the everyday, unbridled, and virtuosic ways that the peopled world already quite capably does and desires to do (Li Wei 2016). I am worried why multilingual literature has not yet garnered a sturdy lane in which to emerge in commerce as “better literature” too, crowded out as I see it being by certain economies of monolingual overproduction, translational austerity regimes (see Chapter Two on Dorthe Nors), and low expectations about readerly pleasure and comprehension. The ongoing occlusion of multilingual literariness , and multilingual aesthetics generally, has never resulted from absent public demand, just insufficiently effective demand—the difference being one of late capitalism’s lasting tragedies.
For novels are always, among other things, powerful idealizations about human communication and human being. Whatever one’s critical orientation may be, we cannot sidestep the fact that novels project a durably immersive world of meaning and meaningfulness, of sense and senselessness, which in each case intends to solicit our desire, our ambivalence, and our eventual amplification through conversations with our friends. Like good conversations, novels are, at their best, “visions of sanity” for us (Tannen 1981). Overproducing monolingual projections of the world, through novels, will thus reliably constrain and skew what count as plausible and desirable forms of meaning-making socially. The monolingual metaform of the Eurocentric novel can socialize us into harsh and unnecessary foreclosures about what kinds and combinations of language(s) are and are not eligible for meaningfulness and credibility, even in nonliterary arenas of social practice .
In the end, Literature in Late Monolingualism is the result of a humbling and meandering process of mid-career unlearning for me as a literary scholar, literary translator, applied linguist, mid-level academic administrator, and language(s) teacher. It is about what happened when I stopped trying so hard to set up ill-advised blind dates between literary novels and social multilingualism, between literary studies and multilingualism studies, or even between translation and multilingualism—each being a venerable pair of things whose profiles never quite suggested an easy date in the first place. The result, as we shall see in the novels taken up in the following chapters, turns out to be a pretty racy and hopeful story.
David Gramling is Professor and Department Head for Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. They are the author, editor, or translator of eight books, including The Invention of Multilingualism (2021) and The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016), which was awarded the American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018.