Monica Gheţ

 

 

THE „BODY” OF LANGUAGES

(FACES OF IDENTITY VS. MONOCULTURED MULTICULTURALISM)

 

               

 

Someone belonging to a linguistic minority once said: “Without my identity, I don’t exist.” – more exactly meaning (experiences and papers on the subject prove it) that he cannot recognize his conscious, active ego outside the language and habits shaped within the historicity – historialité, Geschichtlich- (keit) (– in Gerard Granel’s distinctions following Heidegger’s – “à savoir qu’il n’y a pas d’historialité pour les humanites qui ne s’inscrivent pas dans l’histoire de l’Etre.”) as well as the history of his community. This is nothing but comman belief with populations of Central and Eastern Europe. Opposed to it, here goes another “ideological” position teaching students of advanced studies in European Universities that gender is mere convention – that is, being a man or a woman should be considered a “convention”, which may whenever be easily corrected. In other words, we face here a situation similar to the well known English joke: when the customer asks for a coffee (in England, naturally…), the waiter brings a dark coloured liquid in a cup; the customer asks if it is tea or coffee: “Can’t you tell the difference?” says the waiter. “No” answers the man at the table. “So, what does it matter” replies the waiter.

                Further on, we are told (customs’ instructions, not made public) that a person is allowed to have as many passports as he/ she pleases. Id est, the person can be the citizen of numerous states, if he/ she so chooses. A condition valuable even in Ceauşescu’s Romania. What officials of those days omitted to mention was that they were supposed to share the same ideology. Nobody dared to ask if, the other way round, a Romanian citizen could really become the citizen of several states – no such examples were given concerning Romanians of the time. To continue our question on identity, older days are plainly illustrating the ambiguity of the case: empires always used more than one language: there was the language of the administration, and a considerable number of the inhabitant populations’ idioms. Thus, Jews, Greeks a.s.o. were first identified as Roman citizens, only in second place members of their particular community – a religious less than a linguistic one. An aspect perpetuated during the centuries of Christian “sovereignty”, before the split of the Church, where Latin was dominant both in clerical and educational/ scientific activities. Furthermore, populations inhabiting kingdoms of the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, till the Reformation and even later were identified by their affiliation/ belonging to a religion or another. This proves the ongoing confusion around the historic character Matei Corvin (Matias Rex) – claimed by both Romanians and Hungarians, whilst he was indeed a valach nobleman, not yet a Romanian, for there didn’t exist a state of Romanian authority, but his Catholic religion as well as his social power and position favored his well known historic identity.

                A totally different situation aroused during the XIX-th century by the creation of nation-states following the Volksgeist ideology, and drew upon a revival of the Babel myth in the post-colonial 20th century. The modern languages we know are refined forms of the Word belonging to the outgrowth of national languages. Some territories didn’t have to wait so long. Take as an example Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare above all.

                Such examples are meant to lead us towards nowadays painful question: are we endowed with an assuring identity according to our citizenship, educational language etc., when multiculturalism is declared an official reality? And, what happens if as good post-modern Europeans or Americans we are trained to become polyglots. George Steiner developed the subject in After Babel, just to multiply the already given confusion. He was like some of us thought to communicate in three or four “native languages”. Which and why was one of them recognised as first, second or third ? “What language am I, suis-je, bin ich or sunt eu ? Steiner himself encounters difficulties in offering an answer. The examples he produces are poets’ and novelists’ obliged to defect their native country. A most brilliant name among them, Vladimir Nabokov as he can be read in Speak Memory or the novel Ada. Steiner tries his exquisite talents in impressive but bleak demonstrations, perfectly aware they are not satisfying enough. To begin with we should state that not only in After Babel, but also in other of his writings George Steiner considers each language the expression of human uniqueness. Even more, he accuses some of the famous linguistic schools (Moscow’s and the one in Prague) of ignoring the very essence of literature by searching criteria of “objectivism”, although such criteria don’t operate in fictional literature. The best he can do is to quote Jean Paulhan and Merleau-Ponty in order to distinguish the work of the mind from the words covering it. Thus, with Paulhan the reality of thinking would be previous or exterior to words. A reality which Paul Ricoeur called the “eternity” of our thinking reference. More precisely, we use past and future tenses rather as  conventions of our present mind, in its attempt to control reality. A suitable illustration of this, says George Steiner, seems to be the use of tenses (with significant anthropological meanings) regarding sexual equality and implied in the use of our verbs, compared to Semitic languages, not indicating the gender of the action. Quite a paradox, if considered the much claimed discrimination of women in those cultures…Taking Proust as a literary witness, Steiner, after a short exposé devoted to the refined, unique forms of past tenses recognisable in A La recherche du temps perdu, concludes that no matter of the tenses in use, memory functions only like a present act. And furthermore, God’s tense (Time) is an perennial, extraterritorial Present. In this respect, future-telling as bases of future tenses/ projects are rather close to madness, for we know what follows certain actions, nevertheless are still thrilled by their fulfillment. A first consequence of this cruel issue is art’s representations. So goes our attachment to metaphysics, religion, ethics, etc. as means of our denial of truth. For the frame is not comprising morality but techniques of survival. In Steiner’s opinion, only an almost insignificant percentage of the human language is genuinely informative, trivially said, reliable. All the rest goes with creating/ inventing of our world and ourselves, because each individual language accumulates the information of it’s community, builds a wall against the surrounding environment, in a secret code/ realm invented for its subjects alone. So poetry “concentrates” energies with no respect for routine or conventions, finally modelating that language. That’s probably how rather recent languages get numerous poets to shape it, while traditionally, rather “crystallized” expressions of culture prefer to ignore them. And last but not least Steiner concludes that “language is a constant creation of alternative worlds”, for “there are no limits imposed to modeling forces of the word” finally producing “ambiguity, polysemia, opacity, the violation of grammatical and logical bounds.”

                But one question doesn’t get a proper answer, not even in Steiner’s remarkable work, which after all is build around the semantics of translations: what if I speak a certain language? Does it change my way of thinking, does it shift to the very memoirs/ references of that given language ? Do I become through its use the exponent of that particular background ? Does my English make me more British or American than French, Romanian, Italian and so on ? The kernel of a possible response is already recognisable in Steiner’s appeal to the previous, exterior “work” of human thinking he draws from Paulhan and Merleau-Ponty. In this respect we may legitimately ask to what language, culture do belong Paul Celan, Beckett, Cioran, Nabokov, Kundera, Culianu etc. Are they mental issues of the so called “openness”, demolished with credible arguments by Allan Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind), or do they carry on their “prejudices” through the languages they got used to write in? For all of them are obviously not the cultural “breed” of the languages they wrote in and brought them fame.

                Before venturing an explanation let us find out an inevitably simplified version of the common perception of multiculturalism. This enterprise reaches a sense when compared to interculturalism, for both concepts are valid. In the 20th century intercultural process we should first identify the effects of national state’s secularism, since culture had already become those days the substitute of no longer satisfying demands set to religion. (Allan Bloom, Berdiaev) The announcements of which were already quite clearly stated by the Enlightenment, but less admitted as such. Anyway, with Nietzsche’s famous statement: “God is dead”, habits of European thinking could no longer stay the same. And it is somehow relevant to see that the period of massive emigration to America is contemporary to this “discovery”, so into the New World where God wasn’t late in getting transferred from the Book (Bible) to the dollar bill. But, looking back to intercultural interferences proper to the birth of national-states, and following the discourse of Remi Brague (Europe la voie romaine, Paris, 1992) and of Claude Karnoouh’s analyses (Un logos fără ethos), we reach the astonishing conclusion showing us that “those were the days” (the XIX-th century) of the supreme profit of European intercultural “fertility”, allowing people to compete with their cultural legacy – in other words, get mutually stimulated. Bur also to achieve a level of standardisation, mostly visible after the First World War. What first appeared a benign influence of habits, religions, traditions, within different state-languages, was overcome by the imperatives of modern economic facilities: a larger comfort, a superior welfare and, finally, meant the cultural and political standardization of the Eastern and Western areas. On the other hand, and opposed to the general belief, multiculturalism, as a recent trend – also called an effect of affirmative action, proves to divide the general rules of “surviving welfare”. “Multiculturalism”, apparently “the smiling face of the <global village>, as Claude Karnoouh puts it, is nothing but the climax of economic and linguistic way of standardization. Matching very well the necessities of productive potentialities, among other things.

                But what created the invention of such a concept? The origins of “multiculturalism” are met in the multiple forms of “affirmative actions”, belonging to once rejected or unfavoured groups: of race, ethnic, religious, physical ability, gender, and especially language – obviously indicating a different community of culture from the privileged, leading one. The perverse effects of the overcoming “melting pot” didn’t tire to show their poison. The logical consequences that “immigration countries” had to envisage from the beginning, and which are now in full show points to the vulnerability of democracy all over the world, whether we like it or not. For those people (immigrants) had to be, and were aware about the “federal” laws of their new existence: a common language, no matter of their ethnic diversity. Id est the culture belonging to the adoption state is always opposed to their original culture and the institutions representing it. Kymlicka, for instance would accept their claims of preserving specificity, but underlines the common sense, an evidence helping them to participate in the competition of “values”. In this field most interpreters mix up multiculturalism with interculturalism. Perfectly aware that I am r oversimplifying the problem, a hot going on contemporary debate, I dare say that no country, state-nation (especially not the Federal Nation of USA) has ever officialized at the present moment, several state languages. Traffic or flight indicators, announcement made in English and Spanish, or Romanian and Hungarian and sometimes German for Central- Eastern Europe,) are ironically irrelevant (see the case of France, including Corsica). Take as an example the completely absence of the German community, once at the very roots of urban Transylvanian civilization. No matter how many section of German the University would invent, Germans won’t be brought back. Finally, multiculturalism is a covering story for the reservation type of preserving communities within monocultural and linguistic social/ state dominance which need their cooperation, all tuning well in the choir of the European Union, or the Overseas English language speaking countries. All this is nothing but to prove an overwhelming monoculturalism at work from “Alaska to the Don”.

                For most members of other communities, that is not belonging to the official language community, such a “forced” shift from a language to another is traumatizing or creates frustrations, although, they were initially supposed to assume the consequences of emigration, including the use of the new language. Still, this is particularly true for people living within new shaped frontiers. Central and Eastern Europe offer dramatic examples, far from being solved. The common opinion judges writing in another language (in the official language, for instance) as a betrayal of one’s original identity. Thus meaning: keep your language, or you are “lost”. In other words, your personal process of thinking has to observe a specific language and no other. A “rule” which education in the world today no longer favours. On the contrary, learning the best you can a widely spoken modern language has become a prime condition of professional and social promotion. The same stands for the United States, where English must be well known as a first step of social recognition. Not including those willing to “change” their identity – a legitimate individual right, as they say – the perception of the “silent majority” of other linguistic communities doesn’t seem to be at ease. Nowhere.

But there is one “privileged” category, indeed, a very small number of artists who proved able to “save their souls”. Naturally, they are exceptions hard to follow. Coming back to the creative personalities, like the ones mentioned above, what have they to do with this “global” – not only linguistic – “village” ? May be here is the place of a possible answer to the transnational artists of the word (not many, but of major significance) who cared enough about their traditions to “dress” them in the “clothes” of another expression, or simply to recreate them by ironical identity (fake identity). This all is true with Kundera, Eugen Ionesco, Cioran, Beckett, Nabokov, more recently, Andre Makine, Anne Wiazemski, and others. However brilliant the language of their work in French or English, they are not considered exclusively French or English authors. Their “background” covers much of the anxieties of the “village” we share.

                What is certainly accepted is that after Freud, as Rorty’s brilliantly demonstrates, imagination remains the only faculty of expression. An if so, the language it uses is of no importance, as long as freely chosen. Two literary artists of the XX-th century: Joyce and Nabokov fully shaped this anxiety of the “alienated” word. Joyce proved it in Finnegan’s Wake and Nabokov quite successfully tried the same in Ada. Exaggerating, we might say: “the rest is silence”. Stage directors like Peter Brook, Andrei Şerban or Silviu Purcărete have made visible on stage their own intuition on the subject, where few words support the image story. The same goes for the great cinema we witnessed in the XX-th century.

Still, words continue to be written in as many languages we care to preserve, while personal and cultural identities are no longer the same they used to be.