<div dir="ltr"><h2 class="">What gets lost when English becomes the lingua franca of the Internet, and the world?</h2>
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By <a rel="author" href="http://www.slate.com/authors.katy_waldman.html">Katy Waldman</a>
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<figure class="" style="width:590px;display:block;margin:0px auto;float:none"> <img title="Illustration by Jon Chadurjian." alt="Illustration by Jon Chadurjian." src="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/books/2015/01/SBR/ILLOS/141216_BOOKS_Minae-illo.jpg.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge.jpg"> <p class="">Illustration by Jon Chadurjian.</p>
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<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0231163029/?tag=slatmaga-20"><strong><em>The Fall of Language in the Age of English</em></strong></a>,
by the Japanese novelist and scholar Minae Mizumura, has all the
ingredients of a rage-read. Indeed, when it was published in Japan in
2008, it <a target="_blank" href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/01/03/books/book-reviews/novelist-mizumura-fights-arrest-fall-japanese-literature/#.VK7cuWTF8fM">infuriated commentators</a>,
who dismissed Mizumura as “reactionary,” “jingoistic,” or “elitist” and
swarmed across Amazon deleting positive reviews. More than 65,000
copies have sold since then—which suggests the slender work’s declinist
soothsaying continues to touch a nerve. The book appears this month in
English (enemy territory!), where—if we Yanks could be trusted to read
something first penned in a non-Western tongue—it would likely inspire
more umbrage, more name-calling, more amorphous unease. The book’s basic
premise, developed in a sinuous line through seven chapters, is that
every language creates and nourishes untranslatable truths. Dominant
languages infuse their verities into the wider world, crowding out
alternative visions from more minor tongues. Linguistic asymmetry isn’t
new—over the past two centuries, Latin, classical Chinese, and French
each took a turn in the sun—but never has one language so completely
eclipsed the rest, Mizumura says, as today, in the age of the Internet,
with English.</p>
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<img src="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/Authors/katy_waldman-authorbio.png" alt="Katy Waldman" class="">
<span class="">Katy Waldman</span>
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<div class=""><p>Katy Waldman is <i><b>Slate</b></i>’s words correspondent. </p>
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<p>And have you heard? English is a tuneless, careless juggernaut!
English has a tendency to favor science over art, sound over image,
market value over intrinsic cultural worth. (For Chrissake, English
spawned <em><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/059035342X/?tag=slatmaga-20">Harry Potter</a></em>,
which Mizumura clearly wants to assign to everlasting torment in its
own circle of hell.) Her disdain—mostly implied, but sometimes explicit,
as when she describes Americans as “grown tall and stout on too many
hamburgers and French fries”—might lose Mizumura some Anglophone
readers. But it shouldn’t. Every writer need not love English, or
English speakers. And we might benefit from attending to the critiques
of someone who refuses to kiss the ring.</p>
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<p>You can find reasons to jump on the angry bandwagon: Mizumura’s tone <em>can</em>
sound disagreeably peevish, bitter, or despairing; she doesn’t bother
disguising her scorn for the United States; nor does she shrink from
dismissing the entire contemporary fiction scene in Japan as “just
juvenile.” (That last is what set off the initial batch of protests.)
But these critiques come to feel superficial in the face of the book’s
lucidity, erudition, and force.</p>
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<p>Mizumura’s first shrewd move is to start with a personal essay, which
puts the book’s center of gravity in a lyrical, literary space
somewhere above all the consequent salvos of angry scholarship. (Since <em>The Fall of Language </em>will
go on to tease apart “academic” and “novelistic” truths, reserving more
love and reverence for the latter, this is a wise call.) In “Under the
Blue Sky of Iowa,” she hangs a wreath of personal details on a monthlong
international writers’ conference. We learn of her addiction to Agatha
Christie audiobooks and her poor health—Mizumura suffers from “autonomic
dystonia,” and envisioned her Iowa stay as a “resort idyll” where “I
could … spend my days reading and walking … letting my mind and body
unwind in the tranquil flow of time.” Most importantly, she arrives at
the conference “with a hidden vow to keep my participation to a
minimum.” Isolating herself proves easier than expected, as few of the
writers speak comfortable English (and none have fluent Japanese). The
ghost of an allegory begins to emerge from Mizumura’s careful
descriptions of the blue sky, the yellowing leaves, the authors passing
each other wordlessly in the halls at night, unable to communicate. She
imagines them hunched over their computers, scoring thoughts to the
faint music of their own language. “I grew more and more haunted by the
idea that we might be a group of people headed for a downfall,” she
writes. The participants represent a prism of different tongues, but “in
the sense that we might be headed for a downfall, we were all the
same.”</p>
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<figure class="" style="width:300px"> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0231163029/?tag=slatmaga-20" target="_blank"><img title="150109_BOOKS_mizu16302_Front" alt="150109_BOOKS_mizu16302_Front" src="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/books/2015/01/SBR/COVERS/150109_BOOKS_mizu16302_Front.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg"></a>
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<p>Languages have materiality, Mizumura insists, and her personal
essay-cum-allegory lets the landscape of English letters hover like a
mirage above physical America. In Iowa “the view was not particularly
beautiful. There was none of the poetry one sees in scenes of the
countryside in American films.” Yet “turning to Chris [the program
director], I roused myself and said exactly what an American might say
at such a moment: ‘Beautiful day!’ ” Such are the dangers of a universal
language: Being in America, speaking “American,” Mizumura can utter
only “what an American might say,” even if that means lying about the
blighted prospect around her. In contrast, here is the author’s memory
of touching down in France: “Once I set foot in Paris, I was greeted
with boulevards shimmering with new leaves and skies gloriously
liberated from the dark of winter.”</p>
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<p>I mention France because the French language—all liberté and
illumination—is one of Mizumura’s sanctuaries, a spiritual alternative
to English. (It is also a scholarly alternative: Though she doesn’t
mention him outright, Mizumura, who studied French literature at Yale
during its Structuralist heyday, is clearly indebted to <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure">Ferdinand de Saussure</a>,
one of the first to propose that meaning arises from closed linguistic
systems. Saussure wrote in French.) Her family moved from Japan to New
York when she was 12, and she “stubbornly resisted getting along either
with the United States or the English language,” instead soaking in
French audiobooks on repeat in her room. What draws Mizumura to the
lingua franca of the Enlightenment is its beauty, but also its
predicament: Once the embodiment of the “soul of Europe,” a
standard-bearer for the humanities, the expressive Play-Doh for writers
like Voltaire and Diderot is now in the same lamentable position as
Japanese. Which is to say, French and Japanese speakers are confined to
the particular, while English speakers live in the universal.</p>
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<p>A writer writing in English can count on her words reaching people
all over the world, whether in translation or the original, but there’s
no guarantee English-speaking readers will ever encounter experiences
first framed in Japanese. Nor can bilingual writers just switch to
English: Even if the West does not seem “too far, psychologically as
well as geographically,” a sense of romance surrounds novels written in
the novelist’s mother tongue, making fiction formulated from a second
language less palatable. So, Mizumura concludes, non-English speakers
“can only participate passively in the universal temporality … they
cannot make their own voices heard.” Discouraged by the deafness of the
world—even as Internet fans sing about our increasing connectedness—they
might decide to stop writing altogether.</p>
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<p class="">The French language—all liberté and illumination—is one of Mizumura’s sanctuaries, a spiritual alternative to English.</p>
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<p>When writers stop writing in a language, that language decays. People
lose faith in its ability to bear the burden of their fine feeling and
entrust their most important thoughts elsewhere. Raging against the
decline of “lesser” lexicons, Mizumura is stressing more than the loss
of cultural artifacts, or the value of diversity for its own sake.
Non-dominant tongues must live on, she warns, because “those of us …
living in asymmetry are the only ones condemned to perpetually reflect
upon language, the only ones forced to know that the English language
cannot dictate ‘truths’ and that there are other ‘truths’ in this
world.” Buried in that argument is an oddly touching one about the
nature of literature: “The writer must see the language not as a
transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality,
but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.”</p>
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<p>I’m not sure if I share Mizumura’s pessimism regarding the transfer
of meaning between tongues—I’m no Saussurean, and while maybe our “rice”
can’t capture the mythical freight of the Japanese “ine,” I tend to
think sensitive and knowledgeable workarounds can go a long way. (For
example, Mizumura seems to underestimate the power of a good translator,
which is a shame given the lovely translation given her by Mari
Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter.) But I do believe that writers
should be wrestling with words, rather than deploying them
thoughtlessly. And I’m ready to stand behind any author who is (rudely,
furiously) urging us all to the mat.</p>
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<figure class="" style="width:300px"> <img title="Minae Mizumura." alt="Minae Mizumura." src="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/books/2015/01/SBR/AUTHORS/141216_BOOKS_Minae-Mizumura.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg"> <figcaption class=""><span>Minae Mizumura.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Some of the deepest pleasures in <em>The Fall of Language</em> lie in
Mizumura’s historical analysis. She attacks the (Western) premise that
written language merely represents spoken language, pointing out that
most people into modernity yelled at their kids in local dialect while
reading and writing (if they were literate) in an “external” tongue.
This “universal” language usually belonged to an older, grander
civilization, like Rome or classical China; to it were entrusted the
texts that embodied intellectual, aesthetic, or ethical excellence. Yet
as mass printing transformed books into commodities, the market for
works in the elite language was soon saturated. A cadre of bilinguals
began to translate them into the vernacular, devising grammar rules as
they went. With the glories of the “universal” libraries being gradually
emptied into these fledging tongues, the tongues themselves were
elevated. They began to circulate as something more—national
languages—suited not just to huge themes but to the fleeting dreams and
textures of everyday life. Mizumura traces how the myth of the “national
language,” a pure upwelling of political character, coincided with the
flowering of the nation-state—and, even more fascinatingly, of the novel
itself. To her, it is no coincidence that literature began to aim at
new forms of self-expression just as common people were developing an
argot that could swing from God to the gutter, and the written mediums
for scientific learning were growing more receptive to questions of
humanistic truth.</p>
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<p>At some point in all this, you realize: “Language” may be in the
book’s title, but Mizumura has really crafted a conservationist’s plea
for <em>literature</em>. Discussing the golden age of Japanese modernist fiction, she introduces us to Natsume Soseki, who penned the novel <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140455620/?tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Sanshiro</em></a><em> </em>in
1909, 41 years after the Meiji Restoration opened Japan to the West. In
an early scene, the naïve student Sanshiro meets a shabby man on a
university-bound train; he is Professor Hirota, a liberal arts scholar
specializing in English, and he informs Sanshiro that their homeland “is
headed for a fall.” Hirota, steeped in lettered arcana, knows all there
is to know about the Western canon. But his learning lies fallow—he
writes nothing, publishes nothing—and his houseboy calls him “the Great
Darkness” for his ability to absorb the splendors of English literature
without emitting any light of his own. The professor has failed the
Japanese language, of course, in ways that are painfully relevant to
Mizumura’s argument. But the author also weaves in a stray detail: that,
over the course of their conversation on the train, Hirota unfolds for
Sanshiro “the curious story of Leonardo da Vinci injecting arsenic into
the trunk of a peach tree experimentally, to see if the poison would
circulate to the fruit.” </p>
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<p class=""><span>Top Comment</span></p>
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Who says "It's a beautiful day" on a consistent basis? Who is forced into saying it here in the US? <a>More...</a>
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<p style="text-align:right">-DukeLaw</p>
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<p>I have no idea why Mizumura airdrops this quoted anecdote into her
book—the sentence ends and she never remarks on it again. Still, it’s
striking. As a description of a scientific investigation, the story
means one thing. As a capsule of literary truth—the kind of spectral
allegory Mizumura conjures with her opening essay—it feels almost
unbearably alive with import. Even without the Western interplay of
trees, wisdom, and death, Hirota’s “curious” tale—flowing here from
Europe to Japan to the United States—captures something real about
ambition, curiosity, courage, and cruelty; about alluring goals and
bitter aftertastes; about connection, circulation, and disjuncture. It
rewards a literary way of thinking one hundredfold. And I felt that, if
Mizumura is right that literature demands us to be conscious of the
particular language we’re manipulating, and that such consciousness
cannot exist without linguistic diversity, we should perhaps be devoting
more of our lives to protecting linguistic diversity. (Or
言語の多様性の保護に私たちの生活を捧げる.) As she writes, the same polyphonic jostle of
tongues that “condemns” us to “reflect perpetually upon language,” and
upon literature, has a singular power to leave us “humble, and mature,
and wise.” </p>
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<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0231163029/?tag=slatmaga-20"><strong><em>The Fall of Language in the Age of English</em></strong></a> by Minae Mizumura. Translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter. Columbia University Press.</p>
</div><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/01/minae_mizumura_s_the_fall_of_language_in_the_age_of_english_reviewed.html">http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/01/minae_mizumura_s_the_fall_of_language_in_the_age_of_english_reviewed.html</a><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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