by Paul Auster
I have been reading Jacques Derrida’s little book on the mother tongue (Monolingualism of the Other, 1996). Some of it is high theorizing, some quite autobiographical, about Derrida’s relations with language as a child born into the Jewish-French or Jewish French or French-speaking Jewish community in Algeria in the 1930s. (He reminds us that French citizens of Jewish inheritance were stripped of their citizenship by Vichy, and were therefore in fact stateless for several years.)
What interests me is Derrida’s claim that, though he is/was monolingual in French (monolingual by his own standards—his English was excellent, as, I am sure, was his German, to say nothing of his Greek), French is/was not his mother tongue. When I read this it struck me that he could have been writing about me and my relation to English; and a day later it struck me further that neither he nor I is exceptional, that many writers and intellectuals have a removed or interrogative relation to the language they speak and write, in fact that referring to the language one uses as one’s mother tongue (langue maternelle) has become distinctly old-fashioned.
So when Derrida writes that, though he loves the French language and is a stickler for correct French, it does not belong to him, is not “his,” I am reminded of my own experience of English, particularly in childhood. English was to me simply one of my list of school subjects. In senior school the list was English-Afrikaans-Latin-Mathematics-History-Geography, and English happened to be a subject I was good at, Geography a subject I was bad at. It never occurred to me to think that I was good at English because English was “my” language; it certainly never occurred to me to inquire how one could be bad at English if English was one’s mother tongue (decades later, after I had become, of all things, a professor of English, and begun to reflect a little on the history of my discipline, I did ask myself what it could possibly mean to make English into an academic subject in an English-speaking country).
Insofar as I can recover my childhood way of thinking, I thought of the English language as the property of the English, people who lived in England but who had also sent out members of their tribe to live in and, for a while, rule over South Africa. The English made up the rules of English as they whimsically chose, including the pragmatic rules (in what situations you had to use what English locutions); people like myself followed at a distance and behaved as instructed. Being good at English was as inexplicable as being bad at geography. It was some quirk of character, of mental makeup.
When at the age of twenty-one I went to live in England, it was with an attitude toward the language that now seems to me exceedingly odd. On the one hand I was pretty sure that by textbook standards I could speak, or at least write, the language better than most of the natives. On the other hand, as soon as I opened my mouth I betrayed myself as a foreigner, that is to say, someone who by definition could not know the language as well as the natives.
I resolved this paradox by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge. I told myself that I knew English in the same way that Erasmus knew Latin, out of books; whereas the people all around me knew the language “in their bones.” It was their mother tongue as it was not mine; they had imbibed it with their mothers’ milk, I had not.
Of course to a linguist, and particularly to a linguist in the Chomskyan line, my attitude was completely wrongheaded. The language that you internalize during your receptive early years is your mother tongue, and that is that.
As Derrida remarks, how can one ever conceive of a language as one’s own? English may not after all be the property of the English of England, but it is certainly not my property. Language is always the language of the other. Wandering into language is always a trespass. And how much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls from your pen echoes of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before you!
All the best,
John
May 11, 2009
Dear John,
Thank you for yesterday’s fax. I feel that we have finally hit upon a workable system. A slow letter across the seas from America to Australia and then a quick, electronic transmission of paper from a room in a house in Adelaide to a room in a house in Brooklyn.
The conversation about sports might well be coming to an end, but the question about why no new games have taken hold for so many years is a good one, something, I frankly confess, it has never occurred to me to ask. You mention England and the end of the nineteenth century, but the same applies to America as well. The first professional baseball team was created in 1869, which was the same year that Princeton and Rutgers played the first intercollegiate football match. The only exception I can think of is basketball, which wasn’t invented until 1891 and didn’t become popular until forty years later when a rules change eliminated the center jump after each basket and speeded up the tempo of the game. Now basketball is played in every country of the world, and just as England no longer owns cricket and soccer, America no longer owns basketball. Case in point: two or three years ago, an overpaid, overconfident American national team lost to Greece in the semifinal of the world championship.
But essentially you are right. Nothing new has made an impact for generations. When you think about how quickly various technologies have altered daily life (trains, cars, airplanes, movies, radios, televisions, computers), the intractability of sports is at first glance mystifying. There has to be a reason for it, though, and the answer that leaps to mind is that, once codified, sports cease to be inventions and turn into institutions. Institutions exist to perpetuate themselves, and the only way they can be eliminated is through revolution. So much is at stake now in professional sports, so much money is involved, there is so much profit to be gained by fielding a successful team that the men who control soccer, basketball, and all other major sports are as powerful as the heads of the largest corporations, the heads of governments. There is simply no room to introduce a new game. The market is saturated, and the games that already exist have become monopolies that will do everything possible to crush any upstart competitor. That doesn’t mean that people don’t invent new games (children do it every day), but children don’t have the wherewithal to launch multi-million-dollar commercial enterprises.
About twenty years ago, I was watching the evening news, and a story came on about a small town somewhere in the south whose board of education—because of budget difficulties, I think—had decided to dispense with the teaching of foreign languages. A number of local citizens were interviewed on camera and asked to give their reactions to this new development, and one man said—and this is an exact quote; his words burned themselves into my brain and have been lodged there ever since—: “I have no problem with it, no problem at all. If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”
Stupid and disturbing as that comment might be (and hilarious, too, of course), it seems to touch on something essential about the idea of a mother tongue. You are so thoroughly impregnated by your own language, your sense of the world is so deeply formed by the language you speak, that anyone who does not speak as you do is considered a barbarian—or, conversely, it is inconceivable to you that the son of God could have spoken a language other than your own, for he is the world, and the world exists in one language only, the one that happens to be yours.
Just three generations ago, my great-grandparents spoke Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. That I was raised in an English-speaking country strikes me as a wholly contingent fact, a fluke of history. My father’s mother—my demented, homicidal grandmother—spent most of her life in America but spoke English with such a thick accent that I had trouble understanding her. The only thing I ever saw her read was the Daily Forward, a newspaper printed in Yiddish. Even more interesting is the case of Siri’s father. A third-generation Norwegian-American born in 1922, he grew up in such an isolated rural community—largely inhabited by Norwegian immigrants and their descendants—that all his life he spoke English with a distinctive N
orwegian brogue. What was his mother tongue? Siri’s Norwegian-born mother didn’t move to this country until she was thirty, and because her mother came to stay with the Hustvedts in Minnesota after Siri was born (which meant that Norwegian temporarily became the language of the household), the first language Siri spoke was Norwegian. What is her mother tongue? She is an American, a superb writer whose medium is the English language, and yet every now and then she will make a small slip, mostly to do with prepositions (the most daunting element of any language). Water under the bridge. Water over the dam. The two expressions mean the same thing: it’s all in the past. But Siri is the only person who has ever said: Water over the bridge.
You were born in a bilingual country, which complicates matters considerably. But if you spoke English at home when you were a child, then you are first and foremost an English speaker. South African English, later tempered by your long stays in the lands of British English, American English, and Australian English. There is also Irish English, Indian English, Caribbean English, and God knows what else. Just as the English no longer own cricket and soccer, they no longer own English. Laugh at the notion of “American” if you will, but the fact is that when the French publish books by American writers, the title page reads: traduit de l’americain, not traduit de l’anglais. I have many grievances against America, but English in its American incarnation is not one of them.
On the other hand, we who are writers—no matter what our language—should take heart from these words by Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” I am referring, of course, to Harpo’s brother. Whose real name was Julius.
With warmest greetings to you and Dorothy,
Paul
May 27, 2009
Dear Paul,
You say that the title pages of French translations of your books read, Traduit de l’americain. Mine say Traduit de l’anglais (Sud-Africaine). I’d like someone to point to the moments when my anglais becomes sud-africaine. To me it reads like anglais purged of markers of national origin, and a little bloodless for that reason.
I think I am at odds with you over the question of mother tongue (though I note that you tend to eschew that rather feeling-laden phrase in favor of “first language”). I agree that one’s weltanschauung is formed by the language that one speaks and writes most easily and, to a degree, thinks in. But it is not formed so deeply that one can never stand far enough outside that language to inspect it critically—particularly if one speaks or even just understands another language. That is why I say that it is possible to have a first language yet nonetheless not feel at home in it: it is, so to speak, one’s primary tongue but not one’s mother tongue.
This phenomenon is more widespread than one might think. In Europe, for instance, before the arrival of the nation-state and the triumph of national languages, Latin—which was no one’s mother tongue—was the currency of intellectual life. The same situation exists in Africa today vis-à-vis English and (to a lesser extent) French and Portuguese. In Africa it is not practically possible to be an intellectual in your mother tongue; you can’t even be much of a writer. In India and Pakistan, where it is the home language of only a minuscule minority, English is the medium of much of literature and all of science.
You point out that there is such a thing as American English or Indian English, and imply that these “Englishes” have mother-tongue status in the United States and India respectively. But the truth is that on the page (leave aside in the mouth or in the street) these differ from English only in trivial respects: the odd locution or idiom here and there, not the elemental vocabulary (which has such determinative power over the speaker’s epistemology) or the syntax (which dictates the forms of thought).
As I said, I started thinking about the subject of the mother tongue after reading Derrida. I began to feel my own situation more acutely after moving to Australia, which—despite the fact that within its territory there are scores of Aboriginal languages still clinging to life, and despite the fact that since 1945 it has encouraged massive immigration from southern Europe and Asia—is far more “English” than my native South Africa. In Australia public life is monolingual. More important, relations to reality are mediated in a notably uninterrogated way through a single language, English.
The effect on me of living in an environment so saturated with English has been a peculiar one: it has created more and more of a skeptical distance between myself and what I would loosely call the Anglo weltanschauung, with its inbuilt templates of how one thinks, how one feels, how one relates to other people, and so forth.
All the best,
John
July 6, 2009*
Dear Paul,
Last month I visited your country for the first time in five years, to see my brother, who lives in Washington, D.C., and has been ill.
Before embarking I very deliberately thought through the question of first impressions and what I was going to allow to count as first impressions; in particular, whether I was going to allow your immigration service, recently rebranded as Homeland Security, to play any role in forming them.
For, as you know, I have a long and largely unhappy history of relations with U.S. Immigration, which I won’t rehearse. I was not eager to be plunged back into that history and have my mood touched by its sourness.
In the event, the immigration interview at Los Angeles airport was as bad as I had feared. I was escorted out of the line and taken to a back office, where for an hour I waited my turn among the mail-order brides and students with papers from dubious colleges, before being quizzed by a poker-faced officer: Who was I? Had I visited the U.S. before, and if so when? The interrogation went on and on, in circles. “If you will just tell me what the problem is,” I said at one point, “then I can perhaps try to solve it for you.” “Sorry, sir,” replied the officer, “I am not at liberty to divulge that.”
In the end they stamped my passport and let me in. What it was all about I still don’t know. Perhaps I was just an elderly Caucasian randomly pulled out of the arrivals line to prove it is not only young men “of Middle Eastern appearance” who get harassed.
“I am not at liberty to tell you what is wrong.” It can’t be much fun having to parrot such gobbledygook. But who would want to work for a service where you earn promotion not for the number of people you let through but for the number you turn back?
But I was going to write about first impressions, not about immigration officials and their discontents. I was going to give you my first impressions of America after a long absence. Yet what strikes me now is how banal those first impressions were, and more generally how little of interest I have to say about foreign places, despite a lifetime of traveling.
France, for instance: even after having wound my way around most of France on a bicycle, I can’t claim to have anything to say about the country that is fresh, new, worth saying. England, where I lived for years, or America, where I lived even longer, ditto. To say nothing about South Africa, where I was formed and spent most of my working life, or Australia, where I have lived for the past seven years. Memories, plenty of memories. Images, some of them quite vivid. But all of them trapped in their particularity, not generalizable. My experiences seem to remain my experiences alone, not relevant to other people.
I seem to be afflicted with a peculiar kind of blindness. It’s not that I am incurious. On the contrary, everywhere I go my eyes are wide open, I am on the alert for signs. But the signs I pick up seem to have no general meaning. And the generalizability of the particular is the essence of realism, is it not? I have in mind realism as a way of seeing the world and recording it in such a way that particulars, though captured in all their uniqueness, seem yet to have meaning, to belong to a coherent system.
What does a phenomenon like this mean: a more or less intelligent person like myself living in an age of easy travel, who a
s he nears the end of his life must recognize that his manifold experience of the visible world adds up to nothing worth retelling, that he might as well have spent his life in a library?
Or is it perhaps that I have been picking up the wrong sort of signs—that the only signs I see, because of my idiosyncratic blindness, are signs that tell me that life is the same everywhere in the world, rather than signs of the distinctiveness of every tiny part of creation?
If the born travel writer is preternaturally alert to signs of difference, am I the born anti–travel writer, alert only to signs of the same?
The whole business puzzles me. I say to myself, You have just come back from a visit to the United States, what were your impressions? And again and again, blocking out every other image, comes a memory of a young man in nondescript clothing riding a battered old bicycle, nonchalantly, in the wrong direction, against the traffic, in a Manhattan street. What does it mean, this solitary, overriding image? Why, when I say to myself Give your impressions or Summon up your images, is this the only image that comes back? Is there some absurd faculty inside me trying to tell me the young man riding the wrong way says something about America in 2009?
I travel but don’t write travel books. Nor do you; or perhaps you do, but publish them under a pseudonym: Peter Westermann, Nicole Brebis. Do you have first impressions that you trust? I don’t trust mine in the slightest.
Yours ever,