Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Doctoral Dissertation
不能言說的出口：弱勢文學作為一種翻譯的可能 Unspeakable Things (Un)spoken: Minor Literature as
Translation
Hsin-ju Liu
Advisor: Chaoyang Liao, Ph.D.
108 6
June, 2019
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this and other related projects. Each of my dissertation committee has provided me with extensive guidance during my defense.
I would first like to thank my advisor, Professor Chaoyang Liao. His attitude
continually and convincingly helped me whenever I ran into a blind spot or a question.
He allowed this dissertation to be my own work, but steered me in the right direction with patience.
I would also like to thank my committee members, Professor Liang-ya Liou, Professor Guy Beauregard, Professor Chun-yen Chen, and Professor Amie Parry.
Their works and courses have shown me the global concern and brought me to a much broader scope in modern comparative literature. In addition, their questions (as well as advice) during the defense helped me clarify the problem I encountered during my process of research. Without their input, the dissertation could not have been conducted.
Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents and to my partner for supporting me with continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and throughout the process of writing the thesis. This would not have been possible without them.
Toni Morrison
Jean Rhys Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha
speech
act pure language
Abstract
The core of the thesis is to answer the following questions: How to render speakable what was formerly unspeakable? How to say something unsayable? Being inspired by Toni Morrison’s lecture— “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
Afro-American Presence in American Literature”— the thesis aims to explore the representation of the unspeakable things unspoken in selected works of minor
literature. As the canon fodder, the unspeakable things are patently presented in minor literature; therefore, the investigation would like to explore the possibility of
presenting the unspeakable things through a translation practice which is more evident and effective in minor literature. During my process of analysis, the linguistic practice in minor literature would be conceptualized as an act of translation through a reading of Naoki Sakai’s works which problematize the conventional idea of translation. The thesis would also like to explore how the act of translation in minor literature
inscribes, erases, and distorts borders through its deterritorialization and reterritorialization of languages.
Chapter One explores the self/other opposition with a discussion of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Chapter Two digs deeper into the issues of psychic traumas through the act of translation and border-crossing in Arundhati Roy’s two novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Continuing the previous discussion, Chapter Three opens up the possible speech act for the unspeakable things unspoken with a transnational approach. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the interlinearity of the Benjaminian “pure language.” According to Walter Benjamin, pure language is not an actual language; it does not refer to a merging of all languages into a singular linguistic system. Pure language introduces a concept where all languages complement each other in intention. Reading minor literature as a form of translation might mark a
meta-linguistic capability for intercultural understanding; this mode of reception might help different texts to be reapproached and reconnected with one another.
Key Words: translation, minor literature, Naoki Sakai, Deleuze and Guattari, comparatizing
Table of Contents
Introduction: How To Render Speakable What Was Formerly Unspeakable?
---1 Chapter One: Minor Literature, Subjectivity, and the Other
---29 Chapter Two: Minor Literature, Traumas, and Borders
---102 Chapter Three: Minor Literature, Translation/Transnation, and Comparatizing Taiwan
---168 Conclusion
---212 Works Cited
---217
List of Figures
Fig. 1. Frontispiece, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 1982.
---77 Fig. 2. Detail, “Urania/Astronomy” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 1982.
---85 Fig. 3. Back Cover, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 1982.
---99 Fig. 4. Bagua, “Terpsichore/Choral Dance” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 1982.
---99 Fig . 5. Comparison Maps of Taipei (above) and China (below).
---173
Introduction: How to Render Speakable What Was Formerly Unspeakable?
We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily “not-there”; that a void may be empty but not be a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them.
—Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature1
In a lecture originally titled “Canon Fodder,” Toni Morrison engages the canon debate and further reinforces the literary presence of African Americans as well as the cultural awareness that comes with it. Morrison tries to expose African American people’s struggle to imagine themselves artistically due to their absent and silenced status in American literature. She terms the literary absence of African Americans as
“willful oblivion.” In her discussion of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, she showed how the Afro-American presence has shaped the choices, the language, and the structure in the canonical text without recognition. The presence of Arican Americans in literature remains unspeakable as well as unspoken. Morrison urges her audience to pose questions about the authors’ and critics’ erasure of African Americans from a
1 Presented as The Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Michigan, October 7, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. University of Michigan, October 7, 1988. 121-163.
Tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/morrison90.pdf (accessed March 18, 2018). In my opinion, the unspeakable things do not have the vocabulary to conduct a speech; they remain unspoken for lack of recognition. For the unspeakable things to be spoken, Morrison proposes a reexamination into canonical texts to look for the prescribed absence of the unspeakable things.
society that is seething with their presence (136). By examining the effects of this willful oblivion, one could see the tactics hidden beneath the surface of African Americans’ invisibility in American literature.
Morrison argues that African American people are the subjects of their own narrative and participants of their lived experience. They need not be imagined by other people as if they were “not there.” Therefore, for Morrison, it is high time to recognize the “stressed and planned” absence of African Americans in American literature. She views the absence as a form of silence, as the “unspeakable things unspoken” (135-36). To break the silence and find the lost things, Morrison urges, a reexamination of American canons is needed. It is a search for the ghost in the machine.
How to render speakable what was formerly unspeakable? How to say something unsayable? How to locate the ghost in the machine? In a way, Toni Morrison manages to recover the silenced voice of African Americans in literature through her works.
For instance, in Beloved, the narrative is presented in the form of a fragmented story.
Morrison’s linguistic practice enables her to search for the “ghostly matter”2 and further turns it into words. In other words, this linguistic practice makes what was formerly monologistic become heteroglossic (from one voice to various voices).
Morrison breaks the silence through the introduction of multiple voices. That is to say, what she tries to do is to shape a silence while breaking it: it is a way to define a neighborhood by the population held away from it.
2 In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon believes that the return of ghostly matters functions as the trace of an absent presence; it is an evidence of things that cannot be seen. In Beloved, Gordon argues, ghosts are things that have not been forgotten: they are inducts of uneasy minds. The return of the ghost/Beloved is the claim of the past on the present.
To speak the unspeakable means that it has to go through a transfiguration in the form of linguistic exchange. The transfiguration of the unspeakable allows it the access to the right to speech, that is, to be considered as a legitimate language. If discourse is considered as a symbolic asset that could receive different values depending upon the market it is offered, the unspeakable needs to be spoken under a legitimate condition in order to be “on the market.” That is to say, in order to have access to the right to speech, the unspeakable should be transfigured into a legitimate language.
These linguistic exchanges happen on a symbolic market which Pierre Bourdieu terms as the linguistic market. Bourdieu uses the notion of the linguistic market to indicate the way certain languages are valued over others. In his discussion of the economics of linguistic exchanges, Bourdieu brings up an idea that a discourse could only be recognized if “it conforms to the legitimate norms.” This premise further elaborates the notion of the legitimate language: It is a discourse which one speaks
“not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished”
(648). Economically speaking, production is controlled by the structure of the market;
therefore, in order to gain the chance to be on the market as a legitimate speaker, one has to possess linguistic capital. Linguistic capital is allocated according to the power relations of the linguistic market. Therefore, only a legitimate speaker could have a favorable lingual utterance.
A legitimate speaker with linguistic capital could render speakable what was formerly unspeakable because of her right to speech. Toni Morrison introduces the unspoken things in Beloved because she transmits the ghostly matter to a legitimate
linguistic market. Morrison transmits the unspeakable to the market by her linguistic practice: she passes her words for a legitimate language. Morrison’s linguistic practice involves transmitting something unspeakable to something recognizable on the linguistic market; it could be considered as a form of translation.
Nevertheless, there is a gray area in the act of transmitting: Morrison’s speaker is trying to highlight the ghost in the machine of the linguistic market. As opposed to the legitimate speaker, her speaker becomes an imposter of a legitimate speaker so that she gets to deliver the speech without getting caught by the censorship of the dominant language. According to Bourdieu, a legitimate speaker should possess the ability to use the right words, correct grammar, tone, register, body language, and so forth. These become the norms that give authorization and govern linguistic
investment of the dominant language. Morrison’s speaker is different from Bourdieu’s notion of the legitimate speaker; however, the speaker still needs to transcode her linguistic capital in order to translate the unspeakable. The right to speech could be seen as the imperative to be heard. No speech is speech if it is not heard. To say the unsayable, the act of translation is not only necessary but also inevitable.
I would like to see the transcoding of the unspeakable onto the linguistic market as a translation. When handling the planned oblivion in Beloved, Toni Morrison applies her linguistic capital and wins the right to speech for the unspeakable things unspoken. In the lecture mentioned above, Morrison proposes a reinterpretation of the American canon in order to uncover the “unspeakable things unspoken.” What is more, to depict the ghostly matter in Beloved, she uses the language of authority without submitting to its power. She minoritizes the language of authority/legitimate
language. She practices the language of authority with a minority twist, political elements, and collective values. Her linguistic practice in Beloved is a practice of a
“minor literature” which is termed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Hence, being inspired by Toni Morrison’s linguistic practice, the thesis aims to investigate the representation of the unspeakable things unspoken in selected texts of minor literature. Being the “coarse food” for canons and the subject of the willful oblivion, the cannon/canon3 fodder (the unspeakable things unspoken) could be evidently presented in minor literature (Morrison 123). This notion becomes the title4 and subject matter in the thesis. The thesis would like to explore the possibility of presenting the unspeakable things unspoken through a translation practice which is more evident and effective in minor literature. Although Morrison’s discussion of the canonical work, Moby Dick, deals with the unspeakable things unspoken, the subject still needs “reinterpretation” to be recognized. It is precisely her revisiting of the work allows the unspeakable things a narrative space: she brings them to a legitimate linguistic market so that the presence of the African Americans is no longer invisible.
I would argue, to address the problem of the unspeakable things through examining texts of minor literature may be more effective. Therefore, before conducting a thorough discussion, a review of the general idea of translation helps consolidate the investigation.
Translation, in its conventional sense, is the communication of the meaning from
3 Morrison loads the term with double meaning. The unspeakable things unspoken are treated as cannon fodder for canons for their disposability. From my perspective, a concrete example would be the underrepresentation of some ethnic groups or the whitewashing in the Hollywood film industry.
4 Also, the “un” enclosed in parenthesis in the title indicates that even after the act of translation, the unspeakable things could not be ensured an actual speech. There is a possibility, but no guarantee.
one language into another. It is the transmittal of a source-language text into an equivalent target-language text. Roman Jakobson distinguishes three types of translation: intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic.5 Intralingual translation, or rewording, takes place within one language; interlingual translation, or translation proper, translates verbal signs into another language; intersemiotic translation, or transmutation, consists of the interpretation of linguistic signs through systems of non-linguistic signs (Jakobson 233). According to Jakobson, interlingual translation is the commonsense concept of translation; it is the prototype of translation. Nonetheless, the prototypical translation cannot cope with the unspeakable. There is one problem among many inside Jakobson’s division: If the interlingual translation is the only
“proper” one, how and why can the others be categorized as translations? Hence, a different translation approach needs to be introduced to transcode the unspeakable.
Jakobson’s division of translation is rather narrow. His notion of intersemiotic translation is a unidirectional metalingual practice in which linguistic signs are codified into non-linguistic ones. He does not bring out a reverse operation: the translation of nonlinguistic into linguistic signs.
A reverse operation of Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is suitable for
rendering speakable what was formerly unspeakable. It recasts a nonprescriptive vibe without rejecting the traditional translation. Semiotically speaking, translation
involves a wide range of text-manipulative activities;6 it could explore possible translation modes with reinterpretations that are capable of shaping and coding of the
5 In his renowned text, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.”
6 The text here is not the conventional view which limits it to documents or books. It could also apply to films and other works.
unspeakable. In a similar manner, Naoki Sakai proposes a hermeneutic approach to translation so as to reconsider the current comprehension of translation.
Other than a mere operation of transferring meanings from one language into another, an examination of Sakai’s theory of translation helps to elaborate the act of translation in minor literature.
In Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, Naoki Sakai explores the notion of translation; he uses the concept of translation to inquire into sociality in his theoretical work. For him, translation is an everyday situation and happens whenever people interact through speech. In the work, he points out that the way most people understand translation is problematic; he further includes the hermeneutic and historical function of translation in his discussion.
The Regime of Translation and the Homolingual Address
Sakai states that Jakobson’s idea of interlingual translation (translation proper) is the regime of translation which “articulates languages so that we may postulate the two unities of the translating and the translated languages as if they were autonomous and closed entities through a certain representation of translation” (2). The
Jakobsonian translation proper introduces the regime of translation as an
institutionalized assemblage of protocols, rules of conduct, canons of accuracy, and ways of seeing. According to Sakai, translation is replaced by “the representation of translation” and considered as a form of communication between two closed language entities.
Sakai’s main point is to problematize the regime of translation by showing the binary logic of the “homolingual address.” He critiques the homolingual address and
proposes the heterolingual address to draw attention to the problematics of translation proper. According to Sakai, there are two different attitudes/stances utilized in the act of translation: the homolingual attitude and the heterolingual attitude. People who take the homolingual attitude tend to ignore “the untranslatable” during translation process and equate “translation to communication” (14).
The homolingual address is a form of “homosociality”: different regimes could also be homolingual, for the regime of translation institutes specific economy of homogeneity as well as heterogeneity through translational practices (Sakai 8). Things such as ethnicity, nation, and culture are premised on a homolingual plane within the regime of translation. It is marked by the introduction of “the schema of
co-figuration” (15).
This particular schema renders the possibility of co-figuring the unity of
ethnicity or nation-states with another language unit; it is a way for people to imagine a nation or ethnicity as a homogeneous sphere. In addition, it also presupposes the homogeneous nature of the social relation between a given addresser and addressee.
The homolingual address does not need to take place within the same language unit.
According to the translation proper, the addresser and the addressee could address each other even though they belong to different languages: they figuratively speak the same language. In other words, translation under the regime of homolingual address is guaranteed with “communication” which is anterior to “address” (6).
For example, the homolingual address postulates that readers of the Japanese
“copy” could understand Foucault’s works as much as readers of the French
“original” (Sakai and Soloman 7). The homolingual address in the regime of
translation imposes an idealized mutual comprehension within a single national language and mutual incomprehension across national language barriers.7 Sakai’s discussion discloses the paradox in the schema: The translation is needed across languages; however, people could figuratively speak the same language. The paradox is exemplified in Jakobson’s idea of interlingual translation. In Sakai’s opinion, Jakobson’s interlingual translation (translation proper) is the homolingual
representation of translation even if the act takes place between different languages.
For Sakai, the Jakobsonian interlingual translation can be termed as a homolingual mode of translation “[a]s long as the position of the translator is set aside and viewed to be secondary” (Sakai 5). The address in this translation model “is still homolingual in the sense that two different language communities are posited as separate from one another in the representation of translation, and that translation is understood to be a transfer of a message from one clearly circumscribed language community into another distinctively enclosed language community” (5-6). Inspired by Sakai, I would like to see the translation practice adopting the attitude of the homolingual address the homolingual mode of translation. To maintain the premise that all address is
homolingual and unfiltered in the representation of translation, a translator becomes necessary but invisible. To complicate the problematic of translation, Sakai proposes the notion of the heterolingual address to historicize the homolingual presumption.
The Heterolingual Address
As a critical alternative to the homolingual address, the heterolingual address
7 For instance, Scarlett O’Hara in the film, Gone with the Wind, was once translated as Hao Sijia, and Rhett Butler as Bai Ruide in Taiwan; this made the audience relate to the characters more, regardless of different cultural contexts between the two places (both Hao and Bai are common Chinese last names, and the translation did make some Taiwanese mistake them as the two leading characters’ last names).
criticizes the historical hegemony of the former. The heterolingual address is an address in discontinuity, and in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner. According to Sakai, in the mode of heterolingual address:
[Y]ou are always confronted, so to speak, with foreigners in your enunciation with your attitude is that of the heterolingual address. Precisely because you wish to communicate with her, him, or them, so the first, and perhaps most
fundamental, determination of your addressee, is that of the one who might not comprehend your language, that is, of the foreigner. (Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity 9)
Sakai states that translation adopting the attitude of the heterolingual address is a process which intends to understand difference. It is a process invested with histories, hermeneutics, traditions, and stereotypes through which people get to locate the foreign while delineating the self. Unlike the homolingual practice, a heterolingual attitude helps to understand the idea of self/other in a nonaggregate way. The use of
“we” in the heterolingual mode of translation refers to “a linguistically heterogeneoud ensemble” (Sakai 4).
Being attentive to the use of “we,” Sakai tries to speak and listen for those who are “neither reciprocal apprehension nor transparent communication was guaranteed”
(4). The homolingual use of “we” could induce misunderstanding and
misapprehension. In fact, the notion of “we” consists a mixed audience. By saying
“we” to such an audience “was to reach out to the addressees without either an
assurance of immediate apprehension or an expectation of a uniform response from them” (4). In spite of being the homolingual “we” that is used by a speaker to define an accepted collectivity between the speaker and the audience, the “we” in Sakai’s notion is “a nonaggregate community.” Since the addressees would respond to the speech act “with varying degrees of comprehension,” the mode of address is heterolingual in its nature (4). The otherness of the audience is not repressed but inscribed through this heterolingual information delivery and exchange: It is a process to confront rather than assimilate the Other.
Thinking of the act of translation in a heterolingual address, Sakai problematizes the conception of a “pure” community that is shaped by the foreign. In the
heterolingual address, the act of inception and reception of every utterance occurs as
“the act of translation, and translation takes place at every listening or reading” (9). In the heterolingual address, “addressing in enunciation is not supposed to coincide with eventual communication, so that it is demanded of the addressee to act to incept or receive what is offered by the addresser” (8). Moreover, the act of translation, unlike the homolingual one, does not promise a transparent communication; it expects that
“every utterance can fail to communicate because heterogeneity is inherent in any medium, linguistic or otherwise” (8). It is an act of translation that calls for a
counter-translation. By applying the attitude of the heterolingual address to translation, Sakai problematizes the conventional idea of translation. Therefore, the heterolingual address in translation can be seen as the language of the foreignness/otherness inside the addresser and the addressee. Because it is impossible to transmit the unspeakable to the dominant linguistic market if translation still abides by the homolingual model,
Sakai’s idea of heterolingual address opens up the possibility of putting the
unspeakable onto the market. That is to say, the unspeakable can be translated only through a heterolingual practice for it does not belong to a specific linguistic entity.
The unspeakable things unspoken can be considered as a specific kind of address; it is an address of reaching out without guaranteeing the arrival at the destination. Since the unspeakable cannot express/address on its own, an agent who engages herself in the heterolingual mode of translation is essential. We could see the transmitter as a translator, and an examination of the translator’s position helps to define different modes of address. According to the translator’s position, homolingual address stresses the invisibility of the translator. The translator is viewed as “a somewhat heroic prestigious agent” (6) since she has the right to speech (but is paradoxically erased owing to the logic of homolingual address). The translator’s task is to mediate communicational exchange with members of another community.
However, the heterolingual address describes an attitude of the translator who does not belong to any particular linguistic community. In a heterolingual address, the addresser “is always confronted with foreigners” in the act of enunciation since neither the unitary language unit nor the plural language units can be taken for granted (10). The position of the translator in a heterolingual address is thus
indeterminate and hybrid: “[T]he translator acts as a heterolingual agent and addresses herself from a position of linguistic multiplicity (9).
Viewing translation from a position of linguistic multiplicity, the unspeakable things unspoken could find their way to speech; however, they still need the translator for they do not possess enough linguistic capital that could make them enunciative
speakers. The task of the translator not only belongs to “the professionally assigned translator,” but the rest of us as well, are also responsible for it (10). The liminal position of the translator makes it possible for us to understand translation outside the homolingual address. The translator in the heterolingual address reveals an essential indeterminacy in the formation of subjectivity: she becomes “a subject in transit”
owing to her position (11).
The Subject of Translation
The translator who engages in a homolingual address is invisible; however, in a heterolingual address, the translator is neither an addresser nor an addressee. Due to the translator’s ambiguous position, the translator in a heterolingual address becomes a subject in transit: she is both an addressee and not an addressee, and she is both an addresser and not an addresser. In a heterolingual address, the translator, the addresser, and the addressee cannot be viewed simultaneously:
In respect to personal relationality as well as to the addresser/addressee structure, the translator must be internally split and multiple, and devoid of a stable
positionality. At best, she can be a subject in transit, first because the translator cannot be an “individual” in the sense of individuum in order to perform translation, and second because she is a singular that marks an elusive point of discontinuity in the social, whereas translation is the practice of creating continuity at that singular point of discontinuity. (Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity 13)
Just because the enunciation of the unspeakable is infused with multiple voices, the presence of the translator discloses the inherent discontinuity within the enunciation and the positions that follow. For instance, the planned absence of African Americans in Moby Dick is hard to discern when readers read it from the homolingual
perspective. The planned absence is “an elusive point of discontinuity in the social,”
and Morrison is able to mark the point. In order to create continuity in discontinuity, she rereads Moby Dick and locates the heterolingual address of the unspeakable. Her disclosure of the canon fodder is also a practice of translation. To create “continuity at that singular point of discontinuity,” the translator cannot be the monolingual
individual of the regime of translation; her individual personality is destabilized because she no longer translates in a unified language community (13). The essential ambiguity of the translator is the evidence of her sociality, and her translation leaves the trail of the foreign within the heterolingual process. The subject in transit also reveals the paradoxical status of the foreign through translation: the foreign is both incomprehensible and comprehensible for it is in transition to something familiar owing to the position of the translator. The act of translation tracks the unspeakable things unspoken; “the untranslatable, or what can never be appropriated by the economy of translational communication, cannot exist prior to the enunciation of translation. It is translation that gives birth to the untranslatable” (14).
Translation and a subject in transit as the translator are inevitable for rendering speakable what was formerly unspeakable. Toni Morrison succeeds in finding the ghost in the machine through reexamining Herman Melville’s canonical text, Moby
Dick;8 however, I would like to locate the ghost the other way—from minor literature.
Since the assumption of inherent homogeneous language entities no longer works in the translation practice adopting the heterolingual address, a minoritarian reading could help us have a more refined discussion. In doing so, the discussion needs to take various kinds of languages into account, such as hybrid languages and broken
languages, which are the attributes of minor literature.
While Morrison explores the idea of whiteness in Moby Dick to investigate the African presence as an objectified “image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness” in the American psyche (Playing in The Dark 38-39), I would like to examine the willful oblivion of the unspeakable things from a less mainstream, but more effective, minoritarian aspect.
As a kind of literature that employs the minoritization of major language, minor literature fleshes out the heterolingual condition through its various modes to address.
Minor literature can be seen as a translation that confronts us with the problem of subjectivity and otherness. Since the trail of the foreign discloses the inexpressible within the expressible, minor literature could embrace the nomads in one’s own language/s.
Minor Literature and Translation
In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pose a question to help recognize the multilingualism of modern world and culture:
8 Morrison notes that there are images of “impenetrable whiteness” in pre-Civil War American literature. Morrison explores the ideology of whiteness, claiming that in Moby Dick, it is an ideology formed in fright. And in Moby Dick, Africans serve as the repressed darkness in the American psyche;
therefore, Morrison wants to see how Melville explores the racial difference in the context of whiteness.
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? … How to become the nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope. (19)
The condition described above can be applied to deconstruct the precondition of what Sakai terms as the regime of translation. The translator is like the one who walks on the tightrope because of her liminal status in the heterlolingual address. There is a purpose in the use of language in minor literature: to stretch the language out of its major shape; it is a deterritorialization of the major language. The deterritorialization of the major language also introduces the heterolingual attitude into the major
language’s former homolingual construct.
As a type of literature indicating the instability and violence of language, minor literature does not make recognizable sense, but expresses intensities, captures forces, and takes action. Its goal is not fostering or extracting meanings, but bringing forth intense expression. And since the unspeakable could not express/address itself directly to its audience, as a genre that highlights the instability of language, minor literature helps to render speakable what was formerly unspeakable through an act of translation.9 Deleuze and Guattari define three characteristics of minor literature: the
9 Mainstream literature (like Moby Dick) could also deal with the subject of the unspeakable. Some mainstream literary works might deal with the same topic with loanwords and language changes.
Nevertheless, the way the topic is treated in mainstream literature is an expression rather than a translation; it does not match the criteria of minor literature. The agent involved in the expression can say what he/she means because it is his/her self-expression. Through the expression, the readers understand the addresser’s idea about the unspeakable, and the addresser is sure that his/her
homogeneous audience can incept what he/she wants to say. Conversely, the agent in minor literature
deterritorialization of major language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation (18). They draw on Franz Kafka’s works as examples to elaborate their theory. Kafka was born in a
German-speaking family in Prague. As a Jew in Prague, the hostile relation between those who spoke German and those who spoke Czech is evident for him. Being bilingual, Kafka created his works resulting from the collision of his idea of culture, territory, and the politics. From these conflicts, Deleuze and Guattari draw discussion about minor literature.
Minor literature does not designate specific kinds of literature; its revolutionary condition fleshes out the site of polyphony. Polylingualism accurately echoes with Sakai’s heterolingual address; it is also a way to prevent the homogenization of language. Polylingualism “actively prevents language from becoming homogeneous, it keeps it in a state of constant imbalance, and thus makes it creative” (Lecercle 196).
The deterritorialization of major language posits minor literature beyond formal criticism; it is not fixed in a certain category, but an expression machine. Capable of treating and developing its contents, minor literature is much more able to work over the unformed expressive materials (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 6).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s writing machine10 is constituted by contents and expressions that have been “formalized to diverse degrees by unformed
deals with something that is not (just) his/her own. What makes translation different from common speech is “an attitude or stance that is neither that of the addresser nor the addressee” (Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity 53). The agent has to say what he/she has to say without expressing him/herself. He/she is responsible for the original text, and this is his/her task as a translator.
10 For Deleuze and Guattari, a machine could be defined as a system of interruption or breaks; every machine is a part of a system of machines, and they integrate some flows. Therefore, they characterize Kafka’s works as a writing machine that has no “privileged points of entry” (3). The technical and bureaucratic machines that Kafka depicts in his works function in the real by a disassembling and deterritorialization; it is a process expresses a minority struggle.
materials that enter into it, and leave by passing through all possible states” (7). It would seem that the flow between the machines is transformed through the interruption; it does not have a final cause (or a definite start). To limit the flow through an illusionary idea of a fixed subjectivity, for instance, is a misrepresentation.
It is difficult to see the flows in the homolingual situation. Minor literature enables us to get past the illusionary subjectivity and see the fluidity of those flows: “the
problem is not that of being free but of finding a way out, or even a way in, another side, a hallway, an adjacency” (7-8). Hence, the minor practice of major language transforms the presentation of translation (in Sakai’s words, the regime of translation) into a writing machine of the heterolingual address. As a result, the unspeakable things could find a point of entry onto (and around) a legitimate linguistic market because of the deterritorializing feature of minor literature.
Apart from the first feature, minor literature has other features that are different from the mainstream literature: its political nature that links each individual to politics.
Minor literature unveils that each individual does not have a rigidly produced subjectivity; the subjectivity is woven through his/her political experience. Closely related to the second feature is the collective and enunciative value of minor literature.
Accordingly, the political nature is inseparable from the third feature, its collective value. The individual speaks in a collective voice in minor literature; the statement is collective for it never refers back to a specific subject. Minor literature is not only an asubjective assemblage; it is also non-representative and deterritorializing. In this way, a language of sense is traversed by a line of escape to “liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form” (21). It is the
condition of a collective enunciation that is “lacking elsewhere in this milieu” (18).
The language of sense cannot render speakable what was formerly unspeakable for it follows a homolingual model. But instead, the deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense though it derives from it. Through turning a language of sense into polyphonic and heterolingual, deterritorialization marks the porous border that the unspeakable could get in.
The three features of minor literature share common notion with Sakai’s heterolingual mode of translation. I would argue that for one to have a proper understanding of Sakai’s heterolingual mode of translation, minor literature could serve as one of the effective approaches because of its unique linguistic practice.
Minor literature reflects the multiplicity of language and the transitory positionality of the translator engaging in the address. It also destabilizes the cofiguration of both dominant and minor languages as the translator moves through different positions as the addresser, the addressee, and the arbitrator. Minor literature and the heterolingual mode of translation facilitate one another. Sakai’s idealistic demarcation of the homolingual and the heterolingual attitudes towards translation would be more sophisticated if we can ascribe some empirical validity to his ideal through investigating minor literature.
For this reason, the linguistic practice in minor literature would be conceptualized as translation in the thesis. I would also like to see how minor literature minoritizes the regime of translation and extends a way to examine the praxis of social relations with its heterolingual stance. Therefore, the investigation aims to probe into “the unspeakable things unspoken” through minor literature. The
thesis would also like to explore how the act of translation in minor literature inscribes, erases, and distorts borders through its deterritorialization and reterritorialization of languages.
In order to provide a platform for discussion on the problems mentioned earlier, the thesis intends to investigate through a text analysis of minor literature for
speculative rationale. There would be works selected from minor literature across countries. The investigation intends to see how the unspeakable is translated in minor literature. The structure of the thesis indicates my thought process in trying to answer my question about the unspeakable things unspoken. Like Morrison’s revisit of Moby Dick, I try to read into the problem of individuation by revisiting the postcolonial classic and Asian American classic as the point of departure of the thesis. Reading them as minor literature reopens a dialogic space for the problem of subjectivity. Then, moving from personal to family, and move onto a whole nation, Chapter Two displays how my research scope can be expanded. Moreover, the wound described in the chapter undergoes a turn from literal to figural in terms of trauma narrative. In Chapter Three, I apply a transnational approach to see if Taiwan can be included in the discussion. The movement of the thesis is from personal identity to a family trauma, and then to a national one. Finally, it aims to search for the transnational possibility for dialogue.
Chapters Overview
Chapter One aims to explore the self/other opposition in a heterolingual way.
Minor literature problematizes the self/other opposition as its initial step of denunciation of homolingual address. In a homolingual address, the presumed
opposition between the self and the other is accepted as an empirically given. The representation of translation facilitates an encounter between the language of “the self” and the language of “the other” as if they are respective entities. However, according to Sakai, the actual practice of translation is heterogeneous, and the self/other opposition in homolingual mode posits a paradigm regardless of this heterogeneity. Minor literature, on the other hand, uses the figure of “the other” as a liminal moment that destabilizes the self/other opposition as well as discloses social relations in language.
In order to see how minor literature subverts the fixed self/other opposition, the chapter would look into the failed individuation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Both works unfold the imposed cofiguration of the self/other opposition with their heterolingual approaches to translation. Wide Sargasso Sea seeks to humanize the racial characterization of the West Indian madwoman in Jane Eyre. Written as a prequel to Jane Eyre, the novel describes the life and youth of the “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre with a detailed
background. It writes back to the homolingual and imperial narrative of Jane Eyre.
Described as a “poor ghost” by Rhys, Bertha Mason turns into Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea; it tells the story which was never narrated in Jane Eyre. The work deals with topics of ethnic inequality and the malice of displacement and assimilation of subjects. In Dictée, Cha explores the complicated situation of individuation. Dictée is a story about the liminal state the protagonist situates herself as a Korean American;
it shows that the quest for a fixed identity is impossible for the subject. The work explores the process of subject formation through the female speaker, the diseuse,
within the narrative. Through the diseuse’s translation, Dictée unravels the oblivious condition of the diseuse’s mother, her Korean fellowmen, and herself.
Wide Sargasso Sea and Dictée both deal with the problem of unspeakable pasts and undetermined subjectivity. Both works, by definition of Deleuze and Guattari, can be viewed as minor literature: they are written in major languages with minor twists.
Translation in minor literature reveals the fundamental disjunction and discontinuity of individuation as well as social relations; it is a way to think from within the schema of cofiguration. It is not just a way to locate the unspeakable pasts; it is also an
attempt to translate the enigmatic messages that are repressed through the
individuation process. Moreover, cogitating Wide Sargasso Sea and Dictée from the perspective of translation might help to reconsider the two works with various
nuances. The failed individuation process in the two works might contain a difference in multiple degrees, owing to their diverse social and historical milieux. Therefore, this chapter wishes to investigate these varied nuances of the failed individuation process by examining the two works.
Chapter Two wants to dig deeper into the issues of psychic traumas through the act of translation. The text analysis intends to examine the repressed psyche in Arundhati Roy’s two novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Roy’s act of translation reopens the unspeakable wounds from the past.
The God of Small Things unfolds the family traumas of a high-caste Syrian Christian Indian family, and Roy further develops the representation of trauma with progress in scope as well as in depth in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Published two decades apart from her first novel, Roy is able to further explore the issues of trauma, history,
and border under the big frame of globalization. The two works illustrate the process of translation of traumatic events from a family to a nation. The method also crosses the linguistic and national borders because the characters in both works are forced to face the fear of resurrecting past traumas.
In The God of Small Things, the narrative focuses on the drowning of a little girl.
The event separates the central characters, the two-egg twins, Estha and Rahel, after their journey into the river resulted in the drowning of their English cousin, Sophie Mol. The traumatic event interweaves with another strand of the tragic separation of the twins’ mother and her lover, Velutha, who is casteless and classified as an
untouchable. The secrets of the family are revealed through the traces of the traumatic events.
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy expands her scope to a broader scale so as to map out the diverse stories in modern India. The novel weaves stories of people across the Indian subcontinent—from crowded neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the valleys of Kashmir. The novel contains many stories: a hijra (trans woman), a man from the untouchable caste passing for a Muslim, a government official in the intelligence service, a rebellious woman who kidnaps an abandoned baby, a freedom fighter in Kashmir, to name just a few. These stories somehow surpass the subject matter in The God of Small Things. The God of Small Things unravels the caste system and the inrooted patriarchy in India, whereas, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness discloses other marginalized groups’ life in India in a way that goes beyond a postcolonial perspective.
The traumatic events in both works are unspeakable and unspoken; however,
they demand to be told in some way. They reside on the other side of the homolingual mode of translation, and they have an effect of dislocation. To get beneath the surface to understand the enigmatic transformation of traumatic traces in both works, I would like to apply Jean Laplanche’s notion of de-translation to give translation an
additional psychoanalytical twist. De-translation, according to Laplanche, is a reopening of the old translation as well as a veering towards the other. Subjects who want to make sense of themselves do not want to restore an intact past; they welcome a deconstruction of the old, insufficient, and partial construction that could generate enough power to re-translate. Residing on the negative side of translation,
de-translation is a liberation of thinking from the defensive mode: it helps to cope with traumas which are unavailable to consciousness. Being unspeakable and
unspoken, traumas paradoxically demand to be seen and heard.11 Translation in both works avail to transform traumas from the unconscious to the world of consciousness:
it is a return of the repressed.
Besides detailing traumatic events, Roy also marks the shift from a family’s story to a nation’s narrative with her two works. In addition, the change helps explore the idea of bordering. When translation (the homolingual one) takes place, a border12 between one language and another is given which separates one group of people from another. However, minor literature’s practice discloses that the idea of a border is unnatural and arbitrary. Bordering is a movement, an action in progress; it is not readily accomplished. The characters in both works encounter the liminal situation
11 A traumatic event is not experienced as it happens, it would come back later in connection with another place and in another time. The paradoxical demand of trauma springs from its delayed response and overdue address.
12 The concept of bordering is linguistic, spatial, and national. It could be a split of the space of one language and another, as well as the division between one national language and another.
where they situate as subjects in transit in their own narratives. Besides inquiring into the border problem, the chapter would go further to probe into the modalities of bordering.
Chapter Three hopes to engage a transnational comparison from Taiwan’s texts.
In the hope of opening up the possibility of an address of the unspeakable things unspoken, the first two chapters intend to approach the possibility through minor literature. By exploring topics of subjectivity, traumas, and borders, the investigation generates a type of transnational apprehension. The transnational apprehension also exposes the problematic production process of these topics on both global and local scales.
With specific historical experience and memory, the coloniality of Taiwan could and should be included in the discussion to reflect the coloniality of knowledge production. With intense discussion and publications about Asian American literature and postcolonial studies, some Taiwanese scholars somehow prioritize their stress on the American classic texts and studies. As a result, local texts become the canon fodder during the process of knowledge production in Taiwan. Swerving from conventional readings of classics towards local minor literature might help us discover alternative modes of knowledge production. Thereupon, this chapter would like to connect Taiwan’s local narratives with the established genres of minor literature and postcolonial discourse. To connect is an act of comparatizing; the method could include Taiwan within the already saturated conversation.
The discussion would begin with Syaman Rapongan’s The Death of Ngalumirem.
As a Tao/Yami13 writer in Lanyu, Syaman Rapongan writes about the indigenous epistemology focusing on the ocean and develops oceanic solidarity in a shared experience as islanders. The oceanic point of view in his works is very different from the conventional Sinocentric one. Syaman Rapongan’s stories criticize the
Sinocentrism and lack of ocean consciousness in Taiwan literature. Since he cannot criticize the Han-centric consciousness with Tao, he has to write in Chinese—with a twist of Tao language. Syaman Rapongan’s marginal position as a writer as well as his subject of writing can be considered as a form of minor literature. His works help people incorporate the maritime history of Taiwan into their established knowledge;
his deterritorialized language contains the power to blur the border (linguistic together with spatial) between Taiwan and Lanyu. Through the act of translation in minor literature, people could see how this deconstruction of linguistic entities and enclosed borders is conceivable, and it could further produce a network for Taiwan to be situated globally.
The Sinocentrism of Taiwan literature has more or less prevented the island from being included in the discussion of postcolonial studies. According to Shu-mei Shih, Taiwan should be involved in such discussions because of its serial colonized state;14 however, it is marginalized in postcolonial studies. Understanding Taiwan in terms of oceans rather than landmasses could offer a valid critique of the mainlander KMT’s
13 The younger generation in Lanyu (Orchid Island) refer themselves as Tao people; however, the term
“Yami” is generally used in English scholarship. In order to “comparatize,” I choose to place both terms here.
14 There seems to be an impasse concerning Taiwan’s contested (post) coloniality. The indeterminable state about the outset of Taiwan’s postcolonial phase indicates that Taiwan has a liminal (as well as marginal) space in the discussion of postcolonial studies. Did Taiwan enter the postcolonial phase with the end of Japanese rule in 1945? Or at the end of the KMT’s martial law? Or is Taiwan still under the neocolonial rule of the US? This indeterminacy has been transformed into creative power in Taiwan’s literature, films, and historical narratives. Hence, to comparatize Taiwan globally is an act of
challenging the established categories.
regime of national imagination (which is, if we follow Sakai’s translation as a trope, the regime of translation). Besides, the method could also connect Taiwan’s discourse with other cultures and societies by way of “comparatizing” (Shih 2).15
In light of the oceanic consciousness, analyzing Syaman Rapongan’s works with comparative contexts of, for example, Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid could offer interconnectedness results from the potentiality of relations. Syaman Rapongan illustrates his Tao epistemology through his portrait of fishing seasons and tidal currents. He also describes how Tao men choose between Tao life in Lanyu and the cultural assimilation in Taiwan. The islandness and oceanic worldview allow the characters of Syaman Rapongan envision certain solidarity with other island dwellers around the globe. The embodied oceanic experience depicted in his works enables him to translate the oceanic worldview and the oblivion of Taiwan’s islandness. It may be the start of a new wave to study Taiwan in comparative contexts aside from recognizing and theorizing the legacy of Japanese rule and the KMT nationalism.
Although Syaman Rapongan might not be viewed as the representative of Taiwan literature owing to his marginal position, looking into his works through the
perspective of minor literature could still bring forth insightful discussion. How the characters react and relate to Taiwan in The Death of Ngalumirem could help
reconsider Taiwanese subjectivity as well as expand the discussion to a global scale.
In order to have a thorough investigation on the topics of subjectivity, traumas, and borders, the thesis would focus on how translation serves as a different
perspective in the already saturated discussion and studies. The thesis concludes with
15 As a site of crossings, Shih proposes to situate Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally in Comparatizing Taiwan.
a discussion of the interlinearity of the Benjaminian “pure language.” According to Walter Benjamin, pure language is not an actual language; it does not refer to a merging of all languages into a singular linguistic system. Pure language introduces a concept where all languages complement each other in intention. This intention is a form of interconnection translated with the mutual complementary intentions of various languages. The Benjaminain interlinear translation is a manner of becoming in terms of practice; the practice fleshes out an “afterlife” of the text only in
translation. The afterlife reveals itself in translation as a “higher sphere not in transcendental meaning;” it is an afterlife with historicity (Benjamin 72). The text undergoes a change in its afterlife; it is the changing modes of reception by posterity.
The historical modes of reception help texts in the past to be reapproached and bring them to the present. Thereupon, the interlinear translation possesses a meta-linguistic capability for intercultural understanding. Reading minor literature as a form of translation might mark the becoming of language manifested in a continuous practice to create an empirically verifiable continuity out of discontinuity.
Chapter One: Minor Literature, Subjectivity, and the Other
She is not béké16 like you, but she is béké, and not like us either.
—Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
The problem of failed individuation, the unspeakable pasts, and undetermined subjectivity is explored in various postcolonial texts; however, how to comprehend the formation process of a displaced subject? By viewing the formation process of the displaced subjects in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a minoritarian form of translation practice, the intricacy of the displaced subjects in both texts can be examined with nuances. In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s nanny Christophine tries to explain Antoinette’s ambiguous racial identity to Mr. Rochester; however, even though Christophine is aware of
Antoinette’s creolized status, she is unable to place her in a simple dichotomy of black/white or West Indian/English. As a prequel to Jane Eyre, many people consider Wide Sargasso Sea as an exemplary model of postcolonial writing back.17 Rhys’s discourse produces what is not already recognizable, and it has the power to disrupt and dislocate. Writing with a language that could not be considered as her own,
16 Béké is the Creole word for a white person.
17 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin adopted the phrase “writing back” from Salman Rushdie and consider it as postcolonial writers’ way of engaging in the imperial discourse. The idea of
“writing back” questions the reductive representation in the colonial mode. See Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
Rhys’s language seems foreign, and it is a feature of minor literature. In order to have a detailed analysis, I would like to summarize the text.
As a child, Jean Rhys was impressed with the depiction of “the madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre. While this ghostly character frightens most readers, Rhys has doubts and sympathy for this madwoman because of her Creole identity. She cannot realize why Charlotte Brontë would depict a Creole woman as a madwoman, and she needs to “write her life.”18 Begins in the 19th century Jamaica, Wide Sargasso Sea takes a creolized narrative perspective as a deconstructive challenge to Jane Eyre. As a “writing back,” the novel portrays the process of how Antoinette Cosway turns into Bertha Mason. The story is arranged into three parts with three narrators: In part one Antoinette remembers her childhood and teenage life before her marriage to
Rochester. Part two discloses Rochester’s pressure as an Englishman who tries to dominate in the new environment. Part three opens with Grace Poole’s narrative; she is Bertha Mason’s nurse/jailor. The novel ends with Antoinette’s narrative when she steps in the role of the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield.
The Plot
The story opens in the time of the abolition of slavery throughout the British colonies in 1834. Antoinette’s family estate falls into ruin after the death of her father (a former slaveholder) and after the Emancipation Act of 1833. Later her mother Annette remarries a rich Englishman, Mr. Mason, in the hope of improving the living on the plantation. The renovated plantation and the display of wealth intensify
resentment of the neighboring ex-slaves. One night, a mob sets fire to the house, and
18 Rhys talks about Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre in an interview: “She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her life.” In The Guardian, August 8th, 1968.
it kills Antoinette’s mentally disabled little brother. After the fire, Mr. Mason goes back to England, and Annette is kept in a country house after her mental breakdown.
Then, when Antoinette turns seventeen, Mr. Mason comes back and informs her that he has friends coming from England, and he also implies that one of them would marry Antoinette.
The second part begins after Antoinette’s marriage to a nameless Englishman.19 As a second son who stands to inherit nothing under the English law, the husband admits that he marries Antoinette for her dowry. One day, after receiving a letter from a man called Daniel Cosway, Rochester believes that he is tricked into marriage with a madwoman who comes from a mad family. He starts to distance himself from Antoinette, and this makes her distraught. Being mentally unstable, Antoinette is taken to England by her husband and is under the care of Grace Poole. At the end of the story, Antoinette no longer knows where and who she is. One night, after stealing keys from Poole, she gets out of the attic, takes a candle, and prepares to burn down the house.
Postcolonial Writing Back as Translation
One could never again read Jane Eyre quite the same way once he/she has read Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS). Just like what Toni Morrison did in her finding for the African presence in the whiteness of Moby Dick, Jean Rhys engages herself with Brontë’s canonical text and tries to redress the poor ghost’s grievance. Being
rewritten within the specific historical context of Jamaica, Wide Sargasso Sea can be re-approached from the perspective of minor literature. Although already considered
19 Although the man is nameless throughout the text, his image is apparently based on Jane Eyre’s Mr.
Rochester; therefore, I would use Mr. Rochester to refer to Antoinette’s husband in the discussion.
as great literature, we could recognize its capacity which allows for a speech from a minoritarian perspective. The language in minor literature is not confined to
communication and representation; it fleshes out things which are unrecognizable.
The three narrative modes in WSS mark the polyphonic feature that differentiates itself from the dominat discourse in Jane Eyre, as there is only a homolingual as well as the imperial address in Jane Eyre.
The polyphonic narrative breaks down the homolingual regime, and the
heterolingual deployment of English corresponds with Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature. Firstly, WSS enacts the deterritorialization of language through mixing English with the Caribbean English/French patois. For example, when Antoinette asks her nurse why there are few people visit their estate, Christophine tells her the reason is that the beauty of Antoinette’s mother displeases other ladies: “The Jamaican ladies never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said”
(Rhys 9). As a Martinique woman who marries an Englishman and lives in Jamaica, Annette’s French descent is unwelcomed in British Jamaica. The Caribbean English and the injection of patois highlight the foreignness of the major language and entail a becoming strange of the typical signifying regime. By deterritorializing English with the Caribbean English and French patois, the language in WSS charts specific colonial historicity which is formerly invisible in Jane Eyre. The deterritorialization sends the dominant language into a panic with these displacements.
As the user of “perfect English,” Mr. Rochester is uneasy about this linguistic flux when he and Antoinette spend their honeymoon on Windward Island: “The two women stood in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English but the
debased French patois they use in this island” (39). For him, the deterritorialized language is debased and condemnable. The deterritorialized language has no standard or norms; it does not ground on the English ideals of syntax, grammar, and rhetoric.
Nonetheless, Mr. Rochester believes that English is appealed to a given standard capable of excluding those who do not fulfill the norms. He resents the two women speaking French patois just because it is not the legitimate language.
Christophine’s language also offends him when she refers English coffee as
“bull’s blood” and claims that hers is better because it is not “horse piss like the English madams drink” (50). He could not appreciate the rhythmic and musical feature of Christophine’s language: “Her coffee is delicious but her language is horrible…”(50). He fails to understand the historical and multicultural tendency because the people do not speak “his” language. The use of language indicates the social status one possesses; however, Christophine’s Caribbean English does not imply she is unable to speak “properly.” As a matter of fact, Christophine “could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they talked” (12). By smuggling the patois and unstandardized English into the narrative, Rhys successfully deterritorializes the major language.
Besides, WSS has its political nature, which is also the second characteristic of minor literature. And this political nature is inseparable from the third characteristic, its collective and enunciative value. The particular individual concern is immediately related to social forces in WSS. In the book, Antoinette’s identity crisis arises when she and Tia, her childhood friend, have an argument near the river, and when she faces Tia after the mob sets fire to the estate. Mr. Rochester marries her because as the
second son in the family, he is not allowed to inherit the property. His anxiety comes from not only his inability to rein in his wife, but also his not being able to cope with his Englishness in Jamaica. These individual concerns do not become one totality in a homolingual space. They are cramped and interlaced together with the social forces that compose them: they enact a mode of “collective enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 18).
One example of the collective enunciation of the West Indian social scene is depicted in Daniel Cosway’s letter to Mr. Rochester. In the letter, Daniel reveals that although he is a black Creole, he is the half-brother of Antoinette. The letter also discloses the life on a plantation before Emancipation; it implies that Daniel Cosway is the son of Mr. Cosway and a slave woman. His remark also indicates that it is common that slave owners sexually exploit the women on plantations. In the second part of the novel, when Antoinette and Mr. Rochester are going back to England, a nameless boy begs Rochester to take him along: the boy is thought to be Rochester’s bastard.20 What’s more, it also marks a decisive moment in transforming Antoinette’s life: the ideological assumptions of the metropolis illustrated in the letter start to construct her as the other. WSS infuses individuals with political energies, and it further shows that it is impossible to separate an individual enunciation from a collective enunciation in minor literature: “Everything is political…” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 4).
Bertha Mason’s unaccounted madness finds its way to speech through Rhys’s
20 Deborah Kimmey has discussed the unnamed boy’s identity in “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: Metatextuality and the Politics of Reading in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.”
