Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2015"

“‘Spanish is a language Tu’: Hemingway’s Cubist Spanglish”

Abstract: This essay analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of (1940), in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction. It argues that Hemingway's creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War but an attempt to synthesize and recover the moments of interpenetration between English and Spanish since the 1600s. Hemingway's mode of dialogue in the novel is thus a “structural Spanglish” rather than the common code-switching form; it is a mode of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently between languages. Hemingway accomplishes this by using Spanish as a laboratory for his overlooked experiments in modernist mistranslation, which I trace through his development of cubist techniques in the novel and his debts to Ezra Pound. As he flattens semantic depth and fuses the syntaxes of two tongues, Hemingway actually invents an aesthetic language that corresponds to neither English nor Spanish, all filtered through a narrator who corrupts the translational process. He thereby creates a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. The essay concludes by sketching his place in this genealogy of contemporary writing.

Ein weites Feld as Post–Cold War Novel

Abstract: Günter Grass’s novel Ein weites Feld1 caused a storm of controversy when it was published in Germany in 1995, a storm comparable—in terms of text generated if not geographic reach or danger to the author—to the Satanic Verses affair in the 1980s. Perhaps this was not surprising, since the novel addressed itself to the new, reunified Germany. It opens with its two protagonists Theo Wuttke (known to his friends as ‘‘Fonty’’) and Ludwig Hoftaller examining the recently breached wall, which ‘‘already looked porous, exposing its innards: reinforcing rods that would soon rust’’ (7). Given his reputation, a substantial part of Grass’s audience must have expected the novel to answer the question of what might now constitute a national literature. Strong feelings were bound to be provoked. However, the controversy raises as many questions about the novel as a literary form as it does about the political context into which it was launched, not least because Ein weites Feld was a conscious attempt to use novelistic form as a kind of cultural politics, deployed against both a resurgent German nationalism and all those invested in an ideological interpretation of the end of the Cold War as a victory for the West. Yet if one of the aims of Grass’s novel was to pit the literary against ideology, Ein weites Feld might also be read as a meditation on the difficulty of achieving a literary language that can escape the bonds of ideology. The theme of collaboration runs through the text: language’s collaboration with power, the collaboration of artists with the state and of literature with the perspective of the victor. If Grass begins from the position that it is the artist’s responsibility to side with the vanquished, he also seems acutely conscious that such a position will always be compromised. Despite this, Grass finds some salvation in literary form, notably in the novel’s ability to posit what Jacques Rancière in Politique de la littérature calls ‘‘un monde commun’’ (a common world) (39).2 An optimistic reading of Ein weites Feld might say that it shows the potential still existing in the novel to expand and deepen not just the language of literature but also the language of politics for such a community. As Rancière puts it, in a neat riposte to the classic Marxist formula, ‘‘interpretations are themselves real changes when they transform the forms of visibility a common world may take and, with them, the capacities that ordinary bodies may exercise in that world over a new landscape of the common’’ (Politics of Literature 30; translation modified). Ein weites Feld strives for a literary language that might make visible such a democratic ‘‘common world.’’ It reaches back to the history of the German andthe European novel to demonstrate the ‘‘wide field’’ from which a new post–Cold War culture might draw. It leans heavily on the rich resources of the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 1 Except when stated otherwise, all quotations from Grass’s novel are from Krishna Winston’s translation, Too Far Afield. However, because the title loses its allusive qualities in English, I refer to the book by the German title throughout.