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 NEW CO
MPARIS
ONS IN
WORLD
LIT ERATUR
E

JAMES REAY WILLIAMS

Multilingualism
and the
Twentieth-
Century Novel
Polyglot Passages
New Comparisons in World Literature

Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
English Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK

Neil Lazarus
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on
one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approach-
ing ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as
a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body
of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and con-
tent, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish
works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature regis-
ters both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and
the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered
as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registra-
tion of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.

Editorial Board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA
Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland
Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK
Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK
Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA
Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India
Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067
 James Reay Williams

Multilingualism
and the Twentieth-
Century Novel
Polyglot Passages
James Reay Williams
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-05809-8 ISBN 978-3-030-05810-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05810-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935508

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

This book grew out of a doctoral thesis which I completed at Queen

Mary University of London between 2014 and 2017. My thanks are
due to all in the Department of English, and to the Arts and Humanities
Research Council for funding the project. Particular thanks, though, are
owed to my supervisors, Rachael Gilmour and David James—this book
owes a great deal to their unwavering belief in the project and to the
keenness of their insight, and their generosity, patience, and rigour are
without equal. I am grateful, too, to all of my Ph.D. cohort for their par-
ticipation in a lively and challenging intellectual environment, and to my
fellow travellers in global literature at Queen Mary. My Ph.D. examiners,
Anna Snaith and Neil Lazarus, provided remarkably generous and thor-
ough feedback.
The final manuscript was completed at the University of Exeter, where
numerous colleagues—knowingly or otherwise—have provided insight,
advice, collegial support, and guidance. Again, particular thanks are
owed to my colleagues in modern, global and postcolonial literatures; I
am also grateful to my students, at both Exeter and Queen Mary.
My thanks are also due to the library staff at Queen Mary and Exeter,
as well as at the British Library and Exeter Public Library.
Thank you to everyone at Palgrave—to my series editors Neil Lazarus
and Pablo Mukherjee, to Tom René and Vicky Bates, and to my anony-
mous reader, who provided clear, generous, and constructive feedback.
Finally and least adequately, my heartfelt thanks go to Jenni Råback for
her constant support, keen eye and intimidating facility with languages.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction: Multilingualism, Modernism and the Novel 1

2 Post/Colonial Linguistics: Language Effects

and Empire in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo 33

3 Lost for Words in London and Paris: Language

Performance in Jean Rhys’s Cities 73

4 Self, Dialect and Dialogue: The Multilingual

Modernism of Wilson Harris 109

5 The Dangerous Multilingualism of Junot Díaz 151

6 Conclusion: The Anglophone Novel and the Threshold

of Capacity 195

Index 201

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
Multilingualism, Modernism and the Novel

In what has become one of the foundational texts of the contemporary

study of world literature, Pascale Casanova argues that ‘what is apt to
seem most foreign to a work of literature, to its construction, its form,
and its aesthetic singularity, is in reality what generates the text itself,
what permits its individual character to stand out’.1 Taking as central
the issue of languages, this study is concerned with the manifold ways
in which instances of multilingual contexts and practices of writing give
rise to moments of innovation, revolution, beauty and strangeness in
the novel throughout the twentieth century and into the present day.
The four authors whom I will consider in detail—Joseph Conrad, Jean
Rhys, Wilson Harris and Junot Díaz—are brought into dialogue by their
multilingualism; each of them writes from some personal and politi-
cal engagement with plural languages, and each explores in their work
the possibilities of writing multilingually within a text which is notion-
ally Anglophone. Each in turn thus invites us to consider the limit
cases of what Anglophone literature can be, to destabilise the category
of Anglophone literature, and thereby commands focus on, and often
undermines, the status of English as a ‘world’ language.
The four authors whom I consider in this study are also connected
in their adoption of prose fiction, and more specifically the novel, as
their principal literary form. The novel, which classical accounts posit
as having arrived at roughly the same time as the functionally monolin-
gual European nation state, and risen to prominence as those European

© The Author(s) 2019 1

J. R. Williams, Multilingualism and the Twentieth-
Century Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05810-4_1
2 J. R. WILLIAMS

nations themselves became global imperial powers, is a form whose his-

tory is uniquely tied to that of empire. But if the novel is, in part, weighed
down by this history, populated with the baggage of empire in various
ways both thematic and formal, implicated with global marketplaces and
channels of readership that are themselves products of empire, it also con-
tains within itself a unique set of resources with which to work through
these problematic associations. The novel, in the memorable intervention
of Mikhail Bakhtin, represents an unusual management, engagement with,
and deployment of a plurality of voices: in the novel multiple narratives
can coexist or compete, and it is in the very nature of the form to deploy a
variety of languages. The parameters of the novel form, are of course not
static, and the multilingual must also be understood as a dynamic force,
one which continues to act upon and to shape the novel as it develops in
the century of the decline and demise of empire.
To focus on the issue of multilingualism as it is played out in the
novel is also to reimagine the relationship between macro- and micro-
level concerns in literary criticism with which recent scholarship
in world literature, such as Casanova’s, has concerned itself. The­
cultural and state politics of mono- and multilingualism are engaged in
constant interplay with the material realities of language praxis, just as
recent scholarship in world and global literatures have compelled us to
acknowledge, or to conceptualise, the relationship between the individ-
ual literary text or canon and the wider reality of the modern capitalist
world-system.2
The theme, and the question, of multilingualism, then, represent a
means of negotiating the relationship between the individual text and the
wider historical and political realities into which it asserts itself. On the
one hand, as I will show, the novel deploys a wide variety of strategies to
confront or to incorporate multilingual realities, which in turn necessi-
tates a level of commitment to close reading which certain developments
in global literature scholarship have sought instead to retreat from. On
the other, those multilingual realities with which literary texts may con-
cern themselves are just that: realities, in the sense that language and
the interplay between languages represent, as we will see, a significant
component of the lived experience of modernity for individuals who are
themselves subjects of the wider transhistorical forces of the nation, the
state, the colony and the empire. I would thus align myself in this sense
with a ‘model of world literature…constructed as a means of understand-
ing and appreciating the multiplicity of strategies used by literatures to
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 3

relate to their political and economic environments’.3 Reading the mul-

tilingual tendencies of the twentieth-century Anglophone novel repre-
sents one means by which we can, to borrow from Casanova once more,
‘overcome the supposedly insuperable antimony between internal criti-
cism, which looks no further than texts themselves in searching for their
meaning, and external criticism, which describes the historical conditions
under which texts are produced, without, however, accounting for their
literary quality and singularity’.4
What I share with some of the recent accounts of world literature to
which I have already gestured is a sense of the study of international lit-
eratures as a problematic in need of a methodological solution (or, more
realistically, any number of potentially productive methodological solu-
tions): as Moretti puts the issue in his ‘Conjectures’, ‘world literature is
not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical
method’.5 Multilingualism is, of course, both a textual phenomenon and
a global political issue. But it is also the case, as the analysis which fol-
lows will intend to show, that my own response to the problem of world
literature is one which necessitates continued attention to empire as a
force which has shaped the norms of both prose literature and language
praxis. What is also common across the new world literature paradigm
is a tendency to leave behind vocabularies of the postcolonial, but liter-
ary multilingualism is a phenomenon which has been deeply interwoven
with the political dynamics of empire; managing language diversity was
a pillar of colonial practice, and the process of decolonisation has given
rise to extensive reimaginings of the relationship between English as a
world language and minority languages able to assert and define them-
selves anew.
A consideration of multilingualism in the novel in the timeframe I
propose must necessarily begin with modernism. The advent in litera-
ture in the early decades of the century of a foregrounding of form, a
renegotiation of the terms of realism inherited from the nineteenth-
century novel and a fragmentation of political, ethical and philosophical
commitments bestows a number of concerns which unavoidably medi-
ate the novel’s transition from a time of high empire through the world
wars to the decades of decolonisation. Modernism’s shift in attention
towards form invites investigation of the mimetic links between writing
which embraces fragmentation and often explicitly experiments with the
multilingual at the level of the text, and a world wherein the process of
decolonisation challenged the political status commanded by European
4 J. R. WILLIAMS

metropolitan languages and those of their colonised subjects. Alongside

such formal concerns, the historical boundedness of classical accounts
of modernism by the height of the so-called scramble for Africa at one
end and the Second World War at the other necessitates a discussion still
unfinished as to the engagement in modernist writing with the decline
of empire and the accompanying alteration in political and linguistic
thought.
Just as the periodical classification of literature is a messy exercise, so
too are the geopolitical contexts in which such literature arises. Attempts
at literary periodisation such as ‘modernist’ and ‘postcolonial’ are, of
course, necessarily imbued with a wealth of contested political assump-
tions and assertions as to what they ought to comprise. This pairing of
approaches in particular has for some time been divided by a ragged
and contested border, and multiple accounts thus exist which explore
in different ways the dovetailing of modernist and postcolonial con-
cerns in literature. While some older perspectives tend to see modern-
ism as petering out by the mid-century, and while a certain version of
the postcolonial sees it as the literary projects of former colonies gaining
independence, the interrelation of these two strands of critical thought
has been complicated. With the scepticism shown by Raymond Williams
when discussing modernism ‘as a title for a whole cultural movement and
moment’, having been ‘retrospective as a general term since the 1950s,
thereby stranding the dominant version of “modern” or even “ ­ absolute
modern” between, say, 1890 and 1940’, it is necessary to acknowl-
edge a move beyond accounts of modernism such as Bradbury and
McFarlance’s 1976 collection, which offers a chronology of modernism
which ends in 1930.6 It is thus expedient for my purposes to draw upon
a breadth of interventions, from those which rigidly maintain a view of
modernism as a Euro-American product, albeit one whose formal param-
eters were taken up in various ways by writers from colonies and former
colonies, through those which see the Euro-American example as just
one kind of modernism among many, with postcolonial literature repre-
senting the entry into modernity of various other parts of the world, to
those which see the arch-canonical modernism itself as a kind of writing
of decolonisation.
While the chapters which follow will necessarily draw upon and inter-
vene in these linkages, my purpose here is not primarily to take up a
strident position with regard to what these extant frameworks of study
ought and ought not to be. I also propose that through the multilingual,
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 5

we can discern a different chronology, or a framework of reading which

works at an angle to some of the established periodisations of twenti-
eth-century literature: a series of writers who treat the novel as an
opportunity to engage with histories of multilingualism, and who thus
engage throughout the twentieth century with legacies of empire, and
who continue to explore and to reinvent the linguistic possibilities of the
novel. While we might follow Edward Said in understanding the novel as
a form particularly implicated in the European colonial project, we can
also discern across the twentieth century a range of linguistic strategies
which complicate this history, and which understand that to explore the
potential of the novel to account for multilingualism is also necessarily to
consider the response it offers to a history of colonialism.
The account of the novel that follows takes into account case stud-
ies from the early origins of literary modernism at the peak of empire
through to the present day, and consciously cuts across the extant distinc-
tions between modernism and the postcolonial. I advocate strongly for
the wide and ongoing relevance of postcolonial concerns in reading both
early twentieth-century texts and those which might otherwise fall under
the purview of a flourishing and, occasionally, implicitly post-postcolo-
nial model of world literature. I will consider the European writing of the
beginning of the century as already engaged in postcolonial work, and I
will read the postcolonial novel, particularly that of the Caribbean, as mak-
ing its own productive contributions to the wider redrawing of the history
of empire. In so doing, I aim to propose a history of the novel in the twen-
tieth century which understands the form as engaged in an ongoing rene-
gotiation of the norms of language usage which are a bequest of empire.
I thus begin with Joseph Conrad as the paradigmatic writer of the heyday
and decline of empire, on the understanding that it is far from coincidental
that the novelist most associated both with the origins of modernist form
and with the origins of a writing which engages critically with empire hap-
pens also to be a multilingual: one who stands in oblique relation to the
English language itself, and whose work foregrounds questions of multilin-
gual language usage with unusual frequency. I end my account with Junot
Díaz, a writer of the contemporary Caribbean whose work foregrounds
the unfinished project of postcoloniality. In Díaz as in Conrad, we see
both a formal preoccupation with language and a determination to relate
this issue to a wider context, and to append it to a longer political history:
language, for Díaz, is a site of experimental potential as well as a material
entity with a history of implication in colonial and authoritarian control.
6 J. R. WILLIAMS

Multilingualism in and Out of the Novel

It is a fact all too easily overlooked by many monolinguals that multilin-
gualism is not only perfectly common, but in fact the geographical and
historical norm from which monolingual experience deviates. While liter-
ary criticism, as we shall see, has sometimes been hesitant to recognise or
to incorporate this fact, it is a matter of platitude for linguistics. As one
account would have it, relatively briefly put:

To be bilingual or multilingual is not the aberration supposed by many

(particularly, perhaps, by people in Europe and North America who speak
a ‘big’ language); it is, rather, a normal and unremarkable necessity for the
majority in the world today. A monolingual perspective is often, unfor-
tunately, a consequence of possession of a powerful ‘language of wider
communication’, as English, French, German, Spanish and other such lan-
guages are sometimes styled. This linguistic myopia is sometimes accom-
panied by a narrow cultural awareness and is reinforced by state policies
which, in the main, elevate only one language to official status.7

It is true that the authors I will consider in this study can be conscripted
as a rebuttal to this misconception; to assert that the Anglophone novel
is, so to speak, a fiction, and that it can and does contain within it a mul-
titude of languages aside from English. But it is also important to note
that this misconception is asymmetrical and ideological—it is much more
likely to be held by those who speak a language with its origins in west-
ern Europe, which is to say a language whose widespread distribution
is an unavoidable corollary of its imperial history. The politics of such
a misapprehension have thus been more sharply criticised by Sinfree
Makoni and Alastair Pennycook as ‘blinkered views that posit a bizarre
and rare state of monolingualism as the norm’.8 In fact, Makoni and
Pennycook go even further in their analysis, setting out to expose and to
undermine the ideological gestures implicit in any effort to identify and
define a discrete entity called ‘a language’, arguing that ‘languages were,
in the most literal sense, invented, particularly as part of the Christian/
colonial and nationalistic projects in different parts of the globe’.9
Given this ongoing work in destabilising the very foundations of lan-
guage, and of insisting that languages in and of themselves are discon-
tinuous and amorphous entities, it is perhaps necessary to pause and
ask the obvious question: what is multilingualism? Linguistically, this
question has multiple answers, ranging from the straightforward to the
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 7

open-endedly complex. While academic studies of the subject will often

resort to simple and pragmatic definitions—‘the presence of more than
two languages either in individuals or in society’, for example—the impli-
cations and inflections of such definitions are vast nevertheless.10 To
think critically about multilingualism is necessarily to consider a great
breadth of perspectives; multilingualism may be considered psychologi-
cally or phenomenologically, it may be a question of society and group
dynamics, or of politics and state policy. Issues gathered under all of
these headings will inform this study.
It is, of course, not necessarily any simpler to consider multilingualism
from a purely literary perspective: what is multilingualism in the context
of the literary text? While to an extent the chapters which follow rep-
resent a series of possible answers to this question, my approach to it is
a purposely expansive one. Certainly, the most common-sense definition
holds true in some cases—the existence of two or more languages within
a dialogue, a text, or an author or character’s mind (throughout, I use
‘multilingual’ to refer to two or more languages, in contrast to certain
accounts like that from Stavans and Hoffmann above, which understand
the multilingual as comprising more than two languages and treat bilin-
gualism separately). The multilingual may also be a political condition,
wherein multiple languages figure within state policy, within colonial
practice or in the meetings between nations or communities. Following
the kind of analysis offered by Makoni and Pennycook, though, I will
also consider as multilingual incidences of discontinuity or contradiction
within the ‘same’ languages: meetings of dialect and register, incidences
of unusual vocabulary or accent. Indeed, as much as to provide affirm-
ative answers to the question of what comprises a multilingual text, my
purpose here is to show that the converse notion of an Anglophone text
is no more stable.
Correspondingly, the writers who feature in this project exist in a
variety of relations to various kinds of multilingualism, but all, at their
core, both write out of and engage in their work with multilingualism
and questions surrounding it. Joseph Conrad was a true polyglot, speak-
ing fluent French and a considerable amount of Russian in addition to
his native Polish, before eventually learning and beginning to write in
English in his late twenties. In addition to this, and as I seek to show, his
novels represent an interrogation of the possibilities of multilingualism as
well as the deployment of a variety of multilingual writing strategies. Jean
Rhys, by contrast, was a deeply hesitant multilingual, having grown up
8 J. R. WILLIAMS

speaking English and hearing Creole in Dominica, speaking the former

with an accent which betrayed her Caribbean origins and, upon moving
to Europe, becoming a capable yet anxious speaker of French. Wilson
Harris is primarily concerned with the colonial history of his native
Guyana and of the Americas more generally, and has foregrounded the
roles played by multiple languages both in the European colonisation
of the region and in attempts to fashion an artistic idiom free from this
history. Junot Díaz is a Dominican immigrant to the United States who
writes in a linguistically inventive prose, notionally in his second lan-
guage of English.
To consider a corpus of writers whose engagement with multilingual-
ism is explicit is a rejoinder to a tendency in literary studies to replicate the
same elision of the multilingual which the linguistic sources above criticise,
which is to say that considerations of literary multilingualism frequently
define themselves in terms of striking novelty. Thus Steven G. Kellman’s
assertion that translinguals (that is, writers working in a language other
than their mother tongue) are ‘the shock troops of modern literature’,11
or this fuller and more recent formulation from Juliette Taylor-Batty:

Outside of Joyce and Beckett studies, and despite the recent ‘transnational
turn’ in modernism studies, the topic still receives very little attention.
This is in no small part due to the continuing cultural and political concep-
tion, particularly amongst Western native speakers of world languages such
as English, of monolingualism as the ‘norm’ and the resultant perception
of cases of literary multilingualism as exceptional, unusual, extraordinary.12

What resembles a standard academic summary of the lay of the crit-

ical land in fact demonstrates the pervasiveness of paradigmatic under-
standings of mono- and multilingualism. Taylor-Batty goes on to cite a
wealth of scholarly accounts of multilingualism in literature from 1960
to the twenty-first century, pointing out that they can be relied upon
to define themselves in terms of the apparent novelty to their readers
of the very notion of literary multilingualism. The constant reassertion
of the newness of writing multilingually, and of conceiving of the world
through a multilingual lens, though, serves to demonstrate that a lasting
monolingual paradigm continues to inform studies of literature.
A worthwhile corrective to such misconceptions is also offered in
Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue, which is one of few works to
assert the necessity of extending the kind of complication of flat accounts
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 9

of mono- and multilingualism as outlined above to the reading of liter-

ary texts. Yildiz, too, points out the embeddedness in certain Western
cultural narratives of this monolingual paradigm, remarking that ‘to…
many cultural texts, the phenomenon of multilingualism appears as a
remarkable new development of the globalized age’, while in actual fact
‘it is monolingualism, not multilingualism, that is the result of a rela-
tively recent, albeit highly successful development’.13 Such a paradigm
has, for Yildiz, ‘functioned to obscure from view the widespread nature
of multilingualism, both in the present and in the past’.14 Certainly
there are echoes here, too, of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s call to arms
in Death of a Discipline, which demanded that ‘literary studies will have
to acknowledge that the European outlines of its premise and one of
its tasks – positing the idea of the universality of each of the European
national languages (the jealously guarded particular domain of the old
Comparative Literature) – have, in globality and in subaltern U.S. mul-
ticulturalism, altogether disappeared’.15 Herein both Yildiz and Spivak
acknowledge what underpins Makoni and Pennycook’s analysis above:
the fashioning of such paradigmatic thinking around language, and the
manufacturing of the very notion of the mother tongue, were inextri-
cable from the rise of the nation state in Europe, and from the colo-
nial designs of these same states. Such positions build upon the insight
of Benedict Anderson, who argued that the rise of the nation state in
Europe was contemporaneous with the process wherein ‘capitalism and
print created monoglot mass reading publics’, which ‘created, and grad-
ually spread, the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so
to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups’.16
This rise of the nation, along with the elevation of certain languages
to national status, was also the historical context which allowed for the
rise of the novel; Ian Watt has argued that, in addition to the novel being
reliant upon the emergence of a western European bourgeoisie, it relied
for its invention upon the emergence of a class of readers in the vernac-
ular, contiguous with the spread of middle-class and clerical professions
necessitating such literacy.17 And yet the novel was also, as Said reminds
us, implicated in its rise to prominence with the parallel rise of empire,
thus the memorable formulation that ‘the novel, as a cultural artefact of
bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other’.18
Indeed, turning to a slightly fuller statement of Said’s thesis, we must
emphasise the extent to which the novel was involved in carrying out the
ideological work of empire:
10 J. R. WILLIAMS

Without empire, I would go so far as saying, there is no European novel

as we know it, and indeed if we study the impulses giving rise to it, we
shall see the far from accidental convergence between the patterns of nar-
rative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the
other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to
imperialism.19

It is necessary therefore to consider that if a component of empire was

the manufacture and export of particular epistemologies of language, and
particular means of apprehending and taxonomising linguistic difference,
then the novel too can be considered in light of its relation to these lan-
guage histories. If one part of the ‘complex ideological configuration’
which sustained empire is a set of ways of thinking about language, then
these might also be found within the ‘patterns of narrative authority’
typical of the novel.
If we consider a germane example in the shape of Robinson Crusoe,
we can begin to discern some of the ways in which the novel works its
way through the politics of mono- and multilingualism, and how such
ideas unfold alongside imperial concerns. Thus, shortly after the arrival
of Friday into the narrative:

Friday began to talk pretty well, and understand the Names of almost
every Thing I had occasion to call for, and of every Place I had to send
him to, and talk’d a great deal to me; so that in short I began now to have
some Use for my Tongue again, which indeed I had very little occasion for
before; that is to say, about Speech.20

It is unsurprising, in a sense, that Defoe’s resourceful colonial frontiersman

finds that language teaching is an expertise which comes to him quite natu-
rally. For Crusoe does not, of course, trouble to learn any language known
to Friday, but makes it his business to teach Friday to speak English, ‘so
well’, in fact, ‘that he could answer me almost any Questions’.21 This
fact Crusoe is quick to exploit in order to educate Friday in the ways of
Christianity, and indeed of nation and nationality: those same facts which
we have established were contemporary with the rise and the spread of
national language. Thus, when Crusoe asks Friday ‘the Names of the sev-
eral Nations of his Sort of People’, he finds that he can ‘get no other Name
than Caribs’: nation and language simply do not map onto each other for
Friday in the same ways as they do for Crusoe.22 It is apparently far less
of a problem for Crusoe to speak in the languages of other colonisers:
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 11

when he and Friday rescue another European (along with Friday’s father)
from being devoured by cannibals, Crusoe speaks with him first ‘in the
Portuguese Tongue’, later in ‘as much Spanish as I could make up’.23
Yet even in so totemic an example of the—supposedly—English impe-
rial novel as this, we can find the material with which to begin unravel-
ling some of the language logic of empire. Certainly, Friday is depicted
as being drawn into a certain kind of monologic idiom. We do not know
what language or languages he speaks, and the text is able to enact a
full repression of them: we learn later that Friday becomes an interpreter
for Crusoe, a prototype of that class of interpreters whom colonial policy
(as in a famous document like Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’)
fashioned as a means of managing the fact of multilingualism among its
subjects. Just as colonial policy facilitated and relied upon the export
of a monolingual paradigm of governance, the Anglophone novel sub-
sumes the fact of other languages within its English narration. But, as
Bakhtin’s perspective on the novel makes clear, the novel itself is never
truly monologic; it is ‘a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in
speech and voice’.24 As such, we can, according to one account, ‘find
various instances of “languaging” in Robinson Crusoe, when the hero
creates a fracture between English as spoken in England, and English
as spoken in the Caribbean, in contact with Spanish and Portuguese’.25
We need not credit a text like Robinson Crusoe with anything like a pro-
ductive or democratic essaying of multilingualism, should such a thing
even be possible. But nevertheless, in a text dealing quite explicitly with
imperial practice, multilingualism is simply impossible to avoid. We can
thus discern as multilingual effects not only the casual acknowledge-
ments of Crusoe’s own Portuguese and Spanish, but the transformations
and modifications of English which emerge through Friday’s ‘broken’
attempts at speech with Crusoe. Reading a novel like Defoe’s, that is,
makes us aware of that ‘contradictory process’ emphasised by Emily
Apter wherein ‘globally powerful languages such as English, Mandarin
Chinese, Swahili, Arabic, French simultaneously reduce linguistic diver-
sity and spawn new forms of multilingual aesthetic practice’.26
I choose to mention Robinson Crusoe here not only because it is,
according to the popular imagination, the first ‘English’ novel, and thus
aptly demonstrates that even in its origins, the Anglophone novel had to
confront the reality of multilingualism as it arose in the colonies of the
European powers. It is significant, too, insofar as it takes the Caribbean
as its principal setting, a region with its own particular language histories
12 J. R. WILLIAMS

which render it an unusually fecund one in which to consider the phe-

nomenon of literary multilingualism, and which will also form the locus
of this study. I follow some precedent in considering the Caribbean as
a particularly productive site for this kind of enquiry—Neil Lazarus has
made a strong case for such an understanding:

In work composed in the languages of the former colonial powers, espe-

cially – as, most notably, in the Caribbean – the socially and historically
sedimented resources and symbolic freightage of these languages are first
deconstructed and then reformulated so as to enable them to shoulder the
burden of postcolonial representation.27

If the Caribbean has been the site of some occasionally implicit but
always thorough investigation of colonial language politics for as long as
the novel has existed, then it must also be acknowledged that the par-
ticular histories of colonialism and language in the Caribbean mean that
the process of confronting the colonial past through language has been
ongoing, too, in writing from the region itself. Writing in (for example)
English from the Caribbean, then, contains within it the ‘sedimented
resources’ of much more complex and more plural language histories.
The Caribbean is the site of a unique set of instantiations of the lan-
guage policy and language epistemology which, as we have already seen,
were widespread concerns of empire. Edward Kamau Brathwaite has
commented on the combination of language with political power and
intellectual history which was enacted in the Caribbean:

What our educational system did was to recognize and maintain the lan-
guage of the conquistador – the language of the planter, the language of
the official, the language of the Anglican preacher. It insisted that not only
would English be spoken in the Anglophone Caribbean, but that the edu-
cational system would carry the contours of an English heritage. Hence…
Shakespeare, George Eliot, Jane Austen – British literature and literary
forms, the models which had very little to do, really, with the environment
and the reality of non-Europe – were dominant in the Caribbean educa-
tional system…People were forced to learn things which had no relevance
to themselves. Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other ‘cultural
disaster’ areas), the people educated in this system came to know more,
even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own
national heroes, our own slave rebels, the people who helped to build and
to destroy our society.28
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 13

Here Brathwaite provides gestures both to the continuity with broader

imperial practices experienced by the Caribbean, and the ways in which
the Caribbean stands out as unique. We have already seen, of course, that
a certain tension exists between the rise of state language and a kind of
monolingual national conception on the part of the imperial powers, and
much more plural states of affairs in those regions which they sought to
bring under their control. Brathwaite thus gestures, too, to the plural-
ity of imperialisms experienced by the Caribbean, inviting consideration
of ‘the language of the conquistador’: the Caribbean experienced near-
constant military and economic competition, redrawing of borders and
reinscription of different European linguistic norms which few colonial
regions experienced with such consistency.
The languages common to empire—‘the language of the official, the
language of the Anglican preacher’—are also, in the Caribbean, ‘the
language of the planter’: the presence of slave economies in the region
amounted to a further series of linguistic complexities falling under the
jurisdictions of the European powers. The Caribbean necessitates a con-
sideration of the West African languages of slaves, which were subsumed
into the linguistic milieu and flattened by language policy; the colonis-
ers, Brathwaite remarks, ‘did not wish to hear people speaking Ashanti
or any of the Congolese languages. So there was a submergence of this
imported language. Its status became one of inferiority’.29 It is neces-
sary too, of course, to consider the languages of the indigenous peoples
of the Caribbean, which were either subsumed into European linguistic
taxonomies or eradicated entirely along with their speakers. All of these
considerations amount to the sharpest of divisions between state appara-
tuses like education (as discussed by Brathwaite) which were shaped into
the monolingual institutions of empire, and centuries of actual language
praxis, which have actually existed on a creole continuum. Material lan-
guage usage among populaces is, as accounts like that of Makoni and
Pennycook remind us, always discontinuous and piecemeal; creoles
are not the exception so much as the norm. Or, according to another
account, ‘the Caribbean is characterized by its very complexity, its multi-
plicity of origins, its elusive boundaries, and its defiance of fixity’.30 This
is the reality which monologic assertions of state and imperial power
repress.
As we move closer to the present day, through writers who have
more consciously engaged with the practices and experiences both of
empire and of language use, we can witness a much greater diversity
14 J. R. WILLIAMS

of strategies for writing multilingually. The various ways in which texts

manage and confront language diversity thus become a useful site
through which to interrogate the global, imperial or post-imperial poli-
tics of a given text; as Meir Sternberg writes, the ‘complications’ of the
fact of multilingualism for the writer ‘are intratextual as well as intertex-
tual and representational as well as communicative’.31 Sternberg thus
succinctly demonstrates that, while translation and translation studies
provide one way to approach the issue of multilingualism and notionally
monolingual writing, it is also important that we extend such enquiries
into the text itself, where the mediation between languages must also be
enacted and negotiated. Sternberg, pointing out that ‘such framing and
juxtaposition of differently-encoded speech are…particularly common
within the fictive worlds created in literature’, lays out a series of strate-
gies by which a text can represent and interrogate multiple languages.32
At one extreme, a text might confine itself to a relatively linguistically
uniform community—Sternberg’s example is Jane Austen—while at the
other, a text may completely defy any attempt to identify it with a single
language, switching freely between more than one and apparently grant-
ing no primacy to any.
In practice, of course, the great majority of texts find themselves
somewhere between these two extremes. Texts may faithfully reproduce
the linguistic diversity they aim to depict, offering untranslated dialogue
in multiple languages, or tacitly acknowledge the presence of multiple
languages without making explicit reference to them, offering all text
and dialogue in their own language; such strategies may be mixed and
deployed within a single text. Instead of lingering too theoretically upon
this range and the distinctions therein, I will pause here to provide an
example, in the hope of demonstrating not only the varied approaches
which can be taken to depicting and interrogating the multilingual, but
what kinds of rhetorical and political strategies inhere therein. I will
thus turn to an early scene from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret
Agent. Kellman has drawn particular attention to this as a novel which
betrays Conrad’s ‘incomplete translingualism’, offering as examples
the moments in which Conrad’s syntax or vocabulary reveal an appar-
ent authorial translation from French.33 This is, however, only a partial
explanation of the wealth of multilingual considerations which The Secret
Agent forces.
Mr Verloc, the agent provocateur of the title, arrives at what is strongly
suggested to be the Russian embassy in Belgravia, and there enters into
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 15

conversation with the ‘First Secretary’, Mr Vladimir. The scene, con-

ducted in a mixture of French and English, tantalises the reader with a
series of playful and mocking gestures towards the presumed linguistic
content, which arrives in the text mediated through various degrees of
translation. Thus the opening of the conversation:

The feet of Mr Verloc felt a thick carpet. The room was large, with three
windows; and a young man with a shaven, big face, sitting in a roomy
arm-chair before a vast mahogany writing-table, said in French to the
Chancelier d’Ambassade, who was going out with the papers in his hand:
“You are quite right, mon cher. He’s fat – the animal.”34

The ‘Chancelier d’Ambassade’ is an apparent concession to the

role of French as the official language of diplomacy in this context;
while various narrative gestures (of which the use of French is one)
seem to identify this as the Russian embassy, the Chancelier d’Ambas-
sade has the Germanic name ‘Wurmt’, as does Mr Vladimir’s predeces-
sor, ‘Baron Stott-Wartenheim’. The mingling of multilingual strategies
here is more apparent still in the spoken dialogue which follows, which
is characterised both by the authorial tag alerting the reader to an act
of translation—‘said in French’—and by the deployment of ‘mon cher’,
a relatively recognisable French idiom which renders the passage both
accessible and recognisably foreign. Here we see two of the common
strategies identified by Meir Sternberg’s typography of multilingual writ-
ing practice: the former, what Sternberg terms ‘explicit attribution’, the
latter, ‘selective reproduction’, or ‘intermittent quotation of the original
heterolingual discourse…supposed to have been uttered by the fictive
speaker’.35 Already, we may be compelled to speculate as to the effect
these techniques produce. Does ‘Chancelier d’Ambassade’ lack an ana-
logue in English, or is it being deployed knowing that an English alter-
native would suffice? Is it thus adding semantically to the content of the
passage, or enacting some lampooning strategy with regard to what is
already there? Something similar may seem to lie within the use of ‘mon
cher’, which may infuse the dialogue with authenticity, making it seem
simply ‘more French’, or may again appear parodic, an overly famil-
iar French idiom which seems somewhat out of place. Perhaps, too, we
ought to take note of the manner in which this accentuates the asymme-
try of Vladimir’s utterance; why is the term of endearment rendered in
French, and the ensuing insult translated into English?
16 J. R. WILLIAMS

Acts of so-called selective reproduction offer a convenient way to

begin dissecting the multilingual parameters of this moment, but even
in the brief passage above, it seems there is something rather more subtle
afoot. Indeed, the slightly early arrival of Mr Verloc’s feet (‘the feet of
Mr Verloc…’) mark the first sign that something strange is happening
to Conrad’s English here. The inversion of word order could be read as
a Gallicism, inadvertent or otherwise, or a less easily explicable instance
of what Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien has called ‘weird English’.36 There is
something uncanny in the resonance of this, which seems to play a key
part in bringing to light the atmosphere of political tension suffusing the
exchange. This is no less the case with regard to the nonstandard deploy-
ment just afterward of a semicolon immediately before a conjunction,
which gives the sentence a curiously lurching quality, or the inversion of
the expected order of adjectives in the construction ‘shaven, big face’.
It is difficult to explain why ‘big, shaven face’ would be so much more
comfortable (less still why ‘large, shaven face’ would be even more so),
but at any rate, with ‘vast, mahogany writing-table’ the order is restored
before we have much time to think about it.37 Moments like these,
I think, demonstrate that something is lost in attributing them to an
‘incomplete translingualism’, as though the writing is on its way to being
English, and just hasn’t quite arrived. It is, on the contrary, in this mal-
leable treatment of English, this deployment of something which feels
both English and not-quite-English, where so much of the effectiveness
of the writing lies.
The explicit gestures towards the multilingual must be read alongside
these curious moments where the text’s English begins to deconstruct
itself. The strategies we see above, though, are comparatively simple
compared to what begins to unfold over the following pages:

“You understand French, I suppose?” he said.

Mr Verloc stated huskily that he did…He muttered unobtrusively
somewhere deep down in his throat something about having done his mil-
itary service in the French artillery. At once, with contemptuous perversity,
Mr Vladimir changed the language, and began to speak idiomatic English
without the slightest trace of a foreign accent.
“Ah! Yes. Of course. Let’s see. How much did you get for obtaining
the design of the improved breech-block of their new field-gun?”
“Five years’ rigorous confinement in a fortness,” Mr Verloc answered
unexpectedly, but without any sign of feeling.38
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 17

We can assume that, with Mr Vladimir’s first of these lines, the conversa-
tion is still taking place in French, and thus his question is anything but
simple. The apparently combative nature of asking in French if Mr Verloc
speaks French can also be read as a complete absurdity: a question
which can only be answered in the affirmative, or not at all. That is, Mr
Verloc cannot answer the question unless he does indeed speak French,
and Vladimir’s request forecloses the possibility that he cannot; he
is either asking a question while already knowing the answer, or while
expecting to receive no answer at all. All of this, of course, through the
text’s recourse to Sternberg’s ‘explicit attribution’, is flattened conven-
iently into the parent language of the text; the reader can speculate as
to the kind of disturbance or self-defeating logic at play, but they are
not made subject to it. And yet, with Vladimir’s ‘contemptuous’ switch
into English—‘idiomatic English without the slightest trace of a foreign
accent’, in fact—it seems clear that the reader, too, is beginning to be
implicated in the potential consequences of the text’s interplay of lan-
guages. In addition to bearing witness to Verloc’s own language perfor-
mance, we are reminded that language at the level of the text, too, may
not be all that it seems. If we have to be told that we are reading English
even as we read it, what other language effects may be taking place that
we are not informed of? Just as Vladimir’s spoken English betrays no
signs of the more complex or questionable origins of its speaker, literary
prose, too, may be duplicitous. It may conceal other languages within it,
or it may think in a language other than its own.
The potential of the multilingual as a device for humour and parody is
only further exemplified as this strikingly rich encounter continues:

Mr Verloc intimated hoarsely that he was in the habit of reading the daily
papers. To a further question his answer was that, of course, he understood
what he read. At this Mr Vladimir, smiling faintly at the documents he was
still scanning one after another, murmured “As long as it is not written in
Latin, I suppose.”
“Or Chinese,” added Mr Verloc stolidly.
“H’m. Some of your revolutionary friends’ effusions are written in a
charabia every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese-”39

If ‘mon cher’ is a relatively simple multilingual gesture, which aims

to convey a sense of authenticity in replicating the text’s dialogue with-
out the need for any great proficiency on the part of the reader, then
18 J. R. WILLIAMS

charabia is a rather more complex piece of vocabulary to deploy.

Charabia in fact means nonsense, gibberish, something deliberately or
stubbornly impossible to understand, and it is therefore with some irony
that the text here switches into quite colloquial French: the word chara-
bia is either semantically or literally nonsense, depending on the perspec-
tive of the reader.40 The point to note in this case, though, is that there
are multiple layers at play, numerous possibilities in making sense of the
conversation which grant to its participants various levels of proficiency,
ease or understanding. Verloc’s seemingly benign but stubborn insist-
ence that he might just as well speak Chinese as Latin can also be taken
for a witticism; with another authorial aside, we have already learnt that
the conversation has switched back to French, in which chinois literally
means Chinese, but idiomatically refers to any language which is overly
complex or difficult to understand.41

Modernist Multilingualisms
My decision to take an example from Conrad here is not an arbitrary
one, because while this study will draw upon texts from across a long
twentieth century, Conrad, as a modernist writer from its beginning,
makes clear a number of the concerns which will inform all of the
authors I consider. Even leaving aside the core concerns of the so-called
‘new’ modernist studies, it is apparent that modernism must be closely
implicated in discussions of twentieth-century multilingual writing: mod-
ernism’s position at the height and decline of the empires of Europe, its
foregrounding of the linguistically constructed nature of its works, its
preoccupation with questions of form, with extending the possibilities
of realism and its more pragmatic associations with multiple languages,
migration, borders and so forth, will all by now be clear as contexts for
the work which will follow.
The new modernist studies has provoked a great broadening in the
purview of the discipline, inviting considerations not only of the tem-
poral reach of modernist influence throughout the twentieth century
and into the present day, but also of the breadth of artistic practice
which can be dubbed modernist, the origins of modernist forms in
non-Euro-American contexts and languages, as well as the uptake of
more established conceptions of modernist practice by non-Western
writers.42 While these projections outward geographically and tempo-
rally (in the latter case, outward typically means forward)43 have made
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 19

for reconsiderations of the linkages between modernist form and polit-

ical engagement which have in turn prompted new reflections on the
connections between modernism and colonialism, I would suggest, too,
a need to look backward—to further identify the inheritances of empire
in the early origins of modernism, wherein its formal and linguistic pre-
occupations can be properly rooted.
It is not my most immediate concern here to take a position amid the
wider institutional discussions and debates which have emerged around
modernism recently, gaining particular momentum in the last decade,
particularly with regard to the proper temporal, geographical and stylis-
tic boundaries of the field. Nevertheless, though, it will be necessary to
touch upon these conversations, if only in order to extricate the terms in
which modernism will be considered and deployed in the coming anal-
ysis. Eric Hayot has offered a succinct critique of the expansionist ten-
dency in modernist studies, taking issue with the scholarly practice of:

Placing authors and artists into an already existing theory of modernism

whose center remains European. The only way you recognize that a new
person is a modernist, or that Brazilians had modernism, or that the many
modernisms all belong to the same general category of the modernist, is
if you begin from a conception of what modernism is in the first place.
Adding some new person to the general house, which must be done on
the grounds that in some sense the person already belongs there, allows the
same four or five major figures to continue to define its most basic values.
The furniture changes; the foundation is unmoved.44

Hayot thus provides a convincing perspective on the so-called

Eurochronology problem which scholarship has confronted: taking an
expansionist approach to a field of study like modernism is all well and
good, but it begins from a Eurocentric notion of literary period and of
modernity itself.
Hayot’s own response to the problem of where modernist studies can
and should be going in our present moment is also illuminating; instead
of situating modernism in a particular time or place, Hayot defines it as
one among literary modes themselves defined by the approach they take
to the possibility of representing the world. For Hayot, modernism is
the ‘world-denying’ mode, insofar as it ‘represents situations—no longer
worlds—in which no single shared experience dominates, in which com-
munication becomes a cacophony’.45 This is a useful articulation of
what modernism is for my purposes, first because it allows us to detach
20 J. R. WILLIAMS

modernism from a singular geopolitical and temporal point of origin; it

is sufficiently general that we can retain the European high modernist
locus as being one particularly sustained instantiation of modernist prac-
tice, while allowing for the possibility of other modernisms which are not
necessarily influenced by it, but share its preoccupations with a perceived
incapacity to represent the world. Secondly, with its emphasis on com-
municability and cacophony, Hayot’s thesis allows us to think about the
multilingual as both a concern and an articulation of modernist practice
more generally.
What is at stake in this mode of thinking about modernism is not so
much the question of what it is, but what it does. As a kind of rework-
ing of the more classical formulation of modernism as playing out, in its
adoption of certain forms, the atomised or fragmentary nature of moder-
nity itself, Hayot grants modernism instead an aporetic quality. The
emphasis on a perceived incapacity of communication in Hayot’s account
need not necessarily prescribe a specific formal response as integral to
modernist practice, and indeed, the account which follows will take into
account a variety of formal gestures which aim to make sense of and to
integrate the potential cacophony of multilingual praxis. Nevertheless,
we can read as modernist the moments at which texts must pause to
engage with the question of how to represent a multilingual existence,
a question which I suggest is integral to all of the works I will consider.
Hayot’s analysis, then, is not such a wild departure from longer-held
perspectives on modernism, with their traditional association with frag-
mentation, with a turn inward, with incapacity and with a crisis of politi-
cal and community identification. With his emphasis on community and
communication, though, Hayot offers an account which makes a con-
sideration of language rather more pressing. This thesis on communica-
bility joins, for example, Michael Valdez Moses’s perspective on Conrad,
which argues that ‘the paradigmatic Conradian scene of the imperial
encounter is one of disorientation’ wherein ‘the Western mind…finds
itself at a loss, overthrown, confused, panicked, frustrated, and turned
back upon itself’.46 Again, then, we can see in addition to an important
assertion of the colonial genesis of modernist writing, and a clear com-
plication of Said’s Orientalism, a similar kind of ‘world-denying’ impe-
tus to that advanced by Hayot. For Moses, too, a kind of incapacity lies
at the heart of modernist practice, and this necessarily throws into relief
questions around communicability; later Moses refers more specifically to
 1 INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM … 21

a ‘crisis of language’ underpinning Conrad’s fictional aesthetic, an idea

which I shall consider further in the next chapter.
In these perspectives, which understand modernism as being either
motivated or characterised principally by a kind of alienation from the
world and an accompanying incapacity of communication, it is clear that
language must play a constitutive role. Recent considerations of mod-
ernism have foregrounded the issue of multilingualism more fully, con-
tributing to a more in-depth set of perspectives on the ways in which
modernism engages more explicitly with language.47 Steven G. Yao’s
work, for example, has placed the practice of translation as a central con-
sideration of the modernist period, gesturing to various modernist writ-
ers’ involvement in the practice of translation and thus representing one
approach to exploring modernist practice as concerned specifically with
languages and the spaces between them:

Throughout the Modernist period…translation occupied a manifold con-

ceptual space: it constituted an autonomous literary activity that inspired
sustained and varied critical reflection: it functioned as a specific technique
in the construction of texts in a variety of different modes, ranging from
“original” works to so-called adaptations to “translations” proper, as that
term has been traditionally understood, texts by which various writers both
expanded the scope of Modernism and explored issues of gender, poli-
tics, and language itself; and it embodied a comprehensive textual strategy
for negotiating between the demands of transmission and transforma-
tion, between the authority of tradition and the demands of innovation,
between the endowments of the past and the imperatives of the present.48

Yao’s perspective is important insofar as it invites us to think about

modernism in the light of languages in the plural as well as language in
the singular. It is not merely that modernists engaged with language as
their media in ways more forthright than previous generations of writ-
ers, nor that modernists effected striking redeployments of language and
exploitations of its malleability. What we see in an account like Yao’s and
its foregrounding of translation is a more worldly, politically engaged set
of concerns; while language may be a dispassionate or detached area of
practice and study, to think about languages is necessarily to acknowl-
edge the political and ideological moves necessary in their separations
and meetings. Striking, then, is the focus Yao invites us to direct towards
‘issues of gender, politics and language itself’, suggesting a need to
22 J. R. WILLIAMS

consider the politics of language and the linguistics of the multilingual

as material political experiences. This, of course, is not to elide the prac-
tices of formal experimentation inherent to modernism, but it is a vital
fact underpinning it; as Yao goes on to write, ‘through the practice of
translation, Modernist writers undertook to extend the limits of English
itself, which in turn led them to discover new possibilities for their own
expression’.49
Juliette Taylor-Batty’s more recent account goes further still in its
association of modernism with an applied, worldly sense of the multilin-
gual, suggesting that the new social relations engendered by European
modernity brought with them a newfound literary awareness of linguistic
difference:

The result is not only an acute awareness of the inadequacy of established

literary languages and forms to express this new world, but an unprece-
dented sensitivity to linguistic and cultural plurality and difference – an
awareness, in short, of the condition of Babel.50

There may be a slight tendency here to overstate the case; modern-

ist linguistic engagement and experimentation can, as we have seen, be
considered within a much longer time frame of language and empire.
Nevertheless, Taylor-Batty offers a way into thinking about modernist
practice as concerned, again, not only with language in the abstract, but
with concrete histories of language. The growing consideration of vari-
ous kinds of multilingual writing within the canon can thus, in Yildiz’s
phrase, ‘help to reveal the significance of multilingualism for modernism
on the one hand and for postcolonial and transnational writing on the
other’.51
This is a reminder, too, offered by Moses’ account of the emer-
gence of Conrad’s style above: to think about modernism with par-
ticular recourse to its negotiation of multilingualism is to properly
ground it within particular histories of language. Moses and Begam’s
2007 collection is part of what remains an emergent scholarly tendency
to situate modernism with regard to its relation to, and inheritance
from, European imperialism. It is only now, according to Christopher
GoGwilt, that it is becoming ‘increasingly more plausible to view mod-
ernism, once considered a product of Europe and America, as the effect
of wider, transnational phenomenon. In this view, literary and artistic
modernism properly belongs within a history of decolonization’.52
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 [Going—returns.

Count (touching guitar).

Good! let it be but one.

Elisabetta.

Hath she return’d thy love?

Count.

Not yet!

Elisabetta.

And will she?

Count (looking at Lady Giovanna).

I scarce believe it!

Elisabetta.

Shame upon her then!

[Exit.

Count (sings).

“Dead mountain flowers”——

Ah well, my nurse has broken
The thread of my dead flowers, as she has broken
My china bowl. My memory is as dead.

[Goes and replaces guitar.

Strange that the words at home with me so long

Should fly like bosom friends when needed most.
So by your leave if you would hear the rest,
The writing.

Lady Giovanna (holding wreath toward him).

There! my lord, you are a poet,

And can you not imagine that the wreath,
Set, as you say, so lightly on her head,
Fell with her motion as she rose, and she,
A girl, a child, then but fifteen, however
Flutter’d or flatter’d by your notice of her,
Was yet too bashful to return for it?

Count.

Was it so indeed? was it so? was it so?

[Leans forward to take wreath, and

touches Lady Giovanna’s hand,
which she withdraws hastily; he
places wreath on corner of chair.

Lady Giovanna (with dignity).

I did not say, my lord, that it was so;

I said you might imagine it was so.

Enter Filippo with bowl of salad, which he places on table.

Filippo.

Here’s a fine salad for my lady, for tho’ we have been a

soldier, and ridden by his lordship’s side, and seen the red of the
battle-field, yet are we now drill-sergeant to his lordship’s
lettuces, and profess to be great in green things and in garden-
stuff.

Lady Giovanna.
 I thank you, good Filippo.

[Exit Filippo.

Enter Elisabetta with bird on a dish which she places on table.

Elisabetta (close to table).

Here’s a fine fowl for my lady; I had scant time to do him in. I
hope he be not underdone, for we be undone in the doing of
him.

Lady Giovanna.

I thank you, my good nurse.

Filippo (re-entering with plate of prunes).

And here are fine fruits for my lady—prunes, my lady, from the
tree that my lord himself planted here in the blossom of his
boyhood—and so I, Filippo, being, with your ladyship’s pardon,
and as your ladyship knows, his lordship’s own foster-brother,
would commend them to your ladyship’s most peculiar
appreciation.

[Puts plate on table.

Elisabetta.

Filippo!

Lady Giovanna (Count leads her to table).

Will you not eat with me, my lord?

Count.

I cannot,
Not a morsel, not one morsel. I have broken
My fast already. I will pledge you. Wine!
Filippo, wine!

[Sits near table; Filippo brings flask,

fills the Count’s goblet, then
Lady Giovanna’s; Elisabetta
stands at the back of Lady
Giovanna’s chair.

Count.

It is but thin and cold,

Not like the vintage blowing round your castle.
We lie too deep down in the shadow here.
Your ladyship lives higher in the sun.

[They pledge each other and drink.

Lady Giovanna.

If I might send you down a flask or two

Of that same vintage? There is iron in it.
It has been much commended as a medicine.
I give it my sick son, and if you be
Not quite recover’d of your wound, the wine
Might help you. None has ever told me yet
The story of your battle and your wound.

Filippo (coming forward).

I can tell you, my lady, I can tell you.

Elisabetta.

Filippo! will you take the word out of your master’s own
mouth?

Filippo.
 Was it there to take? Put it there, my lord.

Count.

Giovanna, my dear lady, in this same battle

We had been beaten—they were ten to one.
The trumpets of the fight had echo’d down,
I and Filippo here had done our best,
And, having passed unwounded from the field,
Were seated sadly at a fountain side,
Our horses grazing by us, when a troop,
Laden with booty and with a flag of ours
Ta’en in the fight——

Filippo.

Ay, but we fought for it back,

And kill’d——

Elisabetta.

Filippo!

Count.

A troop of horse——

Filippo.

Five
hundred!

Count.

Say fifty!

Filippo.

And we kill’d ’em by the score!

 Elisabetta.

Filippo!

Filippo.

Well, well, well! I bite my tongue.

Count.

We may have left their fifty less by five.

However, staying not to count how many,
But anger’d at their flaunting of our flag,
We mounted, and we dashed into the heart of ’em.
I wore the lady’s chaplet round my neck;
It served me for a blessed rosary.
I am sure that more than one brave fellow owed
His death to the charm in it.

Elisabetta.

Hear that, my lady!

Count.

I cannot tell how long we strove before

Our horses fell beneath us; down we went
Crush’d, hack’d at, trampled underfoot. The night,
As some cold-manner’d friend may strangely do us
The truest service, had a touch of frost
That help’d to check the flowing of the blood.
My last sight ere I swoon’d was one sweet face
Crown’d with the wreath. That seem’d to come and go.
They left us there for dead!

Elisabetta.

Hear that, my lady!

 Filippo.

Ay, and I left two fingers there for dead. See, my lady!
(Showing his hand).

Lady Giovanna.

I see, Filippo!

Filippo.

And I have small hope of the gentleman gout in my great toe.

Lady Giovanna.

And why, Filippo?

[Smiling absently.

Filippo.

I left him there for dead too!

Elisabetta.

She smiles at him—how hard the woman is!

My lady, if your ladyship were not
Too proud to look upon the garland, you
Would find it stain’d——

Count (rising).

Silence, Elisabetta!

Elisabetta.

Stain’d with the blood of the best heart that ever

Beat for one woman.
 [Points to wreath on chair.

Lady Giovanna (rising slowly).

I can eat no more!

Count.

You have but trifled with our homely salad,

But dallied with a single lettuce-leaf;
Not eaten anything.

Lady Giovanna.

Nay, nay, I cannot.

You know, my lord, I told you I was troubled.
My one child Florio lying still so sick,
I bound myself, and by a solemn vow,
That I would touch no flesh till he were well
Here, or else well in Heaven, where all is well.

[Elisabetta clears table of bird and

salad: Filippo snatches up the
plate of prunes and holds them to
Lady Giovanna.

Filippo.

But the prunes, my lady, from the tree that his lordship——

Lady Giovanna.

Not now, Filippo. My lord Federigo,

Can I not speak with you once more alone?

Count.

You hear, Filippo? My good fellow, go!

 Filippo.

But the prunes that your lordship——

Elisabetta.

Filippo!

Count.

Ay, prune our company of thine own and go!

Elisabetta.

Filippo!

Filippo (turning).

Well, well! the women!

[Exit.

Count.

And thou too leave us, my dear nurse, alone.

Elisabetta (folding up cloth and going).

And me too! Ay, the dear nurse will leave you alone; but, for
all that, she that has eaten the yolk is scarce like to swallow the
shell.

[Turns and curtseys stiffly to Lady

Giovanna, then exit. Lady
Giovanna takes out diamond
necklace from casket.

Lady Giovanna.
I have anger’d your good nurse; these old-world servants
Are all but flesh and blood with those they serve.
My lord, I have a present to return you,
And afterwards a boon to crave of you.

Count.

No, my most honour’d and long-worshipt lady,

Poor Federigo degli Alberighi
Takes nothing in return from you except
Return of his affection—can deny
Nothing to you that you require of him.

Lady Giovanna.

Then I require you to take back your diamonds—

[Offering necklace.

I doubt not they are yours. No other heart

Of such magnificence in courtesy
Beats—out of heaven. They seem’d too rich a prize
To trust with any messenger. I came
In person to return them.

[Count draws back.

If the phrase
“Return” displease you, we will say—exchange them
For your—for your——

Count (takes a step toward her and then back).

For mine—and what of mine?

Lady Giovanna.

Well, shall we say this wreath and your sweet rhymes?

 Count.

But have you ever worn my diamonds?

Lady Giovanna.

No!
For that would seem accepting of your love,
I cannot brave my brother—but be sure
That I shall never marry again, my lord!

Count.

Sure?

Lady Giovanna.

Yes!

Count.

Is this your brother’s order?

Lady Giovanna.

No!
For he would marry me to the richest man
In Florence; but I think you know the saying—
“Better a man without riches, than riches without a man.”

Count.

A noble saying—and acted on would yield

A nobler breed of men and women. Lady,
I find you a shrewd bargainer. The wreath
That once you wore outvalues twentyfold
The diamonds that you never deign’d to wear.
But lay them there for a moment!
 [Points to table. Lady Giovanna
places necklace on table.

And be you
Gracious enough to let me know the boon
By granting which, if aught be mine to grant,
I should be made more happy than I hoped
Ever to be again.

Lady Giovanna.

Then keep your wreath,

But you will find me a shrewd bargainer still.
I cannot keep your diamonds, for the gift
I ask for, to my mind and at this present
Outvalues all the jewels upon earth.

Count.

It should be love that thus outvalues all.

You speak like love, and yet you love me not.
I have nothing in this world but love for you.

Lady Giovanna.

Love? it is love, love for my dying boy,

Moves me to ask it of you.

Count.

What? my time?
Is it my time? Well, I can give my time
To him that is a part of you, your son.
Shall I return to the castle with you? Shall I
Sit by him, read to him, tell him my tales,
Sing him my songs? You know that I can touch
The ghittern to some purpose.
 Lady Giovanna.

No, not that!

I thank you heartily for that—and you,
I doubt not from your nobleness of nature,
Will pardon me for asking what I ask.

Count.

Giovanna, dear Giovanna, I that once

The wildest of the random youth of Florence
Before I saw you—all my nobleness
Of nature, as you deign to call it, draws
From you, and from my constancy to you.
No more, but speak.

Lady Giovanna.

I will. You know sick people,

More specially sick children, have strange fancies,
Strange longings; and to thwart them in their mood
May work them grievous harm at times, may even
Hasten their end. I would you had a son!
It might be easier then for you to make
Allowance for a mother—her—who comes
To rob you of your one delight on earth.
How often has my sick boy yearn’d for this!
I have put him off as often; but to-day
I dared not—so much weaker, so much worse
For last day’s journey. I was weeping for him;
He gave me his hand: “I should be well again
If the good Count would give me——”

Count.

Give me.

Lady Giovanna.
 His falcon.

Count (starts back).

My falcon!

Lady Giovanna.

Yes, your falcon, Federigo!

Count.

Alas, I cannot!

Lady Giovanna.

Cannot? Even so!

I fear’d as much. O this unhappy world!
How shall I break it to him? how shall I tell him?
The boy may die: more blessed were the rags
Of some pale beggar-woman seeking alms
For her sick son, if he were like to live,
Than all my childless wealth, if mine must die.
I was to blame—the love you said you bore me—
My lord, we thank you for your entertainment,

[With a stately curtsey.

And so return—Heaven help him!—to our son.

[Turns.

Count (rushes forward).

Stay, stay, I am most unlucky, most unhappy.

You never had look’d in on me before,
And when you came and dipt your sovereign head
Thro’ these low doors, you ask’d to eat with me.
I had but emptiness to set before you,
No not a draught of milk, no not an egg,
Nothing but my brave bird, my noble falcon,
My comrade of the house, and of the field.
She had to die for it—she died for you.
Perhaps I thought with those of old, the nobler
The victim was, the more acceptable
Might be the sacrifice. I fear you scarce
Will thank me for your entertainment now.

Lady Giovanna (returning).

I bear with him no longer.

Count.

No, Madonna!
And he will have to bear with it as he may.

Lady Giovanna.

I break with him for ever!

Count.

Yes, Giovanna,
But he will keep his love to you for ever!

Lady Giovanna.

You? you? not you! My brother! my hard brother!

O Federigo, Federigo, I love you!
Spite of ten thousand brothers, Federigo.

[Falls at his feet.

Count (impetuously).

Why then the dying of my noble bird

Hath served me better than her living—then
 [Takes diamonds from table.

These diamonds are both yours and mine—have won

Their value again—beyond all markets—there
I lay them for the first time round your neck.

[Lays necklace round her neck.

And then this chaplet—No more feuds, but peace,

Peace and conciliation! I will make
Your brother love me. See, I tear away
The leaves were darken’d by the battle——

[Pulls leaves off and throws them down.

—crown you
Again with the same crown my Queen of Beauty.

[Places wreath on her head.

Rise—I could almost think that the dead garland

Will break once more into the living blossom.
Nay, nay, I pray you rise.

[Raises her with both hands.

We two together
Will help to heal your son—your son and mine—
We shall do it—we shall do it.

[Embraces her.

The purpose of my being is accomplish’d,

And I am happy!

Lady Giovanna.

And I too, Federigo.

 THE END.
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
Crown 8vo. Price 7s. 6d.

THE WORKS OF LORD TENNYSON

POET LAUREATE.
A NEW COLLECTED EDITION.
CORRECTED THROUGHOUT BY THE AUTHOR.
With a New Portrait.

LORD TENNYSON’S WORKS.

THE ORIGINAL EDITIONS.
Fcap. 8vo.

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POEMS 6 0
MAUD, AND OTHER POEMS 3 6
THE PRINCESS 3 6
IDYLLS OF THE KING (Collected) 6 0
ENOCH ARDEN, etc. 3 6
THE HOLY GRAIL, AND OTHER POEMS 4 6
IN MEMORIAM 4 0
BALLADS, AND OTHER POEMS 5 0
HAROLD: A DRAMA 6 0
QUEEN MARY: A DRAMA 6 0
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