Laura Lonsdale: 'Multilingualism and Barbarism'

Laura Lonsdale: 'Multilingualism and Barbarism'

In spite of the transnational turn in literary and especially modernist studies, there are few studies of multilingualism that extend beyond defined literary movements, theoretical discourses, or the cultural politics of particular nations. But, as Jahan Ramazani argues with respect to transnational poetry, ‘although creolization, hybridization, and the like are often regarded as exotic or multicultural sideshows to literary histories of formal advancement or the growth of discrete national poetries, these cross-cultural dynamics are arguably among the engines of modern and contemporary poetic development and innovation’ (2009, 2-3). If cross-cultural dynamics are among the engines of modern literary development, multilingualism is not just a consequence of those dynamics but is rather emblematic of the mixing effects they produce. It therefore becomes important to conceive multilingualism in broader relation to modernity, to view it not only in literary historical terms as a modernist practice, but to think of it figuratively as a literary embodiment of modernity. But how to describe this figurative embodiment? Do cosmopolitanism and hybridity provide adequate frames for viewing the often fraught encounter of languages in a multilingual text, or are these notions too easily absorbed into a globalised idea of difference? Drawing on the etymology of the word ‘barbarism,’ which onomatopoeically conveys the stuttering or repetitive sound of incomprehensible foreign speech ( ba-ba, bla-bla, bara-bara ), this paper will suggest that the word’s evocation of a specifically linguistic mode of difference and a specifically formal mode of interruption gives barbarism strength as a descriptive marker for multilingual practice, even as it remains problematic in its associations.