Third Language or Multilingual, like Franz Kafka

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Third LanguageorMultilingual, like Franz Kafka

• Claire Kramsch, UC Berkeley

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1. Multilingualism of the other

• Kafka, the quintessential multilingual
• A Czech Jews use of German
• Mauscheln or the use of German by Jews is,
  in the broadest sense. . . the loud or silent or
  even torturous appropriation of a foreign
  property, which one has not acquired, but has
  stolen through a relatively rapid sleight of
  hand, a language that remains foreign property,
  even if not a single speech error can be
  detected (Letter to Max Brod June 1921, my
  translation)
• Between the Jew and his language there can be no
  real intimacy, but only problematic connections
  that tie the robber and the robbed (Marthe
  Robert, Seul, comme Franz Kafka, 1979199)

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• Kafka, the non-native speaker
• De-territorializing German
• Kafka does not opt for a reterritorialization
  through the Czech language. Nor toward a
  hypercultural usage of German with all sorts of
  oneiric or symbolic or mythic flights.. Nor
  toward an oral, popular yiddish. . He sees
  yiddish less as a sort of linguistic
  territoriality for the Jews than as a nomadic
  movement of deterritorialization that so
  reworks the German language from within that one
  cannot translate it into German without
  destroying it. . . Using the path that yiddish
  opens up to him, he takes it in such a way as to
  convert it into a unique and solitary form of
  writing
• (Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. Kafka. Pour une
  litterature mineure, 197546-47).

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2. Bericht fuer eine Akademie

• The story
• Honorable members of the Academy,
• You have done me the honor of inviting me to
  give your Academy an account of the life I
  formerly led as an ape.
• I regret that I cannot comply with your request
  to the extent you desire. It is now nearly five
  years since I was an apeI could never have
  achieved what I have done had I been stubbornly
  set on clinging to my origins, to the
  remembrances of my youth. In fact, to give up
  being stubborn was the supreme commandment I laid
  upon myself free ape as I was, I submitted
  myself to that yoke. As a consequence, however,
  my memory of the past has closed itself off from
  me more and more.
• All the time facing that locker I should
  certainly have perished. Yet at Hagenbecks, the
  proper place for apes is in front of a locker
  well then, I had to stop being an ape (my
  emphases)

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3. Linguistic alienation

• Rotpeters acquisition of German
• Henri Gobards four functions of language
• - vernacular, maternal, or territorial language,
  used in rural communities or rural in its
  origins. The here.
• - referential language, language of sense
  and of culture, entailing a
• cultural reterritorialization. The over there.
• - vehicular, urban, governmental, even worldwide
  language, a
• language of business, commercial exchange,
  bureaucratic
• transmission etc. The everywhere.
• - mythic language, on the horizon of cultures,
  caught up in a spiritual
• or religious reterritorialization. The beyond.
• (Henri Gobard Aliénation linguistique analyse
  tétraglossique, 1976)

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4. Kafkas language a mythic language?

• Mythic/metaphoric interpretations of Bericht fuer
  eine Akademie
• Kafkas categorical rejection of mythic language
• Diaries, 1921 Metaphors are one of the things
  that make me despair
• of literature. Kafka deliberately kills all
  metaphor, all symbolism, all
• signification, no less than all designation.
  Metamorphosis is the
• contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any
  proper sense or figurative
• sense, but only a distribution of states that is
  part of the range of word
• distribution détats dans léventail du mot.
  The thing and other things
• are no longer anything but intensities overrun
  by deterritorialized
• sound or words that are following their line of
  escape des intensités
• parcourues par les sons ou les mots
  déterritorialisés suivant leur ligne
• de fuite
• Deleuze Guattari 1975/198622)

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5. Lines of escape of the multilingual writer

• 5.1 Taking the language at its word
• Ausweg or way out.
• I did not want freedom, neither then nor now. By
  the way humans deceive themselves all too often
  with the word freedomNo, freedom was not what I
  wanted. Only a way outeven if the way out proved
  to be only an illusion. Anything not to have to
  stand motionless, with raised arms, crushed
  against a wooden wall.
• Ausweg vs. Freiheit
• As I look back on my development and survey what
  I have achieved so far, I do not complain, but I
  am not complacent eitherI am only making a
  report ich berichte nur. To you too, honored
  Members of the Academy, I have only made a report
  ich habe nur berichtet

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5.2 Re-territorializing language in the readers
body

• Prototypical image-schemas evoked by the words
• Combining image schemas to form possible mental
  spaces
• (Turner, Mark. The literary mind, 1996
  Fauconnier, Gilles Mark Turner. The way we
  think. Conceptual blending and the minds hidden
  complexities, 2002.)

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5.3 Cultivating paradox and irony

• A multilingual pokes fun at monolinguals
• Your life as apes Ihr Affentum, gentlemen,
  insofar as something of that kind etwas
  Derartiges lies behind you, cannot be farther
  removed from you than mine is from me
• Can a multilingual be trusted?
• The first thing I learned was to give a
  handshake, a handshake betokens frankness
  Offenheit well, today, now that I stand at the
  very peak of my career, I hope to add frankness
  in words das offene Wort to the frankness of
  that first handshake

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6. What can we learn from Kafkas multilingual
experience?

• 6.1 Linguistic legitimacy the hidden anguish of
  the multilingual speaker
• Do I speak a legitimate language?
• Am I a legitimate speaker?
• Do I speak in a legitimate manner on legitimate
  topics?

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• 6.2. The anguish of the multilingual writer
  Milan Kundera
• How can I resist feeding into the provincialism
  of large nations? The domination of the market.
• How can I resist feeding into the provincialism
  of small nations or ethnic communities? The
  tyranny of the community.

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6.3 Experienced multilingualism de- and
re-territorialization

• From You are one of ours! Just be one of ours!
  to How can we trust you?
• Multilingual authors deterritorialize major
  literatures and reterritorialize them in a minor
  key.

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Conclusion

• The legitimacy of the multilingual speaker in a
  multilingual world
• a way in IS A way out
• Speakers of several languages can
• Simultaneously mean the same thing and mean
  something very different from what monolingual
  speakers mean.
• Be at once insiders and outsiders
• Be at the same time a self and an other
• Use words that are both their own and someone
  elses
• Say things that are simultaneously true and
  untrue
• Andthey can cross-pollinate one language with
  another

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The particular condition of the multilingual
writer

• One always writes from an absence, the choice
  of a language automatically signifying the
  postponement of another. What at first would seem
  an imposition why does one have to choose
  quickly turns into an advantage. The absence of
  what is postponed continues to work, obscurely,
  on the chosen language, suffusing it, even
  better, contaminating it, with an autrement dit
  that brings it unexpected eloquence. That
  alterity, or alteration, also disturbs the
  reading habits of the bilingual subject. . .
• I wrote the word alterity which brings to
  my mind the French for satisfying ones thirst,
  désaltérer. The writing of a bilingual writer, I
  would venture, is of need always altered, never
  disaltered always thirsty, always wanting,
  never satisfied. And it is also, in another
  sense, alterada, in the way I used to hear the
  Spanish term used by my mother, my aunts, when
  referring to somebody who was slightly off, who
  could not control her thoughts, her voice.
• (Molloy, Sylvia. Bilingualism or the feeling
  of not quite being there In Isabelle de
  Courtivron Lives in Translation, 200374)

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The wager of multilingualism

• 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? This is the problem of
  immigrants, and
• especially of their children, the problem of
  minorities,
• the problem of a minor literature, but also a
  problem for
• all of us how to tear a minor literature away
  from its
• own language, allowing it to challenge the
  language and
• making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How
  to
• become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy
• in relation to ones own language? Kafka answers
• steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope
• (Deleuze Guattari 198619)

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Introduction

• In the past three years, there has been

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Section III

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Section II

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