David Golumbia on Evelyn Ch'ien
The Trouble with Normal English
Review of Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien, Weird English (Harvard UP, 2004)
By David Golumbia, University of Virginia
An especially interesting and original work of recent literary criticism, Evelyn Ch’ien’s marvelous Weird English, like all good works of cultural analysis, raises as many questions for future research as it answers on its own terms. While it engages a variety of topics having to do with the intersection of languages and literature, its main topic is what Ch’ien refers to as “novelists who sustain a practice of linguistic polyculturality” (21). More particularly, she is interested in “how the features of immigrant and postcolonial writing emerge in the works of Nabokov, Rushdie, Roy, Kingston, and Díaz” (56). Ch’ien’s inventive juxtaposition of immigrant ethnicity and multilingualism allows her to address what has long been a major theme in literary writing: the use of a variety of linguistic registers, including those that are typically thought of as “nonliterary,” as essential material for the construction of one of the most archetypical literary forms.
Of course this problematic has been at least somewhat familiar in literary studies for at least two reasons: first, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on what he calls heteroglossia, found especially in the essays “Discourse in the Novel” and “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” in the posthumously-assembled collection The Dialogic Imagination. The term is frequently misunderstood; that it points very much to the same kinds of phenomena Ch’ien sees is quite clear from the text. Referring to what he calls “the comic novel” in English (a genre which for him includes figures as diverse as Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Dickens, and Thackeray), Bakhtin writes:
Comic style (of the English sort) is based, therefore, on the stratification of common language and on the possibilities available for isolating from these strata, to one degree or another, one’s own intentions, without ever completely merging with them. It is precisely the diversity of speech, and not the unity of a normative shared language, that is the ground of style. (Dialogic Imagination, 308; emphasis in original)
What is so striking about Ch’ien’s study is that it appears so new, when the subject it addresses is one that has arguably implicated itself into the very form of the novel from the beginning. We are accustomed to thinking of the novel as among the highest forms not merely of literary art but of literary writing; there is something in the contemporary sensibility that resists the obvious fact that the novel itself is built on a heterogeneity of language, and among the various registers is precisely the non-literary language that we might, on quicker reflection, expect the novel to exclude. Among many other qualities, novelists are supposed to provide excellent representations of the spoken speech styles of the characters portrayed; we simply take it for granted, sometimes even as if they were not part of the novel, that a novelist must be adept at hearing and reproducing forms that we might in the very same breath descry as parasitic or sub-standard.
The second locus for a subject similar to Ch’ien’s is found particularly (though not exclusively) in the US novelistic canon. Perhaps owing to the curious status of American language in its own historical self-conception, US novelists have quite often made it their business to represent a range of speech styles as wide as, or perhaps even wider than, Dickens did. It is no accident that among the most famous and canonical of US novels is Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which self-consciously attempts to reproduce close to a dozen regional and ethnic speech styles, which themselves have been part of the cause for its repeated banning in many educational institutions. Though poorly-remembered today, the “dialect literature” movement of the late 19th and early 20th century in the US built on this tradition, and writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and, later, Langston Hughes built what was once recognized as a entire literary movement, perhaps even a genre, on the incorporation of what many white Americans accused of being a “non-language”—the language, that is, spoken by African-Americans (see Jones, Strange Talk, for a good account of both movements).
Ch’ien rightly points to race and immigration as loci through which the question of linguistic weirdness emerges. Immigration provides a rich matrix out of which linguistic change can emerge, and the immigrant experience is often (but not always) conditioned by a variety of linguistic differences. Ch’ien cleverly re-reads Nabokov’s comic novel Pnin (as well as commenting on Lolita) in terms of that author’s experiences of immigration and of learning English as a second literary language. This is an overdue and welcome reconsideration of an issue that clearly formed much of Nabokov’s subject matter, and it is a tribute to Ch’ien’s intelligence that she sees through the layers of formal and narratological analysis that have been the general means of approaching Nabokov. Few authors in English have as complex a linguistic and diasporic history as does Nabokov, and reading him in these terms is long overdue.
Ch’ien finds a second site for discussion of the immigrant linguistic experience in the works of Maxine Hong Kingston. Here, too, she provides an original perspective on relatively well-trodden material, especially in noting the interesting trajectory of Kingston’s invoking of her native Cantonese language. As Ch’ien rightly notes, the idea that Chinese characters (which are nearly identical for both “Mandarin Chinese”—i.e. what mainland speakers call “putonghua”—and the Hong Kong Chinese spoken by Kingston) are “ideographic” while roman letters are “phonetic” expresses a prejudice held over from the 19th century view of languages. Of course it is true that Chinese characters can stand in as pictures for words, and of course it is true that many characters function just this way. But as the linguist John DeFrancis (among others, but most famously) has been arguing for more than 25 years, “Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing” (133); “for the overwhelming majority of characters, those in the radical + phonetic category … the radical represents a morpheme that may provide a clue to the meaning of the whole character whereas the phonetic represents a syllable that may suggest the pronunciation of the character. In general, the syllabic value of the phonetic is of such overriding importance that the Chinese writing system should be considered to be basically a phonetic systems of writing of the syllabic type” (125).
Ch’ien’s discussion of Kingston focuses in particular on her representations of what she calls “Chinglish” in her 1980 novel China Men and her 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (I write “what Kingston calls ‘Chinglish’” because that term is more often applied to hybridized putonghua-English speech practices; Kingston is referring to a localized California hybrid of Cantonese and English without apparent reference to the putonghua-based practice. Cantonese-English hybrids are typically called “Hong Kong English” or even “Honglish.” See “Chinglish,” “Hong Kong English.”) As Ch’ien shows, speaking of Tripmaster Monkey, “the entire book is linguistically performative” (Ch’ien, 142). Even though Kingston is to some extent documenting the practices of her local speech community, she is also self-consciously playing both with representations of that language (since, as a spoken dialect, it has no standard orthography) and with its actual structure and word forms.
Both Kingston and Nabokov can lay claim, in different ways, to aspects of the immigrant experience (although it was Kingston’s parents who actually immigrated to the US). In her second set of examples, Ch’ien shifts her focus slightly, and it is here where even wider issues also emerge. Addressing Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and several works of Junot Díaz, including his 1997 story collection Drown, and then briefly discussion some works of Derek Wolcott and Salman Rushdie, Ch’ien asks a question even deeper than the one exposed by the immigrant question: to what degree is linguistic multiplicity a characteristic of all language practices? Is there even such a thing as linguistic homogeneity, in practice? If not, from where do the ideologies associated with monolingualism emerge? Why do we need them, and who benefits from them?
In my own teaching, including some of the same works Ch’ien discusses, I find confirmation that the answer to this question lies exactly in the racial formations Ch’ien discusses and also in economic ones. We use linguistic difference as a proxy for racial and class difference, and can insist as a population on “standard English” though we can no longer insist on “white privilege.” In many ways these two ideas stand for the same thing: they suggest that one way of being is correct and others are incorrect, or that one is primary and the others derivative. No matter how definitively we are shown that this value judgment is incorrect (as Labov’s pioneering work has done for the speech practices of African-Americans; see most famously Labov 1969, 1970), as a population we seem incredibly ready to believe otherwise. Even quite well-informed public figures who belong to these communities—Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby—will echo the disparaging and inaccurate assessments of ideologues. As linguists have been telling us for many years, there is no human community without a language, and no language is better than any other; it is not even clear that one of the most famous of linguistic prejudices, that the so-called “creole” or “pidgin” languages that occur in trade zones are “less full” than other languages, is true at all (especially in the works of Michel DeGraaf; see, e.g., DeGraaf 2001).
Perhaps the most vital observation Ch’ien makes is that much like races and ethnicities, languages are always in the process of hybridization; the idea that there is something like a “pure” English or a “pure” Spanish is an ideological construct that literature, in particular, can help us to unmake. Ch’ien argues that “in hybridizing his English, and in asserting the integrity of heterogeneous discourse, Díaz dirties the reputation of translation, demotes it to a mistaken, impossible, and potentially damaging ideal. The concept of translation is crafted by a dominant culture; in practice, translation is erasure … The representation of another culture in another language should be hybrid, so as to avoid assimilation or erasure” (208-9). The multiple registers accessed by Díaz force the reader to think more carefully about heteroglossia than he or she otherwise might, in a novel confined more narrowly to speech patterns associated with the higher classes and majority ethnicities of the US.
These patterns are surprisingly accessible to students, even undergraduates from majority cultures. In reading novels like Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the Rs, both novels about the Philippines and their relation to the US, students are able to see the ways in which ethnic and linguistic minoritization walk hand-in-hand, and especially in Linmark’s work, how linguistic minoritization almost always exists so as to underwrite or cloak racism or at least ethnocentrism. Many white middle- and upper-class suburban university students may have encountered and even absorbed some of the anti-African American English attitudes so prominent in our culture, while at the same time exhibiting the tremendous fascination and mimicry of those same speech patterns common among their peers. Why hate and imitate a practice all at the same time? Why say a speech practice is “less than” ours, and at the same time pepper one’s own speech with it? The paradoxes at the heart of racialist and racist thoughts may be accessed through language with particular facility, because so many of us in the US are engaged in them directly.
Perhaps as importantly as the written representation of “nonstandard” and “minority” speech practices that are today evidenced everywhere in literature, contemporary film and television offer a slightly different window into the complex politics of race and language. Actors do not need to think about precise orthographies to represent various speech forms, and they often shift somewhat unconsciously between various registers to suit a given purpose. I have found in my own classes that the tremendous HBO program The Wire works especially well in this way; the program displays a remarkable range of linguistic practices and registers, with even single characters crossing effortlessly into several speech contexts. The dramatic thrust of the program brings issues of law, race, gender, and economics to the fore, and the evident empathy the program shows toward nearly all of the characters makes racialist assumptions difficult to sustain. The fluency of many characters in any number of speech environments—fluency that is by no means parallel to formal education—raises important questions about the nature of the educational process, as does the program’s repeated insistence on the varieties of “book learning” and “street learning.” I am consistently surprised by the ability of students with no linguistic training whatsoever to notice the many shifts in speech styles often seen in The Wire, and no less by their ability to abstract from these shifts to connected questions about social hierarchies, politics, race, gender, government, teaching, and other topics.
Ch’ien calls the practice she is most interested in Weird English. The title is perhaps the element of the book that raises, for me, its most significant problems, which are minor and terminological. The processes she describes are by no means limited to English, either in the authors she describes or in their worldwide expression; they are characteristics of language in general, which is always hybrid, always changing, always mixing, never pure. And in this sense, despite understanding the utility of the adjective, part of me wishes she had found a different word than weird: because in fact the processes to which she pays such careful attention are not weird at all. They are the norm; and it is the view that something like what we call “standard English” is the norm, that is in fact the ideological problem her book so ably confronts. I have no doubt that her book stands at the beginning of many more studies of related topics, and no less of more literature and media that make the politics of language (and of linguistic normalization) much more visible than they have been in the recent past.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. c1930. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
“Chinglish.” nd. Wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinglish. Accessed Jan 21, 2008.
DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
DeGraaf, Michel. 2001. “Morphology in Creole Genesis: Linguistics and Ideology.” In Michael Kenstowicz, ed., Ken Hale: A Life in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). 53-122.
“Hong Kong English.” nd. Wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_English. Accessed Jan 21, 2008.
Jones, Gavin. 1999. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Labov, William. 1969. “The Logic of Non-Standard English.” In J. Alatis, ed., Georgetown Monograph on Languages and Linguistics 22. 1-44.
Labov, William. 1970. The Study of Non-Standard English. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
North, Michael. 1994. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
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