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Introduction: Multilingualism as the Continuation of Monolingualism by Other Means
Much existing research on the literary languages of immigrant, émigré, or refugee writers rests on the bedrock of two central assumptions. The first is that bilingual or polyglot fiction authors tend to produce linguistically hybrid—multilingual, translingual, or heteroglossic—texts, flush with code switching, word play, mingled speech registers, and other "accented" features.1 Real-life "language mixture," in this interpretation, cannot but shape the narratives that germinate in multilingual quarters.2 Consequently, when life and art do not thus align—this is the second assumption—scholars tend to hold accountable the publishing industry and its sundry wardens, including monolingual editors, literary agents, and marketing advisors. Especially in the US—the destination of this article—"the material apparatus of … trade book publication," in Brian Lennon's damning observation, has systematically failed to represent or express the "multilingual experience, and actual use, of language."3
And yet, this pair of premises is hardly all-encompassing. As several recent studies point out, the jarring gap between some authors' monolingual art and multilingual lives—or, as David Gramling puts it, between "monolingual textuality and multilingual subjectivity"—can be baffling.4 By way of example, what do we make of the fact that Austrian-born Ludwig Wittgenstein, having meandered through the quads of England's Cambridge for decades, made not a mention of language games—for him, an important notion—in his opus on the philosophy of language? Or that Franz Kafka, having sampled cautiously from Prague's linguistic cocktail, hardly ventured beyond the city's straight-laced "paper German" in his writings?5 In other words, why not flaunt the full spectrum of one's mind's (or pen's) linguistic rainbow?
Recent explanations eschew the more conventional socioeconomic causes—in particular, the authors' pecuniary concerns—in favor of the texts' philological reconsideration. They advance a redemptive narrative for such cases. That traces of multiple languages are not readily recognizable, goes the argument, does not yet mean that they are absent. There are, these studies suggest in the wake of Jacques Derrida's influential Monolingualism of the Other, hidden accents to uncover in each work's textual interior or immediate contextual proximity. In a nutshell, to quote Yasemin Yıldız, "what looks like a monolingual text may, in fact, suggest the contours of a multilingual paradigm" because the languages seemingly extrinsic to...