Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
Burns has an “uncultivated genius” that has been touched but unspoiled by anglophone education. By contrast, Wheatley’s subject position as an African American slave of uncertain linguistic background requires that her genius be cultivated in a way anglophones understand. These are the extremes within which the multilingualism of the other is cognizable in the eighteenth century, either as terrific boon or horrific burden.
By evoking the complexities surrounding differently embodied multilingual figures like Wheatley and Burns alongside the homogenizing systems of commercial, cultural, and coercive power within which multilingualism has long been caught—and against which it has had to fight over the course of the last three centuries—I want to advance here the more general claim that attempts to capture, celebrate, and advance linguistic diversity have been the starting point for several important developments in the history of anglophone literature, in the present, yes, but in the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era pasts as well. Put more explicitly, I argue going forward that linguistic exchange, translation, subjugation, and resistance have long been generative elements in literary practice and aesthetic reception. Can we understand the linguistic interventions of known figures like Robert Burns, and Phillis Wheatley, and others as part of the prehistory of the linguistic aesthetics of the present? Indeed we can. Burns is the male multilingual poet who is able to play on the sonic and written traditions of his minority lect; Wheatley is the multilingual poet with no such recourse, a woman who can only channel the energy of linguistic loss into the necessity of poetry as a form of succor to all who can hear (or read) its strains. In this respect, Burns and Wheatley occupy polar ends of a spectrum of possible aesthetic responses to linguistic imposition, a spectrum that coming chapters flesh out more fully.
Since the standardization and imperial deterritorialization of English during the eighteenth century, disciplinary structures stressing national histories have not always made the investigation of topics like anglophony or anglophone multilingualism into a relevant optics for engaging with the literary object. This has resulted in the fact that broad scholarly methodologies for discussing multilingualism and linguistic difference in conjunction with literary products of the eighteenth century and Romantic era need work. Thankfully, contemporary scholars from various periods have provided good models to project forward and backward.86 Even with these models, however, the problem remains difficult. Multilingualism’s extranational dimensions disrupt the coherence of national formations, and this is problematic if we consider the eighteenth-century and Romantic periods to be nationalism’s formative epochs. In general, the consideration of linguistic multiplicity within scholarship threatens to undo intellectual projects organized under the rubric of national history and national thought. Nor has it seemed relevant to think of mainstream cultural phenomena as conditioned by multilingual exchanges transacted at the fringes of national literary culture.87 In the present, however, the economic processes of globalization, which seek both homogeneity as well as the marketability of tolerable differences, demand the further investigation of these phenomena. In a time like our own, scholarship that attends to linguistic multiplicity and what it indexes culturally is both imperative and overdue.
MULTILINGUAL LIVES
Reverend Lyons
There is more to say about the predicament of the multilingual subject Reverend Lyons. In particular, Lyons’s description of the “Irish language and Irish people’s” proscription reaches across the centuries as a foreign and yet familiar discourse of linguistic imposition. Just as Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid are caught in the mesh of a monolingual politics of language (as well as other forms of institutional violence) and have little agency in defining their own identities—much less linguistic identities—which are always preceded and delimited by the textual discourses in which they appear, Lyons’s life speaks to a different but equally important question: the fusion of linguistic and cultural loss.1
Unlike Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind, which has rightly become canonical reading in numerous disciplines because of its vigorous interrogation of colonial ideology as it has outlasted colonialism, Lyons’s speech is recorded in only a few collections of ephemeral pamphlets that are housed at the British Library and the National Library of Ireland. Brief but pithy, the speech is worth reading in detail for the following points: (1) like Ngũgĩ, Lyons argues that the imposition of Standard English has occasioned a cultural disaster for nonanglophones in Ireland; (2) he resigns himself to the impossibility of reversing the force of anglophony in Ireland; and (3) he picks a pragmatic way forward in anglophony while eulogizing his community’s linguistico-cultural past. His lament for the Irish language as a vehicle of cultural continuity is similar to that which I have imputed to Wheatley’s poetry, but Lyons is far more explicit. Not only does he tabulate the destructive effects of the monolingual politics of language I have been describing; he ties this monolingual politics to national, imperial, and religious issues. He also blames it for producing a special kind of literacy problem.
The occasion for Reverend Lyons’s speech is a fund-raising dinner for the Benevolent Society of St. Patrick, a Catholic charitable organization that worked among Liverpool’s poor.2 After praising the society’s ecumenical work, Lyons launches a vitriolic attack on Protestant charitable societies operating in Ireland. Specifically, he berates Irish-language Bible publishers like the Hibernian Bible Society (est. 1806), a group that aimed to bring inexpensive Christian scriptures to people in their own languages, thus making it akin to the better-known British and Foreign Bible Society, an organization established by abolitionist William Wilberforce in 1803.3 As Lyons frames it, British-based Bible publishers are associated with “illiberality, [Protestant] proselytism, and persecution” in Ireland even though their primary and seemingly laudable goal is to circulate Irish-language Bibles. Far from celebrating these organizations for making the scriptures accessible to Irish people in their own language, however, Lyons characterizes them as little more than the covert “money-making” vehicles of Protestant evangelism.4
Lyons alleges that the fundraising mechanisms of Irish-language Bible producers in England are a “complete hoax upon the English people.”5 They should therefore be exposed as fraudulent. “From Erris to Howth, and from Dingle to Donaghadee,” he proclaims, “these societies have left lasting proofs of their bigotry and intolerance.”6 Lyons’s sympathies are unambiguous: Irish-language Bible publishers from Britain pursue conversionary ends by manipulating Irish people through appeals to the cultural resonance of the Irish language they are rapidly losing.7 That Lyons should go so far as decidedly rejecting the value of Irish-language Bibles is revealing, for this is a man who in the same speech will also furiously denounce Standard English’s intrusiveness in Ireland. Not at all a contradiction, his move has everything to do with a pragmatic sense that Irish linguistic ground has already been swept out from under his feet. By endorsing English-language Bibles that properly hew to Catholic orthodoxy, Lyons drives home the point that British imperialism has already set in motion the Irish language’s death; only religion can be preserved as a cultural testament to the Irish past. In 1755, Samuel Johnson famously ended the preface to his dictionary by claiming that tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration. “We have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.”8 Several generations later, and from across the Irish Sea, Lyons inverts this idea by insinuating that the struggle for the Irish language is over. Irish people should therefore fight a battle they are capable of winning: the preservation of a traditional religious culture now that traditional linguistic culture is under such threat.
In the present, the politics of self-determination are commonly linked to native language rights. This is also the case in Lyons’s speech, except that he views the Irish language as a natural right that can no longer be reinstituted. Put another way, at the same time that Lyons asserts the value of an indigenous Irish culture rooted in the Irish language, he also claims that the latter is doomed to disappearance—a fait accompli previously settled by the anglophone “Score.”9 In order to make the claim that Irish-language Bibles are superfluous in Ireland because anglophony penetrated that country so deeply, Lyons delves into questions surrounding Irish- and