Texto em Língua Inglesa

May 11, 2009

Dear Paul,

[…]

I have been reading Jacques Derrida’s little book on the mother tongue

(Monolingualism of the Other, 1996). Some of it is high theorizing, some quite

autobiographical, about Derrida’s relations with language as a child born into the Jewish-

French or Jewish French or French-speaking Jewish community in Algeria in the 1930s. (He

reminds us that French citizens of Jewish inheritance were stripped of their citizenship by

Vichy, and were therefore in fact stateless for several years.)

What interests me is Derrida’s claim that, though he is/was monolingual in French

(monolingual by his own standards – his English was excellent, as, I am sure, was his

German, to say nothing of his Greek), French is/was not his mother tongue. When I read this

it struck me that he could have been writing about me and my relation to English; and a day

later it struck me further that neither he nor I is exceptional, that many writers and

intellectuals have a removed or interrogative relation to the language they speak and write, in

fact that referring to the language one uses as one’s mother tongue (langue maternelle) has

become distinctly old-fashioned.

So when Derrida writes that, though he loves the French language and is a stickler for

correct French, it does not belong to him, is not “his”, I am reminded of my own experience of

English, particularly in childhood. English was to me simply one of my list of school subjects.

In senior school the list was English-Afrikaans-Latin-Mathematics-History-Geography, and

English happened to be a subject I was good at, Geography a subject I was bad at. It never

occurred me to think that I was good at English because English was ‘my’ language; it

certainly never occurred to me to inquire how one could be bad at English if English was

one’s mother tongue (decades later, after I had become, of all things, a professor of English,

and begun to reflect a little on the history of my discipline, I did ask myself what it could

possibly mean to make English into an academic subject in an English-speaking country).

Insofar as I can recover my childhood way of thinking, I thought of the English

language as the property of the English, people who lived in England but who had also sent

out members of their tribe to live in and, for a while, rule over South Africa. The English

made up the rules of English as they whimsically chose, including the pragmatic rules (in

what situations you had to use what English locutions); people like myself followed at a

distance and behaved as instructed. Being good at English was as inexplicable as being bad at

geography. It was some quirk of character, of mental make-up.

When at the age of twenty-one I went to live in England, it was with an attitude

toward the language that now seems to me exceedingly odd. On the one hand I was pretty

sure that by textbook standards I could speak, or at least write, the language better than most

of the natives. On the other hand, as soon as I opened my mouth I betrayed myself as a

foreigner, that is to say, someone who by definition could not know the language as well as

the natives.

I resolved this paradox by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge. I told

myself that I knew English in the same way that Erasmus knew Latin, out of books; whereas

the people all around me knew the language “in their bones”. It was their mother tongue as it

was not mine; they had imbibed it with their mothers’ milk, I had not.

Of course to a linguist […] my attitude was completely wrongheaded. The language

that you internalize during your receptive early years is your mother tongue, and that is that.

As Derrida remarks, how can one conceive of a language as one’s own? English may

not after all be the property of the English of England, but it is certainly not my property.

Language is always the language of the other. Wandering into language is always a trespass.

And how much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls

from your pen echoes of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before you!

All the best,

John

Paul Auster & J. M. Coetzee (2013), Here and Now. Letters: 2008-2011, Nova Iorque e Londres: Harvill Secker, pp. 65-67.