In literary studies, when is (indifference to) monolingualism a form of linguistic indifference?

To whatever extent we believe that monolingualism exists in this world, and/or that it has an effect on literary work in various languages, it is important to ask whether such monolingualism(s) operate through brute suppression of other languages, through attentive control of them, or through half-hearted indifference to them. Although state monolingualist practices differ from place to place and will reliably express a mix of the various inclinations outlined above, scholarly disinterest in observing these distinctions will also exert a profound effect on the practice of literary criticism, as well as on the subjectivity of literary critics and literary agents of all sorts. If a certain monolingualism—say contemporary German monolingualism in Germany—is effectuated through the attempted fortification of a multiculturally standard language (through lexical, prosodic, grammatical, and sociolectal proscriptions and incentives), what noteworthy exceptions tend to be made for whose novelistic and poetic literary expression? If immersive comprehensibility is envisioned as a necessary quality for a good literary narrative, how is a given monolingualism enlisted as an alleged guarantor of that quality for readers? With these two questions in mind, do managing editors at trade publishing houses think their prospective readers are perhaps more monolingual in their anticipations and capabilities than they in fact are? All these questions pertain at the most granular level during all phases of literary work: conception and composition, drafting and proposing, contracting and revising, editing and copy-editing, revising and distribution, translation and reading, and anthologization and didacticization. Concerns for the effects of monolingualism on literary production have never been much of a central worry in canonical literary theory, where more-or-less unified national language(s) have stood as a quite protected necessary evil—expressing a sometimes righteous but always presumptively valuable particularity for literary traditions the world over. Since 1990, though, a drastic change has taken hold in the way major planetary languages coordinate with one another through supply-side algorithmic cross-linguistic information retrieval platforms, multinational trade press conglomerates, linguistic artificial intelligence, and machine translation innovations. These linguistic transformations over the last 30 years have impacted infrastructures of literary production too, privileging certain efficient supply-side modes of translational monolingualism that in turn benefit certain authors and author functions, while positing an imaginary monolingual reader/end-user of literature. Technological innovations in the 21st-century global order often help to fortify, rather than to dismantle, the industrial supply in literary monolingualism. This fortification, paradoxically enough, is achieved most effectively by ascendant models of neoliberal multilingualism and pre-translation/pre-production assurances of translatability. This new aspirational horizon of what I call an “ordolingual” translatability industry (Gramling, Invention) has become a primary precondition for a certain dominant stratum of global commerce and industry, including literary industry. Literary authors in this era are neither external to these systemic transformations nor unaware of the threats that these language-intensive industrial developments pose to their own aesthetic craft; indeed, they are conscious of the complications these developments present to their authorial emergence through literary translation into major market languages. Pandey shows how a new class of literary authors is being scouted and selected for its orderly, manageably translatable multilingualism and for its selective linguistic iconoclasm or for both of these together. This trade discourse encourages and then requires literary performances of what Pandey calls linguistic exhibitionism (Pandey 45). Intan Suwandi reminds us that global commodity chains are predominantly construed and analyzed without regard for (linguistic) laborers and (linguistic) labor exploitation. In her corrective model of value chains in global capitalism, Suwandi offers an “approach that can address both issues: the macro workings of the labor-value chains and the way these mechanisms affect production processes in specific firms, in particular how they ultimately affect the workers who make the commodities” (19). Suwandi continues to explain how her framework, called labor-value commodity chains, “takes into account the questions of power, class, and control—questions that must be addressed if we want to bring the exploitation/expropriation that occurs in global commodity chains out into the open [by] incorporat[ing] a calculation of cross-national variation in unit labor costs in manufacturing” (17). For us literary critics, the question then might be: At what point do authors’ own multilingualism, the craft of translation, the future-perfect of translatedness, and the promise of translatability begin to count as part of the techno-epistemological scene configured directly into the text we read itself rather than as a pre- or post-production matter excused from the scene of close reading? When is the supply chain of monolingualism acknowledged as present and consequent enough to critique as a first-order matter when we do literary analysis? And what does indifference to these features of linguistic political economy do to our close readings, our critical methods, and our curricula? In the spirit that Suwandi proposes, we literary researchers can view the production of contemporary literature as—among many other things—a matter of monolingual supply-chain infrastructure. That is, literary texts in the period I call late monolingualism are often exquisite expressions and performances of a certain orderly global (translingual) infrastructure that has desired, mentored, and produced them—a supply chain requiring a logistically sophisticated manufacture for the least expensive conveyance of meaning to end users. Here, we can glimpse a corollary to sociologist Jason Moore's conception of “cheap nature” in the global literary provisioning of cheap meaning to end users/readers who, indeed, may have never asked for such monolingual products in the first place. In essence, 21st-century monolingualism becomes a supply-side safe space for the imaginary privileged, a securitarian quality-of-life discourse that few real people actually asked for. Often enough, though, the process takes place under the financial, curricular, policy, or ideological auspices of “multilingualism” or “multiculturalism” and enjoys the cover of these terms and their kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too grandeur. Although these concerns may, in eras past, have belonged properly to the field of sociology of literature, I believe indifference to them in literary criticism weakens both our cross-disciplinary credibility as researchers and the close readings we may offer of a given text.

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