Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Page B
Authors: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
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grounded human being. A note to one of the last letters (the book is not in front of me, so my wording might be off) quotes a letter from Maria Jolas to her husband in which she says something like: Beckett is better now—implying, I think, that they never cared for him personally and were now beginning to change their opinion.
And yes, the notes represent an extraordinary undertaking. But do we really have to be told that Harpo Marx’s real name was Arthur?
Best thoughts,
Paul
May 11, 2009
Dear Paul,
One further remark on sport: most of the major sports—those that draw masses of spectators and arouse mass passions—seem to have been selected and codified in a spurt around the end of the nineteenth century, in England. What strikes me is how difficult it is to invent and launch a thoroughly new sport (not just a variant of an old one), or perhaps I should say launch a new game (sports being selected out of the repertoire of games). Human beings are ingenious creatures, yet it is as though only a few of the many possible games (physical games, not games in the head) turn out to be viable.
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 to 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 makeup.
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
And yes, the notes represent an extraordinary undertaking. But do we really have to be told that Harpo Marx’s real name was Arthur?
Best thoughts,
Paul
May 11, 2009
Dear Paul,
One further remark on sport: most of the major sports—those that draw masses of spectators and arouse mass passions—seem to have been selected and codified in a spurt around the end of the nineteenth century, in England. What strikes me is how difficult it is to invent and launch a thoroughly new sport (not just a variant of an old one), or perhaps I should say launch a new game (sports being selected out of the repertoire of games). Human beings are ingenious creatures, yet it is as though only a few of the many possible games (physical games, not games in the head) turn out to be viable.
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 to 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 makeup.
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
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