The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Linguistic Nightmare

Minae Mizumura is a critical observer. She is also a critical reporter, especially of people she encounters. None of her writerly companions attending an international assembly in the middle of Iowa cornfields escapes her sharp-eyed evaluation. And since most of the participants can’t converse with each other, her judgments are mostly only that, sharp-eyed. Nevertheless Mizumura rates with Louella Parsons or Roger Ebert in spotting the character behind the persona.

Mizumura doesn’t like America much. I understand. In terms of popular culture, America is the biggest island on the planet. But apparently the campus of Iowa State University is an exception (see comment #1 below). The authorities there have been importing literary talent for three month stints of ‘interaction’ for decades. This oasis of diversity is what Mizumura is mainly reporting about in this memoir that edges into polemic as it goes along. She, like me, is a curmudgeon (termagant seems vaguely sexist) who, while being mostly civil to everyone she meets, does harbour dark fantasies that she has no hesitation disclosing in print.

One of these fantasies is that the English language is as oppressive as the American people. Mizumura was ripped (her word) from her native Japan at the age of twelve to study in the USA. She never got over the experience and escaped back to Japan as quickly as she could, blaming English (or at least its American variant) for polluting not just her writing but also the entire Japanese language. She is, therefore, not overjoyed to be participating in an academic programme whose only commonality is some degree of fluency in English.

Some part of Mizumura’s distaste for America is cultural. She projects American brashness and unawareness of subtlety onto the language itself. But the principle source of dissatisfaction is racial. She feels out of place in an area dominated by blond-haired blue-eyed giants who start to look old by their mid-thirties and are likely overweight in any case. Having sat in the rear of a Tokyo bus, and looked forward to a busload of people with exactly the same (to me) hair and head features, I can empathise with her alienation.

But I can’t help feeling that there is a latent racial prejudice in her attitude toward English. Her earliest high school educational experience in the Great Neck suburb of New York City is probably to blame. She and I are rough contemporaries in that same school system, which at the time was highly segregated and decidedly lacked diversity of any sort. I can imagine that Mizumura was considered strange if not vaguely threatening to her schoolmates who weren’t even vaguely cosmopolitan.

This school experience seems to me what is behind Mizumura’s somewhat bizarre obsession with saving the Japanese language. She worries that if even a former international lingua franca like French could fall prey to the linguistic magpie of English, - the “valiant” (her term) Académie Française notwithstanding - what chance does Japanese have to retain its integrity? While in Iowa she began to worry not just about the fate of Japanese but also of Mongolian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Nynorsk (a Norwegian dialect), and Tswana (the native language of Botswana) to name but several. Clearly her issue is of worldwide import!

I can’t understand the nature of this issue though. Mizumura meets several other writers from dictatorial and other regimes which attempt to restrict or direct what is written about and how. She recognises this as oppression. What she apparently doesn’t recognise is that language is the ultimate form of true collective decision-making. Language users are constantly inventing and importing new words and phrases, usually modifying their meaning dramatically along the way. Some of these innovations are rejected and some become part of everyday speech. And some are just what the doctor ordered to sabotage directive authority. Few are coerced; none of these last except as irony.

But Mizumura has a very different logic. “There is a hierarchy among languages,” she thinks. On the top of her hierarchy is English, not because it has the largest number of speakers or because of the ease of learning it but because it is the dominant second language and has thus become ‘universal.’ She is worried because “To a writer, the fall of one’s own language means nothing less than the fall of one’s national literature, of which every writer is a bearer.” For them not to feel this way would be “ethnolinguistic betrayal.” It appears that she regards her fellow writers and the readers of Japan with a disdain at least equal to what she feels for Americans.

I do share a certain nostalgia with Mizumura about lost languages, - Latin, Classical Greek, Aramaic, and Anglo-Saxon get my votes for revival - mainly because each language is really untranslatable. Each cuts the world at different joints, as it were, and has connotations, echoes, and substrates that are unique. Yiddish for example has only several million remaining speakers but continues to decline and has no significant literary production today. But American English has absorbed an enormous number of Yiddish words and phrases, not as translations but as part of itself (schmuck, bupkis, chutzpah, klutz, glitz, schlep are just a few that come to mind). If anything, Yiddish is to some extent preserved in English. This is what English has always done. It is the whore of languages, mating with all and sundry, and taking whatever seems more precise, or beautiful, or different, or just because it makes communication with a non-English speaker possible.

So, Mizumura’s plea to the Japanese people to appreciate their language more by limiting the influence of English is more than just bizarre, it is also counter-productive. Linguistic insulation is not something at all desirable. Attempting to achieve such insulation implies totalitarian measures which history has shown to be ultimately ineffective. Language is not something we control but something we submit to. We may tweak its edges but whether those tweaks result in any permanent effects are not things we can determine.

I have to conclude that Ms Muzimuza’s lament is really a working out of a teenage trauma rather the formulation of a serious suggestion. I hope that as therapy this book and her fictional companion volume are successes. But as a literary theory both are bunk.

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