Wednesday, January 18, 2006
‘On Language’ 1/18: How Proust used English
Proust explored French attitudes about English
‘On Language‘
Chicago Tribune
January 18, 2006
By Nathan Bierma
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What stands out in this phrase from novelist Marcel Proust: “mes snow-boots que j’avais pris”?
It means “my snow-boots which I had brought.” You don’t need to know French to see the word “snow-boots” sticking out.
The phrase, from Proust’s masterpiece seven-volume novel, translated into English as “Remembrance of Things Past,” is just one example of an eye-catching English loan word in the midst of Proust’s French prose, says Daniel Karlin, author of “Proust’s English” (Oxford University Press, 229 pages, $45).
Other examples from “Remembrance” include “les films,” “les cocktails,” “le revolver,” “le golf,” and more than a hundred others. One character even says “le five o’clock tea.” That’s a lot of English for a French author who, Karlin writes, “never traveled to England, never learned English, and confessed his inability to either speak the language or understand it when it was spoken.” (“I don’t claim to know English,” Proust once said in French. “I do claim to know Ruskin”—the English writer Proust translated into French.)
But Karlin says Proust’s use of English was no accident.
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I asked Daniel Karlin how 19th Century fears about English in France compared with 21st Century ones. He replied:
I’m not an expert in the modern period but I’d say they (the worries) haven’t
diminished but they have diversified; the major change is a shift from anxiety
about British English to anxiety about American English, which in turn would
link to anxiety about the spread of American culture generally (the idea that
we are living in a ‘McWorld’—or ‘McMonde’ . . .) Modern mass media
(Hollywood cinema, pop music, advertising etc) play a big role here, but so do
aspects of technology especially in the realm of computer games and the
internet. I do get the impression that France remains very divided about all
this—and here nothing much has changed—I quote in the book an example of
a newspaper fulminating against the spread of English vocabulary while another
article on the same page makes use of that same vocabulary without apparent
irony, and I’m sure you could duplicate that today.In terms of the wider issue of cultural politics (to do with the preservation
of a ‘pure’ French language) I think the contest may have shifted to immigrant
forms of French (as spoken by Algerians, say, or people from French West
Africa) but I’m really speculating here; you’d have to be living in France to
pick up those vibes.