Anticlimax: The Multilingual Novel at the Turn of the 21st Century

Abstract

I propose to see multilingualism as a mode of critique that offers us new reading strategies and new ways to construct and historicize literary archives. It destabilizes political hegemonies, allowing us to rethink concepts such as hospitality, community, and belonging. In disciplinary terms, taking multilingualism as the basis of world literature renews the field as a theoretical and critical framework. I argue that the existing models of world literature are largely dependent on translation, which ends up constructing another mirage of a possible monolingual system. I propose a model based on multilingualism that––borrowing Lacan’s terminology––I call the Real of world literature. It is a world literature based on a multilingualism impossible to reduce to a series of monolingualisms or to tame by the fantasy of translational monolingualism. In this project, I study novels written by authors from territories marked by the dominant presence of Spanish––Latin America, Spain, and Equatorial Guinea––published in the last three decades (1990-2021). Each of these novels is written primarily in one language: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Mayan, Nahuatl, Quechua, or Spanish. Yet all of these texts are marked by linguistic conflicts, which I trace through multilingual forms. I identify a series of novels which display a set of common aesthetic practices, best described as anticlimactic. This anticlimactic aesthetic can be understood as a series of formal traits, narrative and rhetorical, which depend upon the intertwining of multilingualism and anticlimax. This aesthetic is the logic of the project’s corpus; offers a perspective from which to historicize it; and shapes the political and disciplinary dimensions of my dissertation.