L’Écriture en langue étrangère comme pratique et comme poétique: le cas de deux écrivains « francographes », Nancy Huston et Andreï Makine

Abstract

This article examines the claims made by translingual writers Nancy Huston and Andreï Makine about the literary function of the foreign language, and also analyses how the poetic potential of foreign words is thematized in their fiction. It focuses on two novels which portray artistic trajectories in search of a language distinct from the imperfect words of everyday expression, be it through a nostalgically opaque language of childhood as in Le Testament français, or through an exploration of the meeting point of music and language as in Lignes de faille. While both writers emphasize the defamiliarizing function of the foreign language which, for Huston in particular, draws attention to its material form, their novels shift the site of linguistic defamiliarization from formal linguistic innovation to bilingual perception, which is likened to a ‘magic’ of words, an ‘optical illusion’ which serves to preserve childhood wonder and sensitivity.