“Québex”: Post-Nations, Translations, and Other Cases of Multiple Identity

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. Yes, like myself. For a more detailed account of this kind of fragile ethnic memory, both within and beyond the limits of French-Canadian New England, see Larkosh. 2. As we stop here before this horizontal line that also serves as a border (i.e. 45° N), let me pause for a moment as well in order to make my intentions as clear as possible, especially for those who remain skeptical of the usefulness of theorizing such cultural and linguistic crossings by way of an admittedly personalized introduction. Such on-the-ground lived experience as narrated here serves to underscore the fact that, in spite of the continuing (and yes, often exclusive) emphasis on the received linguistic variants, literature and culture of “France proper,” in the overwhelming majority of French/Francophone studies programs, both here and in other supposedly Anglophone North American universities, it will never be enough to diminish the undeniable and ineffaceable proximity of this neighboring Francophone place, one that persists both outside, alongside, and inside the U.S. That which is closest and most present to question these institutionalized divisions quite often remains institutionally distanced, while that which is presumably “more important,” however “further away,” is prioritized and thus brought closer (whether the literary and cultural patrimony of “France proper,” or even that of an emergent, supplemental and equally selective “Francophonie”: i.e. with Québec, strangely enough, all-too-often absent from it). Then again, I claim no exemption, as I too have emerged from this institution like so many others, complete with a good measure of its cultural baggage, awareness of institutional divisions, “key” French texts, along with their supposed translations and quotations (Derrida's seminal essay “Living On/Borderlines” is only the first of a long list of unavoidable “foreign debts” impossible to pay here). No wonder that at times it is my own French-Canadian immigrant background, combined with related readings “in a language called French,” that appears to be the lighter of my two Francophone valises. All the same, I have to ask whether it is still our all-too-accessible and porous cultural and linguistic border with Québec that may actually remain more of a source of institutional discomfort than the by-now naturalized corpus (no matter whether it appears to be in translation or not) of French literature and theory in the U.S. university. In “Living On/Borderlines,” Derrida still speaks to this translingual passage, by way of James Hulbert's brilliantly “unfinished” translation: “What this institution cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper with [toucher à; also “touch,” “change,” “concern himself with”] language and, paradoxically, an ideal of translatability that neutralize this national language. Nationalism and universalism. What this institution cannot bear is a transformation that leaves intact neither of these two complementary poles” (76). It is thus precisely this sort of precarious maneuvering of between these co-dependent and still firmly entrenched institutional discourses of nationalism and universalism, as well as their presumably “original” and “translated” languages, that unavoidably finds itself continued here. 3. Many will also recall how Roland Barthes had already subjected such totalizing conceptions of a universalized “Man” and “his” world to intense scrutiny in his 1957 work Mythologies, both in the final essay “Le mythe aujourd’hui” and even more specifically in the chapter entitled “La grande famille des hommes,” in which both French and American models of universal humanity intertwine and are thus revealed in their incompleteness by way of two parenthetically inserted critiques of U.S. institutional racism and French colonialism: “(mais pourquoi ne pas demander aux parents d’Emmet Till, le jeune nègre assassiné par des blancs, ce qu’ils pensent de la grande famille des hommes?)” (175); “(demandons aussi aux travailleurs nord-africains de la Goutte d’Or ce qu’ils pensent de la grande famille des hommes)” (176). In this context, it is strange that out of all the pavilions and other structures built on the Île Ste.-Hélène for presumably universal exposition, two remnants stand out: Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, once the U.S. pavilion and now, stripped of its shiny plastic coating in a subsequent fire, a Canadian environment museum called the Biosphere; and the immense stainless steel “stabile” sculpture by the US artist—yes, raised in France—Alexander Calder, with the patently universal and deceptively simple title: “L’Homme,” later moved to a far-off corner of the fairgrounds. Forty years later, though, it is these incomplete (and “American”-designed) representations of Man and his World, ironically enough, that, although redesigned and repositioned, are still standing here.