Translation and Transubstantiation in The American

Abstract

Translation and Transubstantiation in The American Cheryl B. Torsney Most readings of The American suggest, either literally or figuratively, that the key rhetorical figure in the novel is allegory: that Newman, an advertisement for muscular, moral American manhood, in not revealing the skeleton in the French Bellegarde family closet, exemplifies the New World triumphing over the Old. 1 In such a way the dichotomies of the international theme are oversimplified. I would suggest that the rhetorical figure to which we must attend is not allegory per se but rather translation, that in The American “things”—characters, material objects, ideologies, which represent imperial drives, class division, and sexual orientation—are both lost and found in translation. 2 As Eric Cheyfitz explains: “Translation means precisely not to understand others who are the original (inhabitants) or to understand those others all too easily—as if there were no questions of translation—solely in terms of one’s own language, where those others become a usable fiction: the fiction of the Other” (105). Although Cheyfitz’s “original” is the European imperialist and his Other is the African and the Native American, his primary argument, that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104), is nonetheless pertinent. For during the period when The American was being written and revised for the New York Edition (1876–1906), the United States was coming into its own as a colonizer in her own right: in Venezuela, in the Philippines, in Cuba, as well as in the American southwest and Mexico. And while translation is not the same problematic when it mediates between two imperialist/capitalist languages as when it mediates between the European and “the primitive,” English speakers and French speakers are distinctly [End Page 40] Other for each other in the museums, cafés, and drawing rooms of the novel, each trying to colonize the foreigner. 3 Translation remains here a powerful imperialist activity. As Cheyfitz succinctly notes: “[At] the heart of every imperial fiction . . . there is a fiction of translation” (15). At the heart of The American is Newman’s narrative of himself as a successful American translator with a birthright to raid the resources and markets of the Old World in his desire to extend his empire of self. Our first glimpse of him—physically, phallically stretched out to his full length on a divan in the Salon Carré at the Louvre—seems to suggest his challenge to the surrounding foreign culture. Unfortunately for him, he is not attuned to the problematics of translation, an activity he perceives as simple word-matching, with dollars and francs being the key equivalent terms. 4 Refusing his efforts at colonization is the French cultural Other, represented by the Bellegardes, for whom Newman will always be a Foreigner. Given Newman’s commodity-driven motive for his European travel—to secure for himself “the best article in the market” in the way of a wife (71)—The American can be described as an imperial fiction with a fiction of translation at its core, as a novel of disappointed cultural imperialism resulting from a failure of translation. To understand how a failure of translation lies at the heart of Newman’s failed colonial adventure, we must consider how various notions of translation play themselves against each other, implicating not only rhetorical and linguistic theories but also religious and political ones. By examining philosophies of translation, we can see how this figure accounts, perhaps better than any other, for the activity of the narrative. To begin, then, Aristotelian rhetoric has it that translatio, the figure of resemblance, lies at the center of all metaphor. But modern linguistic, philosophic, and literary theories have problematized the figure as essentially slippery, its constituent terms impossible to pin to each other. According to Charles Sanders Peirce, no transaction of meaning is effected without the prerequisite activity of translation. Or, to put it a bit differently, without translation, nothing happens: the chain of signification is not activated (Liszka 53–54). Walter Benjamin interrogates the specialized meaning of translation, that is, the rendering of one language into what is understood to be its rough equivalent in another, by asserting...