Translingual poetics and the politics of language: the case of Katalin Molnár

Abstract

The corpus of contemporary translingual writing in French is varied in terms of both the origins of the authors associated with this burgeoning literary phenomenon and the range of topics that writers address. Studies of this translingual corpus tend to focus nevertheless on a recurrent set of aspects including the fictionalization of language acquisition and the active intertextual engagement of authors with canonical French literature. These emphases often feed into a set of assumptions regarding the translingual author, who is read as seeking integration, through a process of progressive accumulation of linguistic and literary competence, into a long-standing French literary tradition. This article engages with the work of the author of Hungarian origin Katalin Molnár to interrogate and disrupt this model. Molnár’s oeuvre shows similarities with that of other translingual writers in that if focuses on processes of language acquisition and provides evidence of intertextual engagement. Drawing on recent scholarship on glottophobie, I demonstrate through the study of Molnár’s work the under-explored potential of exophonic writing to contribute to processes not of continuity but of a more disruptive renewal of a French literature that seeks to develop a literary praxis where translingual poetics converge with a critical politics of language.

Keywords:

• Translingual
• exophonic
• linguaphobia
• bilingualism
• language acquisition
• Katalin Molnár

The growing visibility of translingual (or exophonic) writing in French is to be recognized, not surprisingly given the nature and origins of the practice, as part of a much broader phenomenon that crosses cultures as well as languages (Kellman and Lvovich 2021). Although there are numerous historical precedents for authors migrating from one language to another, and then selecting their newly adopted medium for literary expression, translingual writing has increased in prominence in the early decades of the twenty-first century as a cultural manifestation of what has been dubbed the broader “unmooring” of languages in the new millennium (Phipps 2013). The nature of translingualism shifts, however, according to its context, with its disruptive potential variously reduced or enhanced in the light of, for example, the (self-)regulation of the language to which it relates. The polycentric nature of English, for instance, tends to grant significant licence to those translingual authors who adopt the language. Global English may exist as a form of international lingua franca, but the potential for semiodiversity within the language itself is evident in its openness to exophonic experimentation. Focusing on a language that eschews policing not only as a result of its centrifugal dynamics but also in the light of its increasing existence in diglossic or multilingual configurations, Evelyn Ch’ien (2004) analyses the emergence of what she dubs a “weird English,” by which she means in large part the new forms of expression that emerge when various languages combine. Often, in the work of many postcolonial authors working in English such as Arundhati Roy, this process betokens a performance of linguistic resistance that critiques the continued complicity of anglophone monolingual ideologies in the wielding of colonial power. Such disruption is similarly implicit in the work of many translingual writers, although their relationship to English is often markedly different. Junot Díaz, for instance, a Dominican-American author, translates the cultural hybridity of his diasporic identity into a creatively disorientating multilingual poetics. A text such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz 2007) draws on the internal diversity of English, notably in relation to the popular subcultures and multiple registers of which the language is a vehicle, and proceeds to blend this with varieties of Spanish present across North America and beyond. The result is the demonstration of a dynamic, disruptive translingualism that is at once a focused critique of the limits of the monolingual but also a more general illustration of the creative potential of working across languages.

The extent to which such approaches are possible within French is ostensibly more limited. The language is equally subject to processes of diasporization that have impacted historically on its varieties spoken around the world. At the same time, historical contact has generated a series of French-related Creoles, notably in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. However, the centripetal concentration of linguistic power in France – evident in phenomena such as the French-language publishing industry, in the persistence of bodies such as the Académie française and in the broader regulating authority of the “république mondiale des lettres” (Casanova 2004 [1999])—is reflected in a greater policing of literary production. That is not to say that the scope of translingualism is in any way limited. The contribution of authors who have migrated physically to France (and to other French-speaking regions such as Quebec) as well as linguistically to French remains widespread, with the identification of phenomena such as a littérature-monde en français revealing the extent to which the work of exophonic authors complements that of their postcolonial peers. Both groups have indeed been united—in the littérature-monde manifesto (Le Bris et al. 2007)—in the category of “écrivains d’outre-France.” With the perceived deterioration of French national literature associated with the broader déclinisme identified in French society (see Morrison 2010; Patrick 2016), such external input by authors originating from a wide range of cultures—including Afghan, Chinese, Iranian and Japanese—is often seen not only as an endorsement of the status of French as an attractive world language, but also more actively as a reflection of the potential hospitality the language offers writers and artists from elsewhere who are seeking an alternative space of creativity. There is a need to recognize that this space is regulated, however, according to an ideological monolingualism. Translingual writers tend to be admitted to the confines of French national literature on condition that the disruption this entails is minimized. The rite of passage of these authors often involves an initial stage of apprenticeship, i.e., of learning from canonical literature (Montesquieu for Chahdortt Djavann; Rousseau for Akira Mizubayashi; Proust for Andreī Makine). At the same time, the room for experimentation proves limited, not least as a number of exophonic writers have, in recent years, been admitted to the regulatory responsibilities associated with membership of the Académie française. These include Makine himself (in 2016), and before him the Chinese-born writer, poet and calligrapher François Cheng (in 2002), the Lebanese-born writer Amin Maalouf (in 2011; he is now the Académie’s perpetual secretary) and the British-born poet Michael Edwards (in 2013).

What may appear on the surface to be evidence of a commitment to inclusivity and an indication of the welcoming elasticity of the French language as it adapts to external influences become, on closer scrutiny, a reflection of the capacity of French culture to conscript and then assimilate difference. The case of Andreī Makine provides a telling illustration of this tendency, evident in his nostalgic evocation of a hallucinated country in Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer (2006). Echoing de Gaulle, the author defends “certaines idées de la France” (Makine 2006, 13), proof in his view of an “impalpable quintessence française” (23) or what he dubs elsewhere a “francité” (59). Central to the reflection is a focus on the French language, lauded for its universal and universalist qualities, but nevertheless seen as under threat as a result of historical amnesia and the spread of popular culture (specifically “les vomissures du rap” [84] or “dix millions de spectateurs collés à leur écran pour une loft story” [90]) in France itself. Recollecting with a degree of reverence his 1996 meeting in Japan with the académicien Michel Serres, an embodiment of what he calls “l’élégance intellectuelle de la francité” (59), Makine seems on occasion to be writing his own letter of application for the Académie française (he would be elected a decade later). What emerges in particular, especially through Makine’s memories of the power of French literature as an inspiration for those behind the Iron Curtain during the Soviet era, is a sense of the translingual writer as the guardian of imagined national values, often even as a bulwark against perceived forces of change within the nation itself. What is lacking in any such intervention is any engagement with the ideological underpinnings of French as a national language, and the instrumentalization of literature and culture these underpinnings often imply.

The election of a number of exophonic authors to the Académie française and their recognition through the prize cultures central to the regulation of literature in France (1995 is often cited as a key year in the emergence of a contemporary translingual tradition, because it was in that year that Makine won the Prix Goncourt for Le Testament français (1995) and Vassilis Alexakis the Prix Médicis for La Langue maternelle (1995) [ex aequo with Makine]) are evidence of the mechanisms of assimilation to which I have alluded above. In a context of anglocentric globalization, those seeking to counter threats to the French language and to one of the principal repositories of its génie, namely literature in French, find welcome allies among a group of global authors for whom French is not a “mother tongue” acquired by accident of birth but a positive choice: a medium selected on the grounds of its perceived hospitality and inclusive values. Despite such institutional structures that allow for the integration of translingualism into a national literary tradition in France, the practices of exophonic writing inevitably contain the potential for a creative heterogeneity that belies any attempts—by critics or institutions—to impose cultural homogeneity. A striking example of alternative approaches is to be found in the work of Katalin Molnár, an author also born in the Soviet bloc in the decade immediately following the Second World War (Molnár in Hungary in 1951, Makine in the USSR in 1957). Moreover, Molnár’s work reveals very different emphases in its engagement with French language and culture from some of the translingual authors mentioned above. There may be clear and continued evidence of intertextual engagement with a French literary canon, as is the case in the work of other translingual authors, but Molnár’s approach is less that of veneration than of creative experimentation, evident not least in her wide use of phonetic writing alongside other practices that disrupt any sense of “bon usage.”

Her work is as a result less an homage to “cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer” than a linguistic and socio-cultural reflection on “cette France qu’on oublie,” i.e., on a country that judges and hierarchizes vernacular speech, non-prescriptive writing and linguistic variability according to the class and cultural origins of those using it. Although she does not use the term, I argue that Molnar’s texts are a sustained critique of the glottophobie (in English linguicism or linguaphobia) that is evident in the policing of language use in France and in the ideological monolingualism with which this practice has been associated throughout the post-revolutionary period. This term has been popularized in France by the linguist Philippe Blanchet, who in a 2016 book and accompanying volume of testimonies collected via interviews (Blanchet and Clerc Conan 2018) makes a case for the widespread presence of linguistic discrimination in France. His argument links language use to questions of social justice by demonstrating that those who speak languages other than French or those who speak French in “non-standard” (and often markedly accented) ways are subject to prejudice, with an acknowledgement that these two groups often overlap. Blanchet outlines the various ways—social and institutional—in which linguaphobia functions, exploring the extent to which French ethnolinguistic nationalism has normalized language-based discrimination as a means of exercising social control. Molnár’s creative practice challenges linguistic homogenization and the social hierarchies it underpins. She harnesses her outsider status of the exophonic author and seeks to challenge the monolingually Francocentric assumptions evident in many translingual narratives, ostensibly different from a “Franco-French” tradition but nevertheless often recuperated by it. Far from seeking the assimilation into the French literary establishment of which there is evidence among a number of her peers, Molnár deploys translingualism as a means of pluralizing literary language, of challenging its prescription, and of reflecting on the page forms of everyday usage that surround her and that also characterize her own communication as an exophonic author who has acquired French as a language additional to her original Hungarian. The result, in Jenõ Farkas’s terms, is “un délire sémantique et phonétique du français” (2005, 42), a radically disruptive writing in French that requires significant engagement even from the French-speaking reader, faced with a text that is at once defamiliarized as a work of literature (as a result of its form and often hybridized content) but then unexpectedly familiar once decoded given its proximity to everyday usage.

Having learnt and then taught French in her native Hungary, Molnár moved to France in 1979. As is the case with many translingual writers in the French tradition, she focuses in her work on processes of language acquisition, although any sense of perfection is attenuated from the outset not only by her relationship to Hungarian, shaped by a mother of Austrian origin who “a toujur parlè oen ongroa ènsertèn é mal aksentué, oen peu kom unn nétranjèr,” but also by the unorthodox nature of her initial teacher: “j’é étudyé le fransè a l’aj de katorz an é sui devenu, plu tar, profèssoer de lang é de litératur fransèz. Mè kel professoer ! Oen professoer ki n’a eu ôkoen kontakt, pandan katorz an d’étud, avèk lé zumèn ki parl sèt lang” (Molnár 1995, 2). Given these twin challenges to any sense of linguistic prescription, she concludes this passage by noting: “J’é par konsékan ôssi unn trè grand ènsèrtitud kan ta la bonn fasson de parlé é d’ékrir an fransè.” Molnár did not initially write in French. Her first two works were in fact published in Hungarian in 1987 and 1990, during a time when she was associated with the avant-garde periodical Magyar Műhely (literally, Hungarian Workshop), a journal that had been published in Paris since 1962 by a group of Hungarian exiles. Subsequent work (transgressively spanning poetry, fiction, autobiography and the essay, with translingualism complemented accordingly by an actively transgeneric voguing) has been produced in a linguistically experimental French that is deliberately, in the author’s terms, “fôtif,” drawing on oral expression but also shaped by a process of translanguaging between French and Hungarian (see Pshevorska 2023).

The distinctiveness of this language lies, however, in an active questioning of what such faultiness might resemble in a socio-political and literary context characterized by linguaphobia. Molnár deliberately deviates from the standard shared narrative of the acquisition of French recounted by many translingual authors as discussed above, according to which an apprenticeship in the language accompanies a quasi-ontological process of self-transformation. The French language becomes in this process a site of personal or political sanctuary, often affording a possibility of liberation and even rebirth. In her performance text Konférans pour lé zilétrés (1999), Molnár challenges this traditional translingual narrative of the emergence of elective affinities between writer and language: she claims here she learned French at school only after her head-teacher prevented her from learning English when the class for that language was oversubscribed in the context of national Beatlemania: “Ki a voulu aprandr le fransè a laj de katorz an ? Ébin, jvè vou dir: sé pa moi parske moi, a laj de katorz an, je voulè aprandr langlè a kôz dé Biteuls” (Molnár 1999, 14). Self-deprecation is complemented by demythologization of the status of French, with Molnár eschewing any sense of Francophilia to imply that the language is an imposed rather than a selected one, a substitute for her first choice to which she was attracted via the globalizing of its popular culture.

Molnár is not, however, the only recent translingual author of Hungarian origin to write in French. Her older compatriot Agota Kristof (1935–2011), who fled Hungary in 1956 and settled in Switzerland, focuses on the process of acquiring French as a means of survival, presenting in texts such as L’Analphabète (2004) the sense she had of—as the title suggests—becoming illiterate again as she grappled with the fundamentals of a new language. Kristof’s relationship with the new language was a more troubled one than is often the case with translingual writers, culminating not in the attainment of perfection but in a residually antagonistic relationship: “Je parle le français depuis plus de trente ans, je l’écris depuis vingt ans, mais je ne le connais toujours pas. Je ne le parle pas sans fautes, et je ne peux l’écrire qu’avec l’aide de dictionnaires fréquemment consultés. C’est pour cette raison que j’appelle la langue française une langue ennemie, elle aussi. Il y a une autre raison, et c’est la plus grave: cette langue est en train de tuer ma langue maternelle” (Kristof 2004, 42–43).

There are similarities between the two authors, not least—as Julia Őri notes—in their search for an effect of authenticity in their linguistic practice: “ces auteures ne veulent pas tellement raconter des histoires vraies – même si les deux s’inspirent de leur propre vie –, mais elles souhaitent plutôt trouver un langage susceptible d’exprimer la « verité »” (Őri 2018, 452). Like Molnár, Kristof does not aspire to any linguistic “passing” (Piller 2002). Not only does she admit a continued reliance on dictionaries but also associated French with an enemy status as the language is seen to be responsible for a personalized linguicide, progressively eradicating her original Hungarian. However, whereas Kristof’s signature approach, which became evident throughout her writing, was to develop a style reliant on the lucid, clear use of French, Molnár’s work actively harnesses the challenging experience of learning a language in order to create a body of work that disrupts French literary and linguistic norms, asserting “l’incorrection comme principe esthétique et éthique” (Őri 2018, 463). In the process, she deliberately generates what is for the French reader a defamiliarizing opacity that calls into question the very readability of her texts—or rather, by extension, calls into question what is to be understood by the notion of literary readability. Translingual composition is thus no longer the grateful reimbursement of a debt by an author granted access to a national literature that was not originally their own. As Alain Ausoni notes incisively, by inhabiting a liminal and insecure space between languages Molnár’s aim was radically opposed to any such convention: “l’intérêt n’est pas de figurer le changement de langue comme le principe d’une rupture existentielle et littéraire permettant et appelant l’écriture de soi mais de faire le point sur ce qu’on peut retirer littérairement de l’insécurité linguistique qu’il peut occasionner” (Ausoni 2018, 166).

It is clear from Molnár’s trajectory that she claims no monopoly for translingual writers such as herself over these disruptive practices. Like that of many other exophonic authors in French, her work is in active dialogue with previous writers (in Molnár’s case, with similarly experimental prose writers such as the Céline of Voyage au bout de la nuit, the Vian of L’Ecume des jours and the Queneau of Zazie dans le métro, the third of whom advocated for a “néo-français” similar to Molnár’s own practice of phonetic transcription). This is a debt that Molnár openly acknowledges in her novel Lamour Dieu (written under the pseudonym Kité Moi). The ludic alterations of these authors’ names in contrepèteries (to Céline and Queneau are added other writers and thinkers, notably “Shurt Kwitters” and “Figmund Sreud”) and their description according to a revised system of dating both reflect a committed embracing of the very tradition these writers represent, without a hint of anxiety of influence:

non seulement on n’invente rien mais on ne se prive pas non plus des autres, de Fouis-Cerdinand Léline par exemple (fou trançais, 57 av. K. M. 10), ni de Quaymond Reneau (fou trançais, 48 av. K. M. 25), ces deux-là aimaient bien certains vulgarismes sévèrement proscrits par la « Grammaire du trançais, ouvrage couronné par l’Académie trançaise […], tas de choses dans ce récit viennent directement de chez eux, on les a volés, on les a copiés, que tout le monde soit rassuré là-dessus ». (Moi [Molnár] 1999, 121–122)

As such, Molnár arguably belongs to an existing eclectic tradition of avant-garde experimentation, evident also for example in the phonetic aspects of the lettrisme developed by Isidore Isou. Molnár’s writing is, however, something different, primarily a cultural and literary revalorization of spoken French, a phonocentric response to the graphocentrism that in France elevates national literature to the status of “lieu de mémoire” (Fumaroli 1992). On the one hand, as she notes in the 1996 essay “Dlalang” (Molnár 1996b) (echoing views held by Caribbean authors such as Edouard Glissant), the French language was until the early modern beginnings of linguistic prescriptivism associated with such fluidity: “Pendant de longs siècles les langues nationales correctes n’existaient pas encore” (cited in Ausoni 2018, 171). On the other, and as part of a retort to the often class-based assumptions of a specifically French linguaphobia, translingual poetics extends beyond such historical comparisons and beyond the aesthetic experimentation of Queneau and others to embrace a progressive politics of language. The function of the French she forges is actively inclusive, addressing not least the place of the aspiring L2 French speaker who seeks to navigate the many challenges of acquiring the language: “Je propôz une ékritur du fransè parlé ke lé zilétré peûv aprandr trè vit, trè trè vit, an kèlke smèn koi” (Molnár 1999, 13). As Michael G. Kelly notes, in an article on “poetry as a foreign language,” Molnár’s insistent speaking “from a distance” reflects a sense of “experienc[ing] oneself as one of the dominated in language (even when something approaching ‘mastery’ has been achieved” (2011, 401).

This approach is evident already in Molnár’s initial activity as a poet, seen for instance in her first collection, poèmesIncorrects et mauvaisChants chantsTranscrits, published in 1995. These initial interventions were part of a collaborative endeavor that bridges the translingual and the experimental, involving most notably Christophe Tarkos and Pascal Doury, with whom she co-founded the short-lived literary review Poézi prolétèr in 1997 (only two issues were published). This activity reinforced Molnár’s interest in capturing orality in the written text, rooted in a sustained engagement with the malleable sound of language central to poetry but extended into her experimental prose. The association with Tarkos was cemented following his premature death in 2004 when Molnár acted as coeditor of his Ecrits poétiques with P.O.L. (2008), the publisher with whom her two major works have appeared. Part of a series of periodicals for which Tarkos was responsible during his writing career, Poézi prolétèr operated in many ways as an anti-revue, refusing to define a clear audience and eschewing any overtly pedagogical purpose: “Sépa ünvrèrevu dutou ! moi, je parl derevu parske sélmô mé anvré sépa ünrevu, si tuveû, sétapsurd defèr ünrevu, sékonplèteman idiô” (Molnár and Tarkos 1997, 10; cited in Christoffel 2020, 23). The phonetic approach here, a characteristic of much of Molnár’s own subsequent work, renders the French language other by privileging phonemes over lexemes, sound over the conventional visual form of words. Jeff Barda underlines the place of “pâte-mots” in Tarkos’s poetics, an indication of the “kneading process that can be shaped and reshaped continually,” indication of “a constructivist metaphor of the poetic work that reflects the becoming of language” (2018, 20), and yasser elhariry, in his study of Tarkos’s performance practice, focuses on this form of linguistic becoming, claiming that in an exploration of the pre-lingual and post-lingual, the poet “excavates something deeper, more archaic, more translingual, burrowed deep in the language” (2021, 67). The use of “translingual” here by elhariry is telling, for Tarkos’s textual soundscapes, characterized by the phonetic accumulation of various vowels, semi-vowels and diphthongs, breaks down French in a way that permits its connection with other languages, a process evident for instance in the poet’s discussion of the Hebrew vowel yod (elhariry 2021, 68). It is here that his experimental, improvisational approach as a French poet intersects directly with and in the process illuminates Molnár’s own exophonic practice—as practice associated with the defamiliarization of language that is presented as an acquired medium rendered “weird”, to borrow Ch’ien’s description of translingual writing in English cited above—by an implicit awareness of its coexistence with the author’s other languages.

Setting out this project, Konférans pour lé zilétrés serves in many ways as Molnár’s personal manifesto, following on from the earlier text also cited above, the essay “Dlalang” published in the Revue de littérature générale, in which similar ideas are explored. Here is a genuinely disruptive intervention, especially when read alongside texts produced at around the same time and belonging to the same genre, notably the collective “Pour une littérature-monde en français” of a decade later, among whose forty-one signatories featured several translingual authors, but whose paradoxical effect was to perpetuate a normatively monolingual French (Forsdick 2017). Molnár’s work is a performance text, reflecting a broader “dialogue permanent avec les lecteurs” (Farkas 2005, 44) that is evident throughout her work, but one whose impact depends on its phonetic and textual transcription. The title konférans suggests an overtly academic function, but this contrasts jarringly, even oxymoronically with the target audience, lé zilétrés. The published version outlines the performance history of the lecture across five dates in October and November 1997, noting playfully the limitations on scheduling (only possible on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday, as Molnár was working on other days of the week), and recording the detail of the clown shoes worn by its author: “deux énormes godasses de couleur rouge.” It includes also paratextual material, notably two annexes reproducing the handout provided for each audience member as well as various versions of the Hungarian song with which the performance concluded. The former consists of a statement of intent, entitled “Koman ékrir sinpleman,” in which Molnár explains—in terms that ironically echo the various stalled attempts at orthographic reform in France—that: “On ékri skon antan é on ékri pas skon antan pa.” This is supplemented by a chart—or “TABLÔ DE KONPARÈZON”—in which she sets out the “fransè simpl” proposed in the lecture and the official usage of “français compliqué” (Molnár 1999, 40–42). This contrasts, for the sign and sound “a” for instance, “ami, pat, pat” with “ami, patte, pâte.”

Such an example underlines the blend of familiarity and unfamiliarity that Molnár’s approach involves, suggesting the process of unlearning and relearning which engagement with her translingual French requires. Aurally, for her French-speaking audience, the intervention would have been relatively straightforward to follow, but it was the phonetic composition in this “fransè simpl,” projected onto a screen behind the performer, that would have generated the defamiliarization central to Molnár’s translingual poetics. Central to the konférans is an explanation of the language in which she presents, the result of a cohabitation of French with Hungarian, with the translingual subject located between different regimes of grammar and syntax:

Ébin, sél fransè de kèlkun ki a dabor apri un nôtre lang é ki a pratiké sèt ôtr lang trô lontan pour an pèrdr linfluans, ski fè ke mon fransè él rézulta de la koabitassion de deû lang an moi. Koabitassion : joli mô. Lé lang ne koabit pa. Ta premièr lang te di : il fô toujour dir « sé moi ki é bèt » tandis ke la deuzièm prétan kil fô toujour dir « sé moi ki sui bèt », ta premièr lang te di : il fô toujour dir « sil ferè bô, jirè me promné » tandis ke la deuzièm prétan kil fô toujour dir « sil fezè bô, jirè me promné », insitsuit, insitsuit […]. (Molnár 1999, 8)

Molnár concludes that this process yields “un fransè déranjé par unn lang apriz avan,” an aspect evident in various ways in her work more broadly as it focuses at times on the interplay of French and Hungarian, and—in addition to neologistic invention—contains “Hungarized” traces of the syntax of the former in what on the surface appears to be disordered syntax introduced into the latter (Őri 2015, 91). Molnár articulates here the frustration of an L2 speaker who not only feels that their competence in French will never match that of an L1 speaker but who also—in a context of linguaphobia—senses that the language they speak will always be judged as lacking or substandard and inferior: “pourkoi,” she asks, “chui kontre le fransè, pourkoi jmélanj imigré é ilétré, pourkoi chfè sesi ou sela. Mèrsi, tou sa, on mla déja di, on ma déja sufizaman angueulé ladsu, jé u ma dôz dangueulad ladsu […] ?” (Molnár 1999, 7). The response to the question is two-fold: on the one hand, in an image contrasting delicacy with destruction, there is a critique of linguistic prescription and an acknowledgement of the potential of translingualism to challenge the inertia this generates: “Ya la gramèr fransèz, sa, sé la boutik de porselèn, unn vièy vièy boutik de porselèn épui ya léléfan inprudan ki fons dedan” (10); on the other, the results of this process—simplified spelling, hybridized syntax, a “Hungarized” French that at times has similarities with the Creoles of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean—are no longer integrated into the text as an exotic trace of vernacular usage, as controlled evidence of the types of French emerging from the unmooring of languages, but are acknowledged instead as the source of both creativity and critique, as a French literary text in their own right.

Konférans pour lé zilétrés outlines a personal poetics already evident in a work published shortly before the performances it records, Quant à je (kantaje) (Molnár 1996a) (published with P.O.L.), and then developed in Molnár’s only one novel, Lamour Dieu (published also by P.O.L. in 1999). The writing in these works is generically indeterminate and consistently combines the fictional with other forms. In a paratextual marker on the cover of the first, the author therefore describes Quant à je (kantaje) as an “agrégat,” a term she draws from Gilles Deleuze’s comments on the purposes of art. The text is constituted as a collage or a series of fragments, textual and visual, characterized also by typographic experimentation and woven together with indications of cross-references in the margins that disrupt any linear reading to encourage the reader’s more labyrinthine engagement with the text. These formal features reflect an overarching meta-reflection throughout the text on writing, meaning that Molnár embraces but then immediately moves beyond the lexical borrowing and the occasional idiomatic intrusions evident in other translingual writers in order to inscribe her exophonic condition into a phonetically transcribed language in which her persistent alterity as a writer—evident in a series of lexical, grammatical and cultural “interferences” (see Őri 2019, 23–30)—becomes irrecuperable.

The poetics of the second work, Lamour Dieu, a text that functions more clearly as a novel, are of a different order. This semi-autobiographical narrative recounted by a white female author-narrator of Eastern European origin, Kité Moi (“Molnároise et euroblonche” [Moi [Molnár] 1999, 8]; her initials, K.M., are clearly those of Molnár herself), who tracks her relationship with and ultimate split from the eponymous Lamour Dieu (“Olifanticain et laminoir” [Moi [Molnár] 1999, 8]), a man of African descent. The text is an account of a progressive breakdown in communication and intercultural understanding, with the narrator looking back over the relationship and supplementing her own recollections with reflections of her friends and acquaintances. Unlike Quant à je (kantaje), the text is typographically conventional, and contrasts sections of narrative in conventional French with dialogue that is written phonetically. It is within the latter that the elasticity of Molnár’s writing becomes clear, with the vernacular register of Lamour Dieu—the novel notes that he avoids “les mots compliqués” and prefers terms such as “machin, truc, patati, patata” (142)—coexisting with the narrator’s Hungarian-influenced French, evident not so much in her deviation from linguistic standards as in her regular direct transcription of proverbs and sayings that border on the nonsensical when rendered into another language: e.g., “Les Molnarois disent : ne mélange pas le fils de l’hippopotame avec la philosophie, ils disent ça parce que ces deux choses se prononcent presque pareil en molnarois : « vizilo fia” et « filozofia »” (82).

At the same time, the novel relies on the development of a specific lexicon in French (neologisms are developed notably to designate terms relating to sexuality; for instance, what in French is a “préservatif” becomes in the novel “pénétratif” [Moi [Molnár] 1999, 53]) as well as an associated alternative chronology mentioned above that replaces a calendar based around the traditionally accepted year of the conception or birth of Jesus with one that relates to the narrator’s own birth (“av. K.M.”). In part, this approach is a ludic one, with “telephone” for instance becoming “talaphone”; the days of the week are also transformed into words that reflect the attitude of workers experiencing them, passing from the grief of “jourdeuil” (Monday), via the hard slog of “jourlong” (Thursday) to the relief of “jourenfin” (Friday). While France becomes “la Transe,” Hungary is presented—borrowing the author’s own name—as “la Molnárie,” and this sustained effort of writing en molnárien becomes reminiscent of Maryse Condé’s refusal to accept pigeonholing as a francophone writer in her repeated personalized claim: “Je n’écris pas en français, je n’écris pas en créole, j’écris en Maryse Condé” (Pfaff 2016, 64). In the case of Molnár, this forging of a new language involves construction not so much of a distinctive literary voice as of a linguistic and literary system, characterized by neologisms and by the forms of translingual and transcultural interference discussed above. It is this system that has a highly original world-making potential, reflecting in the literary text not only the subjectivity of the exophonic author existing between and across languages but also the lived social reality of such an existence in a society associated with linguistic prescriptivism and the multiple hierarchies in which this results.

Both Quant à je (kantaje) and Lamour Dieu build on the principles outlined in Konférans pour lé zilétrés to disrupt notions of linguistic purity and to question the privileging of a certain understanding of “literary” language. At the heart of the text’s translingual practice is a challenge to the conservatism of written literary French and a reflection of the author’s disapproval of its divergence—in terms not least of grammar and lexicon—from spoken language. As such, the adoption of this stance is inevitably political, notably reflecting the difficulty of immigrants, in a country characterized by what Blanchet sees as institutionalized linguaphobia, to integrate linguistically as well as socially: “parler en barbare pour les barbares que nous sommes est un acte bien plus sain que parler avec pureté […] Pour entrer dans un nouveau établissement, dans un nouveau milieu est difficile, mais avec un résultat trop faible encore plus difficile de s’intégrer. Relativiser l’idée de la pureté des langues revient à voir plus clairement cette armature et la voir plus clairement revient à se défendre mieux contre” (Molnár 1996b; cited in Őri 2015, 91).

Following this logic, what appears to be a process of defamiliarization becomes a challenge to any internalization of a set of artificial linguistic norms. As such, her work anticipates more recent linguistic interventions in France, such as the 2023 tract Le français va très bien, merci, written by the collective Les Linguistes atterré.e.s, in which there is a direct challenge to a series of the assumptions with which Molnár also engages: nostalgia for an imagined previous linguistic stability; the nationalization of the French language; a discourse of the invasion of French by other languages (notably but not exclusively English); a fetishization of “correct” spelling; an inherent deficiency in spoken French when compared to its written counterpart; and linguistic panic associated with internal and external variation—“le français n’est pas ‘massacré’ par les jeunes, les provinciaux, les pauvres ou les Belges” (Les Linguistes atterré.e.s 2023, 44), a catalogue to which we might also add “les Hongrois.” In Őri’s terms: “La transcription de la parole serait donc moins l’invention d’un nouveau système que la régularisation et la légitimation d’un système largement connu de tous les francophones” (2018, 463). For Molnár, written language risks obsolescence as a result of over-prescription, whereas spoken language retains the spontaneity she seeks to replicate in her work. As a result, translingual production involves a self-positioning that is not only interlingual (Molnár’s French is, as is the case with a number of exophonic writers, “déranjé par unn lang apriz avan” [Molnár 1999, 8]), but also purposefully intralingual. French is no longer a stable, homogeneous, singularized and monolingual entity, but deregulated in a way that echoes both writers of the early modern period such as Rabelais and also contemporary Caribbean writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau in the creolized French of his 1992 novel Texaco. Reading Molnár is therefore a work of decipherment, with translingualism acting not as an impediment to making sense, but as a stimulus for active engagement with the text and with the creative possibilities embedded in its language. In this way, translingual poetics meets the politics of language as the purpose of literature becomes—in Lucie Bourassa’s terms—“à la fois hédoniste et critique” (2010, 121), i.e., a balance between transgression and renewal, a reflection on the tensions between belonging and not belonging.

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Charles Forsdick

Charles Forsdick is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge. He is a specialist on francophone postcolonial writing and world-literature in French, French colonial history, and postcolonial memorialization. Recent publications include the co-edited Transnational French Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2023). He is British Academy Lead Fellow for Languages and a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.