TRANS Nr. 17: 3.4. - Stefana Roussenova: The Reconstitution of the Self

Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften

Januar 2010

Literaturen der Migration: Konfrontation und Perturbation als kreativer Impuls
Sektionsleiterin | Section Chair: Ursula Moser (Universität Innsbruck)

Dokumentation | Documentation | Documentation

The Reconstitution of the Self in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation
and in Lubomir Kanov’s Between the Two Hemispheres

The paper studies the close relationship between language, writing and the reconstitution of the self in exile in two immigrant autobiographies within the theoretical context of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. It is argued that both Hoffman and Kanov re-enact a similar model of readjustment of the self based on the endorsement of creativity and the role of the imagination as factors transforming exile into a positive and empowering event. Both narratives challenge the traditional assimilative model of cultural death and emphasize the importance of finding a channel along which to transplant the Old-World culture onto the new life. The role and functions of metaphorics are also discussed for the representation of the readjustment process.

In our time, called the Age of Migration, cross-cultural movement has become the norm rather than the exception as Eva Hoffman points out in her essay The New Nomads (Hoffman 1999:42). The scope of international migration is so large that almost all countries are affected by it either as receiving societies or as lands of emigration or both. In the light of these developments autobiographical narratives of exile gain particular importance because they highlight the problematics of dislocation and readjustment. One of the central issues which these narratives foreground is the close relationship between selfhood and language in the process of reconstituting the self.

Traditionally described as a difficult condition involving dislocation, fragmented identity and alienation, the very notion of exile has been recently revised in a more positive light precisely because it privileges marginality and instability. Hoffman writes that the positive sign attached to exile is associated with the fact that “today, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands – uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity”(Hoffman 1999:44).

One of the outcomes of the rethinking of exile is connected with a rejection of the old assimilative myth of the shedding and death of the Old World identity in immigration. The traditional assimilative model is openly challenged in recent narratives of exile which emphasize the empowering aspects of crossbreeding in the difficult process of the reconstitution of identity. Drawing on her own exilic experience as an expatriate Bulgarian in France, Julia Kristeva suggests in her book Strangers to Ourselves that the only way to learn about and accept different cultures and peoples is to affirm one’s own strangeness instead of suppressing it. Affirmation, instead of rejection of strangeness is the condition for the achievement of the necessary balance between otherness within the individual and that within the receiving society.

I have chosen to look at the autobiographical narratives of two immigrants whose tales endorse Kristeva’s notions of strangeness and offer perceptive accounts of the human cost in cross-cultural transition ‑ Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, published in 1989, and Lubomir Kanov’s Between the Two Hemispheres published in 2002. Both narratives reject complete assimilation and show that successful integration is conditional on finding ways in which to translate the old world culture into the new experience.

Eva Hoffman, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Canada at the age of 14 in the late 50’s, became a successful writer and journalist in New York city. The Bulgarian Lubomir Kanov had worked as a psychiatrist for some 16 years in Bulgaria when he emigrated in the early 1980s , first to Canada , then to the US. He had to study medicine and specialize in psychiatry in the US for a second time in order to become a well-established psychiatrist with a large private practice and director of a clinic on Long Island. In narrating the hardships of dislocation both tales use the strategy of counterpoint which underpins doubleness and employ the outsider-participant perspective to both cultures.

Organizing her narrative in three parts, “Paradise”, “Exile” and “The New World”, Hoffman re-visits her Polish self through her Canadian identity and re-examines the New World culture through the memory of her Polish self. The story is narrated in two voices, the voice of the young girl who feels and suffers, and that of the mature woman who seeks to explain the suffering by resorting to linguistic and psychoanalytic theories. The girl who crosses the Atlantic and the mature woman who writes the story some thirty years later are one and the same person. The complex handling of viewpoint contributes to maintaining a simultaneous, double viewpoint on the two cultures.

Kanov’s narrative also enacts a model of adaptation which acknowledges otherness and underpins its importance for transforming exile into a positive and productive experience. Otherness is embedded in the novel’s highly unconventional composition. The three central sections are disconnected and heterogeneous: The first section contains the authentic police records of his interrogation by the political police, his trial and sentence to a year and a half imprisonment in Bulgaria in the early 70’s, the second section, entitled “In Brevi”(In Short), is a note-book which presents a kaleidoscope of impressions, thoughts, flashbacks of memory and emotions, and the last section “Tale Quale” narrates his life story in a linear, chronological order. The different parts conspicuously lack a unifying narrative frame, as if to underline that no previously existing frame can accommodate the frightening experience. Such a composition places a heavy demand on the reader to adjust when she/he passes from the impersonal and hostile rhetoric of the police records, onto the intimate tone of the confessional and finally, to the biographical narrative. The deliberately dissociated narrative disguises the fact that each section portrays different versions of the same man: the public version of the criminal, the fluid decentred subject who is a stranger to his own text and finally, the reliable first person narrator who adopts the rational voice of common-sense when he re-visits his past in Bulgaria and tries to understand the arbitrariness of a political system that had branded him an enemy of democracy. The impression is created of a repetitive structure which circles round an experience which remains hidden and unrepresented in the whole narrative: Kanov’s time in a Bulgarian political prison. The fact that the experience falls outside language and articulation suggests the effect of trauma which produces a temporal and spatial disruption described by Gertrud Koch as “a caesura, which intrudes like a black box between the time before and the time after the traumatic event and is experienced as discontinuity”(Epstein 2001:64). The narrative’s overall composition also hints at the traumatic replay of memory. The three sections switch among different narrative frames from the historiography of the police records to the poetic notebook and finally to the straightforward autobiography in order to disrupt linear progression and to undermine closure. The narrative endorses Kristeva’s words that otherness is an inescapable weight which each person has to shoulder and can only lighten by constantly coming back to it: “Let us escape its hatred, its burden, fleeing them not through leveling and forgetting but through the harmonious repetition of the differences it implies and spreads” (Kristeva 1991:3).

In their discussion of exile’s hardships both Hoffman and Kanov and stress the significance of language as a go-between in the process of acculturation.

Hoffman locates the biggest pain of displacement in the loss of the mother tongue. Eva’s exile story is represented as a linguistic adventure beginning with her loss of articulacy in the new world and ending with the forging of a polyphonic narrative voice which gives birth to the new Eva. For Hoffman’s young protagonist, the pain of uprooting in the early days of exile is thematized as a linguistic drama of self-alienation caused by the foreign language which is perceived as an assault on the mother tongue. Eva feels that in English “the signifier has become severed from the signified” so that the foreign sign is a cold and disembodied label. To the young exile ‘river’ in Polish is “a vital sound energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers” (Hoffman 1989:106). Only the mother tongue can afford the innocent illusion of a natural fusion of sign and referent which lends immediacy to the word. The foreign word does not have the capacity to evoke and the image of the word cannot be manifest to her mind. Such linguistic estrangement pervades her capacity to generate meaning and obliterates her very sense of self:

The black hole image evokes the loss of self which the young girl undergoes while the adult narrative voice seeks to explain the experience with the loss of language hinting at the poststructuralist premise that the subject is constituted in language.

Far from being an innocent activity, the acquisition of the new language is described as a coercive process, inventing another Eva and changing her perception of the world. The diary young Eva begins to keep in English “is about me and not about me at all” (Hoffman 1989:121), she says. The diary is impersonal, in it the earlier emotional intensities are reassessed by her in a detached and cold way as “sentimental effusions and eruptions of anger” (Hoffman 1989:121). The new language English, “which is not the language of such emotions” (Hoffman 1989:121), shapes a stark and alienated self to whom she is unable to apply the first person singular and instead, is driven to use what she calls “the Siamese-twin you” (Hoffman 1989:121). The Siamese twins image underpins the awareness of linguistic doubleness between which the immigrant has to oscillate simultaneously.

The novel records the process of re-integration as an inner battle between the two selves, the two languages and cultures. As Eva goes to school and university she learns the right gestures and behaviour which match her new environment. She discovers that her new social self can be expressed only in her public language English while Polish can no longer communicate the new physical world she is inhabiting now. Yet while becoming more like her New World peers she feels that the inner self she had suppressed comes under greater threat. In order to defend it from the alienating influence of her public self, she creates an inner voice in Polish which alone can express her homesickness and the spectral self she might have grown into had she stayed in Poland. The tensions and conflict between the two voices and the two languages become most prominent when she ventures into the emotional sphere of love and sex. The failure of her marriage proves to Eva that she cannot simply imitate the natives, she must understand the forked creature that she has become. She undertakes therapy and learns to “say those smallest first things in English, in the language that has served for detachment and irony and abstraction” (Hoffman 1989:273), she learns to tell her whole story “back to the beginning, and from the beginning onwards, in one language” (Hoffman 1989:272). This involves diving into layers of the self, buried deep in her Polish childhood until the narrator reaches a place in herself that she calls “the white blank centre”(Hoffman 1989:275).

The emergence of the new self in Chapter Three, “The New World”, is imaged in the metaphor of triangulation which supersedes the translation metaphor. With its emphasis on finding the third unknown point, triangulation embodies the progress of Eva’s linguistic journey beyond the limits of translating from Polish into English and focuses on the emergence of her new voice. It is born in a dream in which she experiences a voice saying in English, “The cottage is the heart of desire, it’s the sun itself that stokes the fire.”(Hoffman 1989:243) The poetic dream resembles a haiku in which the notion of home is lodged inside and is inextricably connected with creativity and writing. The dream experienced in English is also the moment in which the adult Eva retrieves the “picture-and-word show” (Hoffman 1989:107) which she had lost as a young girl. In her dream the English words of cottage, sun and fire evoke the lost home which Eva rediscovers. The focus on meaning engendered in both image and word, points to the mode in which Eva is going to reconnect her new language with the deepest, intuitional strata: through the creative act of writing. The metaphor in the dream is of her own creation beyond the two languages and cultures and signals the moment of finding the third unknown of the triangulation metaphor. The poetic dream expresses the moment of metamorphosis in which the translator is transformed into an author. Hoffman’s autobiographical tale endorses the notion that instead of cultural death, true acculturation implies finding the right medium through which to express new meanings by tapping the resources of the Old World experience. As she says in her essay The New Nomads, “We need to develop a model in which the force of our first legacy can be transposed or brought into dialogue with our later experiences, in which we can build new meanings as valid as the old ones.” (Hoffman 1999:62)

The autobiography ends shortly afterwards because the artifact of the text is her life now, writing will be the bridge and the bond between the narrator’s Polish and American cultural identities.

In his autobiography Between the Two Hemispheres, written in Bulgarian, Kanov manifests a similar belief in writing as a medium which holds together the fragmented self. Like Hoffman, Kanov dwells on the exile’s heightened awareness of the threat posed to the sense of self when the mother tongue is lost. “There is a strange desire to withstand dissolution and vanishing,” he says and points out that he has chosen to write in Bulgarian because the mother tongue alone helps him preserve “the old structures, forms and images which go back to childhood and can be experienced only in the mother tongue”(Kanov 2002:6).

He describes the relationship between the mother tongue and the new language in a striking metaphor highlighting the oppositional relationship between Bulgarian and English:

The prison image of English incarcerating the mother tongue echoes Hoffman’s feeling of the aggressiveness of the new language which threatens to engulf the old self.

Similar to Hoffman, Kanov also draws a distinction between the ordinary everyday usage of language which he associates with the communicative function and the “deep metaphorical layers which store emotional knowledge and border on the unconscious” (Kanov 2002:6).

The organization of the narrative voice in the tale is of interest as it points to a similar struggle to reconstitute an identity born out of the encounter with otherness. Otherness is embedded in the very composition of the book. With its lack of an overall frame, the narrative outlines a psychological model of dislocation and reconstitution which can best be described by Kanov’s own words in the introduction:

Unlike Hoffman’s experience which took place in territorial exile, Kanov encounters foreignness at home when he is subjected to interrogation and trial by the secret police leading to his inner exile. The text foregrounds foreignness by confronting the reader with the alien impersonal language of the police files in Section One, presented without any mediating authorial voice whatsoever. The files offer a retrospective glance to the early 1970s in communist Bulgaria when Kanov was interrogated, tried and sentenced to a year and a half imprisonment for the crime of criticizing the regime. The cold, impersonal police records construct a hostile external version of the author as a slanderous liar and enemy of democracy. The document is self-revelatory because it exposes the grotesque injustice of a judicial system which can brand Kanov as an enemy of democracy precisely because he has used his right to free speech. The police files thus ironically subvert themselves and evoke an atmosphere of ruthless censorship and ideological terror. Kanov’s decision to abstain from any personal commentary throughout the long section has a manifold effect: The document casts the defendant as a voiceless object and a non-entity whose voice is jammed by a judicial system which dispenses prison sentences for the crime of free speech. More importantly, the absence of any authorial comment implies Kanov’s categorical refusal to align himself with the system and its values. The blatant absence of a personal opinion in the whole section is an alienating mechanism which marks his difference from the collective body and its values. Section One outlines the moment when his moral space slips outside the majority standard and marks the beginning of his internal expulsion from the homeland which will lead to territorial exile. The traumatic experience of this expulsion is underpinned by the peculiarities of the narrative voice in the next section, “In Brevis”.

The second section is a disconnected, cacophonous composition of bits and pieces of impressions, random events, jokes, dreams, flashbacks of memory uttered by a disjointed voice floating in the world. The unspecified chronotope is a discursive marker for the cognitive paralysis of the traumatized, shattered self. The only unifying principle organizing the chaos of impressions is a series of dichotomies of love-hate, self-effacement ‑ self-assertion which recall Kanov’s self-label of Logos-eater. The most consistent discursive feature in this section is the avoidance of a first person narrator and the adoption of different masks which emphasize anonymity and imply that the only way to tell of the painful experience is to transfer it to an impersonal double. Self-estrangement reaches its height when the third person foreigner-observer does not remember specific names when he tries to pursue his past:

The refusal to recognize himself in the mirror evokes the loss of identity in self-hate due to the paranoia of totalitarian control and casts the authorial persona as a non-being who moves in an absurd and senseless universe. The anonymous place is matched by a monotonous, uneventful time, measured only by the clock and leading to utter confusion in the image of the man kicking his days as footballs: “He viewed his life as a long sequence of days resembling a series of footballs which he could kick away into the past at the end of the day.”(Kanov 2002:116) Another striking image, of the anonymous man speaking in a telephone booth which hangs over a precipice, foregrounds an aspect of dislocation, the dangers inherent in the failure to communicate.

The opposite pole of the antinomy hate-love is centred round writing and identified with remembering, self-assertion and life. As soon as Kanov refers to writing, there is a shift in the point of view and the estranged, anonymous narrator is replaced by a first person narrator:

The switch from the third to the first person narrator enhances the presence of a self who adopts the subject position of agency and authorship. Writing and creativity are possible only when he has the freedom to express himself without censorship or coercion:

The desire to hear his unjammed voice indicates the impulse for inner freedom which he can fully develop only in immigration. Access to agency and the right to author his own life, in place of the object position of the victim in his totalitarian home country is the precious gift which immigration has given him. The novel’s last sentence harks back to the same idea of self-fulfilment through independent decision-making when the narrator says: ”When I look back on my life I can say that I have made the life which I wanted to have, although the head-on winds on my road have been stronger than tornadoes.” (Kanov 2002:198).

Section Three “Tale Quale” documents the birth of the free self in defiance of the public denial of his voice presented in the first section. His life story is narrated in a matter-of-fact and in a chronological order. Here the dispersed narrator is abandoned for a coherent first person narrator who adopts a biographical time-frame and a specific chronotope. The new narrative voice corresponds to the third version of the authorial self who has overcome the pangs of exile and has successfully remade himself. At first glance the last chapter resembles the traditional rags-to-riches tale of the immigrant who found in America the land of freedom and opportunity. Yet the life story he tells ‑ from the poverty of the underpaid professional and the persecuted free-thinker in Bulgaria to the successful psychiatrist and free individual ‑ does not illustrate the traditional assimilative myth of the death of the Old World self. He makes it clear that it is the preservation of his otherness as a Bulgarian and not its erasure in assimilation that has helped him succeed in America. Kanov stresses that it is the good command of his mother tongue which provided him with a high linguistic norm which he applied to the new language: ”It is due to my vast reading and my mastery of Bulgarian from which I kept translating in my daily work, that I was able to produce a richer and more expressive language than many native speakers” (Kanov 2002:194). Another aspect of his work, his ability to empathise with his patients, is a quality he ascribed to his Bulgarian legacy which is a culture more attentive and attuned to the emotions than the one he found in America. Like Hoffman, Kanov has discovered a way to transform the Old World legacy in his adopted country. The account of his journey home in the final chapter shows that the cultural translation is an ongoing process. When he returns to Bulgaria the distance provided by his residence abroad gives him a stranger’s perspective as regards the home country.

The present-day country which he sees on his return is again projected as a double vision. It is both the grim, impoverished, post-communist country run by incompetent bureaucrats and a dream-like Edenic land of plenty, which he compares to “a vast vineyard, blessed by God with grapes, and sunshine and wine” (Kanov 2002:189). The grim vision resembles closely the country he had left rather than present-day Bulgaria, and testifies to the common exilic experience that the immigrant retains an anachronistic image of the country which is frozen at the moment of departure. Home time stops for the immigrant at the moment of leaving and he is excluded from the nation’s evolvement.

The beautiful vision is a mixture of his remote childhood memories of his grandfather’s vineyard near the Danube and his utopian dream of Bulgaria as a rich farming country. Yet, Kanov succeeds in transforming a fraction of his dream-vision into reality by starting a vine-growing business in his grandfather’s vineyard and creating jobs for several families. The immigrant’s enterprising spirit and taste for self-sufficiency and pragmatic action which he acquired in America, manifests itself on his return to his old country. This time Kanov takes his otherness as an American to Bulgaria just as he had taken his Bulgaria to America.

By choosing to focus on the subjective rather than the political or ethnic aspects of otherness, both Hoffman and Kanov map out a similar model of adaptation which confirms the importance of the simultaneous upholding of the two cultures. Hoffman’s writing and Kanov’s professional work afford them the medium through which they could tap their Old World legacies in order to continue to evolve. In that sense the immigrant experience can be said to afford privileged insights into the problematics of inter-civilisational encounters. The price both Kanov and Hoffman have to pay is the impossibility of return and the prospect of permanent uprooting because the country they left has moved on. Both narratives underpin the words of Julia Kristeva’s about the foreigner:

1. All quotations from Lubomir Kanov, Between the Two Hemispheres are in my translation.

3.4. Literaturen der Migration: Konfrontation und Perturbation als kreativer Impuls

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For quotation purposes:
Stefana Roussenova: The Reconstitution of the Self in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation and in Lubomir Kanov’s Between the Two Hemispheres -. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 17/2008. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/3-4/3-4_roussenova.htm

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