Ethos construction and the poetics of bilingual writing in the oeuvre of Nancy Huston between 1984-2002.

This project aims to explore the poetic repercussions of a bilingual, self-translating writing practice on the imaginary of ‘self’ and ‘body’ that is developed in Nancy Huston’s fictional oeuvre over a time period of two decades. As such, this research navigates between different research traditions: (i) that of a rapidly growing field of ‘self-translation studies’, (ii) that of a well-established rhetoric and pragmatic tradition of discursive self-representation via the construction of ‘ethos’ in (written) discourse, and (iii) that of a sociopoetic approach to literary discourse, which aims to establish a connection between the institutional trajectory of authors and the various ethè that emerge from their writings in this process.

In our approach to literary self-translation, we have opted for an author- and text- oriented approach; our primary research question being how the self-translator negotiates her self-image in language, or 'ethos', through the creation of complex scenographies that are shared across (self-translated) versions of a single text. In order to answer this question, we have chosen the methodological framework of Dominique Maingueneau’s notion of embodied ethos, which explores how ‘ethos’ is constructed through textual scenographies on three different levels: (i) through (one or more) language(s) that give(s) body to the text(s) (ii) through a particular imaginary of the body developed in the text, (iii) through the inscription of the text in a body or community of readers.

Ethos has thus far been studied mostly within a monolingual framework in the field of literary studies, and primarily in a referential way in the field of translation studies. In the latter, ethos became part of a reflection on the ethics of translation and/or the translator, as a way to look at attitudes towards translation and translation patterns, or as a derivative of a translator’s style. Rarely, however, has ethos been looked at as a particular kind of relationship between two subject positions, which can be staged through fictional scenographies by a single author/translator. Myriam Suchet’s research on the differential nature of the translator’s ethos in heterolingual, fictional texts, is a notable exception.

In our approach, then, we have combined Suchet’s understanding of ethos as a differential notion to examine a translator’s identity-in-language, with Maingueneau’s multileveled, embodied, understanding of the ethos-notion. We have done so, through an analysis of the ethos-construction in three novels by Nancy Huston. By examining the evolution of a particular imaginary of ‘self’ and ‘body’ in Huston’s works over a period of two decades, we were able to relate the developments to the author’s changing institutional positioning and her strong desire to legitimize her own literary discourse as being both a part of, and outside of, a primarily Francophone literary establishment.

Finally, we identified three different types of ethos: (i) an ethos of recuperation, where a previously abandoned mother-tongue is re-introduced through the staging of a fictional translation process, in a predominantly monolingual text, (ii) an ethos of self-narration, wherein a bilingual writing process leads to the creation of two monolingual novels which foreground a complex process of fragmented identity construction, (iii) an ethos of disembodiment, where a process of self-translation leads to the disintegration of language and body in the text. For Huston, therefore, there is a constant conflict between the language of narration as a form of textual embodiment, which remains monolingual throughout her career, and the emergence of a bilingual poetics when we consider the speaking bodies which are staged in her novels – and which undergo compelling transformations as she evolves from an occasional, primarily French-writing, to a French and English, systematically self-translating, author.