Seite 31 [31]
THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF LANGUAGE USE
an ethnographer “learns that his or her assumptions about how the world
works, usually implicit and out of awareness, are inadequate to understand
something that had happened”,’* the readers learn that their assumptions are
insufficient to understand what happens in the literary text.
A gap, a distance between two worlds, has just surfaced in the details of human
activity [here: the literary text]. Rich points, the words or actions that signal those
gaps, are the raw material for ethnography [here: a deeper reflection on the meaning
of the text], for it is the distance between the two worlds of experience that is exactly
the problem that ethnographic research [here: literary analysis or close reading] is
designed to locate and resolve."
Moreover, in exactly the same way as rich points are a dynamic given, code¬
switches and relexifications function dynamically in the text in the sense that
the ways in which they are perceived and interpreted by the readers are not
static and not restricted to authorial intent. In what follows, I will analyze five
examples of such “rich points.”
PARATEXT: “THE PARISIAN” VERSUS “THE PARISIAN OR AL-BARISI”
The attention of the careful reader is immediately drawn by the difference
between the title on the book cover, “The Parisian”, and the one on the inside
title page, “The Parisian or Al-Barisi.” Al-Barisi is the transliteration of the
Arabic word for Parisian. The italicization marks the word as foreign to the
language of the title on the cover and the main text. Rather than using the
transliterated Arabic word and then translating or explaining it, the English
title is used first and then translated into Arabic. This inversion, together with
the fact that this does not happen on the cover but on the inside title page, can
be understood as a signal that the author will take the readers by the hand to
gradually guide them to the inner meanings of the interplay between English,
French and Arabic, here metonymically represented respectively by The Paris¬
ian and Al-Barisi,"* while indicating from the beginning that this will not be
a monolingual reading experience.
The bilingual title is also closely related to the plot and the main character.
Despite the condescending way in which he was treated in France, particu¬
larly by his host Frédéric Molineu who observed him as an anthropological
16 Agar: The Professional Stranger, 31.
17 Tbid.
18 The reference to French is more complex here, but we could argue that French is implied se¬
mantically by the meaning of “the Parisian / al-Barisi”.
«29 +