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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, codeswitches 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 Parisian 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, particularly 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 semantically by the meaning of “the Parisian / al-Barisi”. «29 +
