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PEOPLE learn languages for all sorts of reasons—not always to talk with other people. They may learn Assyrian or Old Persian to interpret stone carvings, Italian to sing Rossini, Chinese to do calligraphy, Turkish to explore psycholinguistics, other languages to decipher intelligence intercepts. There is even an academic specialty called English for special uses, most prominent in places like Hong Kong where certain professions (e.g., the law) rely on the making of fine distinctions in a variety of English that nobody in Hong Kong really speaks. These special uses are not the ones that colleges have in mind when they set out language requirements. Most of us, I think quite reasonably, expect that the goal of language study in college is to be able to talk with native speakers more or less readily and naturally and to read the sorts of texts that a native speaker encounters in the course of daily life (newspapers, novels, letters, reports). And when we express that goal as the attainment of advanced competency instead of mandating two years of study or a certain score on a placement test, we mean a kind of all-around ability, which is the most plausible way of justifying the existence of language requirements as well as the fairest way of allowing for the many reasons people choose to study this or that language.1
Competence or competency is a feature of learners, not of the thing learned, so when we test for competency or elaborate standards for assessing it, we are really doing diagnosis: not measuring a thing or property as much as gauging a potential, scrutinizing behavior for the signs that we agree to accept as evidence that the condition of competency exists. We can never capture the total linguistic knowledge of a student in a test, for, as linguists since Noam Chomsky have never ceased reminding us, the number of sentences that can be generated even on the basis of quite limited grammatical and lexical givens is infinite. But by representative sampling, we can form a theory of the linguistic devices in students’ minds and estimate their ability to use the language in a variety of situations. From the evidence of performance we hypothesize the condition of competence.
Instead of speaking about competency testing or standards, I would like to examine the model of competency—the all-around ability to do things and communicate in a language—in relation to an older goal for language study: becoming able to read the standard-setting works of literature in a language. A little-discussed role of literary works throughout history has been their adoption as benchmarks of ability: you know that you know Latin when you’re able to read Vergil (though you may still have trouble with Tacitus); you know that you know French when you can get through Candide or Madame Bovary on your own; and some dialects are in fact defined through their close association with the specific book that long marked the goal of study in that language: Vedic Sanskrit, biblical Hebrew, New Testament Greek. So in one traditional way of thinking about language, competency derives from the canon. In textbooks of an older generation, sentences given to demonstrate grammatical rules are typically taken directly from the very canonical work you are on the way to reading.
As canons expand, as languages diversify, as the purposes of language study change, this way of understanding competency has come to seem too particularistic and limited, not to mention elitist, reactionary, antiquated. That I think the canon approach still has something to offer us probably shows that I deserve to be called elitist, reactionary, antiquated. But let me make the case for literature as the realm where competency, in a particular and deep sense, happens, and let me illustrate my case with the language I mainly work in, Chinese.
Summing up the results of forty years of structuralist literary criticism, Jonathan Culler once advocated the study of “literary competence" as the reader-oriented complement to literary criticism, the study of "literary performance” (113–30). Just as speakers of a language have a competence, an ability to understand new utterances that goes far beyond the sentences they may actually produce in a career of linguistic performance, so readers of literature, although not authors themselves, must know how to catch the meanings that authors throw out. Culler is not advocating a particular corpus but seeking to discover the conventions by which we adopt unfamiliar works into the family of literature: not just the formal properties that mark the difference between a newspaper story and a sonnet but also the subtler, tacit body of expectations, the patterns of attention and recognition, the rules of interpretation that we readers use to build works of literature out of black marks on white paper. Insofar as we can distinguish between literary language and ordinary language, it is a learned literary competence that allows us to do so, and the more doubtful the case (consider, for example, collage poetry), the more we tend to make the unspoken rules explicit. My friend Xu Zidong once told me how he discovered that there was such a thing as literature. As a student in elementary school, he had to memorize the first paragraph of an essay by the great modernist fiction writer Lu Xun: 
(“In the garden behind our house were two trees. One of them was a jujube tree, and the other one was a jujube tree too”). He couldn’t understand why it was written that way, and he showed the book to an elderly relative, who said, “Oh, that’s literature. Literature is full of unnecessary words.” That’s one definition of literary language: excess, abundance, an efflorescence on the strict minimum needed for social activity, conspicuous consumption of the dictionary’s riches. But there are many ways of wasting resources, and not all of them amount to art.
Another line drawn between literary and ordinary language has become part of the folklore of the profession not to mention of New Haven. Paul de Man once cited an episode of the television series All in the Family: Edith Bunker gives her husband Archie the choice between having his bowling shoes laced over and laced under, to which he replies cuttingly, “What’s the difference?” Edith patiently begins to explain the difference, whereupon Archie throws a memorable fit (9–10). His question had all the grammatical marks of being a question, of asking for information, but its rhetorical purpose was to refuse to accept any information. As de Man points out, this little scene plays out the millennial history of the relations of grammar and rhetoric, of language seen as communication technology versus the devious things that people do with communication, such as lie, sneer, joke, and ask questions that are not questions. In the working-class living room that is Archie Bunker’s Globe Theatre, utterance clashes with innuendo as he commits an act of literature, a figure of speech, and is understood to be seeking a deeper understanding of the shoelace. I think any account of advanced competency should seek to show speakers how to recognize and respond to the part of language that goes beyond grammar and even contradicts it, as in this consecrated example.
Departing from de Man’s use of the Bunkers’ domestic drama, I would firmly reject any suggestion that the scene be interpreted as shorthand for saying that teachers of grammar (the language faculty) and teachers of rhetoric (the literature faculty) are doomed to work at cross-purposes. Nor would I like the example to be taken as implying that the right place for grammatical education is “before” or “below” the attainments of rhetorical, literary education. Rather, the crevasse between the two is to be bridged by more engagement in language teaching by literature professionals and more involvement with literary texts on the part of language specialists. Whether you lace it over or lace it under, that tie needs to be made tighter, for the benefit of both sides.
Shoelaces take us to our next example, a one-line poem composed by Arthur Rimbaud in a sort of drinking club, Les Zutistes, that he and his off-and-on partner Paul Verlaine frequented in the 1870s. A parody of the didactic verse then being supplied to a large and appreciative public by François Coppée and Charles-Xavier de Ricard, it reads simply:
L’Humanité chaussait le vaste enfant Progrès.
On the huge child Progress, Humanity put shoes.
Like a bad political cartoon, the allegory falls flat, not so much because of the unconvincing personifications as because of the bathos: putting shoes on a child is about the most prosaic activity you can imagine (I’ve done it many times myself), and in the French lexicon, chausser is far from a poetic verb, unless it is used in a context that clearly alludes not to smelly contemporary shoe leather but to the light-treading personages of Greek mythology. It would be possible to have a complete grammatical understanding of the sentence and not be sure, like Edith Bunker, exactly what was meant by it. The literature in this example involves acquaintance with the rules of French alexandrine verse; with the importance of the caesura after the sixth syllable (which puts extra emphasis on the incongruous word “chaussait”); with the precedents, norms, styles, and schools of nineteenth-century poetry; and finally with the particular weaknesses or lazinesses of imagination that are being skewered in this minimalist parody. In short, you need a trained ear to recognize good and bad poetry in any language, and the farther you roam from your home language, the less certain you are going to be of your ability to tell chalk from cheese, literal meaning from figures of speech, jokes, and parodies. As a constant reader of Chinese poetry, I can tell you how difficult it is: I’m always having to ask my friends about the exact weighting of this or that word I see in the poetry of a certain period. Databases help us frame questions but don’t give automatic answers.
Another example, to show how much you can get by without knowing when you know you’re reading literature:
Le pavillon de Melkarth, en pourpre fine, abritait une flamme de pétrole; sur celui de Khamon, couleur d’hyacinthe, se dressait un phallus d’ivoire, bordé d’un cercle de pierreries; entre les rideaux d’Eschmoûn, bleus comme l’éther, un python endormi faisait un cercle avec sa queue; et les Dieux-Patæques, tenus dans les bras de leurs prêtres, semblaient de grands enfants emmaillotés, dont les talons frôlaient la terre. (943)
This is from Salammbô, Flaubert’s historical novel about ancient Carthage, generally recognized as a magnificent flop although its author protested that he had shown more generosity to its characters than to those in Madame Bovary. In English it would read:
The shrine of Melkarth, in fine purple, sheltered a petroleum flame; from the hyacinth-colored shrine of Khamon rose an ivory phallus edged with a circle of precious stones; between the sky-blue curtains of Eschmoun a sleeping python described a circle with its tail; and the Pataecian Gods, clasped in the arms of their priests, had the appearance of huge children in swaddling clothes with heels brushing the ground.
Most readers of the novel, like me, just sail past the enumeration of ancient gods and cults on which Flaubert spent countless hours of research. His aim was, as in Xu Zidong’s uncle’s account of literature, to display treasures that would exceed the audience’s ability to evaluate them, to dazzle, although the result may be merely to numb. Bringing up the rear of this parade of excess, those tall, stiff, and absurd Pataecian gods—who need care and feeding and are quite unable to do anything on their own, though they are worshipped presumably for their extraordinary powers—arrive in the arms of their self-effacing priesthood. The incompetency in ancient Mediterranean religious history that I feel when reading the passage shades over into the sense, once I’ve caught the implication of a straight-faced joke in the narrator’s meticulous description, that I have not missed anything. This knowledge too is a kind of advanced competency.
These examples point toward a definition of literary competency as something different from lexical, grammatical, or referential understanding: as an ability to recognize and account for aberrant discourse. It presupposes, but is not limited to, the understanding of standard, literal, grammatical, serious discourse. Literary competency is a competency on top of competency; it’s the supercompetency you need to deal with the superdiscourse that is literature.
There’s a potential paradox here. You become competent in the normal, regular, regulative, rule-bound patterns of language in order to read texts that defy the rules, contradict the patterns, ironically suspend much of what you took so long to establish. Literature scholars are connoisseurs of abnormal sentences. Jean Cohen long ago put French poetry through a statistical wringer and confirmed the judgment that the more poetic or experimental poetry is, the further its choices of wording or grammar will be from the norm.
What if I were to exploit this gap between normal language and literary language to propose a less antiquated and elitist version of the old model in which we learn language in order to read literature? I would then be advocating that we take as our goal a competency in recognizing and instantiating verbal style; the ways the inhabitants of a language and culture, and we readers, have of possessing the tools of communication; a way of being in language. We can all remember the painful but instructive process of learning how to make a joke in our foreign languages, by which I mean an intentional and successful joke, a joke that would be recognized and responded to as such by a native speaker. Our current measures of competence do a good enough job of evaluating a student’s ability to communicate information in a grammatically and idiomatically appropriate way. But what if we were to create a new category, one of language abuse, a domain in which rewards would come from being able to demonstrate spontaneous wit and counterintuitive uses of speech? When you learn to recognize stylistically informed language, you get two things at once, the normal way, which is implied, and the twisted way, which is expressed. You also get a motive for using language that the standard dialogues of grammar books do not contain. If we were to put style and wit at the top of our pyramid of linguistic competences, we might discover, and help our students discover, a new purpose for reading literature, that low-cost extravagance.
My examples have been from English and French, but the problems get to be particularly interesting in East Asian languages, which are always rated as very difficult for American learners. The reason is largely a matter of diglossia—the independence of spoken language from written. Attaining advanced competence in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean means knowing a lot. You have to learn first the contemporary spoken language, which can be pretty hard, with its grammatical rules that are not cut to the same pattern as English and its phonology (consider the tones in Chinese). At the same time, you must learn the written language, which does not map onto the spoken language in any easily predictable way. The written languages of Asia are in each case really a second language on top of the spoken language, with complex rules of character formation and a vast vocabulary.2 When you have learned all this, a further region of complexity awaits you, the hierarchy of speech registers. To be really literate in Chinese or Arabic—to understand a fairly sophisticated magazine article, for example—you also have to know something of the language’s classical form. Allusions, quotations, proverbs, snatches of poetry are constantly disrupting the smooth prosaic flow of literal, easily understood speech. These disruptions are not mere ornamentations: much of the cultural memory and reference knowledge of the native speaker is sedimented in them. Fortunately this classical language uses the same written signs as the contemporary language (more or less, but in some cases a great deal less). However, it has its own peculiar grammar, and its texts often must be read with the help of commentaries, a body of additional texts written in a more recent form of the ancient literary idiom. So there are three languages that must be learned to attain literary competence: spoken modern language; written modern language; and the classical language, which is read and written though not spoken.
In the early twentieth century, young cultural rebels tried to replace the classical language with modern, vernacular versions of written Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that would be closer to the language actually spoken in the streets. Allusions and quotations were discouraged; literary forms were simplified; a regional dialect usually became the norm for a national pronunciation and grammar.3 But the classical language couldn’t be entirely eliminated without inducing a greater cultural amnesia than the literate classes of those countries were willing to accept. There is still a great deal of classical language left in an ordinary piece of Chinese or Japanese writing. To reveal its presence, no better detector can be found than a foreign learner who repeatedly bumps up against forms of expression that make no sense in terms of the modern language.
The cultural reformers of the early twentieth century thought of themselves as inheriting the impulses of the European Renaissance, another period when the scholastic language of a defunct empire, Latin, gave way to the idioms of contemporary life—Italian, French, German, Spanish, English. China, on this analogy, is a Europe that kept its Latin. Japan and Korea are imbued with the same classical language; to have full literary ability, you must know their local form of Chinese. In similar ways, majority-Islamic countries, with classical Arabic preserved as a sacred language, possess a Latin that has historical points of contact with the local tongue. It is classical Arabic that actually covers the territory of the long-caressed dream of the ’umma, or pan-Islamic state (see Suleiman). In comparison with these linguistic empires we can see a little more impartially what was lost when we gave up Latin: an international conversation, a media commons that belonged exclusively to nobody but was available to all.4
What does this circumstance mean for advanced competence in the difficult languages?
By not learning the full set of skills that native speakers learn in their schools, the foreign learner will always be a step short, always partly outside the conversation. If being a fully conversant speaker means being able to anticipate in one’s mind the probable reactions of a native speaker, the learner without a classical background won’t ever quite get there. The "they" will always be remote, incalculable, directed by signals outside our range of hearing—and therefore irrational, backward, hostile, unknowable.
Some examples come readily to mind. The squabble, ongoing since 1999, between Egyptian and American officials over the meaning of the short prayer uttered by the Egypt Air pilot whose Boeing 767 shortly thereafter went into a fatal dive, involves distinguishing the lexical and conventional meanings of an oft repeated and originally classical-language phrase (see Helmore, Eltahawy, and Walters; Langewiesche). The Harvard student who was pressured to change the title of his commencement speech, “My American Jihad,” found himself in a lexical no-man’s-land between the terrains of Arabic etymology and American mass journalism.5 Neither of these controversies could be made to go away by an application of advanced literary reading knowledge, but such knowledge is necessary to understand in the first place why there is a controversy. It is not particularly helpful to advise all Americans to become comparative philologists, but there is a clear need for people who can interpret not only between countries but also between the multiple languages, texts, and ages of the countries involved in communication.
Learning the grandmotherly, generative high-culture languages as well as the mother tongues of the people we are communicating with makes us truly capable speakers, listeners, rhetoricians. Maybe this demand is a lot to put on the classical language; but it’s the language that the huge immobile children borne by the priests of ancient Carthage would speak, if they could speak.
1For widely accepted definitions of advanced competency, see ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. The cleft between competency and competence seems to reflect merely the idioms of applied linguistics and linguistic theory communities.
2On the complexities of learning and using such a system, see Kess and Miyamoto.
3See Hu Shi 
. For the wider context of this linguistic revolution led by the “young,” see Anderson.
4For a history of the long afterlife of Latin, see Wacquet.
5See Zernike; Keim. For the speech itself, see Yasin.
ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines C Speaking (Revised 1999). ACTFL. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.actfl.org/public/articles/Guidelinesspeak.pdf.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Cohen, Jean. La structure du langage poétique. Paris: Flammarion, 1966.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Flaubert, Gustave. Salammbô. Œuvres. Vol. 1. Ed. Albert Thibaudet and René Dumesnil. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. 709–994.
Helmore, Ed, Mona Eltahawy, and Joanna Walters. ”Anger at Boeing Suicide Claims.” Observer 21 Nov. 1999. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/egyptair/article/0,2763,196583,00.html.
Hu Shi . “Wenxue gailiang chuyi 
” (Recommendations for literary reform, 1918). Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Hu Shi 
. Ed. Yi Zhuxian 
. Hong Kong: Sanlian, 1987. 142–52.
Keim, Brandon. ”The Jihad against ‘Jihad.’“ CommonDreams.org. 7 June 2002. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0607-07.htm.
Kess, Joseph F., and Tadao Miyamoto. The Japanese Mental Lexicon: Psycholinguistic Studies of Kana and Kanji Processing. Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1999.
Langewiesche, William. ”The Crash of Egypt Air 990.“ Atlantic Monthly Nov. 2001. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/11/langewiesche.htm.
Rimbaud, Arthur. ”Album zutique.“ Œuvres complètes. Ed. Antoine Adam. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. 210.
Suleiman, Yasir. The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology. Washington: Georgetown UP, 2003.
Wacquet, Françoise. Le latin ou l’empire d’un signe. Paris: Albin Michel, 1999.
Yasin, Zayed. My American Jihad. Cornell U Lib. Middle East and Islamic Studies Collection. 6 June 2002. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/mamjihd.htm.
Zernike, Kate. “Harvard Student Drops ‘Jihad’ from Speech Title.” New York Times 1 June 2002.
© 2005 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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