Empowering languages and disempowering the narrator: Multilingualism as a poetic tool

Empowering Languages and disempowering the narrator: Multilingualism as a poetic tool How are power relations depicted through the use of multilingualism in Kjartan Fløgstad’s Second World War novel Grense Jakobselv (2009)? And how do code-switched fragments communicate with the reader of the novel without the support of the narrator? These are the main questions of this paper. Multilingualism has been one of the corner stones in the authorship of Kjartan Fløgstad (1944). This prolific Norwegian author shows a profound interest in exploiting the creative possibilities of language, which become evident in his many linguistic puns and language games, and in the co-presence of different languages in his prose. His texts are typically written in Norwegian but with words, sentences, poetry or song lyrics in other tongues. In Grense Jakobselv words, phrases and fragments from thirteen national languages are mixed with the Norwegian. This paper shows how fragments in German, Italian and Spanish have different functions and depict different kinds of power relations in the work. It examines how these multilingual pieces that might seem superficial, communicate crucial information that is not voiced by the narrators of the novel, and suggests a theoretical approach to this poetic use of language.