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'Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey' by Ariel Dorfman

Torn Between Two Languages

Sunday, June 21, 1998

By Eileen Weiner

	Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey By Ariel Dorfman Farrar, Straus & Giroux $23.00

Maybe Shakespeare was wrong. A rose might, in fact, smell more or less sweet when called by another name, or when named in another language. But Shakespeare didn't consider all the facts.

Because any appreciation of the rose's perfume requires the agency of the nose, and the nose communicates with the same brain that registers the name of the flower, one's perception of the rose may well be influenced by what it is called.

Or so we might conclude after reading Ariel Dorfman's memoir of a life divided, often reluctantly, between two languages and cultures. Dorfman, a Chilean writer perhaps best known in the United States for his play and subsequent movie, "Death and the Maiden," is currently a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University. "Heading South, Looking North" explores his youthful search for a single identity and a meaningful voice.

The book is predominantly a meditation on language and its central role in the development of the personal and political self. The Spanish and English languages become characters in this story, each with a distinct personality, competitors for the throat of the young Dorfman, who was born in Argentina to Spanish-speaking parents but raised in New York City.

From a very early age, the author was unwilling to accept the dualities of being bilingual and bicultural, and he refused to speak a word of Spanish for 10 years. English, and everything it represented, had won his heart, mind and tongue.

When the politics of the McCarthy era forced his parents to leave America and resettle in Chile, Dorfman was forced to learn Spanish in order to survive. It was here that he abandoned his legal name, "Vladimiro" (in honor of Lenin), in favor of "Edward," after the prince in "The Prince and the Pauper," a story about duality and identity.

After several years of grudging bilingualism, Dorfman found Chile had become an emotional home to him, and he chose to attend college there, rather than returning to the States.

As his political awareness grew in the turbulent 1960s, Dorfman strained to be as chileno as possible, working to banish "the slight smidgen of a gringo accent that still crept into my voice like slime out of a swamp."

The next symbolic name change was the adoption of "Ariel," his middle name and the title of an influential book on the history of South America written in 1900, a name "recognized by vast numbers of Latin Americans as a symbol of opposition to the United States."

This clearly is not a man who takes lightly the question of "What's in a name?" or anything else related to the spoken or written word. Not surprisingly, a few years later, during a year of study in California, he swore to remain faithful to his new love, Spanish, and to never again write in English. This promise was discarded in later years, when Dorfman permitted himself to become "a bigamist of language," married to both of his linguistic loves.

If all of this sounds like a fragile basis for a book of nearly 300 pages, it is. The device of personifying the two languages soon wears thin, as do Dorfman's youthful self-obsession and grand gestures. ("I will never grow another beard ... until there is socialism in Chile.")

Unfortunately, the author's penchant for excess carries over to his prose, which frequently verges on the melodramatic. Sentences fairly drip with adjectives, and the author apparently subscribes to the literary doctrine of never using one metaphor where two might fit.

Nevertheless, the book is interesting when Dorfman occasionally allows his gaze to move beyond himself. He was an insider in the socialist government of President Salvador Allende, a witness to the U.S.-backed military coup that ousted Allende in 1973, and a political exile from the land he adopted as his own. His insights into that period have the unique perspective of a man coping with a "schizophrenic, adulterous existence," suspended between two nations and two languages.

The structure of the book echoes this sense of duality, with chapters alternating between the author's childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, and the events surrounding the coup. This structure works for the most part (despite the self-conscious chapter titles) but results in some narrative difficulties as the gap between the periods shrinks.

"Heading South, Looking North" is an intellectual and political memoir, at its best when exploring the complex subject of how language, nationality and personal identity are inextricably bound together. It would be a more satisfying book if the author had looked beyond himself, and had drawn a clearer picture of the people and situations surrounding him, both north and south.

Eileen Weiner, who lived for a time in Chile, is a free-lance writer in Pittsburgh.