While we are used to the trope of invisibility in the context of translation – suffice it to mention Lawrence Venuti’s seminal The Translator’s Invisibility – when Christine Brooke-Rose titled her last work Invisible Author, she called attention to the invisibility of texts that insist on inclusion of unexplained difference. As an example she quotes the dissimilar reception of her own 1968 multilingual novel Between and George Perec’s 1969 La Disparition. While Perec advertised his constraint to make it obvious to the reader and thus ascertain the placement of his novel in the experimental literary cannon, Brook-Rose let her constraint – the omission of the verb “to be” – go without a footnote or foreword. That her novel attempts to formally make visible what usually goes unnoticed in globalizing discourses – the influence of translation on international communication, unacknowledged differences among European nations during the cold war, the female translators who convey delegates’ messages at international congresses – makes this lipogram particularly meaningful.

In my talk, I will focus the multilayered invisibility that Between exemplifies to argue that literature rarely allows us to engage with radical difference. While the texts that mix foreign languages within one text are exemplary global texts in their attempt to represent a reality of transcultural identities and experiences, they disappear from literary conversations when they fail to manage and explain their difference. Like foreignization in translation, multilingual literature does not allow its reader to believe in the seamless transference from one language to another and thus draws attention to what resists planetarity.