How to understand the Other. Multilingualism and Translingualism in the Latin American Road Movie.

Abstract

This article examines language as an understudied aspect of the road movie idiom. After a brief sketch of the specific features of the Latin American road movie, it explains why language occupies a central place in many of its stories. First, attention is paid to cases in which this centrality is expressed a contrario by depicting characters who hardly express themselves (a strategy referred to as ‘mutism’). Subsequently, the article distinguishes between two basic ways in which road movies deal with language: multilingualism and translingualism. It uses the first term to refer to situations in which road movie characters belonging to different linguistic communities make a serious attempt to understand each other, yet end up finding that they are not able to convey what they really mean. The second term is used for situations in which characters assume language barriers between them will be too high to allow true communication; however, in the end they discover they are able to communicate anyway. The article concludes that the two ways of dealing with language – illustrative of a particularist and a universalist view on language respectively –suggest the ambivalence of communication in general.