ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the work of multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall and that of linguist Jean-Jacques Lecercle, both of whom consider language as a physical and bodily experience that can be violent and uncontrollable. If for Lecercle the literature of nonsense is a space where meaning constantly oscillates between one and another meaning, this chapter argues that ‘non-sense,’ by comparison, is the relatively static space in-between where no sense is made, where the reader cannot or does not want to inhabit one langue or another and the entire body participates in that refusal or inability to make sense. When Bergvall decides to opt for the English language as her primary language for her writing, she starts questioning her body’s integrity in its commerce between languages. Her trilingual poem ‘Crop’ oscillates between English, Norwegian and French, and this chapter argues that if the body is cropped, truncated during its travels across languages as Bergvall suggests, its integrity is only retained if considered across the range of languages it uses.
