Just what we need: yet another book on mainly Ulysses, assembling disparate essays, with not even an overall thesis.
Not really my doing. It was Frances Ilmberger who came up with the idea. Of course, I was flattered at the suggestion, and more so when she volunteered to edit a volume, so that I could sit back and let it happen or gracefully interfere with her labours. But by approving, I am taking full responsibility.
The justification is that there are indeed various scattered articles that came out in recent years. Since I have been a regular participant in the Joyce Summer Schools of both Dublin and Trieste, as well as the annual Birthday conferences in Rome, this entailed at least two presentations per year. I am more than just grateful, of course, to Anne Fogarty, John McCourt, Franca Ruggieri, Serenella Zanotti (and many others) who made these events possible and also supported publications.
Naturally, the pieces assembled reflect my enthusiasms and shortcomings. An outsider and non-academic — well, a seasonal “visiting professor”, but only when actually visiting — I could always pose opportunistically either as a serious scholar or an amateur and autodidact. Not that I was always conscious of it, but I realise in hindsight that all my output was directed far more at Joyce’s text than at other critics, which explains the paucity of references or footnotes.
I have frequently pointed out that my handicap was that I never took a Joyce course — and my advantage that I never took a Joyce course. I set out on my own without any of the requirements for a reader of Joyce: no academic background, my English an acquired language, with no idea of what Ireland was except that it lay somewhere behind England, and no Catholic education. So I picked up a copy of Ulysses in 1952, mainly to test my English and with a hope to find spicy bits (on the whole a grave disappointment). My English was not adequate naturally, nor was there much guidance around except Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen, but I plodded on with bafflement and curiosity and graduated to Finnegans Wake and then almost by coincidence was drawn into active annotation by James Atherton, who invited me to investigate Zürich traces in the Wake. Such was my entry into the predominantly welcoming international Joyce community.
By constitution, I am a pedestrian philological provider of commentaries, a scholiast. There is no modesty in that; in fact it is partly a boast. There is nothing wrong with walking on the ground level (what would Joyce be without it?), nor with philology, the love and study of language: it is a base for all literature. It has produced great insights — and an enormous volume of tedious trivialities. In other words, I start at the bottom, leaving the higher spheres of abstraction and theory to those who are qualified.
Whatever else Joyce does, he certainly caters to our explorative instinct (though it is always wrong to say “our” or “the reader”), and there is great satisfaction in throwing some light on a tricky problem, even a provisional light. That’s the temptation of Finnegans Wake on which I concentrated in the sixties and years to follow. It grants unique “aha!” experiences and remains a constant source of delight and fun. It also frustrates. My philological conscience leaves me dissatisfied, even deeply worried, about all those passages that still remain opaque and do not offer sufficient revelations — and this, mind you, after seven decades of devoted endeavour (with participation in many reading groups, some still going on). So, apart from occasional comments, I have backed out of extended speculations and find myself incapable of posing as a Wake scholar. The Annotations that we have, first out in 1980, are still not only a fundamental invaluable source, but also, after more than forty years, with its abundance of blank spaces that we really cannot afford, a basic failure of the Wake community — a collective one, not a fault of Roland McHugh, whose achievement remains unchallenged. There is proportionally too much semantic debris in comparison to necessary enlightenment so that I cannot maintain a pretence of expertise. All the better then, that, still holding on to an old-fashioned notion of sufficient “understanding”, I remain an exception and my dissatisfaction is fortunately not shared by others.
The focus is on Ulysses as still a rich area for investigation. All my attempts may ultimately derive from admiration for the sheer workmanship, how well put even the simplest stretches are. Maybe all I ever did was to transmit subjective experience, generally in scrupulous detail. I found solace when little discoveries made in my closet could be shared with others, in talk, in class, at a conference, in glosses. Come to think of it — which I haven’t for a long time — all I ever did was try to pass on my own kind of delight, especially to newcomers (which Joyce turns us all into). I always naively wanted my reader(s) to learn something, if possible something worth knowing. At the same time, I am never free of doubts that what I unearthed may be tritely obvious to most readers, being right there in plain sight of the texts.
Readers may notice that I rarely bother with long introductions and in general I do not survey the staked-out area, but dive right into concrete passages, trying to deduce something from them. A possible blurb for this book might be that, of all that has been written or lectured on Joyce, this collection is the one that has the lowest proportion of words ending in “-ism” (or beginning with “post-”). Not that I don’t have my own exotic terminology. To make a point, I felt I had to name some salient features and make up terms that were not used before: “epimorph”, “dislocution”, “eutrapelia”, “symphoric”, and others. They enable me to determine what they ought to mean.
In my ramblings, I keep returning to often the same favourite passages or sentences, but generally in an alternative context or through a different approach. Every (a simplification!) Joycean item tends to be polytropical. This epithet from the first line of the Odyssey, “polytropos” (“in many directions” and “versatile”), is superbly suited to call up the dynamics that absorb me.
It is easy to go too far, but then Joyce started the game and he seems to invite us to play it by his unstated and perpetually changing game rules. In some cases, there is temptation to go too far, in other cases, of course, not far enough. The Latin verb invenire means not only to find but also to invent, to make up. Whoever is without sin may draw the line. Joyce naturally attracts crackpots, and some extravagancies are amusing or ridiculous but they reflect back on an unsettling awareness that one’s own views may appear equally grotesque or vapid. I do not hold that crackpots are by definition always the others. Cracked pots, or looking glasses, look very Joycean.
One of my hobbies is to use translation as control groups. It’s not that translations just lose in substance, as they must, they simply do or act less and on generally fewer levels, while the originals just won’t keep still. It is fascinating to unravel how a passage performs in another language. Displaying inadequacies is too cheap a thrill, but matching (an element of) the original with its translated counterpart sharpens one’s observation. Rather than gloating over “mistakes”, it is constructive to wonder why a translated sentence or phrase goes astray; it tells us something about the original we might otherwise not have noticed. It may be stimulating to ask “how would one translate this?” or “how would one advise a translator to deal with a sentence?”
Maybe what I am enthralled by could be called “epiphany” — but not in line with other approaches. I am not especially impressed by those that Joyce wrote down and labelled with the ecclesiastical word. I am probably corrupted by how Joyce introduces the epiphany in Stephen Hero: “a sudden spiritual manifestation” (211). Thinking in terms of insights or revelations, I take Joyce to be almost universally epiphanic, from “There was no hope for him this time” to the end (the exception, for me! is Exiles). In this view, “epiphany” is more of a verb in action than a static noun. Ironically, I find those sketches that Joyce collected as “Epiphanies” the least revealing parts of all his work. The sheer vitality of the text, rather than its “properties”, occupies me.
Paradoxically, I am perturbed by large-scale not understanding of the Wake while I also vehemently claim that Joyce tolerates ignorance in his works as it usually contains a healthy dose of scepticism. Joyce is democratic in uniting us in partial ignorance — which in reality remains the rule rather than the exception. Flaunting some insights is an antidote to a predominant nescience. When Molly calls Boylan an “ignoramus”, it is easy to overlook that this latter-day noun is originally a verb in the plural stressing that “we do not know”. A casual aside may turn out to be of potential application, as when Haines dismisses Stephen’s remark about payment with a brief, wholly unemphatic “I don’t know, I’m sure”. This can be sublimated into wisdom as old as Socrates: what we can be sure of is that we know next to nothing.
Removing some of such ignorance by sporadic explicative glosses is the aim of this enterprise.
Fritz Senn