Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading

Boriana Alexandrova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030362782
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030362799
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

© The Author(s) 2020

B. AlexandrovaJoyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of ReadingPalgrave Studies in Modern European Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36279-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Boriana Alexandrova¹

(1)

Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, York, UK

Boriana Alexandrova

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Multilingualism Studies and the Wake

Multilingual writers thoroughly populate the European and global literary canon: from Ovid to Dante , from John Milton to James Clarence Mangan, from the nineteenth and all the way through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, polyglots such as Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce of course, and numerous contemporary and postcolonial authors, including Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Maryse Condé, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and J. M. Coetzee, among countless others, have embodied the solid multilingual foundations of world literature. Medieval scholarship has had a sustained interest in social and textual multilingualism because, as Mark Amsler points out, “Multilingualism and language mixing were the norm in later medieval Europe.”¹ However, affectionately as we may hold the works of numerous modern and contemporary multilingual writers in our increasingly globalised world, modern multilingualism studies as a field of research only began to formally emerge in Anglophone and European scholarship in the 1960s–1970s. New Zealand scholar Leonard Forster’s small book of lectures on multilingualism, The Poet’s Tongues (1970), has been credited as the first discrete study of literary multilingualism in Anglophone writing from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century. Although Forster had published earlier short articles in German on the subject,² The Poet’s Tongues offered the very first encompassing (albeit sketchy) survey of what the author calls the “problems of multilingualism in literature.”³ Identifying multilingualism as a “problem” in literature is in itself quite telling of the systematic ways in which multilingual writing has tended to occupy a secondary, often easily overlooked, position in relation to literary forms described as fluent and monolingual. Even Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a text so inextricably multilingual that over 80 different languages (and counting!) have been identified in it,⁴ has contended with an overwhelming resistance against its multilingual form in the course of its history.

Undeniably, the Wake’s multilingual form makes it “difficult” to read; it is a “problem,” especially for readers not quite prepared for the intellectual, relational, and even physical challenges it presents. Joyce’s patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was also the most unyielding champion of his work in his lifetime, wrote to him in the early stages of Work in Progress that “I do not much care for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius.”⁵ She was one among many friends, acquaintances, and reviewers who simply did not get it, and these early readers would not be the last to dismiss this unapologetically difficult multilingual text so readily. A mere flick through Deming’s James Joyce: The Critical Heritage will reveal a copious collection of cranky critiques of the work, including Mary Colum’s 1927 review for the New York Herald Tribune, where she muses that “His new work […] is likely to prove all but entirely incomprehensible to anybody” and adds: “no literary critic could possibly admit that a work, of which any considerable portion was written like this, could belong to the domain of literature.” Ever crankier was Desmond McCarthy, reviewing under the pseudonym ‘Affable Hawk’ for the New Statesman in May of 1927:

But though every deformation of word and sentence in this passage is intentional and deliberate, it should no more provoke laughter than the attempt of the unfortunate sick man to state that he took his dog out in the morning. It should disgust. The taste which inspired it is taste for cretinism of speech, akin to finding exhilaration in the slobberings and mouthings of an idiot.⁶

McCarthy’s descent into aggressive eugenicism was appalling (and sadly not atypical for the time⁷), but while such readerly rage may not find expression in quite such offensive terms across all critical assessments, the fact that the Wake’s multilingual form has confused, exasperated, and upset plenty of readers remains clear. Associations of multilingualism and intellectual disability were also not uncommon in Joyce’s lifetime and they persisted even in scholarship through to the late twentieth century. The most pressing issue that recurs in the Wake’s harshest criticisms is its “obscurity,” brought about by multilingualism’s “systematic darkening” (to borrow John Bishop’s coinage) of what is implicitly the illuminating clarity of monolingual alternatives. Multilingualism’s most unforgivable crime becomes its irreverent revolt against all borders of sense.

Joyceans have tackled the book’s linguistic difficulties head-on through their painstaking efforts to produce plot summaries,⁸ copious elucidation catalogues such as Roland McHugh’s Annotations to “Finnegans Wake”, glossaries,⁹ and reference databases such as the Finnegans Wake Extensive Elucidation Treasury (FWEET),¹⁰ which of course are all successors of the collectively gathered treasury of the Wake Newslitter .¹¹ All of these are aimed at a monolingual Anglophone readership, even though many of the contributors were and are far from monolingual, monocultural, or even natively Anglophone. What makes the Wake particularly special is its ability to break down the divides not only between languages and cultures but also between experts and non-experts, between disciplines, interests, and communities. Its multilingualism might render it one of the world’s most democratic works of literature: in theory, it perplexes everyone equally, and equally every Wake reader needs to invest plenty of time and patience in researching its thousands of intertextual, historical, cultural, and linguistic references to come to grips, at least in part, with the stories Joyce might have been trying to tell. It is indicative that Wake scholarship was pioneered not by full-time academics working in isolation but by an eclectic community of readers, many of whom multilingual, with no certified authority in the discipline—such as Adaline Glasheen, a housewife; Fritz Senn, a proofreader and translator; Petr Škrabánek, a doctor; Roland McHugh, a biologist—who simply enjoyed playing Joyce’s elaborate language games. Even the academics who authored the earliest published studies of the Wake, like David Hayman, Matthew J. C. Hodgart, and Clive Hart, owed significant parts of their analyses to the micro-research done by everyday readers like the contributors to the Wake Newslitter. Glasheen’s First, Second, and Third Census of “Finnegans Wake” and McHugh’s Annotations to “Finnegans Wake” continue to serve as key reference guides, while even the most seasoned Joyce scholars continue to attend Wake reading groups where readers of all levels and linguistic repertoires are encouraged to contribute to an overbrimming melting pot of textual references and interpretations.

Even though plenty of readers concede that the Wake cannot readily be centred on a single language—Umberto Eco characterises it as a “plurilingual text written as an English speaker conceived of one,”¹² while Juliette Taylor-Batty points out that whatever English we might find in it has been “deformed beyond recognition”¹³—it has proven difficult not to position Joyce’s monumental last work as a kind of English-language text. Wake translators, for one, have frequently had to occupy a pragmatic stance on the intrinsic value of English to the work, in spite of its multilingualism. Several translators have reported having to work on the premise that the Wake is “basically an English book,”¹⁴ albeit “distorted English,”¹⁵ whilst major Joyce scholars have produced landmark studies of the multilingual form as a mechanism of “interference” and an “obstruction to the understanding of a message,”¹⁶ or as a means of “systematic darkening” that peculiarly illuminates the book’s subject matter: the night.¹⁷ A degree of “monolingualisation” has therefore proven unavoidable for readers not only trying to “understand” the text to a reasonable degree but also to be able to practically handle it in translation.

The search for these moments of illuminating clarity in the apparent “darkness” or “obscurity” of the Wake’s multilingual form has therefore preoccupied most, if not all, of its readers—including, admittedly, this reader. In Chap. 3, for example, I develop a new framework for interpreting what I have identified as the Wake’s phonological patterning system in order to offer more tools for navigation through the boundless narrative and linguistic complexity of Joyce’s text. Chapter 4, meanwhile, will elucidate several of the Wake’s Russian translations for the benefit of Anglophone readers, and Chap. 6 will show that whatever the background or interests of the reader, “monolingualisation” becomes a necessary form of interpretation in literary engagement with the Wake and beyond it. Engagement with an-other, be that an-other text, artwork, language, or person, has to involve a degree of familiarity and recognition in what is otherwise a boundlessness of difference. We cannot touch and be touched by literature unless we locate the familiar, the “touching” textuality within it; and we can only be “touched” by ideas that we can understand at least in part.

Nonetheless, although monolingualising the multilingual monster has proven necessary and perhaps even inevitable for Joyce’s readership, some obvious yet elusive questions remain: what if we approached literary multilingualism as a unique form of illumination, rather than a means of “systematic darkening”? What if the Wake’s ideal reader was not a native English or Irish English speaker, or a “fluent” reader in any sense, but rather someone willing to occupy the position of the foreigner: the multilingual reader? Who would that multilingual rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Multilingual Matter-er-s: Foreign Speech and Wakean Materiality
• 3. Thereinofter Is the Sounddance: Multilingual Phonologies and Sound Patterning in the Wake
• 4. Multilingualism in Translation: The Russian Wake(s) in Context
• 5. Ethical Multilingualism
• 6. Conclusion. Multilingual Homecoming: Re-encountering the “Same Renew” (FW 226.17)
• Back Matter