Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 1999"

Shocking the reader in James Joyce's "A painful case"

Abstract: James Joyce's "A Painful Case" is about a story that is painful for a reader: a newspaper article of the same title that gives James Duffy a disturbing shock when he reads of Mrs. Emily Sinico's death. This shocked reading produces a moment of classical anagnorisis when the man recognizes his implication in the woman's fate. But is Joyce's "A Painful Case/' painful for the reader as well? I hope to con cur with critics who have thought so1 and argue that even though the reader is not implicated in Mrs. Sinico's pain, the narration obliges "us" to experience vicariously the shocks to her heart, the last of which kills her. "Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart's action" (D 114), the coroner reports to the Dublin Evening Mail. The thematic presentation of James Duffy's painful shock upon reading "A Painful Case" is encased in a performative reenactment of reader shock?potentially twice. I will argue that the narrator treats us precisely as Mr. Duffy treats Mrs. Sinico and suggest on less hermeneutical evidence that the narrator also treats Mr. Duffy as Mrs. Sinico treats him?thereby producing a second aftershock. In the process, the reader is given an opportunity to feel what the woman feels2 and, in a more surprising way, to real ize that the man's subjectivity might have been as occluded as the woman's and can be retrieved only at the price of painful readerly implication. There is a method to Joyce's careful contrivance of read er shock and discomfort, and I will suggest that it is to engage the reader not only in an ethical re-thinking but an ethical re-feeling of the two great Irish sex scandals of the late nineteenth century: the case of Charles Stewart Parnell and the case of Oscar Wilde.

The secret life of Leopold Bloom and Emily Sinico

Abstract: Sometimes we need to speculate about what happens in the gaps in a text: about what characters do while they are offstage, for example. James Joyce's enthusiasm for puzzles, including his attachment to what we might call the MTntosh Syndrome, makes him an especially inviting target for such scrutiny. He spoke himself of the puzzles and enigmas he had included in Ulysses.1 These days, most readers would accept the fact that similar mysteries also color his other works, not only Finnegans Wake but Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles as well. Some puzzles, indeed, may link pairs of these texts together. In such cases, the characters have even more space to create mischief between the texts. We may still need to devise new ways of resolving cases of this kind, but at least we can remain confident that Joyce observed the basic laws of physics in his concealed and perplexing plot develop ments as much as in his more overt and lucid ones. As Hugh Kenner and other critics have demonstrated, we can trust Joyce to follow cer tain kinds of logic that allow such speculations to proceed and appar ent gaps in texts to be at least partly filled; tacitly, many readers of Joyce's works have come to accept the justification for Kenner's spec ulations over the nature of Stephen's encounter with Buck Mulligan at Westland Row Station and his assessment of Frank's motives as a "suitor" of Eveline's or John Gordon's skillful "identification" of MTntosh.2 Readers will usually accept the utility of these avenues of speculation whether or not they agree with a critic's conclusions in a given case and whether or not they feel that such conundrums can ever be fully resolved. The criterion of value is, rather, the enhance ment in our sense of a text's particular nature that such speculations can furnish. A puzzle that extends across two texts may reward us with a sharper sense of both texts if we investigate it more closely. All readers will recall instances where a character from Dubhners reappears in Ulysses. In several cases, we see their lives evolving in ways that we might have predicted from a study of the stories. We

Colonial spaces in Joyce's Dublin

Abstract: For ten years at the beginning of this century, James Joyce lived in Trieste, a city that shared many qualities with his native Dublin. Both cities had ancient and distinctive identities; both were Catholic; both were dominated by a foreign power; and both cele brated indigenous languages radically different from those of their conquerors. They were both colonial cities. When, in 1907, Joyce lec tured at the Universit? Popolare on "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" (CW 153-74), his audience would have been quick to see the parallels between Dublin and Trieste, including that between Irish nationalism and the irredentist movement against Austria. The Triestines' natural receptiveness to the theme of colonial dom ination would have encouraged Joyce, for example, in his comparison of British rule in Ireland to "what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State" (CW 166), a subject of international scandal in those days.1 Joyce's language is liveliest, however, when describing the effects of an imperial presence within the space of the Irish capital. As evidence of the "moral separation" between England and Ireland, Joyce recalls never having heard the English hymn "God Save the King" sung in public "without a storm of hisses, shouts, and shushes that made the solemn and majestic music absolutely inaudible" (CW 163). When an English monarch wishes to visit Ireland, he notes, "there is always a lively flurry to persuade the mayor to receive him at the gates of the city. But, in fact, the last monarch who entered [Edward VII in 1903] had to be content with an informal reception by the sheriff, since the mayor had refused the honor" (CW 163). What interests me here is the way Joyce conceives of the city as a contested space of imperfectly accomplished colonial domination. With its broad vistas, ordered arrangement, and masterful architec ture, the modern city is the ideal site for the display and deployment of imperial authority. But it is also a space in which that authority pro duces uncontrolled and to some degree unpredictable effects of resis tance. In its formal boundaries and its arrangement of structures into linear but irregular patterns, the space of the city may be compared to that of the literary text, where authorial control is continually sub

Mist-mys-tification on the source text: dynamic ambivalence in the Chinese "Ulysses"

Abstract: Although the complete Chinese translation of Ulysses did not appear until 1995,1 it is far from true that Chinese readers were uninformed about this masterpiece or the artist himself. In fact, in the 1960s, readers in Taiwan were introduced to Joyce's great narrative art. A bimonthly journal called Hsien-tai Wen-hsui (Modern Literature), launched in 1960, played a seminal role in presenting and translating in sections Joyce's Dubliners.1 The complete Dubhners was published in 1970, drawing extensively on the 1960s translations;3 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man came out in 1975.4 The phenomenal attention paid to modern writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and others in Taiwan in the 1960s is due to the prodi gious translation effort of a nucleus of young writers who were, at that time, foreign literature majors in college. They were, in turn, stimulated to emulate, adopt, and appropriate the stunning narrative innovations learned through western stories and novels then. Thus, Uterary "modernism" in Taiwan was happily ushered in. Dubliners, in particular, won distinguished recognition among the literati by impelling a local Uterary genius to undertake a similar "modern" experiment. The result was Pai Hsien-yung's collection of fourteen stories under the title T'ai-pei Jen (Jales of Taipei Characters), pubUshed in Taipei in 1971.5 The success and artistic prominence of Pai's similar work highlights the preeminent place accorded Joyce in literary his torical development, even in as unlikely a spot as Taiwan, which is quite remote from Europe. That a complete translation of Ulysses by Taiwanese writers or scholars has yet to appear in Taiwan's literary market is in large mea sure due to a rather insular academic environment and a long-stand ing local policy against translation as a proper scholarly credential. However, fragments of Ulysses in Chinese were attempted by H. C. Chuang in 1988.6 It was, therefore, with foresight and admirable courage that the first attempt to produce a complete Chinese Ulysses, by a mainland Chinese scholar, Jin Di, was actually commissioned by a Taiwanese publisher. A writer of short stories himself, Tsai Wen-fu of the Chiu Ko Publishing Company had been well aware of the unique experimentation of Ulysses since the 1960s when he was an active contributor to Taiwan's literary modernism. Unlike his fellow pubUshers at the People's Literature Publishing House in Beijing in

A 'new life' for 'a little cloud': Byron, Dante and the Meanderteller

Abstract: Nearly a century has elapsed since "A Little Cloud" appeared in the sky of Dublin to cast a troubling shadow on the future of Little Chandler. Although speculations have abounded, none to date has offered a satisfactory explanation of the elusive pres ence of the cloud in Dublin's heavenly vault. The mystery is com pounded by the fact that the cloud is mentioned only once in the story to signal the Stygian apparition of Ignatius Gallaher, who "emerg[es] after some time from the clouds of smoke in which he had taken refuge" (D 78). Although the "infernal" innuendo is intrigiiing, it hardly offers a clue to the engrossing puzzle offered by the title. In a letter to Stanislaus from Rome, dated 18 October 1906, Joyce exudes satisfaction as he remarks, "A page of A Little Cloud gives me more pleasure than all of my verses" (LettersII 182),1 not a surprising statement considering the effective blend of romantic imagery and Dublin tranche de vie that accompanies Little Chandler's growing awareness of the strictures on freedom imposed by matrimony. Keeping in mind Joyce's well-known preference for devious paths, it seems appropriate to consider, first, those explanations of the title suggesting that much of the satisfaction expressed in his letter to Stanislaus stems from the clue floating in the sky. Such possibility cannot be discarded since, as Joyce reminds us in Finnegans Wake, "Some time very presently now when yon clouds are dissipated . . . the odds are, we shall all be hooked and happy . . . ?lite of the elect" (FW 453.30-33). Joyceans who have tried vainly to dissipate the small atmospheric disturbance through intensive sherlockholmesing become hooked on the story, perhaps because they have failed to come up with an entirely satisfactory explanation. Speculation thus far includes the Bible: "Behold there ariseth a lit tle cloud off the sea, like a man's hand" (I Kings 184).2 The apparition foretells years of drought, an omen that, if applied to the story, could suggest an ironic reversal of the climax, where the spiritual aridity of

We two and the lost Angel: the cousins of Sandymount and James Joyce

Abstract: On 1 March 1907, Joyce wrote from Rome to his brother Stanislaus: "I have come to the conclusion that it is about time I made up my mind whether I am to become a writer or a patient Cousins" (LettersII 217). He refers here to the Irish writer and Joyce's contemporary James Cousins, whom he considered some thing of a meager literary talent. But in the same letter, he writes about trying to publish Dubliners, so really his mind was already made up. He continued to think of James from time to time, though, because thirty years later he wrote to Tom Keohler:

Joyce and Chinese fiction writing

Abstract: describes their practice as an interpretative approach; his own, he terms a loy alist approach. Jin's method tries to represent the original in its entirety, echo ing the "objective view" in typical modernist texts that mark the "exit of the writer" from the text. In this case, it is the exit of the translator, though the word "exit" may be misleading, since the translator, like Joyce's "arranger," just steps back and plots everything from behind the scene. Xiao and Wen's translation, which I call a kind of "breast-feeding model" that is meant to be reader-friendly, seems to be more romantically charged by their creative (even dashing) execution?addition, simpUfication, substitution, or para phrases?therefore ironically shifting the spotUght from the reader (and the writer) to the translators themselves. The absence or presence of the transla tor is an important basic difference between Jin's and Xiao and Wen's trans lations of Ulysses. It is an issue of how a translator positions the "seU" among the original writer, text, and reader. In my translation of this essay, I have used Jin's term "loyalist approach" for zhi yi and "interpretative approach" for yi yi. The two approaches, as Wang Yougui forecasts, wiU foreshadow new directions for the century to come. 4 Yu Haipo, "Ulysses, Unsettled War between the South and North," Zhong guo Dushu Boa (China Reading Weekly), 2 (1 June 1994), and Feng Yidai, "A Comparison of the Two Chinese Translations of Ulysses," Zhongguo Dushu Boa (3 August 1995); Jiang Feng, "Is Ulysses an Inaccessible Book from Heaven?: Samples of Translations of Ulysses," Shuwu (Bookhouse), 1 (August 1995); and Huang Mei, "Ulysses Comes from Afar," Dushu Yue Boa (Reading Books Month ly), 4 (April 1995), 93-96. 5 See Xiao Qian and Wen Jiero, preface to Yulixisi (pp. 15-16). Further ref erences to the preface will be cited parenthetically in the text. 6 Jin Di, foreword to Yulixisi, "An Epic in the Twentieth Century" (p. 7). 7 I derive this meaning from the Chinese folk proverb "Qian yifa ke dong quan shen." 8 See Wen Jiero, "Forty Years in Literary Translation," World Literature, 2 (25 April 1991), 287. 9 See Wen Jiero, "Forty Years in Literary Translation" (pp. 283-91). 10 Wang Zuoling, Some Thoughts and Attempts at Translation (Beijing: Beijing Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press, 1989), pp. 2-3.

Translations of the Century: A Careful Reading of Two Chinese Versions of Ulysses

Abstract: Chinese translation and foreign literatures: after a seventy-two year-long wait, one fortunately not in vain, two complete translations of James Joyce's Ulysses, the greatest English literary work of the twentieth century, finally came into being in China, like an antiphonal duet of phoenixes. In twentieth-century China, this accomplishment may be compared to that of Zhu Shenghao and Liang Shiqiu, who translated the complete works of William Shakespeare, and Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, who rendered A Dream of Red Mansions into English.1 Considering the universally recognized literary value of the original work, the degree of difficulty involved in its translation, and the excellence achieved in the translations produced, it is no exagger ation to say that these two versions of Ulysses are the translations of the century. Ulysses is regarded as the Mount Everest of English literature; its translation should be no less. Climbers cannot ascend to the top if they are not brave enough, intelligent enough, and persistent enough. The arena of Chinese translation is fortunate to have three well-sea soned translators who have seen their hair turn white and who have left no stone unturned in changing this masterpiece into Chinese. It is also fortunate that the most exacting literary publishers have made it possible for two versions with such distinctive styles to be added to the Chinese literary world. One of the translations is by Xiao Qian and his wife Wen Jiero, and the other is by Jin Di.2 I have compared both of them with the widely recognized corrected and reset edition published by Random House in 1961. To my great surprise, the two

Stanislaus Joyce's "Book of days": the Triestine diary

Abstract: Stanislaus Joyce's Triestine diaries have always been clouded in mystery and the subject of speculation among Joycean scholars, who, with the single exception of Richard Ellmann, were not allowed to consult or even to see them. Ellmann alone had access to the diaries from a very early stage and at some point photocopied them, presumably with permission from the Stanislaus Joyce Estate, but it would appear that no one else in the field of Joyce biography has had the benefit of a detailed study of them. As a consequence, since nobody knew for sure what they actually consisted of, mistakes began to be made and mythologies created. Brenda Maddox, for example, in her acclaimed biography of Nora Barnacle, published in 1988, talks of Stanislaus's "invaluable diaries, the first covering the years before he left Dublin for Trieste in 1905, and the second cover ing the turbulent years in Trieste until the brothers were separated by the First World War."1 Ira Nadel, in his iUuminating article "The Incomplete Joyce," possibly relying on Maddox's version, makes the same mistake and writes about "Stanislaus's two diaries covering the Dublin years until he left in 1905 and Trieste until the First World War."2 It is not clear where Maddox found this piece of information, and indeed if it was true that Stannie kept writing his Trieste diary inces santly for ten years, this would be wonderful news and every Joyce biographer's dream. But the diaries cover a period of only two years ?from January 1907 to February 1909?and a quick glance at EU mann's footnotes in his James Joyce should have alerted Maddox to her mistake, since in both the original 1959 edition and in the 1982 revised edition Stanislaus's diary was used only for the writing of the fourteenth chapter, relating to the period from 1907 to 1909. As can be seen from a list kept by Ellmann describing the docu ments in the possession of Stanislaus Joyce's widow, Nelly Joyce, the Trieste diary consists of "15, 48-page closely written notebooks." It begins on 1 January 1907 and ends abruptly, for no apparent reason, on 11 February 1909. The Triestine diary, or the "Book of Days," as

James Joyce, Triestine futurist?

Abstract: Among a rich variety of influences offered to Joyce by the city of Trieste, the Futurist movement appears to have been of par ticular relevance. At first glance, Futurism, combining a cele bration of power, speed, modern technology, dynamism, and con quest, might seem an unlikely source of inspiration for Joyce, but closer inspection reveals a surprising number of stylistic parallels between the work of the Futurists and that of the exiled Irish writer.1

"Proteus" revisited: a critical note on the stylistics of Jin Di's Chinese "Ulysses"

Abstract: The subtitle of the present essay fully reveals my understanding of what translation is ess ntially I omit the word "translation" between "Chinese" and "Ulysses" to demonstrate my hesitation to subscribe to the general belief that translation is an equivalent to the original I doubt even more whether any text written in an Indo European language could be rendered satisfactorily into Chinese, a language whose syntax, morphology, and writing system are so obvi ously unique that even certain Buddhist texts with doctrinal subtlety, when changed from Sanskrit or Pali into Chinese characters, have to be done in transliteration In this light, what a translator from west ern languages could aim for in his or her enterprise, to borrow Jin Di's well-known theory of translation, is to re-create in a rendered text at most an "equivalent effect" ("dengxiao") to that produced by the orig inal,1 or to create the illusion that the original has already been re-pre sented through the linguistic exchange I believe that it is only with this knowledge in mind that we can begin to approach Jin Di's "trans lation" of Joycean style in Ulysses I would like to inaugurate my discussion with Jin's use of both nar rative and description in Chinese prose, since their English counter parts constitute most of Joyce's Ulysses Before I cite particular exam ples, I have to indicate that most of Jin's effort admirably results in an idiomatic Chinese that is a fine amalgam of both the vernacular and the literary However, this should not blind us to the fact that stylistic defects appear even at the outset of the translated novel, as may be observed in quite a few cases of Jin's rewriting of Joycean adverbs In English, an adverb can appear before or after the verb that it modifies; although this usage occurs in modern Chinese too, it creates undesirable wordiness and awkwardness especially when the adverb is placed before the verb it pertains to A good example can be found in the first page of Ulysses, in which Mulligan is described as having "blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains" (II 110-11) Contrary to the original, Jin's Chi nese equivalent to "gravely" is improperly positioned before the verb "blessed," making the rendered sentence sound awkwardly wordy: "Ta shengse ningzhongdi dui talou, zhouwei de tianye he zhengzai suxing guolai de qunshan zuole sand zhufu" (1:45-46, my emphasis) To the best of my knowledge, the notion of "di" as an adverbial marker

Love. That word debated by all: a speculation

Abstract: A decade or so ago, when the debate about the restoration of the love passage in Hans Walter Gabler 's edition of Ulysses was threatening the peace of Joycean groves,1 Susan Sutliff Brown mentioned to me at the Milwaukee Joyce conference that she thought "Sirens" divided into eight nearly equal sections, the fifth of which, at the midpoint of the episode, begins at U 11.681 of the Gabler text. As it happens, this line also contains the "love" word twice: "Love that is singing: love's old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. Love's old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers . . . and . . . gyved them fast" (U 11.681 84). So there lies love at the heart of "Sirens." I was doubly intrigued because the passage includes not only love but also Molly's planned song for the Belfast concert. It is easy to believe that Joyce manages that placement as a way of making Molly's song one of the siren songs of the novel. A few months later, my colleague William Judd returned from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar on Dante

A short walk in Joyce's rooms

Abstract: In via Bramante 4, in the rooms that he shared with Nora, Giorgio, Lucia, and Eileen from 15 September 1912 until 28 June 1915 (that is until their departure for Zurich), James Joyce lived the most tranquil years?certainly from an economic point of view?of his stay in Trieste. The apartment had been found for him by Stanislaus, who was undergoing a real crisis of rejection of his brother after having been involved for the umpteenth time in his disagreements with his landlords. On this occasion, he had had to sort out personally?since Joyce was with Nora and the children in Ireland?a bitter quarrel with the pharmacist Giovanni Picciola, the putative owner (or per haps tenant with the power of subletting since there is no document stating that he was the actual owner of the rooms that, in fact, belonged to the Triestine family Cosmitz from 1895 till 1923) of the flat in via della Barriera Vecchia 32, where the writer was domiciled and which contained all the furniture and household goods of the family as well as those of Eileen, who had remained in Trieste. Picciola had promised, through his estate agent, a reprieve of the notice to quit the flat before Joyce's departure for Dublin, but then, judging by Joyce's letters to Stanislaus, he had changed his mind without any apparent reason. Perhaps exasperated by Joyce's remon strances, he had looked for another tenant, the one who, anxious to move into the house, terrified poor Eileen by threatening to have her put out on the street by the bailiffs. Eileen, in tears, added to Stanislaus's worries by forcing him to find another house for the whole family. The choice fell on the flat in the house in via Bramante 4 that was available precisely because the house had just recently been constructed. The house in question?which is still in existence?was the prop erty of the building constructor Giovanni Widmer (officially regis tered as such), built on lot Number 2871 after the building project had been approved by the municipal judge on 29 June 1910, and was quite elegant, with a distinguished facade. It had five stories perimetrically framed by two high pilaster strips with composite capitals and extended to a frontal length of more than nineteen meters with a lat