Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 2001"

The National Library of Ireland's New Joyce Manuscripts: A Statement and Document Descriptions

Abstract: On 29 May 2002, the National Library of Ireland announced that it had acquired a large collection of previously unknown Joyce manuscripts. The documents had been in the possession of Alexis L?on, the son of Joyce's Parisian friends Paul and Lucie L?on, and Alexis L?on gave the National Library an exclusive oppor tunity to buy them. Sotheby's in London negotiated the transaction, which took sixteen months to work out. The Library paid ?8 million for the manuscripts?12.6 million Euros or $11.7 million?and agreed to pay the costs in three installments, with over 5 million Euros com ing from the Heritage Fund set up by the Irish Ministry of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht, and the Islands ("Gaeltacht" refers to the Irish speaking regions of Ireland) and the remainder from the Allied Irish Bank Group, operating under the Irish government's tax-credit scheme. "At one bound," Terence Killeen wrote in the 30 May 2002 issue of the Irish Times, "the National Library, which already had impressive Joyce holdings, has established itself as one of the world's major Joyce repositories."1 In September 2001, the Library asked me to look at the manuscripts and to report on their authenticity contents, and?in qualitative rather than dollar terms?value, In mid-November 2001,1 went to London, where by then the manuscripts were located after being moved from Paris, and spent two intense days looking at all of them. These were two of the most amazing days I have ever experienced. One by one, I looked at the documents full of notes and drafts?most of them for Ulysses but also two notebooks from earlier years and a few materials for Finnegans Wake?that hardly anyone else had ever seen or thought still existed. After the establishment of several major library collections of Joyce manuscripts in the 1950s and 1960s, nothing new surfaced for almost forty years. Then, two Ulysses manuscripts came to light and were sold for huge sums in late 2000 and mid-2001. First came a draft of "Circe," one that in April 1921 Joyce sent as "a curiosity" (LettersIII 40) to John Quinn, who was purchasing the entire Ulyss?s manuscript as

Preliminary Comments on Two Newly Discovered Ulysses Manuscripts: 1881

Abstract: The past two years have offered abundant proof that Joyce's manuscripts carry significant financial value, but what of their scholarly value? The first substantial Ulysses holograph manu script to be sold for almost four decades, a draft of "Circe," fetched $1.4 million at auction in December 2000. This had the effect of bring ing other manuscripts, previously known only to their owners, onto the open market. In July 2001, a "Eumaeus" manuscript was sold for just under $800,000, and, most famously, a large cache of manuscripts was purchased in May 2002 for $10 million. With the exception of the "Eumaeus" draft, all these manuscripts were purchased by the National Library of Ireland and thus will be available for scholarly research. While this deluge of manuscripts has effectively doubled the number of known holograph drafts for Ulysses, considerable gaps still remain.

"A Grievous Distemper": Joyce and the Rheumatic Fever Episode of 1907

Abstract: In May 1907, James Joyce became seriously ill in Trieste with what has been variously characterized, following Richard Ellmann, as a bout of "rheumatic fever" (JJII262) or, based on Kathleen Ferris's James Joyce and the Burden of Disease, as the symptoms of neurosyphilis or possibly incipient tabes dorsalis.1 A considerable amount of confu sion and mystification has always surrounded this episode, with numerous biographers and critics blindly repeating Ellmann's unsub stantiated assertion that Joyce was hospitalized during this period. He was not, as was first pointed out by Ferris, based on the evidence of Stanislaus Joyce's Trieste diary, which I have confirmed by an examination of the master registers for the Ospedale Maggiore for the months of May-August, 1907.2 Most recently, the debate has centered on the vexed question of whether Joyce had been infected by a vene real disease, specifically syphilis. After extensive research in Trieste's main medical archives, I have found no clinical records showing that Joyce received treatment for any such ailment in Trieste, though the correspondence with Oliver St. John Gogarty in 1904 and again in 1907 indicates that Joyce was indeed infected with something?at the least, gonorrhea or some form of venereal urethritis?and that he had sought medical advice from Gogarty.3 To deny or minimize this, as various biographers and critics have done, is to ignore the virtually incontrovertible evidence contained in the correspondence between Gogarty and Joyce and Gogarty and Dr. Mick Walsh concerning Joyce's condition, as cited by Ferris (26-29). My primary intention here, however, is not to argue for a specific diagnosis but rather to examine the clinical situation as it existed in Trieste in May-July 1907 in order to document as fully and accurately as possible the historical-clinical context in which any diagnosis would have been made. The reasons for such an approach are fairly self-evident: any historical diagnosis not based on detailed clinical records must remain to some degree conjectural, but in Joyce's case the multiple, contradictory, and recurrent nature of his symp toms over many years, the lack of any surviving clinical evaluation or

Joyce Slipping Across the Borders of English: The Stranger in Language

Abstract: Joyce was an exile for most of his life, a choice that put him in daily contact with languages other than English For a writer who was so deeply interested in everyday experience and used it as mater ial for his creative work, it is not surprising that the multilingualism that surrounded him should be a recurrent feature in his writing The aim of this essay is to discuss the presence of "the stranger" in lan guage by examining Joyce's attitude towards the foreigner, the per vasiveness of foreign-ness in his style, and the exploitation of alterity as a modality of communication The interplay between English and foreign words in Joyce's texts results in an estrangement or "for eignizing" of the word, which opens a space for the presence of "the stranger" in Joyce's language I will first consider Joyce as a writer who slips across the borders of the English language and address the significance of the presence of foreign words and phrases in Joyce's texts with specific reference to Italian ones I will then comment on the reader's possible reactions to such foreignizing presences Joyce's multilingual texts address both the monolingual English reader and the foreign reader with the result of displacing them both But such a displacement, or dislocution (to use a term successfully introduced by Fritz Senn1), not only requires us to rethink our notions of writing and reading but also, paradoxi cally, challenges and even breaks down the usual discrimination between foreigners and fellow citizens The second part of this essay will be concerned with issues of for eignization and translation It will address the problem of Joyce's texts moving across the borders of different cultures, as happens when they are translated and rewritten in another language, and compare the foreignized reader with the foreign one Can Joyce's for eignizing language be domesticated into another linguistic code, so that real foreign readers can have access to it in their own language? On one level, the answer is, of course, yes: Joyce's texts are translated into a number of western and eastern languages They travel across

Sunny Jim: Joyce and Max Müller's Comparative Mythology

Abstract: Joyce's reputation and influence are based on verbal innovations that recombine and extend existing elements in novel ways. Though Joyce's linguistic modes are powerfully idiosyncratic, his taproots draw deeply on nineteenth-century linguistic ideas. Friedrich Max M?ller was among the most famous of the experts on language who disseminated to educated Victorians the ideas about language and culture then being generated by comparative philology (today, known as linguistics),1 Joyce echoes major M?llerian ideas, and each kind of echo merits discussion. In what follows, I will exam ine M?ller 's best-known theory: that linguistic processes generate mythology, which, in turn, is centered on solar religion. For Victorians and for the designer of Ulysses, these were among M?ller 's most interesting beliefs. These concepts emerged from M?ller 's work as the most important Sanskrit expert of the third quarter of the century. Late in the 1840s, he began the first critical edition of the Rig-Veda, Sanskrit's core doc ument.2 During the 1850s, he wrote not only on the Veda but on com parative philology, a field that had grown out of the link between Sanskrit and European languages. His first major non-Vedic work was a long 1856 essay on what he termed "Comparative Mythology."3 This was the first attempt to analyze myth by integrating European and non-European materials; if the Indo-European languages were related, their cultures should be related too. M?ller 's reputation as an authority on language was made by Lectures on the Science of Language in two series totaling twenty-one lectures and over one thousand pages.4 Lectures on the Science of Language covers many topics, but the second half of series 2 argues that language generated divinities through "radical metaphor" (Lectures 2:388). Through metaphor, a root meaning, "shine," for example, came to describe and name the sun, dawn, spring, fire, light, happiness, or religious praise. These roots were also applied to con

Late Joyce and His Legacies: Teaching Finnegans Wake and Its Aftertale

Abstract: Describing Finnegans Wake, Martin Amis recalls the warning "tell a dream, lose a reader," then marvels at the fact that Joyce devoted an entire book to dream-telling, undeterred by the number of readers he might thereby lose.1 Writing about teaching is a little like relating a dream: you hold your reader hostage to your account of a fleeting experience, one whose immediacy has long faded even for yourself. Your presumption of the reader's willingness to draw near to your vanished experience is the dreamer's presump tion in retelling the dream. To write about teaching Finnegans Wake, then, should be doubly interdicted. It is like telling a dream within a dream: you risk compensating for the listener's double removal from the event by resorting to raw hyperbole, the mode of the hustler and mountebank. You would be better off selling twice-chewed gum. But it would not be quite accurate to say Joyce "told" a dream in the Wake the same way we relay the fragments of our own dreams to some trapped listener who feigns interest. However much it succeeds in inflicting on its reader a dreamlike dislocation of the familiar, the Wake was composed with awful deliberateness and powers of atten tion; if it demands an "ideal insomnia" of its reader (FW 120.14), it seems also to have resulted more from its writer's wakefulness than

An Italianate Irishman: Joyce and the Languages of Trieste

Abstract: "' I ^loets l?ve trips'"; by quoting this sentence from Henri I -^Michaux at the beginning of the Italian section of his biogra JL phy of Joyce, Richard Ellmann tacitly identifies Joyce's expe rience in Italy as part of a particular tradition (JJII 183). While this identification has a certain validity, Joyce considered himself more an exile than a traveler, and, despite the casual nature of his arrival there, he sought to find roots in Trieste. When he eventually left the city, it always remained for him a second country.1 This close association with Trieste distinguishes Joyce from the many English-speaking writers who traveled around Italy learning only bits of the language:2 not only did he choose Italian as the official language of his family, but he himself became a bilingual writer. For five years at least (gen erally between 1907 and 1912), as Giorgio Melchiori has emphasized, Joyce published exclusively in Italian.3 When he arrived (almost by accident) in Trieste on 20 October 1904, Joyce could rely only on a rather odd, bookish Italian ("a crippled Italian full of ulcers," says Alessandro Francini Bruni4). He had been studying "the Cinderella of modern languages" (JJII 46) since his first year at Belvedere5 and had received a good grounding in literature (that of Dante and Gabriele D'Annunzio, in particular) from Father Carlo Ghezzi at University College6 but little language training.7 So he entered into an exchange of language lessons with Francini Bruni, who "taught the official Tuscan to those students in the Berlitz School anxious to get rid of their harsh Triestine dialect."8 Joyce, however, did not succeed in teaching his friend English, though he did manage to make progress with his Italian. The lessons started in Pola with the translation of "Mildred