Abstract
This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s key concern with multilingual reading as an embodied practice. It explores the materiality of Joyce’s multilingual narrative through a close textual engagement with multilingual onomatopoeia, semantic layering and simultaneity, and second-language acquisition theory that enable the reader to experience Wakese as a palpable fabric and a material literary experience. The chapter engages with linguists such as Roman Jakobson, Joyce’s contemporary Otto Jespersen, Steven Pinker, and Juliette Taylor-Batty, among others. The chapter explores the ways in which the Wake’s semantic instability engages the reader in a series of interpretative strategies that are akin to the ways in which multilinguals manoeuvre their non-native languages. This demonstrates the ways in which Finnegans Wake invites every reader—even the self-identified monolingual reader—to cultivate a creative multilingual consciousness that embraces the rich stylistic scope of the text and relinquishes its dependency on the semantic value of language.
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Notes
- 1.
Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions, ed. Jean Paul Riquelme (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), xi.
- 2.
The “vehicular” level of linguistic functionality derives from a conceptual model Gobard developed in his L’Aliénation linguistique: Analyse tétraglossique (Paris: Flammarion, 1976). According to John Johnston, “Gobard proposes what he calls a ‘tetraglossic’ model based on different language functions: first is the ‘vernacular,’ the mother tongue or native language, spoken simultaneously in geographically restricted areas (a village, a small community, or region); second is the urban or national ‘vehicular’ language, the language of society, commerce and bureaucracy, the primary purpose of which is communication, as opposed to the ‘vernacular,’ the language of community in the literal sense, involving not the exchange of information but the presenting of forms of recognition; third is the ‘referential’ language, the language of culture and tradition that assures the continuity of values through systematic reference to enshrined works of the past; and fourth, finally, is the ‘mythic’ language, which functions as a kind of ultimate recourse, a verbal magic whose ‘incomprehensibility is experienced as irrefutable proof of its sacred character (the word ‘amen,’ for example, or the Latin used in the Catholic Church).” John Johnston, “Translation as Simulacrum,” in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 52–53. The reader may, of course, recognise resonances of Gobard’s idea in Bakhtin’s and Forster’s coincidentally contemporaneous theories of heteroglossia and polyglottism respectively, as discussed in Chap. 1. Susan Shaw Sailer takes this framework further to theorise C. K. Ogden’s reimagination of Wakese into Basic English (a text I will touch upon further in Chaps. 3 and 5) and to point out that “What Joyce’s Wakese rarely does, however, is to operate at the vehicular or informational level. When this level appears, it is usually embedded in such an ambiguous context as to force the reader to register uncertainty about the ‘facts.’” Susan Shaw Sailer, “Universalizing Languages: Finnegans Wake Meets Basic English,” James Joyce Quarterly 36 (1999): 864–65.
- 3.
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 22.
- 4.
Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 27.
- 5.
Tolstoy quoted in Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priëm,” in O Teorii Prozy (Moskva: Krug, 1925), 63.
- 6.
Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priëm,” 63; my emphasis.
- 7.
Juliette Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 23.
- 8.
Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction, 116.
- 9.
Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction, 117.
- 10.
McHugh, Annotations, 3.
- 11.
Senn, Dislocutions, 59.
- 12.
Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 47.
- 13.
Juliette Taylor, “Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens,’” James Joyce Quarterly 41 (2004): 410, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25478068.
- 14.
Erika Rosiers, Otto Jespersen at the Wake: A Genetic Study of Linguistic Sources for Finnegans Wake (Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic University, 1999). Roland McHugh, “Jespersen’s Language in Notebooks VI.B.2 and VI.C.2,” A Finnegans Wake Circular 2, no. 4 (1987): 61–71. Dirk Van Hulle, “The Lost Word: Book IV,” in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote, Irish Studies in Literature and Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 441.
- 15.
Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), 413–14.
- 16.
Jespersen, Language, 414.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
In Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (1922), Jespersen dedicates a full chapter, entitled “The Individual and the World,” to these questions, with one chapter section notably called “The Foreigner.” Here he remarks that “Many scholars have recently attached great importance to the subtler and more hidden influence exerted by one language on another in those cases in which a population abandons its original language and adopts that of another race, generally in consequence of military conquest.” He terms this non-native influence the “substratum” underlying and perpetually modifying the structure, grammar, vocabulary, and phonology of a language (191–92). His later book, International Language (1929), which Joyce also knew and referenced in the Wake as McHugh has shown, theorises the linguistic, political, and practical implications of international languages like Ido, Esperanto, Volapük, and even Latin, ultimately coming out in defence of the need for international languages, whose key purpose is to improve global communications by being as universally accessible as possible (hence their typically simplified grammatical structures, limited vocabulary, and flexible rules of pronunciation). Jespersen, International Language [1929], Routledge Library Editions: Otto Jespersen: Collected English Writing (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007).
- 20.
Jespersen, Language, 192.
- 21.
Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 2004), 136–37.
- 22.
Attridge, Peculiar Language, 148.
- 23.
Attridge, Peculiar Language, 139.
- 24.
Taylor-Batty has pointed out that “Ulysses tends to be recognised more for its overt intralingual diversity than its multilingualism, its use of foreign languages seen by Milesi, for example, as mainly serving ‘to enhance motifs or for purposes of characterization’, or by Yao as indicative of Stephen Dedalus’s own polyglot erudition.” This tendency to treat Ulysses as a monolingual text (and its more explicit multilingualism as ornamental and secondary) is what inspires her interest in Ulyssean, as opposed to Wakean, multilingualism. Yet this also means that the multilingual effects that Taylor-Batty conceptualises as linguistic “distortion” and “protean defamiliarisation” in the earlier text should not apply to the unmistakably multilingual text in the exact same way. After all, Ulysses can be and has been deemed an English-language text (even if it is a text of many Englishes); but Finnegans Wake, as I have persistently suggested, is unmistakably a text of many non-Englishes: if it is a linguistic distortion, it certainly cannot unproblematically be considered a distortion of a single language. Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 115.
- 25.
Jespersen, Language, 414.
- 26.
Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978), 58.
- 27.
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 154.
- 28.
Taylor, “Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens,’” 412.
- 29.
Attridge, Peculiar Language, 136.
- 30.
Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Word and Image,” in The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1975), 17.
- 31.
Remember that Jespersen refers to the English “cuckoo” as an example of onomatopoeic language based on inarticulate noise and subsequently shows it as phonologically “echoic” of words in both French and English: “cuckoo may become cuckold (Fr. cocu), and from cock are derived the … Fr. coquet, coquetterie, cocart, cocarde, coquelicot.” Language, 414. Indeed, does this not resemble the way “ivy” becomes echoic of “Ivory, ivoire, avorio, ebur” in Stephen’s imagination in Portrait (193)?
- 32.
Jacques Derrida, Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 93.
- 33.
Every reader would “identify” the languages of the Wake differently, based on her or his own linguistic proficiency, experience, mental and emotional state, and other contextual factors in the event of reading.
- 34.
Katarzyna Bazarnik, Erik Bindervoet, and Robbert-Jan Henkes, “Hier Komt Iedereen: An Interview with Erik Bindervoet and Robbert Jan-Henkes, the Dutchifiers of Finnegans Wake” (Journal article manuscript, courtesy of Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, Warsaw, Poland, 2004), 6.
- 35.
Sara Ahmed’s concept of “stranger fetishism,” that is, “the production of strange bodies as objects,” would serve us well here in the theoretical and ethical understanding of what it means to distance oneself by othering an-other body through deeming that body’s language as other: as foreign and strange to one’s own. Ahmed writes: “the stranger is not any-body that we have failed to recognise, but some-body that we have already recognised as a stranger, as ‘a body out of place.’” Conversely, we might think of an-other language (such as Wakese) not simply as any language that we cannot recognise but as an object that we have already recognised as foreign, as not-ours and not-us/not-I. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 51–52, 54, 55.
- 36.
Bazarnik, Bindervoet, and Henkes, “Hier Komt Iedereen,” 6.
- 37.
Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes, “Finnegans Wake in Dutch, Dutch in Finnegans Wake, and What to Do with It” (Journal article manuscript, courtesy of Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, Cracow, Poland, July 2004), 4.
- 38.
Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, “Note on the Text,” in James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xlviii–xlix.
- 39.
Erik Bindervoet, Robbert-Jan Henkes, and Finn Fordham, “Appendix: Selected Variants,” in Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 631–46.
- 40.
James Joyce, The Restored “Finnegans Wake”, ed. Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon (London: Penguin Classics, 2012), 239.8–9.
- 41.
This is not to argue, of course, that Henkes and Bindervoet’s assertion is incorrect, but rather that it could be variously interpreted and thus should be variously reconsidered.
- 42.
Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to “Finnegans Wake” (New York: Viking Press, 2005), 242.
- 43.
Campbell, Skeleton Key, 51.
- 44.
John P. Anderson, Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: The Curse of Kabbalah (Boca Raton, Florida: Universial Publishers, 2008), 330–31.
- 45.
These latter examples show a more substantial and cohesive use of the phonology of non-English languages, compared to the fragmented Danish phrase embedded into the previously quoted passage from II.3.
- 46.
McHugh, Annotations.
- 47.
Steen Klitgård Povlsen, “The Hoax That Joke Bilked: On the Connection Between Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Freud’s Der Witz,” in Reinventions of the Novel: Histories and Aesthetics of a Protean Genre, ed. Marianna Ping Huang Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (New York, 2004), 277.
- 48.
McHugh omits the German valediction and instead glosses “Hugacting” with the Dutch “hoogachteng,” which also translates as “yours faithfully.”
- 49.
Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction, 119–20.
- 50.
These associations are possible if we were to read “Orthor” as a personification of the Greek-rooted prefix “ortho,” signifying “straight, rectangular, upright, perpendicular,” or sometimes “right, correct, proper” (OED).
- 51.
Interestingly, the OED also defines “frow,” or its homophonic variant “frough,” as “liable to break or give way, not to be depended on, frail, brittle. lit. and fig.” Also: froughy/frowy, adj.—musty, sour, stale, not sweet.
- 52.
I hesitate to subscribe to such a misogynistic interpretation, but it is also worth noting that the Wake plays with the trope of femininity as submission, flightiness, or infantilism (Issy, the young ALP, the rainbow girls, etc.) while simultaneously rendering femininity as an all-powerful, maternal, life-giving, and annihilating force (ALP).
- 53.
Taylor, “Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens,’” 414.
- 54.
Jespersen, Language, 192; my emphasis.
- 55.
Attridge, Peculiar Language, 139.
- 56.
Taylor, “Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens,’” 414.
- 57.
Hélène Cixous, “The Pleasure Principle or Paradox Lost,” in Volleys of Humanity, ed. Eric Prenowitz, trans. Laurent Milesi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 77.
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Alexandrova, B. (2020). Multilingual Matter-er-s: Foreign Speech and Wakean Materiality. In: Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36279-9_2
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