Abstract
Implicitly invoking Leopold Bloom’s irresolute homecoming in the final episode of Ulysses, this closing chapter reflects on what it means to “come home” into a space of difference: what transferable practices can we garner through an embodied multilingual engagement with literature and otherness? Is homecoming possible for the migrant who has long departed from their birthplace? Is it possible to experience our mother tongue as safe and familiar once we have been exposed to the multilingual and cross-cultural difference of the world? And what do we do with our yearning for familiarity—for a sense of home—if our “home” is not safe, or if our “mother tongue” is not knowable? This chapter shows that a close reflection on the affective impact and ethical value of embodied multilingual reading can offer a particular insight into these questions, which are so pertinent for our understanding of Joycean multilingualism, European modernist cosmopolitanism, as well as our real-life encounters with cultural, linguistic, and political difference in the private and public spheres today. Also addressed is what can be learned from the creative and ethical potentiality of the Wake’s public dimension: that is, the ways in which its unique multilingual composition has historically invited—even necessitated—group collaboration and thus established a global reading community. The chapter reflects on the text’s unexpected accessibility to marginalised or discursively dislocated readers and emphasises the subtle ways in which the reader’s engagement with multilingual difference can be a positive source of pleasure and illumination (as opposed to undesirable, impenetrable difficulty). In way of conclusion, the chapter opens up pathways for further critical reflection on the meaning of the “multilingual encounter”: what does a hospitable space, where we can creatively encounter other readers with new, singular linguistic and emotional experiences of the text, look like; and is a truly hospitable encounter—one that does not erase but rather embraces the difficulty of difference—possible beyond the world of Finnegans Wake?
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Notes
- 1.
Hélène Cixous, “The Author in Truth,” in “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 171.
- 2.
There has of course been a keen enough interest in Joycean postcoloniality as evidenced by valuable essay collections such as Joyce, Imperialism, & Postcolonialism, TransLatin Joyce, or Emer Nolan’s James Joyce and Nationalism, among many others: Leonard Orr, ed., Joyce, Imperialism, & Postcolonialism, 1st ed., Irish Studies (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Brian L. Price, César Augusto Salgado, and John Pedro Schwartz, eds., TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature, First edition, Literatures of the Americas (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). See also Declan Kiberd, “James Joyce and Mythic Realism,” in Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage Books, 1996), 327–55; and Michael Patrick Gillespie, James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination, The Florida James Joyce Series (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015). For a closer examination of the links between Joyce’s language(s) and Irish postcoloniality, see Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).
- 3.
The body of scholarship produced on this topic is too copious to list fully here, but the following essays and collections offer some poignant discussions of postcolonial writers’ engagements with the English language as a literary structure of colonial power: Salman Rushdie, “Introduction,” in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, ed. Elizabeth West (London: Vintage, 1997), ix—xxiii, as well as in the written debate (also perhaps a provocation and rebuttal) between Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in: Chinua Achebe, “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature,” in The Education of a British-Protected Child (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 96–106; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature,” in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1994), 4–33. Marlene NourbeSe’s essays on writing and exile also bring an extremely valuable perspective on these debates. See for example: the Introduction to Marlene NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture 1984–1992 (Stratford, Ontario: Mercury Press, 1992); Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Bla_k: Essays & Interviews, First edition, Essais, no. 3 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: BookThug, 2017).
- 4.
Joyce, Portrait, 205.
- 5.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272.
- 6.
Diana Brydon, “Dionne Brand’s Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 991.
- 7.
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993), 13.
- 8.
Lorde, Zami, 14.
- 9.
My uses of “Audre” (first name only) refer to the semi-fictional protagonist of Zami. Otherwise I refer to the author as Lorde.
- 10.
Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 2; my emphasis.
- 11.
Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability,” in Disability/Postmodernity (London and New York: continuum, 2002), 67.
- 12.
Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, 19.
- 13.
Philip, Bla_k, 56.
- 14.
Lorde, Zami, 14.
- 15.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 201.
- 16.
Philip, Bla_k, 73, 131.
- 17.
Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” in Bla_k, 57.
- 18.
Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, 140.
- 19.
Seamus Deane, “Imperialism/Nationalism,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 366.
- 20.
Juliette Taylor-Batty, “Protean Mutations: James Joyce’s Ulysses,” in Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 114.
- 21.
John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands, ed. Tim Robinson (London: Penguin Books, 1992).
- 22.
Alan Titley, “Synge and the Irish Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge, ed. P. J. Mathews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 92.
- 23.
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 124.
- 24.
Jolanta Wawrzycka, “Translation,” in James Joyce in Context, ed. John McCourt (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 132. Of course, I use the term “Italian” loosely here because, as Wawrzycka outlines, the register of Joyce and Vidacovich’s translation was at least as multilingual as Synge’s original Irish English text.
- 25.
Deane, “Imperialism/Nationalism,” 366.
- 26.
Philip, Bla_k, 48–49.
- 27.
Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 22.
- 28.
Eva Hoffman, “The New Nomads,” in Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss, ed. Andre Aciman (New York: New Press with the New York State Library, 1999), 48.
- 29.
Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” in Bla_k, 57.
- 30.
This quote derives from an unpublished interview I conducted with Matthews in 2009 as part of my MA dissertation research for University College Dublin. Christopher J. Matthews is a contemporary Northern Irish poet, born in Belfast, who has published several books of poetry, including A New Life (2000) and Eyelevel: Fifty Histories (2003), alongside his contributions to literary publications such as The Yale Review and The Dublin Review. Matthews has been compared to Joyce as a globetrotting Irishman with a penchant for modernist experimentation in his own right, but his work is not very well-known outside of a handful of closed writerly circles. I was fortunate enough to meet him and be taught by him in Lugano, Switzerland between 2004 and 2007, during which period he introduced me to Joyce and Irish modernism for the very first time. For that, I felt it appropriate to pay this small tribute to him in my first book on Joyce. The source of this quote is referenced here as Christopher Matthews, Personal Interview, June 21, 2009.
- 31.
Here “ribber” echoes the Bulgarian “riba” or the Russian “ryba” (fish); “dabardin” invokes the Bulgarian “dobar den” (good day; good afternoon), which does not appear either in McHugh’s Annotations or in FWEET.
- 32.
For an extensive treasury of Slavonicisms in the Wake, plus some biographical and genetic investigations into their integration into the Wake, see Petr Škrabánek, Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in “Finnegans Wake”, ed. Louis Armand and Ondřej Pilný (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2002); and Bernd Engelhart, “‘… or Ivan Slavansky Slavar’ (FW: 355.11): The Integration of Slavonic Languages into Finnegans Wake,” in Genitricksling Joyce, ed. Sam Slote and Wim Van Mierlo, European Joyce Studies 9 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), 135–44.
- 33.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 22.
- 34.
Petr Škrabánek, “Slavonic Dictionary,” in Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2002), 12.
- 35.
Škrabánek, “Slavonic Dictionary,” 13.
- 36.
As cited in a different context above, evidence of Joyce’s treasury of Slavic words used in (or potentially intended for) the Wake is collected and discussed in Engelhart, “‘… or Ivan Slavansky Slavar’ (FW: 355.11): The Integration of Slavonic Languages into Finnegans Wake.”
- 37.
Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, 21.
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Alexandrova, B. (2020). Conclusion. Multilingual Homecoming: Re-encountering the “Same Renew” (FW 226.17). 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_6
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