irrelevance-page 249

This is more just a tip of the hat to the premise of blogging here, but I did get intrigued by the word 'irrelevance' after our last meeting, enough so that I did a blog post about it elsewhere. You can find it here, if you're interested.

The woman thing

I may be wrong, but I consider myself to be about the most skeptical of Joyce's take on women of the members of our group, but I swear I wasn't going around hunting for ammunition. Instead, I was trying to remember exactly why Joyce was so keen on Giordano Bruno, when I came across this article in the James Joyce Quarterly by Joseph C. Voelker, called "Nature It Is": The Influence of Giordano Bruno on James Joyce's Molly Bloom. As it's JSTOR, I have the usual problem of not being able to read the whole article, but nevertheless, the first paragraph is interesting.

"James Joyce was remarkably consistent in his portrayal of women, and this consistency is of a kind more frequently found in philosophical argument than in the novelistic observation of character. From Polly Mooney to Anna Livia Plurabella, Joyce's women live in close contact with their senses, reason only in the most inept and self-contradictory manner, and threaten repeatedly to throw off their individual identities--like the merest frillies--to reveal their true essence beneath. Really they are not so much fictional representations of actual women as they are flowing rivers and spinning earthballs, disguises for Natura, whom Joyce deployed in his life-long war with the propoents of Grace."

This is not totally surprising to me, but what is surprising is that Joyce derived his idea of Nature from Giordano Bruno. Voelker says, "Like Joyce's most lovingly delineated woman, Molly Bloom, Bruno's Nature is at once incontrovertibly fixed and in constant flux." Joyce was apparently heavily influenced by the book Giordano Bruno by J. Lewis McIntyre, which came out in 1903:

"In other words, Nature, under one aspect, is a spiritual unity, in which are comprised all possible differences, or all separate existences : under another it is these many existences themselves, in each of which, in succession, all differences are "realized," all modes come into being; and finally under another aspect, it is the force which brings forth the separate forms or existences out of the formless, indeterminate, indifferentiated unity of being, or God."

Personally, I'm happier with Bruno's naming this whole magilla Nature than Joyce's naming it Anna Livia Plurabella. But it does help me to understand better what he's driving at.

The Wake in Translation, Part 2. Turning Japanese

It's been a couple of busy months since I posted part one of this discussion of the Wake in translation, despite the fact that I have really wanted to get to this very interesting article I discovered on the history of the Wake in Japanese. Yup--Japanese. If you'd like, you can just cut to the chase and head over to Atelier Aterui and read the article by Eisharo Ito.

For me, it is timely to revisit this article after our last meeting, because one thing that struck me about our last reading together was exactly the thing the article talks about--the mysterious way in which Joyce was able to sustain multiple narratives simultaneously. I'm not talking about plots and subplots here, or even the way Joyce was able to draw from such a multitude of sources. I'm talking about how, on the one hand, the book can be a running commentary on Lewis Carroll, yet on another, is also fully able to carry the multivolume discourse by John P. Anderson on Finnegans Wake, which is subtitled The Curse of Kabbalah, and  in which two ideas of God contend and interact with each other. And so on and so on.

I think the way of translating this work into Japanese can help us understand this a little. Parts of Finnegans Wake had been tranlated into Japanese as early as 1933, but it was left to Naoki Yanase to attempt the whole book in the late 1980s and early 90s. The earlier groups at work on the project tranlated what they considered to be the surface meaning, and then use endnotes to discuss other meanings and context. Yanase was part of one of these groups, but then went on to try it alone.

The “Joycean language” is a fertile bed of multilingualism whose ambiguity enables the reader infinitely to interpret each word, phrase and sentence Joyce interweaved in the text--Eisharo Ito

Yanase decided to render this multiplicity in Japanese. For this effort, he had to coin new words in Japanese, and also attempt to create a Japanese "style" that seemed to reproduce the Joycean style. He translated the complete book, which is now considered a masterpiece in its own right, but his unique usage was very difficult to follow and has proved too much for most Japanese readers. (I should point out here that the language he was tranlating into has not only a different script, but a very different idea of how to write a word in itself.)

It was then left for Kyoko Miyata to write a more accessible translation for the non-scholarly reader. Her method was to stick with what she discerned as the main narrative and then add one or at the most two alternative readings by means of the footnotes. The article says that Miyata was impressed by what Michal Butor, the French translator of the Anna Livia Plurabelle, had to say about reading the Wake--"the reader consciously or unconsciously makes one choice among mass of meanings of words and phrases." In other words, you choose a trail and follow it.  In Miyata's words, she wished to render Finnegans Wake “as an organic whole, to bring in relief this thin but surely existing flow of narrative.”

The end of the article shows the two Japanese versions alongside the original. It's interesting to look at, even if you can't read a word of Japanese.

Parallels with Sylvie and Bruno

"All of Dodgerson's dodges one conning one's copying and that's what wonderland's wanderlad'll flaunt to the full."

I recently read Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno (in the Mercury House edition illustrated by Santa Cruz's own Renee Flower) and I have heard of Joyce's familiarity with the work.  (James Atherton asserts it is the work of Carroll's Joyce read most attentatively.)

It's a really strange work, Carroll has essentially deconstructed the Victorian novel and the children's story mixing adult theological discussions, and satire with sentimentality, romance, magic and fairies, philosophy and nonsense, and made something that seems oddly modernist or postmodernist.  Needless to say it's still a walk in the park compared to the Wake.

Here's some of the parallels.

• it starts in mid-sentence
• there are abrupt transitions between states of consciousness and events
• serious topics discussed seriously and sentimentally --
  are startlingly intermixed with nonsense and fantasy
• much takes place in an eerie or dream state (in fairy land)
• the waking world has a parallel plot in the dream world
• character is fluid and characters have multiple incarnations in parallel
• distortions of logic and language by the speech of childhood

Here's some notes essentially copped directly from the Editor's Note:

[N]oted one of Carroll's biographer's, "...[Carroll] was firmly resolved: that the project should be completely different from the Alice books." ... Another biographer adds, "Sylvie and Bruno bears the same relation to Lewis Carroll's earlier works, mutis mutandis,  as Finnegans Wake  to the more intelligible earlier productions of James Joyce... [Another says]... "...Yet many of the wildest and most startling features of Finnegans Wake are merely the logical development...of ideas that first occurred to Lewis Carroll."

And here's a thought, from Sylvie and Bruno:
"And what a grand thing it would be,” I went on dreamily, thinking aloud rather than talking, “if we could only apply that Rule to books! You know, in finding the Least Common Multiple, we strike out a quantity wherever it occurs, except in the term where it is raised to its highest power ..". "...Most libraries would be terribly diminished in bulk. But just think what they would gain in quality!”

round about page 243...

I pretty much popped in and out of the Wake group last night, August being an awfully busy month for me, so rather than posting something lengthy, I'll just say that I was struck by Tom's take on Shem. He said that Shem's stance was always one of mediated reality--mediated by words, that is--rather than that of the man of action, represented by Shaun. As if in affirmation, Campbell writes that Shem, an outcast from the guess the colors game, which he fails at, threatened to write a jeremiad against them.

I can certainly relate to the Shem position, because I think I tend to come at things a bit obliquely, describing my experience of something by relating it to some other thing.

But in reality aren't we all by necessity Shaun as well? We must have the unmediated reality before we can have the mediated one. Maybe a Shaun accepts reality in its unmediated form more easily, while a Shem has to describe it to himself or others before he knows it is real...

Finn group recap--pages 237-239

I haven't been all that good about recapping where we as a group actually got to in the last session, so let me correct that a bit. It's pretty easy this time. We began on page 237 with the rainbow girls saying "Enchainted, dear sweet Stainusless..."

Stainusless is of course a play on Stanislaus, Joyce's brother, who has the fortunate or unfortunate role of playing the good or at least "upright" brother. Shaun to his Shem, Chuff to his Glugg, and so on. In the story right now, as Chuff, he is in the enviable position of both the center of their circle and the center of their admiring attention as well. (Glugg is well out of the charmed circle). Although he is being worshipped, it is somewhat in negative form, as he is NOT unclean, NOT outcaste, all of which brings us back to remembering Shem, the one who is all these things. And 'stainusless' is after all not the same thing as 'stainusnotatall'. There's a bit of wolf in sheep's clothing aspect to Chuff.

Brought into the litany of worship are some other elements that we noticed and speculated about. There's a lot about Egypt and the Egyptian underworld in particular. There is also a lot of Buddhism, or more precisely, the tales of Buddha's life, this time in the form of the tale of the hermit and a very faithful hare. And many many plays on words involving the Catholic mass. ("May he colp, may he colp her, may he mixandmass colp her!")Also a bit of a tale from Greek tragedy, about Philomena and the King of Thrace.

Ready for the next meeting, then? Well, as always, ready as we'll ever be.

The Mary Ellen Bute film

Here's the film that Ed linked to a couple of posts back. It's on YouTube, so we might as well have it here as well: