Re:Reading in the Rain
Newer Sources and
Holiday Reading in the Prairies (VI.B.14) Notebook
Robbert-Jan Henkes
Summer
1924. On the Feastday of the Elevated Ankle.
In the Municipal Library of the fortified town of Saint-Malo in Brittany, Joyce
is reading. Outside the rain is pouring down. Dissipated clouds empty their red
rains over the Land of the Past. Brittanny! Where all coastal towns were called Armoricae.
‘Les
huîtres, monsieur!’ A smell of cooking is coming from the tiny
kitchen of the librarian. Little does he know that in twenty years time his
castle of books will burn to oblivion as a result of Allied bombings.
Spring never took
off and the great water manufacturer up above decided to inundate the summer as
well. Foggy dew and brine abound. July at its worst. Most certainly so. Gale born gravel is coming right out of
January’s teeth, as if the seasons had switched places. Water worshipping
angels are playing bagpipes deep into the bosom of the night.
‘I augur twill be
worse,’ the quaking librarian, M. Herpin, says. ‘How nice!’ M. Joyce answers. ‘Oui
oui, it could scarcely be bettered.’ M. Herpin sighs. ‘As we say in Bretagne: After three days we
all tire of the rain, of our wife and of being abroad.’
What is M. Joyce
reading with nothing better to do? M. Joyce is reading about Brittany, its
customs and traditions. He is skimming though articles and books of the great
folklorist Paul Sébillot. And through the textual
Hubble telescope of time, we slowly get to know what exactly he has lain his lone and tired and sick eyes upon. It is not the 1909 volume of the Annales de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de l’arrondissement
Saint-Malo. And
neither is it the 1910 volume of the Revue
de Bretagne, de Vendée & d’Anjou.
Different holiday lecture has come to
light since the first installment of ‘Reading in the
Rain’ in the Spring of 2009: an ordinary traveler’s
handbook, an encyclopedic excerpt about druids, two
historical explorations of the Mont Saint-Michel, a booklet about the Gauls and some still unidentified work of an informational
nature about the town where M. Joyce is staying, Saint-Malo, written by a
relative of the librarian, M. Eugène Herpin.
Let’s have a closer
look at the two books he is reading now.
Sometimes Joyce
seems almost human. Through our genetic time telescope we see him reading about
the Mont Saint-Michel, and apparently for no other reason than his upcoming
touristic outing to the Mount, in the beginning of August, in a week or so. Almost human – for it isn’t the ordinary
sightseers’ guidebooks that Joyce reads, telling you where and when to look
left to the transept built in 1563 where the bones of the 23d bishop of Avranches lie, or so they say, with pictures of all the
things you don’t realize you haven’t seen. For Joyce no picture books, but good
old-fashioned books with letters, lots of letters. He wasn’t allowed to strain
his eyes with writing, on doctor Borsch’s orders, but the good ophthalmologist
had said nothing about reading.
The books Joyce
read in preparation for his city trip are two tomes by
Étienne Dupont (Avranches, 29 December 1864 - Saint-Malo 1928). Dupont was a historian with a penchant for out of the way
legends and hard-to-find archival matter. He was for some time curator of the
Saint-Malo public library and its archives, and he was one of the founders of
the Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de l’arrondissement de Saint-Malo, and published in its Annales.
Dupont’s Le Mont Saint-Michel Inconnu, as the title implies, is a collection
of lesser known stories about the legendary Mount, and it caused Joyce to jot
down 72 notes, of which only one may have been used, 056(a) ‘quartermaster’,
although the word itself does not appear as such in Dupont.
His Les légendes
du Mont-Saint-Michel, which Joyce read first, is a collection of stories
and anecdotes, old and new, true and legendary, about the abbey and the prisons
of the Mount. Joyce’s first note (of fifty) is of a compositional nature,
022(d) ‘tell in style of legend (Knock)’ – occasioned by Dupont,
in his introduction, warning the reader that this is not a historical,
philological work, of the kind Dupont specializes in
— he is a true archivist, always ready to tell us where he found a manuscript
or a piece of information, a man after my heart — but that these are anecdotes
and legends pure and simple, told just like they are, without footnotes,
commentaries or different versions of the same story. Joyce’s note would then
refer to the old legends being told, in Dupont’s
words ‘with such an intensity that you’d think they are real.’ Yes, very much
like Finnegans Wake.
Having telescoped
down the source, I have been able to supplement a couple of tentative
transcriptions and correct a few mistranscriptions in
the Brepols edition of Notebook Prairies VI.B.14.
Sometimes regrettably: unfortunately there is no such word as ‘nombrilisme’ on 033(f), the word is Tombelaine.
On the other hand it is nice to know that it says ‘goglu’
and ‘pisteur’ on 32(g) and to know what it is about.
And there is a joke that has become clear, the one about flatchested
women being called huguenotes
on 031(a), because they don’t worship the saints,
which sounds the same as seins,
breasts.
Interesting!
A pity that these notes were never used in Finnegans Wake. But at least M. Joyce, when he visited the Mont Saint-Michel, knew infinitely more than he possibly could see.
|
Notebook pages |
Source |
total / used |
|
Prairies B.14.015(g)-(j) |
Cook’s Traveler’s Handbook for Normandy & Brittany (1923) [Mikio Fuse] |
4 / 0 |
|
Notebook pages |
Source |
total / used |
|
Prairies B.14.029(a)-(r) |
M. Sabbathier,
Dictionnaire pour l’intelligence des
auteurs classiques, Grecs et Latins, tant sacrés que profanes, contenant la
géographie, l’histoire, la fable et les antiquités, vol. 14 (1773) [Dirk
Van Hulle] / OR Joseph François
Gabriel Hennequin, Esprit de L’Encyclopédie,
ou recueil des articles les plus curieux et les plus intéressans
de l’encyclopédie, en ce qui concerne l’histoire, la morale, la littérature
et la philosophie (1822) [Mikio
Fuse] OR Diderot - Encyclopedie,
première édition, tome 5 [Dirk
Van Hulle] |
18 / 0 |
|
Prairies
B.14.021(d)-022(d); 030(g)-031(g); 032(c)-033(f) |
Étienne Dupont, Les légendes du Mont-Saint-Michel,
Historiettes et anecdotes sur l’abbaye et les prisons, Perrin, Paris, n.d. (1924, Nouvelle édition) [Robbert-Jan Henkes] |
50 / 4 |
|
Notebook pages |
Source |
total / used |
|
Prairies
B.14.045(d)-046(a); 053(k)-054(f); 055(l)-057(e); 059(b)-(k); 068(e);
068(g)-070(e) |
Étienne Dupont, Le Mont Saint-Michel Inconnu, D’après des
documents inédits, Librairie Perrin et Cie., Paris 1912 [Robbert-Jan
Henkes] |
72 / 1 |
|
Notebook pages |
Source |
total / used |
|
Prairies B.14.046(e)-(f); 046(j)-047(a) |
Albert Grenier, Les Gaulois, Collection Payot, 1923 [Robbert-Jan Henkes] |
7 / 1 |
|
Notebook pages |
Source |
total / used |
|
Prairies B.14.075(k)-076(h) |
[Eugène Herpin, in:] ? Annales de la société historique et archéologique de l'arrondissement
de Saint-Malo 1911 [Robbert-Jan Henkes] |
13 / 1 |