Reading in the Rain
New Sources in the Owldeed (VI.B.5) and Prairies (VI.B.14) Notebooks
Robbert-Jan Henkes
Summer
1924. In the Municipal Library of the lovely fortified town of Saint-Malo in
Brittany, Joyce took out some magazines and studied them. It was raining
outside. Mercilessly. They hadn’t seen such a rainy summer here since last
year. What did the hotel manager say? ‘July at its worst.’ And halfway August
not much better. Les Vacances de M. Joyce ... Randomly but always on the alert,
he leafs through the bound volumes of diverse folkloristic magazines. To see
what chance has in store. Last time he took some notes from articles in the Annales de la Société d’histoire et
d’archéologie de l’arrondissement Saint-Malo. And from the Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée & d’Anjou.
Interesting material, but as yet a bit uncertain for what. The tomy volumes of
1909 and 1907 of the Annales he had
probed. ‘Mais non non non, monsieur Joyce, you cannot take them home, they are
revues, magazines, periodicals, hein?
It is forbidden! Ab-so-lu-ment! I’m desolated but it is hors question.’ Even if he had wanted to carry them home to the
hotel, they would have broken his ashplantfrail back. Now the 1904 volume of
the Revue des Traditions Populaires,
number XIX, was laying in front of him in the reading room. Let’s see. The Norwegian Fish Slapping Dance. That
is not what he was looking for. Folk
Songs of the Spanish Inquisition. Hm. It should be something more local,
more Breton lorelike. Let’s try this, by Yves Sébillot. I’ve seen his name
before, or no, that was Paul Sébillot. Must be related. Father and son touched
by the holy ghost of their motherland. Traditions
and customs of Lower Brittany, part X, Marriage in the Trégorrois area.
Sounds interesting. Maybe something for an outrageous incestuous marriage
ceremony for Shaun and Issy. (I’m glad they stayed back at the hotel.) (It was
nice though, to celebrate their birthdays in Saint-Malo.) Is that an idea for a
follow-up for Shaun? Or should I look for Dawn? Or to incorporate the marriage
customs into the goodbye lessons of Shaun to Issy. No, it was Yves, Paul-Yves. Here’s the same article, in a more recent
series.[1]
With his less bad right eye close to the book, Joyce starts
reading about marriage customs in the region around Tréguier, halfway between
Saint-Malo and Brest, deep in the heart of Asterix country. Some strange rites
may even be Celtic relics, and Celtic history and prehistory is what Joyce is
looking for on his well-deserved holiday in Brittany. In the marriage customs
essay he reads about how to find out what your lawfully wedded partner will be
like: count the spikes on a holly leaf, and each spike stands for a different
characteristic for your future wife or husband, and the last will be true, so
you will know whether he or she will be nice, beautiful, roguish, cuckold or
thievish, noting on page 92 of his notebook VI.B.14 (Prairies): ‘for future H
count nettlespikes’. And about the custom of sticking pins in the nose of Saint
Guirec, or in Breton Zant Gwirek, by girls who want to get married. And he
makes notes about the wooing ceremony itself, the wedding and the nuptial
feast, ‘which takes place in the open air, and the guests are seated on long
laid out ladders’. When the bride leaves her parents, according to the closing
words of the article, there is a lot of crying, which is called in Breton ‘Ar oueladen’, that is in French ‘la
pleurade’, as Joyce notes on Prairies (VI.B.14) 094(e).[2]
The end. Joyce lays aside the volume with the Sébillot
article and takes up another book. He holds his hands so that we just can’t
make out the title. ‘That’s interesting,’ he murmurs, and he jots down some
words,[3] ‘jeu de
massacre ... toit en dos d’âne .... tréma, that’s a dieresis ... low Breton and
high Breton ...’ Then he closes the book and picks up yet another volume on the
table. This time we were so wise as to anticipate and to read the title before
he opens it. It is another folkloristic revue about Brittany, the Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée et d’Anjou
from 1904. He opens the volume seemingly at random, halfway. There he starts
reading about the expression ‘Je suis un sot breton’, ‘I am a Brittanic fool’,
which, the author claims, has nothing to do with foolishness, but is derived
from ‘z’haut’ and has to do with high, ‘I am from Upper Brittany’. And about
the best way to iron a typical Breton head-dress, that is to sit on it. Mighty
interesting. After a few notes Monsieur Joyce calls it a day. His pencil is out
of ink. The rain has stopped for a moment. The lights have gone out. It looks
like thunder in the air. Nora comes by to get him to go for a walk. The
proprietor of the Hotel Chateaubriand has sent a message that another pack of
books has arrived for him to read from Shakespeare & Co. Joyce returns the
volumes to the desk clerk, saying with a menacing inflection: ‘I’ll be back.’
How did Joyce become a reader instead of a writer? The
answer is simple. He had to. In April 1924 he was abruptly forced to stop
writing, on doctor’s orders, when his ophthalmologist, Dr. Borsch, warned him
that further work would be fatal for his eyesight, and that he had to give his
eyes as much rest as possible, awaiting another operation. To cast from him all
temptation to continue working on the first watch of Shaun, Joyce bought a big
suitcase and on the 24th of May, he packed his books and papers and sent them
to Sylvia Beach. He also bought a fountain pen to commemorate and commiserate
the start of his enforced idleness. On the 11th of June the operation took
place and on the 27th he was able to write to Harriet Weaver that his left eye
was still bandaged but that he was allowed to read with the other. But working,
writing was still forbidden. To escape the gloomy weather and dreary thoughts
in Paris, Joyce and his family left Paris around the 7th of July for an
extended holiday in Brittany. As soon as he arrived in Saint-Malo, he took from
the hotel bookshelves the three-volume Illustrated Chateaubriand. It was there
because the hotel was called ‘Hotel de France et Chateaubriand’, named after
not only the proud and mighty country they lived in, but also after their most
famous townsman, François René de Chateaubriand, born in the Rue des Juifs on
the 4th of September 1768 as the son of a slave trader.[4]
But that was not the only book Joyce read and took notes
from. Not to strain his eyes, Joyce read voraciously during his holidays. The
editors of the Brepols edition found for Owldeed (VI.B.5) three books and eight
periodicals and for Prairies (VI.B.14) a staggering twentytwo books and five periodicals.
And that seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. There is still a lot of
uncharted territory in these notebooks, a lot of unidentified source material,
but with the help of a recently invented tool that wasn’t available to the
editors when these notebooks were published, Google Book Search, and the good
offices of especially the University of Michigan that put its library online in
2007, I managed to identify thirteen more sources, nine books (for certain) and
four periodicals (in varying degrees of probability), totalling 537 entries for
which the source now can be identified. In due course these findings will be
incorporated in the electronic Notebook updates in these Genetic Joyce Studies. Here’s the list of newly, post-Brepols
identified sources in Owldeed (VI.B.5) and Prairies (VI.B.14):
Books
|
Notebook pages |
Source |
total / used |
|
Owldeed B.5.010, 011, 012, 014,
016, 034, 049, 069, 082, 112, 119, 122, 129 Prairies
B.14.003, 008, 009, 012, 013 |
Jacques Boulenger & André
Thérive, Les Soirées du Grammaire-Club,
Paris, Librairie Plon, 1924 (270 pp) (co-identified with Mikio Fuse and
Aida Yared in VI.B.5) |
92 / 7 |
|
Owldeed B.5.142-144, 146-147, 151,
152 Prairies
B.14.011, 015-020 |
Édouard Schuré, Les Grandes Légendes de France, Paris,
Perrin et Cie, 1921 (1892), 298 pp |
106 / 9 |
|
Prairies B.14.087-091 |
Edward FitzGerald, Miscellanies, London, MacMillan and
Co, 1900, 207 pp |
36 / 11 |
|
Prairies B.14.091-092 |
The Apocryphal New Testament, being the Apocryphal
Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses, with Other Narratives and Fragments Newly Translated by Montague Rhodes James, 1924
(reprinted 1926, 1945, 1950, 1953), 594 pp (identified on VI.B.5.105 by Mikio
Fuse) |
16 / 0 |
|
Prairies B.14.103-104, 175-179 |
Standish O’Grady, Selected Essays and Passages, Dublin,
Talbot Press, 1918, 340 pp |
61 / 26 |
|
Prairies B.14.121-124 |
Zacharie Le Rouzic, The Megalithic Monuments of Carnac and
Locmariaquer: Their Purpose and Age, with Five Views and One Map,
translated by W.M. Tapp, Editions de La Bretagne Touristique, Saint-Brieuc,
1908, 40 pp |
24 / 9 |
|
Prairies B.14.125-127, 147-150 |
Matthieu-Maxime Gorce, Saint Vincent Ferrier (1350-1419),
Plon, Paris, 1924, 303 pp |
46 / 8 |
|
Prairies B.14.135-137 |
F.G. Crookshank, The Mongol in Our Midst, A Study of Man
and His Three Faces, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co / New
York, E.P. Dutton, 1924, 123 pp |
26 / 1 |
|
Prairies B.14.202-208 |
Maurice Delafosse, L’âme nègre, Payot, Paris, 1922, 180
pp |
62 / 12 |
Periodicals
|
Notebook pages |
Source / Found in |
total / used |
|
Prairies B.14.053, 054, 057 |
Annales de la Société historique et archéologique de
l’arrondissement de Saint-Malo,
for the years 1907, 1909, 1911, 1913, 1921-1924 (from Google Book Search
snippets) |
22 / 0 |
|
Prairies B.14.059, 068 |
Étienne Dupont, Une astrologue Bretonne au Mont Saint-Michel
(1356-1370), about Tiphaine Raguenel on page 259-278, in: Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée & d'Anjou
(Société des bibliophiles bretons et de l’histoire de Bretagne, Nantes),
1910, 670 pp |
11 / 1 |
|
Prairies B.14.092-094 |
Yves Sébillot, Traditions et coutumes de Basse-Bretagne,
X, Le mariage au pays Trégorrois,
p.348-356, in: Revue des Traditions
Populaires, Recueil mensuel de mythologie, littérature orale, ethnographie
traditionelle et art populaire, Paris 1904, 576 pp (?) |
24 / 1 |
|
Prairies B.14.094 |
Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée et d’Anjou, edited by Arthur La Broderie, Émile Grimaud,
vol. 31-32, 1904 (from Google Book Search snippets) |
4 / 0 |
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Linguistic forages: Les Soirées du Grammaire-Club
The
first book Joyce read after or even during his reading of Chateaubriand was a
book of dialogues about the sorry state of the French language. He either found
it in a Saint-Malo bookshop or he might have taken it with him from Paris. In
their introduction the authors, Jacques Boulenger & André Thérive, quote a
letter with a proposal for a kind of linguistic academy, of ‘not more than 12
to 19 people, Belgians from Brabant and Flanders excluded.’ They decide not to
call their gatherings an academy, but a ‘club’, a ‘grammaire-club’ even, to
show that they don’t take themselves too seriously and are not to be mistaken
for rigid language purists.
The main claim to Wakean fame of Les Soirées du Grammaire-Club
is that here the famous word ‘proxenete’(French: pimp; bawd) of the Anna Livia
Plurabelle chapter originates, entered on Owldeed B.5.119(j): ‘
proxenete’. The story behind it goes like this, in a
discussion about grammatical and linguistic stupidities, pedantry and
pretensions (and I translate off the cuff from page 73 of Les Soirées): ‘Recently, a newspaper published some fine follies
that their ignorance and pretensions cause journalists to commit. Poor Charles
Muller, who died for the fatherland, was a student with a grant in Rennes and
at the same time editor of a Breton journal, l’Avenir. One day, an enemy newspaper of l’Avenir stated that it was a scandal that the city of Rennes had
given one of their student grants to a ‘proxénète’ like Muller. It was at a
time when duels were still fought: Muller sent two of his friends to demand the
reason of this rude insult and the journalist did as asked: he explained that
for him, proxénète (which he no doubt
dimly confused with proxène) meant: stranger, and that with this word he
wanted to say that Muller was from Le Havre and not from Rennes. The case was
allowed to rest there, after the insulted party obligingly instructed his
adversary, in l’Avenir, that proxénète had no more the meaning of stranger than pédicure had that of pédéraste.’
The interesting thing is, that Joyce in Finnegans Wake not only incorporates the
word alone, but also the context of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding
the word that is the subject of the anecdote, though the proxenete in question
is no longer Shem, but Anna Livia herself: ‘Letting on she didn’t care ^+, the
proxenete! Proxenete and what is that? Were you never at school? It’s just the
same as if I was to go for example now and proxenete you! For God’s sake and is
that was she is?+^’ (MS 47474-125, JJA 48:75, FW 198.17, 22)
In toto Joyce made 92 notes from Les Soirées in his two holiday notebooks. It may appear at first
sight that he entered the items linearly, as the first two positive Soirées-notes,[5] Owldeed
B.5.010(c) draisienne / bicycle, and 011(c) Karosse / Karredge, derive from the
opening pages of Les Soirées (11 and
14). But in this case appearances are deceptive. As the editors make plausible,
Joyce started his Chateaubriand notes on arrival in Saint-Malo on Owldeed
B.5.119, and then worked forward as well as backwards, filling in the spaces he
left empty as he entered loose thoughts while recuperating in the dark from his
eye operation.[6] Considering there are
fourteen different Owldeed B.5 notebook pages with mostly scant Soirées notes, the first on page 10 and
the last on page 129, it is probable that Joyce entered these items in the same
way as the Chateaubriand notes: starting somewhere and then turning back to the
beginning of the notebook to fill in the unused spaces. In that case, he may
have started on the same page as the Chateaubriand notes, p.119, stumbling on
the famous ‘proxenete’, and reading Les
Soirées from there.[7]
A nice instance of Joyce’s reading strategies we find on
Prairies B.14.013(k) and (l). Boulenger & Thérive warn against a language
with too many allusive metaphors and with too much evocative slang, passing
into normal usage, like saying ‘il est midi’ [it is noon] for ‘it is too late’
or even for ‘it is impossible’: mediocre writers already express themselves
through nothing but incomprehensible images. After which Joyce invents an
incomprehensible image himself and comes up with the utterly strange ‘sweet
greenriding bosom’.
As always Joyce is an active, participating reader, not
reactive in the sense that he agrees or disagrees with the author, but active
in the sense that while reading he develops ideas and immediately tries to fit
the ideas and words into his own framework, which can be the Wake episode he is thinking about, or
his own life and circumstances. For instance, when on page 156 of Les Soirées Racine and Montaigne are
called ‘des auteurs néo-latins’,
Joyce at once takes it personally and makes the extension, on Prairies
B.14.012(b): ‘J.J. neo-saxon’.
Of these 92 items, Joyce used only seven in Work in Progress. From Owldeed B.5 just
one, the famous ‘proxenete’, and from Prairies B.14 the fairly non-committal
and unrevealing ‘supercillious’ (003k), ‘pudding stone’ (003n), ‘all the same’,
‘realise himself ’ (008g), ‘casque of
telephonist’ (009i), ‘Babel 
’
(009l) and ‘semantic’ (012a). An interesting deleted item appears on Prairies
B.14.008(i), ‘Déja (Chilperic hears of assassination of Louis XVI)’. In Les Soirées, the discussants imagine
Socrates coming back and warning the French writers that because of their
neglect the language of their masterworks of literature is dying. The president
of the Grammaire-Club then says: ‘Already!...
As Chilperic answered, in an operette of Hervé, when a frankish warrior told
him about the death of Louis XVI or the crowning of Charlemagne. I love to hear
Socrates fearing microbes and praising our French masterworks.’ The item still
hasn’t been not localized in FW or
the manuscripts, but if it is a compositional or conceptual mental note to self
by Joyce, a reminder that his present work would be a refutation of
chronological time as we know it, then the thought pervades the entire Wake.
All in all, Les
Soirées de Grammaire-Club is a much less important source than for instance
Jespersen,[8] but
nonetheless it shows Joyce’s lasting interest in all forms and aberrations of
language and once more it highlights his kleptomaniac approach to strange and
out of the way words.[9]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Route Touristique: Schuré’s Les Grandes Légendes and a Visit to
Carnac
Although
he wasn’t allowed to write, on account of his eyes, Joyce was allowed to think,
and think is what he did. (A writer really has no holidays.) The first watch of
Shaun was finished (and not yet cut in two) and now he was racking his brain
how to continue. In fact, his breakthrough only came in October or November,
when he read reviews of Mary Travers’s preternatural book Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (Prairies B.14.186) which gave
him the crucial idea for
Edouard Schuré’s Les
Grandes Légendes de France was either sent by her or found by Joyce in a
Saint-Malo bookshop. Joyce was acquainted with Schuré, because Schuré was the
writer of an interesting study about women inspirers, Femmes inspiratrices et Poètes annonciateurs, that Joyce had read,
around May 1923, along with its English translation, taking down Wagner &
Mathilde Wesendonck material in Trist B.3.66-77 (source identified by Geert
Lernout). Of the four parts of Les
Grandes Légendes Joyce studies only the last two parts (after finishing
Chateaubriand), about the Mont Saint-Michel and its history and about Breton
legends and the ‘Celtic genius’.[10] He
starts with prehistoric legends and heathen legends from Brittany in Owldeed
B.5 and returns to the stories about the Mont Saint-Michel in Prairies B.14,
maybe in preparation for a visit to the famous rock in the beginning of August,
in the company of Mr. Lloyd Morris and his mother on a tour of the area.
From the thirty-two pages of Celtic legends, Joyce makes
twentyfour notes, from Owldeed 142(g) to 144(l), of which two are on-the-fly
transformations of the original words: 143(g) the Brenn(an) shielded / elected,
telescopes one of Ireland’s most frequent surnames, Brennan, with the ‘brenn’ or village chief who, once elected, was
elevated on a shield, in the best Heroix/Abraracourcix-tradition.[11] The
second pun is ‘Tristan usque ad mortem’, where Schuré merely has: ‘Tristis usque ad mortem, that is the
first and last impression of Cape Raz.’ Neither was used by Joyce. The only
item he employed was 144(c) ‘here flux unite T & I / reflux suicides’,
which derived from a local legend about the Baie de Trépassés, where once a
year – so the legend goes – the souls meet of those who killed themselves for
love. The flux (high tide) unites them, the reflux (low tide) separates them,
and wailing and groaning they try to hold on to each other.[12]
In Prairies B.14 Joyce concentrates on the Mont
Saint-Michel, making seventy entries from 67 pages of Légendes in a straightforward fashion, maybe even in one reading
session during an average bad weather day, with only some scattered non-source
remarks in between.[13] The
entries are from Prairies B.14.015(i) to 020(p). Interesting is the Shaun
figure that Joyce distills from a shellfish merchant on the Mont (Prairies
B.14.016h&i). He has a characteristic face, and in his spare time sits as a
model for the countless visiting painters. He proudly tells Schuré that his
portrait is sold all over the world: ‘On me vend dans le monde entier.’ Joyce
typically improves on the wording: ‘On me vend partout’. The intriguing note in
the middle of the Schuré index, on Prairies B.14.017(o) ‘
triangle’, is not in the source, and hence may well be a
first inkling of the later chapter II.2. Very few items end up in Finnegans Wake, and mostly without any
contextual memory that would link it to the source.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On
the 1st of September, the Joyces visited the menhir fields of Carnac, in the
company of Mr. and Mrs. Morel.[14] In the
Musée Miln-le Rouzic Joyce bought a small, forty-page guidebook, in English, by
the foremost authority on the subject (and maybe co-founder of the museum?)
Zacharie Le Rouzic. The guidebook, The
Megalithic Monuments of Carnac and Locmariaquer; Their Purpose and Age, with
Five Views and One Map, was translated, faithfully, though with one
mistake,[15] by W.M.
Tapp, LL. D., F.S.A. We can be sure that Joyce read the translation (and not
the French original) because the various technical terms coincide with the
English version and not always with the French. Already the first two items,
Prairies B.14.121(n) ‘dressed stone’ and 121(o) ‘flaked’, can only have been
taken from the English, as the corresponding terms in French are one and the
same, ‘taillée(s)’, and not two different words: French: “Ces pierres taillées sont divisées en types
différents, dont le plus ancien est le type chelléen, de Chelles
(Seine-et-Marne), ayant plus ou moins bien la forme d’une amande taillée sur ses deux faces, mais variant
beaucoup de forme, de taille et de fini dans le travail.” English: “These flaked stones are divided into different
types, of which the most ancient is the Chellean type, of Chelles
(Seine-et-Marne), having more or less the shape of an almond, dressed on its two faces, but differing
very much in form, shape, and finish.” [emphasis added] The word ‘fabrique’ on
Prairies 122(e) would seem to point to a French source, were it not that this
is a nonce back-translation of Joyce’s own making of the English word
‘manufacturies’: in fact Le Rouzic doesn’t employ the word ‘fabrique’, he uses
the word ‘ateliers’. All in all, Joyce must have read the English version.[16]
An interesting entry is Prairies B.14.124(c) ‘bury ass with
him’, because the original text is about horses: ‘We have seen that in several
tumuli bones of horses and oxen have been discovered’. It is not the first time
that Joyce attributes to the ass what is told of the horse, see for instance
Prairies B.14.023(f), where Joyce writes: ‘ce n’est pas la peine de siffler
quand l’âne ne veut pas pisser’, whereas the original proverb goes ‘it’s no use
to whistle when the horse doesn’t want to piss’. This may already be an
intimation of the fifth evangelist, John’s donkey in the Wake.[17]
What is also beginning to emerge is a pattern in Joyce’s
use of his notes. He seems to be attracted first and foremost to using notes
that he thought of himself, even if they were occasioned by the source and were
extensions of what he read. In this 24 item Le Rouzic cluster, Joyce uses three
notes, and one of them, Prairies B.14.122(d) ‘terracotta’, is not verbatim in
the source, but was inspired by the context and the word ‘earthenware’. This
pattern has everything to do with Joyce’s pro-active way of reading, his
purposeful thinking along with the text, that was also striking in his notes
for Les Soirées (see the Prairies
012(b) ‘J.J. neo-saxon’-note, above). It is as if he wants the text he is
reading to tell him something, and the text also wants to tell him something,
but it has to be helped along, the right words have to be dragged out as it
were. And the helpful words Joyce jots down, are usually the first he is able
to use in his drafts, because they have already gone through his milling mind
once.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Edward FitzGerald, Miscellanies
A
book Joyce found in a Saint-Malo second-hand bookshop? Asked Sylvia Beach to
send? It doesn’t appear to be even remotely connected with Joyce’s concerns at
the time. The editors were very close to identifying this book as the source
for this cluster of notes, but apparently weren’t able to check the first
edition, the one that Joyce used. The various subsequent editions of the Miscellanies after 1900 often have
totally different contents, pieces added as well as pieces left out, and in a
new arrangement. It seems probable that Joyce read the first edition, although
he didn’t read it linearly from start to finish.[18]
Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) is now mostly known as the
translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam, but he was a poet and a writer himself. The Miscellanies is what the title says: a hodgepodge of longer essays,
memoirs, introductions to collections of sayings, and even a preliminary
compilation of data for a biography he wanted to write about Charles Lamb. The
main dish is the Platonic dialogue Euphranor, an impressionistic account about
education against the background of FitzGerald’s good old Cambridge University
days. The notes Joyce makes focus on the marked student language FitzGerald
employs, somewhat affected and immature at the same time. For instance:
Prairies B.14.087(d) kept
(lived)
Miscellanies 60: So, without more ado, we turn’d into Trinity Great
gate, and round by the right up a staircase to the attic where Lexilogus kept.
Prairies B.14.087(e)
should (for this time only) not
Miscellanies 63: At last, after a little hesitation as to whether he
should wear cap and gown, (which I decided he should, for this time only, not,) Lexilogus was ready: and calling
out on the staircase to some invisible Bed-maker, that his books should not be
meddled with, we ran downstairs
These
particular two notes ended up via the C-notebook on FW p.362.36-363.01: ‘And you, when you kept at Dulby, were you
always (for that time only) what we knew how when we (from that point solely)
were you know where?’
Of the 36 notes from FitzGerald’s book, eleven ended up in FW, nine of which through this B
notebook and two through notebook VI.C.12 (see above). All used notes ended up
completely scattered in at least six different chapters of the Wake, but nonetheless they are placed on
interesting spots. On FW 6.05-06 we
find the proverbial ‘thurum and thurum in fancymud murumd’, which turns out to
derive from the final paragraphs of the Preface
to Polonius in the Miscellanies
(p.172), being an introduction to a collection of ‘Aphorisms and Apophthegms’,
originally published in 1852: ‘Some extracts are from note books, where the
author’s name was forgot; some from the conversation of friends that must alike
remain anonymous; and some that glance but lightly at the truth are not without
purpose inserted to relieve a book of dogmatic morals. “Durum et durum non
faciunt murum.” § And now Mountain opens and discovers— § Polonius.’ (The
Shakespearean name Polonius should take the curse of the possibly dull
contents.)
An instance of Joyce’s pro-active, purposeful,
utalitarian and teleological way of
reading (and note-taking) occurs on Prairies B.14.088(p), where he notes:
‘laughter (witness joined)’. In the source passage in the Euphranor dialogue there is no witness, only laughing,[19] but
apparently Joyce wanted to remind himself of his sometime previous note in
Owldeed B.5.023(i) ‘laughter in which the / witness joined’ (taken from the Connacht Tribune), and he immediately
linked the notes by adding the ‘witness’ to the Miscellanies one. Then, when he harvested his material and used the
image for FW 092.02-05, he crossed
out both entries in the same run-through.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Suspicious Sourcery: Folkloristic
journals in the Saint-Malo library
It
is difficult to unequivocally identify magazine articles as Wakean sources.
First of all the original magazines are very hard to find in the paper flesh,
and secondly you never know whether Joyce didn’t come across the article in
another context, in some other collection of papers. The snippets revealed by
Google Book Search often don’t show the words themselves you were looking for,
and never give you the author of the article in question. To be sure of the
source you need to have the paper edition in front of you. True, in the
Saint-Malo library Joyce may very well have read diverse articles in the yearly
volumes of the Annales de la Société
d’histoire et d’archéologie de l’arrondissement Saint-Malo, and the Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée & d'Anjou
and the Revue des Traditions Populaires,
as Google Book Search indicates, and the image of Joyce reading these journals
is what the romanticized introduction of this article was inspired by. These three magazines were digitized in
2007 by the University of Michigan and magnanimously put on the world wibe web,
but as long as we can’t check them live, we can never be completely sure. So if
you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Ann Arbor, and the weather is really
bad, you might give it a try and spend a few days reading, to check if the
magazine articles really are the immediate source for these notes. Otherwise,
the search is still on.
Of the two articles Joyce certainly read – though maybe in
other collections – one is the Sébillot essay about the Breton marriage customs
of the introduction. This one I have been able to check in its paper form in
the Revue des Traditions Populaires.
The second paper version of an article that Google Book Search marked as a
Joycean reading suspect, is page 259-278 of the 1910 volume of the Revue de Bretagne et de Vendée. The
author is Étienne Dupont, and the title of his essay is Une astrologue Bretonne au Mont Saint-Michel (1356-1370). It is a
small and specialized study on the astrological activities of Tiphaine Raguenel
and her possible place and time of residence on the Mont Saint-Michel.
If the Revue is
really the source, Joyce must have picked the volume more or less haphazardly
from the library shelves. The name Tiphaine Raguenel might have caused him to
start reading, having already made a note about Tiphaine (her full first name
was Epiphanie) and her husband Bertrand Duguesclin on B.14.020(c) and (l), from
a reference in Schuré. If it seems strange that Joyce would pick such a
specialist study, remember that Joyce read these kind of articles also to find
suggestions for further reading,[20] and in
this case it may also have served as a preparation for his imminent visit to
Saint-Malo.
Joyce jots down a few words from the Dupont article on
Prairies B.14.059(c)-(k), among them the unmistakable ‘approaching the
hexameter’, from an aside by Dupont who is not certain why in an ancient
manuscript every month starts with a line of Latin verse with a measure that
seems to resemble a hexameter’ (‘dont la mesure paraît se rapprocher de
l’hexamètre’). But what really gave away this essay on Google Book Search are
the two sentences Joyce copies in their entirety on Prairies B.14.68(h),
starting ‘Quand il eut quitté ses habits sacerdotaux’.[21] With
these lines Dupont closes his essay. Judging from Joyce’s crossed-out first try
to copy this sentence in an on-the-fly translation, it seems that he was
especially struck by the ‘eloquent and persuasive words’ – being characteristic
of the object of his composing thoughts, the honeytongued Shaun. The abbot in
question, Geoffroy de Servon, gave Tiphaine Raguenel extreme unction on her
deathbed and absolved her of her sins (she was only forty years old). And after
she died, he went to her husband, Bertrand Duguesclin, the ‘unfortunate king’s
officer’, and the good abbot comforted him so eloquently and persuasively, that
already a couple of months later he was about to remarry. Well done, Shaun!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Something to Read: The Apocryphal New Testament
As
Mikio Fuse showed, The Apocryphal New
Testament (translated by M.R. James, 1924) is the source for Owldeed
B.05.105(a-k) (items g and h being under investigation). Apparently Joyce had
just acquired the book, and he started reading from the start, in the
introduction, and then began on p.116, halfway through the Acts of Pilate,
laying the book aside to take notes from the Irish Times and other newspapers. First, learning a poem of Valéry
by heart absorbed his attention for a little while, and then reading the Oeuvres Choisies Illustrées of
Chateaubriand for a long time. But Joyce couldn’t part with his recent
acquisition and he had taken it with him to Saint-Malo, and during a lull in
his reading regime, perhaps waiting for another parcel of books from Paris,
sent on request by Sylvia Beach, he took up the Apocrypha once again on
Prairies B.14.091.
The editors of the Prairies B.14 notebook, in their
explanations to 091(e) and 092(f), in fact do refer to the Apocryphal New Testament, but they fail to identify it as
unmistakably the source for the entries on these pages. It is a fairly
consecutive cluster of notes Joyce took from the book, from 091(c) up to
092(h), from reading in a straightforward fashion 25 pages of Apocrypha,
starting on page 199, this time not the Acts of Pilate, but smack in the middle
of the assumption of the Virgin, according to the Discourse of Theodosius, and
laying the book aside once more just before finishing the Syriac Narratives of
the said Assumption of the Virgin.
Joyce’s last note on 092(h) is an interesting
Ireland-related trivium. Jesus, in this apocryphal account, takes the apostles
on a visit to hell: ‘and the earth sprang upward and they saw the pit.’ M.R.
James footnotes: ‘I have pointed out, and the Rev. St. J. Seymour has
elaborated the thesis, that this visit of the apostles to Hell was known in Ireland at an early date, and that the
Irish form must be derived somehow from this Syriac text.’
Unfortunately none of these Apocrypha made it into Finnegans Wake,[22] but
soon Joyce would start collecting more Irish trivia.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Irish History and Mythology: Standish
O’Grady’s Selected Essays and Passages
Somewhere
in the last weeks of July, Sylvia Beach sent Joyce the only book she could find
by the 78-year old Irish writer Standish O’Grady, his Selected Essays and Passages, published in Dublin by the Talbot
Press in 1918. In the 1870s and 1880s O’Grady had been one of the first to
write about the mythical and historical past of Ireland, and he had been
instrumental in creating a collective conscience of his race, albeit that this
conscience and the literary movement resulting from it, was of the dreamy,
‘Celtic twilight’ kind that Joyce ridiculed in The Holy Office (1904) and even more deadly in Finnegans Wake, where he coined the phrase ‘cultic twalette’ (FW 344.12).
O’Grady wrote very romantically, very rhetorically and very
very beautifully, in a highflighty style no more of this day, about the Irish
past, about Finn, Cuchulain, the Irish bardic tradition and the great legendary
past of Ireland and he had (the literary histories say) a profound influence on
writers like Yeats and AE. Why would Joyce want to read the old books of
Standish O’Grady and not one of the myriads of recent works on Irish mythology,
for instance the classic Celtic Myths and
Legends by T.W. Rolleston of 1911? Maybe precisely because it was the first
influential book on Irish mythology, and because it was written in such an
oldfashioned style. In this way he could catch two flies in one blow (as the
Dutch saying goes): the Irish background he was investigating for further
expeditions into Book
To give an impression of the style, I will quote the
passage from which Joyce took down the words ‘dislimn’, ‘grouting’ and ‘shot
rubbish’:
“Romances and poems supplied the great blocks with which
the fabric was reared. These the chroniclers fitted into their places, into the
interstices pouring shot-rubbish, and grouting. The bardic intellect, revolving
round certain material facts, namely, the mighty barrows of their ancestors,
produced gradually a vast body of definite historic lore, life-like kings and
heroes, real-seeming queens. The mechanical intellect followed with perspicuous
arrangement. With a thirst for accuracy, minuteness, and verisimilitude. With
such quarrymen and such builders the work went on apace, and anon a fabric huge
rose like an exhalation, and like an exhalation its towers and pinnacles of
empurpled mist are blown asunder and dislimn.” (Selected Essays, p.24)
One of the two items Joyce uses from this small index is in
fact probably inspired by this aeolian prose itself. On page 39 O’Grady remarks
that the mounds, the barrows, the caiseals all over the country can be found in
the ancient literature, ‘with the names and traditional histories of those over
whom they were raised.’ Joyce at once sees the comic potential of the word and
jots down: ‘selfraising’, linking this selfraising prose with selfraising
dough.
You would think that Joyce would have given back this book
to the four waves of Brittany. A man, even a writer of Joyce’s omnivorous
stature, can only take so much. But no, another O’Grady index starts on
Prairies B.14.175, much longer now, up to 179(c). Joyce was back in Paris by
this time (or maybe still in London, where he stayed from 15 September to 12
October 1924), and he found the courage to go on. O’Grady’s style remains the
same, but the stories become more interesting, because they contain more
details. Joyce reads, from the selection Irish
Bardic History, the passages about Ceasair and the Ceasairian Deities,
about the Natural Mythology of the Irish, about Irish Unity, he reads the
legends concerning Cuculain but he skips the last passage about Niall Mor of
the Nine Hostages.
The section dealing with Irish Politics and Political
History is of less interest to Joyce, but he does read the essay about the
17th-century treatise Pacata Hibernia
(‘Ireland Pacified’), by Thomas Stafford, being an eyewitness account of the
Elizabethan Wars in 1603 in the province of Munster. In 1896, O’Grady had been
the editor of a republication of this important historical document with its
wonderfully evocative title (the word ‘pacification’ being no more than a
euphemism for cruel suppression.)
The 47 consecutive entries Joyce makes in this second index
are only interrupted by two conceptual notes for Book II, ‘curfew ’ and ‘
light
out’ on Prairies B.14.177(ab).[23]
Curiously, Joyce used very many of these items , 25 of them, but only seven of
them ended up in their original destination, Book
The real harvest took place in 1932 when Joyce started
drafting the Night Lessons episode of II.2. He employed twelve O’Grady notes in
close proximity, but when he decided to abandon the episode and to butcher the
already drafted part, many of the notes were left abandoned on the cutting room
floor, for instance ‘cleverism’ (176g), ‘live in future more than past’ from
(177f), ‘wet his weapon’ (177l), ‘eject’ (178c)[24] and
‘private gallows’ (178j). High time for a comprehensive variorum Work in Progress edition to see these
words in full action again.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stand-in Patrick: Saint Vincent Ferrier (by M.M. Gorce)
The
Joyce family holiday was drawing to an end. From Saint-Malo they had travelled
to Quimper and from there to Vannes. Carnac valait le détour, and now Joyce was
back in Vannes, last stop before returning to Paris. In one of the few quality
bookshops of the small town, he acquired a recent biography of the famous Saint
who died in Vannes, 505 years ago, Saint Vincent Ferrier, written by
Matthieu-Maxime Gorce, the trade edition of his 1923 doctoral thesis. Thank God
not a hagiography, so much the better, Joyce ponders. Plain, pure, cold, menhir-hard
facts, that’s what he needs. It is the third of September and the weather is
good reading weather.
It is not really clear why Joyce was so interested in
Vincent Ferrier, or Vincent Ferrer, as his real name was, unless J.J. really
had second sight (see Prairies B.14.017(n), taken from Schuré) and wanted to
check out the family tree of a far descendant of the good saint, one who would
eventually be instrumental in editing this very notebook VI.B.14 (Daniel
Ferrer), in cooperation with another Vincent, surnamed Deane. It is also
possible Joyce hoped to find useful Breton details in the biography. The Saint
preached and self-chastised himself on many occasions in Brittany, and
eventually died in Vannes. (It is not known if it was from his self-inflicted wounds.)
This religious masochism itself may have piqued Joyce’s curiosity: one of his
favourite books was Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz) by Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, so much so that he even named his Ulyssean hero after its
author, and gave him (Leopold Bloom) some decidely masochistic traits.
It is also possible that Joyce read this Life just to
telescope it eventually with his notes on Saint Patrick and to make some kind
of a supersaint life, enriched by diverse ingredients and additions. Some
entries in the Vincent Ferrier-clusters make it probable that Joyce was in fact
thinking about Saint Patrick and picked up the Gorce biography only when he had
no Patrick material left to read. That would also help to explain why Joyce
skips whole chapters of this book: he didn’t really care where he left off, as
long as he could harvest some fitting saintly particulars.[25]
There are three sequences, 125(k)-127(i); 147(f)-148(c)
and149(f)-150(g), totaling 46 entries, of which 5 made it into the manuscripts.
The editors have traced most of the biographical details back to the main
source book on Saint Vincent’s life, the standard biography by R.P. Fages, and
indeed, Joyce might just as well have read his 1894 Histoire de Saint-Vincent Ferrier. (Writing is for a large part copying,
Joyce is a prime example of that.) But as it happens, he didn’t. Google Book
Search yielded the Gorce biography as an indubitable source, the last Vincent
Ferrier-note on 150(g) ‘fructitude’ being the unique telltale word, the spot-on
hapax legomenon that gave it away.[26]
One of the reasons that Joyce used so few notes (5 out of
46), may be that he read the book with Saint Patrick on his mind, who was soon
to be dropped from the big plan of Finnegans
Wake, as Patrick was slowly allowed to merge with Shaun, and wouldn’t need
to be so overtly saintly anymore.[27]
An interesting entry that did make it into the final text
appears on B.14.148(a) ‘wife offers stocking & / veil to hang H’. Saint
Vincent, who has seen the light and has left the service of the Pope, travels
the country while preaching and lacerating himself, and tells an interesting
parable: ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you a story: There once was a woman and her
husband had killed someone, and after the verdict they dragged the criminal to
the scaffold, the wife following and crying about her misery. And when they
arrived at the scaffold, they noticed that they had forgotten the rope to hang
the man. So the wife said: Why do you need a rope, here’s the veil of my
headdress, take it. And so it was done. The husband was hanged with his wife’s
headdress and I don’t know if you have comparable headdresses for this
purpose.’ Take that! Sounds like a koan. Note that Joyce changes the headdress
(‘coiffure’ in the original) into even more revealing stockings. It ended up on
FW 495.09: ‘Here’s to the leglift of
my snuff and trout stockangt henkerchoff ...’ It’s nice to know that the
original connotation of the sentence is ‘go hang yourself with it’.
Saint Vincent did not mince words. He was a violent
preacher if ever there was one. One time he got angry in an utterly depraved
town and shouted (Gorce, p.150, Prairies 147i): “There is not, among you, a
child of fifteen who is a virgin. People pretend an impossible chastity.” In a
foonote citing his source (Fages), Gorce adds sanctimoniously: ‘Not a very
flattering picture of the morals of the time,’ and he confesses to have
suppressed a ‘grande crudité d’expressions’, in other words some very
unpublishable bad language of the Saint, which we can only guess at. That is
the funny thing about suppressing things: you immediately try to find the best
worst words in your own vocabulary to fill the gap — completely contrary to the
intention of the censor!
Probably Joyce finished the book back in Paris: his next
reading notes derive from the Catholic
Encyclopedia, which he couldn’t have taken with him to Brittany, unless he
was travelling in a trailer van.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Mongol in Our Midst (Francis
Graham Crookshank)
This
is the book the editors refer to in their footnote on page 12 of the
Introduction of Prairies VI.B.14 as ‘an unidentified book of racial (and
obviously racist) anthropology’. Joyce’s reading about anthropology and the
Celts is all in the interest of his studying, for Shaun, the Dawn, of Man and
Civilization. The Crookshank notes on these pages, 135(g)-137(i), are
immediately followed by entries from a book by Williams James Perry, The Origin of Magic and Religion,
137(j)-141(a) and in a short while he will also read African tales disclosing
the primitive Soul of the Negro, on Prairies B.14.202(i)-208(d). Joyce probably
read the Crookshank book on his return from Brittany, or during his London
trip.
The Mongol
in our Midst proposes the thesis
that Mongolism, or Down’s syndrome as we call it now, in honour of the
physician who first described it, is really an atavism, or falling back to a
previous state of human development. Well, it isn’t, but at the time medicine
was still not aware of chromosomes and the like. Crookshank goes a step further
and he tries to make a case for the separate evolution of the three races,
white, yellow and black, and more, he argues that the white man descends from
the chimpanzee, the black man from the gorilla, and the yellow man from the
orang utan – as Joyce notes on 136(i)-(m) – or at least have common ancestors.
Crookshank gathers this from similarities in handmarkings, gestures and
especially in posture.
There is a Dutch writer, Matthijs van Boxsel, who collects
all kinds of farfetched, ridiculous or faulty theories, whether it be the
hollow-earth theory, or theories of everything and pyramids, or the idea that
Ulysses came from Walcheren in Holland, but also scientific theories that have
since proven to be false. He writes about them under the name of Morosophy, or Encyclopedia of Foolishness or
Stupidity (‘domheid’). He describes these apparently nonsensical theories,
or rather, the people who thought them out and then laughs very loudly about
them. He wants to show that he knows better. And that, of course, is the
greatest foolishness, to think in a Hegelian way that history ends with you.
I’m sure that Van Boxsel would have loved to include Leonardo with his
improbable theories of flying machines and underwater boats, were it not that
they now exist. Most of these ‘foolish’ theorists were very learned and very
serious men (although sometimes they were jokers and their theories were meant
as pranks – also something Van Boxsel fails to appreciate, having no sense of
humor), and if science took a turn that was not theirs, it is not their fault:
they were, unlike Van Boxsel, inventive, inspired thinkers. Even Crookshank,
however outdated, racist or completely misguided his theories may sound now,
was a serious and attentive doctor. He even wrote an appendix to C.K. Ogden’s
classic about the influence of language on thought, The Meaning of Meaning,[28]
pointing to the dangers in medicine of fixing labels to diseases that are not
well understood, because after a while the labels start leading a life on their
own, not a bad observation at all, as far as I can judge. With which I only
want to say – finishing my polemical interlude – that I hesitate to call
Crookshank foolish or stupid.
But whatever Crookshank is or isn’t, Joyce did not particularly
take to the book. Apparently he read less than half of it. He could well have
left the book behind on his night table in the London Euston Hotel on checking
out (only conjecturing). And, what’s more, he used only one meagre element in Finnegans Wake, the word ‘mongoloid’,
that ended up on FW 550.16, ‘and to
my saffronbreathing mongoloid, the skysig, I gave Biorwik’s powlver and Uliv’s
oils ...’ Not something that Crookshank would be proud to show to visitors
wanting to know what that book was doing on his coffeetable. (‘Look! I’m in Finnegans Wake!’ ‘Oh, you’re finally
taken seriously?’)
Crookshank’s central thesis starts from this observation on
page 33-34: ‘The interest attaching to these homologies is enhanced by the fact
that, incidentally to these observations, certain homologies have been found
between (1) certain types of the ‘White’ groups of the human race (2) the
Chimpanzee and (3) a kind of mentally defective individual, found amongst
certain white races, who is said to suffer from Dementia Precox. § Furthermore,
homologies of the same order appear to obtain between (1) the Black, or Negro
division of the human race (2) and the Gorilla, or great African ape, and also
(3) a type of idiot occasionally (though rarely) seen in Europe, and described
by Langdon-Down as of the ‘Ethiopic’ variety.’
Joyce makes one apposite social comment (a rare occurence),
on Prairies B.14.135(j) ‘arrears of love’. Crookshank talks about “arrears of
development” by which children of “the Hospital type of Mongol” fall “still
more into arrears of development and are recognised ultimately as imbecile.”
Indeed, as Joyce’s note implies, the ‘arrears of development’ often point to
suffered ‘arrears of love’. This might be one of the reasons why Joyce soon
lost interest in this book.[29]
Maybe Joyce finished the book at a later date, but there
are no traces of it in the following (lost) notebook Slings VI.D.3, so probably
he closed the Mongol in Our Midst for
good. Out of regret and frustration that he stopped reading so soon, I have
compiled a hypothetical Joycean index for the remainder of The Mongol in Our Midst, hoping someday it will be helpful for a
continuation of Finnegans Wake, using
all of Joyce’s unused and virtual notes from his sources. Here are the words he
didn’t take down:
palmar
eminences [48]
accoucheurs,
conjurers and pickpockets [51]
hand
of idiot at Cork [53]
fissured
tongue [54]
mongoloid
[success]ful comedian [57]
sham
letterwriting on the stage [56-57]
lellow [58]
lobeless ears [62]
eye
= little fish [65]
[??] flattish
calves [75]
stellate
arrangement [77]
not
in need of circumcision [78]
Rolandic
area [79]
Klaatsch!
[80]
exhausted parents [83]
the
present writer [88]
sporadic
occurrence [92]
orangism
[97] his frowsy cap [100]
Dr
Unterhose [103]
brilliant observ[ation] [116]
Virgin on the Rocks [117]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Negro Soul (by Maurice Delafosse)
L’âme nègre by Maurice Delafosse (Payot, Paris, 1922) is a handsome
booklet, ‘schlank und rassig’ as the Swiss bookdesigner and
typographer Jan Tschichold would say, of 9.5 x 16
centimeters and 180 pages. It doesn’t take more than an hour or two to read.
The author sets out, as he states in his introduction (in which he often quotes
Lévy-Bruhl), to find out what goes on in the mind of the Black Man. What does
he think? What is his mentality? What does his soul look like? Other writers
have tried to describe this black soul from the outside, from their own Western
point of view, but Delafosse wants to let the inhabitants of the Dark Continent
speak for themselves. He has collected a great number of tales, songs and
sayings from all kinds of tribes and all kinds of languages, all faithfully
translated by people who knew the respective language perfectly. The
faithfulness of Delafosse is attested by the numerous square brackets he uses
to insert words and phrases to make the tales more understandable. Joyce’s
attention must have been drawn to this booklet by the promise of a truthful
transcription of the black man’s words: that was also the reason he previously read two books by the Scottish missionary Dan Crawford, containing many peculiarities of African languages and of what Crawford called ‘black thinking’.[30] African culture is deeply steeped in
oral tradition, with lots of songs and music and a firm belief in the
supernatural. Doesn’t that make – to rephrase John Lennon and Roddy Doyle – the
Nigger the Celt of the Modern World, or the Celt the Nigger of the Past? (Even
as the holidays were finishing, Celtic tradition and the Dawn of Civilisation
remained Joyce’s main line of inquiry in his prolonged period of enforced
idleness.)
In his time Maurice Delafosse (1870-1926) was a well-known
anthropologist and a prolific writer on African subjects, especially on the
many languages of Africa he encountered on his explorations, but he was also
interested in all kinds of customs and rites. In 1904 he published a
comparative vocabulary of more than sixty Senegalese languages and in 1922 and
1923 he published no less than five books, besides L'âme nègre also Les Noirs de
l'Afrique, a French-Fulfulde (or ‘Peul’ as the French say) dictionary, a
book about Sudanese religious terms, and a collection of reminiscences, Broussard ou les états d'âme d’un colonial,
suivi de ses propos et opinions.
In total Joyce made 62 notes, of which ten are crossed out
and used, one in I.4, one in /
that will be 3 } proverb’. In L’âme nègre
(p.131): ‘The leopard took the goblet in question and pronounced the proverb:
‘I have already eaten two gazelles, whoever will pour the palmwine will be the
third.’ Shaun is the one Joyce thinks of on 207(i) (‘ he is Shaun / who am I’), reading the story Simplicity about a man named Abarnakat,
who doesn’t know himself anymore when he wakes up, because in his sleep his
comrades have taken his characteristic red band around his neck and adorned
someone else with it, and they did the same with Abarnakat’s red blanket and
his donkey. On waking up, Abarnakat saw the other person, with a red band round
his neck, the donkey attached to his feet and himself asleep under the red
blanket, and said, getting up crying: ‘That person is Abarnakat; and me, who am
I?’
The last section of L’âme
nègre, Chapter XXII, Jeux d’Esprit,
is a collection of riddles, yielding six notes, on 207k-208d, of which three
made it into Finnegans Wake:
- If I can count to ten without saying one, will I get some
meat? the hyena asked. - Sure. - Two goats and a chicken, see if that doesn’t
make ten paws. (207k-l ‘10 without saying 1 / 2 goats hen’)
— And which three bring fortune, and there is no hair
growing on them? — The foot, the heel and the tongue. The foot because it
carries the merchant on his travels, the heel because you sit on it during
visits to powerful persons, the tongue because success follows beautiful
talkers. (208a ‘heels to sit on’ -> FW
476.31 ‘they could not rightly tell their heels from their stools’)
— Here I have a billy goat; when you attach it to the
inside of a house, its beard will find a way to go outside. What is it? — It is
fire: when you light it inside a house, the smoke will go out. (208b ‘smoke =
beard of the fire’ -> FW 501.26-27
‘Bonafires! With their blue beards streaming to the heavens.’)
— What is a henhouse filled with little white chickens? —
The mouth filled with teeth. (208c ‘pigeonhouse / mouth’ -> FW 444.24-25 ‘if you don’t keep a civil
tongue in your pigeonhouse’)[31]
— What is a small boy who will hit everybody and nobody
will see him? — It is the wind. (208d ‘harlequin wind’)
And with these words L’âme nègre closes. Joyce goes on making notes in Prairies B.14 from other books, articles and newspapers, some of them identified, but more still undiscovered. We still have a lot to do to catch up with Joyce, a lot of sources to hunt down.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The wonderful World of Wakecraft
‘I
read a good deal here,’ Joyce wrote, in the understatement of the year, on the
5th of August 1924 to Sylvia Beach from his hotel in Saint-Malo. It is no
wonder that the condition of his eyes barely improved. New eye operations
turned out to be necessary, a sixth one in the end of November, and two more in
1925. In the meantime, he worked on, sporadically and as far as his eyesight
permitted, on the watches of Shaun, stopping only to revise chapter I.5 for
publication in Criterion (April
1925), and chapters I.7 and I.8 for This
Quarter and The Calendar (June
1925). And no doubt reading all the while.
We know in many cases what Joyce was reading, but in many
more cases we don’t. The search for Finnegans
Wake sources is not finished by a long way. With Google Book Search we have
a powerful new tool to unveil more sources and map the background of Finnegans Wake more fully, as more and
more books will be put online and the European university libraries will follow
the good example of the University of Michigan, until all the world’s a
database. Of course, results from a Google Book Search alone are not enough to
positively tell us whether Joyce read a particular book or not, because often a
search only yields ‘snippets’. But if there are enough snippets of consecutive
entries found in the same book, the probability rises, and it may be the right
time to try to look for the book or periodical in its paper form, to establish
the context and to doublecheck the findings. One thing is certain, however, and
that is that the paper edition of the Notebooks is an essential prerequisite if
you want to go source hunting on the internet. Joyce’s handwriting is almost
impossible to read for untrained, ordinary human eyes, and without the
transcriptions of Joyce’s scribblings in the Brepols edition (which often
border on the miraculous) you will find yourself in the darkest of woods.
A final word of warning: searching for Wake sources can be
addictive. Once I had found the second part of the Soirées notes in Prairies (VI.B.14), I locked myself up, I
neglected my family, shirked my duties and generally wasn’t able to think about
anything else but finding new sources. This lasted a full month, before I could
tear myself away, little by little, from the World of Wakecraft, but after two
months I still have to have my daily dose of source hunting. So beware. You may
try this at home, but at your own peril.