Abstract
This chapter develops new theoretical frameworks to address the key ethical issues pertaining to the multilingual position: issues of linguistic and subjective boundedness and hospitality, as well as mutual transformation and “transmaterialisation,” occurring in the space of encountering difference—be that an encounter with an-other subject; with an experience belonging to an-other; with a stylistically estranging or destabilising, “monstrous” text; or with an-other, foreign language. The chapter begins with a revisiting and an ethical re-evaluation of Bakhtin’s theorisation of the dialogic imagination and “heteroglossia.” Implicitly mirroring Chap. 2’s exploration of multilingual materiality, this chapter cultivates an ethical theory of embodied engagement with Wakean multilingualism. It engages the works of feminist phenomenologist and disability theorist Margrit Shildrick, her collaboration with disability theorist Janet Price, as well as essays and “body-poetry” by multilingual Caribbean poet Marlene NourbeSe Philip in dialogue with Audre Lorde’s ethics of the creative dialectic. The chapter also engages with Judith Butler and Merleau-Ponty in an ethical dialogue with Joyce’s contemporaries C. K. Ogden and F. R. Leavis, who took up a particularly hostile position to the modernist multilingual, transculturalist movement championed by the contributors of Eugène Jolas’s modernist magazine transition. Section v, “Ethical encounters with the Wake,” delves into Joyce’s complicated representations of child abuse and sexual violence, which are not referenced semantically so much as materially embodied in the Wake’s multilingual poetics. This section queries the creative role and ethical responsibility of the reader in embodying the violence of the text and explores the coincidence of Joyce using “minor” languages and registers (pidgins, creoles, baby talk, “bad English,” etc.) to convey the unspeakable violence against a minor (HCE’s daughter Issy).
An early version of this chapter was published as an article in the 2016 issue of European Joyce Studies: Boriana Alexandrova, “Babababblin’ Drolleries and Multilingual Phonologies: Developing a Multilingual Ethics of Embodiment through Finnegans Wake,” European Joyce Studies (June 2016): 90–104.
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Notes
- 1.
For a glimpse into their friendship, see their letter exchange published across two 1965 issues of The New York Review of Books: Edmund Wilson, “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” The New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/07/15/the-strange-case-of-pushkin-and-nabokov/; Vladimir Nabokov, “Letters: The Strange Case of Nabokov and Wilson,” The New York Review of Books, August 26, 2965, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/08/26/letters-the-strange-case-of-nabokov-and-wilson/
- 2.
Maria Kager, “A Search for the Viscous and Sawdust: (Mis)pronunciation in Nabokov’s American Novels,” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (2013): 79–80.
- 3.
Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” in Lolita (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 316–17.
- 4.
Ekaterina I͡U. Genieva, I͡U. A. Roznatovskai͡a, and I͡U. G. Fridshteĭn, eds., “Russkai͡a odissei͡a” Dzheĭmsa Dzhoĭsa (Moskva: Rudomino, 2005), 109.
- 5.
This foreshadows my engagement with Margrit Shildrick’s concept of “monstrous corporeality” later in this chapter, wherein “the boundaries between self and other” are collapsed and whereby the monsters “leave also a trace embedded within that, in Derridean terms, operates as the signifier not of difference but of différance . What is at stake throughout is the risk of indifferentiation.” Margrit Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin: Reconfiguring Relational Economies,” in Thinking through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, Transformations (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 163.
- 6.
See Chap. 3, for a more detailed discussion of Bloom’s embodied engagements with Italian.
- 7.
Here as everywhere throughout this book, the term “singular” implies “changeable”—that is, a variability contingent on shifts in the temporal, spatial, cultural, psychological, and so on in the context of the literary event.
- 8.
Marlene NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 18; second emphasis mine.
- 9.
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 111; my emphasis.
- 10.
These include indigenous Amerindian languages, African languages that arrived with slavery, Indian languages like Bhojpuri and Hindi, as well as Spanish, French, and English. Lise Winer, Trinidad and Tobago, Varieties of English around the World 6 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1993), 8–11.
- 11.
“The Master’s Tools” essay, delivered as a panel contribution at the Second Sex Conference in New York, September 29, 1979, was Lorde’s response to the political, cultural, racial, and class inequalities palpable within feminist politics in her time. She observes the ethical necessity for feminist politics and theory to include the voices of “poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.” Yet she notes at the start of her talk that “I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.” Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 110.
- 12.
Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, 18; my emphasis.
- 13.
This binary opposition is well illustrated by the iconic ideological debate between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe on the political and artistic bearing of the English language on African literatures. 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; 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.
- 14.
Joyce, Portrait, 205; my emphasis.
- 15.
Joyce, Portrait, 193.
- 16.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 12.
- 17.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 362.
- 18.
One of the fundamental premises of The Dialogic Imagination is that the novel form, objectified as a realist work of prose, counteracts the idealisation of language and literary subject matter performed by poetic forms (e.g. the epic poem).
- 19.
The reasons for picking up this aspect of Bakhtin’s idiocultural perspective will become clear in the course of this chapter as I move on to consider readerly engagement with the Wake through the scope of gender and disability theory.
- 20.
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 296.
- 21.
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 299–300; my emphasis.
- 22.
As shown in examples throughout this book, each literary event is weathered by variable factors, such as the time and place of reading; the continuum of the reader’s conscious and unconscious thoughts, emotions, and associations; a person’s particular mode of reading, be that quietly to oneself or aloud in a reading group, or onstage in an interpretative performance; the reader’s singular bodily disposition, multilingual repertoire, or idiocultural specificity, and so on.
- 23.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 141.
- 24.
Vike Martina Plock, “Bodies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, ed. Sean Latham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 186.
- 25.
A striking extract from Woolf’s diary, an entry dated August 16, 1922, just months after the publication of Ulysses, describes it as “An illiterate, underbred book […]: the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? […] Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.” Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 1st American ed., vol. 2 (New York, NY: Jovanovich, 1978), 189.
- 26.
See, for example: Marion Quirici, “Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics,” Joyce Studies Annual (2016): 84–109.; Vike Martina Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010). See also: Siobhán Purcell, “‘BUCKLED DISCOURSES’: Disability and Degeneration in Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks,” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 27, no. 1 (2015): 29–41.
- 27.
See, for example, Quirici’s tracings of “nausea” reported by Joyce’s reviewers. Quirici, “Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics.”
- 28.
Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability,” in Disability/Postmodernity (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 67.
- 29.
Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin,” 161.
- 30.
Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin,” 160.
- 31.
Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake”: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/JoyceColl.NorrisDecenter, 131.
- 32.
C. K. Ogden, “James Joyce’s ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ in Basic English,” transition, no. 21 (March 1932): 259.
- 33.
Price and Shildrick, “Bodies Together,” 63.
- 34.
John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, “Finnegans Wake” (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 4.
- 35.
My use of the term “historical” here refers to the (in no way exhaustive or definitive) possibility of reading a character like ALP in conversation with the literary, cultural, political, and even biographical imagery that the text may potentially conjure up. For example, Joyce wrote to Italo Svevo in a letter from February 20, 1924 that he had “given the name of Signora Schmitz”—that is, Livia Svevo, Italo Svevo’s spouse—“to the protagonist of the book I am writing,” thereby formulating a historical-biographical basis for the character. In the biography, Ellmann also quotes from an interview Joyce apparently gave to an Italian journalist: “They say I have immortalized Svevo, but I’ve also immortalized the tresses of Signora Svevo. These were long and reddish-blond […]. The river at Dublin passes dye-houses and so has reddish water. So I have playfully compared these two things in the book I’m writing. A lady in it will have the tresses which are really Signora Svevo’s.” It could also be said that ALP is a character written in the past while simultaneously becoming perpetually rewritten in the present, through the creative dialectic transpiring in the event of reading. Stuart Gilbert, The Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, The Complete Letters of James Joyce (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), 211–12; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 561.
- 36.
Price and Shildrick, “Bodies Together,” 68.
- 37.
Cataldi’s Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space. Reflections on Merleau -Ponty’s Philosophy of Embodiment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) is one of the earliest and most influential feminist re-imaginations of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of “the flesh of the world” and inter-subjective (or cross-bodily) “transitivity” as conceived in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Judith Butler’s position on the unseverability of language from the body is also at play here: “language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 37–38.
- 38.
Price and Shildrick, “Bodies Together,” 74.
- 39.
“It is true that ‘the things’ in question are my own, that the whole operation takes place (as we say) ‘in me,’ within my landscape, whereas the problem is to institute another landscape.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 141.
- 40.
Margrit Shildrick, “Visceral Phenomenology: Organ Transplantation, Identity, and Bioethics,” in Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 47–68.
- 41.
Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin.”
- 42.
Shildrick, “Visceral Phenomenology,” 58.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin,” 163; my emphasis.
- 45.
C. K. Ogden, Debabelization: With a Survey of Contemporary Opinion on the Problem of a Universal Language (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1931), 21–22; my emphasis.
- 46.
Ogden, Debabelization, 15–16.
- 47.
Eugène Jolas et al., “Inquiry about the Malady of Language,” transition 23 (1935): 153.
- 48.
Ogden, Debabelization, 13.
- 49.
Ogden, Debabelization, 11–12; my emphasis.
- 50.
Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), 9.
- 51.
Jespersen, Language, 191–92.
- 52.
Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin,” 161.
- 53.
Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, 22.
- 54.
Shildrick, “You Are There Like My Skin,” 161.
- 55.
For example, in John Gordon’s “Finnegans Wake”: A Plot Summary. Moreover, in their 1982 plot summary, Understanding Finnegans Wake, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon similarly read this passage as a dialogue between Issy and her mirror image, narrated chiefly in her own voice. They suggest: “She puts on her lipstick, pursing her lips in the mirror, saying: ‘Move your mouth towards minth, more, preciousest, more on more! …’ It is her tete-a-tete with herself, over whom she is incurably jealous and impossibly erotic.” John O’Hanlon and Danis Rose, Understanding Finnegans Wake: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1982), 94. In his Reader’s Guide to FW, Tindall reads the tenth answer as “a dialogue between Shaun and Isabel,” who he suggests are represented as lovers despite also being brother and sister (116). Tindall recognises the Swiftian reference embodied in Issy’s “little language” but he also problematically characterises her as a vain, flirtatious ingénue—“Her chief interest outside loving is clothing” (117)—and he even goes so far as to say, dismissively, that “Isabel, wherever she appears, is a constant bonehead.”
- 56.
Interestingly, in the earliest published versions of Swift’s letters to Stella from 1766, 1768, and 1784, editors Deane Swift and John Hawkesworth “used their editions to ‘improve’ upon the original letters, correcting the ‘little language’ […] which mimics infantile speech patterns, and omitting passages that they felt detracted from the clergyman’s dignity.” Abigail Williams, “The Difficulties of Swift’s Journal to Stella,” Review of English Studies, no. 62 (2011): 759, doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgr009.
- 57.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2012). The square brackets contain the textual variant, which the editors omit in the main body of the text in this edition and include in their “Selected Variants” list on pp. 631–46. The current variant is sourced from the James Joyce Archive, vol. 49, pp. 479 and 478, and is listed on p. 635 of this edition. All such textual variants hereafter will appear square-bracketed in the quotes drawn from the Wake.
- 58.
Textual variant listed in square brackets and sourced from JJA 47:76, 47:96. See “Selected Variants,” p. 635.
- 59.
Note also the pun on “accent” with “assent” and “ascent,” suggesting that acquiring an acceptable English accent is an act of compliance and a rise towards an abstract, perhaps political or even moral, ideal.
- 60.
The term “block” seems particularly appropriate in this context, as a double entendre playing on the act of putting words in Issy’s (and the reader’s) mouth, which has the potential to impede her speech or block out her voice, as in “Sall I puhim in momou. Mummum,” and the slang term for sexual penetration as used in Joyce’s December 9, 1909 letter to Nora. James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellamnn (London: Faber, 1975).
- 61.
The multilingual formulation carries meanings like “And you must not play jealous” (“zeloso” being the Portuguese word for “jealous”) and “And you must not play zealously.” It should also be noted that “musnoo” could be read as both “must not” (or “must no” in a pidgin formulation) and “must (k)now,” which again in a pidgin formulation would be able to signify all meanings simultaneously: “And you must know/no play jealous/zealous.”
- 62.
FWEET also interprets this as a reference to the English proverb “Moderation is everything,” potentially revealing an additional layer of meaning. Raphael Slepon, “Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET),” updated October 19, 2013, http://fweet.org.
- 63.
See, for example: Gordon, “Finnegans Wake”: A Plot Summary, 155.
- 64.
Derek Attridge, “Ethical Modernism: Servants as Others in J. M. Coetzee’s Early Fiction,” Poetics Today 25, no. 4 (2004): 654, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/poet/summary/v025/25.4attridge.html.
- 65.
Marian Eide, Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 84–85.
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Alexandrova, B. (2020). Ethical Multilingualism. 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_5
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