THE LANGUAGES OF JOYCE THE LANGUAGES OF JOYCE Selected Papers from the 11th International James Joyce Symposium, Venice, 12-18 June 1988 Edited by R.M. BOLLETTIERI BOSINELLI, C. MARENGO VAGLIO and CHR. VAN BOHEEMEN JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY PHILADELPHIA/AMSTERDAM 1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data International James Joyce Symposium (11th : 1988 : Venice, Italy) The languages of Joyce : selected papers from the 11th International James Joyce Symposium, Venice, 12-18 June 1988 / edited by R.M. Bollettieri Bosinelli, C. Marengo Vaglio, and Chr. van Boheemen. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941--Knowledge--Language and languages-Congresses. 2. Joyce, James. 1882-1941-Criticism and interpretation-Congresses. I. Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria. II. Marengo Vaglio, Carla, 1942- . III. Boheemen-Saaf, Christ ine van. IV. Title. PR6019.O9Z627 1988 823'.912~dc20 92-31117 ISBN 90 272 2124 3 (Eur.)/l-55619-473-0 (US) (Hb. alk. paper) CIP ISBN 90 272 2125 1 (Eur.)/l-55619-474-9 (US) (Pb. alk. paper) © Copyright 1992 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O. Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • 821 Bethlehem Pike • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA Contents Introduction Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli ix Abbreviations xix The Languages of Joyce Giorgio Melchiori 1 Joyce, Semiosis and Semiotics Umberto Eco 19 The Language of the Repressed Silences: Where Joyce's Language Stops Marilyn French 41 The Return of the Repressed in Joyce: (Self) Censorship and the Making of a Modernist Susan Stanford Friedman 55 Representing Interiority: Spaces of Sexuality in Ulysses Joseph A. Boone 69 ‘‘Goddinpotty": James Joyce and the Language of Excrement Vincent J. Cheng 85 VI CONTENTS The Language of Absence The Ghosts of Ulysses Maud Ellmann 103 "The Voice of an Unseen Reader" in Giacomo Joyce Elizabeth Brunazzi 121 Re-Signings, Re: Signatures: Joyce and Pound Reading Shakespeare's Will Kathryne V. Lindberg 127 The Language of Presence Shem the Textman Hugh Kenner 145 Dubliners: Double Binds (the Constraints of Childhood and Youth) Bernard Benstock 155 James Joyce and Gift Exchange Phillip F. Herring 173 The Limits of Language Going Back to the Return Jean François Lyotard 193 Linguistic Dissatisfaction in the Wake Fritz Senn 211 CONTENTS VII Towards the Sublime Klaus Reichert 223 Joyce in Babylonia Annie Tardits 229 Physics, Rhetoric, and the Language of Finnegans Wake Dirk Vanderbeke 249 ‘‘Untitled" Alan R. Roughley 257 Notes on Contributors 265 Index 271 Introduction Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli - Language this alls fare for the loathe of Marses ambiviolent about it (FW 518.2) Hardly any critical work on Joyce fails to comment on his peculiar use of language, and yet much remains to be explored in terms of the very notion of ‘‘language(s)". The present collection intends to offer a contribution to such an investigation. Why the languages of Joyce, rather than the language? Joyce's readers know that words are not innocent, nor are morphological markers - the missing apostrophe in Finnegans Wake may well be the most often commented upon grammatical morpheme in literature. The opposition "languages" vs "language" originates in the co-editors' intention to focus on the plurality of Joyce's com municative models - not so much and not only in terms of the variety of registers, styles, and techniques that characterize his writing, but also in terms of the influence that this plurality has had on the language of his readers. The papers collected here document the wide diversity of approaches that the very notion of "language" stimulates when the texts under scrutiny are the texts of Joyce. The expression "of Joyce" is to be read in its double value of "subjective and objective genitive"; it refers not only to the masterful linguistic encoding of Joyce's texts, - Joyce as the possessor of a plurality of languages, the subject who produces verbal communication - but also to the readings inscribed in those "languages" - Joyce as the recipient of a plurality of languages, the object of the hermeneutic work of his readers. It was with this in mind that, when organizing the Eleventh International James Joyce Symposium, Christine van Boheemen and I, as coordinators of the X ROSA MARIA BOLLETTIERI BOSINELLI academic programme, willingly accepted the suggestion - made by Carla Marengo (chair of the conference) - of giving it the general title "The languages of Joyce": in the best tradition of Joyce International Symposia, we wanted to leave the symposium topic open to a wide range of contributions. And open it was. There were about 500 registered participants (of whom 302 delivered one or two papers), coming from twenty different countries. Besides the six major addresses, there were about 400 contributions presented in 67 panels, 16 short paper sessions, and six Living Book Reviews. No volume of proceedings could ever fully document the diversity of viewpoints, critical approaches, and topics that were discussed during that week, or give an idea of all the events that took place within the walls of the Cini Foundation and in the lovely surroundings of San Giorgio Island. Nor would it be possible to identify a single focus characterizing the Symposium. All the papers selected for the present collection, however, converge to illustrate the Symposium's main topic from a variety of viewpoints. The first two articles, Giorgio Melchiori's keynote lecture given at the opening of the conference and Umberto Eco's inauguration of the Bloomsday events, aptly introduce the theoretical problems concerning a definition of the languages of Joyce. Moreover, they tackle the whole range of Joyce's works, from the early production (Melchiori) to Finnegans Wake (Eco). As Melchiori puts it, ‘‘The whole of Joyce's work, from the Epiphanies to Finnegans Wake, is a great feast of languages of which we are asked to partake" (p. 1). This volume is an invitation to join in this "great feast". Each critic, each reader can do so according to her/his own personality, cultural background, literary taste, theoretical framework, and specific competence. So while Mel chiori, as the Shakespeare scholar he also is, brings us to the feast of Joyce's "wonderful vocables" via the words of Mote, the page of Love's Labour's Lost, Eco invites us to enter the universe of Joyce's unlimited semiosis through his reading of Charles Peirce's theory of the sign. Their different perspectives are emblematic of the possible directions of meaning we can follow on our way through the ‘‘meandertale" of Joyce's writing. It is important to notice, however, that both these introductory essays, while legitimizing the different critical approaches represented in the various sections of the volume - in that they consider Joyce's work as the most "open" of open works, at the same time indicate the boundaries of that "openness". Melchiori issues the warning that