The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

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James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual

Liberators of Language

Maria Kager

To cite this article: Maria Kager (2018) James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual
Liberators of Language, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 93:1, 39-47, DOI:
10.1080/00168890.2018.1396082

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2018.1396082

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The Germanic Review, 93: 39–47, 2018
Published with license by Taylor & Francis
ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online
DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2018.1396082

James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner:

Multilingual Liberators of Language

Maria Kager

This article reflects on the relation between Fritz Mauthner and James Joyce, of whom we
know that he read Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache and quotes sections of
it in his monumental last work, Finnegans Wake. It will focus on the complex multilingual
environments in which Joyce and Mauthner grew up and consider the ways in which these
shaped how they thought about language.

Keywords: James Joyce, Fritz Mauthner, multilingualism, bilingualism, modernism,

philology

ritz Mauthner and James Joyce were both convinced of their own genius. In his memoir
F Prager Jugendjahre, Mauthner describes what he calls his “Wunderkindschaft” (23, 25)
and elaborately reflects on the difficulties of growing up as a “Wunderkind” (19), a child
prodigy. He believed his monumental Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions
toward a Critique of Language) to be a revolutionary masterpiece that would forever change
the way philosophy was conducted, and he considered himself the logical and more daring
successor of Kant. While Kant had grasped, as Gershon Weiler puts it, the “immensely impor-

Maria Kager holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and is lecturer in modern
English literature at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her work has appeared in, among others,
Studies in the Novel, The James Joyce Quarterly, The Journal of Modern Literature, L2 Journal and
in various edited volumes. She is currently completing a book about bilingualism and cognition in
modernist fiction.
Copyright C 2017 Maria Kager.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which
permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

39
40 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 93, NUMBER 1 / 2018

tant idea that reason is something in need of criticism,” he had “failed to understand that rea-
son is nothing but language” (3). Although Mauthner acknowledges Kant as a revolutionary
thinker, he judges himself the more radical of the two: “Vor den Pforten der Wahrheit ist Kant
stehen geblieben. Die Sprachkritik allein kann diese Pforten aufschließen und mit lächelnder
Resignation zeigen, dass sie aus der Welt und dem Denken hinaus ins Leere führen.” (Beiträge
II 494) (“Kant remained in front of the gateways of truth. Only the critique of language can
open these gateways and show with cheerful resignation that they lead away from the world
and from thought into emptiness.”) Or, in the words of Jean Michel Rabaté, “Kant’s sad fate
was that, like Moses, he could not enter the promised land of Sprachkritik” (102).
Joyce, too, thought highly of himself. George Russell famously remembers the pre-
tentiousness of a young James Joyce, who spoke so disdainfully of other writers that Russell
observed: “I wouldn’t be his Messiah for a thousand million pounds. He would be always
criticizing the bad taste of his deity” (qtd. in Ellmann 104). When Joyce met Yeats, who was
seventeen years his senior, he disparaged his latest poetry and allegedly told him at the end of
their conversation: “We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you”
(id. n. 106). At the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we find Joyce’s alter ego
Stephen confidently preparing to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience
of [his] race” (253). Like Mauthner, Joyce was convinced that he would write a masterpiece
that would forever change the face of European literature.
The difference between the two is that Joyce was right in his prediction and Mauthner
was not. Joyce’s works are still read today, while those of Mauthner have drifted to the mar-
gins of philosophical awareness. Mauthner may have seen himself as the Messiah of modern
philosophy, but we do not. He is an isolated and mostly ignored thinker who, in spite of his
influence on Wittgenstein, “gathered no followers and created no schools,” and whose major
works have not been translated into English (Skerl 975).
Yet his philosophical beginning was promising. When Mauthner’s Kritik der Sprache
first appeared in 1902, it made an impression in the German-speaking world. Mauthner’s
radical language skepticism held that philosophy so far had neglected to examine critically
the basic assumptions on which its metaphysical conjectures were founded, because it did not
question language itself. According to Mautnner, language and thought are one: “es gibt kein
Denken ohne Sprechen, das heißt ohne Worte. Oder richtiger: Es gibt gar kein Denken, es gibt
nur Sprechen. Das Denken ist das Sprechen auf seinen Ladenwert hin beurteilt” (Beiträge I
176). (“There can be no thinking without speaking, that is without words. Or better: there
is no thinking, there is only speaking. Thinking is speaking valued for its market price.”)
Language, Mauthner claims, consists only of metaphors, based on the recollection of sensory
experience; therefore, it cannot grasp reality. Human beings are too familiar with this system
to recognize it, and it is therefore the task of the philosopher to draw our attention to the
metaphoric nature of language and to free us from the mistaken belief that language can
convey any truth about the world. I will return to Mauthner’s ideas in more detail later in this
article, but this is his theory in brief.
Mauthner’s work expressed ideas that were widespread in contemporary Austro-
Hungarian society, and it was widely read. However, although the Kritik was popular with
the general public, it was not with academic philosophers. Partly, this is due to Mauthner’s
unstructured and loquacious style. The Kritik is an immense body of work, spanning three
 KAGER  JAMES JOYCE AND FRITZ MAUTHNER 41

volumes and over 2,200 pages, and, as Hans Sluga observes, Mauthner “scatters his insights
loosely through the enormous corpus of his text” (Sluga 108). His style is chatty and ram-
bling and very different from the concise, organized philosophical writings of thinkers such
as Kant and Wittgenstein. Moreover, Mauthner was not a professional philosopher. He was
a novelist, a journalist, and a famed theater critic, who worked on his philosophical ideas
in his spare time. As a consequence, academic philosophers considered him a dilettante, a
“journalist who wrote philosophy too” (Sommer n. 243), a writer “who meddled in higher
affairs about which he understood nothing” (Weiler 338).
Yet no other thinker took the critique of language quite as far as Mauthner. He radically
dissolved all ties between language and reality and pushed the critique of language to its very
limits. It is this extreme nature of Mauthner’s language skepticism that made him appealing to
modernist writers who were concerned about the emptiness of modern language, its clichéd
nature, and its inability to communicate, writers such as, for instance, Eugene Jolas, Samuel
Beckett, and James Joyce. They saw, in the words of Beckett, “how worn out and threadbare
was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers” (Disjecta 30) and found an ally
in Mauthner.
Joyce was very interested in the “Sprachkrise” that Mauthner describes in his work.
He read the Kritik in its entirety, all three volumes of it, and took at least twenty pages of
notes.
There has been some critical discussion about when exactly Joyce encountered the
writings of Mauthner for the first time and whether this was or was not too late for him to
have been influenced by Mauthner’s ideas. Several possible dates have been suggested for
Joyce’s initial contact with Mauthner. The earliest possibility is proposed by Joachim Kühn,
who notes that Joyce read Mauthner during his first stay in Zurich, between 1915 and 1919
(n. 14). Samuel Beckett remembered having “skimmed” through Mauthner for Joyce “in 1929
or 1930,” on a “notesnatching operation” for Finnegans Wake (Ben-Zvi 143). In an unpub-
lished extract from his memoirs, Eugene Jolas suggests that he read out sections from Mau-
thner’s Kritik to Joyce during Joyce’s visit to Zurich from September 1934 to February 1935.
Jolas recollects: “I remember reading him the German work on language by Mauthner, and
he was very interested in some of his conclusions that he thought were similar to his own. He
was stretched out on the sofa, his legs intertwined inextricably in the air, constantly taking
notes and gesticulating” (qtd. in van Hulle, “Beckett – Mauthner” 146). But Dirk van Hulle
remarks that Jolas “is not the most reliable source for this kind of dating” (van Hulle “Trans-
textual Undoings” n. 54). And, in fact, notes about Mauthner’s Kritik that genetic critics have
discovered in Joyce’s notebooks date from 1938. Given “the late date [of these notes],” writes
Geert Lernout, “the impact of Mauthner on Joyce’s writing can only be extremely limited
[since] almost all of Finnegans Wake had been written at that time” (22). Moreover, accord-
ing to Lernout, these notes are “disappointing from the perspective of a possible intellectual
influence” (23) and he therefore calls for a “correction of the Mauthner myth” (26).
However, although Joyce might not have actually taken notes from Mauthner before
1938, Mauthner’s ideas were current at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it seems
unlikely that Joyce had not at least heard of the “Sprachkritik” before 1938, especially since
these ideas were, as Jolas pointed out, very similar to his own. Moreover, “proving” influence
is always difficult, and I think it is not interesting to try too hard to demonstrate that Joyce
42 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 93, NUMBER 1 / 2018

was directly influenced by Mauthner. We know that Joyce read Mauthner, and, as Linda Ben-
Zvi has pointed out, “it is certain that, at least, Joyce found in the Critique corroboration for
many of his own views about the functioning and limits of language and found a strong—
albeit garrulous—voice championing the very experiment upon which Joyce was embarked
in the writing of [Finnegans] Wake” (144).
Now, I think it is remarkable that a philosopher from Bohemia and a writer from Dublin
should have reached such similar ideas concerning language. In this article, I would like to
suggest that their shared interest in the limits of language, in what language can and cannot
do, might be explained, at least in part, by the similar linguistic surroundings in which they
grew up. Both Joyce and Mauthner came from a dominated linguistic area, from a complex,
polylingual society, and these circumstances promoted in both an early awareness of and an
interest in language.
Mauthner grew up in Horzitz, a small town in a part of the Hapsburg empire where
the dominating language was Czech. The language of his family, however, was German,
and in Prager Jugendjahre, he describes that as a child he was equally fluent in Czech and
German. In fact, he suggests that, initially, his Czech was probably more fluent as this was
the “Ammensprache” (20), the language he spoke with his nurse. It was not until he was four
years old and allowed to dine with his parents that he became more fluent in German. As
a consequence, he was accustomed to move between the two languages from a very early
age. When he was six, his family moved to Prague, where he attended German-speaking
schools but was also expected to function fully in Czech. In addition, as part of his Jewish
upbringing, he was taught the rudiments of Hebrew (“ein bisschen Hebräisch” (30) (“a little
bit of Hebrew”). He describes the nationalist tensions surrounding the Czech language in
Bohemia at that time and recollects how German-speaking students would be bullied and
even punished if they displayed ignorance of Czech (45). Thus even though he was fluent in
Czech and enjoyed, for instance, translating the Czech poetry of a school friend into German
(44), he experienced Czech as forced on him and as surrounded by anxiety.
In his memoir, Mauthner reflects extensively on the early moving back and forth among
his three languages and concludes that, being a Jew in a bilingual country, he has “keine rechte
Muttersprache” (50) (“no real mother tongue”). What he did have was an early passion for
“Sprachforschung,” for philology or linguistic studies (30). He describes becoming aware at
a very young age of certain “Sprachgesetze” or “linguistic laws” and asking questions, “die
törichten Fragen einer veralteten Sprachphilosophie” (“the foolish questions of an outdated
philosophy of language”), such as “warum heißt das und das Ding so und so? Im Böhmischen
so, und im Deutschen so?” (31), “warum ist dieser Ausdruck richtig und der andere nicht?”
(197) (“why is such and such a thing called this or that? This in Czech, and this in German?”
“Why is this expression correct and that one not?”). Mauthner’s linguistic environment, he
argues, predestined him to a philosophy of language. He writes:

Indeed, my linguistic conscience, my linguistic critique was sharpened that I

could regard not only German, but also Czech and Hebrew as the language of
my “forefathers,” and that I had the corpses of three languages to carry around
with me in the words that I used. Indeed, a language philosopher could develop
under such psychological influences.
 KAGER  JAMES JOYCE AND FRITZ MAUTHNER 43

Jawohl, mein Sprachgewissen, meine Sprachkritik wurde geschärft dadurch,

daß ich nicht nur Deutsch, sondern auch Tschechisch und Hebräisch als die
Sprachen meiner ,Vorfahren’ zu betrachten, dass ich also die Leichen dreier
Sprachen in meinen eigenen Worten mit mir herumzutragen hatte. Jawohl, ein
Sprachphilosoph konnte unter solchen psychologischen Einflüssen
heranwachsen. (48–49)

This idea of different linguistic corpses that haunt the languages that he speaks is, I
think, very interesting with regard to Joyce.
Like Mauthner, Joyce grew up in a community where language was surrounded by
anxiety and pressure. As an Irishman, Joyce takes up a different, colonial, position with regard
to language than Mauthner, yet the way in which they wrote about their relation to language
is surprisingly comparable. Joyce considered English a “borrowed tongue” and viewed the
Irish people as “condemned to express themselves in a language not their own” (Letters
226). Through Stephen Dedalus, Joyce expressed a sense of estrangement from the English
language. Comparing his own English to that of his English-born Dean of Studies in the
famous “funnel” passage from Portrait of the Artist, Stephen reflects:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different
are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak
or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so
foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its
words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
(Portrait 189)

The Hiberno-English that Joyce speaks is haunted by the ghost of Irish inasmuch as
many Hiberno-English words and expressions are anglicized versions of Irish ones. More-
over, even “English” words, such as the “home, Christ, ale, master” that Stephen mentions are
pronounced differently by an Irish person than by an English one. The linguistic “corpse” of
Irish is present in the English that Stephen, and Joyce, speak, and this awareness does not just
cause Stephen and his creator to “fret in the shadow” of English but is organically connected
to Joyce’s creative misuse of English.
For Joyce, as for Mauthner, consciousness of the dual linguistic powers at work in his
language inspired an early linguistic awareness and an obsession with words. This linguistic
consciousness developed even further when Joyce studied Italian and French in university
and, later, when he moved to Trieste and became a complete bilingual in Italian and English,
but it is there from the very beginning of his literary career.
Joyce’s works are all driven by an obsession with language. In Portrait of the Artist,
as Hugh Kenner writes, Stephen “strain[s] his imagination after secret connections between
real things” and words (Kenner 7). A young Stephen muses, for instance, “Suck was a queer
word” (11), and he asks: “How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold?” (35).
He ponders the fact that different words can refer to one and the same thing:
44 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 93, NUMBER 1 / 2018

God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for
God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said
Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But,
though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the
world and God understood what all the different people who prayed said in their
different languages, still God remained always the same God and God’s real
name was God. (16)

It makes Stephen “very tired” to think like this about the relation between a word’s
form and its meaning (16), but he cannot stop, and it is something that will continue to fas-
cinate him—and his creator. The university student in Stephen Hero continues this kind of
“Sprachforschung:”

He read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had
from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was
often hypnotized by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him
strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly. (26)

Joyce was not ignorant of the value of words but, on the contrary, made it the very
essence of his writing: Joyce’s works are all “about words” (Kenner 12). In fact, the lan-
guage of Dublin is the subject of all his works. To quote Kenner once more: Joyce “makes it
impossible to ignore the word on the page” (Kenner 12). This tendency of making us notice
language explodes in Finnegans Wake, of which F. R. Leavis wrote: in “Work in Progress,
[the working title of Finnegans Wake] it is plain, the interest in words and their possibilities
comes first” (194). For Leavis, this is not a good thing. He complains of Joyce’s “liberties
with English” (id.), and Joyce indeed is always testing how pliable the rules of language
really are and often breaks them. For Joyce, however, these assaults on the linguistic norms
of English constitute a creative solution to the problem that Mauthner voiced in his Kritik: the
fact that language has become stale and worn out, that it has lost its meaning and its ability
to be noticed.
In sum, the complex linguistic environments in which both Joyce and Mauthner grew
up caused them to have a heightened linguistic consciousness, and in both Joyce and Mau-
thner this resulted in a sense that language was arbitrary. Linguistic research into multilin-
gualism suggests that it is characteristic of multilinguals to realize that language is arbitrary,
“that a word’s form and its meaning are not inseparable entities but have become associated
merely through convention” (de Groot 390). As a consequence, multilinguals are aware “that
the relation between a word’s sound and meaning is arbitrary, that a particular thing (or living
being or abstract concept) remains this very same thing if its name were to be changed into a
completely different one” (390). The linguist S. J. Evans even suggests that the separation of
sound and meaning can be a liberating achievement. He writes: “it frees the mind from the
tyranny of words. It is extremely difficult for a monoglot to dissociate thought from words,
but he who can express his ideas in two languages is emancipated” (qtd. in de Groot 293).
To free the mind from the tyranny of words is precisely the aim of Mauthner’s Kri-
tik. Here, he insists that language is nothing but “a construct that deludes us to infer unity
 KAGER  JAMES JOYCE AND FRITZ MAUTHNER 45

between words and the world, when that unity is nothing but interpretation” (Wellbery 656).
People who believe “that language renders a unitary ‘truth’ merely forget the historical con-
ventionality of language arising from its metaphoricity” (Wellbery 656). Language, suggests
Mauthner, consists only of arbitrary metaphors, but we are so used to these metaphors that
we no longer recognize them as such. We do not realize, for instance, that we are using
metaphors “wenn wir die Zeit mit räumlichen Ausdrücken (lang, kurz), wenn wir die Ton-
höhe mit Raum- oder Farbenbegriffen (tief, hell) umschreiben.” (Beiträge II 468) (“when we
indicate time with spatial expressions (long, short), or when we describe pitch with spatial
or color concepts, (deep, light).” We think we can use language to describe the world around
us, but, in fact, language cannot reflect any truth beyond itself. Truth is not a correlation
between language and reality but a correlation with the use of language. Language is the
use of language, and words mean only what we use them to mean. Mauthner writes: “Die
Sprache ist nur ein Scheinwert wie eine Spielregel, die auch uns so zwingender wird, je mehr
Mitspieler sich ihr unterwerfen, die aber die Wirklichkeitswelt weder ändern noch begreifen
will” (Beiträge I 25). “Language is only a convention, like a rule of a game: the more partic-
ipants there are, the more forceful it will be, but it will neither alter nor understand the real
world.”
Most human beings are unaware of the arbitrary nature of language. They think that
they can know the world, that they can discover an objective truth about reality, but, in fact,
they are imprisoned by the hold of language. And, according to Mauthner, those who are
bewitched by language cannot free us from it:

He who sets out to write a book with a hunger for words, a love of words, with
the conceit of words, in the language of yesterday or of today or of tomorrow, in
the coagulated language of a confident and stable step, he cannot undertake the
task of liberation from language. I must destroy language behind me and in front
of me and within me step by step if I want to ascend in the critique of language,
which is the most important occupation for thinking man, I must destroy each
step of the ladder as I tread upon it. He who wishes to follow me must rebuild
the steps in order to destroy them once more.

Der kann das Werk der Befreiung von der Sprache nicht vollbringen, der mit
Worthunger, mit Wortliebe und mit Worteitelkeit ein Buch zu schreiben aus-
geht in der Sprache von gestern oder von heute oder von morgen, in der erstar-
rten Sprache einer bestimmten festen Stufe. Will ich emporklimmen in der
Sprachkritik, die das wichtigste Geschäft der denkenden Menschheit ist, so muß
ich die Sprache hinter mir und vor mir und in mir vernichten von Schritt zu
Schritt, so muß ich jede Sprosse der Leiter zertrümmern, indem ich sie betrete.
Wer folgen will, der zimmere die Sprossen wieder, um sie abermals zu zertrüm-
mern. (Beiträge I 1–2)

Ben Zvi has observed that Joyce expressed himself “in words that are strikingly sim-
ilar to Mauthner’s” (148): “I know [language] is no more than a game,” he wrote to Harriet
Shaw Weaver on October 16 1925, “but it is a game that I have learned to play in my own
46 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 93, NUMBER 1 / 2018

way” (qtd. in Ellmann 594). It is, moreover, a game whose rules Joyce enjoys breaking—in
this sense, Stephen Dedalus’s “Non serviam!” (U 15.4228) is also a linguistic endeavor, inas-
much as he will not serve or obey the rules of conventional English. Joyce famously claimed
he had “declared war” on the English language (Letters 237), although he later added that
this destruction need not be permanent: “I’ll give them back their English language. I’m
not destroying it for good” (JJLL I 546). While writing Ulysses, Joyce remarked, “I cannot
express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition” (Letters 397). In Finnegans
Wake, Joyce liberates himself from this tradition. Here, he is truly “au bout de l’anglais”
(Letters 546), at the end of English. Or, as Finnegans Wake proclaims of itself, “this is nat
language at any sinse of the world” (FW 83.12).
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce attempts to renew the congealed, fossilized forms of lan-
guage that Mauthner describes in the Kritik. He destroys English as we know it and cre-
ates a new language consisting of multilingual portmanteau words that draw our attention to
the arbitrary and conventional nature of linguistic rules. Finnegans Wake is, of course, one
immense example of the polyglot pun—it would be a challenge to find a sentence that has not
at least several of them, but I will give just one example here. With a word such as “drunk-
ard paper” (FW 114.22), for instance, which we find in the “letter” section of Finnegans
Wake, Joyce plays with the French “papier buvard,” “blotting paper,” but literally “paper
that drinks,” and also with the slang word “blotto,” extremely drunk. In this way, he makes
us question the obviousness of a word such as blotting paper. Why should it not be called
“drunkard paper,” when what it does is drink the ink? Through this kind of interlingual play
with words, through his use of multilingual portmanteau words and puns, Joyce makes us
notice language and question its conventions.
For Mauthner, the critique of language must eventually lead to silence. Since lan-
guage cannot grasp reality, it is not worth speaking. Moreover, “[b]ecause language can-
not transcend itself in order to assess its own competence, resolute thinkers must renounce
speech” (Johnston 198). Thus the ultimate ideal of the Kritik is silence. Joyce’s solution is
as extreme, but it points in the opposite direction. Finnegans Wake is not a call for silence
but the contrary—a vociferous celebration of the limits of language that breaks through these
limits, playing with them, drawing our attention to them, and transgressing them.

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