Review

Author(s): Clive Hart

Review by: Clive Hart
Source: James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 12 (Oct., 1983), p. 5
Published by: James Joyce Broadsheet
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30076367
Accessed: 22-06-2016 03:24 UTC

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William M. Schutte Index of Recurrent Elements in
James Joyce's ' Ulysses'
Carbondale: Southern Illinois U.P. 1982 429pp
$20.00
ISBN: 0-8093-1067-8
MORE THAN
twentiethany other
century artist
- more ofProust
even than the
-Joyce understood the interdependence of
language and memory. He understood that the relat-
ing of beginnings, middles and ends is a primary
activity of intelligence, and that the capacity to
perceive and discriminate among such relationships
is at the heart of the aesthetic response. In reading
even the shortest of Joyce's works one's memory is, or
ought to be, continuously engaged, standing outside
the flux of the text and doing the work of building
imaginative structures. With criticism - and not least
the criticism of Joyce - rapidly falling into the hands
of people who would not experience aesthetic delight
in the Prado itself, it is more than ever important to
stress Joyce's role as a maker, a shaper of shapes
which, more than the sum of their parts, work on us
by triggering unexpected insights.
Recently there have been a number of attempts to
free us from contemplation and the exercise of
memory by the promotion of linear readings. Involve-
ment in the progress and process of Ulysses, in the flux
of its modulating surface, is indeed invigorating, but
it also tends to avoid the question of why the book is
as it is, what makes it this thing and no other, just so
long, just so dense. Some of us still want a sense of the
whole. Such a 'sense' is not at all the same as a single,
stateable, pigeonholeable 'meaning'; indeed,
meaning is no more at issue here than when one is
engaged with the musical whole which is the Goldberg
Variations. With Ulysses as with music, linear involve-
ment is delightful, but not nearly so delightful as an
awareness, achieved through memory, of how things
hang together.
What, however, can one most profitably relate to
what? What are the constitutive elements of the
book? As with all the most powerful works of art, the
difficulty is 'not so much to analyse as to identify
them. They are certainly not the same as those which
make up a newspaper article, a guide book, or any
and every other kind of writing. They are of a higher
conceptual order and are 'privileged' in the sense that
they evaporate, or at any rate are no longer to be
found, when the text is subjected to analysis at too
low a level.
Mr Schutte's book is a useful aid to memory,
supplementing Hanley's Word Index. Before the work
of listing recurrent elements could be undertaken, Mr
Schutte had to make decisions, the most important of
which was what, for the purpose, to take the word
Ulysses to mean. Mr Schutte takes it to mean the
words on the page and what he indexes are recurrent
elements of the written text. Although he does not, of
course, limit himself to graphically similar words and
phrases, most of his entries are firmly based on
graphic units. Here are a handful, chosen at random,
from his page 2: 'hair, grained and hued like pale
oak'; 'blood and ouns'; 'one moment'; 'a low whistle
of call'; 'Chrysostomos'; 'a prelate, patron of the arts
in the middle ages'. The elements are arranged in
text order, making it possible to use the book as a
continuous guide while reading. The first occurrence
Illustrating Finnegans Wake
WwHAT which,
ARE WE so theTO MAKE
scholars tell of a book
us, has no
characters and which, as the author
insisted, has neither 'goahead plot' nor is written in
any recognizable language? There seem to be plenty
of verbose spokesmen and women within its pages
prepared, apparently, to correct this impression. The
particularly self-assured voice of the narrator of 1,5
can be heard declaring (of something) that it 'is not a
miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs
and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and
juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only
looks as like -it as damn it.' Perhaps the scholars,
entangled within their own knotty verbiage, are not
the best persons to enlighten us on this score. We
should turn, then, to those artists who have
attempted to represent its 'whatage' in line and paint.
One of the best illustrations of Finnegans Wake I have
ever seen is Jean Lancri's Auxfenetres du Fleuve (oil on
canvas, 1972). This large painting, with its segments
of colour linked by the motif of the river and filled
with symbolic objects and letters of the alphabet,
reminds us that Finnegans Wake was written at the
time when cubism and surrealism were the vital
contemporary modes in art. His painting is a specific
attempt to create an image for the whole work and its
visual allusions to Arp, Miro and Klee are well
conceived.
Lancri's painting was first displayed at the Fifth
International James Joyce Symposium in Paris in
1975. There art few equivalent works of art to match
it. But it is not, strictly speaking, an attempt to
illustrate Finnegans Hake. We have featured more
specifically illustrative works in the past. The
etchings of Saul Field are an example. His work, like
that of Stella Steyn on page one of this issue, selects
images or vignettes and translates them into fairly
representational scenic equivalents. They are of
interest to the reader of the "ake insofar as they
5
9
Bok , 0
evew
of each element lists all future occurrences. Those
future occurrences are also noted at the appropriate
points, with cross references to the initial list. At the
end of the book there is an alphabetical index refer-
ring the reader to initial occurrences.
There is much to be thankful for here, and I do not
imply criticism of Mr Schutte's admirable efforts and
achievements if I add that I also find his book
profoundly unsatisfying. The problem lies in the
difficulty - perhaps the impossibility - of the
enterprise itself. The most interesting recurrences in
Ulysses, as in so many books, are not textual at all,
and they therefore escape any verbal filter which Mr
Schutte or anyone else might devise. To take one
simple and important group of recurrent but only
partially verbal elements: although 'sexual fascina-
tion' and 'menstruation' are listed, one will look in
vain for an easy guide to adultery, gonorrhea,
impotence, masturbation, syphilis, veneral disease.
And in any case the most exciting recurrent elements
in Ulysses are not only non-verbal but also non-
thematic: the periodic shifts of tone and imagery at
the end of each chapter, the echoing of gesture and
physical movement, the mirror-image relationships
in 'Penelope' which it took most of us so long to
notice. But what makes Ulysses so satisfying a work of
art is one's growing awareness of recurrences more
tenuous still. The idea of recurrence needs, in fact, to
be broadened so that one is concerned not only with
clear and positive repetition but with any necessary
relationship suggesting that this must go with that.
Not only is Christ, in this sense, a recurrence of
Adam, but so also is Eve. The dark of 'Eumaeus' is an
inverted recurrence of the light of 'Telemachus'; the
dogs enjoying life in Molly's memory of their copula-
tion are recurrences of the dead dog of 'Proteus'. He
proves by algebra ...
Although Mr Schutte's book does not, could not,
offer a direct guide to the full range of such
recurrences, it prepares the ground by giving us a
firmer sense of the textual networks than most of us,
individually, will have been able to perceive for
ourselves. Inevitably he misses many even of the
simpler kind: 'Give us the paw!' (305.22) recurs not
only in 'Circe', at 454.04, but also in Molly's dog-
inspired 'Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I'm dying for
it' (89.10, 778.29), which in turn recurs in the 'dying
for one's country' element, which Mr Schutte also
omits to relate explicitly to the violent erection on the
scaffold. Ulysses being so rich and intricate a work,
recurrences of this kind exfoliate forever.
A spot check of a handful of entries shows the index
to be quite accurate. The few typos I noticed were
relatively insignificant and it is clear that Mr Schutte
has taken greater pains in preparing his book than
has sometimes been the case with compilers of
Joycean lists. It is not his fault that the results of his
useful work have had, no doubt for economic reasons,
to be reproduced from typescript. This is nevertheless
regrettable, since the dreadful layout, with inflexible
spacing and a severely limited range of symbols, have
made his book more cumbersome to use than would
have been the case had good letterpress been
available.
Clive Hart
manage to do what is often so laboriously attempted
by the critic: they present an immediate and
composite picture of the visual components of a
passage. And more often than not they reflect the wit
(Field) or the whimsy (Steyn) of the passage without
substituting the crudities of the botched paraphrase.
The drawing on the cover of this issue is the latest
of a series of drawings which attempt to paraphrase
the text in visual terms. The intention was to depict
the 'attitude' of HCE as he appears before William
the Conk and to reveal the sheer comicality of his
curious regalia. The attempt to do this has
highlighted some of the familiar aspects of reading
the Wake: the difficulty of fitting a face to the
characters; the tendency of words to be released from
their historical locations; the ambivalence devolving
upon the recognizable by the presence of neologisms.
The exercise becomes symptomatic of the
hermeneutic process itself and the Falstaffian figure
that emerges is clothed in an assemblage of stage
props that owe as much to the interpreter's
guesswork as they do to Joyce's deliberate fudging of
the borders between naturalism and surrealism.
Relatively straightforward terms like 'topee',
'surcingle', 'plus fours' and 'puttees', deprived of the
semiotic codes that would designate them military,
clerical, athletic or fashionable articles, become as
ambiguous as the Joycisms 'bulldog boots' and
'pocketcoat'. Yet these indeterminacies are what the
reader, as much as the illustrator, has continually to
wrestle with.
A rather different effect is achieved when the
illustrator attempts to render in pictorial form a
complete narrative sequence, and it is this less usual
aspect of illustration that is represented in this issue
by the line drawings of Tim Ahern and the cartoons
of Thomas Prindle. Their illustrations attest to their
imaginative grasp of the anarchic comedy of Finnegans
I'ake and, though neither artist solves the problem of
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Thomas Faerber and Markus Luchsinger Joyce
und Zfrich
Ziirich: Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft 1982 95pp
HE PROSPECT of bringing together the
major factors relating to Joyce and Z(irich
and the impact of the city on his work is an
exciting one. Handsomely illustrated as it is,
however, this book falls somewhat short of one's
expectations. The authors, two Swiss students, set
out to present the main biographical details relating
to Joyce's sojourn in Zirich by creating thematic
divisions rather than relying on chronological
sequence. They also attempt an examination of the
numerous allusions associated with ZGrich, tracing
their origins and their functions in Joyce's works.
The biographical material is introduced by a
discussion of the pitfalls to be encountered in using
such information and the possible relevance that may
be elicited from it. Using Ellmann's biography, they
point out the already widely accepted criticism that
accuracy tends to be sacrificed to narrative flow. In
attempting to avoid such flaws, however, the authors'
concise presentation of biographical data unwittingly
distorts many of Ellmann's conclusions. The authors
seldom give reasons for their somewhat idiosyncratic
notions. The most amusing of these is their transfor-
mation of Ellmann's 'Joyce impressed Weiss with his
fine, pleasant voice' to ' Weiss halltte eine gute Stimme, die
Joyce grossen Eindruck machte.'
The extensive section detailing the most important
of Joyce's allusions to Zririch and Switzerland is
heavily indebted to Fritz Senn's work but is marred
(as is the whole book) by misquotations and printing
errors. In attempting to disprove Straumann's view
that there are few demonstrable links between
Martha Fleischmann and Gerty MacDowell, they
attempt to substantiate these links by using evidence
clearly culled from Ellmann's biography. The fact
that his evidence comes mainly from Straumann is
ironically overlooked. Oddly enough, despite this
opportunity to take a hard, critical look at Ellmann's
approach to this issue, they fail to take up the
challenge.
The book is at its most informative when dealing
with the history of the Sechseldiuten fertility rite
(literally the ringing of six o'clock). Aspects of this
ancient Zilrich ceremony, celebrating the burial of
winter, which are woven into Finnegans Wake, are
thoroughly examined. It should be noted, however,
that Fritz Senn has written extensively on this topic
in the past and the present writers add little that is
new. The final chapter, focusing on Zfirich as a meta-
phor for the City in Ulysses, and on the influence of
the labyrinth game bought by Joyce in Zfirich, airs
some interesting ideas. However, a good deal more
work needs to be done for this chapter's potential to
be fully realized.
A book on this subject is welcome and while it
suffers from serious shortcomings in the unskillful
handling of complex material, it will nonetheless be
of some value to those who require a concise
introduction to the influence of ZUrich on Joyce's life
and work. Joycean scholars, however, would be
better advised to work directly with the published
sources from which this book's information is mainly
drawn.
Georgia Herlt
the multifaceted text, they provide interesting and
amusing interpretations of the metamorphic world of
the book. Prindle's cartoons suit the formulaic nature
of the comic-strip format and of the 'MaMaLuJo'
chapter of the Wake where the stock responses of the
four prurient old men-women readily identify a
stageyness in the passage. Prindle has captured the
stereotypicality of the characters: the beligerent
stage-Irishness of the old men as well as the over-
sentimentalized images of the mythical lovers.
Tim Ahern has boldly avoided the limitations of
representationalism that, in the end, restrict Prindle
to a set of variations on a basic caricature. His
drawings were used to illustrate the first issues of the
Broadsheet and it is a pleasure to welcome the
publication in book form of his illustrations of the
first chapter of Finnegans 14"ake. His style is
Thurberesque and the deliberately unsophisticated
drawings express the unhibited glee in the gigantic,
the sexual and the fanciful that is undoubtedly an
essential ingredient of a Wake reading. The
Illnesstraited Colossick Idition, as his book is called (see
advertisement for publication details), deconstructs
the solemnities of the critics' text without attempting
to simplify its dense texture. He has eschewed the
principle of selective quotation. Instead, he writes out
in full the entire text in, a child-like printed script that
somehow enables the reader to perceive the words
anew ('every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a
perfect signature of its own'). Ahern has done his
homework and the fluid images that are the result of
his thoughtful and amused response seem often to
acquire the status of the obvious. Ahern's
introduction concludes with the following apologia in
Wakese: 'But Joyce said it's men to make you laugh,
and that a child afree could understand it. If Joyce
was write, there is only one conclusion: to draw. We
sincerely hope he will reach for his pen again soon.
P.B.
20th Century English Literature: A Soviet View
Moscow: Progress Publishers 1982 i6.9t (obtain-
able from Collet's International Bookshop)
INCE the catastrophic Writers' Union debate
of 1934 little has been heard about the Soviet
interest in Joyce in the West. In 1982, however,
a highly successful James Joyce Centennial Con-
ference at Tbilisi State University was reported in
these pages. 1982 also saw the publication of a collec-
tion of essays by Moscow-based critics and the 30-
page survey ofJoyce's works is one of the highlights of
this volume.
The author, Yekaterina Genieeva, begins by
mentioning some Soviet articles onJoyce and transla-
tion of his works. She then discusses Joyce's debt to
Ibsen and dismisses the legend that he held
reactionary political views. In detailed accounts of A
Portrait, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and Ulysses she traces
the conflict in Joyce between the realist writer, with
his 'historically correct understanding of the
particulars of Irish society', and the master of
European modernism who found common ground
with the Soviet film director Eisenstein. She ends
with a commentary on the 'failings' of the Wake,
along similar lines to those argued by S.L. Goldberg.
Joyce's art, she concludes, is
an example of the coexistence of truth and
error. We turn away from him when he ruins
his art with formal experiments. But we
deeply value his mastery as a writer, his social
and ethical criticism of society, his highly
demanding view of the artist, and his expos6 of
individualism and egoism, which guarantee
him a place among the most important writers
of the twentieth century.
Finally, Genieeva notes that 'To this day the
publication of translations of Joyce's works is an
event of great significance in any country'. The Polish
translation of Ulysses 'caused a sensation'. A Portrait of
the Artist was published in Russian in 1976, and
translations of Ulysses into Russian and Georgian are
now being undertaken.
Patrick Parrinder
'WHO MADE THE WORLD'
HE CARTOONS of Thomas Prindle
(opposite page) were originally designed to
form part of a multi-media videofilm, the
latest development of a continuing project, based at
the State University of New York at Albany, to
broaden the potential reading public of Finnegans
Wake. The project began life as an impromptu
dramatized reading of selections from Finnegans Wake
which was performed at several campuses in the
U.S.A. and was recorded on film in order to be
presented at the Fifth International James Joyce
Symposium in Paris in 1975. The film was
subsequently shown at the James Joyce Colloquium
at Buffalo University in 1976 and has been used as
part of a graduate seminar on Finnegans Wake at Yale
University.
'Who Made the World', which developed out of the
film, concentrated on a single episode of Finnegans
Wake, the 'MaMaLuJo' or 'Brideship and Gulls'
chapter. After several concert readings, the script (by
Tom Smith and Harry Staley) was adapted by Helen
and Harry Staley to suit the new medium of video,
combining Thomas Prindle's colourful cartoons with
voices, music and sound effects. The voice-over
readers were Marion Thorstensen, Thomas Prindle,
Helen Staley, Thomas Smith, Robert Thorstensen
and Harry Staley. Andy Aldrich composed the music
for the production, which is interspersed with
passages from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. 'Who
Made the World' was filmed at the Educational
Communication Center, TV Department, SUNYA.
The supervisor was Jack Finch. It was completed in
time to be shown at the Sixth International James
Joyce Symposium in ZGrich in 1979 and has been
used regularly since then as part of the James Joyce
course at SUNYA. The 36-minute video cassette is
available for rent or purchase and enquiries should be
addressed to Prof. Helen R. Staley, 397 State Street,
Albany, New York 12210, U.S.A.
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