They were nicknamed croppies because of their closely cropped hair-style copied from the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, who cropped their heads to distinguish themselves from wig-wearing aristocrats. The barley in the croppies' pockets was to have been their food. Hughes's father and uncle fought in the Great War and one senses their shadowy presence behind this elegy for those who did not survive it as they did. Focusing on Platform One's larger-than-life bronze statue in Paddington station, his imagination travels from a peacetime present, in which holiday-bound families are "scrambling for their lives", to a past in which soldiers left that platform to scramble for their lives — and lose them — on foreign battlefields.
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Many of the most moving and memorable poems to emerge from the second world war were written by Americans. Jarrell, who served in the US Army Air Corps, was concerned with victims, the most famous of whom was the subject of this poem. To get the full force of it one needs to know that a ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a bomber and contained two machine guns and one small man — he had to be small. When this gunner tracked with his machine gun a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret.
Hunched upside down in his little sphere, he looked like a foetus in a womb. Jarrell's gunner wakens from a dream of life to the reality of death: The Battle of Maldon Anonymous An early battle poem written in Old English, this gives a vivid and poignant account of the last stand of Anglo-Saxon warriors against a troop of Viking invaders, and includes a classic articulation of the heroic code.
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson Tennyson didn't see the British cavalry charge against Russian artillery in the Crimean war — other than with his mind's eye — but his lifelong absorption in Arthurian legend and chivalry enabled him to take his place, imaginatively, with the "Noble six hundred". Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy In the 50 years between the writing of Tennyson's Charge', and this heart-wrenching poem of Hardy's, the new "humane" tradition had come to challenge nine centuries of the old "heroic" one.
Christ and the Soldier by Siegfried Sassoon On 1 July , Sassoon saw the carnage of the opening of the Battle of the Somme and, a month later, wrote this brilliant but savagely anti-Christian poem which, significantly, he never published. Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen Not the most flawless of Owen's poems, but the most visionary, this reaches back to the heroic epics of Homer and Virgil and forward to voice in its last lines a compassionate humanity in striking contrast to the last speech of Byrhtnoth, the doomed warrior in The Battle of Maldon.
Aristocrats by Keith Douglas This fine elegy for fellow officers killed in the Battle of El Alamein again acknowledges both ancient and modern traditions of war poetry. Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney The 20th-century Nobel prize-winning Irish poet gives a voice to his voiceless peasant countrymen massacred in the rebellion against the British.
Platform One by Ted Hughes Hughes's father and uncle fought in the Great War and one senses their shadowy presence behind this elegy for those who did not survive it as they did. The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell Many of the most moving and memorable poems to emerge from the second world war were written by Americans.
In TLG, the Anglo-Saxons have escaped from the history books and inhabited the bodies of old friends: His name is Haigha. I must have two, you know—to come and go. One to come, and one to go. It makes sense that in such a world, books might be filled with archaic poetry. All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. More importantly, of course, he introduces five new verses, making the original stanza the framing chorus, and he introduces a new device to allow the poem to speak more directly in the present — speech: The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch! These spoken utterances keep the poem within the scope of a living voice. Columbia UP, , pp. For mock-medieval English to speak in the late Victorian present, however, was also for it to heard increasingly in relation to many tongues.
Humpty Dumpty, history lesson or riddle?
On publication, the poem was received as it had first been conceived, as a philological pastiche. Through the Looking- Glass was published in December , with the date on the title page: Although the fascination with Anglo-Saxon could easily be harnessed to a nationalistic, parochial agenda, in the wider climate of the time even quite distantly mediaeval-sounding nonsense verse is quickly taken up, in its reception, into the bigger, supranational narrative of the Indo-European languages.
This philological blurring of the boundaries between languages challenges very old notions about what languages are and how they might be hierarchically arranged. Against this background it should be remembered that James Murray, the first editor of the New English Dictionary which was to become the OED, was born and grew up in Teviotdale, part of Roxburghshire in the Scottish border country.
Man is fond to classify, to separate, to discriminate, to set apart in little cells of memory the mass of facts he gathers from the field of nature. But nature has no such isolating method — her facts and her laws are a continuous, all-connecting network. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: This awareness was intimately linked to the new philology. It was to deepen appreciation of English and other languages as parts of a complex manifold of forms of speech, and in the very same process, by reminding Europeans of their linguistic interconnectedness to broaden intellectual horizons geographically.
And the fact that, in the philological perspective, English was becoming less insular, parallels the growing polyglot dimension of English nonsense in a manner especially pertinent to Lewis Carroll. However, somebody killed something: There is no question that Dodgson knew the Russian alphabet, and in the months that followed its shapes, still fresh in his memory, flowed into his next project.
A characteristic feature of Cyrillic is its several letters that are, to the Western eye, like reversals of more familiar letters e. Have you any means, or can you find any, for printing a page or two, in the next volume of Alice, in reverse? Most prominent among the early references to Victorian language study is that in Stephen Hero: People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly.
The widening of the scope of philology that started, for Murray, with the discovery of a minor and dialectic form of English, is plaintively echoed here, and also reoriented along particularly Irish axes of political and colonial anxiety. It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure-house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. Vico regarded the distant antiquity of a nation a kind of cultural infancy in which communication is fundamentally mytho-poetic. University of Washington Press, , p.
The Study of Languages ed. They appear in the notebook now known as Buffalo notebook VI. Or so it seems. The Study of Languages, ed. Robert Bierman points to the explicit connection between the technique of this chapter and Finnegans Wake. In continuity, ran Romantic doctrine, lay health; thus by turning away from an imposed inheritance, the Graeco- Roman, towards an indigenous one—Anglo-Saxon, ballads—speech could recover sinewy authenticities.
Darwin made continuity in time the theme of biology; etymologists made it the theme of linguistics. That great collective labor the O. Such studies epitomize what Saussure has taught us to call the preoccupations of the diachronic, elements arrayed in time and our time a thin slice. What we find in Finnegans Wake, are the attitudes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philology spoofed and ironized with a sensibility analogous to that of Lewis Carroll.
An International Language In this work, Jespersen reviewed another offshoot of the supranational philological imagination of the nineteenth century: Dalkey Archive Press, [] p. Adams what was in all the Sundays [ The fundamental insight that the word is brought in along auditory lines of punning and homophony is quite true: Jespersen had noted that: This borrowing, noted by McHugh and expanded on by Rosiers and Van Mierlo, and, I shall go on to argue, occurs in a passage full of allusions to Edward Lear.
Joyce clearly associated philological and linguistic curiosities with the literary forms of nonsense writing. At the end of what is now Buffalo notebook VI. Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes. You do not know what this means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak. We know too that one distimmer of doshes is a gostak.
If, moreover, the doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on. This technique, which runs throughout the Wake, can be seen in this light as the offshoot of both Victorian nonsense and the new linguistic imagination produced by nineteenth-century philology. Ingraham, as quoted in C. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: Press, , p.
He returned to a Parisian life that was more than usually chaotic. He wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver: I am glad to hear that the Earwicker absurdity did not make it to you worse. I think the weather has been atrocious. It is finished but I am filing the edges off it. The wild hunt still continues in the Paris jungle, stampede of omnibuses and trumpets of taxielephants etc and in this ridiculous caravanserai peopled by American loudspeakers I compose ridiculous prose writing on a green suitcase which I bought in Bognor.
In a description so charged with whimsical and absurd invention, taken on its own terms it seems reasonable to doubt it. Joyce might have been expected to resent such an account of the purposes of his writing, since he delighted for so much of his life in the myth of himself as above and removed from his surroundings. The motif is discussed in Ellmann, and Only a few—a very few—winter days have happened: And Joyce is perhaps the more exiled, because writing in a city he thought he had made his home.
And there is a level on which this transformation is therapeutic: We can see this as coming, over time, to be intimately connected with the development of an appropriate literary response to the many and various difficulties of his personal life.
Where nursery rhymes really come from
Leo Knuth hints at this very well: Yet these facts may contribute to a better understanding of one of the most mysterious aspects of his development as a writer — the growth of his sense of humour. Nonsense is never simply humour, nor is all humour nonsensical. Joyce had been a migratory bird about the various quarters of Paris since his arrival in and it was not until that he finally lighted in a comparatively permanent nest of his own.
During the five years between those dates he had removed himself, his family and his steadily swelling baggage no less than ten times. Rodopi, , Critics have tended to divide over the question of whether the latter book should be seen as a natural progression from the former, or as marking a shift into a radically different mode. CUP, , , p. Goldberg, James Joyce Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, , p. Collins, , p. Thames and Hudson, , pp. Long before this new change in working method could be put into practice, however, supporters were being driven away by what they saw as a change of course.
This controversy is often a matter of the nuance and emphasis of our critical descriptions, and as such it holds little interest by itself. Similar problems arise around the late works of other writers. We see a style which, however easily traceable is its point of departure to the work that precedes it, is charged with a newness which is both a necessity and a risk.
fishing for words to hook readers
New Directions, p. These are vague terms, and difficult and academically unfashionable things for literary criticism to try to show. Laughter in all tones and keys, now with the world and now at it, is heard continually. The laughter reminds us often of the bright, mocking laughter of Sterne […] But then it often resembles the louder laughter of a Shakespeare or a Dickens, delighting in the over-lifesize caricature of human types. It is general, unanalytical, even impressionistic: Ulysses is never solemn, is often fantastically comic, is amoral and philosophically humane, but it is always serious.
OUP, [] , p. Ulysses is, as Budgen says, serious; and more importantly, it offers us plentiful grounds for believing in its essential seriousness: The result is an apparent lack of seriousness, a work that invites and provokes us to read it as a grand joke: Clarendon Press, , p. This new mood, this new affiliation with nonsense, must be pinned more thoroughly to some examples.
Joyce built the mythological structure of Finnegans Wake out of associative fragments of songs, nursery rhymes, parodies and popular phrases, the same flotsam and jetsam of literary and oral culture that are the source of the English nonsense tradition and with which the writings of Lear and Carroll have such an intimate relation. I make this claim in explicit contrast to the alternative possible view that the nonsense-elements of the Wake are essentially decorative additions to a basically foreseen or borrowed mythological, symbolic or narrative structure. In other words, the nursery rhymes and songs and parodies make the structural use of sources like Vico and Bruno possible, not vice versa.
My second claim is linked to the first: This prepares the ground for an explicit discussion of Carroll and Lear in the Wake: Bloomsbury, , p. By this, Joyce meant at least one, and probably several, of the early drafts of Finnegans Wake on which he had been working during the summer of This device gained prominence in the re-drafting, and we can re-create the process with some accuracy. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked of the big kiss of Tristan Trustan with Isolde Usolde.
Joyce modified his opening: So And there they were too listening in as hard as they could to the solans and all the birds all four of them listening they were the big four the four master waves of Erin all listening When Joyce next adds a layer of further detail, it is as much to enrich the phonetic texture of the prose as its descriptive acuity: More decorative, perhaps, are the later corrections made on either lost manuscripts or galley proofs in advance of publication in the Transatlantic Review.
And there they were too listening in as hard as they could to the solans and sycamores and the wild geese and gannets and the migratories and mistlethrushes and the auspices and all the birds of the sea, all four of them, all sighing and sobbing, and listening. This is well-placed, since it alerts us on a very subtle level to the far more important additions in the later part of the sentence. All the birds of the air Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing, When they heard the bell toll For poor Cock Robin.
Though the Old Man is relieved when the birds of the air fly away and who would not be? The Young Lady prefigures the Quangle-Wangle in Laughable Lyrics, on whose capacious hat a whole jubilant host of creatures take up residence, beginning with a pair of birds [CVN, ]. The leaves thereof were fair, and the fruit thereof much, and in it was meat for all: Wyth a grounden glaive he threste hym in behynde to the harte…42 The stock of sources for the Tristan legend upon which Joyce could draw was very wide: Field, 3 vols Oxford: Clarendon Press, , III, p. The general remarks on the legend in the present paragraph are indebted to these sources.
Northwestern UP, , p. Cornell UP, , pp. Tristan, sad hero, hear! When read again in the light of the end of the chapter, they prefigure a dark episode in the Tristan myth, and even on first reading they charge other words around them with new potential. The story is told this way in The Golden Bough, a locus classicus for mythology and modernism: Tristan killed the seven brothers, but he was wounded, stabbed by a lance, and the lance was poisoned.
Only Loki, the mischief-maker, is displeased, and goes to Frigg disguised as an old woman. Hother took the mistletoe and threw it at Balder, as Loki directed him. The mistletoe struck Balder and pierced him through and through, and he fell down dead. The illustrative value of this example is twofold: Snorri himself appears in the Wake at Penguin, , p.
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Given this, it is difficult to know whether Hother should be envisaged firing an arrow or hurling a spear. It is even less clear in the Voluspa or Poetic Edda, which seems to describe a plant even more unlike real mistletoe: I am grateful to Dr David Clark for this reference. The balance of the prose could be found in the linking of certain words and phrases on the same rhyming sounds or groups of sounds, by which the structure of sentences and clauses, and of rhetorical periods, is shaped, steered and driven.
The first stanza in the manuscript appears as: Several important points emerge out of such an analysis. The explicit marking of internal rhymes in the drafts may be rare and occasional, but it is reasonable to conclude that this represents a deliberate identification, for private reasons, of a method that was being followed silently and without advertisement elsewhere.
The published poem is amplified and elaborated: The general pattern, as ever with the Wake, is addition, accretion, elaboration. Peter Lang, , p. There is nothing especially new in this observation. About two dozen of the songs, from all the kinds we have surveyed, are used thematically: This connection is further developed in several places in the Wake. For Joyce the myth of the dying god was connected with original sin and the fall — the unnamed sin of HCE in the Phoenix Park — and also with the constant threat to HCE 63 Atherton, pp.
In the Egyptian mythology that informs The Book of the Dead, Osiris was killed by Set and his body cut into pieces which were scattered throughout the country. Isis, the wife of Osiris, found all the pieces except one — the male member, and magically put them together again and made a model of the missing part after which she conceived and gave birth to Horus who avenged the death of his father by emasculating Set.
The same elements are present in his story which accrue around the references to Cock Robin and to mistletoe: The consumption of the god is also implicit, since Osiris was a corn god whose body was ritually eaten,69 and whose effigy was buried with funeral rites in order that he might come to life again. The Druids, says Frazer p. Joyce reinforces the Tristan parallels with numerous references. More suggestive still is Fool pay the bill. Becups a can full. Peal, pull the bell! The Papyrus of Ani, ed. Wallis Budge New York: Dover Publications, [] , p. Spell me the chimes. They are tales all tolled.
But whom does it know? The Quangle-Wangle is one of many wearers of hats in the work of a writer whose most celebrated self-portrait disclosed: Quick quake quokes the par- rotbook of dates. Those who follow their noses might get another whiff of Lear at the very top of the left-hand margin: Puzzly, puzzly, I smell a cat. In the winter of , as the Third Reich began to seem a serious threat to Paris, Joyce prepared to move.
A Descriptive Bibliography Buffalo: University of Buffalo Monographs in English, , p. Routledge, Warnes and Routledge, ; W. Chatto and Windus, ; L. Chatto and Windus, pp. So Lear gives us, among many instances: Yet this is far from 81 Cf. Essays upon Language London: Hamish Hamilton, , pp. Viking, , p. Gilbert is highly selective in the Wakean coinages he chooses as examples, and occasionally evasive in his analysis of them. Gilbert draws our attention, perhaps, to the similarities Joyce wished it drawn to. Very little is on record about how much Lear and Carroll Joyce read, or when he read them.
What he does say largely suggests that any conscious influence came late in his life. Joyce was adamant that he set out on the artistic course of Finnegans Wake entirely unaided by the model of Lewis Carroll. He wrote in May to Harriet Weaver of some of the responses he had received to the published sections of Work in Progress: Another or rather many says he is imitating Lewis Carroll.
I never read him until Mrs Nutting gave me a book, not Alice, a few weeks ago— though, of course, I heard bits and scraps. But then I never read Rabelais 85 See Chapter 2, p. I will read them both when I get back. It is quite likely that he simply forgot how much Carroll he actually knew. A few things about him are rather curious. He was born a few miles from Warrington Daresbury , and he had a strong stutter and when he wrote inverted his name like Tristan and Swift. His name was Charles Lutwidge of which he made Lewis i. There are already signs, however, of Joyce sifting through the character of Lewis Carroll, though as yet few signs of direct engagement with his work.
That Lear is associated for Joyce with Carroll is not surprising, but it is important, since it cannot automatically be taken for granted. And still here is noctules and can tell things acommon on by that fluffy feeling. Larges loomy wheelhouse to bodgbox7 lumber up with hoodie hearsemen… [FW, Take the fool with thee.
Harcourt, Brace and Co. Certainly Carroll, or Dodgson, appears in the Wake in very visual tableau, looking and being looked at: And there many have paused before that exposure of him by old Tom Quad, a flashback in which he sits sated, gowndabout, in clericalease habit, watching bland sol slithe dodgsomely into the nethermore, a globule of maugdleness about to corrugitate his mild dewed cheek and the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his limper looser.
The note refers to a passage in an obscure work on Breton stone circles: Dodgson, for Joyce, is sexually capable but sexually repressed, a man of ill- disciplined eyes, framing things through the camera just as he is framed for us, peering and leering. The same chapter of the Wake that gives us the tableau in old Tom Quad yields up the following: And stow that sweatyfunnyadams Simper!
Haize, , pp. Take an old geeser who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek hair, so elegant, tableau vivant. Creampuffs all to dime! The sentence, with its interlocking patterns of rhyme and assonance, also conveys something of the rhythmic qualities of a nursery rhyme compare: For Joyce, the days were 2 February Candlemas, Groundhog Day, but most importantly his own birthday, on which he took pains to have the first copies of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake arrive , and 16 June the date of his first meeting with Nora, and subsequently Bloomsday.
According to the, possibly misremembered,3 accounts of Carroll and Alice, the weather was blazing hot. Fisher Unwin, , pp. Interviews and Recollections, ed. Cohen Basingstoke and London: The fame, the myth, and the haunting memory of 4 July came to spread beyond the cultural enclosure of Carroll biography.
For Dr. Seuss, Nonsensical Rhymes Came with a Reason
He extended that courtesy across literary friendships as well. Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs! Afrothdizzying galbs, her enamelled eyes indergoading him on to vierge violetian. But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd. The setting is vital: This appears in Iliad 1. I am grateful to Dr Emma Woolerton for this information. Opie and Opie, Law and Language, p.
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Violets are conventionally chaste flowers,15 yet are associated also with beds, banks and other sites of flowers and deflowering, and so, as often in Shakespeare, grow at the edge of the innocent and the sexual: Never, perhaps, to be taken in by old men like himself. See also Hamlet, 5. Violets are also associated with Proserpina, another girl, like Alice, to have adventures underground — see Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, 2nd edn Cambridge: CUP, , p.
Dent, , pp. Violet was also the name of one of the two younger Liddell sisters, the other being Rhoda.
This passage, towards the end of I. The boat-trip passage of I. Likewise, Joyce did not borrow from the methods of nonsense writing, and then again entirely separately borrow from its stock of motifs and characters. In the Wake, where everything is connected, nonsense is engaged with and employed as a whole, connected literary genre. I am grateful to Dr David Clark for this observation. The Angels, girls, are grouped behind the Angel, Shawn, and the Devil has to come over three times and ask for a colour.
If the colour he asks for has been chosen by any girl she has to run and he tries to catch her. As far as I have written he has come twice and been twice baffled. The piece is full of rhythms taken from English singing games. Edward Arnold, , , esp. Loud graciously hear us! Thames and Hudson, [] , p. Tireton, cacheton, tireton, ba! Doth that not satisfy youth, sir?
Quanty purty bellas, here, Madama Lifay! And what are you going to charm them to, Madama, do say? The intervening question breaks up the song rhythms adding variety of pace, tone and diction. These patterns can be found throughout the chapter. In situ the chapter is untitled, like all the chapters of the Wake. The Servire Press, with a cover illustration by Lucia, thus formally lending it an informal title. All run-away sheep bound back bopeep, trailing their teenes behind them. The rhyme, and the game, have been appropriated and transplanted into the new context of the Wake, which has itself been moulded slightly to the shape of the rhyme.
At such meeting-points, other sources too are captured and re-contextualized: Chuffy was a nangel then and his soard fleshed light like likening. Singty, sangty, meekly loose, defendy nous from prowlabouts. Alice is recalled again here more directly as Izod herself, the looking-glass girl. Happy little girlycums to have adolphted such an Adelphus! O, the swinginging hopops so goholden! They say their salat, the madiens prayer to the messiager of His Nabis, prostitating their selfs eachwise and combinedly.
Fateha, fold the hands. Be it honoured, bow the head. As so we hope for ablution. For the sake of the farbung and of the scent and of the holiodrops. Their orison arises misquewhite as Osman glory, ebbing wasteward, leaves to the soul of light its fading silence allahlah lah lahlah lah! These references are catalogued in Atherton, p. They are in the main amplifications of notes from Notebooks VI. OUP, , s. Pearson Longman, [] , p. This notwithstanding, it is reasonable to ask why the Rhine maidens should be connected at this point in the Wake, or for that matter at any point in any work, with Islamic prayer.
This liturgy is Christian as well as Islamic: The setting that we are invited to provide for this passage is a kind of parodic heaven. With it an abode of bliss. To the faithful [ This will be great bliss. Mardrus, and it seems likely that he supplemented this reading with one or another of the English versions available at the time.
Houri of the coast of emerald, arrah of the lacessive pogue, Aslim-all- Muslim, the resigned to her surrender [ Syracuse UP, [] , p. Dent, , p. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, , s. This passage leads us directly into the opening of the hymn of the Floras to 59 Shaun: We thank to thine, mighty innocent, that diddest bring it off fuitefuite. Macmillan, , pp. Eliot, intriguingly anticipates Burnt Norton I. Penguin, , The simple fact that I. The bridge between these two settings is the transformation, in II.
Clarendon Press, , s. Here, at , the father figure H. In this case the wild flowers are the lilts of children. This line can be read as fifty daughters and fifty daughters-in-law: Williams Basingstoke and London: I am grateful to Dr Emma Woolerton for this reference. Just so stylled with the nattes are their flowerheads now and each of all has a lovestalk onto herself and the tot of all the tits of their understamens is as open as he can posably she and is tournesoled straightcut or sidewaist, accourdant to the coursets of things feminite [FW, Faber and Faber, , pp.
The voice here is knowingly feminine: His interpretation of this trope isolates the conventional centre of gravity of the analogy, the beautiful appearance of both, and makes this the focal point for the expression of attitudes of aggressive competition. Its earliest citation in print is in a British periodical.
This too is a notion with a literary pedigree. In the discussion of the Boat Trip passage [FW, Two of his avatars are strongly implied here: Humpty Dumpty, and the Norwegian sailor. But the lines are full of Hamlet as well, and the ghost of old Hamlet, another Scandinavian king. Hump is smartly dressed, the description of his splendid appearance shading into the idiom of heraldry: Pale ashes of the house of Lancaster, Thou bloodless remnant of that royal blood [ References to her are scattered across pages and Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue.
August , p. Ophelia is valuable to Joyce in this regard as a model for his tragic heroine, Issy seen as a forsaken, jilted lover. Woefear gleam she so glooming, this pooripathete I solde? Be good enough to symperise. He does so in the passage above at Oh, you naughty, naughty, bad wicked little girl! I shall punish you severely for this when 90 Hamlet, 5. Be good enough to tremble! Joyce may have been attracted to it out of a prurient interest in punishment especially the most ordinary punishment for a child, spanking as a peculiarly English perversion,93 but it is just as likely that it is the teasing pantomime humour that caught his eye.
Here the character appears to be Alice: He is gone, and 92 I do not use the phrase wholly gratuitously: Vintage, [] , , p. To be unmarried is, for many young women, to garner the fear of remaining childless. In her reading of this passage, Carol Loeb Shloss notes that the sentence: Perhaps the shortest and most neutral summary that could be given would go something like: Even this account is, doubtless, open to criticism.
Ye gods and little fishes! What is certainly the case is that Lucia was an amanuensis for Joyce, and a model for Issy and all the other Wakean types of i. It would be remarkable, in a writer devoted from his earliest work to the quasi-Eucharistic transformation of his life into art, if he had not written this situation and his response to it into Finnegans Wake. This was almost the only topic of our conversation. Sometimes I fancied hearing the complaint of Lear carrying Cordelia in his arms. Few artists except Shakespeare and Balzac knew how to depict the Passion of the Father.
Joyce did not write this passion; he lived it. The author of the Earwicker Absurdity knew how to find emotional balance in a kind of nonsense that both mirrored and controlled the elements of chaos in his life. He owned and read psychoanalytic works, including works of literary criticism [Ellmann, n]. He assimilated, as a literate person inevitably will, those aspects of their theories that were becoming part of the culture in which he lived. Yet even when, in passing, Joyce would occasionally draw on psychological terminology to shed light on his writing, he remained avowedly hostile.
Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, ed. Joyce had not pre-judged psychoanalysis but rather judged it, weighed it in the balance, tried his hand at its methods for himself, and developed towards it a profound antipathy. It does not follow, however, that we should infer from this denial a deep and profound awareness of indebtedness to Freud and Jung. In this view, Joyce would have found his relationship with Freud and Jung impossible to deny while at the same time quite honestly disavowing any kind of discipleship or adherence to the detail of their elaborate systems.
As for the basic affinity of his writing with the broader threads of their work — the examination of the life of the mind, the unconscious, the submerged dynamics and mythological echoes of human relationships — Joyce could reasonably have pointed out that these preoccupations were important to writers long before Freud and Jung, and that if their work had helped give shape to his own treatment of such matters this was by no means purchased at the cost of the adoption of their dogmas and terminologies.
Artists are only really influenced, T. One complaint that recurs in explicit and implicit ways is that of humourlessness. A batch of people here in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud amuses himself at the Since the existence of a personal acquaintance between Joyce and Jung will taken as read in what follows, it is worth summarizing it briefly here.
Mrs Harold McCormick, a wealthy American lady resident in the Swiss city, and a patroness of various artists and writers Ellmann, , urged Joyce in September to be analysed by Jung. Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: Virago, , p. Routledge and Kegan Paul, , Only years later was Joyce convinced to approach Jung as a potential therapist for Lucia Ellmann, ; he took her on, and in his care she showed some small improvements Ellmann, Ellmann reports that Joyce listened unimpressed.
In the nursery rhyme Tweedledum and Tweedledee were chips off the same block who later had a falling-out over nothing: Tweedledum and Tweedledee end up fighting over a trifle: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture London: Continuum, , p. See remarks in Chapter 2, p. We encounter him mainly through the reminiscences of Isa Bowman: By a jury of matrons. A villainous and selfish quality is implied in the repeated allusions to Uggug, the nasty little boy of Sylvie and Bruno: Penguin, , pp. One passage in particular shows us Carroll as a minister of religion: Mischnary for the minestrary to all the sems of Aram.
Shimach, eon of Era. Isa Bowman quotes the recollections of another child model, Beatrice Hatch: For these and other similar examples, see Lewis Carroll, Photographer, pp. Turning up and fingering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous longerous book of the dark. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain. Songs with refrains from Latin grammar inevitably seem to hark back to childhood experience of the schoolroom: And this passage is remembered in the geometric diagram between Anna Livia Plurabelle, with her triangular siglum d, and her river delta, are most clearly referenced, but simultaneously put into play is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the girl whose initials serve in various places in the Wake to connect the mother figure d with the daughter-figure i, of whom she is an important manifestation.
Curtsey one, curtsey two, with arms akimbo, devotees. But most important of all is Carroll the provider of tea, host of an ongoing tea party which can frequently be glimpsed through the theatrical and playground structures at work in the chapter. The tea-party emerges too as a glorious feast in which Joyce gives form to his conception of the Maggies as vivacious, and voracious, consumers.
Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: You are lovely, Gerty, it said. Calder Publications, [written ] , p. Bloomsbury, , pp. Men, teacan a tea simmering, hamo mavrone kerry O? Fontana, , p. Hall, , And yet all these characters and changes are held together within narratives that represent the dreams of one little girl: Joyce believed Lucia to be a creative genius, and this genius spills over into the language of the Wake, since Joyce wanted Lucia to be involved in the work as a creative partner, and in this chapter in particular.
She took art classes with Marie Laurencin, a former intimate of the circle of Picasso and Juan Gris, who been known to the Joyces since the late s. The period , when Lucia enrolled with Laurencin, was a high point for the French surrealist vogue for Lewis Carroll and other nineteenth-century English texts: Laurencin had just finished a series of illustrations for limited edition books — all of them for texts that shared her fascination with the quiet, imaginative power of young girls. He wrote to Budgen in June I should like you to see her initials see enclosed. They will come out on 15 August, 19 copies having been sold to date.
Louis Gillet, art critic for the Revue des Deux Mondes, wrote to me about them: Vous me direz ce que je dois en faire. When the Servire Press edition of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies was published, it was with an illustrated frontispiece by Lucia whose similarity in shape to a dancing form was visually unavoidable. One might call them the fancies of an ancient Irish illuminator You should tell me what to do with them. I fear that our artists would be able to learn a few tricks from this young girl guided by the hand of St Patrick or St Columba.
She flowed along in a nervous swagger, swinging a thin arm amply. Children had always taken the alphabet, along with other sequences, to lend structure to their games and songs: Children sit down in a ring and begin saying something about the cat such as Abomnerble Cat. Then B, such as Bloody Cat and so on. Lucia is particularly clearly referred to in the sideline about old Father Barley how he got up of a morning arley and he met with a plattonem blondes named Hips and Haws and fell in with a fellows of Trinity [ Joyce tells us to look for her in the text itself: It is a kind of nonsense in which over-determined, complex compound neologisms gesture in multiple directions, tantalizing the interpretative instincts of psychoanalysts for whom a rose is never only a rose.
And Nuvoletta, a lass. Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climber over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: And into the river that had been a stream for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears [ But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: We see her also as Alice, entering the Looking-Glass world: Her singing begins to refer to herself and the river in the same terms: They have also tended to be slightly embarrassed by them.
There is a common attitude that, insofar as Joyce has similarities with Lear and Carroll, he is in a different class of sophistication. This is because play is sophisticated and deliberate. This is the same reason why, as I argued in Chapter 1, Sewell was wrong to assume that the definition of nonsense in terms of play ipso facto ruled out parody: And there is sophistication and deliberate parody too in the clowning, joking and folly that constitutes the play of adults.
After all, Joyce also wanted his joke taken seriously. The difficulty is for critics: Typically, critical approaches which interpret nonsensical texts through a set of theoretical presuppositions fall short of this task. I want to conclude by suggesting some consequences that this kind of study might have for our interpretative practices as readers of literature, nonsense more especially, Finnegans Wake more especially still. This dissertation has done no more than gesture towards certain methodological preferences and practices: I want to end by looking forward at where it is gesturing.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is a good example of a theorizing system to which nonsense texts respond poorly. Wittgenstein recognized this when he remarked that Freud had propounded a new mythology. This project, which always carries with it the assumption that Art is a different kind of activity to the random, energetic horseplay of children, misses the mark. As Winnicott writes, the creative impulse must be recognized as something that can be looked at in itself, something that of course is necessary if an artist is to produce a work of art, but also as something that is present when anyone — baby, child, adolescent, adult, old man or woman — looks in a healthy way at anything or does anything deliberately, such as making a mess with faeces or prolonging the act of crying to enjoy a musical sound.
University of California Press, , , p. That is, the text itself is to be interpreted as something other than itself. It was in its nonsensical plurality of sounds and curious suggestive significations that Joyce saw his work as having value; not in some way beyond or beneath it. I suggested in Chapter 1 that nonsense does not negate every possible kind of sense there is.
Sense can me made and unmade on a series of linguistic levels: Routledge, [] , pp. Sydney UP, , p. And this, as I have argued from the outset, is what M. Haight rightly identified as a central aspect of nonsense writing, its parodic engagement with the operation of the language. Nonsense negates our acquired intuitions about language, our ability rapidly to discern hierarchies of significance, our alertness to the pragmatics of interpretation.
By playing with our common sense, nonsense also engages that common sense. It may even help to teach us common sense. Kornei Chukovsky wrote of a Soviet critic who believed that children would be harmed in some way by exposure to the nonsensical and the fantastical in literature: The relations between the real and the absurd which nonsense verses can teach children are in fact the common sense that nonsense requires from us in order to read it enjoyably, and with greater familiarity.
I see the essential task of literary criticism not as explication, or interpretative de-coding, but as increasing and deepening our familiarity with texts whose value is 9 Ibid. That is to say, ultimately and rather obliquely, increasing our familiarity with ourselves. Certainly, this will require localized interpretation, translation and glossing.
It is easy to reject this kind of attitude, but then we might well admit that most of us dabbler at the Wake are still haunted by some Platonic ideal to capture its quintessential core — the ideal of the Ultimate Reduction. Reading Finnegans Wake alongside Lear and Carroll, and other forms of nonsense writing which in various ways to frustrate and even resist our interpretative instincts, can help to point the way towards critical practices which will amplify rather than second-guess our experience of reading. Although some have felt that only a nonsensical criticism can respond to a nonsense text,12 I want to argue that our critical practices must be grounded in a method of close reading which is to a strong degree commonsensical.
It is this method that I have attempted to employ. Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. And yet nonsense, perhaps more clearly than any kind of literature, brings this home to us constantly. Nonsense texts make us aware of the limitations of our interpretative capacities as readers; they can frustrate and subvert our reading practices, yet they also invite us to recognize that this frustration is part of the pleasure they have to offer.
In other words they tease us. Teasing and being teased is a game for two, a game which takes place within conversation and which requires humility. Although Finnegans Wake can be interpreted in any number of ways, [ The nonsense of the text separates reading from intention. But he is wrong to suppose that this effects a divorce between reading and intention. Nonsense writing requires a mode of criticism that is commonsensical, alert, adaptable, and intellectually principled rather than theoretically determined.
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