[ExI] Joyce

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:49 AM 1/29/2008 -0800, Lee wrote:
> >
> >>I am quite certain that if John and I forced ourselves to
> >>read Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses, we would be in the
> >>main merely confirmed in our lack of appreciation.
>
> > And that's your basis for excoriating the writings of James Joyce,
>
>I for one have never excoriated his writing.

Okay, sorry, I was too easily conflating your comments with those of 
the literary critic who signed himself "John K Philistine."

>Instead, I particularly criticize and dismiss out of hand claims
>that Ulysses is "gibberish"....
>I should say more about claims that many passages from "Ulysses"
>are gibberish. It's possible, but doubtful.  In fact, you probably have
>a far better sense of how possible than most of us.  The Question:
>
>        Suppose that we did produce a page or so of gibberish using
>        a sophisticated computer program. The program generates
>        prose that is syntactically correct, of course, but also uses the
>        same vocabulary items as some given extant passage of Ulysses.
>        If this page of true mindlessness had been substituted for one of
>        the pages of the most "difficult" part of Ulysses (or Finnegan's
>        Wake), would anyone be the wiser?  After all, such a passage,
>        if unique or relatively infrequent, could be understood as humor.

It's hard to know how to reply to this thought experiment without 
knowing more about the implied reader. It's true that you 
universalize the problem by asking if *anyone* would be the wiser. 
Change the premise slightly for a moment. Show me a page or so of 
gibberish randomly churned out by the Postmodern Generator, and I'll 
almost instantly know it's bollocks. (Of course, I also know that 
some genuine examples of drivel from the academy are hardly any 
better, but there's stupidity in every walk of life.)

You might as well ask whether anyone would know if a page of randomly 
jumbled chess notation or mathematics is nonsense. In the former 
case, I wouldn't have a clue; I don't play chess or know how to 
decode its notation. In the latter, we know that almost all 
mathematicians are stymied by very dense papers produced by 
specialists outside their own corner of math--but I suspect they'd 
have a sense if the jumble was *completely* random.

If you could really develop a program able to do what FINNEGANS WAKE 
does (no apostrophe, for dog's sake; if you can't even get the first 
word of the *title* right, your chances with the rest are not good), 
you'd be well on the way to meeting the Turing challenge--perhaps 
even well over the line.

One key aspect of that enigmatic book is that Joyce spent years 
developing a vastly learned idiolect drawing upon the vocabularies of 
dozens of different European tongues, so his best readers need to be 
able to unpack his wordplay on the same basis of polyglot 
familiarity. Few of us have that expertise--I certainly don't!--but 
it wasn't just a mad stunt. Joyce was working at the time when Freud 
and Jung and others were claiming that the unconscious or 
preconscious draws upon a sort of fund of primordial knowledge,** and 
linguists were trying to untangle the roots of all languages into an 
Ur-IndoEuropean mother tongue. Such efforts are now seen as premature 
at best and probably mistaken, but the intersection of mythology and 
dream and language generation was seen as the richest site for 
literary exploration and creation. It's no accident that the 
syncretic mythologist Joseph Campbell is one of the authors of the 
SKELETON KEY to the Wake.

In other words, what looks momentarily like a word salad to a 
monoglot is nothing of the sort, and attention paid to Joyce's 
strange construct is repaid, or so we've been told by intelligent and 
creative people I admire, from the brilliant sf writer James Blish to 
the equally brilliant and exuberant Anthony Burgess.

But to return to ULYSSES for a moment: is the following (randomly 
plucked) sample really so hard to understand? How likely that it 
could be created by a random event generator?

<--That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have 
to answer that letter from my cousin.

--Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket. Thank you.

--Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I 
like to break a lance with you, old as I am.

--Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.

He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the 
trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the 
playfield. The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through 
the gate: toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. 
Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.

--Mr Dedalus!

Running after me. No more letters, I hope.

--Just one moment.

--Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.

Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.

--I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of 
being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know 
that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

--Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

--Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a 
rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, 
his lifted arms waving to the air.

--She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he 
stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung 
spangles, dancing coins.>

A nicely caught moment of complacent, self-congratulatory bigotry, that. Hmmm.

Damien Broderick
**"jung and easily freudened" is a rather saucy pun from the WAKE.