The Great Kiswahili Controversy of 1962-3

Let me take you back to the the Great Kiswahili Controversy, which set the pages of the Wake Newslitter ablaze in 1962-3.

I first came across this historic dispute in Roland McHugh's gripping 1981 book, The Finnegans Wake Experience, which is out of print but can be found on google books. For this blog, I've also gone back to the Newslitter, which you can download for free from the wonderful Joycetools webpage.

The back cover of McHugh's book

The beginning of the 1960s was a momentous time in the Wake world. 'In the 1950s,' writes McHugh, 'it had been really difficult to publish articles about FW: editors balked at the ravings of late Joyce....Then in 1962, Clive Hart and Fritz Senn founded A Wake Newslitter, and a new age began.'

The new age marked the end of what the Wake-loving Connecticut housewife, Adaline Glasheen, called 'the amateur's age of unriddling': 

'It was a time when Finnegans Wake was yet outside literature, criticism, scholarship, when it had no price on the literary exchange, when it seemed capable of solution or dissolution at any moment....Work was imaginative, unstructured, freely shared, and great delight was taken in our unexampled chance to explore a charming and enigmatic landscape....It is commonly said...that because Finnegans Wake was so hard to read and so uncertain of permanent literary value that only the amateur could afford to unriddle it....The amateur age was over when Mr Hart and Mr Senn published A Wake Newslitter.'

Adaline Glasheen, Introduction to A Tour of the Darkling Pain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen, University College Dublin Press, 2001
 
Here's Newslitter co-founder, Clive Hart, described by Roland McHugh as 'an Australian of a jovial and genial disposition...like myself trained in the sciences – physics in fact – and...also a major international authority on medieval kites and windsocks.'

Hart in 1967, from flickr

He's one of the two main figures in our Kiswahili Controversy.

The second figure is Jack P. Dalton, a New York textual scholar, notorious for his vituperative attacks on fellow Joyceans. There are some astounding stories about Dalton's behaviour in Fritz Senn's Joycean Murmoirs, where I found this photograph of him.   

The cantankerous Jack P. Dalton lays down the law

Here's a typical blast of Dalton, from his 1963 Newslitter review of David Hayman's First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake: 

'Damn it, Hayman, you make me ill with rage. The creation of such monstrous vile filth as this, and all the rest of it, should be a criminal offense, necessarily capital. That it is not is a grave defect of our society.'

Dalton and Hart were co-editors of Twelve and a Tilly, a 1966 book of essays marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Wake. Dalton submitted a preface for it in which he maligned every single one of his contributors! 

KISWAHILI  IN ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE

 

The controversy began when an amateur Wakean, Philipp Wolff, a Swiss who had lived in Africa, recognized a number of Kiswahili words in the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter. His list was published in the Newslitter in December 1962. Here's an example, from the washerwomen's discussion of the contents of Anna Livia's bag of gifts:

 

'But what was the game in her mixed baggyrhatty? Just the tembo in her tumbo or pilipili from her pepperpot? Saas and tass and specis bizaas.' 209.11 

Wolff writes:  '(here they come thick and fast): tembo = native beer, also elephant; tumbo =belly; pilipili = pepper; saa = hour, watch, clock; taa = light, lantern; bidhaa = trade goods, merchandise. ' 

Dalton responded to Wolff's post with a revised Kiswahili list, published in the April 1963 Newslitter, with a typically snooty introduction:

'It is unfortunate that this note is so lengthy and detailed; especially so, since the original list, had it been done correctly, would have occupied less space than it actually did, and the necessity for this paper would have been obviated....I am not so much interested in Kisuahili, or in Herr Wolff’s performance, or the Litter’s performance, as I am concerned with the foundation of logical principles and practices on which FW scholarship must come to rest, if it is ever to amount to anything more than a stumbling block to the serious student, and a butt of derision for scoffers.'

Using Kiswahili dictionaries, Dalton then confirmed 80% of Wolff's findings. Yet he scornfully rejected others, such as the 'elephant' reading of 'tembo in her tumbo':
  
'I see no reason for calling ‘tembo’ ‘native beer,’ when it is universally, and correctly, called ‘palm wine'....Also, though fun is fun, I’m afraid I’ll have to draw the line on there being an ‘elephant’ in ALP’s belly. Is Herr Wolff serious?' 

For 'And what was the wyerye rima she made!' (200.33), Wolff had suggested 'rima: pit for catching large animals.'

Here's Dalton's withering response: 

'I suggest, for instance, that an extended explanation of just why ALP should be digging a ‘pit for catching large animals’ would (or should, at any rate) bring such a plethora of hearty guffaws as to render further discussion unnecessary.'

This is extraordinarily mean-spirited. Dalton wouldn't even have been looking through Kiswahili dictionaries if Wolff hadn't spotted these words in the first place!

Dalton called for a new 'professional' approach to Wake interpretation, based on the evidence of Joyce's manuscripts.

'Now the list I have presented...stands quite perfectly on its own two feet...However, there is a most interesting aspect of it not yet noted – all the words in the list were added to FW at the same time.'

Dalton knew about the composition process because he was a professional academic, who spent much of his time studying Joyce's manuscripts in the University of Buffalo (according to Fritz Senn, Dalton 'considered its Joyce holdings his own territory and guarded them fiercely').  

But most 1960s Wake readers did not have access to Joyce's manuscripts. McHugh writes that when Dalton's paper appeared, 'it must have seemed that the right of the layman to present his guesswork in the genial Forum of the Litter was threatened.'

An elephant I photographed in the Phoenix Park Zoo

AN ELEPHANT IN THE BELLY

Dalton's paper drew an eloquent response from Clive Hart in an article titled 'An Elephant in the Belly' published in the next Newslitter, and later reprinted in A Wake Digest:
 
'Mr Dalton says, first: ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to draw the line on there being an “elephant” in ALP’s belly’, and then hopes for a plethora of guffaws at the idea that Anna should be seen digging a Very Dip Pit for Heffalumps. These rejections show, I think, three things: first, rather too much insistence on a rational reading of the text; second, a certain lack of artistic sensibility; third, the unwarranted ignoring...of Joyce’s use and abuse of the surrealist mode which was so popular during the heyday of the book’s composition, and which he so richly parodies and cunningly pillages....We must not dismiss too lightly Joyce’s delight in the chance meanings of words, the peculiar interaction often caused by their juxtaposition, and the power of verbal circumstance. That the accidents of language could stuff an elephant into Anna’s world-bearing womb was the kind of thing that delighted Joyce....Whether Joyce himself ever knew about the stuffing, in this particular instance, is quite beside the point. To dismiss such a reading as ridiculously incorrect is to ignore the better half of the book.'

Hart here makes the striking claim that it is irrelevant whether Joyce knew about the 'elephant in the belly' meaning when he wrote the sentence - the reading can still stand. Dalton had wanted to minimise the range of meanings, based on Joyce's conscious intentions, revealed by the composition process. To Hart, this is an example of what the New Criticism called the 'intentional fallacy':

'It is certainly possible, by means of a reversal of Joyce’s process of composition, rationally to extract and isolate the deposits of discrete pieces of denotation from which the book was originally compounded.... What I am suggesting, however, is that it constitutes a most restrictive form of fallacious intentionalism.'

(The 'Intentional Fallacy' is a 1946 essay by W.K.Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, who wrote, 'The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.')

McHugh quotes a letter that Hart sent him in 1968:

'Most modern critics will say, rightly or wrongly, that it doesn't matter a damn what any author intended, except in so far as that intention is borne out by the work itself. ''For all we know, JJ may have intended FW to be a cookery book. Who cares what he thought? What are the book's intentions?'''

Back to Hart's Newslitter article, where he cites Joyce himself in support of anti-intentionalism:

'An anti-intentionalist reading of the text seems, paradoxically, to have Joyce’s sanction—to have been, as it were, part of his intention....He seems to have wanted meanings to accrete in his text by hindsight as well as by means of his own constant redistortions of the vocabulary....How else are we to interpret his delight in the Finns and the Russian Generals?....Joyce wanted to be a prophet.'

Here Hart could also have cited Joyce's use of chance as a collaborator, and his statement, 'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book. It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.'
 
Joyce also wanted his readers to be creative. He told Adolf Hoffmeister that his work could 'satisfy more readers than any other book because it gives them the opportunity to use their own ideas in the reading.' 

Here's Hart's conclusion:

 'Joyce’s comments in his letters and in conversation make it quite clear that he had the common reader in mind as much as the literary sophisticate. He intended the book to contain something for everybody, hoped that readers from any part of the world would find rivers they could recognize, dialects with which they were familiar. He said that he was writing in a ‘Big Language’....There seems every reason to approve of Mr Wolff’s approach as well as of Mr Dalton’s. Part of Joyce’s aim, with his Big Language, was evidently to provide a level of significance to readers familiar with Swahili as living speech....The scholarly approach, which attempts to clarify and define with precision... is a highly artificial way of reading FW. We are bringing literary experience to bear on it, rather than personal experience, and I have no doubt which of the two Joyce would prefer to see used.'

INTENTIONALISTS AND ANTI-INTENTIONALISTS

Dalton's intentionalism and Hart's creative approach are two very different ways of reading Finnegans Wake. It's always struck me that most books about the Wake, and even Wake readers, tend to fall either on one side or the other. McHugh comes down on the side of Dalton's intentionalism, welcoming its restrictiveness:

'For most readers, a satisfied conviction that a particular interpretation is apt will rarely occur without at least a suspicion of authorial intent. And Anti-intentionalism is a fearful stimulus to what is known as the 'lunatic fringe' of FW studies. As Hart himself observes of the Wake, 'Too often its convolutions have been treated as a kind of endless verbal equivalent of the Rorschach Ink-blot Test.' Against this backdrop, the restrictive quality of the manuscript approach seems a welcome curb.'

In his account of a 1971 Wake reading session, McHugh describes himself as a 'minimizer':

'At an early stage Matthew Hodgart underlined a distinction: the maximizers, such as himself, were delighted at every additional level that could be envisaged....On the other hand minimizers such as myself tried to cut the allusions to the smallest number which would account for all the letters in the word.' 

So in his Annotations to Finnegans Wake, McHugh only accepted readings which could be shown to be intended by Joyce - using the evidence of his notebooks, letters and authorized glosses. The same approach is now taken by Raphael Slepon on his fweet website (to the occasional frustration of creative readers, when they have their findings rejected). 

The 1978 publication of facsimiles of Joyce's manuscripts and notebooks as The Joyce Archive (right) gave a big boost to the intentionalist approach. 





The same year, Danis Rose brought out The Index Manuscript, an accurate transcription of the notebook with Joyce's original Kiswahili wordlist.  In his introduction, Rose defines Finnegans Wake as 'an ordered aggregate of elements each of which can be identified with a unit entered in one of the notebooks....The notebooks are primarily compilations of units, each of which can be identified with a fragment appearing in some external source.' 

Rose makes the extraordinary claim that, without the notebooks, it's impossible to read Finnegans Wake. 

'By relating textual elements (comprising drafts) to units (comprising notebooks) and units to referents (external sources)...the primary meaning...can be established....Without a knowledge of the referents these structures are ultimately vacuous and induce in the reader mental exhaustion (through the strain of supplying forced referents).'

Rose's is an extreme version of Dalton's intentionalist, anti-creative, position. A creative interpretation of the Wake involves 'forced referents' inducing 'mental exhaustion'!
 
By the time I subscribed to the Newslitter, in 1979, it had been largely taken over by notebook scholars like Rose and McHugh, tracking down those external sources.

I caught the last years of the Newslitter, subscribing from 1979 to 1984

Here's how the Genetic Wakean, Geert Lernout, justifies the notebook approach:

'This type of discovery differs fundamentally from that of the literary critic who finds a thought or a formula to describe a poem or a novel, or who manages to apply a fashionable theory to a text. The results of such interpretations are more or less interesting. Findings that derive from a radical philological approach belong to a different category: they are true in a different sense for the simple reason that they can be proven wrong. That is why a small number of Wake critics are turning to the notebooks: we are doing a type of research that is falsifiable and therefore scientific in Karl Popper's sense of the word.'

'The Finnegans Wake Notebooks and Radical Philology', Genetic Studies in Joyce, ed Hayman and Slote, p.48

TEMBO IN HER TUMBO 

To finish, let's look again at that phrase, 'tembo in her tumbo'.

'But what was the game in her mixed baggyrhatty? Just the tembo in her tumbo or pilipili from her pepperpot? Saas and tass and specis bizaas.' 209.11 

If you read this aloud, you can see that Joyce probably chose these particular words because of their sound as much as their Kiswahili meanings.

Here's Joyce's original Kiswahili (spelled yet another way!) wordlist transcribed in Rose's Index Manuscript:

This shows that Joyce thought 'tembo' meant 'palm-wine'  – Wolff's 'native beer' – rather than 'elephant'.

 

But  below 'tumbo' Joyce has 'utumbo’, meaning 'bowels', a reading which might have startled Dalton even more than 'belly'!
 

 

 

Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth By Day

'Bad news, I'm dead!', says Lucia Joyce (Maria Tucci) in the opening scene of  'Lucia's Chapter's of Coming Forth by Day'. This latest Wake inspired play, by the New York theatre company, Mabou Mines, has been brought to my home town as part of this year's Brighton Festival. I went to see it at the Theatre Royal on Thursday.

It's written and directed by Sharon Fogarty who, like Olwen Fouéré in her play riverrun, has been inspired by the parallels between Finnegans Wake and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The original title of this guidebook to the afterlife was 'Chapters of Coming Forth by Day'. The Egyptians saw death as the beginning of a long journey through a dark and dangerous underworld, which would end with them 'coming forth by day' into a new life. Joyce associated this with what happens to us every night when we sleep, and so Finnegans Wake, a night book, is full of echoes of the Book of the Dead.

The play places Lucia in the afterlife, with her own personal Book of the Dead. But she's also metaphorically dead because she's spent almost fifty years in mental institutions. There's a strong sense of entrapment. She's unable to escape from the institution and from the shadow of her famous father, James Joyce (Paul Kandel), who appears for most of the play in silhouette behind a screen. The men she falls in love with, such as Samuel Beckett, are more interested in her father than in her. She is frustrated in love and in her attempts to express herself as an artist. 

Lucia was silenced in life and even after death, when her nephew destroyed all her letters. So the play, like Carol Loeb Schloss's biography, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, is an attempt to give her back her voice.
 
There's wonderfully atmospheric music and sound from Carter Burwell, who scores the Coen Brothers' films, and dynamic visual projections on multiple screens by Julie Archer. At one point Lucia is completely engulfed in projected text. Jim Clayburg has designed the set with a cantilevered chair, on which Lucia sometimes takes off, swooping through the air.

The play was originally created as a collaboration with the late Ruth Maleczech, who, according to Fogarty, was 'a fierce and defiant Lucia with a Vesuvian anger simmering away.' You can see from the trailer on Vimeo that she was also very funny. Maria Tucci gives us a more fragile and child-like Lucia.

The text includes quotations from the Wake, reflecting Lucia's state of mind. At one point, the whole stage is lit up by flashes of lightning and, in a rage, Lucia shouts out the mighty thunderword from the book's opening page:

'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!'

Maria Tucci and Paul Kandel as Lucia and James Joyce, from the theatre programme

In my favourite part of the play, Joyce comes out from behind the screen, to deliver to his daughter the lovely lyrical passage in which Nuvoletta, the cloud girl, falls to earth as a drop of rain:

'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 climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. 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 and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!' 

The last line here is spoken by Lucia.

This feels like a description of Lucia, with 'all her myriads of drifting minds'. But, although she was a model for Nuvoletta, Joyce wrote this passage in 1927, three years before his daughter became ill. Joyce believed that Finnegans Wake had the power to predict the future. Had he predicted Lucia's illness here? 

At the time, Lucia was 'struck on dancing'. She was making a career for herself as an avant-garde dancer in Paris. Here she is dancing at the Bullier Ball in Paris in 1929, when the audience shouted, 'Nous réclamons l'irlandaise!' (We're calling for the Irish girl!)

She's wearing a shimmering silver fish costume she made herself. 'It was in silver sequins edged with green. One leg was covered to the heel and the other came right through the costume, so that when she put one behind the other, she created the illusion of a fish tail. Green and silver were entwined in her hair.' James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p 110.

Lucia also speaks the Wake's ending, as Anna Livia, the river Liffey, flowing out of Dublin to unite with her father, the sea.

'And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.'

Spoken by the dead Lucia Joyce, with her father standing beside her,  this passage takes on a whole new meaning.

This was the very first time that Tucci has performed the role and the production was a little unsteady on opening night. But what a thrill to hear again the words of Finnegans Wake spoken on stage.

Andrew Kay, critic of the local listings magazine, Latest 7, wrote that it made him rush home to download the book!

The best thing I've read on Lucia is Joan Acocella's  'A Fire in the Brain: The difficulties of being James Joyce's daughter' in the 2003 New Yorker.

RTE have also made an excellent documentary about her, which you can listen to here. The radio documentary, like Carol Loeb Schloss's book and the Mabou Mines play, claims that Joyce's linguistic experiments were inspired by Lucia's fractured language. In fact, he'd been writing the Wake for seven years before she became ill. Her breakdown was one of the factors that triggered his own writing block in the 1930s when, as he wrote, 'the words came out like drops of blood.'

Finnegans Wake set to music!

Today is the 76th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake!  The big celebratory event is the publication, online and free, of a musical recreation of the Wake, 'in its whole wholume' by Waywords and Meansigns.

Waywords and Meansigns, based in Canada, was created by Derek Pyle, who explained in an interview with Bibliokept that the idea came to him exactly a year ago today:

'In 2014 I organized a party to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. To celebrate we decided to listen to Patrick Healy’s audiobook recording of Finnegans Wake, which is 20-odd hours long. The party, as you can imagine, lasted all weekend — we actually listened to Johnny Cash’s unabridged reading of the New Testament that weekend too. There was very little sleep, and fair amount of absinthe....During the party I started wondering about other ways you could perform the text, and that’s when I came up with the idea of approaching musicians to create a new kind of audiobook.

As it turns out, a lot of people seemed to think my idea was a good one. We’ve had no shortage of musicians willing to contribute, including some really cool cats like Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth and bassist Mike Watt, who currently plays in Iggy Pop’s band The Stooges.'

So the book's seventeen chapters were each assigned to a different musician, given complete freedom, apart from the rule that 'the chapter's words must be audible, unabridged, and more or less in their original order'. 

As you'd expect, there are many different styles of performance, ranging from the Western Mass art punk band, Dérive, who give us an edgy rendition of 'the washers at the Ford'  to the New Zealand saxophonist, Hayden Chisolm, who provides a much more restful, and almost hypnotic, version of the pub chapter.

I love Peter Quadrino's reading of the Yawn chapter, whose recording he's described on his Finnegans, Wake! blog: 'I chose this chapter because it's always been one of my favorites. The opening finds a giant sleeping figure, Yawn, whose yawns and sleepy groans create huge gusts of wind.' 

Have a listen to the wonderful way that PQ creates those gusts of wind in his reading of 'Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!)' 
 
The book's closing and opening chapters, connected by the unfinished sentence, have been given to the same performers,  Mariana Lanari and  Sjoerd Leijten, from Amsterdam. This means, that, for the first time, you can listen to a continuous reading of the 'A way a lone a last a loved a...' sentence.  For the first chapter, they have also sampled pieces from the other musical performances, to indicate how the opening foreshadows what follows.

READING THE WAKE ALOUD

There's an interview with PQ and Steve 'Fly' Pratt, who's recorded the Jaun chapter, on the RAWIlluminations site. They have some great advice about reading the book aloud: 

PQ: 'The experience certainly confirmed the text's inherent musical rhythms, it really comes to life when read aloud. And last but not least, it's often said Finnegans Wake is a book for the ear but it's also a book for the mouth. You'll never utter anything like it.'

FLY: 'Perhaps think of the text as-if it were an interactive word game. Something you play. And to repeat, read it aloud and discover the tongue-twisting turns in every line. Take it slowly. Jump to any page, get your kit off and dive in. If that does not turn you on, the next time you get totally trashed, or feel a case of the giggles coming on, pick up the good book and prolong the enjoyment. Simple.'

PQ: ' Build up a passion and interest for it first. Read some books about it, get to know how bizarre and irrational it is. You can't try to just slog through it like any other big book. It's designed to shatter your logical mind and drown you in a variegated cacophony of lingual sounds from dozens of languages. Also, yes it's difficult but with enough time you will find the book will teach you how to read it.' 

Joyce with his guitar in 1915

 

FINNEGANS WAKE IS A MUSICAL BOOK

Finnegans Wake is the perfect book for this project, because Joyce, a gifted musician, wrote it as if it was music. For example, he described the Anna Livia chapter, which he recorded, as 'an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water.' 

Joyce's title for his great dusk piece was a musical one,  'A Phoenix Park Nocturne'.

He uses many musical techniques, such as the Wagnerian leitmotif, a short, recurring phrase, associated with a particular person, place or idea.  So the Anna Livia chapter ends with the phrase 'Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!' (216.04). This is an Anna Liffey river lietmotif, echoed six other times:

'wasching the walters of, the weltering walters off. Whyte.' 64.20
'and watch her waters of her sillying waters of' 74.29
'And his dithering dathering waltzers of. Stright!' 245.22 
'arride the winnerful wonders off, the winnerful wonnerful wanders off' 265.15
'baffling with the walters of, hoompsydoompsy walters of. High!' 373.06
'Amingst the living waters of, the living in giving waters of. Tight!' 462.04

Finnegans Wake is named after a song, and is full of hundreds of other songs, whose rhythms and lyrics Joyce plays with. The book even includes this song written by Joyce himself.

Setting the whole of Finnegans Wake to music is a mighty achievement.  Even more impressively, Waywords and Meansigns are planning to do the whole thing again later this year with different contributors! Here's how you can get involved.