Bits from books

Below are two vignettes from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, a collection of edited radio interviews with nine women writers. The interviews were conducted by John Quinn, and centred on childhood in Ireland. In his introduction, Quinn writes that “because radio and print are such different media there are things that one can do which the other cannot. If the writers featured in this book were each commissioned to write an essay on their childhood, it would be a very different book.”

In the foreword, Seamus Heaney describes the invention of a narrative for one’s childhood as “to some extent a creative discovery of the self”. All the contributing writers offered a very interesting and mostly spontaneous glimpse of their formative years on the island, full of interesting recollections and some very funny anecdotes:

There were no books at all in our house. My mother was extremely suspicious of literature because she thought it was bad and could lead to sin. My father wasn’t interested in books. Hi reading was confined to the Irish Field and bloodstock manuals. There was no travelling library in our locality then. There were simply no books. Once, when someone in the village actually got a copy of Rebecca, there was such an avidity for it that it was loaned by the page. Unfortunately you would get page 84 and then page 103. As a result, I did not grasp the story of Rebecca for ages.

Edna O’Brien

I discovered Shakespeare largely through Anew McMaster’s travelling players. When he came to Lismore with Hamlet, that was really one of the highlights of my youth. I was so excited that I couldn’t go home to bed. I had to cycle round the countryside for most of the night recovering from that performance.

Dervla Murphy

Blather and blarney and blindfolding the devil

“All Ireland went into the making of this book,” the Sunday Tribune wrote of English As We Speak It In Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce (1827-1914). An exaggeration, certainly, but a forgivable one when describing this wonderful, idiosyncratic collection of Irish-English sayings, proverbs, expressions, folklore, vocabulary and barely categorisable linguistic oddities. There are chapters on grammar, old customs, swearing, and proverbs; there is one devoted to exaggeration and redundancy; there is even a chapter exploring the expressions pertaining to the devil. As the title page declares: “The life of a people is pictured in their speech”.

This blog post is not a review of P. W. Joyce’s book, just a hearty endorsement. Such has been my pleasure as I read it over the last few days that I want to recommend it warmly to anyone listening – that is, reading – who has an interest in Ireland’s folk history or in the endlessly witty and strange innovations the English language underwent under the influence of the Irish tongue. Growing up in the rural west, I was exposed to all manner of colourful turns of phrase and modes of speech. Some I inherited and use to this day; others I lost along the way. Joyce’s book has reacquainted me with a few and introduced me to many others, as fresh today as they might have been a century or two ago.

Irish-English has a great many words and phrases used to describe a person’s lack of intelligence, decency, or industry; one of my favourites is: “There’s a great deal of sense outside your head.” Upon the approach of a conceited person – a pusthaghaun (m) or pusthoge (f) – you could say, with cheerful sarcasm, that here comes “half the town”, a translation of the Irish leath an bhaile /læh ən ‘wɒljə/ or /ljæh ən ‘wɒljə/. A useless fellow is “fit to mind mice at a cross-roads”. Contrary to Freud, a Munster saying insists that “a slip of the tongue is no fault of the mind”. Upon hearing of danger or tragedy, a person might exclaim: “The Lord between us and all harm!” A spaug (Irish: spág) is a big clumsy foot. I’ve heard these last two a lot.

You could say, of a very familiar person, that you’d know their shadow on a furze bush. If someone falls well short of an aim or target, they “didn’t come within the bray of an ass of it”. A version I’m more familiar with, especially in a sporting context, is that they didn’t come “within an ass’s roar” of something. Apparently the phrase harks back to ancient times, when sounds such as bells and animal noises were used as approximate measures of distance. The donkey also appears in a popular expression used of a garrulous person: they would “talk the jawbone off an ass” (or “the hind legs off a donkey”); English As We Speak It In Ireland cites an equivalent saying: that they would “talk the teeth off a saw”.

Ulysses, Ulysses, soaring through all the galaxies

I have never taken part in Bloomsday. Perhaps I should say: I have never deliberately taken part in Bloomsday, though I – like everyone and everything else – could be said to participate tangentially. In the world of Joyce, a connection between any two things is implicit in their existence, and remains only to be spotted, plotted, or forgotted. This was also a legacy of Einstein’s: that no atom could be satisfactorily defined without reference to every other, i.e. to the rest of the universe.

Objectivity never stood a chance.

Infinite interconnection is an idea both beguiling and intuitively true, but long displaced by a default fragmentation. It’s easy to miss or disregard those connections as we go about our daily lives. Were we to afford them our devoted attention, we would surely become infinitely distracted – as we do, momentarily, when our gaze falls on the infinite star map of a clear night sky. The great physicists of the last century rediscovered Indra’s Net, and in Ulysses Joyce mapped it onto a day in Dublin for the perpetual puzzlement of posterity (or at least some of its scholars).

Or did he?

The Irish answer: he did and he didn’t.

Confession no.2: I have not read Finnegans Wake. At least, not from start to finish, not yet. I read Ulysses only last year, and Homer’s Odyssey mere months before that, so I’m catching up slowly. This is no place for a book review, but I’ll put on record that I loved every exasperating cascading serenading page of Joyce’s masterpiece. When I finished it I raided the Joyce corner of my mother’s bookshelf for Joyce-related essays, memoirs, and biographies. So I am on a course leading to Finnegans Wake, but before it there is Richard Ellmann’s biography, which I have more than half a mind to begin reading today. It’s either that or the reissued 1922 text of Ulysses.

[Image: Image of James Joyce (detail) by Louis le Brocquy, 1978; oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm.]

This post was originally intended to be a long and careful tribute to Joyce – “that bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on end”* – but instead it is medium-sized and extemporaneous. The post title, by the way, refers to a French–Japanese cartoon my sister and I were enchanted by in the 1980s.

1980s, 1880s, 3080s, it’s all the same and it’s all in bloom.

If you are interested in taking part in the general merriment of Bloomsday, the James Joyce Centre website has information aplenty; if time and geography are against you, here is a short recording of Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. (After 8½ minutes you can beginagain.) The accent and musicality of his speaking voice are a delight, and there is accompanying text here, if you wish to read along.

I leave you with a poem:

Invocation to Joyce

Scattered over scattered cities,
alone and many
we played at being that Adam
who gave names to all living things.
Down the long slopes of night
that border on the dawn,
we sought (I still remember) words
for the moon, for death, for the morning,
and for man’s other habits.
We were imagism, cubism,
the conventicles and sects
respected now by credulous universities.
We invented the omission of punctuation
and capital letters,
stanzas in the shape of a dove
from the libraries of Alexandria.
Ashes, the labor of our hands,
and a burning fire our faith.
You, all the while,
in cities of exile,
in that exile that was
your detested and chosen instrument,
the weapon of your craft,
erected your pathless labyrinths,
infinitesmal and infinite,
wondrously paltry,
more populous than history.
We shall die without sighting
the twofold beast or the rose
that are the center of your maze,
but memory holds the talismans,
its echoes of Virgil,
and so in the streets of night
your splendid hells survive,
so many of your cadences and metaphors,
the treasures of your darkness.
What does our cowardice matter if on this earth
there is one brave man,
what does sadness matter if in time past
somebody thought himself happy,
what does my lost generation matter,
that dim mirror,
if your books justify us?
I am the others. I am those
who have been rescued by your pains and care.
I am those unknown to you and saved by you.

Jorge Luis Borges

Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.

* Description by Richard Ellmann in the preface to the revised 1982 edition of his biography of Joyce. I edited the post to include the quote and this footnote.

Whitehead and the modern word

Here is an excerpt from a book I’m reading today, Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World:

Each generation criticises the unconscious assumptions made by its parents. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

The history of the development of language illustrates this point. It is a history of the progressive analysis of ideas. Latin and Greek were inflected languages. This means that they express an unanalysed complex of ideas by the mere modification of a word; whereas in English, for example, we use prepositions and auxiliary verbs to drag into the open the whole bundle of ideas involved. For certain forms of literary art – though not always – the compact absorption of auxiliary ideas into the main word may be an advantage. But in a language such as English there is the overwhelming gain in explicitness. This increased explicitness is a more complete exhibition of the various abstractions involved in the complex idea which is the meaning of the sentence.

Whitehead not only had interesting ideas, he also expressed them in interesting ways. A close reading of the quoted material reveals at once its exemplary plainness. Short sentences alternate with moderately long ones, and each point arises naturally from the previous one, with partial repetition for emphasis and lucidity. Technical words are made clear by their context, common words are used whenever appropriate, and abstractions are tied to everyday experience.

Science and the Modern World is a collection of essays adapted from lectures which Whitehead wrote at the rate of one a week – “at white heat”, as his wife put it. In Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, recorded and edited by Lucien Price, Whitehead revealed that he did not rewrite much, but that he wrote very slowly and elided a great deal. He also said: “I do not think in words. I begin with concepts, then try to put them into words, which is often very difficult.”

I found the book, a Pelican edition, at the wonderful Charlie Byrne’s bookshop for the absurdly generous price of €1. Curiously, it is titled Science and the Modern World on the inner title page and in the headers throughout the text, but not on the front cover, where an ampersand replaces the word and, thus demonstrating the general interchangeability of these symbols.

[Portrait source]

David Foster Wallace

RIP David Foster Wallace, the American writer and teacher whose life came to a sad and abrupt end on 12 September 2008. He was 46.

I can thank my mum for introducing me to Wallace’s writing. Many years ago in a second-hand bookstore she happened upon A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; the front cover caught her eye and the back cover* enticed her to buy it for me. From its opening essay about tennis, trigonometry and tornadoes (PDF, 3.25 MB) to its closing tour de force about surviving a luxury cruise (PDF, 8.6 MB), I had never read anything quite like it. I quickly read it again and before long I was knee-deep in Infinite Jest, Wallace’s best known and most infamous book, then his other fiction and non-fiction – all of it eloquent, brilliantly styled, inspiring and occasionally maddening.**

The only David Foster Wallace book that didn’t win me over was Everything and More, where his peculiarly messy kind of fussiness sat awkwardly with the subject matter (mathematical infinity) and seemed hastily written and edited besides. But everything else I read, for example his terrific articles on David Lynch, the ethics of boiling lobsters, and the “seamy underbelly” of U.S. lexicography, thrilled me with the power and grace of good writing. Tense Present (the last link) is one of the most entertaining essays you’r likely to read on English usage, and doubles as a review of Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Garner returns the compliment in this interview: he seems to have happily adopted the neologism SNOOT, Wallace’s family’s term for an extreme usage fanatic. It’s an acronym of Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance or Syntax Nudniks of Our Time. From the essay:

Family suppers often involved a game: If one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. But the really chilling thing is that I now sometimes find myself playing this same ‘game’ with my own students, complete with pretend pertussion.

While Wallace’s writing has a healthy vein of self-deprecation and black humour, it also has more than its fair share of alienation and torment. Wallace suffered from depression, which worsened sharply in the months leading up to his apparent suicide. Many cultures condone death delivered finally at the hands of family, doctors or other authorities, but maintain a taboo over delivering it ourselves. Deciding to die, moreover, is anathema to western society’s glorification of productivity and its obsession with prolonging life, regardless of the cost to human dignity and quality of life.

Whether or not you subscribe to such conventions, Stanley Keleman’s words in Living Your Dying might offer consolation: “suicide can be the ultimate affirmation of human freedom”. In a speech at Kenyon College Wallace said: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day”, which hints at the kind of person he was, or at least wanted to be. For all the whimsy and satire of his writing, Wallace was a deeply humane writer whose attachment to the world may eventually have become too much for him to bear.

There’s a storyline in Infinite Jest about an underground film so entertaining that seeing it is an instantly and fatally addicting experience. Temper the exaggeration and you wouldn’t be far from the effect that Wallace’s writing had on me, though I realize that it’s not to everyone’s taste. For the curious and enthusiast alike, there are links to some of his journalism here and here, and an extensive collection of obituaries here.

* Specifically, the reference to David Lynch.
** Not least the very frequent footnotes.