Joyce’s language(s)

Joyce’s fascination with languages has a paper trail all the way back to his teenage years.

His earliest surviving piece of writing is a translation of Horace’s Ode III.13, which he produced at the age of 14 for his Senior Grade school examinations at Belvedere College. At around 16, he wrote an essay called ‘The Study of Languages’, where he argued that multilingualism and translation were the keys to great literature and philosophy, and by 18 he had taught himself Norwegian in order to read, and eventually correspond with, his favourite playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Even his supposedly monolingual works, like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses, are filled with non-English languages.

In Portrait, for example, Joyce dramatises Ireland’s colonial trauma and revolt against British imperialism through his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus’s, fraught relationship with English. In one oft-quoted scene, he debates his college’s dean of studies while thinking to himself:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

‘I do not much care for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius.’

Joyce’s friend from Dublin, Mary Colum, questioned in her 1927 review for the New York Herald Tribune whether this ‘incomprehensible’ work could even be considered literature, while F. R. Leavis, later to be echoed by another major multilingual writer, Vladimir Nabokov, complained that Wakean multilingualism was not so much a sign of ‘richness’ but of ‘monotonous non-significance’.

Undoubtedly, the Wake is difficult to read—merely mouthing the words, let alone comprehending them, is a mean feat. This text destabilises, fragments, and disorients. But then: so did Joyce’s world between the wars. So is our world right now! So what if we leaned into this Babelian cacophony? Amidst all the seriousness—of colonial violence, of exile, of discrimination against difference, especially that of minoritised communities—and all the slow-going scholarly labour, what if we simply let ourselves play in the mud of Joyce’s multilingual pun factory? What readers tend to find, once expectations are suspended and we open up to simply being present with/in this text, is that there is a little bit of, and for, everybody in the Wake. Read it aloud and listen out for what feels familiar to you—whether that is a language, a song, a nursery rhyme, a famous name, or a surreal apparition of a childhood memory.

Pause for thought

Please give us your thoughts on the article and following question in the comments below:

• How do you, as a reader, experience Joyce’s use of different languages?