Reporter | Intern Tang Mingming
Edit | Zhu Jieshu
"Even if you don't finish Ulysses, you should have one on your shelf, or others will think you're uncultured." At the recent event held by the Shanghai Library on the theme of "Joyce's World and the World's Joyce", the host Zhang Yazhe said this half-jokingly as soon as he came up. In his view, Joyce's book is "one of the most successful marketings in the history of culture." Even though Ulysses and Finnegan's Vigil are known as "Heavenly Books", they have attracted countless readers and scholars to study.
Liu Feng, a professor at Peking University's School of Foreign Chinese, also mentioned that at present, Joyce has formed a huge academic and critical industry, and according to the statistics of foreign scholars, the number of papers and monographs studied by Joyce is second only to Shakespeare." "Because the story of Ulysses is set on June 16, 1904. So June 16 became Blooms Day (the protagonist of Ulysses), "and all kinds of celebrations and academic events are held around the world to commemorate it." So what kind of charm did Joyce have that attracted countless scholars to spend their lives studying him? What kind of courage and perseverance was needed to translate his "Book of Heaven"? How should the average reader enter the reading?
<h3>Ulysses: Attaching the order of detail to the experience of the characters</h3>
In the view of Lu Guoqing, associate professor of the Department of Comparative Literature and World Literature at Shaanxi Normal University, details play a crucial role in Ulysses, "Joyce breaks down the content of the novel narrative into details, distributes them into the text, and at the same time allows them to form their own continuity, so that the length of the text expands like an encyclopedia." But the details of the text in Ulysses "are by no means independent objective counterparts, but are attached to the immediate experience of the characters, which are what the characters do, perceive, and think", and when the details are orderly dependent on the characters' immediate experience, the immediate experience forms an orderly structure through the narrative language.
Joyce wrote to his brother in 1904 that george Moore's "Wild Geese" in The Virgin Land had flaws and loopholes in the details, that the couple in the novel had been living along the railroad line between Bray and Dublin for three years, that the trains on this section were running non-stop, and that even so, the wife had to check the train schedule when her husband was going to Dublin for a meeting, "just like you don't check the timetable of the subway," Lu said. Joyce was very strict about the details. (He believes) that the knowledge of the narrator should be drawn away from the knowledge of the characters: what the characters do not know, the narrator cannot replace him; the characters know, and the narrator does not know, the author should infer the knowledge that the characters should have according to the situation, and on this basis, let the narrator realistically unfold the narrative. ”
This "discipline of writing" is vividly reflected in Joyce's creation. For example, in Ulysses, Bloom forgot to bring his keys when he left the house that day, so he needs to jump over the iron fence when he gets home. Because Bloom's height in the novel is set to 1.76 meters, Joist asked his aunt to see if a medium-sized person would be injured by jumping off the iron fence. Even the Blooms' residence was not entirely fictitious, and in 1904 there were no occupants at 7 Eccles Street, so he put fictional characters in an empty house to construct his fictional world.
The details in Ulysses are not as simple as they seem. Lu Guoqing pointed out that the British poet Eliot believed that Ulysses used "the use of mythology and the continuous control of the contrast between the contemporary and the ancient" to output form and meaning for "a meaningless, disorderly panorama of contemporary history". But hugh Kenner, a prominent Joyce scholar, refuted this view, arguing that the details of life that Joyce dealt with had their own interlocking structures, without the need to implant foreign forms, "If Ulysses had removed the title and the original title, no one would have found its connection to the Odyssey." ”
In addition to the exquisite details and structure of "Ulysses", Liu Feng believes that the most important point of "Ulysses" is to create the immortal character of Bloom, "We read Ulysses Bloom will have the richest understanding of human nature." ”
<h3>Finnegan's Vigil: Shattering, deforming, and reassembling all the words</h3>
"Ulysses" has a profound meaning and a high reading threshold. Liu Feng said that "Ulysses", as the most classic stream of consciousness novel, can be as long as dozens of pages without punctuation, the author uses this to simulate the protagonist's inner flow of consciousness, which also greatly increases the difficulty of translation, Qian Zhongshu even called the translation of "Ulysses" a "unique suicidal act". Even so, Ulysses is not Joyce's highest-threshold and most difficult work. Fifty or sixty languages appear in Finnegan's Vigil, hence the name "Book of Heaven."
Dai Congrong, a professor of chinese and Chinese literature at Fudan University who translated Finnegan's Vigil (Volume I), recalls his first student days as a student who read Joyce. If Ulysses "opened a mighty, delicate river" before her eyes, Finnegan's Vigil opened the entire universe, "the shock is indelible." ”
The average reader is usually startled when they open the first page of Finnegan's Vigil, which is full of new words that cannot be found in any dictionary. In his book The Book of Freedom: An Interpretation of Finnegan's Guardian, Dai rongrong mentions that the famous Joyce scholar Clive Hart summarized the reader's evaluation of the book in the article "Finnegan's Guardian spirit from a changing perspective": some people think That Joyce is crazy; some people think that Joyce deliberately created all kinds of new words, "stacking language together, stuffing it into an intolerable shell, and then hiding behind the reader's back and laughing"; while others think that Joyce tried to write the entire history of human existence, showing " Unprecedented complexity and perfection"; others argue that Finnegan's Vigil itself is "lacking in order", which is staggering, and the words that cannot be found in the dictionary herald the "disintegration of the universe" are Joyce's fables about the rupture of modern society.
Dai pointed out that among the self-made words in Finnegan's Vigil, the most numerous are portmanteau words, that is, new words that Joyce created by combining some of the letters of several words. In her opinion, "it is not so much the ultimate intention of Finnegan's Vigil that transcends the limits of language as it is the ultimate intent of Finnegan's Vigil." In Finnegan's Vigil, Joyce breaks free from the shackles of language by breaking, deforming, and reassembling all the words, and makes himself a god-like creator of language, free in creation. ”
So how can the average reader understand Finnegan's Vigil through the kaleidoscopic language made by Joyce? Day believes that readers can use Borges's The Garden where the Trail Bifurcates as a reading incision for Finnegan's Vigil. Borges was a fan of Joyce, and in The Garden where the Trail Forks, the Englishman Stephen Albert tells the story of a Chinese named Peng Xi, who wrote a book known as "The Garden where the Trail Forks." In Dai Rongrong's view, "Peng Xi spent 13 years writing this book, just as Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegan's Vigil, all to create an eternal art world." The ways in which Borges makes the novel infinitely cyclical can also be found in Finnegan's Vigil. How can we make fiction eternal? Borges borrowed from Albert to illustrate four methods:
The first is that the first and last pages overlap, forming a loop of text. In Finnegan's Vigil, "its beginning and end pages, though different, are connected by the same sentence. ”
The second is that the characters in the work tell the story of the event, thus creating a cycle of narrative behavior," Joyce set up a letter in Finnegan's Vigil, which was dug up by the hen at 12 o'clock, which is a very famous medieval herb in Ireland and the "Finnegan's Vigil" itself. ”
The third is to ensure the act of reading through the cycle of word of mouth. In Joyce's own words, its novels look horrific with the eye and hopeful with the ears. Dai Rongrong also asked some Irish people, who felt that they could understand more than purely by looking at it, by reading aloud. In his book Finnegan's Interpretation of the Vigil, Dai rongrong notes that some scholars consider the hitherto unsolved puzzles in Finnegan's Vigil to be "trivial and insignificant" that "do not have a decisive influence on understanding the whole book", and Louis O'Punk even compares reading Finnegan's Vigil to listening to music, which he feels "is a work in which the overall intuitive impression is greater than the logical deduction of details", so that the reader "does not have to dwell on or cling to the revelatory power of the specific plot of the work." ”
The final one is to construct a "path bifurcation structure" for the protagonist. Unlike ordinary fiction works, which will make the protagonist choose only one as the ending when faced with a choice, "Finnegan's Vigil" allows the protagonist to experience all the possibilities, so that the protagonist can cycle through different times, so that the novel can never be read. This never-ending, "temporal structure of the path bifurcation" is the most important correspondence of Finnegan's Vigil and The Garden of the Trail Bifurcation. ”
From this perspective, we can also understand why Joyce "played" with language in Finnegan's Vigil. Because Joyce hopes to create multiple possibilities for the protagonist by preserving the polysemy of words, "the use of words as the basic level of the text directly reflects the structural pattern of the bifurcation of the path." And when Joyce tries to melt all the possibilities into a novel, it makes his text form a "kaleidoscope of changing changes", so that the novel forms a labyrinth of eternity, so that countless Joyce fans can go deep into his carefully created maze again and again, start their own adventures, and look forward to finding the closest end to Joyce in different possibilities.