On Literature

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS BACHELOR

I am probably the least suitable speaker to celebrate Joyce's bachelor of arts degree. After all, an article published in St. Stephens Magazine in 1901 claimed that it was ideas from Italy that had corrupted Joyce. But I did not ask to give this commemorative address: that is the responsibility of University College. As for the title of my lecture, perhaps my intertextual wordplay is not terribly original, but then I am only "a playboy of the southern world."

I do, however, feel ill at ease with the title I have chosen: I would have liked to speak of the time when Jim, at Clongowes Wood College, announced his age by saying, "I am half past six." But let us not stray from the subject, which is, of course Joyce as bachelor.

All of you know probably that bachelor has become a magic word in many studies of contemporary semantics, ever since it was passed down from author to author as the supreme example of an ambiguous term possessing at least four different meanings. A bachelor is (i) an unmarried male adult; (ii) a young knight in the service of another; (iii) a person who has obtained his first degree; and (iv) a male seal who has not yet managed to mate during the mating season. Nevertheless, Roman Jakobson has pointed out that despite their semantic differences, these four homonyms have an element of incompleteness in common, or at least of something unfinished. In any context, a bachelor is, then, someone who has not yet reached a state of maturity. The young male is not yet a husband or mature father, the page is not yet a knight who has received investiture, the young B.A. graduate is not yet a Ph.D., and the poor male seal has not yet discovered the joys of sex.

When our Jim left University College he was still an incomplete Joyce, in that he had not yet written those works without which Joyce would have remained little more than a bigheaded novice. However, I would like to underline the fact that despite this, at the end of his studies Jim was not so incomplete as one would like to believe, and that it was precisely during those years of study that he clearly outlined, in his first attempts at writing, the directions he would later take in his maturity.

Jim began his degree in 1898, studying English under the supervision of Father O'Neill, a pathetic enthusiast of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, Italian with Father Ghezzi, and French with Edouard Cadic. This was the period of neo-Thomist studies, which often provide the quickest route to misunderstanding Aquinas, but while he was at the College, and before the Pola Notebook and Paris Notebook, Jim had certainly understood something about Aquinas. He once said to Stanislaus that Thomas Aquinas is a very complex thinker because what he says resembles exactly what ordinary people say, or what they would like to say—and for me this means that he had understood an awful lot, if not everything, of the philosophy of Saint Thomas.

In "Drama and Life," a lecture read on 20 January 1900 to the University College Literary and Historical Society, Joyce announced in advance the poetics of Dubliners: "Still I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama."

In "Ibsen's New Drama," published 1 April 1900 in the Fortnightly Review, we can identify that fundamental idea of artistic impersonality, which we find later in the Portrait. Referring to a work of drama, he writes: "Ibsen [...] sees it steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes," and the God of the Portrait Will be "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

In "James Clarence Mangan," a lecture also given to the to the Literary and Historical Society on 15 February 1902 and published the following May in St Stephens Magazine, we find that "Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being, or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life." This is without doubt the first adumbration of the notion of epiphany as it would be developed in his subsequent works.

In "The Study of Language," an essay written during his first year at university (1898–99), we find an astonishing statement that lies at the root of the structure of Ulysses: the young author speaks of an artistic language that escapes from "the hardness which is sufficient for flat, plain statements, by an overadded influence of what is beautiful in pathetic phrases, swelling of words, or torrents of invective, in tropes and varieties of figures, yet preserving even in moments of the greatest emotion, an innate symmetry."

In this same text we can also identify a distant foretaste of Finnegans Wake and of his future reading of Vico, when Joyce writes that "in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of today with that of years ago, we have a useful illustration of the extent of external influences on the very words of a race."

Moreover, Joyce's fundamental obsession, his search for artistic truth through the manipulation of all the languages of the world, is revealed in another passage of this early essay when Jim, still in his first year, writes that "the higher grades of language, style, syntax, poetry, oratory, rhetoric, are again the champions and exponents, in what way soever, of truth."

If it is true that every author develops a single seminal idea in the course of his whole life, this seems particularly clear in the case of Joyce: while not yet a bachelor, he knew exactly what he had to do—and he said so, albeit in an unformed and rather naive way, within these four walls. Or, if you prefer, he decided to make his maturity fulfill what he had managed to foresee while studying in these lecture rooms.

In the first year of his degree Jim meditated on the representation of the Sciences in Santa Maria Novella, and concluded that Grammar had to be "the primary science." He thus dedicated most of his life to the invention of a new grammar, and the search for truth became for him the search for a perfect language.

In the year when Dublin is being celebrated as the European cultural capital, it is appropriate to reflect on the fact that the search for a perfect language was and continues to be a typically European phenomenon. Europe was born from a single nucleus of languages and cultures (the Greco-Roman world) and later had to face its fragmentation into different nations with different languages. The ancient world was bothered neither by the problem of a perfect language nor by that of the multiplicity of languages. The Hellenistic koiné first, and later the Latin of the Roman Empire, guaranteed a satisfactory system of universal communication from the Mediterranean basin to the British Isles. The two peoples that had invented the language of philosophy and the language of law identified the structure of their languages with the structures of human reason. Greeks spoke the language. All the others were barbarians, which etymologically means "those who stammer."

The fall of the Roman Empire marked the beginning of a period of linguistic and political division. Latin became corrupt. The barbarians invaded, with their own languages and customs. Half of the Roman lands went to the Greeks of the Eastern Empire. Part of Europe and the whole Mediterranean basin began to speak Arabic. The dawn of the new millennium saw the birth of the national vernaculars that we still speak today on this continent.

It was precisely at this historical moment that Christian culture began to reread the Bible passage on the confusio linguarum that had taken place during the building of the Tower of Babel. It was only in these centuries that men began to dream of the possibility of rediscovering or reinventing a pre-Babelic language, a language common to all humanity, capable of expressing the nature of things through a kind of innate homology between things and words. This search for a universal system of communication has taken on different forms from then to the present day: there have been those who have tried to go back in time in an effort to rediscover the language that Adam originally spoke with God; others moved forward, trying to build a language of reason endowed with the lost perfection that initially belonged to Adam's language. Some tried to pursue Vico's ideal of finding a language of the mind common to all peoples. International languages like Esperanto were invented, and people are still working to outline a "language of the mind" common to men and computers...

However, in the course of these researches, there were cases when someone claimed that the only perfect language was that spoken by his own compatriots. In the seventeenth century George Philipp Harsdörfer claimed that Adam could not have spoken anything but German, since only in German do word stems offer a perfect reflection of the nature of things (later, Heidegger would say that one could philosophize only in German and, in a generous concession, Greek). For Antoine de Rivarol (Discours sur l'universalité de la langue française, 1784), French was the only language in which the syntactic structure of sentences reflected the real structure of human reason, and therefore it was the only logical language in the world (German sounded too guttural, Italian too sweet, Spanish too redundant, English too obscure).

It is well known that Joyce became an enthusiast of Dante Alighieri in this College, and that he remained an enthusiast for the rest of his life. All his Dante references are to The Divine Comedy, but there are valid reasons for believing that he also had a certain familiarity with the Italian poet's ideas on the origins of language, and with his plan for creating a perfect, new poetic language, as Dante himself expressed it in his De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence). In any case Joyce must have found clear references to this subject in The Divine Comedy, and in Paradiso 26 a new version of the old question about Adam's language.

De Vulgari Eloquentia was written between 1303 and 1305, before The Divine Comedy. Although it looks like a doctrinal dissertation, the work is in fact a self-commentary, in which the author tends to analyze his own methods of artistic production, implicitly identifying them with the model of all poetic discourse.

According to Dante the plurality of vernacular languages had been preceded, before the sin of Babel, by a perfect language that Adam used to speak with God, and his descendants used to speak with each other. After the confusion caused by Babel, languages multiplied, first in the various geographical areas of the world and then inside what we call today the romance area, where the languages of si, d'oc, and d'oil became differentiated. The language of si, or Italian, divided into a multiplicity of dialects, which at times differed even from one area of a city to another. This differentiation was caused by the unstable and inconstant nature of man, his customs and his verbal habits, in both time and space. It was precisely to make up for these slow, inexorable changes in natural language that the inventors of grammar tried to create a kind of unchangeable language that would stay the same in time and space, and this language was the Latin spoken in medieval universities. But Dante was searching for a vernacular Italian language, and thanks to his poetic culture and the contacts he made as an itinerant exile, he experienced both the variety of Italian dialects and the variety of European languages. The aim of De Vulgari Eloquentia was to find a more dignified and noble language, and for that reason Dante proceeded by way of a rigorous critical analysis of dialectal Italian. Since the best poets had, each in his own way, departed from their regional dialect, this suggested the possibility of finding a "noble dialect," a "vulgare Mustré" ("an illustrious vernacular," i.e. one that "diffused light") worthy of taking its place in the royal palace of a national kingdom, were the Italians ever to have one. This would be a dialect common to all Italian cities but to none in particular, a kind of ideal model which the poets came close to and against which all existing dialects would have to be judged.

Consequently, to combat the confusion of different languages, Dante seemed to be proposing a poetic idiom that had affinities with Adam's language and that was the same as the poetic language of which he proudly considered himself the founder. This perfect language, which Dante hunts down as though it were a "scented panther," appears from time to time in the works of those poets that Dante considers great, albeit in a rather unformed way, not clearly codified, and with grammatical principles that are not quite explicit.

It was in this context—faced with the existence of dialects, natural but not universal languages, and of Latin, universal but artificial—that Dante pursued his dream of restoring an Edenic language that was at the same time both natural and universal. But unlike those who would later seek to rediscover the original Hebraic language, Dante intended to re-create the Edenic condition with a stroke of modern invention. The illustrious verna cular, for which his own poetic language was to be a model, would help the "modern" poet heal the post-Babel wound.

This audacious conception of his own role as restorer of a perfect language explains why, instead of condemning the multiplicity of languages, Dante brings out their biological strength in De Vulgari Eloquentia, their capacity for renewal in the course of time. It is precisely on the basis of this creativity of language that he believes himself capable of inventing and launching a perfect, modern, and natural language, without going back to lost models. If Dante had believed that the primordial language was to be identified with Hebrew he would have immediately decided to learn it and write in the language of the Bible. But Dante never thought about that possibility, because he was certain he could still find, through a perfecting of the various Italian dialects, that universal language of which Hebrew had simply been the most venerable incarnation.

Many of the arrogant statements of the young Joyce seem to allude to the same task of restoring the conditions of a perfect language through his own personal literary invention, with the aim of forging "the uncreated conscience" of his race, a language that would be not arbitrary like ordinary language but necessary and existing for a reason. In this way the young bachelor understood Dante's idea perfectly, and also mysteriously, and he would pursue it throughout his life.

However, Dante's project, like every other blueprint for a perfect language, involved finding a language that would allow humanity to escape the post-Babelic labyrinth. One can, as Dante did, accept the positive plurality of languages, but a perfect language ought to be clear and lucid, not labyrinthine. Joyce's project, on the other hand, as it moved progressively away from his first Thomist aesthetic toward the vision of the world expressed in Finnegans Wake, seems to be that of overcoming the post-Babelic chaos not by rejecting it but by accepting it as the only possibility. Joyce never tried to place himself on this side or the far side of the Tower, he wanted to live inside it—and you will allow me to speculate whether by chance his decision to start Ulysses from the top of a tower is not an unconscious préfiguration of his final objective, namely, that of forging a "polyguttural" and "multilingual" crucible that would represent not the end but the triumph of the conjusio linguarum.

What can the ultimate origin of such a decision have been?

Around the first half of the seventh century A.D. there appeared in Ireland a grammatical treatise entitled Auraicept na n-Éces ( The Precepts of the Poets). The basic idea of this treatise is that in order to adapt the Latin grammatical model to Irish grammar one must imitate the structures of the Tower of Babel: there are eight or nine (depending on the various versions of the text) parts of speech, namely, nouns, verbs, adverbs, and so on, and the number of basic elements used to build the Tower of Babel was eight or nine (water, blood, clay, wood, and so on). Why this parallel? Because the seventy-two doctors of the school of Fenius Farsaidh, who had planned the first language to emerge after the chaos of Babel (and it goes without saying that this language was Gaelic), had tried to build an idiom that, like the original, was not only homologous with the nature of things but also able to take into account the nature of all the other languages born after Babel. Their plan was inspired by Isaiah 66.18: "I shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues." The method they had used consisted in selecting the best from every language, fragmenting, so to speak, the other languages, and recombining the fragments into a new and perfect structure. One is tempted to say that, by doing this, they were really genuine artists, since, as Joyce says, "the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist" (Stephen Hero, [>]). Cutting into segments—which is the basic concept in the analysis of linguistic systems—was so important for these seventy-two learned men that (as my source suggests) ^* the word teipe, which was used for "to segment" and therefore to select, to model, indicated automatically the Irish language as a berla teipide. Consequently, the Auraicept, as a text that defined this event, was considered to be an allegory of the world.

It is interesting to note that a somewhat similar theory had been expressed by a contemporary of Dante, the great twelfth-century Cabalist Abraham Abulafia, according to whom God had given Adam not a specific language but a kind of method, a universal grammar, which, although it was lost after the sin of Babel, had survived among the Jewish people, who had been so skillful in using this method that they had created the Hebrew language, the most perfect of the seven post-Babelic languages. The Hebrew that Abulafia talks about was not a collage of other languages, however, but rather a totally new corpus produced by combining the twenty-two original letters (the elementary segments) of the divine alphabet.

By contrast, the Irish grammarians had decided not to go back and look for the Adamic language, but had preferred to build a new, perfect language, their own Gaelic.

Did Joyce know of these early medieval grammarians? I have not found any reference to the Auraicept in his work, but I was intrigued by the fact, quoted by Ellmann, that on 11 October 1901 young Jim went to John F. Taylors lecture to the Law Students' Debating Society. This lecture not only celebrated the beauty and perfection of Irish but also formulated a parallel between the right the Irish people had to use its own language and the right Moses and the Jews had to use Hebrew as the language of revelation, rejecting the Egyptian language that had been imposed on them. As we know, Taylor's idea was amply exploited in the "Aeolus" chapter of Ulysses, which is dominated by the parallel between Hebrew and Irish, a comparison that represents a kind of linguistic counterpart to the parallel between Bloom and Stephen.

Allow me then to raise a doubt. In Finnegans Wake (p. 356) there is the word "taylorised," which Atherton interprets as a reference to the Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor.^* I, on the other hand, would like to interpret this as a reference to John E Taylor. I have no proof of it, but I find it interesting that this quotation comes in a context (Finnegans Wake, p. 353 if.) where Joyce begins speaking of the "abnihilisation of the etym," and uses expressions like "vociferagitant, viceversounding," and "alldconfusalem," and ends with "how comes every a body in our taylorised world to selve out thisthis," with a reference to the "primeum nobilees" and to the word "notomise." It seems probable that the idea of inventing languages by dissecting and cutting up the roots of words was inspired by that early lecture by Taylor, accompanied by some indirect knowledge of the Auraicept. But since there is no textual proof of all this, I cannot present my suggestion as anything other than an attractive hypothesis, or simply a personal fancy.

There is no evidence of Joyce's familiarity with medieval Irish traditions. In the lecture "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," given in Trieste in 1907, Joyce insisted on the antiquity of the Irish language, identifying it with Phoenician. Joyce was not an accurate historian, and during the lecture he confused Duns Scotus Eriugena (who was definitely a ninth-century Irish writer) with John Duns Scotus (born in Edinburgh in the thirteenth century, though in Joyce's time many were convinced he was Irish) and treated them as the same person; he also believed that the author of the Corpus Dionysianum, whom he called Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, was Saint Denys, patron saint of France—and, since this attribution was also false and one does not know whether Dionysius really was some Dionysius or other, the real author of the Corpus was in any case a Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and not Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. But at University College Joyce had studied only Latin, French, English, mathematics, natural philosophy, and logic—not medieval philosophy. Whatever the case, the analogies between the claims of the Irish grammarians and the search by Joyce for a perfect poetic language are so surprising that I will try to find other links.

Although Joyce's ideas about the ancient Irish traditions were imprecise, for the purpose of inventing his own poetic language he came to know rather well one text he mentioned explicitly, for the first time, in his Trieste lecture on Ireland: The Book of Kelts.

As a young man Joyce had certainly seen The Book of Kells at Trinity College, and later he mentioned a reproduction of it: The Book of Kells, described by Sir Edward Sullivan and illustrated with 24plates in colour (2nd ed., London-Paris-New York, 1920). Joyce had given a copy of it to Miss Weaver at Christmas 1922.

Recently, when writing the introduction to the marvelous facsimile edition of the manuscript,^* I pointed out that this masterpiece of Irish art had been preceded by a "murmur," and I am certain that Joyce was influenced by that murmur, even if in an indirect way. Two days ago I spent an afternoon in the most magical place in Ireland (for the second time in my life), the Seven Churches of Clonmacnoise, and once more I understood that nobody, even someone who has never heard of the Irish grammarians or works such as The Book of Kells, The Book of Durrow, The Lindisfarne Gospels, and The Book of the Dun Cow, can look at that landscape and those ancient stones and not hear the murmur that accompanied the birth and the thousand-year life of The Book of Kells.

The history of Latin culture before the year 1000, particularly between the seventh and tenth centuries, charts the development of what has been called "Hisperic aesthetics," a style that emerged and developed from Spain to the British Isles, and even parts of Gaul.^* The classical Latin tradition had previously described (and condemned) this style as "Asianic" and later "African," as opposed to the balance of the "Attic" style. In his Institutio Oratoria (XII.79), Quintilian had already emphasized that the best style must display "magna, non nimia, sublimia non abrupta, fortia non temeraria, severa non tristia, gravia non tarda, laeta non luxuriosa, iucunda non dissoluta, grandia non tumida" (grandeur, not excess, sublimity not harshness, strength not rashness, severity not grimness, gravity not dullness, joy not abandon, pleasantness not decadence, greatness not pomposity). Not just Roman orators but also ancient Christian rhetoric denounced the kakozelon, or damaging affectation, of the Asianic style. For an example of how profoundly scandalized the fathers of the church were when faced with examples of this "mala affectatio," see the invective by Saint Jerome (in Adversus Iovinianum, I): "Such is the barbarism displayed by these writers, and so confused does their discourse become thanks to these stylistic vices, that we have reached the point where we do not understand who is talking and what is being discussed. Everything (in these works) is expanded only to then burst like a weak serpent which splits in two as it tries to contort itself.... Everything is caught up in such inextricable verbal knots that one could quote Plautus here: 'Here nobody except the Sibyl could understand anything.' What are these verbal monstrosities?"

This broadside sounds like the spiteful description a traditionalist might make about a page from The Book of Kells or Finnegans Wake. But in the meantime something was to change: those qualities that, according to classical tradition, had been classified as vices would become virtues in the poetics of Hisperic writers. A page of Hisperic writing no longer obeyed the laws of traditional syntax and rhetoric, the models of rhythm and meter were overthrown in order to produce expressions that had a baroque flavor. Sequences of alliteration that the classical world would have considered cacophonous began to produce a new music, and Aldhelm of Malmesbury (Epistula ad Eahfridum, PL, 89, 91) had fun composing sentences where each word began with the same letter: "Primitus pantorum procerum praetorumque pió potissimum paternoque praesertim privilegio pane-gyricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgantes...." The Hisperic style's lexis became enriched with incredible hybrid words, borrowing Hebrew and Hellenistic terms, and the text was studded with cryptograms and enigmas that defied any attempt at translation. If the ideal of classical aesthetics was clarity, the Hisperic ideal would be obscurity. If classical aesthetics exalted proportion, Hisperic aesthetics would prefer complexity, the abundance of epithets and paraphrases, the gigantic, the monstrous, the unrestrained, the immeasurable, the prodigious. The very search for nonstandard etymologies would lead to the breaking down of the word into atomic elements, which would then acquire enigmatic meanings.

The Hisperic aesthetic would epitomize the style of Europe in those dark ages when the old continent was undergoing demographic decline and the destruction of the most important cities, roads, and Roman aqueducts. In a territory covered in forests not only monks but also poets and miniaturists would look out on the world as a dark, menacing wood, teeming with monsters and crisscrossed with labyrinthine paths. In these difficult and chaotic centuries, Ireland would bring Latin culture back to the continent. But those Irish monks who wrote down and preserved for us that small amount of the classical tradition they had managed to salvage would take the initiative in the world of language and visual imagination, groping for the right path in the dense forest, like Saint Brendan's comrades, who sailed the seas with him, encountering monsters and lost islands, meeting a giant fish on which they disembarked when they mistook it for an island, an island inhabited by white birds (the souls who fell with Lucifer), miraculous fountains, Paradise trees, a crystal column in the middle of the sea, and Judas on a rock, beaten and tormented by the incessant pounding of the waves.

Between the seventh and ninth centuries, it was perhaps on Irish soil (but certainly in the British Isles) that there appeared that Liber Monstrorum de Diversis Generibus,^* which seems to describe many of the images that we find in The Book of Kells. The author admits in the opening pages that although many authoritative books had already recounted similar lies, he would never have thought of presenting them again if "the impetuous wind of your requests had not unexpectedly arrived to throw me—a terrified sailor—headlong into a sea of monsters. [...] And without doubt it is impossible to count the number of kinds of monstrous marine animals which with enormous bodies the size of high mountains whip up the most gigantic waves and shift huge expanses of water with their torsos, almost seeming to uproot the water from the depths only to then heave themselves toward the quiet estuaries of rivers: and as they swim along, they raise spume and spray with a thunderous noise. In huge ranks, that monstrous, enormous army crosses the swollen plains of blue water, and sweeps the air with lashes of the whitest spray, white as marble. And then churning up the waters with a tremendous backwash, waters already in a ferment because of the huge mass of their bodies, they head for land, offering to those standing on the shore watching them not so much a spectacle as a scene of horror."

However fearful the author may have been about telling lies, he cannot resist the colossal beauty of this fascinating falsehood because it allows him to weave a tale as infinite and varied as a labyrinth. He tells his story with the same pleasure as the Vita S. Columbani describes the sea around the island of Hibernia, or as in the Hisperica Famina (a work with which the author of the Liber Monstrorum must have had a certain familiarity), where adjectives like "astriferus" or "glaucicomus" are used to describe the breakers (and Hisperic aesthetics would privilege neologisms such as "pectoreus," "placoreus," "sonoreus," "alboreus," "propriferus," "flammiger," and "gaudifluus").

These are the same lexical inventions praised by Virgil the Grammarian in his Epitomae and Epistulae^* Many scholars now maintain that this mad grammarian from Bigorre, near Toulouse, was in fact an Irishman, and everything—from his Latin style to his vision of the world—would seem to confirm this. This Virgil lived in the seventh century and therefore, presumably, one hundred years before the production of The Book of Kells. He would cite passages from Cicero and Virgil (the famous one) that these authors could never have written, but then we discover, or presume, that he belonged to a circle of rhetoricians, each of whom had taken the name of a classical author. Perhaps, as has been surmised, he wrote to mock other orators. Influenced by Celtic, Visigoth, Irish, and Hebrew culture, he described a linguistic universe that seems to spring from the imagination of a modern surrealist poet.

He maintains that there exist twelve varieties of Latin and that in each of them the word for "fire" can be different: "ignis," "quoquihabin," "ardon," "calax," "spiridon," "rusin," "fragon," "fumaton," "ustrax," "vitius," "siluleus," "aenon" (Epitomae, IV. 10). A battle is called "praelium" because it takes place at sea ("praelum"), because its importance brings about the supremacy ("praelatum") of the marvelous (Epitomae, IV. 10). Geometry is an art that explains all the experiments with herbs and plants, and that is why doctors are called geometers (Epitomae, IV. 11). The rhetorician Aemilius made this elegant proclamation: "SSSSSSSSSSS. PP. NNNNNNNN. GGGG.R.MM.TTT.D. CC. AAAAAAA. IIIIWWWW. O. AE. EEEEEEE." This is supposed to mean "the wise man sucks the blood of wisdom and must be rightly called leech of the veins" (Epitomae, X.1). Galbungus and Terrentius clashed in a debate that lasted fourteen days and fourteen nights, discussing the vocative of "ego," and the matter was of supreme vastness because it was a question of determining how one should address oneself with emphasis: "Oh, I, have I acted correctly?" (O egone, recte feci?). This and much more is told us by Virgil, making us think of the young Joyce wondering whether baptism with mineral water was valid.

Each one of the texts I have mentioned could be used to describe a page of The Book of Kells or, for that matter, a page of Finnegans Wake, because in each of these texts language does what the images do in The Book of Kells. Using words to describe The Book of Kells is tantamount to reinventing a page of Hisperic literature. The Book of Kells is a flowery network of intertwined and stylized animal forms, of tiny monkeylike figures amid a labyrinth of foliage covering page after page, as if it were always repeating the same visual motifs in a tapestry where—in reality—each line, each corymb, represents a different invention. It has a complexity of spiral forms that wander deliberately unaware of any rule of disciplined symmetry, a symphony of delicate colors from pink to orangey yellow, from lemon yellow to purplish red. We see quadrupeds, birds, greyhounds playing with a swan's beak, unimaginable humanoid figures twisted around like an athlete on horseback who contorts himself with his head between his knees until he forms an initial letter, figures as malleable and flexible as rubber bands inserted amid a tangle of interlacing lines, pushing their heads through abstract decorations, coiling around initial letters and insinuating themselves between the lines. As we look, the page never sits still, but seems to create its own life: there are no reference points, everything is mixed up with everything else. The Book of Kells is Proteus's realm. It is the product of a sober hallucination that has no need of mescaline or LSD to create its abysses, not least because it represents not the delirium of a single mind but, rather, the delirium of an entire culture engaged in a dialogue with itself, quoting other Gospels, other illuminated letters, other tales.

It is the lucid vertigo of a language that is trying to redefine the world while it redefines itself in the full knowledge that, in an age that is still uncertain, the key to the revelation of the world can be found not in the straight line but only in the labyrinth.

It is not, therefore, by accident that all this inspired Finnegans Wake at the point when Joyce tried to create a book that would represent both an image of the universe and a work written for an "ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia."

Also with regard to Ulysses, Joyce had already declared that many of the initials in The Book of Kells possessed the character of an entire chapter in his book, and he had explicitly asked that his work be compared to those miniatures.

The chapter in Finnegans Wake that clearly refers to The Book of Kellsls the one conventionally called "The Manifesto of Alp." This chapter tells the story of a letter found on a pile of dung, and the letter has been seen as a symbol of all attempts at communication, of all the literature in the world, and of Finnegans Wake itself. The page in The Book of Kells that most inspired Joyce is the "tenebrous Tunc page" (folio 124r). If we allow our gaze to wander over this Tunc page, simultaneously reading, however haphazardly, some lines of Joyce, we have the impression that this is a multimedia experience, where the language reflects the illuminated images and the illuminated images stimulate linguistic analogies.

Joyce speaks of a page where "every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Allé anyway connected with the gobbly-dumped turkey was moving and changing every part of the time." He talks of a "steady monologue of interiors," where "a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons" becomes an "Ostrogothic kakography affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk," made of "utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past ... indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desidered."

What, then, does The Book of Kells represent? The ancient manuscript speaks to us of a world made up of paths that fork in opposite directions, of adventures of the mind and imagination that cannot be described. It is a structure in which every point can be connected to any other point, where there are no points or positions but only connecting lines, each of which can be interrupted at any moment because it will instantly resume and follow the same direction. This structure has no center nor periphery. The Book of Kells is a labyrinth. This is the reason it succeeded in becoming in Joyce's excited mind the model of that infinite book that was still to be written, to be read only by an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia.

At the same time The Book of Kells (along with its descendant, Finnegans Wake) represents the model of human language and, perhaps, the model of the world in which we live. Perhaps we are living inside a Book of Kells, whereas we think we are living inside Diderot's Encyclopédie. Both The Book of Kells and Finnegans Wake are the best image of the universe as contemporary science presents it to us. They are the model of a universe in expansion, perhaps finite and yet unlimited, the starting point for infinite questions. They are books that allow us to feel like men and women of our time, even though we are sailing in the same perilous sea that led Saint Brendan to seek out that Lost Island that every page of The Book of Kells speaks of, as it invites and inspires us to continue our search to finally express perfectly the imperfect world we live in.

Jim the bachelor was not in fact incomplete, because he had seen, albeit as if through a haze, what his duty was and what we had to understand—namely, that the ambiguity of our languages, the natural imperfection of our idioms, represents not the post-Babelic disease from which humanity must recover but, rather, the only opportunity God gave to Adam, the talking animal. Understanding human languages that are imperfect but at the same time able to carry out that supreme form of imperfection we call poetry represents the only conclusion to every search for perfection. Babel was not an accident, we have been living in the Tower from the beginning. The first dialogue between God and Adam may well have taken place in finneganian, and it is only by going back to Babel and taking up the one opportunity we have that we can find our peace and face the destiny of the human race.

This whole story began in Dublin, when a boy began to be obsessed by the images in The Book of Kells, and perhaps by those in The Book of Durrow, of Lindisfarne and The Dun Cow...

"Once upon a time there was a Dun Cow coming down along the maze and this Dun Cow that was down along the maze met a nicens little boy named baby Jim the bachelor..."

This is translated from a revised Italian version of a lecture given on 31 October 1991 at University College Dublin to commemorate the anniversary of the conferral of the degree of Bachelor of Arts on James Joyce. The original English version is now in Umberto Eco and Liberato Santoro Brienza, Talking of Joyce (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998).