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
