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
