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).
BETWEEN LA MANCHA AND BABEL
In thanking this university (Castilla-La Mancha) for the honorary degree bestowed on me, I am pleased to see that this ritual is taking place in La Mancha, and at the very time we are celebrating Jorge Luis Borges.* For there once was, and perhaps there still is, a library in a village in this region, whose name people have never wanted to mention. This library, filled entirely with adventurous romances, was a library with a way out. Indeed, the wonderful story of Don Quixote begins at precisely the moment when our hero decides to leave the site of his bookish fantasies to venture out into life. He does so essentially because he is convinced that he has found truth in those books, so that all he needs to do is to imitate them, and reproduce their feats.
Three hundred fifty years later, Borges would tell us the story of a library with no way out, where the search for the true word is endless and utterly hopeless.
There is a profound analogy between these two libraries: Don Quixote tried to find in the world the facts, adventures, and damsels his library had promised him: and consequently he wanted to believe and did believe that the universe was like his library. Borges, less of an idealist, decided that his library was like the universe—and one understands then why he never felt the need to leave it. Just as one cannot say, “Stop the world, I want to get off,” likewise one cannot escape from the Library.
There are many stories of libraries: there are the lost libraries, like that of Alexandria, and there are the libraries we enter and leave immediately, because we realize that they contain only absurd stories and ideas. The Library of Saint-Victor was like that, the one Pantagruel entered several decades before Quixote was born, where he was delighted by those hundreds of volumes that promised the wisdom of ages, but as far as we know he left it almost instantly to do something else. He has left us only the curiosity and the desire to know what those volumes were about, and the pleasure of repeating their names like a litany: Bragheta Juris, De Babuinis et Scimiis cum Commento Dorbellis, Ars Honeste Petandi in Societate, Pormicarium Artium, De Modo Cacandi, De Differentiis Zupparum, De Optimitate Tripparum, Quaestio Subtilissima utrum Chimera Bombinans in Vacuo Possit Comedere Secundas Intentiones, De Baloccamentis Principum, Baloccatorium Sorboniformium, Campi Clysteriorum, Antidotarium Animae, De Patria Diabolorum …
We can cite titles from the libraries of both Rabelais and Cervantes, since they were finite libraries, limited by the universes their books spoke about: the former talked of the Sorbonne, the latter of Roncesvalles. We cannot cite titles from Borges’s library since the number of books in it is limitless, and because it is the shape of the library more than the subjects of its books that interests us.
Libraries of Babel were dreamed of even before Borges. One of the properties of Borges’s library is that it not only contains countless volumes in endless, repeated rooms but can display volumes containing all the possible combinations of twenty-five letters of the alphabet, so that one cannot imagine any combination of characters that the library has not foreseen.
This was the ancient dream of the Cabalists, because only by combining endlessly a finite series of letters could one hope to formulate one day the secret name of God.
And if I do not quote, as all of you might have expected, Raymond Lull’s wheels, that is because even though he wanted to produce an astronomical number of propositions, he intended only to conserve those that were true, and reject all the rest. However, by putting together both Lull’s wheels and the combinatory Utopia
