Ashplant

Schotter, Jesse. "Verbivocovisuals: James Joyce and the Problem of Babel." James Joyce Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2010): 89–109.

Related topics:

Beginnings and Endings
Catholicism
Irish History Transformed
Judaism
Language and Linguistics

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/verbivocovisuals-james-joyce-and-the-problem-of-babel/oclc/794420373&referer=brief_results

Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/james_joyce_quarterly/v048/48.1.schotter.html

Joyce's extended relationship with C.K. Ogden leads Jesse Schotter to explore Joyce's fascination with solving the "problem of Babel." One of the most important cultural obsessions at the turn of the century, the problem of Babel was that people struggled to communicate using different languages, which inspired a number of philosophers to develop universal language solutions (89). Although Joyce's references to Babel in Finnigans Wake reveal his own fascination with the progressive discussion, he seems to find the solution to the problem in the past, particularly in visual languages like the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt. He can therefore seek a kind of linguistic universalism without erasing (or, really, easing) the diversity of modern languages and cultures (91).

Joyce's interest in rediscovering lost genealogical connections between languages likely stems from his documented appreciation for Giambattista Vico's theory that in gesture and hieroglyphics, the sign and its referent are more closely associated than in any other types of language (Schotter 94). Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus refers to this theory in "Circe" (U 15.105-7).

Schotter's analysis further asserts that Joyce does not believe that the printed word represents the end of visuality in language. For example, Joyce references to rubrics—the decorated letters at the beginning of many Gutenberg Bible passages—indicate a continued awareness of specifically visual language (98). According to Schotter, Joyce expands this awareness to include all language by drawing attention to the visual nature of orthography, both in his plots and his unconventional instructions to his publishers.

At the end of the article, Schotter turns to Ulysses to focus on the passage in which Bloom and Stephen compare Hebrew and Irish characters (U 17. 731-76). This passage links the genealogies of both languages, resulting in a cyclical kind of language development and hinting again at the possibility of universality.

Citations and Related Sources