by Umberto Eco
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 se
a 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).
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.