"WONDERLAND'S WANDERLAD": JAMES JOYCE'S DEBT TO VICTORIAN NONSENSE LITERATURE Aingeal Mary Aisling Clare PhD Department of English University of York September 2011 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the literary relationship between James Joyce and Victorian nonsense, particularly Lewis Carroll. Tracing the defining characteristics of literary nonsense beyond the Victorian period, it aims to assess what we mean by 'literary nonsense', and to evaluate the terms of Joyce's nonsense inheritance. The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter One: "'A letters from a person to a place about a thing": The Nonsense Letter.' This chapter looks at central nonsense themes of miscommunication, the (mis)construction of meaning, textual play, and the inadequacies and absurdities of epistolary conventions. My research draws on personal letters from Joyce, Carroll, and Edward Lear, as well as examining the relationship between fictional letters and their host texts, and delivering a detailed analysis of the Finnegans Wake letter in its various guises. Chapter Two: "'Mocked majesty": Games and Authority.' This chapter explores the various forms of authority in nonsense, from autocratic monarchs to omniscient authors, and from the parental or pedagogic authority of adults over children to the rigid and unspoken rules of children's games and discourses. The various species of games we find in the work of both Carroll and Joyce are analysed, from the tightly ordered playworlds of chess, cards, and games with logic and language, to the rough-and-tumble hijinks of the Finnegans Wake children's twilight street games. Chapter Three: '''Jest jibberweek's joke": Comic Nonsense.' This chapter begins by exploring the Kantian model of incongruous humour we find in the nonsense double act, examining how both Joyce and Carroll emphasise and exploit the double nature of the joke, using it to generate the vaudevillean dialogues and comic contrasts between the many 'collateral and incompatible' pseudocouples who populate the nonsense terrain. It goes on to address the dark underbelly of the comic, identifying a Hobbesian meanness at the heart of nonsense humour. A treatise on the bad pun concludes the. chapter, moving from Carroll's portmanteau words to the pun-infatuated jokescape of Finnegans Wake. Chapter Four: 'Nonsense and the Fall.' This chapter offers a unique reading of literary nonsense asa philosophical answer to the FalL Nonsense texts betray an almost morbid obsession with falling; literal and symbolic falls are a central theme of both the 2 Wake and the Alice books, and falls into language, madness, chaos, and forbidden knowledge are staples of the nonsense condition. Ontological crisis and semantic collapse are among this chapter's themes, as it investigates why it is a general and necessary condition of literary nonsense to be always hovering on the edge of the abyss, and forever toying with its own destruction. 3 CONTENTS Introduction 09 1 "A letters from a person to a place about a thing": The Nonsense Letter. 14 2 "Mocked majesty": Games and Authority. 48 3 "Jest jibberweek's joke": Comic Nonsense. 82 4 Nonsense and the Fall 120 Bibliography 150 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am pleased to extend my sincere thanks and gratitude to my supervisor, Derek Attridge, who offered much-needed encouragement and support throughout the gestation of this thesis, and whose intelligence and perceptiveness as a reader is matched only by his patience as a supervisor. I also thank Vicki Mahaffey, who supervised the first year of my PhD, and whose positive influence was felt long after her departure, and Hugh Haughton, who read my early drafts with such thoughtfulness and care. I acknowledge and thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my PhD, and those who awarded me the scholarships that allowed me to attend international conferences. Thanks in particular go to the International James Joyce Foundation; University College, Dublin; and the Trieste Joyce Summer School. I would like to thank my friends, in particular Percy, Sam, Richard Barlow, Paul Fagan, and Justin Quinn, for always reminding me of the Joycean adage 'In risu veritas', Lastly and importantly, I thank David Wheatley, to whom this thesis is dedicated with love. 5 AUTHOR'S DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. 6 ABBREVIATIONS AP James Joyce, 1965 (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin. CLC Lewis Carroll (ed. Alexander Woollcott), 1999 (1939). The Complete Lewis Carroll. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Only page numbers are cited, as the pages are continuous across all three volumes. CNV Edward Lear (ed. Vivian Noakes), 2002. The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse. London: Penguin. Cohen Morton N. Cohen, 1995. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. London: Macmillan. Collingwood Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 1898. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. London: T. Fisher Unwin. D James Joyce, 1974 (1914). Dubliners. London: Penguin. Ellmann Richard EHmann, 1982 (1959). James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. FW James Joyce, 1992 (1939). Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin. Gardner Lewis Carroll (ed. Martin Gardner), 2001 (1960). The Annotated Alice. London: Penguin. Haughton Lewis Carroll (ed. Hugh Haughton), 1998. 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and 'Through the Looking-glass'. London: Penguin. L James Joyce (ed. Stuart Gilbert), 1957. Letters of James Joyce, vol.I. London: Faber and Faber. LII James Joyce (ed. Richard Ellmann), 1966. Letters of James Joyce, vol. II. London: Faber and Faber. LIII James Joyce (ed. Richard EHmann), 1966. Letters of James Joyce, vol.III. London: Faber and Faber. LLC Lewis Carroll (ed. Morton N. Cohen), 1979. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. New York: Oxford University Press. Only page numbers are cited, as the pages are continuous across both volumes. SLEL Edward Lear (ed. Vivien Noakes), 1990. Selected Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SLJ James Joyce (ed. Richard EHmann), 1992 (1975). Selected Letters of James Joyce. London: Faber and Faber. 7 SLLC Lewis Carroll (ed. Morton N. Cohen), 1982. The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll. New York: Pantheon Books. U James Joyce (00. Jeri Johnson), 1998 (1922). Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8 INTRODUCTION Always sensitive to others' opinions of his work, James Joyce reported in a letter some of the responses he had received from readers of his Work in Progress, the ever- expanding draft of what would eventually be published as Finnegans Wake: Another (or rather many) says he is imitating Lewis Carroll. I never read him until Mrs. Nutting gave me a book, not Alice, a few weeks ago - though, of course, I heard bits and scraps. But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe this. I will read them both when I get back (L, 255).1 Joyce did not embark on the mastadonic project of Finnegans Wake with a thorough knowledge of Carroll's oeuvre already in his head; any thematic or stylistic overlap between Carroll's writing and the premise of the Wake is, he says, a mere coincidence. It is never advisable to take Joyce entirely at his own word on the subject of his influences (he was given to down-playing them, preferring to present to the world an image of a devastatingly original, mercilessly modem writer, born fully-formed), and some critics have contested his claim.' There seems in this case, however, little reason to doubt him. It is hardly surprising that some of the books that would become important presences within the Wake's intertextual tapestry were not all lined up and ready to go from the beginning. The Alice books are important presences within Finnegans Wake, but they are not a premise for it, as Homer's Odyssey was for Ulysses. Joyce came late to Carroll, but in terms of the Wake's compositional history, his discovery of Carroll's work took place relatively early on, in the sixth year of the seventeen years it would take him to complete the Wake; there was plenty of time to absorb Carroll's work and put it to good use. I Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 31 May 1927. 2 It has been suggested by John A. Rea that Joyce in fact had read some Carroll before he started writing 'Work in Progress', adapting Carroll's Mischmasch parody of Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh in 'Circe' (John A. Rea, l'A Bit of Lewis Carroll in Ulysses.' James Joyce Quarterly, Fall1977 (86-9». Rea's essay does not provide watertight evidence of Joyce's pre- Wake reading of Carroll though, and certainly does not, as Ann Buki has suggested, catch Joyce in the act of dishonesty about his influences, since Rea makes no claims about Joyce having read Alice before 1927, and Joyce freely admits to knowing 'bits and scraps,' of which the Lalla Rookh example could have been one (Ann M. Buki, 1982. 'Lewis Carroll in Finnegans Wake' ,.in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration (ed, Edward Giuliano). New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 154-66 (154). 9 Much has now been written about the connections between Joyce and Carroll, from general discussions of thematic overlaps to dutiful lists of everything we know Joyce to have read by and about Carroll, when he read them, and where in the Wake he inserted the references.' The existence of this body of groundwork obviates, to a large degree, the need for further detective work of this kind. This is not to say that discoveries are not still being made (1have some of my own), nor that such discoveries are of reduced value; only that the laying of these foundations has freed future criticism from its study carrel amongst the archives. Thanks to the scholarly sleuthing of the last fifty years of Joyce studies, we are now in the position of knowing all we are ever likely to know about Joyce's reading of Carroll, and it is from this privileged vantage point that my own thesis can be launched.