Senn / O'Neill Joycean Murmoirs

Fritz Senn on James Joyce
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84351-225-7
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 330 Seiten

In charge of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation since its inception in 1985, Fritz Senn has studied the life and works of James Joyce for five decades, published widely and taught across Europe and the United States. He has been on the editorial board of all major Joyce journals, co-founded A Wake Newslitter with Clive Hart in the 1980s and supervised and co-ordinated the Frankfurt Joyce Edition with Klaus Reichert from 1969 to 1971. He has also instigated and co-organized several international Joyce Symposia. In Joycean Murmoirs, Christine O'Neill, a Zurich Joyce scholar based in Dublin, has drawn Senn out in numerous, wide-ranging interviews about Joyce and his works, the global Joyce community and friends, problems of translation, Joyce and Homer, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, the intricacies of language and, not least, his own life and personality. These thought-provoking exchanges lend a privileged view of a richly eclectic literary and cultural milieu, giving glimpses of leading scholars and commentators from Richard Ellmann to Niall Montgomery and Anthony Burgess. They form a fascinating composite portrait of one of Europe's foremost international Joyceans.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Senn, Fritz

O'Neill, Christine

Leseproben

PREFACE

FRITZ SENN

So once more a book that I have not really written comes out under my name. In fact I am both ambivalent subject and self-conscious object. Once more it is the outcome of someone else’s initiative.

The origin is in all those stories about long ago that were and are still exchanged in the evenings, usually during a Joyce conference, about the ancestors of the Joyce family — I mean the family of Joyceans — many of whom are no longer with us. The times before you youngsters were around. Meanwhile I have become even more of a Nestor, a commentator on far-gone days and events. Memories have accumulated over half a century and have no doubt changed in the process. Stories tend to take on a life of their own and become almost fixed in their formulation so that they, quite possibly, occult the original events. That, incidentally, is History — not so much what actually happened, but what someone remembered and passed on. At any rate, from time to time a listener, possibly out of politeness, proposed to have it all written down. This was never a viable option for me. I know myself too well: while I am struggling to put an incident into coherent prose, other reminiscences crowd in and have to be put aside for future use but most likely then fade into oblivion. I also find that, so different from a telling in inspiring company, as soon as I fix something verbally it becomes lifeless, no matter how fanciful the original anecdote may have been.

That’s where Christine O’Neill comes in. And that’s a long story. She had drifted into a Joyce seminar I did for the University of Zurich in the anniversary year of 1982, and she volunteered to present a paper at very short notice. It had to do with translation, and she emerged with credit. Two years later, when she went to Trinity College, Dublin for a year, I was able to give her a few propitious contacts, among them my old friend Niall Montgomery and also Petr Škrabánek. After her return we remained in touch. When the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (ZJJF) opened, we employed her part-time for the next few years to help in the day-to-day running of the establishment. She came to use our research facilities extensively, in particular when she did her doctorate at Zurich University under the direction of Professor Andreas Fischer (who was not yet a member of our board of trustees) and my less official self. Her choice to focus on the ‘Eumaeus’ episode may have had something to do with my own predilection.

In our weekly Ulysses reading group in the mid-eighties she came across a visiting Irishman, Tim O’Neill. He showed a lively interest and contributed many insights thanks to his comprehensive knowledge of manuscripts and Irish history. His interest — not that I noticed for a long time — was not limited to our reading of Ulysses. In due course Christine Bernhard became Christine O’Neill and finally settled in Dublin. For years the O’Neills have been a kind of Foundation outpost and have excavated an amount of relevant material that is now part of our holdings. It was Christine O’Neill who collected some of my essays and edited them for what became Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce in 1995. More recently, she resourcefully initiated the present project. With determination, she proposed the idea to Antony Farrell of The Lilliput Press, as well as to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, and with untiring resolution descended on the Foundation at irregular intervals. She corralled me and set to it, microphone and notebook at the ready. On occasion the interviews were continued in Dublin. All along the way I had to be prodded. My enthusiasm for the project was intermittent. I often found myself procrastinating, indisposed and reluctant, especially when it came to dealing with her very faithful transcripts. From any given question or cue I could hardly restrict myself to the subject at hand but soon trailed off, associated freely and got bogged down in side issues. I often had to be called back to the topic at hand. All of which was part of the idea, or, at least, an inherent risk.

In Act Two all the accumulated clutter had to be reworked into coherent sentences. It is excruciating to read what one has said spontaneously even when it sounded crystal clear at the moment of utterance. Then I found how much I had been repeating myself and how much I had left out. Next, some semblance of structure had to be imposed on the haphazard jumble of reminiscences. So the result, predictably, is a bit of a hybrid. Based on the interviews and transcripts, it had to be edited and filtered (syntactically), and many dates and references had to be checked. During all that time new memories cropped up and adaptations were necessary. All of this will no doubt show in the multiform retrospective arrangement. The impetus was Ithacan, with its question-and-answer procedure, but the result possibly comes all too close to the uneasy amalgamation of ‘Eumaeus’. Despite considerable reworking, there remains something of the as-you-go-along nature of the original interviews. So this is also an untastable apology for the chaosmos of it all. Or, to wind up all the caveats, whenever something appears to lack coherence, let us put it down to spontaneity.

So I owe it all to Christine and her perseverance — encouragement, cajolery, coercion, scourges, thumbscrews, blackmail, forbearance and whatever else she astutely had at her disposal. The advantage for me is that I can evade responsibility and blame the topics and selection on her questions. She, in turn, might rejoin that I had both time and opportunity for ample modifications which, of course, I had. I am good at putting things off, so the months went by while she was breathing down my neck.

There is nothing remotely complete about these chancy memoirs. Nor is there much justice in the space allotted to colleagues, Joyceans, friends and others in these pages. Some get scant mention or none at all, partly due to limitations of space, more often due to inadvertence and flawed memory. The emphasis is on the earlier times as there is no way of keeping up with all the contacts of more recent years. At the moment I have twenty symposia under my belt and an even greater number of conferences in many countries and three continents. I have just calculated that since 1985 I must have had contact with at least 120 different participants at our annual workshops alone. In a few rare cases, incidentally, it may be an advantage not to be mentioned. Omissions abound, and a few complaints have already reached me before publication.

Inevitably there has been a great deal of self-restraint, or call it internal censorship. Above all, I do not aim to intrude into the private or personal, not even in my own case. For better or worse, some of the more racy anecdotes remain the stuff of oral poetry, more appropriate in an intimate circle or at a late-night session in an Irish pub (where usually I cannot even hear what anyone is saying). What one remembers is often funny at the expense of an otherwise perfectly personable victim. By their nature, the more ludicrous events are more entertaining than straight admiration can ever be, as the narrator of the ‘Cyclops’ episode demonstrates so vigorously. I would not follow in his eloquent footsteps even if I had the skill. So there is at best, or is it worst, only muted scandal. It must be human nature that the less agreeable encounters loom larger in memory than many good and stalwart acts of friendship. This explains why some of the more colourful or wayward individuals that have crossed my path of old have come in for more limelight than many of those that are more like you and me. So the best friends may get undeserved short shrift.

Still, a less than Christian impulse could not be entirely repressed. There are a few particularly fatuous statements that I did not have the heart to leave out, but their perpetrators will remain nameless. Had I foreseen at the time that decades later I would be subjected to a ruthless inquisition, I might have taken notes on many occasions when I asked diffident questions of some of Joyce’s contemporaries.

Emphatically, this is neither an autobiography nor a history of Joyce criticism nor a panorama of Joycean activities. As usual, I cannot ever avoid going back to the Joycean texts on the slightest provocation, but since this is not an academic study it lacks all scholarly paraphernalia and appends only a list of books that have been referred to in passing, and an index where you can see if you are listed. Chances are you are not. My overall aim was to show how so much of what is now the Joyce Industry or mafia is not some powerful behind-the-scenes fraternity pulling strings. Rather it is something that grew initially from the personal enthusiasm of individuals who did not, at first, have academic promotion as their goal. I have tried to describe this from my own subjective angle.

The reminiscences are larded with all sorts of opinions, prejudices, grievances and views on Joyce, including some unsolicited by Christine. All the codology of the Joycean business is destined for a small, inside audience mainly, those, in other words, to whom names like Frank Budgen or Richard Ellmann, or terms like ‘Epiphany’, do not have to be explained. For those entirely outside, it may grant insights into the sociology of professors of literature, amateurs, or just enthusiastic readers, and...