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DISCOVERING "BRAIN", "LOGIC", AND "SENSATION" IN JOYCE'S RUSSIAN PUBLICATIONS
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Dobrovolskaya M.
PhD, Associate Professor, European Languages Department, Russian state university for the humanities, Moscow
Abstract
This article discusses James Joyce's novel Ulysses through Russian translations in the 20th century. Using Vygotsky's theory of the identical psychological processes of the perception and creation of a work of art and the processes of perception and creation of a word, the present study traces a variety of critical opinions on Joyce's unique mental abilities, including memory, his intensive "brainwork" in writing Ulysses. The role of academic studies and some critical opinions are illustrated in the research as they draw parallels between Joyce and Russian writers.
Keywords: Joyce and Russian writers, brain, translation
Introduction
The first publications of several episodes of Ulysses, different stories from Dubliners, written by Irish writer, James Joyce, first emerged in a journal version in Moscow Revolutionary issues in the twenties last century, when the first Soviet Republics, Russia, Belo-russia, Ukraine, and several Southern Republics were in one union after the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917 [1]. The time of writing Ulysses in Zurich is characterized by Richard Ellman as "the atmosphere of literary experimentation" [2, 409]. Accidentally, Joyce, Dada, Lenin were simultaneously working on their creations in one city at a certain period of time, having nothing in common except the wish to implement their thoughts into reality. It seemed, everywhere there was a push towards a new literature, a new art, a new way of life. It meant that people were tired of the old repetitive style of life. There was a real need in changes as it was proclaimed in Dada Manifesto: "I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization..." [3, 149]. Lenin was inspired by the activity among young generation in Switzerland, writing in his letter to Inessa Armand from Zurich (1916): "That's where the interesting and fruitful work" ('Vot gde intetesnaya i plodotvornaya rabota!') [4]. At approximately the same period of time, in Russia, the young psychologist Lev Vygotsky began working on the psychological aspects of art (1917-1925), regarding two main problems: "to give both an objective analysis of the text of a work of art and an objective analysis of the human emotions that arise during the reading of this work" [5]. As it was stated by Vygotsky, "the psychological processes of the perception and creation of a work of art coincide with the identical processes of perception and creation of a word" [6]. According to Vygotsky, "through the channel of literature and moving motives of thought, spiritual needs are transmitted to readers, guiding their activity" [7]. Besides, using analogy it is possible to name and explain the unusual and unknown experience by means of an old and familiar image, giving example of Shakespeare, who created Othello "to apperceive the idea of jealousy" [ibid.]. Thus, Joyce introduced Bloom to his readers, whose name became a metaphor for anything that is a key part in "some life process" [8, 10]. In readers perception, the
word bloom may lead to different thought processes that proves the words of Vygotsky, "the image in a word helps apperceive the new meaning" [6].
From the motives mentioned above I can explain the choice of words brain, logic, sensation for the title of the research. A variety of phrases with the word brain and its derivatives, compounds and idiomatic expressions from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man and Ulysses reveal Joyce's talent as a linguist and a teacher of English, who can easily make word combinations with the word brain, useful to study and discuss at reading seminars, for instance: ".the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage." [9, 117], "The bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps." [ibid.,131], "A cold sweat broke out upon his forehead as the foul memories condensed within his brain" [ibid, 136], "His brain began to glow. Another. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull" [ibid., 147]; "Memories beset his brooding brain" [10, 9], "All his brains are in the nape of his neck, Simon Dedalus says" [ibid., 97], "... being blessed with brains which also could be utilized for the purpose and other requisites" [ibid., 542], "brains on their sleeve like statue in Glasnevin" [ibid., 103]. In addition, the word brain is more often used in its colloquial context as mind, intellect, clever, brilliant person, or in the compounds like brain-building material in the Evening Telegraph's advertisement of 'Force': "Children need cereal food. It makes bone and muscle. But they need a cereal food that contains brain-building material as well. 'Force' comprises all the food essentials: the tissue builders, the bone makers, the brain stimulants, the energy producers, the blood makers - in just the right proportion" [11]. In the words of Vladimir Nabokov in his lecture on Ulysses, "throughout the book, he also used a copy of the Dublin newspaper Evening Telegraph, 16 June 1904, Thursday" [12, 413]. This is obvious, the notion of brain was actual for Joyce's scheme, in which he outlined the connection of each episode with a certain organ of the human body, except for the first three episodes, as well as the connection with science, symbol and color. In the words of Stuart Gilbert, "each episode of Ulysses is associated with a given organ of the human body.", imagining
the book composition like "a living organism" with "the natural interdependence of the parts between themselves" [13, 40-41]. According to Joyce's explanation, the ninth episode of Ulysses is associated with brain relating to literature and art. Vladimir Nabokov believed that the scheme was sketched out by Joyce for the sake of jokes. At the same time, Vladimir Nabokov sees logic in the first episode of Ulysses: "Original Joyce: simple, transparent, logical and unhurried. This is the basis of episode 1 of the first part and episodes 1 and 3 of the second part; transparent, logical, slow passages are found in other episodes" ('Iskhodnyj Dzhois: prostoj, prozrachnyj, logichnyj i nespeshnyj. Eto os-nova glavy 1 pervoj chasti I glav 1 i 3 vtoroj chasti; prozrachnye, logichnye, medlennye otryvki vstrechautsya i v drugih glavah') [12, 419]. The word logic, related to brain as the ability to argue and convince, forms its derivative logical that is contrary to illogical or without logic. In one of the articles it is argued, that "logical and syntactical gaps become a primary feature" of Joyce's "interior monologue technique as it matures and gains complexity from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Ulysses " [14, 145]. Another word in the title is sensation, which was borrowed by Russian language as sensacija in the only meaning close to 'triumph' that Anthony Cronin uses to characterize Joyce's book: "I do not mean that Ulysses is not a hopeful and indeed a triumphant book, because in fact it is" [15, 20].
Commenting on the last episode of Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov argues that "we should not think that Joyce's stream of consciousness conveys a genuine event. This reality is only so far, because it reflects the author's work of the brain, the consciousness contained in the book. This book is the new world invented by Joyce" ('My ne dolzhny dumat', chto potokom soz-naniya Dzhojs peredayot podlinnoe sobytie. Eto real'nost' lish' postol'ku ona otrazhaet avtorskuyu rabotu mozga, soznanie, zaklyuchyonnoe v knige. Kniga eta - novyj mir, izobretyonnyj Dzhojsom' [12, 510]. The author of the article "The week in Paris" ironically supposes: "It took, I understand, nearly six years of Mr. Joyce's life to write, and it will take nearly six years of ours to read. ... For hundreds of pages he will write desperately erudite nonsense, that, unfortunately, is not nonsense for himself' [16]. Conversely, Boris Pasternak, in the letter to his sister in 1924, advises to read Joyce and Proust, though, "he judges their merits on translations, incomplete and sketchy, and by what is said about them in different journals" [17, 195-196]. The remarks on Joyce's brainwork, made by H.G. Wells in his letter to Joyce (1928), were quite pessimistic: ".I've an enormous respect for your genius dating from your earliest books and I feel now a great personal liking for you but you and I are set upon absolutely different courses. Your mental existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions." [18, 274-275]. For Stuart Gilbert, Joyce possesses an outstanding memory like "remarkable powers of memory" of minstrels, the reciters of epic poems: "It is significant that Ulysses is both detailed and elaborate in its narration of facts and its numerous historical and literary echoes. Like his predecessors James Joyce was gifted with a
prodigious memory." [13, 78]. Undoubtedly, readers of Ulysses can be impressed by Joyce's remarkable and universal knowledge of life, his unique memory. Concurrently, to understand Joyce's writing approximately correctly, readers need to obtain good memory. In the words of Fritz Senn, "memory enables us to make sense of odd collocations" [8, 78].
James Joyce's novel was introduced in Russia as a "new word" from the West in the literary world. The translations into Russian of several episodes of Ulysses emerged in 1925 in a literary miscellany Novinki Zapada ('New Editions from the West') [19, 61-94] not in full volume with the five excerpts from the first, the seventh, the twelfth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth episodes from Ulysses, translated by Zhitomirski. In the introductory note to the translations of the fourth and the eighth episodes from Ulysses, completed by Alimov and Levidov, and published in the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta (1929) ('Literary Newspaper'), it is stressed that the author of the book is "one of the most interesting figures of post-war Western European literature" [20, 3]. By placing excerpts from Ulysses, the editorial board meant to introduce Joyce to Soviet readers as a master of new literary forms. The American scholar, Emily Tall focused her research on "the reception of James Joyce in Russia", pointing out "a paradigm of Soviet cultural politics" [21, 244], mentioning Valentin Stenich and Igor Romanovich, who translated the fourth and the fifth episodes, published under the title "Mr Bloom's Morning" ('Utro m-ra Bluma') in Literaturniy Sovremennik (1935) ('Literary Contemporary', 1935) [22, 136-159], and the sixth episode, published in Zvezda (1934) ('Star', 1934) [23, 116-137]. In 'Commentaries' to the translation, Rashel Miller-Bud-nitskaya wrote about the universal history of Vico, interpreted by Joyce as the highest stage of the historical thinking of mankind, its liberation from national limitations and awareness of its unity, pointing out Joyce's "language-making ability" and his "philosophy of language" which is closely related to Vico's idea of "mental dictionary" as "a powerful tool to destroy national enmity and create a single human culture" [24, 60]. The same year, members of Ivan Kashkin's school of translators completed the first six episodes from Ulysses, published in selected issues in Internatsionalnaya Literatura ('International Literature') [25]. In 1936, the translated tenth episode of Ulysses was published in the fourth issue of the same journal [26, 69-91]. Kashkin's students turned to the translation of accessible episodes from Ulysses, as the urban theme was associated with the earlier translation of Manhattan by J. Dos Passos, who attempted to cover the full fluidity of urban life of the modern city. In the words of Kashkin, "all these echoes of Joyce: the parallel deployment of several, as if unrelated subjects, torn, fractional presentation of them, accurate recording of fleeting scenes and moods, the desire to catch above all the rhythm of the urban vortex" ('Parallel'noe razvertyvanie neskol'kih, kak by nesvyazannyh predmetov, razorvannoe, drobnoe pred-stavlenie o nih, tochnaya zapis' mimoletnyh scen I nas-troenij, zhelanie ulovit' prezhde vsego ritm gorodskogo vihrya' [26, 157-158]. Obviously, the translations of Ulysses into Russian in the twenties and thirties last
century played an important role in the development of translators' skills on working with a complicated text of Ulysses. The boom in translations and publications of Ulysses came in the late eighties last century when the revised version of a book was announced in a journal "Sovetskaya kultura" [27, 8].
Naturally, in the twenty first century Joyce's Ulysses is not a "new word" for a young generation of students, who are easily absorbing information available on internet or other media sources. At the same time, the original text of Ulysses motivated the participants of a literary seminar to work together on a translation project [28, 3-4], taking for the comparative analysis the tenth episode from Ulysses, translated in 1936 and the contemporary version of translating the original text (2012): "Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men and of his sermon on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African mission and of the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown and yellow souls .".[10,183]. The identified discrepancies between the original text and the translations led students to their own understanding of the national identity of the original text and culture that allowed them to be more precise in their own translation.
It is worth mentioning the work of Russian scholars, who began discussing Joyce in the early sixties. In this connection, it is important to underline Vygotsky's "inner speech" theory that influenced the research on stylistics, conducted by Irina Arnold at Leningrad University. The primary goal in reading and understanding the original text of Ulysses was "to explain as much as possible all the shades of thought and emotion expressed by artistic means, and to prepare students for the perception of the expressive possibilities of the language and its various lexical layers" ('Dat' po vozmozhnosti polnoe predstavlenie obo vsekh ottenkah mysli i emocij, vyrazhaemyh hudozhestvennymi sredstvami, i podgotovit' studentov k vospriyatiyu ek-spressivnyh leksicheskih sloev') [29, 5]. According to Arnold, the absence of punctuation in Ulysses conveys the stream of consciousness or the infinite connection of times and cultures in the history of mankind, as in the fourteenth episode: "Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipol-lent nature's incorrupted benefaction" [10, 314]. In sty-listics, the stream of consciousness with the absence of punctuation in sentences is called inner monologue or inner represented speech, that was used by Russian writers in the earlier period of time. Thus, Motileva regards inner monologue in Leo Tolstoy's novels "insep-
arable from the "dialectic of the soul", that Chernyshev-ski compared with "mysterious movements of psychological life" ('Vnutrennij monolog u Tolstogo neotde-lim ot "dialektiki dushi", imenno u Tolstogo vnu-trennyaya rech' stala predmetom issledovaniya "tainstvennejshih dvizhenij psihicheskoj zhizni", kak govoril o nem Chernyshevskij') [30, 180]. Obviously, Joyce knew Russian literature in translations as he discussed Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gorky in two letters to his brother Stanislaus (September 18, September 24, 1905) from Trieste [31]. It is amazing, how Joyce reveals his knowledge of Russia in some words in Ulysses: "the bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy" [10, 59], "That was done when we were lying becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton" [ibid., 516], "I seen Russia. Gospodi pomilyou. That's how the Russians prays" [ibid., 511]. In the words of Clive Hart, "Joyce's interest in, and knowledge of, the great tradition of Russian prose writing can be seen to be more profound than one might have suspected" [32, 172]. In John Jones opinion there are "certain similarities between Dostoevsky and a number of such writers, including Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Franz Kafka, in addition to Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot" (ibid.). However, Booker believes in "an initial point of contact between Joyce and Dostoevsky" with the reference to "Bakhtin's meditations on human subject as product of social interactions" (ibid.). Conversely, Bakhtin supports the point of view of Kirpotin, who "emphasizes the realistic and social character of Dostoevsky's psychology as opposed to degenerate decadent psychology of Proust and Joyce" [33, 59].
Finally, it would be worth mentioning Valentina Ivasheva, who highlighted an appreciable influence of Joyce's method of writing on western writers in her textbook on English literature for philological studies in the sixties last century [34, 38-66]. The Russian scholar linked the interest in the notions of consciousness and unconscious with the booming science of "brain activity" at the time, pointing out Joyce's language experiments in Ulysses, based on the data of modern science which "caused a storm of indignation of conservative-minded or simply under-informed readers" [35, 76-116]. Apparently, Joyce's unique mental abilities allowed him to become one of the greatest world authors, whose writer's "brainwork" created his own world of words in Ulysses for readers' thinking, puzzling, perceiving and sharing ideas in intellectual discussions. Thanks to "providing puffs in the local papers" [10, 528], James Joyce became known to Russian readers through a variety of translations and their publications in the first decades of the twentieth century.
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