Philip - my husband - often calls me a Joyce freak, which I don't suppose is really right - or is it? It is true that exactly one half of my PhD dissertation was about Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; it is also true that I enjoy reciting parts from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake which I know by heart, although, besides Philip, my two young daughters are my only audience, and now they know by heart almost as much of those extracts as I do myself and start enjoying joycean word poliphony and alliterations; it is also true that I seriously believe that it was the real spirit of James Joyce that came to me in one of my dreams some 13 years ago and talked to me about his writings. So, may be after all, I am a Joyce freak. But then - of those who like linguistics, literature or philology - who isn't?
It is common knowledge that James Joyce is probably the most influential writer of the 20-th century. He introduced many stylistic tricks that make up his individual literary method and have been widely studied and used by the writers of the second half of the 20-th century. In fact, without knowing those joycean tricks, one is likely to miss a thing or two while reading a good contemporary book. I was pleasantly reminded of that last June, when I had the luxury of having enough time to read two fabulous books by two of my favourite writers. Perhaps, it was even more pleasant since stumbling upon James Joyce in those books was the last thing I could have expected. And having delighted in enjoying this exquisite surprise in the first one that I read, I could not believe my eyes to find it in the other one as well. The two books I read last June could not be more different in their genre, plot or composition. It would never have occurred to me to compare them had I not read them one after the other. But now, the more I think about them, the more similarities I find. These two books are Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and David Lodge's The British Museum Is Falling Down.
- Both books were written at about the same time in the 1960s.
Written between 1966 and 1968, Ada or Ardor was one of the last novels written by Vladimir Nabokov almost at the end of his professional career and life - when he was seventy. This is his longest novel and probably one of his most sophisticated ones.
- Both books are mainly about sex, even though quite different aspects of it.
One of the most erotic books ever written, Ada or Ardor, as the title suggests, is about passionate and everlasting love. It being incestual and therefore socially unacceptable and doomed from the start only adds to the romance. But as in any fairy-tale - which the book partly is - after years of torturous long separations and few short meetings, the main characters, already in their 50s, find the way to start living together and live happily everafter until death doth them part, which happens when they are well into their mid-nineties. It is even likely that they die on the same day "... into the finished book..." of a family chronicle that they have written together - "... into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb", leaving it to the critics to argue whether they committed mutual euthanasia or not.
Unlike this romantic and highly poetic hymn to unearthly love (for Ada or Ardor takes place on a different planet called Antiterra), The British Museum Is Falling Down is a comic down to earth novel about the most unromantic aspect of sex possible - contraception or, rather, lack of it in an English Catholic family, and hence the dread of a young father of having yet another (the fourth) baby. This book also has a fairy-tale-like ending, when a good fairy materialising in the form of a wealthy and fat American millionaire driving around London in a limousine and smoking cigars offers the anxious father a good job which will allow him to rent a house with enough room for the new possibly coming babies.
- But of course, what made me even think of comparing these two books, was neither of the previous similarities but the presence of joycean method in both of them.
Now, with James Joyce's books this is a really hard thing to do, especially with Finnegans Wake. The number of puzzles is so enormous, and the number of languages used to make up those puzzles is so vast, that unless one is a real Joyce freak (not at all a make-believe one like me) it is virtually impossible to read the whole book. To get the jouissance from reading it would just take too much time - solving all these puzzles. To get the regular pleasure from reading it is impossible because without solving the puzzles it is completely unreadable and makes no sense. Still, it is quite a doable task to read and decipher some part of it and get the jouissance there. This is exactly what I did once, choosing the most famous part and obviously, the one that James Joyce was most satisfied with, since he chose it for his audio recording: Anna Livia Plurabelle. But even doing as little as that, gives you a good training in this game. And once you get the hang of it, you can use the skill whenever you read any other book and stumble upon any similar style, which becomes very recognizable to you.
This is exactly what happened to me while I was reading Ada or Ardor. But it did not happen immediately. As I have said before, I did not expect to find any joycean tricks in Ada. I read Lolita almost 20 years ago, when I was still a naive reader, not acquainted with James Joyce, and therefore completely unaware of the importance of being "an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia". So I missed all the puzzles there and probably a lot more than that. But in Ada, all the allusions, puns and alliterations started jumping out at me, providing a second source of pleasure (or, indeed, jouissance!) from the otherwise very readable and enjoyable text. What makes Nabokov different and a lot easier to read than Joyce is the fact that his books are virtual page-turners with a suspenseful plot. So if you miss all the rest, you can still enjoy it, as I enjoyed Lolita 20 years ago. In his work The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco says that complex or open texts, similar to those by Joyce, demand a very special reader, and that one can read, for example, Kafka's Trial "as a trivial criminal novel, but at this point the text collapses". Would Ada collapse, if read, say, as a romance novel? Did Lolita collapse when I read it naivley 20 years ago, even though I totally enjoyed its music and atmosphere?
The other thing which makes Nabokov's books easier to read is the number of languages used for the puzzles. The three main languages that he uses are English, Russian and French with the addition of some Latin. In fact, the first three are not only used for puzzles, but make up the whole body of the text of the book, since the majority of the characters are trilingual and enjoy ornating their English with French and Russian colorful expressions.
Unlike Ada or Ardor, The British Museum Is Falling Down does not have any joycean puns, alliterations or allusions within the text itself: it is the form of the Ulysses that it alludes to or, rather, parodies. Similar to Ulysses, the action of the whole book is limited to one day. There are ten chapters and an epilogue, and just as every chapter of Ulysses corresponds to and resembles a chapter from Homer's Odyssey, so does every chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down by way of a parody imitate the style of one of the following authors: Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Fr. Rolfe, C.P. Snow, and Virginia Woolf. But with the exception of the Epilogue which quite obviously parodies Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness at the end of Ulysses and may be a chapter where the main character faints and has a horrible in its absurdity Kafka-like dream or hallucinations, these imitations are not so easy to spot. They were not at first recognized even by the literary critics who reproached David Lodge of inhomogeneous writing style. So 15 years after The British Museum Is Falling Down was first published, David Lodge wrote a An Afterword for the 1981 edition of the book, explaining its structure and listing the writers whose style he parodied.
To sum it all up, both of these books are brilliant, a real joy to read, and - thanks to James Joyce who is quite obviously smiling through them - inspire the reader who has read them once to read them all over again, this time trying to find what has been missed the first time. And isn't it also just like in Finnegans Wake - where the first sentence begins at the very end of the book, as if the book itself invites the patient champion-reader who succeeded in reading it to the end, to start it all over again and this time - to really understand it?
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