Polyglotism in Rabelais and Finnegans Wake
Jacob Korg
University of Washington
The affinities between Joyce's novels and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel have long been a theme of Joyce criticism, in spite of Joyce's well-known assertion that he had not read Rabelais. Most of these comparative studies have focused on Ulysses, but in "Joyce and Rabelais" Duncan Mallam pointed out that there are also numerous correspondences between Gargantua and Pantagruel and Finnegans Wake. 1 There is now ample evidence both that Joyce was more familiar with Rabelais' work than he admitted and that he made use of it in Finnegans Wake. One area of correspondence, if not of direct influence, is the use which both authors made of polyglotism, one of the most prominent features of the text of Finnegans Wake. Especially significant is their common use of more than one language in hybrid words or interlingual puns.
The allusion to Rabelais and the occurrence of the word "bumgut" in Molly's monologue have long been accepted as evidence that Joyce took them from Sir Thomas Urquhart's seventeenth-century translation. Further, as John Kidd shows, in "Joyce's Copy of François Rabelais' 'Les Cinq Livres,'" Joyce possessed a two-volume copy of the original French text. 2This is now in the Humanities Research Center at Austin, and Kidd has examined the markings, stains, fingerprints, and other signs of wear in it to see whether they offer clues to its influence on Ulysses. He finds several such indications, and asks "Did Rabelais nudge Joyce towards the innovations of the Wake?" 3
The fact that he did, if only through indirect influence, had been established some years earlier by Claude Jacquet, in Joyce et Rabelais; Aspects de la création verbale dans Finnegans Wake. 4 Joyce admitted that he had read some chapters of a study called La Langue de Rabelais, by L. Sainéan (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1922-1923); this was in the letter of 31 May 1927 to Harriet Shaw [End Page 58] Weaver, in which he declared that he had never read Gargantua and Pantagruel itself, "though nobody will believe this." This is the same letter in which he said that he had not known Lewis Carroll until recently, when he was given one of his books—not Alice, however. (It was Sylvie and Bruno.) 5 Jacquet showed that Joyce copied many of the words discussed in the Sainéan book into a notebook listed as VI B. 45 in Peter Spielberg's James Joyce's Manuscripts and Letters at the University of Buffalo and that he worked many of them into the fabric of Finnegans Wake.
La Langue de Rabelais, according to Jacquet, is a study of the relation between Rabelais' language and the civilization of his time. It is divided into sections dealing with military matters, social life, music, popular legends, and the like. Joyce's list follows the sequence of the words as they appear in Sainéan's study, and many of them are rare or dialect terms which he could not have understood without Sainéan's explanations.
Jacquet offers his evidence in a table of three columns: the first notes the word in Joyce's workbook, together with initials showing whether it was cancelled in red or green crayon; the second quotes the context of the word in Sainéan; and the third shows the word as it appears in the text of the Wake together with its page and line position. Jacquet lists one hundred fifty-one words noted by Joyce, who did not use all of them but indicated the ones he did use by crayon cancellations. 6
The influence of Rabelais (or Sainéan) appears early in the Wake and is widely diffused. The names of the weapons on page four—"Baddelaries," "Malchus," "Verdons," "Assiegates"—are variants of weapons described on page seventy of Sainéan's first volume. Joyce, of course, usually made creative use of his borrowings. The notebook entry, "malmaridad," from a term in Sainéan for a Provençal dance, appears in the Wake as "Malmarriedad." 7 Joyce entered Rabelais' phrase, "eschorcher le renard" in his notebook in English as "flay the fox (peel it)." Sainéan explains that "malmaridad" means to throw up after excessive drinking, a sense derived from the stench that arises when an animal is skinned. Hence, it appears in the Wake, following Sainéan's information, as "flay-fell foxfetor" (Finnegans Wake, p. 118). Sainéan's quotation about a time when chickens had teeth is noted as "when chicks had teeth" and is transformed in the Wake into "And the chicks picked their teeths" (Finnegans Wake, p. 20).
The transmogrification of linguistic resources is one of the most conspicuous themes of Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the second book alone, the resources of language are stretched and transcended in the pretentious jargon of the Limousin student, the unintelligible "langues factices" of Panurge, the testimony of Baisecul and Humevesne, which shows that eloquence can be meaningless, and the debate of gestures between Thaumaste and Panurge, which seems, on the other hand, to show that words are not needed for conveying ideas.
Multilingualism was, of course, commonplace in Rabelais' time. If one was at all literate then, one was bound to know Latin as well as French, and an educated man was likely to encounter other languages among his fellow students, especially in the university environments in which Rabelais spent much of his life. But Rabelais used so many foreign terms that he felt the need to write a Briefve declaration d'alcunes dictions plus obscures contenües on quatriesme livre, in which he defines many of the foreign words from Turkish, Arabic, German, Tuscan, and other languages [End Page 59] that he used. There is an element of blague in this appendix. Many of the terms defined are familiar French words: "Anagnoste," from the Greek, "without knowledge," is defined as "Lecteur," and one definition archly admits that "Bringenarilles" is a "Nom faict à plaisir, comme grand nombre d'autres en cestuy livre." 8
The polyglot spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel that also pervades Finnegans Wake is most conspicuous at the point in the second book at which Panurge speaks in a series of languages before lapsing into French. Gargantua's letter to his son urges him to include the ancient languages, including Chaldean and Arabic, among his studies, but he does not mention the modern tongues spoken by Panurge. Greek was suspect at the time, since it opened fields of learning that threatened the Latin-based tradition of Sorbonne scholars, and Rabelais' competence in it was one of his challenges to orthodoxy. His text is peppered with foreign expressions, provincialisms, coinings, puns, portmanteau words, and all sorts of verbal play, one of these being the blending of words from different languages into hybrids, a device integral to the idiom of Finnegans Wake. 9
The jargon of the
More fully developed instances of this device, verging into genuine blendings of language, appear in two passages analyzed by Marie-Madeleine Fragonard. 11 She finds these linguistic experiments going on in two passages from the Tiers Livre, the list of arms gathered by the Corinthians in the Prologue, and the plants mentioned in connection with the discussion of "pantagruelion" in Chapters 49-52.
The weapons, together with their names, are mostly borrowed from foreign sources, following "le système des dettes panurgien." For example, "dagues" and "goussets" are from Arabic, "parthizens" and "ravelins" from Persian, and there are similar borrowings from Italian, German, and Latin. However, all of these terms are in deviant form, many being "francisé" by having French endings added to them and thus being transformed into bilingual hybrids.
Rabelais played a somewhat different linguistic game with the names of the plants in Chapters 49-52. Here, only three languages—Greek, Latin, and French—are involved (with some exceptions). One procedure is to join the etonym with some element from another language. Fragonard presents footnoted tables detailing these blendings, showing, for example, that "delphinium" is a Greek form with a Latin ending and "santonique" a Latin term that has been "francisé." Fragonard's [End Page 60] term for the course taken by Rabelais in naming his armaments and his plants is the accurate one of "l'hybridation." 12
Multilingualism appears conspicuously in the speeches of Panurge at his first appearance, although there is, apparently, no blending of the different languages in single words. Panurge, whose name, from the Greek, means something on the order of "capable of all things," and implies a thievish, mercurial character, is Rabelais' Buck Mulligan. However, the Pléiade edition of Rabelais' Oeuvres Complètes, noting that
Some of these speeches were added in later editions, the Scotch and "langues factices" in 1533, Basque and Danish in 1534. The three speeches of "langues factices" are identified by Panurge's hearers as the language of the Antipodes; "lanternois," the tongue of the country where the Dive Bouteille is to be found in the Quart Livre; and the language of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. 14 In the Tiers Livre, Panurge claims to be fluent in "lanternois" and recites a quatrain in it.
Émile Pons, in "Les Langues imaginaires dans le voyage Utopique: Les 'jargons' de Panurge dans Rabelais," undertakes the Quixotic task of deciphering Panurge's "langues factices." 15He concludes that they represent three different, although related languages invented by Rabelais and unearths some portmanteau words that correspond exactly to the linguistic hybrids of Finnegans Wake.
An example is his translation of the word delmeupplistrincq; it sounds, Pons says, like "donne-moi please to drink"—an echo, he thinks, of a specimen of "charabia international," or international gibberish, a decadent form of polyglot speech. Pons takes the word sorgdmand as a merging of the German sorge, "sorrow," and the French demande, "request," with the meaning "la requête de ma détresse." In these analyses, linguistic heterogeneity appears more often in contiguous words forming unified expressions than in single words. The phrase Dodelb up drent, according to Pons, combines English ("doubled up") and French ("te rend") to mean "[Le Seigneur] te le rend au double." Admitting that Gott fano dech is difficult, he surmises that it is composed of the German for God along with variants of one of two Hebrew forms, one meaning "maudit" and the other "benisse." The words "dal heben," according to Pons, combine the Arabic halib with the Hebrew leben, both words for "milk."
Even more speculative is his decipherment of the phrase nin porth zadikin. After some discussion, he concludes that nin is best seen as a corruption of the Latin nisi, porth as the French verb "porte" with a jocular Hebraic ending, and zadikin as the Arabic zad meaning "food" and the possessive kim meaning "your." In its context, Pons concludes, the phrase means something like "unless you bring food." [End Page 61]
Proceeding in this way, Pons is able to produce perfectly intelligible French translations of the "langues factices." He says of them: "Rabelais se plait ici à juxtaposer et combiner des vocables d'origine ou de nationalité differente, à créer des hybrides, richement métisses . . . ," exactly the process which we see in Finnegans Wake. And Pons follows up with a Wakeism of his own by calling such words "hippocampélephantocamélos linguistiques." 16 What he says of Rabelais' polyglotism applies equally well to Joyce's text: "L'auteur y communique invinciblement à son lecteur le sentiment de puissance et d'agilité qu'éprouve l'esprit à s'exprimer en l'infinie diversité des idiomes." 17
Pons' analyses are recognized both in the Pléiade edition of Rabelais' Oeuvres Complètes and in the authoritative Rabelais by M.A. Screech, although Screech adds that nobody could have understood anything in these speeches but the place names. 18If Pons' decoding is accepted, it certainly testifies to Rabelais' use of hybrid terms. However, some reservations, recognizing Pons' creativity while withholding credence, are also possible. Many of his inferences are strained and implausible, depending on errors of transcription, ambiguities, or mere speculation. By reducing the gibberish into lucid translations, as he does, he nullifies the cryptic element which is a part of Panurge's character. Perhaps the point that his analysis unintentionally makes is that language, no matter how mutilated and deformed, cannot avoid being meaningful.
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The seeds of Joyce's experimental use of a polyglot idiom appear in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
While waiting impatiently to hear about his admission to the university, the restive, language-conscious Stephen observes clouds that have floated westward over Dublin and thinks: "The Europe they had come from lay out there beyond the Irish sea, Europe of strange tongues and valleyed and woodbegirt and citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races. He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture for an instant . . ." (A Portrait of the Artist, p. 167). Finnegans Wake might be regarded [End Page 62] as the formulation of that music. But the mature Joyce repudiates Stephen's vague, sentimental, semi-conscious sense of other languages by using them to produce a sharply detailed, bawdy, and riotously comic multilingual epic.
Multilingual hybrids appear on the first page of Finnegans Wake. The first example, "passencore" in lines 4-5, was not a first thought, for the initial draft from the James Joyce Archive shows that Joyce first wrote "not encore," as separate words, and then cancelled "not" to write "pass" above the line, linking it to "encore" to form a single word. Similarly, "aquaface" was originally "waterface," a form which survived several drafts until Joyce changed it in the second set of transition proofs to make it a bilingual hybrid.
The thunderword on the first page was probably also a second thought, in keeping with Joyce's method of building up his text incrementally. It does not appear in the initial draft of Chapter 1 but was inserted, apparently as a later addition, at the bottom of the first page of the second pencil draft, in the position where it remains. 20Coming so early in the text, it solidly establishes the principle of the multilingual hybrid, for its hundred letters contain the words for thunder from ten languages. Joyce paid some attention to the authenticity of the foreign words; his abbreviated form of the Japanese "kaminari" was incorrectly transcribed from his jumbled manuscript, so that an errant "m" had to be corrected to "n" in proof.
The hundred-letter words are a recurrent feature of the Wake's narrative. Of the ten thunderwords, eight are multilingual hybrids, composed mainly of foreign words for such expressions as "applause," "close the door," and "whore." Monstrous agglutinations of this kind are also found in Gargantua and Pantagruel. For example, in the account of the false marriage of Basché's baker in Chapter 15 of the Quart Livre, the blows exchanged during this strange ritual are described in several enormous compound words expressive of violence that suggest the thunder-words of Finnegans Wake. 21
The many puns and blended words in the first few pages of the Wake are dominated by English, but the account of Bygmester Finnegan's construction on page four contains the remarkable pair "buildung" and "maisonry," smooth blendings, respectively, of English with German for "depiction" and French for "house." "Caligulate," (Finnegans Wake, p. 4) which embodies the name of a Roman emperor, and "celescalating" (Finnegans Wake, p. 5) which contains the name of an heretic, are unusual among the hybrids in making use of proper names. More common is the principle involved in "eriginating" which conveys its English meaning through the Latin "erigo," to place upright. As one proceeds through the text with the help of the Annotations, one finds on page 5 "agentlike" (German, eigentlich, "truly"), "shebby" (Turkish, shebi, "likeness"), "bedoueen" (French, bédouin from the Arabic, bidwan, "desert dweller"), "jebel" (Arabic, "mount" with a pun on "devil"), "ansars" (Arabic, Koran scribes, with a pun on "answers"), "stonengens" ("Stonehenge" with the Danish engen, "meadow"), "hippohobbilies" (the Greek hippo, "horse" with English "hobby"). This page also makes use of some proper nouns to form hybrids. "Sendday's" seems to allude to the Japanese city of
This frequency and variety are characteristic of the text as a whole, and the attentive reader, with the aid of the various foreign language lexicons, will turn up innumerable interesting and [End Page 63] uproarious polyglot hybrids of this kind, similar to the far less frequent instances in Gargantua and Pantagruel.
There are occasional multilingualisms in Joyce's earlier novels, but they are intrinsic to the style of the Wake. They are an important class of the verbal inventions that—together with historic, mythical, and literary allusions—make up the colorful and variegated fabric of the Wake's text. Its use of separate foreign words in their original sense is not sharply different from conventional use, but the real break with convention occurs in the coining of multilingual hybrids such as those pointed out in Rabelais' work by Fragonard and Pons. Theyare of special significance because they mark the idioms of the respective works as sharply different from the mother language and thus create a literary genre that transcends national boundaries. 22
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These neologisms no doubt had different meanings for readers and authors so widely divided in time and place, but they share several effects. They are, in the first place, extensions of the general comedy of both works into the linguistic sphere. By bringing together two or more terms from different cultures, the new word achieves the comic effect of disproportion or inconsistency. A second effect, nearly opposite to the comic one, is that of suggesting relationships among languages, the impression made by Stephen's meditation on "ivory" that any single language is only one of many ways of expressing thought, a point also inherent in Panurge's requests for help in various languages.
It follows from this insight that the word is not sacred, that it can be manipulated and re-formed. A stage direction in Finnegans Wake aligns verbal deviation with the splitting of the atom by Lord Rutherford: "The abnihilisation of the etym . . . by the first lord of Hurtreford explodonates" (Finnegans Wake, p. 353). Dividing and re-assembling the word creates an "explosion" of new semantic force, especially when polyglot words are combined. Two instances of hybrids that extend meaning occur in a single sentence of the Wake when, in reply to Butt's boast that he has shot the Russian general, Taff says: "Ah, you were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged. Aha race of fiercemarchands counterination oho of shorpshoopers" (Finnegans Wake, p. 352). "Shutter reshottus" is, according to the Annotations, a play on the Latin title of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus ("The Tailor Retailored"), a blending which parallels the reflexive form or "counterination" of the two phrases. "Fiercemarchands," joins the ardor of the English soldiery with the French taunt that the English were a nation of shopkeepers, thus suggesting that the two characteristics can co-exist. The taunt is unobtrusively threaded throughout the sentence by a series relating to shops: "shutter . . . marchands . . . counter . . . shorpshooters."
The blending of languages is a response to the pressures of the changing and shifting intellectual environments in which both Joyce and Rabelais wrote. In milieus of that kind, the fertility of language is increased by multiplying the blendings that occur naturally, albeit more slowly, in ordinary usage. Hybrids also imply resistance to linguistic authority. Rabelais was occupied with the Humanist rebellion against an academic conservatism that discouraged the study of languages, and Joyce's linguistic deviations can be felt as an expression of Stephen Dedalus' resentful [End Page 64] feeling that English was an alien tongue. For both authors, radical departures from conventional style, along with the deliberate violation of linguistic purity, provided openings to new horizons of expression, and their use of multilingual hybrids is an extreme development of this drive toward intellectual freedom.
Fragonard observed that in the list of hybrid names of weapons in Gargantua and Pantagruel, "tous les peuples et tous les temps se sont mobilisés pour créer ce vocabulaire de la guerre totale. . . ." 23 Her observation applies even more appropriately to Finnegans Wake, except that its vocabulary is not "guerre totale," but "langue totale," an idiom that carries on and advances Rabelais' linguistic craftsmanship.
Jacob Korg is Emeritus Professor of English at the
Footnotes
1. Duncan Mallam, "Joyce and Rabelais,"
2. John Kidd, "Joyce's Copy of François Rabelais' 'Les Cinq Livres,'" Library Chronicle of the
3. Kidd, p. 160.
4. Claude Jacquet, Joyce et Rabelais; Aspects de la création verbale dans Finnegans Wake (Paris: Didier, 1972).
5. Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (Viking, 1957), p. 55.
6. See also Danis Rose, "Corrections to Jacquet's Joyce et Rabelais," Wake News Litter, XII, 6 (1976), pp 106-08, a painstaking critique which is oddly in need of correction itself.
7. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Viking Press, 1968), p. 30. Subsequent references to Finnegans Wake are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
8. François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 710.
9. These hybrids, as well as other uses of foreign languages, can easily be located in Annotations to Finnegans Wake, by Roland McHugh (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). This volume also lists the foreign languages that appear in the Wake. See pp. v and viii.
10. J.M. Cohen's translation of the
11. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, "Le Banal et l'exotique: Le vocabulaire comme instrument de l'imagination," Études Rabelaisiennes, XXXVII (1999), pp. 9-23.
12. Fragonard, "Le banal et l'exotique," p. 23.
13. Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, p. 1274.
14. The four lines of "Utopian" verse at the end of More's work seem to have aroused considerable interest and may have provided Rabelais with a precedent. Panurge's nonce languages have also been compared with some dialogue in La Farce de Maître Pathelin which is not understood because it is in dialect.
15. Émile Pons, "Les Langues imaginaires dans le voyage Utopique: Les 'jargons' de Panurge dans Rabelais," Revue de Littèrature Comparée, XI (1931), pp 185-218.
16. Pons, "Les Langues imaginaires," p. 194.
17. Pons, "Les Langues imaginaires," p. 186.
18. M.A. Screech, Rabelais (Duckworth, 1979), p. 494.
19. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin, 1979), p. 189. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.
20. The James Joyce Archive: Finnegans Wake, Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, eds. (Garland Publishing, 1978), Book I, Chapter 1, p. 45.
21. Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, pp. 574-75.
22. The conventional lexicon, of course, is friendly to hybrids. Examples include "photocopy," Greek and Latin; "courtroom," French and Old English; "typewriter" Greek and English; "microfilm," Greek and English; "endpaper," Germanic and Greek ("papyrus"). These familiar forms do not seem to be hybrids, or to challenge conventional word-formation.
23. Fragonard, "Le Banal et l'exotique," p.10.
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