Mauthner's "Critique of Language" - A Forgotten Book at The "Wake"

Mauthner's "Critique of Language": A Forgotten Book at the "Wake" Author(s): Linda Ben-Zvi Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.
19, No. 2, James Joyce and His Contemporaries (Summer, 1982), pp. 143-163 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246311 . Accessed: 08/10/2013 18:52
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Mauthner's Critique of Language: A Forgotten Book at the Wake

LINDA BEN-ZVI
James Joyce, limited by failing eyesight, often made use of a cadre of young admirersin the process of amassingthe encyclopedic volume of material that was to become Finnegans Wake.One of "Joyce's runabout men" was Samuel Beckett1 and a specific assignment given him was the reading of Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions toward a Critique of Language), the three-volume study of language completed in 1903 by Austrian philosopher Fritz Mauthner.2 Beckett says of the task: "I skimmed through Mauthner for Joyce in 1929 or 30. 1 do not remember what passages I marked as likely fodder for Finnegans Wake.I did not suppose he was concerned with the doctrine. It seemed just another notesnatching operation."3 Such techniques for finding philosophical underpinnings to bolster the massive structure of the book were not unusual. It was Joyce who suggested that Beckett study the works of Bruno and Vico as possible antecedents of the Wake,though he later admonished: "I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories beyond using them for all they're worth."4 Joyce referred to Vico's cyclical theory of history as "a trellis"5 upon which he could train his own views of recurrence.In a similar way Beckett's "notesnatching operation" of the Critique provided another frame, this time for Joyce's great experiments with language. Yet, while legions of Joyce critics have followed in Beckett's exegetic footsteps and plumbed Bruno and Vico "for all they're worth," Mauthner has been totally ignored.6 James Atherton makes no mention of the Critique in his The Books at the Wakeor in the addendum "A Few More Books at the Wake";neither does Arthur Broes in "More Books at theWake."7 Aside from Ellmann's initial citation, the only study I have discovered mentioning Joyce and Mauthner is Joachim Kiihn, Gescheiterte Sprachkritik: Fritz Mauthner, Leben und Werk,written in 1975.8 In a brief summary, Kiihn connects the works of Joyce and Beckett to the "skeptical school" of writing which pervades twentieth-century German literature and has, as Kiihn argues, its genesis in the literature of such Hapsburgwriters as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and in such philosophers as Fritz Mauthner. Whatjoins all these men is their common recognition of the limits of language and their desire to move
1982 Boardof Trusteesof the Universityof Illinois 0010-4132/82/0600-0143/$02.10/0
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beyond congealed forms in order to create a literature freed from the confines of ordinary language. While Hofmannsthal in his "Letter of Lord Chandos" denied the possibility of rehabilitating language, Kiihn sees both Joyce and Beckett - each in his own way attempting to take on the challenge Mauthnerposes in the Critique: finding a way to revitalize language.9 The theories which Mauthner develops in his massive study of language derive in large measure from Bruno and Vico, but unlike these philosophers, Mauthner does not make language an adjunct to a more comprehensive theory of history and philosophy; instead he places the critiquing of language at the heart of all philosophical investigation. In so doing he became the first modern writer to insist on the primacy of language as the true study of philosophy. Mauthnerbelieved that the basic error of all contemporary philosophies, even works he admired, such as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer's The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, lay in their failure to examine the basic premises on which their metaphysical speculations were based because they failed to examine the nature of language itself. Mauthner'slinguistic idealism replaced metaphysics with a close analysis of the functioning of ordinary language in an attempt to delimit the possibilities of languageuse in both philosophy and general communication. From his monumental classification system of language, four areas of investigation seem to have particular relevance to Joyce: (1) Language as Thought, (2) Language as Metaphor, (3) Language as Communication, and (4) Language as Poetry. It may be impossible to say with any exactness just how influential any of these theories were in the shaping of Finnegans Wakebecause Mauthner is so derivative of sources which Joyce knew well. But it is certain that, at least, Joyce found in the Critique corroboration for many of his own views about the functioning and limits of language and found a strong - albeit garrulous- voice championing the very experiment upon which Joyce was embarked in the writing of the Wake. 1. Languageas Thought "The real metaphysical problem today is the word," EugeneJolas wrote in 1929 in "The Revolution of the Word and James Joyce," his contribution to Our Exagmination.10 For him, as for Joyce and the writers contributing to transition, epistemological debates over truth, value, and meaning could usually be reshaped as questions of language.Jolas' editorial goal in transition was to publish those writers who were conscious of the increasingly serious malady of language and who held that "the problem of language and of the processes of intellection have as great an importance ... as life itself."11 "Workin Progress"appeared in transition in seventeen in-
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stallments, running from 1927 through 1938, and concurrent with the serialization Jolas ran his campaign for "a revolution of the word." Finnegans Wake, therefore, was not an isolated phenomenon; it was very much a reaction to its times and embodied the major intellectual concern of the period: how to deal with words that had become vitiated and "had lost their primary meaning."12 Such concerns were mirrored not only in literature but also in linguistic studies that attempted to deal with the role of language in communication. The Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ogden and LA. Richards sought to reverse the reification of the word "meaning" by providing some systematic basis for the connection between words and facts. In their summary of nominalist philosophers who have focused on the problem of language, they give credit to Mauthner, one of the few references to Mauthner that can be found in linguistic or philosophical studies:
Until recent times it is only here and there that efforts have been made to penetrate the mystery [of words] by a direct attack on the essential problem. In the fourteenth century we had the nominalist analysis of William of Occam, in the seventeenth century the work of Bacon and Hobbes. The discussion rises to an apex with the Third Book of Locke's Essay and the interest of Leibnitz in a philosophical language. . . . We reach the nineteenth century movement in which the work of Bentham, Taine, and Mauthner was especially significant.1
Of all the nominalists whom Ogden and Richards mention as primary explorers in the area of language, none is more rigorous in his linguistic skepticism than Mauthner. Going beyond even Hume, he subsumes all knowledge under language and then denies its basic efficacy: the ability to reflect any meaning beyond itself.
One of the points of departure of this work is that there is no thinking outside speaking (i.e., outside language), that thinking is a dead symbol for an ostensible mistakenly seen attribute of language: its imaginary ability to promote insight [Erkenntnis] .14
Mauthner's central thesis, repeated throughout the Critique, is the inseparability of thought and speech and the impossibility of severing thought from language:
What stands most clearly in the path of knowing truth is that all men believe they themselves think, when actually they only speak, and also that scholars and students of the mind all speak of thinking for which speaking should be at most the instrument or the clothing. But this is not true; there is no thinking without speaking, i.e., without words. There is no thinking, there is only speaking. (I, 176)
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For Mauthner even natural laws cannot be verified because they cannot be seen apart from language: "Thus what we call a law of nature is nothing but our own state of mind toward inductive concepts or words which came to be framed in us. Little enough but at the same time, everything we have" (III, 564-65). Nowhere does Mauthner actually deny the existence of absolutes, but he contends that man cannot know of them because they exist beyond the possibility of his language to articulate them:
Yet behind the space of our language must be hiding something related to the space of reality. . . . And thus there might be hidden behind the compulsion to daring metaphors (like the transposing of spatial ideas to notions of time) a coercion which lies in the undisclosed relationships of the world of reality. (II, 453)
"Undisclosed" is the central word: whatever man cannot say he cannot know. It is this phrase, affixed by Wittgenstein to the end of his own study of language, the Tractatus,1S that underlies all of the Critique and that leads Mauthner to the following conclusion, also shared by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations: "Language is only a convention - like a rule of a game: the more participants, the more compelling it will be. However, it will neither grasp nor alter the real world" (I, 25). What Mauthner does salvage is the power of words to evoke ideas that it can never corroborate:
Let us summarize in short: to be sure "the" language does not exist, individual language too is nothing real; words never create insight, they are merely a tool of poetry, they do not give real cognition [Anschauung] , and they are not real. Nevertheless they can become a power, destructive like a storm which is a breath of air like the word. A word can easily become more powerful than a deed was; however, the word never advances life. (I, 151)
Before discussing the philosophical arguments that support this skeptical position, it may be helpful to trace briefly how Mauthner reached this view of language. In the same way that Jolas, Joyce, and others derived their conclusions about the decay of language from personal biographies that were marked by physical displacements from one linguistic milieu to another, Mauthner, too, experienced in his own life the stresses caused by trying to survivein a polylingual society.16 Born in 1849 in Bohemia to Jewish parents, he was raised in Prague, then part of the Hapsburgempire, taught Hebrew as part of his religious training, educated at a Germanspeaking gymnasium, and expected to function and communicate in Czech, the language of the country. This early experience of verbal balancing - which directly parallels that of his fellow Czech, Franz Kafka, born in the same city thirty-four years later - helps
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explain Mauthner's lifelong preoccupation, near obsession, with the alienation caused by language:17
He who has become lonely among his fellow human beings because he has arrived at a different language or a different world-view [Weltanschauung] , he who deviates from the way of the others, he would have a nice and easy time in imparting his lonely thinking to others - if only there were understanding among people, if the dreamers and fools were right who speak of telepathy among human (I, 634-35) being. . . . But what we call thinking is mere language.
Like Gregor Samsa and other Kafka personae, Mauthner recognized the isolation caused by the desire to communicate in a new language to people unable to interpret the words. He further recognized the futility of attempting to free oneself from the hold of language. On the very first page of the Critique, he clearly states his recognition of his ultimate failure:
In the Beginning was the Word. With the word, men stand at the beginning of their insight into the world, and if they stay with the word they'll stop there. He who wishes to move on, even if it be only a tiny step . . . he must try to redeem the world from the tyranny of language. (I, 1; italics mine)
Mauthnercontinues by making clear the kind of person and the type of writing that might be able to succeed in the battle against bewitchment by language:
He who sets out to write a book with a hunger for words, with a love of words, and with the vanity of words, in the language of yesterday or of today or of tomorrow, in the congealed language of a certain and firm step, he cannot undertake the task of liberation from language. I must destroy language within me, in front of me, and behind me step for step if I want to ascend in the critique of language, which is the most pressing task for thinking man: I must shatter each rung of the ladder by stepping upon it. He who wishes to follow me must reconstitute the rungs in order to shatter them once again. (I, 1)
Mauthnerrecognized the problem with which he was dealing: trying to critique words with words, trying to pierce through the "congealed language" of his epoch with the only tool available to him - the very language he denied. However, while fully aware of the impossibility of the attempt and of the loneliness and alienation that accompanied it, he also points to the possibility of a work that would free itself by refusing to be confined by the language of its time, destroying the fossilized forms of communication as it went, and requiringthose who would follow it to find their own equivalent means of ascension. In many ways Finnegans Wakeis just such an achievement. "I'd like a language which is above all languages, a language to
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which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition," Joyce told Stefan Zweig in 1918.18 Mauthner, in a diatribe against Aristotle, had faulted the philosopher for his linguistic parochialism since his assumptions about language were only gleaned from his experiences with his native Greek.19 "This thralldom to words," as Mauthner called it, was a condition against which Joyce, too, inveighed. Rather than displaying an insularity that presumes one's native language is paradigmaticof all languages,Joyce was painfully aware of the babelized state of modern communication. Frank Budgen reported that Joyce once told him that he had discovered the meaning of the story of the Tower of Babel. Budgen bemoaned his failure to ask Joyce for the solution,20 but it is there in Finnegans Wake,where Joyce attempted to reverse the fragmentation of contemporary language by fusing what had been sundered on the Plain of Shinar. Joyce's own linguistic biography, similar in scope to Mauthner's, provided him with ample illustrations of the problems caused by language.Joyce, like Mauthner, was born into a society where he was expected to speak a language not his own. As Stephen Dedalus complains: "The language in which we are speaking [English] is his before it is mine. ... I have not made or accepted its words. . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language."21As a child Joyce was also exposed to a classical language associated with religious rites, and it remained part of his word horde long after the practices had ceased to have the same validity. Finally his adult exiles brought him into direct contact with polylingual societies created by the political upheavals in Europe duringJoyce's lifetime. All these experiences made Joyce conscious, as Mauthnerhad been, of the impossibility of capturing any absolutes in one given language. This linguistic awareness may explain the central quality which Beckett finds in the Wake: "the absolute absence of the Absolute" (Our Exag., p. 22). If language cannot give insights into the world, then what can be done with it? Joyce answers the question in words that are strikingly similar to Mauthner's(see page 146): "I know it [language] is no more than a game, but it is a game that I have learned to play in my own way. Children may just as well play as not. The ogre will come in any case."22 Pyrrhonism,Hugh Kenner chooses to call it: that skepticism that maintains that, like Mauthner'snominalism, there is no meaning beyond words. "The Irish as Joyce presents them (and who shall differ?) are such Pyrrhonists they are apt to be set snickering by the mere suspicion that an idea has entered the room."23 The Dublin constituted in all of Joyce's works, Kenner argues, is "a whole community agreed upon this one thing, that no one at the bottom knows what he is talking about because there is nothing to know except the talk" (p. 54).
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If Joyce sharedMauthner'srecognition that "the word never advances life" he also held the belief that "a word can easily become more powerful than a deed was." From the very first page of Dubliners, Joyce's persona displays his awarenessof the mystery of words: "the word paralysis," "the word simony," "the word gnomen" (D, p. 9). The repetition of "word" reinforces the evocative force of language as a means of transport, not to worlds of objects and facts but to worlds of sensation and magic. These strange words move the boy by their auralpower: they "sounded strangely in my ears" (D, p. 9). As he stands looking up at the old priest's window he does not remember experiences but only words, and the new knowledge he is about to gain - the yet unspecified "it" - will be rooted as well in the evocative nature of language: "it wounded me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being" (D, p. 9; italics are mine). The name not the thing causes fear, and one can almost imagine the boy adding "maleficent" to his list of strange-sounding, foreboding words. Like his later avatarStephen, also a savorerof words, the young boy experiences life as language.24 The tendency to make thinking synonymous with language, as Mauthner argues, is displayed by Joyce as well as by his characters. Edmund Wilson recognized this quality of Joyce's mind, when he noted in Axel's Castle, "Joyce's people think and feel exclusively in terms of words, for Joyce himself thinks in terms of words."" Wilson also commented on the problems faced by a writer who wishes to take his reader into the mind where denotative language will not suffice:
Now, in his new book [Finnegans Wake] , Joyce has tried to make his hero express directly in words, again, states of mind which do not usually in reality make use of words at all - for the subconscious has no language - the dreaming mind does not usually speak - and when it does, it is more likely to express itself in the looking-glass language of "Jabberwocky" than in anything resembling ordinary speech. (P. 227)
Joyce fully recognized the problem that Wilson described: "What the language will look like when I have finished I don't know. But "*6 He also realized having declared war I shall go on jusqu'au bout. that the result would not be "languageat any sinse of the world" (FW 83:12). In the phrase, so like English and yet not English, so familiar and yet synthetic, lies part of his answer. By creating neologisms, portmanteau words, rhymes, and verbal and semantic associations, he created a new language while using as fulcrum the devalued words of the past. The process can be seen in the seemingly simple phrase, "In the buginning is the woid" (FW 378:29). Joyce indicates in the neologism and pun the very "bug" that confronts language: the inability to encapsulate the void with the word. The
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phrase resonates with associations that shatter past contexts and create new meanings. First there is the echo of the syntactical antecedent, the biblical source, that sheds ironic light on the modern dilemma of man reduced to bug, no longer heir to the Word in capitalized form, not even to a lower case variation, but to some new condition conveyed by the neologism "word" grafted onto "void." There are further verbal associations which the novel itself provides. The central character in the Wakeis Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker who takes his last name from the old English word earwig, a bug that enters the body through the ear. Therefore the further doubling of meaning: "In the bug" that is in the hero Earwicker,the void/word struggle for rapprochement is to be fought. This inner struggle for accommodation will parallel the macrocosmic situation of humanity balancing void with word. The biblical meaning also plays against this context since the individual struggle for knowledge of godhead is to be waged independently "in the bug." WhatJoyce does with this phrase - doubling and redoubling meanings, employing echoes of old associations against newly created contexts - he does throughout the Wake.He forces the reader to react to words in new ways in the attempt to illustrate language as thought.27 MargaretSchlauch recognized this effect of Joyce's language when she wrote in 1939, "For the polyphonic interweaving of themes he tries to substitute polysemantic verbal patterns. . . . You distort the words in a given passage so that they suggest at one and the same time not only the original ones but also another series of verbalisms."28 How to deal with such a language has been the central critical question of those readingFinnegans Wake,not only voiced by the "monodialectical arcadians"whom Beckett scornfully attacks in Our Exagmination (p. 19), but by virtually everyone who has ventured into the world of the Wake.29 Joyce himself pointed to one answer when he said, "One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammarand goahead plot."30 This description, unfortunately, has led many to assume that Joyce in his language experiment was attempting to capture the world of the "nightynovel" (FW 54:21) alone. While the book certainly is a cosmic dream told in the language of sleep and states of semiconsciousness, it is also an attempt to do what Mauthner calls for - to move beyond "congealed language"by creating a synthetic language that would demand a response not connected to the elucidation of the world of facts and objects. Joyce's intention is implied in his response to those who feared his language: "Whenmorning comes of course everything will be clear again. I'll give them back their language. They really needn't worry and scold so much. I'll give them back their English language. I'm not destroying it for good!"31
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Joyce, like Mauthner, knew that mornings never bring verbal clarity. His linguistic creations were not destructions but attempts to break the tyranny imposed by daytime language, or as William Carlos Williams explains: "Joyce maims words. Why? Because meanings have been dulled, then lost, then perverted by their connotations (which have grown over them) until their effect on the mind is no longer what it was when they were fresh but grows rotten aspoi - though we may get to like poi" (Our Exag., p. 184). The Critique was a warning against pot, the Wake a mythopoeic freshener. 2. Language as Metaphor In order to understand how Mauthner reached the conclusion about the impossibility of language to reflect any truth beyond itself, it is necessary to follow the logic upon which he builds his premises. Mauthner was a strict empiricist throughout his life, even when such a position led him into untenable positions. As such he held that there was nothing in man's mind that did not derive from his senses. However, senses often distort and, at best, capture only part of experience. To describe this limitation of the senses, Mauthner coined the word Zufallssinne, the accidental or chance occurrences of the senses.32 The senses observe in a limited fashion, he noted, and since they are the prime means for the apprehension of reality and lead to subsequent language acquisition, both thought and language can be no more than chance or accidental occurrences of the senses: "The world came about through our evolving senses, but the senses too come about through the evolving world. Where can there be a detached picture of the world?" (I, 342). Mauthner argues that there is no way for man to gain an unimpeded picture of reality beyond the limits of his senses: "We hold that our five senses are accidental and that our language, which came about from the memories of these Zufallssinne and was extended through metaphorical conquest of everything knowable, can never give us insight into reality" (I, 114). To further complicate the search for absolutes, man must rely not on immediate sensory apprehension but on what remains of sensations encoded in memories of the original experience - another remove from the actual. Memory is an important word for Mauthner, one he employs as synonym for language: "We are so little capable of separating our memory of similar things from concepts or words that frequently we would be better off to say simply language instead of memory and words instead of recollections" (I, 522). Mauthner carries this theory of Zufallssinne as far as to argue that the ego itself is not certain, predicated as it is on memory which is faulty and impossible to verify. Thus though "I am conscious of myself," Mauthner says, "on the needle point of the moment I can im-
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pale only one impression, and so the ego in 'I am*would be lost again if I did not have a memory of the fact that being remained in the flux of becoming, that I was" (I, 653). Yet the self, like truth, is impossible to verify and the best man can do is to "erect bogeys of words" (I, 654) to describe the indescribable sense of being. Because of the blurringof experience through the distortions created by memory, Mauthnerconcludes that words - the verbal components of memories - are basically analogical in nature and that their tendency to convey approximations is their basic quality:
That which we called all too humanly the basic fault of memory, that is its essence. It does not notice the difference between sameness and similarity. It notices faultily, it notices falsely. And without this essential mistake there would not be a development in the organic world, and in the world of the mind there would not be any concepts or words. (I, 531)
Mauthnerbelieved that language came about because man continually forgot the images of the past and found new words that may have had connection with previous forms but which had shed or submerged the earlier meaning. "Memory would be unbearable if we could not forget. And the words or concepts that only arose because of false memory would be unusable for everyday use were it not for the characteristic of memory that consists in being unfaithful. . . . We would neither live nor think if we could not forget" (1,531). Because language was analogical, Mauthnerwas led to the view that all language is thus metaphoric. The notion of the metaphoric nature of language came to him through the works of Vico, a source Joyce also used to reach a similar conclusion about language.Mauthner says in tribute to Vico:
A word of Goethe drew my attention to Vico and I approached his work in great anticipation, for once hoping not to be disappointed. This extraordinary man is unjustly ignored. To be able to grasp his conclusions, I was indebted to the clarity inherent in his ideas: all language formation cannot differ from metaphorical formations. The term metaphor is derived from the rhetorical school and strikes us as an intolerably pedantic expression for the essential quality in our mental life for which we now have the newer expression - thought association [Gedanken Assoziation] . (11,455-56)
Thus by using the word metaphor to express any sense of association, rather than as a limited rhetorical device, Mauthnerwas able to conclude "that language arose from metaphors and that it grows by way of metaphors" (I, 113).33 Denying any other source of language, Mauthnerunequivocally states, "No word has ever any other but a metaphoric meaning" (II, 451). Words and thoughts are then just "pictures of pictures of pictures" (I, 129).
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While Mauthner argued that language cannot offer a clear picture of reality, it is able to offer some solace since it provides a tie with other epochs, and a freeing from temporal constraints:
According to the memory of the human race, an oak is this or that tree as it grew thousands of years ago and, according to the results of reason, as it will grow after thousands of years. This temporal element [dieses Zeitmoment] or - if you choose to say so - this independence from time is essential to the activity of reason; maybe this is due to the fact that there belongs to the production of the most simple concept or words a comparison of the present with a past preception, i.e. memory, i.e. an overcoming of time. (11,712-13)
Mauthnerbelieved that "In the individual language of each individual human being is laid down the entirely conscious or half conscious memory of the humainrace" (I, 472-73). However, speakers were not usually aware of the history of their language since etymology is usually overlaid by usage:
One could object that, after all, a living language as it presents itself without any comparison in today's usage is one whole and does not need its history as it is proved by its usage among uneducated folks. . . . After all, language is often enough enriched from a period of time through historical knowledge. . . . but, to be sure, then the common word of the old language grows into the new common language only extremely rarely with its old meaning. In almost every archaic usage lies a changed sense. (I, 20)
Mauthner'stask in the Critique was to make people aware of the origins of language, since only by recognizing the continuum that language reveals could one gain freedom from time: "it [language] can serve better than any other the only use granted to us by thinking: an understandingof the past and the expectation of the future" (1,481). If language is metaphorical and thus only an approximation of a memory, it is finally all mankind has and so can be used as long as users are made aware of these limitations:
If however, we could elevate ourselves only one little step beyond the human we would in all likelihood realize further that our words are neither the beginning nor the final links of associations but that words form rather indifferent places in the eternal circular dance of associations. In our brains there is a blinking and rushing to and fro between a hundred different memories, uncontainable, uncertain, and entangled; we hold on to words desperately, because the memory of mankind has laid down in them at least a provisional order of the old chaos. (I, 523, italics mine)
These basic theories of Mauthner - the power of memory, contingency of the senses, the metaphoric nature of language, the unveri-
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fiable state of the ego, and the importance of etymology - are central to Joyce. Frank Budgen reports that Joyce prized memory above all other human faculties.34 It was, after all, from memory that Joyce recreated the Dublin of his novels. Though physically exiled, he recognized that "everyday in every way I am walking along the streets of Dublin and along the strand. And hearingvoices."35 The Dublin of Ulysses and Finnegans Wakewas not the real Dublin, but one filtered through memory - history fabled, Joyce said - thus metaphoric in the general sense in which Mauthneruses the word as bridge between past and present. Such use of metaphor does not imply complete substitution, but rather "thought association" which Vico's use suggested or "Fables in Kind"36 where doubleness is always evident - "two thinks at a time" (FW 583:7) clearly present. This sense of metaphor as connector lies at the center of Joyce's later writing.37 What allows the story of Ulysses to be grafted onto the tale of a Jew travellingthrough the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904, is the principle of similarity: Bloom is not Ulysses but analogous to him as all men and women are in some measure avatars of each other. As Stephen remarks: "When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . ." (U, p. 41). Joyce, like Mauthner also indicates that one's sense of self is derived only from memory: In the Scylla and Charybdissection of Ulysses Stephen thinks:
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever changing forms. I that sinned and prayed and fasted. (U, p. 18 7 ; italics mine)
The "I" exists in Joyce, as it does in Mauthner, through the testimony of memory, the analogy between people through the collective memory of the race. And if the similarities are not exact - as in the awkward superimposingof Stephen onto the face of a paralytic Shakespeare,reflected in the mirror in Bella Cohen's parlor they are close enough to allow for recognition. As Stephen notes, "We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love.But always meeting ourselves" (U, p. 210). The "ineluctable modality of the visible" (U, p. 38) restates Mauthner'sview of the "eternal circular dance of associations." Even more than Ulysses, Finnegans Wakeis, as Ellmann describes it, "a wholly new book based upon the premise that there is nothing new under the sun."38 Moving beyond the application of the theory of similaritiesin Ulysses which related to the theme and not language,Joyce attempted in his last great work to give shape to the
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agglomerationof human experience by combining them in a my thos of all men who fall and rise again and by creating a language which to would reflect this mythos. As EugeneJolas noted in "Marginalia in "The criterion of 'Work Joyce's Progress,'" genius James principal is the capacity to construct a mythological world."39 This fable the Viconian metaphor writ large - required a new language,Jolas recognized: "New grammaticalmedia had to be found to bring to emergence the pan-symbolic world" (p. 101). If Finnegans Wakehad "the sameold gamebold adomic structure" (FW 615:6), it could not have the same language:
It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con's cubane, a pro's tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall. (FW 117:12)
There is also another element which Mauthner discusses and which Joyce uses in the Wake,and that is the power of language to free men from the confines of time by invoking its history. Frank Budgen, in his essay in Our Exagmination, recognized this quality in Joyce's language: "For Joyce's purpose no word is unpoetic - none obsolete. Wordsfallen out of use are racial experience alive but unremembered. When in the poet's imagination the past experience is relived the dormant word awakes to a new life and the poet's listeners are lifted out of their social, functionedgrooves and partake of the integral life of the race" (p. 39). The words seem to echo Mauthner in their recognition of the possibility of language connecting man with other epochs - with other myths - if the poet can employ a language that makes such associations. Hugh Kenner describes the language of the Wakeas existing in "the not quite trackless nowhere in which words remain."40I would prefer to say that what Joyce was attempting to do was the opposite: to track the arc of associations providing a clear continuum, and thereby forcing the contemporary speaker to realize that his is only the current refrain of a longer song. In the Wakewords come trailing their etymologies and their literary contexts. Thus, in the phrase "In the buginning was the woid," the echo of the previous context of the phrase does more than offer an ironic comment on the present state of man: it also offers some sort of bridge with the past and a freedom from the present. "Woid" may reflect man's "buglike" state today, but "the Word" is not completely erased from memory since it gains "a new life" in the created neologism. The effect of this commingling of past and present is exactly the "provisional order to the old chaos" which Mauthner describes. The overcoming of time by words is achieved because Joyce is able to offer up language fully aware of its past and of its doubleness, or more accurately, as Joyce expressed it, its "quadrivial"nature.41
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3. Languageas Communication Despite Mauthner'savowal of the imprecise nature of language, he did believe that it could be used in communication, as long as people accepted the fact that their words would only be approximations and would never convey unambiguous pictures of themselves or the world. However, Mauthnerwas contemptuous of most men, and believed that they were not interested in the limits of language, and that they deluded themselves about the power of the words they used: "Human language suffices for practical purposes. [. . .] Only those fools who understand and wish to be understood feel the insufficiency of language" (I, 50). Such people, Mauthner said, were very few:
And today still language on its lowest level is deictic. "Give me liverwurst." The mute person points at the liverwurst with his finger with identical success. The dog snaps for the liverwurst with an even quicker success. ... In social intercourse language approaches liverwurst simplicity as for instance in an inn, in trade, in war, or in the battle of love. In the most refined conversations in a salon among excellent, highly esteemed people it approaches a work of art. Babble lies in the middle, thoughtless babble as thousands millions of people execute it for hours every day. (I, 48-49)
The averageman was well served by his languagebecause he demanded so little of it: "After all it is useful for the mundane alehouse, for the need to communicate, for the enjoyment of gossip on the part of the alehouse guests, and for the shouts of the waiter. That's the sort of thing language is good for" (I, 523). Mauthner'sdescription of the "mundane alehouse" as setting for typical human discourse leads directly to the topic that I have purposely saved for this section: Mauthner at the Wake.James Atherton, in describinghow sources are woven into the scheme of the book, says that Joyce's "usual method was to make use of a book without mentioning it to anyone, as far as we know, and then to insert a reference to the book, as a kind of acknowledgement, somewhere in his own text."42 While there is no mention of the Critique which I have been able to find, Joyce does use the name of Mauthner.The reference appearsin Book II, chapter iii:
-I shot be shoddied, throttle me, fine me cowheel for ever, usquebauched the ersewild aleconner, for bringing briars to Bembracken and ringing rinbus round Demetrius for, as you wrinkle wryghtly,bully bluedomer, it's a suirsite's stircus haunting hesteries round old volcanoes. We gin too gnir and thus plinary indulgence makes collemullas of us all. But Time is for talerman tasting his tap. Tiptoptap, Mister Maut. (FW 319:3; italics mine)
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Adaline Glasheen in the Third Census of Finnegans Wakesays that "Maut"might refer to the word malt, a possibility given the drinking that takes place in the scene. However, she indicates her hesitancy about such a readingby placing a question mark next to the citation.43 Helmut Bonheim in A Lexicon of the Germanin Finnegans Wakedefines "Maut" as excise, toll, or - if derived from the German "Mau"44- as middling. It is Clive Hart who makes the possible connection with Mauthner.45If Atherton is correct that Joyce embeds names and references in carefully selected hiding places, then the choice of this particularchapter for citing Mauthner is substantial evidence to support such a reading. The scene is HCE's pub, and the section is generally referred to as "The Pub," "The Tavern," "Tavernryin Feast," or in its earliest form "The Story of the House of the 100 Bottles." Under any title it is clearly the "mundane alehouse" of Mauthner. The chapter is the longest one in the Wake,taking up nearly one sixth of the book, and it is strategically placed at approximately the middle of the work. It is also generally regardedas one of the most difficult portions of the book, primarilybecause of the many threads of discourse that run concurrently through it.46 The central action revolves around the tavernkeeperEarwickerwho is kept busy throughout the long night waiting on his customers, withstanding their sallies and innuendoes about his reputation and character, and trying to speak above the din caused by their various conversations. There is gossip about the innkeeper, talk of a Flying Dutchman and his travels, of some secret act of disgrace - a possible allusion to HCE's own act of shame - and an elaborate story spun by a Norwegian sailor about a search for a tailor, a tale reminiscent of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. The entire scene at "the House of Call" is connected to Mauthner'stheories of the misuse of language, and the nature of communication in the modern world, where much is said and little is understood. These interweavingtales that constitute the basic verbal discourse of the section reinforce his belief that languageuse usually takes the form of gossip and fabrication. Hovering over this scene of babble is the physical embodiment of the decline of language in the modern world: the radio/television. WilliamYork Tindall calls Joyce prophetic for having invented the television before its time: even more prophetic is Joyce's awareness that this picture-radiowould be the mechanical monster that would spew out even more words to add to the cacophony of the communal alehouse. Against the conversations of live people, there is the blotting and garblingeffect of the mechanical voices that subsume all and distort further. The skit of Butt and Taff and the repeated interruptions for news that run through the chapter point to the further decline of language because of the disembodied voices, just
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as the subject matter of the skit - Buckley's shooting of the Russian General - indicates the decline of heroism and national pride, a decline that Mauthner also linked to language distortion.47 Besides the direct mention of the name, there are two other references in this section which have associations connected to Mauthner and appear severalpages before; on page 314, which is exactly midway through the 628 pages of the Wake:
And forthemore let legend go lore of it that mortar scene so cwympty dwympty what a dusty dust it razed arboriginally but, luck's leap to the lad at the top of the ladder, so sartor's risorted why the sinner the badder! Ho ho ho hoch! La la la lach!
One of Mauthner'smost striking images in the Critique is of the philosopher of language as climber, attempting to move up a ladder beyond the limits of language. "I must shatter each rung of the ladder by stepping upon it," he wrote on the first page of his work. The image of the ladder and the fall are central to the entire action of the Wake.Tim Finnegan's fall engenders the action of the novel and refers to the falls of all men. CertainlyJoyce would not have been adverse to grafting another association to his ladder image, by relating the climb and fall from a ladder with the attempt described by Mauthner of trying to free oneself from the vicissitudes of language. The use of the ladder allows Joyce to connect, if elliptically, the fall of man with the linguistic fall from cohesive communication to babel. The two Germanwords at the end of the quotation "Hoch" (high) and "Lack" (laughter) also refer to two aspects of Mauthner' s theory. For Mauthner the highest point on the ladder, or on a critique of language, would finally be found in laughter or silence. That this quotation is associated to the direct reference to Mauthnerwhich follows is indicated by the repetition of the word "top" when Joyce calls Mauthner, "Tiptaptop, Mister Maut."48 The second image that can possibly be connected to Mauthner also appearson page 314, a few lines above the ladder image. It is the sound of thunder, one of the ten such sounds that permeate the book. Though it is clear that thunder was derived from Vico,49 I agree with Margot Norris who said, "the image is as polyvalent and over-determinedas all other elements in the dream."50Therefore the use of thunder as the coefficient of the poet, which Mauthner describes in relation to poetry, could well be implied in the thunder of the Wake (see below p. 159). 4. Languageas Poetry Faced with the prospect of deeding language to the purview of the tavern, Mauthnerrecoils. Again doing some questionable philosophical juggling, he is able to salvagelanguage for one purpose:
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poetry. His argument is similar to that made by Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning and Stuart Gilbert in "Functions of Words."51 Words are divided into two types, those that give information and those that convey feelings. While words never give exact pictures of the world, and so are unreliable carriers of information, they are able to be used as emotive signs in the hands of the poet. And as long as poetry does not give answers and does not try to explain or teach, it is viable: "The poet alone magically brings forth his touching ideal configurations [Idealgestalten] without the aid of nature, with the insufficient tool of language which, invented for the traffic of everyday usage, becomes newly created in the poet's mouth."52 Mauthner seems to have in mind a particular type of poet - the bard, like Goethe, whom he sees wielding a vatic power. The following description must have been of interest to Joyce, who comes close to filling what Mauthner sees as the role of the poet, to forge singlehandedly a new language:
The great poet (writer) of our times would be he who could translate the new ideas of music, painting, and science in such words that they would immediately turn into words of poetic language. Not much is achieved by stammering, babbling and the imitations of sounds. The first demand of each usable language would be clarity, of the language of writers, of the language of scholars, and of the language of poets. But with clarity alone a word will not become capable of poetry. The same way as each human being carries unconsciously within him all the inheritance of his ancestry, the same way each word of poetic language is enriched by its own history and by the symbols of history. Most basically the language of poetry and that of prose are merely distinguished from each other through the fact that poetry uses the word in the fullness of its historical wealth, while prose uses it in the meagerness of its everyday value. And for this reason only he can be a creator of language, and increaser of poetic language, who finds word for new moods, special words of apparently historical coinage, words of symbolic fullness. (I, 108)
Such a poet could be the one redeemer of language, the vatic voice:
Language cannot be a work of art for the simple reason that it is not the creation of one single person. As I said before, I cannot really imagine, but I can think in words, that mankind may have lived devoid of words and concepts for thousands of years without doubts and without lies like animals and that then all of a sudden a gigantic man would have arisen, a giant among dwarves; and he would have been a poet; because language had never been a work of art but always the artistic means of poetry. He, all by himself alone, would have brought forth language out of his longings, would have invented and expanded it as if he had been driven to discharge his tension in one clap of thunder. Then it would have turned into a
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work of art, the work of one, but also a monolog. The dwarves would not have understood him. Language out of need of thunder could have become a work of art (I, 26-27; italics are mine)
The description of the poet as redeemer of language is a vivid portrait of Joyce, thunder and all. And Mauthnerwas correct: "the dwarves"have not understood him. Though pursued in a different form and deriving from a different source, Finnegans Wakeshares with Mauthner'sCritique a common end - "the liberation from language." And just as Joyce recognized that the end of his book was merely "the final full stop though there is none,"53 Mauthner too concluded his study with the recognition of never ending struggle: "Whatcan we think or say in the language of tomorrow? . . . What appeared to be a last answer today will be a new question tomorrow; and the question in turn will become an answer in the language of us foolish human beings" (III, 635). As far as the significance of Mauthner to Joyce, it is clear that the Critique was one of the books at the Wake,and that Mauthnerlike Bruno and Vico - provided a philosophical framework that closely paralleled the one Joyce embedded in Finnegans Wake.Perhaps more than to Joyce, Mauthner offers the reader of Joyce some insights into the problems of language in the modern world, and one further aid in unravelingthe mysteries of the book.
LINDA BEN-ZVI Colorado State University
NOTES 1. Stuart Gilbert's phrase, quoted in Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce's World (London, Methuen and Co., 1957), p. 168. MariaJolas also describes how Joyce had his friends gather material, but she makes clear that Beckett was never Joyce's secretary, merely one of many friends providing the same service. See "Interview with Carola Giedion-Welker and MariaJolas," James Joyce Quarterly, 11 (Winter 1974), 106. 2. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 661-62. Ellmann is incorrect on two points about Beckett's reading of Mauthner: The date was 1929 or 1930 not 1932, and Beckett read the material himself and did not read to Joyce as Ellmann stated. Letter received from Samuel Beckett, 20 July 1978. Letter received from Samuel Beckett, 2 September 1979. 3. Letter received from Beckett, 2 September 1979. 4.James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 1:241. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 21 May 1926. All further references to letters will refer only to volumes. 5. Quoted in Padriac Colum and Mary Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958), p. 123. 6. Part of the reason that Mauthner has gone unnoticed by critics stems from the biographical questions that surround his connection to Joyce. First, Joyce's copies of the Critique, which Beckett reports that he returned after completion of his assignment (Letter from Beckett to L. Ben-Zvi, 20 July 1978) have never been found. They fail to appear in either the Buffalo catalogue of the Joyce library of the late 1930s (Thomas Connolly, The Personal Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography, Univ. of Buffalo Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 [Buffalo: The University of Buffalo, 1955] ) or the Ellmann catalogue of
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Joyce's library in 1920 (Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce [London: Faber and Fabcr, 1977] , pp. 97-134). Second, there is no certainty about the date of Joyce's first contact with the writings of Mauthner. Between 1916-18, when he was living in Zurich, Joyce might well have heard of Mauthner from any of the Austrian emigres with whom Jie came into contact at the Restaurant zum Roten Kreuz and who formed the Club des Etrangers. It was during this time that Joyce learned of the writing of Mauthner's contemporary, Otto Weininger, and Mauthner's works were sufficiently popular, going to three editions by 1925, to have received equal attention (see Ellmann, James Joyce, pp. 420-23). However, there is no mention of Mauthner nor of his works by any who have written about Joyce in Zurich during this period, so it can only be assumed that by 1929 Joyce knew of Mauthner. Although there have been no critical studies of Joyce and Mauthner, there has been considerable interest in the influence:of Mauthner on the writings of Beckett. See Linda Ben-Zvi, "Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language," PMLA, 92 (March 1980), 183-200. My discussion of Mauthner's theories of language are based in large part on this article. 7.James Atherton, The Books at the Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1960); James " Atherton, "A Few More Books at the Wake, James Joyce Quarterly, 2 (Spring 1965), 145; Arthur Broes, "More Books at the Wake, James Joyce Quarterly, 19 (Winter 1971), 189-217. 8.Joachim Kuhn, Gescheiterte Sprachkritik: Fritz Mauthner, Leben und Werk(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), pp. 14-19. 9. For background on the Hapsburg period see Carl Schorske, Fin-DeSiecle Vienna (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980). For specific references to Mauthner in the period see Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 120-32, 178-82. 10. Eugene Jolas, "The Revolution of the Word and James Joyce," in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 77. All further references to this book will appear in the text abbreviated as Our Exag. 11. Eugene Jolas, "Inquiry About the Malady of Language," transition, 23 (July 1935), 144. 12. Eugene Jolas, "Logos," transition, 16 (June 1929), 26. For an excellent discussion of the connections between transition and Joyce see Dougald McMillan, Transition 192738: A History of a Literary Era (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975). 13.C.K. Ogden and LA. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), pp. 43-44. Ogden knew Joyce during the writing of Finnegans Wake and it is possible that he introduced Joyce to Mauthner's work, noting the similarity in their views toward language. 14. Fritz Mauthner, Beitrdge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3rd d., 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1923; rpt Hildesheim: Georg 01ms, 1967), I, 507. This translation and all subsequent translations from the German were done in collaboration with Sabine Jordan. All further references to Mauthner's work will appear in the text 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logic o-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.54. Wittgenstein directly cites Mauthner in the Tractatus: "All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense)" 4.0031. For a discussion of the possible influence of Mauthner on Wittgenstein see Gershon Weiler, Mauthner's Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 298-306. 16. For Mauthner's biography see Weiler, pp. 332-41; Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), v. 221-24, and Janik and Toulmin, pp. 121-26. 17. Besides the Critique, Mauthner wrote eleven major works, including a four-volume study of atheism which analyzes the effect of religious language. See DerAtheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (Stuttgart und Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1920-23). 18. Quoted in Stefan Zweig, The Worldof Yesterday (New York: Viking Press, 1943),
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p. 275. Zweig also describes Joyce's great linguistic abilities: "The better I knew him the more his incredible knowledge of language astonished me; his round firmly sculptured brow . . . stored every vocable or every idiom, and he was brilliantly able to toss and keep them balanced in the air" (p. 275). 19. Fritz Mauthner, Aristotle, trans. Charles Gordon (London: McLure, Philips, and Co., 1907), p. 45. This is the only one of Mauthner's works that has ever been translated into English. 20. Frank Budgen, "Resurrection," in Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25 th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake, ed. Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 12. 21. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 189. All further references to Joyce's works will appear in the text with the following abbreviations: Dubliners (New York: Viking Press, 1969) [D] ; Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934 [ Ul ; Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 197 1) [ FW]. 22. Quoted by Ellmann, p. 594: Letter to Harriet Weaver, 16 October 1925. 23.Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1979), p. 53. The same idea is developed in Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), pp. 304, 313-20. 24. For a broader discussion of Joyce's love of words see Robert Sage, "Before Ulysses and After," Our Exagmination, pp. 149-70. 25. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study on the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), pp. 225-26. 26. Letters I: 236, Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 November 1925. 27. For a detailed discussion of the complexity of Joyce's use of language see Bernard Benstock, Joy ce-again's Wake:An Analysis of Finnegans Wake (Seattle: Univ. of Wash. Press, 1965), pp. 131-34, 143-48. 28.Margaret Schlauch, "The Language of James Joyce," in The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert Deming, II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 723. 29. For a representative sample of reactions to Finnegans Wake, particularly to the language, see Deming, II, 661-744. 30. Quoted by Ellmann, p. 597: Letter to Harriet Weaver, 21 December 1926. 31. Quoted by Ellmann, p. 559, from Max Eastman, The Literary Mind (New York, 1931), p. 101. 32. Mauthner consistently speaks of the senses as a matter of chance or of accident, Le., as Zufallssinne. The German word ZufaU normally refers to things or events that might be called matters of chance or of accident The things so denoted might also be called contingent, as Weiler, for instance, interprets the word, if it is understood that the word is not being used in its strictest sense, viz., as the name for a modal category encompassing only things or events that are both possible and nonnecessary. The word Kontingenz, sometimes used in German philosophical writings to indicate contingency, is not used at all by Mauthner. Mauthner does not adequately clarify the sense in which he uses ZufaU, and he recognizes the ambiguity (see I, 1 14). The closest he comes to defining his use of the term is the following: "The concept of accidental sense [Zufallssinne] is nothing but a provisional expression for the sad certainty that our senses have evolved, have developed slow" ly, and have developed accidentally [zufllig] (I, 360). 33. Mauthner is at his most general when using the word metaphor, which takes on many meanings. For a discussion of his use of the term see Weiler, pp. 156-64. 34. Quoted by Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962), p. 53. Sb.Letters I: 395. Letter to C.P. Curran, 6 August 1937. 36. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, rev. trans, of the 3rd. ed. (1744) trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), d. 129. 3 7. The idea that metaphors indicate some form of contiguity may be confusing to those familiar with the work of Roman Jakobson and those linguists and critics who follow his models. Jakobson saw the substitution quality of metaphor as opposed in func-
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tion to the pattern of contiguity which he attributed to another rhetorical trope, metonymy. See Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasie Disturbances,*' in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton Press, 1956), pp. 55-82. For a good discussion of metaphor and metonymy in relation to modern literature see David Lodge, "The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy" in Modernism, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 481-96. 38. Ellmann, p. 558. 39. Eugene Jolas, "Marginaliato James Joyce's 'Work in Progress,'" transition, 22 (February 1933), 101. 4O.Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, p. 301. 41. Quoted by Ellmann, p. 559. 42.Atherton, The Books at the Wake, p. 19. 43. Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1977), p. 190. 44. Helmut Bonheim, A Lexicon of the German in Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1967), p. 98. 45. Cited in Weiler, p. 142. Weiler's citation does not make clear whether Hart suggested Mauthner or merely pointed to the inclusion of Mister Maut in the Wake. 46. For various readings of Book II, chapter iii see Edward A. Kopper, ". . . but where he is eaten; Earwicker's Tavern Feast," in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake, ed. Michael H. Begnal and Fritz Senn (Univ. Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 11637; William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake (New York: Farrar,Straus andGiroux, 1969), pp. 187-220. 47. For a connection between the section and nationalism see Benstock, pp. 171-74. 48. Beckett also borrows the ladder image from Mauthner for Watt, when Arsne in a long monologue describes the inevitability of "existence off the ladder." He warns that when dealing with what is unutterable and ineffable "any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail." See Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 62. 49. Ellmann, p. 565. 50. Margot Noms, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake:A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976),' p. 56. 51.Ogden and Richards, pp. 139-59; Stuart Gilbert, "Functions of Words," transition, 18 (Nov. 1927), 203-5. 52. Mauthner, Credo (1886) cited by Kiihn, p. 58. 53. Quoted by Ellmann, p. 721.

Mauthner's "Critique of Language" - A Forgotten Book at The "Wake"

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Mauthner's "Critique of Language": A Forgotten Book at the "Wake" Author(s): Linda Ben-Zvi Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.

Mauthner's Critique of Language: A Forgotten Book at the Wake

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