Senn / O'Neill Inductive Scrutinies

Focus on Joyce
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84351-459-6
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Inductive Scrutinies gathers some of Fritz Senn's major essays of the last ten years. Based principally on Ulysses, they display anew his regard for Joyce's text in all its detail. The selection does not attempt a broad overview of Senn's writing, nor is it organized around a single theme: rather it is meant to show his lifelong interest in the workings of language - its limitations, disruptive energies, its allusive potential within and beyond a single work. In particular it demonstrates continuing concern with the problems of annotation as well as with the reader's pleasurable and active participation. In the editor's words, 'His chosen playground is Joyce as something written, to be scrutinized with dedication. An extraordinary familiarity with the text underlies his response, and his imaginative and nimble explorations always start with and return to Joyce's word.'

FRITZ SENN is Director of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, contributing editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, author of Joyce's Dislocutions (1984), co-founder and co-editor (until 1983) of A Wake Newsletter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Senn, Fritz

O'Neill, Christine

Leseproben

INTRODUCTORY SCRUTINIES: FOCUS ON SENN

The present volume collects some of Fritz Senn’s major essays of the last ten years, mainly on Ulysses. They display anew his regard for Joyce’s text in all its detail. The selection does not attempt a broad overview of Senn’s writing nor is it organized around a single theme; rather it is meant to show his lifelong interest in the workings of language, its limitations, disruptive energies, its allusive potential within and beyond a single work, in particular his ongoing concern with the problems of annotation as well as the reader’s pleasurable and active participation. His chosen playground is Joyce as something written, to be scrutinized with dedication. An extraordinary familiarity with the text underlies his response, and his imaginative and nimble explorations always start with and return to Joyce’s word. Not that this excludes forays to non-Joycean areas; classical references are particularly frequent. His essays also convey a sense of a mind at work, developing, exemplifying. Senn probes with agility and argues and extrapolates sceptically. Not for him interpretative certainty or the monolithic argument drawn out to book-length. Hence a volume of inductive scrutinies.

In his introduction to Fritz Senn’s Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation (1984), John Paul Riquelme, the editor, looks at Senn’s particular advantage as a non-native speaker in reading and explicating Joyce. He stresses the fine awareness of linguistic irregularities and disruptions in a reader who takes nothing for granted. As the essays demonstrate, such a sensibility turns reading into an act of translation and criticism into a running commentary on the text. The view of Senn as foreign commentator helps one understand his critical preoccupations.

For the last decade Fritz Senn has been directing the Zürich James Joyce Foundation. This institute, the most comprehensive Joyce library in Europe, consists largely of his former private collection of work editions, translations, criticism, background material and realia. A favourite haunt of many Joyce scholars, it provides ideal research facilities and is a welcoming place where ideas are exchanged. At the regular workshops Senn’s chairing is invariably unpolemical, stimulating and friendly.

As this collection coincides with the tenth anniversary of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation and with thirty-five years of Senn’s published writings on Joyce, it seemed appropriate to invite Joyce scholars to comment on his status. The spectrum of views which follows should be of interest to novice and seasoned Joyceans alike. However, to present a balanced picture, I also asked Senn to talk about himself, and this interview, characteristically informal, concludes the introduction.

In a letter to some twenty-five Joyce scholars of varying age, nationality and critical inclination, I wrote of my endeavour to ‘situate Fritz among other Joyceans concerning his particular interests, strengths and critical preoccupations, but also with regard to his limitations or, if you wish, blind spots’, and asked for frank and descriptive rather than evaluative comment. I mentioned that Senn knew of the letter and condoned it. As it turned out, those who answered were pleased to have been asked for comment even if some felt daunted by the task. Despite my promptings I received no replies with strong negative criticism.

There is general agreement on the nature of his work. It is considered unique in Joyce criticism. This is to do both with the nature of his contributions and his personality. His feeling for Joyce is based on an affinity of temperaments, and some consider him the best reader Joyce ever had. He seems to read Joyce in the writer’s own spirit. Without ever dominating the text by his intellect, Senn puts all his knowledge and critical ability at its service. He does not curtail Joyce’s dynamics. His readings are invariably lively, clear and original, and even the most familiar passages still yield surprises under his scrutiny. The attention he brings to bear on textual detail is painstaking, and his interest in period trivia comes close to Joyce’s own.

As for the nature of Senn’s contributions, they are of particular value to readers interested in philology and stylistics. Ever alert to the strangeness and comedy of Joyce’s language as well as to the experience of reading it, he responds with a text very much his own. His style is inimitable, incisive, witty and lucid, however complex the issues he discusses. Also, Senn is one of those rare scholars who do not need to keep citing theorists. This is partly because he is unusually independent in his thinking, so much so that often he can only express himself with the help of newly coined terms. Yet many Joyceans feel that Senn’s ideas are in tune with some of the most important ‘theoretical’ writing of the last few decades, especially Derrida’s. They see his writing parallel and, more so, anticipate currently fashionable theory. Some Joycean scholars think him unwilling to acknowledge, others unable to see, how much his approach to literature shares with the best examples of post-structuralism; one scholar put it that he ‘obstinately denies affinity and understanding’ (with or of Derrida). Senn’s own view of his relation to theory finds expression in the interview and in the preface. Maybe this is the place to mention Senn’s mischievous, quizzical personality and his sly and sometimes punishing sense of humour.

Fritz Senn is known to encourage and develop up-and-coming Joyceans. He shows great patience with them, but less so with renowned scholars. At the same time, he is unusually open to the ideas of anybody interested in Joyce.

Senn is thought by many to be a gifted teacher. He manages to make Joyce’s works approachable and fresh without sacrificing their complexity and strange inventiveness. He considers questions more fruitful than answers. It is his familiarity with the texts that enables him to be continually surprised by them. However, he is least patient with dullness and scholars lacking textual knowledge or clarity.

Senn’s classical knowledge is remarkable, likewise his extraordinary feeling for the connections between Ulysses and its Homeric precursor. Far from referring to the Odyssey as a simple grid for Ulysses, he never tires of searching into Joyce’s unique translation and rewriting of Homer and exploring the interaction between the two texts. Joyce through Senn, and Senn through Joyce do agitate the Odyssey.

Several scholars referred to Senn as an authority on Finnegans Wake. He is considered a pioneer in its exegesis, and the enormous importance of A Wake Newslitter in the history of the work’s reception is undisputed; Senn was co-founder and co-editor (he insists that Clive Hart did most of the work). For one thing, the Newslitter helped towards establishing reasonable and verifiable standards for interpretation. That he has detached himself from the Wake in latter years (see the last essay in this collection) seems almost completely ironical to some scholars, who feel it is only now that the consequences of his original endeavours are coming to fruition.

A few individual remarks from the thumbnail sketches, assembled without connection or comment, may add up to a impressionistic collage. His ‘gadfly’ presence at conferences has been mentioned, or how when struck by certain ideas he seizes on them with a ‘tenacious fixation’. His insistence on looking at the text directly with the invariable result of seeing what was otherwise neglected marks him, according to one scholar, as ‘singularly smart’. There was the pithy remark that everything he says or writes could be placed ‘under the banner of common sense operating at expert level’. It was felt that Senn’s recognition ‘honoris causa’ from the University of Zürich was a ‘tribute from all scholars’, and that he is ‘sui generis and indispensable’. Lastly, many a Joycean would share in the wish that closed one letter: ‘Long may he write as he does.’

Thanks are due to Derek Attridge, Morris Beja, Bernard Benstock, Christine van Boheemen, Vincent Deane, Michael Gillespie, Hugh Kenner, Terence Killeen, Margot Norris, Marilyn Reizbaum, Joe Schork, Jacques Aubert and Katie Wales for their frank and incisive observations.

INTERVIEW WITH FRITZ SENN, MAY 1994

How do you view your development as a Joycean over the past thirty-five years?

‘Development’ suggests a maturing process or an ascent towards some commendable peak. Come to think of it, by hindsight, I wonder if in the long run—and the run has been long—I developed sufficiently (I’m talking Joyce here). Somehow it seems I’ve been doing the same thing all over all along, with of course stupendous advances in sophistication and refinement that anyone could spot with a magnifying glass. Probably I should have changed more.
Overall, I have been trying to figure out, often in close-up—Joyce, after all, offered extended close-ups, Ulysses for one—just how language works, what it can achieve, and what it fails to put across. So in some way I am a case of...