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3. James Joyce and Giordano Bruno: An “Immarginable” and Interdisciplinary Dialogue
- University Press of Florida
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3 James Joyce and Giordano Bruno An “Immarginable” and Interdisciplinary Dialogue Federico Sabatini Joyce’s interdisciplinary and “intermedial” method famously relies on a mixture of literary genres and kinds of narratives, as well as on a concoction of techniques derived from various artistic disciplines, such as painting , sculpture, music, and cinema. As in Ulysses, where a different art or discourse was used to shape each chapter, in Joyce the structural laws of visual arts are always employed to shape the writing itself and the structure of the texts. It is my intention here to connect this stylistic peculiarity to Giordano Bruno, who also advocated a tangled combination of arts and sciences and whose work was overtly praised by Joyce, starting from his essay “The Philosophy of Bruno” (1903) and later becoming a philosophical source for the structure and language of Finnegans Wake. Besides the elevated number of references to Bruno in the Wake, Joyce especially created the mot-valise “immarginable” (FW 4.19), a term that summarizes the whole philosophy and subversive cosmology of Bruno, containing ideas of margin and “lack of margin” together, absolutism and relativity, ideas of innumerability, of thinkable and unthinkable, imaginable and unimaginable, illimitable imagination for an unbounded universal space. According to Bruno, in fact, there were infinite worlds that spread throughout space, a structure of the universe made of suns and clusters of suns circling in grand orbits without any fixed center. The theory, which profoundly influenced the structure of Finnegans Wake, strikingly fascinated Joyce, who was also sympathetic to Bruno’s heroism (in relation to the Inquisition) and intellectually attracted to “his constant and inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience” 26 Federico Sabatini (Pater 234–44) and to his atomistic coincidence of the infinitesimally large and the infinitesimally small, as in the words on Bruno by Walter Pater: Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as “the infinitely little”; no blade of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere. But the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starry space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes. (239–40) Bruno’s atomistic theory and assertion of an ubiquitous center in a constantly enlarging circumference of the universe inform both the themes of his works and, especially, his style, so as to strikingly resemble Joyce’s literary method, in which the style itself was a semantic vehicle for the content. Starting from his critical essays, it is well known that Joyce had a keen interest in the Renaissance, considering it a breakthrough period and a phase of amazing innovations. In “The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance ” (1912), the writer praises the “struggle against scholastic absolutism” and against that “system of philosophy that has its fundamental origins in Aristotelian thought.” He considers the Renaissance as a “hurricane amidst all (this) stagnation” and praises the “tumult of voices” that arose throughout Europe, and he particularly refers to Bruno’s theory of contraries: “Giordano Bruno himself says that all power, whether in nature or the spirit must create an opposing power without which man cannot fulfil himself, and he addsthat inevery such separation there isa tendency towardsa reunion.The dualismofthegreatNolanfaithfully reflectsthephenomenonoftheRenaissance ” (OCPW 188). The theory is then further enacted by Joyce in the end of the essay, where he makes the Maximum and the Minimum coincide in a manner very akin to Bruno’s: “All modern conquest, of the air, of land, the sea, disease, ignorance, melts, so to speak, in the crucible of the mind and is transformed into a little drop of water, into a tear” (OCPW 190). Joyce simultaneously presents the antithesis between a vast space and a large portion of matter (the air, the sea) and the infinitesimal part of them, symbolized by a drop of water, which nevertheless contains the whole and can be taken as the whole. The passage, besides re-creating Bruno’s ideals and style, also evokes notions of pantheism and, to an extent, mirrors Bruno ’s theory of the human point of view with respect to the philosophical [35.173.178.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:03 GMT) James Joyce and Giordano Bruno 27 debate between absolutism and relativism, the same one that is...