Cannibal Joyce

3. “Mr. Berlicche and Mr. Joyce”: Language as Comestible

3 “Mr. Berlicche and Mr. Joyce” Language as Comestible by the beerlitz in his mathness —FW 182.07 From the opening paragraph of “The Sisters,” the initial story in his first major work of fiction Dubliners, to the last page of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, among many other concerns, trains his readers to converse in a foreign language .1 Joyce’s instructional methodology is intriguing and original for its time. From a very broad overview, we can readily extract the primary features of this method from his work and, with a modest substitution of terms—“instructor ” for “author,” “students” for “readers”—distill the general principles of the “Joycean Method” for language acquisition into a kind of handbook: The instructor (a) conducts all lessons exclusively in the language that his students have come to him to learn. He accomplishes this (b) by introducing these students to basic vocabulary in the initial lesson, although these words may sound as “strangely in [their] ears” as “the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism” (D 9). He encourages the students to repeat aloud and to continue rehearsing these newly acquired words, perhaps modeling for them how they should “Every night” say “softly to [themselves] the word[s]” they have learned (D 9). To enhance the students’ growing comprehension, the instructor (c) begins by focusing on concrete topics; he reserves more abstract matters for later lessons. He does this by developing sample conversations and narrative situations that, ideally, may be as universal as the experiences of death, friendship, and first love, although the students’ initial vocabulary might not be adequate to reach full expression concerning these topics. Gradually and progressively he leads the students through sample experiences they can “relate” to: meeting someone, attempting to purchase some object, planning travel, attending an entertainment, conducting a 46 / Cannibalizing Language businesstransaction,makingholidayvisits,speaking to public gatherings, and so forth. Further, (d) the instructor demands that the students enter into conversations with him as soon as the first lesson. The best strategies for initiating this dialogue are to put “difficult questions” to the students, “asking [them] what one should do in certain circumstances,” or to give them “unfinished sentences” to complete (D 13, 11). By the third lesson, even when the instructor is “talking to himself,” the students will be able to “interpret these signs” and assign meaning to them (D 33). Although the instructor’s language has an underlying grammatical and syntactical system, (e) he does not attempt to explain such subjects within his lessons. The students gradually come to grasp the structural principles of the language by experiencing them in discourse, rather than by studying them in isolation. The more advanced students will eventually wish to become familiar with these structures. There are abundant guides, handbooks, and schemas for study. After his students have mastered the initial series of model situations and conversations, the instructor (f) introduces them to a more extended series of experiences featuring, for example, himself as a young man—a central character with whom they might identify. Initially, this narrative only modestly taxes the students’ acquired vocabulary; however, as the lessons proceed, their difficulty gradually increases. Thus the instructor acquaints the students with the unique features of the language culture under study: familial relationships, religious customs, social and political conditions, and art and literature. Once the students complete these lessons, the instructor then (g) leads them into the technically more difficult dimensions of the language they are learning: the past perfect tense perhaps (“Happy. Happier then” [U 8.170]), the “imprevidibility of the future” imperfect (U 17.979–80), and the subtle use of the subjunctive mood for conditional circumstances (though saving the “imperfect subjunctive” for the last lessons of all [FW 468.09]), but he continues to illustrate these through a series of narrative situations. The instructor, however, moves on to a new central figure for these narratives . The former character “no longer interest[s]” him or his students “to the same extent” because he “has a shape that can’t be changed” (Budgen 107). The instructor effects a transition between the narratives by having the “old” central figure encounter the “new” one. Given the practical concerns of most students who undertake the study of a foreign language, the instructor wisely generates a narrative concerning a businessperson. This strategy also offers wonderful opportunities to introduce a variety of encounters and a Language as Comestible...