Polyglotism in Rabelais and Finnegans Wake

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. ² This 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 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...