Noch Mehr Über Joyce: Streiflichter (Still More on Joyce: Highlights) by Fritz Senn, edited by Sabine Baumann (review)

In 1987, Fritz Senn proposed, as a provisional label for the Protean change pervading all levels of Joyce’s texts, the term “provection,” the gist of which can be summarized this way: “the same idea, but more of it, and with a difference.”¹ Since Senn’s writings on Joyce follow this principle, they, too, can be called provective, and that is particularly true of this collection. The book opens with a “Vorwörtliche Einstimmung” (a prefatorial-preverbal tuning the instruments/getting the reader into the right mood) followed by a chapter titled “Ausgangspunkt und Schnittstelle Zürich” (“Starting Point and Interface Zurich”), which, by including specific pieces of biographical and local information, offers the reader a preliminary pattern of orientation. This chapter also contains an interesting section on the early phases of Senn’s involvement with Joyce (16-18).

The main emphasis of Senn’s book is Ulysses (chapters 3-9). Step by step, we are made familiar with the work’s basic elements and major levels of reference, the kind and function of its different modes of presentation, and the problematic role of attempts to grasp its wealth of information by consulting commentaries. Chapter 10 is then devoted to the ways Joyce’s artistry is once more “provected” in Finnegans Wake. In this chapter, the limits of interpretation are pursued through a number of borderline cases (252-69) whereby basic criteria for distinguishing convincing or at least acceptable readings from mere speculation become discernible. But Senn is honest enough to show us the other side of the coin as well: unlike many other interpreters, he explicitly draws our attention to those parts of this refractory text that we do not (yet) understand (216, 225, 229). Senn’s concluding chapters focus on two areas of general import: the chances and limits of translations (chapter 11) and the (dis)advantages of the analytical instruments provided by genetic criticism (chapter 12). In order to avoid misunderstandings, however, this rough survey must be supplemented by the more decisive fact that all chapters are closely interconnected by a dense web of cross-references. Occasionally we are offered close readings of larger passages of texts as, for instance, in the Citizen’s transmogrification of the Christian credo in “Cyclops” (188-90—U 12.1354-59) or in the fable “The Ondt and the Gracehoper” in Finnegans Wake (247-51—FW 414.22-419.10). Moreover, in every case, all observations are based on concrete textual examples, and this direct way of tackling problems opens a wide scope for the reader’s decision about the best manner of using the book. In case of doubt, one may safely proceed by beginning the book wherever one wishes and be irresistibly swept into the vortex of Joyce’s “wordcraft” (FW 356.36).

In thus integrating his manifold observations into a coherent (though by no means closed) whole, Senn skillfully augments his material by shifts of perspective. The notion of “provection,” re-activated and slightly modified here (63-65), is complemented by a new tentative label of the same type: Joyce’s “eutrapelian turns” (183-85)—a collective term used to describe all kinds of verbal distortions and based on the ambiguous Greek noun eutrapelia, which Aristotle appreciated as a virtue (“tasteful joking”) of the “ready-witted” (eutrapeloi), whereas St. Paul regarded it as a sin (“inappropriate jesting”).² In pointing out the different notions inherent in the classical and the Christian interpretations of eutrapelia, Senn emphasizes that Joyce took into account both applications of this word in an “eminently Joycean procedure” (186).

More often than in his other work, Senn applies Joyce’s art of handling language to his own text, especially in the book’s opening chapter. The section highlighting the book’s primary message (“Dare to read yourself!”) is titled “Frisch getraut: Selberlesen” (9), where the first component also alludes...