Literary Criticism: Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce Christine O'Neill (editor) The Lilliput Press, 330pp. €40This, Joycean Murmoirs, is the third non-book to be extracted from Fritz Senn in English - and "extracted" is the word. There are also at least two in German.
All the others are collections of essays, though the word "essay" needs to be taken in its original meaning here of "attempt", "trial" or "foray", much more than a coherent and achieved, well-formed whole.
Senn's last book, Inductive Scrutinies, had as its introduction a brief, very fascinating interview with Christine O'Neill, and that may well have prompted the current work, which consists entirely of a series of such interviews, ranging over all of Senn's long career in the Joyce world and arranged in various categories, such as translation (a Senn favourite), Homer (another), annotation, and so on. The interviews contain plenty of material about Senn himself, and about the controversies, scandals and personalities he has experienced and observed. (Stephen Joyce gets a fully deserved chapter to himself.)
Senn, aged 80, director of the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, is the most eminent living Joycean. This eminence was hard-purchased: he does not have an academic background, his personal life was difficult, and he has always been subject to crippling depressions.
All of this is covered in Joycean Murmoirs, which is remarkable for a rare honesty, both about the subject himself and about others. Any work that includes on its first page the question "Did you ever seek help?" can hardly be accused of wishing to glamorise its subject. Senn is here, warts and all. And the tactful tactlessness of the interviewer can only be acknowledged: no one else could have done it. The one serious disappointment is in the quality of the pictures presented: given the marvellous pictorial resources of the Zurich foundation (symposiums, conferences, etc) and Senn's own well-known dexterity with a camera, it is a pity that a book like this contains only a series of head shots of various eminent Joyceans, mostly deceased.
THIS WORK HAS much to offer on many levels - the personal, the scandalous, the anecdotal, the (very mildly) nostalgic, though never sentimental - but one of its chief interests is what it tells us about Senn the critic.
It provides him with a rare chance to enunciate - in suitably random, unsystematic fashion - his critical non-credo. It is in many ways easier to describe the things Senn does not do as a critic rather than the things he does. But that is itself part of the point, since it indicates the Sennian via negativa, the learned ignorance that forms the substratum of his critical non-approach to Joyce. The things he does not do include most of the possible approaches (critical, biographical, historical, theoretical, etc) that could be taken to Joyce's work. So true is this that one sometimes feels an affinity between Senn's position, or lack of it, and some of the more Zen-like (it must be the name) types of contemporary theory, the ones that dwell on the abyss or the void, in spite of his rigorous disavowal of any such connection.
He says himself that he is at bottom a philologist, literally a lover of words, but in this case, "philologist" covers a very wide range. A principal attribute is an extraordinary power of sheer noticing: the things Senn observes in Joyce's texts are amazing. (Some of this detailed noticing must go back to his days as a proof-reader.) More important than such noticing, however, is the extraordinary sensitivity to all the overtones of the words he reads, a sensitivity that is greatly enhanced, as he has said, by the fact that English is not his first language. And while these observations may seem local and provisional, they can open up wider perspectives on Joyce's methods. This ability is always controlled by a thorough awareness of context, and never falls into the trap of over-reading. Examples abound in this volume: particularly clear and impressive is the discussion of certain phrases in Dubliners on page 118, fine testaments to the linguistic perceptiveness that is perhaps the most striking quality of this unique critical discourse.
THE WORD 'UNIQUE' is very relevant here. Senn is a highly valued and much-loved figure in the Joyce world, but there are no "Sennians", no critical disciples in the way that, say, some of the high priests of theory that I referred to earlier have left many disciples in their wake. What he does as a critic is absolutely inimitable, and this is its cost as well as its value.
One of the costs is a certain Beckettian, dead-end, terminal quality to the Senn oeuvre and the typical Senn lecture: though he sometimes does enunciate certain general "principles" for the reading of Joyce (and devises some remarkable names for them: "provection", "dislocutions"), it is probably true to say that nobody but Senn himself has been able to do much with these. They are very provisional in their application: they are not be confused with the rather similar-sounding concepts propounded by the theoreticians.
That should not be the last word: in the first place, there is nothing coercive about this: Senn is a man of strong opinions (the temptation to transcribe here in full his exasperated "rules" for delivering papers at academic conferences had to be strenuously resisted: it's all in the book) but there being no "school of Senn", anyone is free to practise postcolonialism, poststructuralism or post-whatever you're having yourself. He will even sit, not very patiently, through such disquisitions, though you won't catch him at it.
BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, to emphasise too much the cloud of unknowing that hangs over his work is to overlook the constant humour, the impish charm, the delightful puncturing of all pretension and all pomposity, the play of wit and words and basic Joycean wisdom that constantly animate this discourse.
Things are perhaps summed up in a particularly resonant Joycean sentence: "Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!"
Terence Killeen is the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to Ulysses. He is an Irish Times journalist