Solving the Problem of Babel
Solving the Problem of Babel
By situating James Joyce within a larger discourse about the problem of Babel, this chapter show how hieroglyphs were used to make arguments for the origin of linguistic differences. The journal transition—in which Joyce’s work was serialized—served as a clearinghouse for ideas about how a new linguistic unity might be forged: either through Joyce’s Wake-ese or through the philosopher C. K. Ogden’s universal language of Basic English. Fascinated by these theories of universal language and drawn to the anti-imperialist politics underlying them, Joyce in Ulysses andFinnegans Wake turns to visual and gestural languages—film, hieroglyphs, advertisements, and illuminated manuscripts—in an effort to subvert theories of ‘Aryan’ language and imagine a more inclusive origin for the world’s cultures. The commonality of writing and new media become in Joyce a political gesture: a way of insisting on the unity of all races and languages in a mythic past against Nazi claims for racial purity.
Keywords: James Joyce, Universal Languages, Eugene Jolas, C.K. Ogden, Film, Aryanism, Modernism, Advertising
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