SCARLETT BARON, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON: “James Joyce and the Rhythms of the Alphabet”

Joyce’s works evince a sustained fascination with those individual units of language upon which his art depends: the letters of the alphabet. Stephen Daedalus, we read in Stephen Hero, ‘put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter’. The ‘fiery-hearted revolutionary’ of Joyce’s draft novel ponders ‘the values of letters’, ‘even permut[ing] and combin[ing] the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions’. In this early vignette, AEIOU, best known to Joyceans for their cryptic appearance in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, are evoked in the context of explicit allusions to Blake and Rimbaud, both idols of Joyce’s youth.

The paper will begin by exploring the intertextual derivation of Stephen’s poetic experiments and the evidence of Joyce’s own enduring interest in the history and ‘rhythm’ of the alphabetic sequence. It will go on to trace the ramifications of this preoccupation in Ulysses– as exemplified, for instance, by Stephen’s ambition to write books ‘with letters for titles’ and by the book’s manifold disruptions of ordinary spelling – and in the even more radical alphabetic chaos of Finnegans Wake. Ultimately, it will argue that Stephen’s sensitivity to the poetry of individual letters and to the rhythms of their myriad potential conjugations functions as an emblem of Joyce’s view of literature itself as a set of element equally susceptible and responsive to permutation and recombination.

Scarlett Baron is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature at University College London. She is the author of ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her current book project, entitled A Genealogy of Intertextuality, traces intertextual theory’s core ideas and emblematic images to their antecedents in paradigm-shifting interventions in the fields of science (Darwin), philosophy (Nietzsche), and psychoanalysis (Freud).