iv. Zurich

A fundamental question remains about Joyce's use of early Irish literature and history in Ulysses: was Joyce's knowledge of early Irish myth and literature acquired principally before he left Ireland in 1904, or did he deepen his understanding of Irish literature and history in significant ways after 1904? The question has implications for the way in which we perceive the early Irish elements in Ulysses: Joyce's mythic structures will

be interpreted quite differently if it is assumed, on the one hand, that he had access to texts and critical material about early Irish culture for verification of details and other purposes while he was writing Ulysses, or if it is assumed, on the other hand, that he relied almost exclusively on knowledge gained more than a decade earlier. Is the broad but schematized use of Irish myth in Joyce's work attributable primarily to his mythic method itself and thus comparable to his treatment of other mythologies in Ulysses, or is it attributable in a significant degree to Joyce's isolation from Irish myth after 1904, to his working largely from memories of texts, conversations, speeches, and the like, many years after the fact when those memories may themselves have become somewhat vague?

On the whole, evidence suggests that even after leaving Ireland, Joyce continued to deepen his knowledge of early Irish myth and literature. As noted above, he continued to receive the United Irishman and thereafter Sinn Féin for some years, and the educative function of these newspapers would have provided Joyce with materials during the years between 1904 and 1914. Moreover, Joyce would to some extent have been brought au courant with developments in the field of Irish literature during his visits to Ireland in 1909 and 1912. These were years when Kuno Meyer was director of the School of Irish Learning in Dublin and when he and others kept the topics of early Irish literature and myth in the domain of public discourse through lectures and statements in the popular press as well as through their teaching. The prestigious and scholarly Irish journal Ériu was making accessible many texts of early Irish literature.^[26] Anglo-Irish writers, including Yeats, also kept early Irish material in circulation; during the years between 1904 and 1912 Yeats produced two of his CuChulainn plays (On Baile's Strand and The Green Helmet ) as well as his Deirdre.

While Joyce was in Trieste, he used early Irish history and literature in several ways, notably for his Trieste lectures and also for the architectonics of "The Dead." In discussing Joyce's use of The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel in "The Dead," Kelleher takes up the possibility that Joyce called on his memory for his knowledge of Irish myth in that story:

[26] Ériu was begun in 1904; the early volumes were edited principally by Kuno Meyer in association with various other scholars including Carl Marstrander, Osborn Bergin, and R. I. Best, and the first two volumes were reviewed favorably in Dana.

It may rightly be objected that at the time Joyce was working on the story in Trieste his letters indicate that he had very few Irish books or maps with him. Moreover, he complained in a letter of 1906 that Dublin was already growing hazy in his memory. I doubt it ever really grew hazy. I doubt that his memory, particular and capacious as a bard's, ever relinquished anything once learned from books, from observation, or from his father whose knowledge of Dublin was as intimate and curious as his own. ("Irish History" 431)

Budgen also comments on Joyce's prodigious memory of written text (Making of "Ulysses" 176–77; cf. Power, From the Old Waterford House 66–67). If we take the position that Joyce, like the ancient Irish poets, was able to retain copious and detailed memories indefinitely, then his need to consult books to refresh and sharpen his understandings about early Irish matters is moot. This, however, is a large and ultimately unnecessary assumption.

It is clear that once located in Paris, a major center of Celtic studies where d'Arbois de Jubainville had been professor, Joyce would have had access to virtually any text or critical book on early Irish literature that he cared to work with, but by the time he was in Paris the broad mythic structures linking Ulysses to early Irish literature had been set. It is precisely during the period that Ulysses was taking shape in Zurich, therefore, that Joyce would have consulted Irish mythic materials to greatest effect, for he arrived in Zurich in June 1915, just as he was beginning on the third episode, and he left in October 1919 as he was about to begin "Nausicaa" (JJ 2 383, 469, 473).

Though in Trieste, as Kelleher points out, Joyce had access to few Irish books, necessitating requests to his Aunt Josephine for Irish materials, in Zurich Joyce found a different set of resources, extensive materials that make it unnecessary to suppose that Joyce was dependent on either his personal library or his memory of texts read long since for his use of Irish myth in Ulysses. Joyce worked almost daily, as is well known, in the Zentralbibliothek, a library formed when voters of the canton and city determined in 1914 to merge the relatively recent Kantonsbibliothek (founded 1835) with the older Stadtbibliothek (founded 1629). The former, housed in the Predigerchor, served also as the library of the University of Zurich. Though the Zentralbibliothek existed on paper from 1914, it was only in March 1917 that the new construction for the joint facilities was opened; until that date Joyce would have used the several reading rooms of the original foundations.

German philology was at its height during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, and German philologists were at the forefront of Celtic studies, partly in virtue of the fact that Celtic languages and Celtic evidence are central to the enterprises of comparative philology and to the construction of the Indo-European hypothesis. The University of Zurich had an excellent faculty with philological interests. Not surprisingly, then, since it served the research needs of the university and a public interested in philological questions, the Zentralbibliothek in Joyce's day had a small but distinguished Celtic collection to which Joyce as reader had ready access. Examination of the collection of the Zentralbibliothek indicates that even had Joyce known nothing of early Irish literature and culture before he went to Zurich in 1915, he would have found in the Zentralbibliothek all the source texts required to furnish the Irish architectonics in Ulysses discussed above.

The library subscribed to the major scholarly journals of the period, including Revue celtique (1870–1934). The library received as well several series, among them the Todd Lecture Series and the series of texts edited by Whitley Stokes and Ernst Windisch under the title Irische Texte mit Uebersetzungen und Wörterbuch, which had as a supplementary volume Windisch's 1905 edition and translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge. The holdings included the entire run of d'Arbois de Jubainville's Cours de littérature celtique. These series and periodicals form the backbone of the Zurich collection of Celtic publications (as they do of any collection of early Celtic materials, for that matter) and provide most of the materials needed for the study of early Irish literature.^[27]

Joyce found an extensive collection of monographs on early Irish language and literature in the Zentralbibliothek as well. The German scholars are, not surprisingly, best represented. Philological texts included J. K. Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica (2 vols., 1853 and 1871); publications by

[27] Not all the early publications on Irish history and literature currently in the Zentralbibliothek were part of the collection when Joyce was working on Ulysses. Gaps in the holdings were filled in during the 1940s and 1950s at the request of Julius Pokorny, then professor in Zurich. Thus, the library currently holds Ériu (1904–) as well as an incomplete run of Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (1899–); R. I. Best's Bibliography of Irish Philology and Printed Irish Literature (1913) was apparently added to the collection in 1947–48 when Best's second bibliographical volume was purchased. I am indebted to Georg Bührer for clarifying accession dates here and elsewhere.

Heinrich Zimmer; philological works by Whitley Stokes, including his Three Irish Glossaries (1863); philological studies by d'Arbois de Jubainville, Joseph Vendryes (notably De hibernicis vocabulis quae a Latina lingua originem duxerunt, 1902), and Holger Pedersen, among others;^[28] John O'Donovan's Grammar of the Irish Language (1845); Ernst Windisch's Kurzgefasste Irische Grammatik (1879); early linguistic studies by Rudolf Thurneysen, including his Handbuch des Alt-Irischen (1909), which remains in its English translation (A Grammar of Old Irish, 1946) the standard grammar of Old Irish; and publications by Julius Pokorny. Significantly, the library also owned Charles Vallancey's Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language as well as his Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic or Irish Language .^[29]

In addition to the series of editions and texts listed above, literary publications included editions by Kuno Meyer, such as his publications on early Irish poetry, his Fenian text Cath Finntrága (1885), and his editions brought out by the Todd Lecture Series, which include The Triads of Ireland, The Instructions of Cormac Mac Airt, and the early Fenian texts in the volume Fianaigecht; Whitley Stokes's editions of religious literature, including Saltair na Rann (1883), The Calendar of Oengus (1880), and Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore (1890). The library also owned Thurneysen's Sagen aus dem alten Irland (1901); Carl Marstrander's Fleadh Dúin na nGéadh ocus Cath Muighe Ráth (1910); and Eleanor Hull's Poem-book of the Gael (1913). The library had purchased some Modern Irish materials, among them Edward Walsh's Irish Popular Songs with English Metrical Translations (1847).

Publications owned by the Zentralbibliothek on early Irish history and culture are extensive and too numerous to detail here. They include volumes in d'Arbois de Jubainville's twelve-volume Cours, Alexander Bugge's Contributions to the History of the Norsemen in Ireland (1900), the edition of the laws by John O'Donovan, and Zimmer's important study of the role of women in Irish literature, "Der kulturgeschichtliche

[28] Joyce's comments to Larbaud about the Latin borrowings in Irish may reflect a familiarity with Vendryes's work; see Letters 1: 217–18.

[29] The library currently owns James Midgley Clark's Vocabulary of Anglo-Irish (1917) as well as P. W. Joyce's English as We Speak It in Ireland (1910), both of which contain useful materials for an author representing characters who speak an Anglo-Irish dialect; however, these works were acquired only in the 1930s.

Hintergrund in den Erzählungen der alten irischen Heldensage." Many of the important collections and studies of placelore were represented in the collection when Joyce used the Zentralbibliothek. These works included the volumes of Edward Gwynn's publication of the dindsenchas^[*] in the Todd Lecture Series that appeared before 1919. P. W. Joyce's publications on placelore were also represented, with the first two volumes of his Origin and History of Irish Names of Places and two copies of Irish Local Names Explained as part of the collection.^[30]

The current author/title card catalogue of the Zentralbibliothek was begun in 1898 as a unified catalogue of various libraries in Zurich, principally the Kantonsbibliothek and the Stadtbibliothek; initially cataloguing the new acquisitions of the several libraries, it was funded by the canton but organized by the staff of the Stadtbibliothek. Only gradually did the card catalogue become a comprehensive listing of the holdings. For more than two decades, including the period when Joyce read in the library, it was used in conjunction with catalogues of the several institutions; these catalogues were kept in the form of volumes, like those of the catalogue of the British Library. The subject catalogue (Schlagwortkatalog ), a pioneering effort in Swiss library science, was organized in the first decade of the twentieth century originally for the Stadtbibliothek but soon encompassed the Kantonsbibliothek as well; following American practices, it was a card catalogue based on a system of subject categories developed under the guidance of the library director, Hermann Escher, who was interested in making the library more available to the nonspecialist but serious reader. In advance of its time in European libraries, this efficient system would have made it very easy for a reader like Joyce to identify and call for publications about Irish material owned by the library. During the period 1915–19, when Joyce was working in the library, there were subject entries under "Irische" and "Irland" as well as "Keltische" and "Kelten." These subjects were in turn subdivided; under "Irische," for example, there were such divisions as "Irische Sprache," and the subdivisions of "Irland" included "Flora," "Fauna," "Geschichte," and so forth. Joyce could also, of course, have looked for the publications of specific authors such as d'Arbois de Jubainville in the author/title catalogues.

[30] Volume 3 of Origin and History was acquired in 1954 at the instance of Pokorny.

The collection of Irish materials in Zurich is important as much for what it does not contain as what it does contain. Because the holdings were acquired to serve the interest in philology in the German culture area and at the University of Zurich in particular, the collection of Irish materials is strongest in early Irish language, literature, history, and culture rather than in Modern Irish materials or literature in Anglo-Irish, specifically the writings of the Anglo-Irish literary revival. In Ireland cultural nationalism embraced Old and Middle Irish, Modern Irish, and Anglo-Irish writings related to Irish material, but in Zurich the primary interest was in Old and Middle Irish language and literature, which are of greater significance than Modern Irish for the Indo-European hypothesis and comparative historical linguistics. In this regard the bibliographical emphasis in Zurich is very different from library collections of Irish materials that Joyce had used in Ireland. In Zurich Joyce found neither Douglas Hyde's publication of Modern Irish poetry, Love Songs of Connacht (1893), nor books by A. E.; these omissions would have been unlikely in an Irish library of comparable size.^[31]

The Zurich library also made available, not unnaturally, a different set of authors from those generally found in English-language libraries. German and French authors are best represented in the Zurich Irish collection, with the English authors primarily those working within the tradition of German philology. Thus, the library contains important books by such scholars as Zeuss, Zimmer, Windisch, Thurneysen, and d'Arbois de Jubainville; authors writing in English are more restricted, with Stokes and Meyer being notable exceptions that prove the rule. No Sigerson is to be found, and little P. W. Joyce.^[32]

The emphasis in the Zentralbibliothek was on scholarly publications rather than popular ones, in part because it is by statute a research library. The library has very few of the popularizations, retellings, and translations that were part of the program of Irish cultural nationalism. A striking example is the absence of Augusta Gregory's Cuchulain of

[31] The library later purchased A. E.'s Collected Poems (1920) and Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, but it contained nothing by either of these authors while Joyce was in Zurich during World War I.

[32] As noted above, some of P. W. Joyce's monographs were part of the Zurich collection, but it would appear that James Joyce knew this author primarily from his Irish days. P. W. Joyce's Social History of Ancient Ireland is part of the collection at present, but the library owns the third edition, issued in 1920; hence the book was not available to Joyce while he was working on Ulysses in Zurich.

Muirthemne, the book Yeats called in his preface "the best that has come out of Ireland in my time"; it is virtually inconceivable that an Irish library interested in the cultural revival would have failed to purchase this text.^[33] Critical texts and commentaries aimed at a more general audience are likewise missing: the library contains neither Eleanor Hull's Text Book nor Douglas Hyde's Literary History of Ireland, a book that likewise had great currency in Ireland. In Zurich, therefore, a more scholarly view of Irish myth, literature, and history was thrust upon Joyce, a view to which he had probably been exposed briefly during his stay in Paris in 1902–3; the philological framework for Irish studies stressed texts and translations rather than retellings and popular refractions. Though even scholarly sources at times omit some of the most sexually explicit passages of Irish literature, by and large the Irish materials available to Joyce in Zurich were the raw texts with very literal translations showing both the texture of the language and the formal properties of the narratives, as well as a relatively candid view of the contents.

An important and for Joyce probably fortunate gap in the Zurich holdings is the lack of any English-language translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge. The library later acquired John Strachan and J. G. O'Keeffe's "Táin Bó Cúailnge" from the Yellow Book of Lecan (1904–12) as a supplementary volume to Ériu, but it does not own the various truncated translations of the text by such people as Winifred Faraday. In particular, the library does not hold Joseph Dunn's 1914 translation. For Táin Bó Cúailnge Joyce would have had to rely on Ernst Windisch's comprehensive 1905 German edition and translation of the text, issued as a supplementary volume to the series Irische Texte and owned by the Zentralbibliothek, as noted earlier. Acquaintance with Windisch's text would have been a happy chance for Joyce, because in English-language translations Táin Bó Cúailnge was severely circumscribed and bowdlerized; since the text was presented as the national epic by nationalists, nothing offending nationalist sensibilities was tolerated in translation. Windisch, by contrast, is motivated by philological interests; his text is complete and the translation transposes the formal properties of the text, the humor,

[33] The Zentralbibliothek now owns the 1926 editions of Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, acquired when the Anglo-Irish literary revival had become a literary phenomenon worth collecting in its own right.

the sexual and scatological aspects, the redundancies and absurdities. Insofar as Molly is reminiscent of Medb, she is closer to the Medb of Windisch's Táin Bó Cúailnge and translation than to the Medb of any English translation Joyce might have read.

The wealth of materials related to early Irish literature, history, and language in Zurich's Zentralbibliothek illustrates again the overdeterminacy of Joyce's knowledge of these subjects. He had become acquainted with materials related to Irish history and literature used in Ulysses before he left Ireland in 1904; in addition the publications he needed for his treatment of Irish myth in Ulysses —even the flamboyant texts and theories of Vallancey—were at hand in the libraries he used in Zurich.^[34] Moreover, though the Zurich collection of Irish materials is not, strictly speaking, essential as a repository of sources for the Irish myth in Ulysses, the affinities between the configuration of the Zentralbibliothek's Irish holdings and Joyce's treatment of Irish myth, which transcends the constraints of Irish nationalism, suggest that the library's collection influenced Joyce's thinking about his country's traditions. Because of both the composition of the collection of books pertaining to Celtic language and literature and the accessibility of that collection, in part by virtue of a superior catalogue system, few libraries in Europe and the British Isles would have been better than Zurich's Zentralbibliothek for Joyce to have pursued his interests in early Irish literature, history, and language.