Interview with Fritz Senn

Legendary Joycean Fritz Senn interviewed 
by Lara May O'Muirithe

Fritz Senn is founder and Director of the James Joyce Foundation in Zürich. The Foundation was formally established in 1985 and has provided numerous scholars and amateurs alike with outstanding resources; the library is extensive, holding more than five thousand volumes and including dozens of translations into more than forty languages. I first met Fritz when I was a student at the Dublin James Joyce Summer School in 2011 and was impressed by his unassuming disposition and his unconventional delivery of lectures, which he always conducts without notes. His publications include Joyce's Dislocutions, edited by John Paul Riquelme (1984), Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, edited by Christine O'Neill (1995), and a collection of interviews, The Joycean Murmoirs, which was was published in 2007 and edited by Christine O'Neill. In this interview, Fritz elaborates on his continual engagement with group readings of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the early formation of a Joycean community and the establishment of the Foundation, as well as discussing the impact of the recent expiration of copyright on Joyce’s work and the controversy surrounding the release of The Cats of Copenhagen by Ithys Press.

The James Joyce Foundation houses one of the most comprehensive collections of Joyceana in Europe. How did you acquire it? 

I became interested in Joyce in the '50s, and at that time no Joyce Industry had as  yet evolved. There weren’t many books on Joyce around and it was easy to keep up with  publications. From a moment that I cannot now determine I grabbed whatever I could lay  hands on, and also collected magazine articles or offprints, posters — everything faintly  connected. I engaged in a lot of correspondence with Joyce scholars, critics or translators.  Within an increasing network, authors often sent you their books or articles. I made  as many contacts as possible; people with similar obsessions tend to find each other.  Over a number of years, a lot of material came together and a substantial collection kept  growing. Most of the studies at that time were done by American academics, far ahead of all the others. I was also lucky to get to know some people who had met Joyce — Frank Budgen, above all, and Joyce’s Zürich friend Carola Giedion-Welcker. Then, in 1982, the Jubilee Year, something changed when I lost my job.

What was your job at that stage?

I was working for a publisher, first as a proof reader, then an editor. When the company was restructured they got rid of me. For a time I was at a loss and helpless, yet it was comforting to see how a growing Joyce community that had developed over the years came to my aid with suggestions and proposals. Somebody local approached the bank that had installed the James Joyce Pub in 1978. I don’t know if you saw it when you were in Zürich, it’s not far from the Foundation. It was the old (pre-crisis) Union Bank of Switzerland that had bought and set up the interior of the pub imported from Dublin (it already came with the name James Joyce attached to it), and they wanted to know who that was, so I became connected with the bank. The collection I had might otherwise be dispersed. The head of the Bank, Dr. Robert Holzach, who had become interested in Joyce’s books, managed to institutionalise the collection as a research centre in 1985. This followed a Swiss tradition of supporting Culture, called after Maecenas, the Roman sponsor of arts. In 1985, the Foundation was formally set up. From then on we systematically acquired all kinds of Joyceana that were available (we could never afford expensive first editions or artwork). We did get free copies and donations, but books don’t come in automatically: we have to order them. Within the 27 years of our existence a lot of material has accumulated and, as you may have seen, it’s not only books but also magazine articles, offprints, pictures, posters, videos, tapes and CDs, ephemera, and thousands of newspaper clippings — probably more than anywhere else in the same place. Of course there is no such thing as completeness.

Concerning your career’s progression, was it your early involvement with a generous network of Joyceans which facilitated the establishment of the James Joyce Foundation in Zürich? 

I have always been an amateur, that is I never had a real academic job (except for  a few semesters as a guest professor at American Universities - for a short time, I was a “professor”! - though I have continually been doing courses on Joyce. Mainly Ulysses, in Zürich, but not as a member of the faculty. So I flaunt my amateur status though in actual fact I have become a sort of professional. As an outsider you are free to pursue what you are genuinely interested in, and you don’t have to go along with whatever is in academic fashion. Also you have the time to absorb such complex challenges as Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, a luxury that students rarely can afford. I always had an ambivalent position, outside the academia and yet always part of the Joyce world. By now we have had more than twenty International James Joyce Symposia (they originated in Zürich in 1966), not counting the conferences in the US. I got fascinated and found something to absorb my time — don’t ask me what exactly it was. In such a position you find others with similar attitudes. If you’re particularly mad in one respect you find birds of a feather. That led to a wide-spread correspondence in a kind of pioneering spirit. At one stage I was mainly interested in Finnegans Wake and there was a dispersed group us who exchanged observations and wrote little explanatory notes. In the old times of the typewriter one could knock out a few carbon copies at best, and we sent them around in a haphazard fashion. At some point I suggested we might have a kind of bulletin, to be distributed among the like-minded. We started, and by we I mean Clive Hart who was then a student in Cambridge. This became the Wake Newslitter, which also gathered momentum as it obviously served a need. Information, glosses about Wake passages, could be shared internationally. It was a time of minute discoveries which also resulted in a multitude of little notes (that swelled my bibliography out of proportion and made it look very impressive). The Newslitter became the first permanent publication (after a short-lived James Joyce Review) until the James Joyce Quarterly was initiated by Thomas Staley and it helped me a lot to be connected to it right from the start. 

You’re a central figure in the Joycean community, but how does your outsider’s perspective bear on your working relationship with various institutions and scholars? 

According to whim, I can be part of it all or stay outside. One of my disadvantages is that I never took a Joyce course. One of my advantages is that I never took a Joyce course. You can observe things better [from the outside]. And, also, I didn’t have to produce anything for academic advancement, and that means I spent my time over what fascinated me. Students with so many obligations simply can’t afford this. The price is some intellectual narrowness.

The career you have created is enviable. I admire that you are apart from the academic rigmarole, but  presumably there was a time when you may have veered more towards that life? 

There was a time when I thought an academic career might be enviable. By some strange coincidence (everything in life depends on coincidence) I was invited in 1968 to the University of Buffalo where they have the big Joyce Collection and a summer school where some of my Joycean friends had been teaching. I was scared stiff because I had never even taken a Joyce course and so I didn’t know, literally, what I was supposed to do in a class room. I overcame my fear, went and I liked it. I had something to pass on, what had been a private hobby could be communicated. So I liked the academic life I had experienced. I toyed with the idea of having an academic position in the States. I never made any serious move however, and at the time people like me, who only have a limited scope, one single melody, were in little demand. A general problem: either you spread yourself all over a wide area, or else you specialize on something. I happened to fall into the second narrow category by constitution. I am glad now not to be moored in some University, subject to its requirements and at the mercy of intellectual fashions and the constraint of literary theories. 

Jumping to recent events, are you able to discuss the controversy surrounding the release of The Cats of Copenhagen? 

The Foundation received a donation of lots of original stuff a few years ago, generously given by Hans Jahnke, an in-law of the Joyce family. It comprises a lot of documents, notes, additions to Finnegans Wake, and quite a cache of letters, and photographs, as well as ephemera. Among the letters there is a very short one, a page and a half, where Joyce writes to his grandson that there are no cats in Copenhagen. Some weeks before he had sent his grandson a box of chocolates called “The Cats of Beaugency”. This is based on a local legend of the Devil building a bridge but demanding the first soul that passes over it, but he is cheated by a cat that is sent across first. That much longer letter had long ago been turned into a children’s book, The Cat and the Devil. The short follow-up is a charming piece, written in a fairylike tone. As you know, all the material we have, and we have a lot, is open for inspection. It is the purpose of libraries to make their holdings accessible for the benefit of scholars and readers. Somebody we know – no mention of any names – must have copied the letter, as others have been free to do. Then in February last year we heard that a new Ithys Press in Dublin was going to publish the letter, as they wrote us just before it became a fact — out of the blue. We never imagined anybody would do that, behind our back, without asking us or informing us in good time. The Foundation of course does not have (and never claimed) copyright of the letter, this belongs to the Joyce Estate. But legally the owner of a document must also give permission. So this publication, an expensive limited edition, happened behind our back, without our knowledge, agreement, permission or connivance. We also had assumed that the expiration of Joyce copyright would not include all the unpublished material, which would still be under seal for an indeterminate time. The legal situation is extremely confused and obscure with different laws obtaining in different countries. At any rate, we were shocked and felt betrayed. I made it quite clear to newspapers that we had nothing to do with the act of which we were ignorant. We were – and I’m always trying to find a term for which we cannot be sued — bypassed, the publication happened behind our back. If publication is legally possible at all we would have liked at least to be given an option. A bitter taste is left behind.

I know how congenial the staff at the Foundation are and I certainly benefited from the open-access to the resources. You received quite a lot of sympathy from those who had visited the Foundation. 

The main issue is that trust has been broken, the kind of trust among scholars without which we could not function. The Foundation has been and will remain open to scholars. Most of our visitors are known, familiar or even friends. We are a financially weak institution. We cannot engage in law suits. It was never our intention to publish and make money from the letter. When I protested against the clandestine action Ithys Press presented me as someone suppressing the free expression thoughts, and I was called “morally reprehensible” — a new role for me.

One of the editions of The Cats of Copenhagen is being sold for a large sum of money?

They did an expensive bibliophile edition, for collectors. It has now been published in the States in a commercial edition. Again, it happened without our knowing or consent. We still believe, naively, that as sole owners of the document we ought to have a say in its publication.

Let’s focus on a more pleasant subject: the reading groups. They relate to the genesis of the Foundation itself; reminiscent of a medieval reading group, you began by meeting with fellow ‘obsessives’ and working through the texts together. 

There had been a reading group before the Foundation. I told you I have been doing Joyce courses for the Zürich university, but not part of the faculty. In 1982, the Joyce anniversary, a student asked why don’t we do this slowly and privately. Once we had the Foundation, the Ulysses reading was transferred there. We have so much material at hand, and I don’t want the Foundation to be just an assembly of books and magazines and God knows what, but we should do something with it. The Foundation should not be a noun - a substantive - but a verb: something active and communal. We have the time, the place, the background, and something to hand on to the community – to Zürich. We’re lucky, I am lucky, that in my old age I have a position where I can do what I like and do best. The reading groups have become an institution, a part in the cultural life of our city. By now we have no fewer than four such groups, two each on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake even if this is straining our forces and resources. The groups are under no pressure, we can proceed sentence by sentence. Ulysses normally takes about three years, Finnegans Wake around eleven! Participants come from as far as Basel, Berne or St. Gallen.

Joyceans speak of the joy of re-reading Joyce - the 'retrospective arrangement.' How has your reading of the texts altered over the years?

Ulysses is the sort of book that, no matter how erudite or perceptive you are, reveals itself by stages. Coming to the end you might feel ready to begin, and the book will have changed along with you; each reading changes. I cannot say how often I have read the book because from a certain, or rather not certain, stage on you no longer read through from the beginning. In the kind of activity I have, with reading groups, courses, preparing talks, research, etc., consecutive readings become an exception. 

Some readers express anxiety about how one ‘should’ one approach Joyce as a beginner. How would you query this standpoint? 

I always hesitate to use "should" or "must". My advice is to charge ahead, try to find out what is not immediately understood, but basically persevere if something does not make sense. Understanding in Joyce trails behind, it is retrospective. I always claim that not understanding (not only in books, but in life) it not the exception but the norm. I advise that we try to compensate our inevitable initial ignorance by active curiosity (Odysseus had it). 

The reading groups at the Foundation partly operate as a support system (I'm thinking of The Wake!). Your approach is emphatically non-hierarchical and you seek to open to the field. 

Oddly enough, Joyce may be best read in groups. The advantage is we share different background knowledge and also often share common ignorance (which makes it more easy to come to terms with it). Reading together (without preconditions in the case of our Zürich readings) can take away the fear that Joyce's reputation tends to infuse. The texts, Ulysses certainly, are also accessible, in fact very human and as we slowly pick up, increasingly funny.

Your first language is Swiss German and you mentioned to me before that you first read Ulysses in English. What was that like, what did you make of the text’s uses of Hiberno-English? You hadn't yet visited Ireland, so what was its imaginative appeal? 

I was a student of English with an exchange year in England, and it was an opportunity and a challenge. I wanted to test my English, among other motives, and then there was some Zurich connection anyway since a large part of Ulysses was written, or drafted, in Zürich. It was also a scandalous book, with an aura of its own. I bought a copy (one guinea!, a substantial part of what I earned) and began the venture. Oddly enough, I do not remember just what I was able to make of it. I know I had to look up "parapet", then a new word for a foreigner, as well as "gunrest" (not in the dictionary, but it could be guessed). My memory is dim, all I know is that I must have trudged on, with a dictionary at my side. There was no guide then. Some months later I found Stuart Gilbert's and Frank Budgen's books, so that was something to hold on to. I forget most details, I must have been lost, but a fascination emerged, to see what can be done with language (perhaps I haven't done anything else all those years).

 In what ways is translating Joyce more problematic than translating the work of other writers? He seems to be translating himself in some instances; in Ulysses, for example, the Sirens chapter is distinct from Ithaca. How does the translator negotiate such linguistic manoeuvres?

I have not myself translated Joyce (except when I had to do the Joyce quotes in Ellmann's biography in German). It was only after some time that I began to wonder how passages, often scintillating ones, would be rendered into German, so I got the German translation of 1930 and looked what had been done. It was disappointing, in the nature of things. Literary translation is already next to an impossibility. Whatever is typical in a text, idiosyncratic, the local colour, the nuances, semantic play, etc is likely to evaporate. I then looked at French and Italian versions and started to compare. I think I was the first to concern myself with Joyce translations, in the sixties. At first one tends to be highhanded and arrogant, finding fault with the existing solutions, but later on I am becoming more tolerant, realising the tremendous handicaps. Just think of all the manifest or embedded quotations. I find it profitable now to look at translations to see where they deviate significantly — this always refers back to a feature of the original that otherwise I might have overlooked. And then of course Joyce already is translation. Ulyssesrepresents itself as a remake of the Odyssey (and much else, Shakespeare, rituals, etc.) And within it you have the whole scope of English, from the Hiberno variant to literary language, dialects, slang, and even earlier stages of English. Each episode is in a way a different translation, with changes of register, mode, style, perspective, etc. As you say, Sirens differs from Ithaca, one has to be musically orchestrated, with different sounds and echoes, the other has to be abstract and neutral (helped by the strong Latin component of the English vocabulary for which there is often no equivalent).

How does one go about translating Finnegans Wake, a multilingual text? 

Finnegans Wake is entirely beyond the scope. Its semantic layering (sometimes, not always, play on words and meanings) is so obviously impossible to recreate adequately. Ironically then, it becomes almost easier just because it cannot be done, normal criteria no longer apply; there is a kind of general absolution, and everything achieved is to be appreciated. In my formula: FW is impossible to translate and therefore it has to be attempted. A sort of Beckett syndrome: Try to fail better!

 On the ‘afterlife’ of texts, Walter Benjamin, in his essay, 'The Task of the Translator', postulates that a translation does not exist as a secondary phenomenon. In the context of Joyce studies, how would you respond to the idea that a text may be enriched in translation? 

Of course translations, different by necessity, create a new text, deficient in many ways, but possibly also enriched, at least there will be substantial deviations. The many existing renderings of Ulysses (around 30 I would guess) have often had a great impact in their culture as partly autonomous works. By the way the sheer bulk and richness of Ulysses make sure something will get across, independent of multiple minor losses.

The genetic critics - such as Dr Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Luca Crispi (University College Dublin) - undertake assiduous manuscript work. What has been the effect of this type of scholarship on the field? 

Since Joyce, at least from a certain moment on, hardly ever threw away anything he had done, notes, drafts, etc. there is a wealth of material to study to progress of the works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This offers unique insight into the workshop and we come as near to the author's thoughts, perhaps intentions?, as we ever will. So we can trace the laborious genesis. A valuable, very solid, no-nonsense, approach makes us aware of new angles. We have too much material to cope with and the kind of homework we could and perhaps should be doing becomes enormous, out of reach. So we have to be grateful to those who do it. I do have a few reservations though. One of my axioms is that understanding must not depend on accidentally preserved notes and drafts. Here I use "must" — and it is an aesthetic must. I want works to be autonomous. I know, FW is a different case where we have to be grateful for any kind of insight, no matter from where. 

Joyce carefully controlled his output; we have already discussed the issues surrounding the release of The Cats of Copenhagen, but what do you think will be the impact on Joyce's legacy now that the copyright has expired? 

Joyce wrote amazingly little, in bulk. Now that no agency can control our output we are likely to see a lot of texts, editions, "creative" of great originality or immense stupidity. The genie is out of the bottle for good and will take any number of shapes. 

What do you think of the cultural appropriation of Joyce’s work? Images of Joyce pervade mass culture and, as with other major authors like Yeats and Beckett, they have been commoditised by the Irish state in a way that removes them from their original context. Are you a purist? 

Purist? I don't know. I try to be tolerant even where I do not like a particular result, like the two films we have of Ulysses. It is all too easy now for someone to compose a piece of music or to paint a canvass and call it "Oxen of the Sun" or something like that. Joyce has been and will be turned into kitsch: t-shirts, ashtrays, souvenirs. In some way it is a success: Joyce seems to become what he also writes about and is now called popular culture. Huston's "The Dead" is probably the best of all films so far, especially in relation to the atmosphere. Like what I said about translation, if some adaptation does not succeed, according to whatever standard or criterium, at least it shows what can be done with language as against other media. We also learn from unsuccessful attempts. 

 In certain respects, I regard Leopold Bloom as a proto-Situationist, a psychogeographer. How radical is Joyce today?

Joyce is radical. As a constitutional philologist I mean that he is going to roots (radix), which is also going back — perhaps one way to reach forward. But I am not good at labels. Proto-psycho-geographer all right. I am at a loss about "proto-Situationist" — who knows, I may have been one myself all my life without knowing?