Even though an Irish novelist, James Joyce was able to “transform, deform”(1) and control English language as well as mix it with other languages such as German, Italian, and even Persian. Practicing the varieties of languages, Joyce inserts himself vehemently into the “annals of literary history.”(2) Indeed, Finnegans Wake is penned in dozens of languages and includes thousands of stories and obscure allusions to different kinds of literature sharing the same subjects, as Joyce writes, “There extend by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same” (FW 5. 28, 29).

There are many fragments of deja lu, or of something that he had always been already read, or experienced and the Wake, this “unenglish” “fablebodied” (FW 160. 22, 34) story, is the wake of that already. It seems that “one thousand and one stories” is written as a result of reading the Persian story of The Thousand and One Nights.(3) While the most immediate and substantial link between Joyce and Persia is a rare-known biographical one, the references to The Thousand and One Nights demonstrate Joyce’s points of contact with the Persian culture. Hence, Joyce’s novel includes stories similar to those narrated by Shahrzad: “Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizard all of them whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde” (FW 17. 26-30). Although it is a “great mound of stories, a gigantic accumulation of the world’s narrative,”(4) it is not one of them it is, in fact, all of them which occur in this novel at the same time. This Joycean view of the Persian stories makes both Finnegans Wake and Shahrzad’s riveting tales everlasting.

The delightful oscillation of the ambiguous and often incomprehensible words is set awhirl in the novel. It is rare to have one meaning that would be present in such a work, but rather a constellation of meanings and various echoes of other cultures. Hence, the reader is confronted with a book of languages and foreign words, containing no fixed nationalities, and even identities for the characters. Words do not picture the world independently of their users and readers, neither do they hold reality in their grasp for our calm contemplation, nor do they transmit to us the way things were or are.

For instance, Joyce toys with so many characters, city names, river names and words in different languages and describes human beings, metamorphosing them into objects such as stone and tree. The same strategy is used by Shahrzad in the interwoven stories of The Thousand and One Nights. Therefore, when Joyce writes “What a meanderthalltale to unfurl and with what an end” (FW 19. 25-6), he refers to the meander tall tale told by Shahrzad and it is “Damadam(5) to infinities!” (FW 19. 30) There is a perspective of quotations from the Persian story of Shahrzad, a mirage of Persian structures, culture and Joyce’s departures and returns from English to Persian or vice versa.

Some Persian words are used throughout the text. Most of these words are basic Persian words used both in daily speech and in written texts. Thus, it gives not only a jolt of pleasure but also so much exquisite joy to the Persian reader. For example, in “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” Joyce successfully used three hundred and fifty river names. In a talk with Max Eastman about this chapter, he remarked on his use of so many river names, and said that he “liked to think how some day, way off in Tibet or Somaliland, [or even in Persia] some boy or girl in reading that little book would be pleased to come upon the name of his or her home river.”(6) The Anna Livia chapter includes the name of Persian river “Arras” (FW 53. 2, 568. 36) or Rud-e Aras in the north-west of Iran.(7) Persia or Iran features on several occasions in the Wake, “Irenean” (FW 23. 19), “Iren” (FW 310. 20, 620. 9), “Iran” (FW 144. 18, 358. 21, 491. 36), “Pershan” (FW 280. 15), and “Persia” (FW 583. 14) however the references might not seem consistent enough to establish any real or acceptable thematic emphasis.

Joyce’s text finds its pleasures in the knowledge that language is innately unstable and ambiguous. Hence, it is true that no single reader could understand all the languages in the Wake. He has succeeded in adapting English to suit states of mind of every reader, chiefly through special arrangements as well as special kinds of words in their particular uses within different languages. His “polyglot language” is brought to its own global world or universe in which, as Joyce says, he effects “in a few minutes what may have taken centuries to bring about.”<(8) The beauty of the Wake’s language is that if any reader reads it aloud, he will find a playful language game, through which Joyce unconsciously mixes different languages, creates new words and gives old words new meanings. The discoveries of different words and their possible references and meanings further the various readers’ understanding of how Joyce worked; and at the same time, they enrich the way of reading the Wake. For this reason, Joyce in this novel represents a completely new language “built from cultural circulations and exchanges that have taken place for thousands of years.”(9) Indeed, on the one hand he makes a city of languages, and on the other hand, he telescopes a universal language. Joyce has made an “aesthetic realm” in which “a new super-language” unites all languages very excitingly.(10) In this sense, Joyce will be successful in his “multilingual architectural feat of total unification.”(11)

As far as no research has yet been done regarding the significance of the Persian literature in Joyce’s novels, what I intend to do is to make the novel’s Persian voice heard, in fact, one of the voices out of which the novel is woven. Alongside each story, every reader can read and hear his own words and voice. In such a complicated interweaving of stories and voices whose origin is hidden or lost in the vast perspective of deja vécu, the novel is changed to be a labyrinthine city of languages, literatures and cultures.

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS: SHAHRZAD’S TALES

In The Thousand and One Nights, Shahrzad tells the King absorbing tales into the early morning not only to forestall death, but to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. Shahrzad’s narrative is considered as an attempt, renewed each night, in this way, she keeps death outside the circle of her life. Furthermore, her stories show the wake numerous times. When Shahrzad finishes her first story, she manages to find a new beginning. In every end Joyce, like Shahrzad, finds a new beginning and he leaves the final line without a full stop. The final word is another story; i.e. the most complicated and well-known work of the twentieth century not merely ends but begins again with the first line. The Wake with its “unfinished and uninitiated beginning” which includes a “tightly woven web of stories” is like Shahrzad’s stories.(12)

Joyce manages to weave the Persian words and Persian culture through referring to Shahrzad’s Persian stories. The Thousand and One Nights,one of the Persian “culture’s recycling and recycled narratives,”(13) is written based on Hazar Afsoon, Hazar Afsaneh, or the ‘thousand magic tales.’ In it there is an endless multilayered story with onion-like structure which is woven and interwoven very meticulously by Shahrzad.

Shahrzad narrates her lifesaving tales to King of Persia, King Shahriyar(14) or Shahrbaz who has already asserted his superiority in his relationship with his unfaithful wife, Khatoon, by enacting a vicarious and sexual revenge on her. As a result he violates a different virgin each night, and orders her to be beheaded the next morning: “tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them” (FW 158. 21-4).(15) But Shahrzad, the grand vizier’s daughter, who volunteers to be the next virgin and maybe the last one, is successful to halt this series of infringements by narrating the king part of a tale each night after sex: “the world’s a cell for citters to cit in. Let young wimman run away with the story and let young min talk smooth behind the butteler’s back. She knows her knight’s duty while Luntum sleeps” (FW 12. 2-5). This “escapemaster-in-chief” (FW 127.10) or Shahrzad selects an easy way to make herself free from King Shahriyar’s punishment: “Essonne inne,” “tell me more. Tell me every tiny teign” (FW 201. 4, 21) “tilhavet,” (FW 202. 10) or ‘telhavat’ it which, in Persian, means ‘it is easy,’ ‘read,’ ‘say,’ or ‘tell’ me. Indeed, Shahrzad becomes an archetype for a woman who has done everything to save her generation (race) from the disastrous problems waiting for them. Then Shahrzad invites her sister, Dinazad,(16) Dinarzad,(17) Donyahzad, or Donyahzade to become the professed audience of her nightly tales. Joyce calls her “dinna” a girl who forgets “that there is many asleeps between someathome’s first and moreinausland’s last” (FW 116. 19-21).

By the sinuous sentences and swerving phrases, Joyce paves the way for the Persian reader to continue a journey in his “unknown verbal country”(18) not only by verbal fluency but also by turning the pages of Shahrzad’s Persian narratives. Shahrzad’s verbal and nonverbal expressions have a fluid, soothing effect that reaches King Shahriyar’s mind and body. Joyce calls Shahrzad(19) and her sister “inseparable sisters, uncontrollable nighttalkers, Skertsiraizde with Donyahzade, who afterwards, when the robberers shot up the socialights came down into the world as amusers” (FW 32. 8-10). Their purpose was to amuse King Shahriyar through narrating various hilarious stories: “Where did I stop? Never stop. Continuarration! […] Garonne, garonne!” (FW 205. 13-15) Thus, the King asks Shahrzad to ‘continue’ and ‘go on’ her stories, called by Joyce “Kunstful” or artistic:

Kunstful, we others said. What ravening shadow! What dovely line! Not the king of this age could richlier eyefeast in oreillental longuardness with alternate nightjoys of a thousand kinds but one kind. A shahrryar cobbler on me when I am lying! (FW 357. 16-19)

Shahrzad’s masterful playing either with narrations or with characters “her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them” (FW 210) helps Joyce weave the variety of narrations and invite the various characters from different nationalities in order to bring joy to every reader who reads it.

Henriette Lazaridis Power states that with the presence of Shahrzad’s sister, “Donyahzade in what becomes a narrative ménage à trois, the king loses direct control over the text.”(20)In this way, Donyahzade not only shares the king’s power over the tales but also “appeases the king by helping to create the illusion of a divided and dependent woman.”(21) However, Shahrzad, like Joyce and Shem, announces her power from a position of disguise or concealment. These Persian daughters, as Joyce calls them “duchtars of Iran,” win again in order to be in again:

He beached the bark of his tale; and set to husband and vine: and the harpermaster told all the living conservancy, know Meschiameschianah, how that win a gain was in again. Flying the Perseoroyal. Withal aboarder, padar and madar, hal and sal, the sens of Ere with the duchtars of Iran. Amick amack amock in a muchtub. Qith the tou loulous and the gryffygryffygryffs at Fenegans Wick, the Wildemanns. (FW 358. 17-23)

This waking again or the waking of “duchtars of Iran,” as Joyce calls it “Irinwakes” (FW 320.17) or Iranwakes, signifies the story of “Perseoroyal,” ‘Parsiroyal,’ or Persepolis or Persia. In this sense, Joyce invites all Persian readers to read his Persianized story or Anglicised Persian story more enthusiastically. He unites items of knowledge from these two languages or cultures, from the waking consciousness of the Persian readers and invests them with absolutely different meanings. Presumably, the key to the dislocated or new meanings is hidden in the connection between the various cultures, particularly between the English and Persian cultures.

In Finnegans Wake Izod with her “grateful sister reflection in a mirror” (FW 220. 9) takes the role or roles of Shahrzad and Donyahzad. In fact, Shahrzad’s narrative strategies give her an opportunity to conduct her own Wake. She subverts the “traditional formulation of authority, with its suggestion of usurpation and rivalry.”(22) Moving from Shahrzad’s stories to the Wake, according to Power, “we see that Joyce’s text is full of rivalries—between Willingdone and the Lipoleum (s), Buckley and the Russian General, the Cad and HCE, Mutt and Jute, and Shaun and Shem, to name a few.”(23) The jinnies’ “handmade’s book” is similar to Shahrzad’s book of tales. Willingdone’s relationship with the two jinnies and his erection parallel the Persian King’s nightly sex with Shahrzad, “Sexcaliber hrosspower.” Willingdone’s mastery over the two jinnies is like Shahriayar’s mastery over Shahrzad and Donyahzad, their sexual and martial authority and power is affirmed as “Sexcaliber hrosspower” (FW 8. 31-6).

By the “big Willingdone mormorial tallowscoop” which focuses “on the flanks of the jinnies,” Joyce refers to the Wake, acting as a telescope which concentrates on The Thousand and One Nights, to indicate the significance of these Persian tales in the world. This equipment, which fuses immediacy and distance, detachment and participation, introduces The Thousand and One Nights to the world throughout a Joycean Wake and welcomes a group of expert viewers and readers for viewing and reading the Wake anew. Joyce’s narrative strategy creates a plurality of languages and a plurality of readings or of literatures for the modern readers to adopt.

The arbitrariness with which I carve a route through Joyce’s text carries with it the shadow of a hundred other interpretations or understandings, all as committed and all as capable of massing evidence in their favour. Although no exact references to the Persian stories or dreams occur in Joyce’s letters or are reported, during writing this novel, it seems that Persia is dreamed by him, as he writes very directly in “The Sisters” in Dubliners: “I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange—in Persia, I thought … But I could not remember the end of the dream” (4).(24)

FINNEGANS WAKE AS A KALEIDOSCOPE

Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, creates a richness of texture and references that allow every reader to recognise familiar items and begin to construct a narrative chain or even a thematic network out of them. This gives an elaborate openness to his writing like the function of a Kaleidoscope, which “converts a chance meeting of fragments into an aesthetic whole by repeating them through multiple reflection[s].”(25) The Kaleidoscopecombines “two opposite alternatives in one: centripetal collision or centrifugal escaping.”(26) Similarly, the Wake acts as a Kaleidoscope which is colourful for every reader. It includes many verbal fragments that repeat each other and as a result it creates the traffic of frequent experiences. This frequency gives the novel and its characters a plurable nature, such as ALP or Anna Livia Plurabelle (FW 104. 1-2).

Joyce, then, as a “fargazer,” uses his text as “A collideorscape” (FW 143. 26, 28) or a “kaleidoscope,” which even the Persian reader, like any other readers, can shake into any pattern he or she finds pleasant. For instance, among Shahrzad’s tales in The Thousand and One Nights, there are some which concern Haroun al Rashid the Caliph of Baghdad during the ninth or tenth century.(27) Joyce’s HCE, with his multiple acronymic identities, might be Shahrzad’s Haroun al Rashid or ALP might be Shahrzad or Donyahzad, as Joyce offers “We nowhere she lives but you mussana tell annaone for the lamp of Jig-a-Lanthern!” (FW 10. 26) ALP, who might be a “dam night garrulous, slipt by his side” (FW 139. 18-19), is Shahrzad whose garrulousness bestows rest and calmness on King Shahriyar. Joyce portrays such a Persian verbose narrator in a book of garrulous narrators such as Shaun, Kevin or Frank. But Shahrzad’s verbosity, “her auburnt streams, and her coy cajoleries, and her dabblin drolleries,” (FW 139. 23-4) epitomise her attempt to save both her life and the life of other innocent girls. Shahrzad is the controller of the murky night in which justice, loyalty and love are blurred; works are undone; the criminal actions are hidden; and the unknown sins occur.

Arrah, it’s herself that’s fine, too, don’t be talking! Skirtsends? You storyan Harry chap longa me Harry chap storyan grass woman plelthy good trout. Shakeshands. […] She’s seeking her way, a chickle a chuckle, in and out of their serial story. (FW 28. 1-26)

Joyce uses Persian “Arrah,” for ‘yes,’ and in this way, he confirms Shahrzad’s behaviour. Shahrzad hopes to rescue the king and the other girls through her “talking” and her “serial story” or romances; she narrates various love stories and indulges the King when he is miserable. She is the “Woman of the World who only can Tell Naked Truths” (FW 107. 3-4), and reveals “a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes” (FW 107. 24-6).

Regarding the stories about HCE, Willingdone, Lipolem, or even Shahrzad, the Wake shows that it is difficult to limit the novel to a fixed origin or an individual one, as Joyce himself writes:

(Not original!). Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone in scratch wig […] with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness (one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all sorts of ages!) […]. (FW 51. 3-9)

On the one hand Joyce provides a sense of continuity or a point of contrast between his novel and the earlier fictions, and on the other hand, he expresses his doubt about the origin of Shahrzad’s narrations.

THE RUSTLE OF PERSIAN LANGUAGE

Reading a text as if it had already been read might not give us a new understanding. We need a rereading, as Roland Barthes states, “an operation […] which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story.”(28) For every reader, to read is to struggle not only to understand or to subject the stories of the text to a semantic transformation but also to be or to find himself. If the readers accept that to read means to be absorbed in the structural and thematic world of the text, then a Persian reader, having this presupposition that Joyce used Persian consciously or unconsciously, will be absorbed in the Persian world of the novel. However, if a Persian reader cannot exactly understand what Joyce means, at least, he can hear the rustle of Persian language. To rustle means to make the voice “audible” for the hearer or reader.(29) This rustle signifies that the language is, universally, working and giving pleasure to the reader. The rustle is the very pure sound of “delectation,” which gives the Persian reader an undivided, impenetrable or unnameable meaning, located in the distance both for the Persian and other readers like a mirage. Such kind of meaning would be the vanishing point of that delectation. The rustle of Persian language or the hearing of it even if in a form of hallucinated perception reveals the design of the intelligent Joyce. De facto, even for a Persian reader the novel works well and functions to perfection.

Such readers would definitely have to give the fundamental presuppositions and they participate in an appropriate process of reading, a process which totally exhausts the text’s potential for new meaning. The Persian reader of the Wake might contextualise this artistic work differently, producing a different text and a different reading experience. When a Persian reader reads the book, it does not seem familiar to him at first reading, but if he is listening to it, the musical aspect of the novel fascinates him too much. It means that even though it might not be pleasing to the eyes, since according to Richard Ellmann “the eyes are closed in Finnegans Wake,”(30) “it is pleasing to the ear,” as Joyce has written to his daughter.(31)

The Persian reader has projected himself into his reading, then he has found simply a new text, a text which he writes in his head when he looks up. Joyce’s writing constraints the Persian reader to a certain meaning of the work, and this meaning might be one of the possible meanings. This reader takes pleasure in the Persian words and in certain combinations or arrangements of words. This pleasure is, no doubt, visibly linked to the observation of what is unfolding and to the revelation of what is hidden.

The Pinglish, i.e. combination of Persian and English,(32) or Anglicised Persian which may be knowingly or unknowingly used by Joyce, is very significant in the Wake. For instance, he uses “inglis” (FW 8. 23) and “anglease” (FW 16. 6, 7) which are the various pronunciations of the words England and English in Persian. Astonishingly, the Persian reader is imagined as being divided into two subjects, two cultures, two languages, and two zones of listening. In spite of the fact that such a confrontation makes understanding and communication obscure, fallacious, hazardous and at the same time uncertain, the rustle of Persian language is heard. What the Persian reader reads is a counter-communication which is taken from his familiarity with the Persian noises or sounds. At the outset of the novel, the Persian reader is confronted with “sosie sesthers worth with twone nathandjoe” (FW 3.12), referring to two sisters Donyahzade(33) and Shahrzad(34) whose names suggest the sisters as the children of the world and city. At the same time “sesthers” might be Esthers, a Persian equivalent of ‘stars’ in English. Esther(35) is also the name of a Persian queen in “The Book of Esther” in Old Testament.(36) Obviously, Joyce’s language includes the surprises of reading and meaning. In this sense, the novel is speaking according to the Persian reader’s interests. It is the Persian language, indeed, which speaks, not Joyce. The novel reaches a point, as Barthes claims, “Where only language acts.”(37)

CONCLUSION

The use of the Persian language traces the “endless capacity of language for self-generation”(38) which is more evident in each page of the Wake. It seems that Joyce’s intention is not only to control but to return the story from his pen to the reader-postman/woman or Shahrzad/female narrator. Joyce mixes various writings, to counter the ones with the others; in fact, he wants neither to rest nor to be fixed on any one of them. His purpose is neither to impose a limit on his text nor to close his writing; rather he opens it to different readers and their understanding. Accordingly, Joyce restores the place of all readers, particularly the Persian reader.

Joyce’s polyphonic language wipes out “sense through nonsense.”(39) He himself emphasises the idea that his language is “nat language in any sinse of the world” (FW 83.12). Indeed, he suggests every reader to participate in a joyful challenge with his “nat language.” The combination of vernacular and deformed languages transforms the novel into a weird puzzle which invites every inquisitive reader to experience an adventurous journey in it, even if from the very far places like Persia. Although the rustle of Persian language might seem a less communicative code for at least the Persian readers they try to understand and simultaneously to be united with the thematic codes of Joyce even at a lesser degree. Undoubtedly, Joyce does not just belong to Ireland but to the world, and even to Persia.