Skeleton Tracks (2022)

Michelle Elvy & Marco Sonzogni, ed.: Breach of All Size:
Small Stories on Ulysses, love and Venice (2022)

Skeleton Tracks

Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

You know how it is when you’re in a strange city, especially if you don’t speak the language well? The books you brought with you dry up, and you become desperate for new reading material. You can usually find a book exchange of some sort in most hostels: French and German paperbacks, English potboilers – even some more serious books among them: Goethe’s Faust or (as in this case) Joyce’s Ulysses, left behind, no doubt, by travellers who’d repented of their self-improving zeal.

This time I was in Venice, on Giudecca. I’d just finished reading Snow Falling on Cedars, and was desperate to exchange it before leaving next morning to catch my train south. Ulysses it was.

Not just any copy of Ulysses, though – the one I’d picked up was a special ‘corrected’ version prepared by some German Professor called Hans Walter Gabler. He’d also included a long preface explaining how, by dint of comparing all the manuscript remnants, he’d managed to reconstruct parts of the book even its author had failed to comprehend.

In particular, in the Nighttown sequence, when the ghost of Stephen Dedalus’s mother appears and he asks her for that word, the ‘word known to all men’, Gabler had actually managed to find out what that word was, even though Joyce himself left it out. Not to keep you in suspense, the word turned out to be ‘love’.

Unfortunately for Gabler, the previous owner had included a few press cuttings denouncing the impudence of presuming to know better than a book’s author what it should and shouldn’t contain.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here. Even though I had doubts about reading Gabler’s rather than Joyce’s version, there’s not much else to do on long train journeys, so I did get a chance to study the book in some detail.

In particular, since this was clearly a student text, I was on the lookout for underlinings or marginal notes. There were none. What there were – in Chapter XV: Circe, the one I mentioned above – were little pinprick dots under some of the words. I’d read my fair share of prison-camp books, and I knew that during World War II people used to send coded messages like that.

I started to jot them down as I came to them. This was the result:

the gondola
wait my love
behind the stable
great light
still young

Make of that what you will.

Michelle Elvy & Marco Sonzogni, ed.: Breach of All Size (2022)

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(18-19/11/21)

Breach of All Size: Small Stories on Ulysses, love and Venice. Ed. Michelle Elvy
& Marco Sonzogni. Wellington: The Cuba Press, 2022. 80-81.

[423 wds]


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