[In the following essay, Lydon recalls her initial pleasure reading Wodehouse's Jeeves stories.]

When my friend and colleague Elaine Marks invited me to write about a book, a text, a passage, or a line that, for whatever reasons, I had come to associate with what literature “is,” it seemed at first that I had been given the assignment of a lifetime. When it came to actually doing it, however, I found, to my surprise and dismay, that I was completely stumped.

No doubt what Roland Barthes tellingly calls the “aphasia native to humankind” (192; my trans.)—which is at its most acute, he notes, whenever we sit down to write—was largely to blame. But the specific cause of the impediment, I soon realized, was my assumption that the assignment required me to go back to an early period of my life when the recognition, while reading or in reading's wake, that this was literature could have exerted a determinative influence on my future, could have produced the notion of what literature “is” that would have made me want to devote my life to it. “Why literature?” it seemed to me, was a question about the origins of a calling. But looking back over a childhood and an adolescence that were largely spent avidly and more or less indiscriminately reading, I discovered that, while listing favorite writers and texts was quite easy, the pleasure these writers and texts had given me, being as immediate as it was intense, precluded by its very nature the self-consciousness that the recognition of what literature “is” requires. To borrow a phrase from Hélène Cixous, I was, in my early days, “swallowed up by [the texts I read] as by a whale” (3), a blissful Jonah about whom it might be asked if I had been reading at all, in any but the most primitive sense of the word. For “in order to read,” Cixous vrites, “we need to get out of the text. We have to shuttle back and forth incessantly. We have to try all possible relations to a text. At some point we have to disengage ourselves from the text as a living ensemble, in order to study its construction, its techniques, and its texture” (3). Yet, just as I recognized the extent to which I had been carried away by the text, I remained convinced, without as yet any evidence to support the conviction, that I had had, nonetheless, a precocious intuition, if not of what literature was, then of literature as an object of desire, surpassing the immediate delights of the text at hand. This intuition could only have come from the kind of disengagement Cixous describes. The question then was, Where and when did that disengagement occur? What reading was its occasion?

Still racking my brains for the elusive ur-text, I began to wonder if perhaps my “first love” (I had borrowed my title, speculatively, from Beckett) had been, not literature, but the word: the word as Krapp experiences it in Krapp's Last Tape, when he lingers voluptuously over “Spooool” with what even Beckett calls “a happy smile.” “Revelled in the word spool,” Krapp will later remember, “with relish.” “Spooool!” he repeats. “Happiest moment of the past half million” (25).

Perhaps, I thought, the question I should be asking was not so much What is literature? but What is the word? And then I remembered that “What Is the Word” (no punctuation) had been Samuel Beckett's last word: it is the English title of “Comment dire,” a poem Beckett wrote in French and translated. The poem was published for the first time, in French and English, by the Irish Times on Christmas Day, 1989, a few days after Beckett's death. Beginning with the single word “folly,” the English version of the poem ends like this:

what is the word—
seeing all this—
all this this—
all this this here—
folly for to see what—
glimpse—
seem to glimpse—
need to seem to glimpse—
afaint afar away over there what—
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over
          there what—
what—
what is the word—
what is the word

And in French:

comment dire—
vu tout ceci—
tout ce ceci-ci—
folie que de voir quoi—
entrevoir—
croire entrevoir—
vouloir croire entrevoir—
loin là là-bas à peine quoi—
folie que d'y vouloir croire entrevoir quoi—
quoi—
comment dire—
comment dire

(19)

John Calder, Beckett's English publisher, suggests that “What Is the Word” may be “the ultimate Beckettian statement about old age and its greatest fear, folly, and the increasing inability to recall the word one seeks to clothe the image or the memory that one might still recall visually.” I am inclined, rather, to see it as a demonstration of the “aphasia native to humankind” that Barthes talks about, the aphasia that is at once the hurdle every writer must repeatedly clear and, in an obscure way, the writer's only subject. This, I take it, is the sense of the final unpunctuated “what is the word” (earlier in the poem it had been followed by a dash but never by a question mark).

But “Comment dire / What Is the Word,” the work of an Irish poet writing in French, was not the only poem to appear in the Irish Times for that day. Immediately beneath Beckett's text and occupying the entire lower half of the page was a selection of recent poetry by Irish poets writing in Irish. Idly scanning this other Irish writing, as I continued to brood over “What Is the Word,” I fixed on “Béarla na nÉan” (“Bird-Language”) by Gabriel Rosenstock, an Irish poet who writes in Irish. Here are the first few lines of the poem:

Thagaidîs go dtí an doras
Lá an Dreoilín
Snas bróg ar a n-aghaidh
Feistithe in éide
Ghiobail, os cionn an chliotar
Cleatar rann acu a rá
Os ard: “De wran de wran de
King of all burds …”

The last words, of course, are in English: not the Queen's but the Irish vernacular, and “De wran de wran de / King of all burds” is Rosenstock's transcription of “The wren, the wren the king of all birds” as it might be pronounced in the accents of rural Ireland. This phrase is the opening line of the doggerel recited by the Wren Boys, who in certain parts of the country (the custom is all but extinct) go from house to house on 26 December brandishing a dead wren tied to a holly bush. This ritual is obscurely commemorative of Saint Stephen, the first martyr, whose feast is observed on that day; thus, according to some accounts, the sacrificial wren would have been stoned to death, as Saint Stephen himself had been. Here now is the poem in Rosenstock's English translation:

                              Bird-Language
They used to come to the door
On Wren Day
Faces shoe-polished
In a raggedy
Garment, rising over the cacophony
A verse out loud:
“De wran, de wran de
King of all burds …”
I remember—don't know, was I nine?
Staring at them … ghosts …
Whites of eight eyes
Through me
From some other planet,
Accents from some distant beyond
(Was I raised
Among them?)
“Up wit de kittle and down wit de pan …”
What vast amount of reading had filtered
Light from me!
What anglicised ways
Obscured my mind? P. G.
Wodehouse and the like?
Saying to myself:
“Rum chappies, what?”—the jabber of slaves.
“From bush to bush from tree to tree
At Ballyorgan I broke me knee …”
I started. Part of me hastening to follow them
Surely. Elope with gypsies,
Knights of the road,
With the circus. Enlist in
The British Army
The IRA
Or some missionary order.
Escape! Prove myself.
I took to Gaelic rhyming
In the end. Studying to be a wren.

Much might be said about “Béarla na nÉan” and its depiction of the dilemma facing the Irish writer for whom English, “so familiar and so foreign,” as Joyce put it, “will always be … an acquired speech” (221). (Beckett's solution to the problem, as I argue elsewhere, was to write in French.) It is significant, therefore, that the Irish word Béarla in Rosenstock's title means not just the twittering of birds, or bird-language, but also English. Hence the last line, “Studying to be a wren,” no more represents a simple return to the origin—a rejection of the tongue of the foreigner—than the Wren Boys, embodying Irish tradition, represent, for the poet, the familiar, the native. To the staring child they appear, indeed, not merely foreign but alien: “From some other planet” (“Ò phláinéad eile”). That the uniquely Irish Wren Boys speak in English, in contrast to the mature poet, who has opted for Irish, gives us a further hint of the complexity of the situation he is describing.

But these thoughts on “Béarla na nÉan” came to me only after a certain amount of reflection. What leapt out at first glance were the following lines:

What vast amount of reading had filtered
Light from me!
What anglicised ways
Obscured my mind? P. G.
Wodehouse and the like?
Saying to myself:
“Rum chappies, what?”—the jabber of slaves.

Even as I instinctively recoiled from this apparent rejection of English and English literature (for me, as for the poet, at least as much a part of our heritage as the Wren Boys are), an old memory stirred, and all at once I had it. The writer with whom I learned to read, in the strong sense that Cixous gives the verb, who enabled me to “get out of the text,” who made it possible for me to “shuttle back and forth incessantly,” to disengage myself enough to become aware of (if not yet to study in any systematic way) the text's “construction, its techniques, and its texture” was none other than P. G. Wodehouse.

And then it all came back to me: the nights devoted to the guilty pleasure of reading such chefs d'oeuvre as Right Ho, Jeeves, Summer Lightning, and The Code of the Woosters, with the aid of a flashlight, under the covers of my dormitory bed (I attended a convent boarding school where lights-out at nine o'clock was the unalterable rule); the clandestine circulation of his books among Wodehouse fans (our leisure reading was closely monitored); the gleeful exchange of quotations among initiates. Prompted by these long-forgotten memories, I took down The World of Jeeves, the sole remaining emblem, in my library, of that youthful passion; and rereading the first story, “Jeeves Takes Charge,” I recovered rapture. Not, however, the rapture of being swallowed up by the text. Aside from the fact that Wodehouse's technique firmly, if tacitly, discourages such a response, it is highly unlikely that a young Irish convent girl would have identified with the trivial and improbable adventures, so remote from her experience, of a silly young swell and his valet. No, my pleasure all those years ago had been of another order, its source the first explosive inkling not only of the what and why of literature but also of what is the word, the quest for the mot juste and the incomparable and endlessly renewable pleasure that attends it.

To paraphrase Barthes, “You can only read what you've read before” (S/Z 15-16, 20), a statement of which Cixous's remarks about reading are a variant. This, the first principle of literary study, as I now believe and try to teach, was unforgettably brought home to me (though I could not then have articulated it) when I would come upon statements like the following (the speaker is Bertie Wooster): “I remember Jeeves saying to me once, à propos of how you can never tell what the weather's going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon” (Code 60). The joke depends of course on the reader's recognizing Shakespeare's sonnet, and my burst of laughter, at the age of fourteen or so, a time when I was being required to learn large chunks of Shakespeare by heart, was the delighted laughter of recognition. Recognition out of context, I must emphasize, so that the sonnet, treated thus familiarly, was paradoxically defamiliarized, given to be seen, as literature, the one thing that Bertie and I did have in common and that transcended all barriers of class, gender, and nationality. For what Bertie's irreverent appropriation of “Full Many a Glorious Morning” held out was nothing less than the exciting possibility of “taming” Shakespeare's text, of “riding on it, rolling over it” (Cixous 3) as distinct from being swallowed up by it.

Quotation, the sine qua non of the literary critic's practice, is the dominant characteristic of Wodehouse's writing in the Jeeves and Wooster series. Every reader familiar with these books will remember that lines from “the poet Burns,” as Jeeves persistently calls him, and from the poet Keats, Browning's “larks and snails,” and Shakespeare's “quills upon the fretful porpentine” are the coin of Jeeves's exchanges with his master (qtd. in Thompson 301, 306, 302-03). (Keats, incidentally, is immortally described as “the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something”: Bertie's schematic recollection of “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.”) These quotations become, as a result, the delight of the Wodehouse devotee, who typically turns into an inveterate quoter both of the canon according to Wodehouse and of Wodehouse himself. I will control the urge on this occasion and limit myself to citing a typical passage from The Mating Season, which has the advantage of sustaining the Shakespearian theme.

In the passage, Bertie's friend Gussie Finknottle has been arraigned for some prank such as stealing a police officer's helmet, and Bertie asks Jeeves why the judge let Finknottle off with a fine. Here is Jeeves's reply and the dialogue it generates:

“Possibly the reflection that the quality of mercy is not strained, sir.”

“You mean it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven?”

“Precisely, sir. Upon the place beneath. His worship would no doubt have taken into consideration the fact that it blesseth him that gives and him that takes and becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.”

In response to which Bertie, reverting to his role as narrator, then says: “I mused. Yes, there was something in that” (qtd. in Thompson 298). For neophyte readers of The Merchant of Venice, the pleasure of coming across this exchange is quite simply unbeatable. It is, furthermore, enough to make literary scholars of them on the spot, for in what other context can they justifiably hope to bandy quotations, à la Jeeves and Bertie, with other readers like themselves?

Kristin Thompson, in her excellent book Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes; or, Le Mot Juste, accurately describes what Bertie and Jeeves do as “linger[ing] over the conventions of language” (279). In addition to discussing Wodehouse's use of quotation with considerable insight, Thompson addresses his brilliant use of cliché, or idiom, as I would prefer to call it. Indeed, I would argue—going a step further than Thompson—that, just as Wodehouse's deployment of quotation teaches what reading is, so his handling of idiom reveals his uncanny ability, as he pursues his meditation on language and literature in a popular form, to teach one how to write. This ability is directly related to his treatment of idiom, since Bertie often gets stock expressions wrong, like so many students who seem to be only half familiar with the common coin of English, not to mention literary criticism. Thus, when I read in a student paper that an incident in a novel “heralds back” to an earlier one, I wish ardently for a Jeeves at the writer's elbow to murmur, “Harks back, I believe, is the expression you are seeking, sir.”

But if Wodehouse should be required reading in freshman composition classes, he would provide an equally useful corrective to the excesses that threaten more sophisticated academic writers. In “Jeeves Takes Charge,” Bertie is pursued by Florence Craye, a woman with intellectual pretensions who is bent on improving Bertie's mind but whose educational methods are, according to Jeeves, “a little trying” (20). Freed from her clutches by Jeeves, Bertie idly picks up the reading she had assigned him before their engagement was mercifully dissolved, a weighty volume called Types of Ethical Theory: “I opened it,” he says, “and I give you my honest word, this is what hit me”:

Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy one only was real and self-subsisting; and that one was Ideal Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other corresponding to our Nature, was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held true for two moments together; in short, redeemed from negation only by including indwelling realities appearing through.

(20)¹

Bertie's flabbergasted response to this verbal onslaught is properly aphasic: “Well—I mean to say—what?” The rhetorical question marvelously, by its very incoherence, conveys a critical judgment. With this, the third in the series of whats that have structured the production of this essay—Beckett's “what is the word” and Rosenstock's Wodehousian “Rum chappies, what?” being the other two—I will conclude. These three whats are shorthand, respectively, for judgments about style (Bertie), the writer's quest for the mot juste (Beckett), and the Irish writer's response to an elitist, if caricatural, English culture (Rosenstock), all considerations that inform my own practice as a reader, critic, and teacher of literature. If literature is the web of idiom and quotation, the lingering over language, that I take it to be, and if The Code of the Woosters, one of Wodehouse's best-known titles, may be taken as descriptive of his oeuvre as a whole, then I am prepared to argue not, defensively, that The Code of the Woosters is literature, though it undoubtedly is, but rather, mindful of all that the word code has come to mean to the literary scholar, that literature was for me, inaugurally and unforgettably, The Code of the Woosters.

Note

1. A book called Types of Ethical Theory does exist. Written by James Martineau, it was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1895 in two volumes. I have so far not succeeded in locating the passage cited by Wodehouse.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “L'analyse structurale du récit à propos d'Actes X-XI.” Exégèse et herméneutique. Ed. Barthes et al. Paris: Seuil, 1971. 181-204.

———. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1974.

Beckett, Samuel. Krapp's Last Tape and other Dramatic Pieces. 1958. New York: Grove, 1970.

Calder, John. “Searching for the Last Word.” Irish Times 25-27 Dec. 1989: 19.

Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Modern Library, 1928.

Lydon, Mary. “Idiom and Medium: Reading Beckett through Irish.” Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, forthcoming.

Thompson, Kristin. Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes; or, Le Mot Juste. New York: Heineman, 1992.

Wodehouse, P. G. The Code of the Woosters. 1938. New York: Vintage, 1975.

———. “Jeeves Takes Charge.” The World of Jeeves. 1967. New York: Harper, 1988. 1-21.

———. Right Ho, Jeeves. London: Jenkins, 1934.

———. Summer Lightning. London: Jenkins, 1957.