“The Blatant Latin Language”

Abstract James Joyce’s debt to the sacred is rooted in his education among the Jesuits and enriched by the force of parody; much of his work can be read in a biblical light, under the sign of metamorphosis. Acting as a “clandestine theologian,” the young artist used Latin as an instrument to find a new meaning for ancient symbols and formulas in contemporary life. In search of the unwritten textual memory active in some of the unsolved riddles and mysterious quotations in Ulysses (as is the case for terribilia meditans), it is possible to reconstruct the net of a “chain of sounds” from which the liberating power of Joyce’s artistic operation sprouts. By modifying his source’s original shape, Joyce can produce an allusive conglomerate which an attentive reader could trace back to three or four different sources mixed together. In the memory machine of Ulysses nothing (however minute or trivial) is or could be insignificant. Unforeseen “ghost meanings” arise from the textual unconscious, overcoming the boundaries of different languages. If the reader manages to master the seductions of the Latin language through the weapons of parody and subversion, as in Ulysses, the distant words of Church Latin will be humanized through a dissemination of their particles in everyday life.