"Only is Order Othered. Nought is Nulled": Finnegans Wake and Middle and Late Zukofsky

Abstract

From 1932 to 1935, with his friend Jerry Reisman, Louis Zukofsky completed an as-yet-unpublished film script of Joyce's Ulysses using the surreal and occasionally nightmarish inserts of Max Ernst to evoke imaginary states of feeling. Joyce seems to have liked it, suggesting that George Arliss play Bloom and John Ford direct it.1 Zukofsky had already completed the first seven movements of A by 1930, and he would not start work on the eighth movement (which he finished in 1937) until the film script was complete. Ulysses left its traces on that movement. The fiveyear interval (1930-35) was echoed by two other fairly large gaps in A 's composition: one from 1940 to 1948 (between the composition of A-10 and of the second half of A-9), and the other from 1951 to 1960 (between A-12 and A-13). During that last interval, Zukofsky worked on two thoroughly Wakean texts: Bottom: On Shakespeare, which took thirteen years to complete (from 1947 to 1960), and (with the collaboration of Celia Zukofsky, since he did not know Latin) a translation and transliteration of the whole of Catullus, which was started in 1958 and completed eight years later. It is these books, in which Zukofsky explored and amplified Joycean techniques, that constitute Zukofsky's deliberate preparation for his final and great works, A 22 & 23 (written 1970-74 after a two-year hiatus in the composition of A) and 80 Flowers (written 1974-78).2 These late poems constitute a radical and major shift in Zukofsky's work, and are of seminal importance to the course of poetry written in English in this century.