Everybody knows the story of how physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed the term “quark” for an elementary particle from James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. But I’ve just heard that Joyce, writing the novel (partly) in Zurich, probably picked up the term from the name of a fresh white cheese/yogurt substance common in Germanic countries, known in Germany and the Netherlands as “kwark” but spelled “quark” in Switzerland.
Anybody have the Straight Dope on this? Were they indeed selling quark in Zurich stores in the twenties and thirties while Joyce was writing Finnegan’s Wake? Has anybody speculated on Joyce’s source for “quark”?
[QUOTE=Kimstu]
Were they indeed selling quark in Zurich stores in the twenties and thirties while Joyce was writing Finnegan’s Wake
[QUOTE]
I’m pretty confident they were. Quark (I think it’s spelt this way everywhere in the German speaking countries, with “Topfen” being the Austrian term for this substance) is a common kind of curd used in many dishes, dessers, etc. It’s not a brand but simply the name for this dairy product.
Whether this is where Joyce got the word from, I don’t know.
Ooh - I’d like it if it did turn out to be derived from the cheese, rather than the particle thingy. That’s simply because when a friend mentioned quarks, I of course first thought of the German soft cheese. Friend was trying to tell me (dunno why, 'cos I know absolutely no physics) all about quarks, and said, “no, do shut up about cheese, nothing to do with cheese, it is actually from James Joyce”. Well, I was very happy and amused that the physicists took the word from Joyce, but I’d be even more amused if the word turned out to have come from cheese all along, which would make complete sense, really.
Um, that is “making sense” in a sort of Joycean way.
I’d be surprised if he didn’t have the cheese in mind. However, this shouldn’t be taken to say that the word in that place “means” the cheese.
If you’ve “read” Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe, btw) – and anyone who has seriously attempted it knows why I use the Derrida quotes – you’ll see that almost no word has a single reading. I wasn’t aware of the cheese, but I can see that meaning being used in another reading of the lines in question.
Here’s the original passage, from the very beginning of Book 2, Chapter 4:
The “quarks” in context are the cries of the seabird, pronounced so that the word rhymes with Mark.
As seen in the next line, the quarks are a variation on bark as a sound an animal makes. But I’ve also read that quark is a pun on quart, as in a pub order: give Mister Mark three quarts. This comes from the ending of Chapter 3:
I haven’t studied Joyce so I don’t want to speculate too much. He may have picked up the sound of the word from its local use as a cheese. But it’s highly unlikely that, as used, he meant it to refer to the cheese.
What you’re missing is that it’s to be “read” both as a misspelling of “quark” and as an onomatopœia for a gull’s cry. The whole book’s a dream, so nothing in it has any one fixed interpretation. For another clear example:
Here I want to focus on “commodius”. It can be read either as a misspelling of “commodious” (large, roomy) or as a construction off of “commode”, either from the shape (rounded) or from the contents (the river in question is either literally or metaphorically polluted). The simple truth is that Joyce intended all these readings, along with whatever the reader could come up with. It’s a dream, subject to interpretation by the dreamer.
Joyce may or may not have intended the relation to a certain sort of cheese, but by the structure of the book itself it doesn’t matter at all what Joyce intended. What matters is whether the reader interprets the line in the light of cheese or not.
Oh, and another thing: Why should any one line necessarily be interpreted in the contextual light of its neighboring lines? Just “because that’s the way books work” won’t cut it here.
I’ve never read any Joyce (I’ve missed out, it seems), but I’ve read enough about Joyce (including here on the SDMB) to guess that the answer to any question about FW phrased in form “Why should X be interpreted Y-ly?” is “Because I can.”
Of course I said it was both. How could you interpret what I wrote otherwise?
Now I see how.
This can be the basis for a very long literary argument, but Joyce himself would answer it with a swift kick in the nuts. He knew exactly what he meant, and he wanted you (the reader) to tease out his meaning. He didn’t spend all those years on the book for readers to interpret it as they please.
And if the context doesn’t provide illumination for interpretation, then why bother reading the words in any sort of order? Why bother writing the words in any sort of order?
Context is everything. I’ve said it before, and it applies to Joyce every bit as much.
Rubbish. Joyce wrote Ulysses as his idea of the pinnacle of the novel form and followed it with Finnegans Wake as its death knell – its “wake”, if you will. (tangent: not that he meant literature to end there, as Tim Finnegan lived on after his own wake)
Joyce didn’t intend any one reading, nor any seventy readings as “proper”. It’s pure text, the stream of unconsciousness, a coma dream. It has as much meaning inherent as any dream does. Even though there are strains he knew he was putting in when he did so, I can’t believe he’d declare any personal reading invalid. He even says as much in the text itself.
You’re free to read Finnegans Wake White-King style, of course. There’s a lot to be gleaned from that pass.
First, though, can you tell me where the beginning properly is? The book is one of (as I quoted earlier) “double-ends joined”, so the beginning and end of the published text are the end and the beginning of a broken sentence. Where’s the “real” beginning? Is this anything more than an arbitrary choice? Is the text inherently circular – needing to be cut somewhere to be published – which Joyce highlighted by cutting it in a very odd spot?
I don’t think you can regard the notion of context in Finnegans Wake the same as you would in a “normal” text. There are places where the surface context jumps abruptly. There are places where one section of text is both the end of one context and the beginning of another, much like the coded sections for different genes in a DNA plasmid can sometimes overlap. Do I mean that Joyce structured his work like DNA, which wouldn’t be discovered for decades yet? Of course not, but that isn’t to say it’s not a valid reading. I daresay Joyce would have been extremely pleased with himself to have “predicted” such a thing.
Further (and more to the “quark” point), context in Finnegans Wake is fractal (another prescience). The appropriate context is far from unique at most points, with different contexts resolving themselves to the microscope of the reader’s mind depending on what scale is being considered. How does a given word support the context of the entire text? Of a given book? Of a section? Of a page? A paragraph? A sentence? Line? Itself? Why should these a priori have anything to do with each other?
A slight hijack, but I don’t really see the tread going anywhere else WRT the OP:
How does one read Joyce? I don’t plan to start any time soon, but I definitely want to try it some time (after grad school, I’m sure). I’m pretty darn smart and well-educated to boot, but there’s no way I could pick out one tenth of the meanings in those words, especially with all the archaicisms, misspellings, references to obscure fields of knowledge, etc. It would surely be impossible to annotate thoroughly, and would make reading it a drudgery. Do I have to wait for a college class to read it and audit? Or is this one of the few things in life I’m genuinely not smart enough to do (as opposed to not talented, skilled, disciplined, trained, or interested enough)
Most of his work, like any other author, White-King style. “Begin at the beginning, keep going until you get to the end, then stop.” Finnegans Wake is really much different than anything else.
What I’d advise is to read his works in the order he published them. Start with Dubliners, a collection of short stories, followed by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses is next, capped off by Finnegans Wake. Each work actually does make reference to the previous ones, and they get progressively more experimental as you go along. I’d also advise trying to find a decent critical edition of each one that fits your style of thought.
If anything you might be too smart. The graduate students I know who just can’t grok Joyce are generally the ones who can’t forget everything they know about “reading”.
Was a quart used as a pub measure in Dublin at the time? While it certainly existed as an imperial measure in Ireland, I’ve never read of it in the context of pubs, nor seen antique quart glasses or bottles or the like, and it’s certainly not used today.
We’re well past the realm of GQ and into the world of “text” - not quite the same thing as literature, BTW, as it can apply to canvas (a stand-in for all forms of art, a poor word in this context - oops), film, music, architecture or any other medium. Ever since modernism planted its flat feet on the artistic world, and not just in the novel, there have been storms and schools of critics battling over the proper way to interpret text. A large part of the argument has been over the emphasis that must be given to the artist’s “intent” and how much to give to what the viewer brings to the text.
As I say, firmly, I am of the context is everything school. Mathochist is wrong again in bringing his reading to my intent. Context is not the same thing as divining the artist’s intent. True art can constantly be reinterpreted, even reinvented, by reimaging it in the context of the viewer’s world. But context is very much against ignoring the artist, the intent, the contemporary history. Joyce’s world is one in which the context is of the most supreme importance, perhaps the most spectacular example of deliberately constricting the parameters in an attempt to make the narrow universal. Joyce knew what he was doing. Mathochist appears to imply that Joyce flung stream-of-consciousness words on the page that were left for the viewer to make sense of. Rubbish. Joyce tinkered with the manuscript through every phase of the publishing process, and not just because of the printers’ typos. Each invented word/pun/association meant something to him.
You don’t read Finnegan’s Wake from beginning to end in one pass, full stop, never go back. The notion is ludicrous. Neither can you take individual sentences and detach them from the book and invent a reading for them.
Here’s an analogy that may be to Mathochist’s heart. Think of Joyce the way you would approach one of those 1200-page proofs that have teams of mathematicians pouring over for years in order to validate. Can you go through one from beginning to end? Yes. Perhaps one must at some time. Should you go back and forth and test and compare and tease out the relationships? Yes. One must. Can you pull an equation out of the middle and say what its meaning is without regard to the context from which it arose? No.
Why should any of these equations a priori have anything to do with each other? Because if not, then the whole is a colossal waste of time. You don’t believe that about math and you don’t believe that about Joyce. So stop making that the core of your argument.
To answer part of your OP, yes, they were selling/using “quark” the cheese in Europe well-before the 20’s-30’s.
Barry Popik, the brilliant finder of words, found a cite from a 1903 book published in the US that was devoted to describing menu terms for an English speaker who might encounter a “foreign” word on a menu.
Quark was described thusly:
So, the term was out there very early.
My link to Barry’s website won’t show you where I obtained the info. It was from one of his posts to the American Dialect Society Mailing List.
I don’t believe it about Joyce. I believe it about Finnegans Wake (as I said before, not “Finnegan’s”). Further, it’s not a waste of time at all for exactly the reasons I stated before (here slightly rephrased): Ulysses is the death knell of the classical novel, and Finnegans Wake is the resurrection of the modern “novel”.
Of course he did. I never claimed to deny this. Joyce carefully crafted dozens of lines of meaning through his final tapestry, but he also said (rather clearly, I think, in that passage I quoted before) that no reading should be discounted whether or not he intended it.
First of all, I don’t consider Finnegans Wake to be representative. It was carefully crafted to be as ambiguous as it is. Further, the analogy is weak. Mathematics thrives on strict rigor while literature has no such requirement.
That said, how many major theorems in mathematics started life as lemmas: mere struts in another proof that have been repurposed and refashioned to serve many more uses once considered in and of themselves, outside the context of the original theorem.
If context were as total (and not scalable) in mathematics as *Exapno Macapse (as long as we’re referring to each other in oratorical style) would suggest the Snake lemma would never have left the realm of modules over a ring, for example. The progress of mathematics essentially involves taking a part of a constructed ediface, trying to determine what it “really” is (outside the context of its application), and building another field around this stripped-down piece. For a more basic example, how does the notion of a tangent vector in differential geometry suggest itself when the preexisting field (analysis on R[sup]n[/sup]) identifies the tangent spaces at all points with the base space itself? By considering the notion of a vector as abstracted from its use in analysis on R[sup]n[/sup].
And finally, to poke my finger in the barrel of this shotgun, the original motivation of string theory was a man happening across a function in a book (one developed over an esoteric point in centuries-old analysis) which happened to have nice properties. Should that function only be considered in the “context” in which it originally arose? I should hope Exapno Macapse would save himself one of his own favorite topics from the dustbin of history.
This word came up not too long ago in Words coined by famous people, and I’m happy I now find this more focused discussion.
At the end:
Quark [etym]: Quack + squawk + muster + master + Mark
All the other comments on the word were mine, including my self-correction, which I submit in the spoiler below.
For good measure, the final post I copy over here is more speculative–a poster mentioned the quark/dairy thing (um, the OP here :))–which is along the lines of a few other posts I see here.
Dates and post numbers can be found in the source thread.
[spoiler] #4
[snip]
I forgot that “quark” starts off with–and the reason for the “q”–is “quack” as we’ll as “squawk.” The “ua” is thus both standard English orthography as well as a nod to the merger of the “u” in “mustering” the “a” in “Mark.”
